NYU/Columbia Conference

I am going to present my shiny new paper "New Dynamics for Epistemic Modality" at the 9th NYU/Columbia Graduate Student Philosophy Conference. It is going to be a blast and I have never been to New York before, so I am very stoked about all this. A draft of the paper is on its way -- in the meantime, here are the slides and the abstract of the talk:

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalised sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I will demonstrate that a dynamic story about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. It provides a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding relativism or an overly weak pragmatics. It also explains why agents are sometimes agnostic about certain epistemic possibilities and why they sometimes accept must-statements even though they do not know the prejacent.

The joyful event takes place on March 7 and the keynote speaker is Karen Bennett, who already has a history of delivering keynotes at great graduate conferences (like this one).

UPDATE (3/14): Matt Moss, Adam See, Phil Lusson, and Erica Shuemer did a great job organising the conference, so a good time was had by all on March 7. As promised, a draft of the new paper is now available in the Research section.