Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Dan Zeman

I got my B.A. in Philosophy from Universitatea de Vest, Timisoara, Romania. From January 2007 to April 2011 I was enrolled in the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Barcelona, doing a PhD within the Cognitive Science and Language programe under the supervision of Genoveva Marti and Josep Macia. Visiting stages at ARCHÉ, University of St Andrews (September - December 2008), Institut Jean Nicod, Paris (October 2009 - February 2010) and Northern Institute of Philosophy, Aberdeen (May - July 2011). From October 2011 I am a postdoctoral fellow at Institut Jean Nicod.

Dan Zeman

Contact

LOGOS-Grup de Recerca en Lògica, Llenguatge i Cognició

Universitat de Barcelona

Facultat de Filosofia

C. Montalegre, 6-8, 4a planta, desp. 4090

Barcelona 08001

dan_zeman[at]yahoo.com

Curriculum Vitae

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My main interests are philosophy of language and formal semantics. I'm most interested in ways of modelling the phenomenon of context-sensitivity, broadly construed. Specifically, I'm interested in the issue of implicit communication and implicit content. 

My thesis is about "unarticulated constituents" - especially in connection with locational expressions and predicates of personal taste. The thesis contains an exploration of the notion of an "unarticulated constituent", a discussion of the "weatherman scenario" (from Recanati (2002)) and its interpretations, and a survey of answers to the general form of argument known as "the Binding Argument" (proposed for locational expressions by Stanley (2000)). I also offer a solution to a recent Binding Argument directed against relativism for predicates of personal taste (Schaffer (forthcoming)) consisting in appeal to "variadic functions" - a technical device employed by Recanati in his answer to the Binding Argument for locations. Although not fully arguing for it in my thesis, I endorse relativism about truth for several domains, such as predicates of personal taste, knowledge attributions, epistemic modals, etc.

Selection of Publications

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  • I recently finished my PhD thesis, THE SEMANTICS OF IMPLICIT CONTENT , in which I develop an "enhanced" relativist view about locations and judges (in connection to meteorological predicates such as "rain" and predicates of personal taste such as "tasty", respectively), combining the postulation of "unorthodox" parameters in the circumstances of evaluation (locations and judges) with "the variadic functions approach" to certain natural language expressions (i.e., treating them as adjuncts and not as arguments). Feedback welcome!

     

    Some drafts:

    - "Temporal Binding in the Event Analysis", a draft of a paper aimed at providing some potentially problematic examples for Cappelen and Hawthorne's analysis of location binding by higher-order (temporal) quantifiers. Comments welcome!

    - "Contextualism and Disagreement about Taste", a short paper arguing that certain contextualists that claim to account for the intuition of disagreement in disputes about tatse find themselves in a dilemma: either they have disregarded certain crucial cases that challenge their view, or they need to appeal to semantic blindness, therefore incurring additional theoretical costs.

    - "Contextualism, Relativism and Binding ", a paper now distributed over several chapters of my thesis, about how to answer the Binding Argument for locations (originally proposed by Stanley) and judges (recently put forward by Schaffer) without being forced to postulate the corresponding varaibles in the logical form of simple sentences such as "It is raining" and "Avocado is tasty";

    - "Index-Proliferation and Semantic Competence ", a short piece in response to Michael Glanzberg's recent attack on "semantic-value relativism";