Cian Dorr, Professor of philosophy at NYU
‘The Multiplicity of Meaning’
Abstract: In this talk I will defend the view that almost invariably, when one asserts something, one simultaneously asserts enormously many very similar things. More generally, a wide range of familiar "intentional" relations - including asserting, meaning, believing, knowing, expressing, and referring to - work in a similarly pluralistic way: almost always, anything that stands in one of these relations to an item of the appropriate sort stands in the same relation to enormously many items very similar to that one. I will argue for this thesis by sketching how the pluralist view solves several otherwise intractable problems, including the Liar Paradox, as well as some less familiar puzzles about variation of meaning across nearby possible worlds.