THIRD BARCELONA WORKSHOP ON ISSUES IN THE THEORY OF REFERENCE

Special topic: GENERAL TERMS

----- ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS -----

Dates: 5-7 (Thursday-Saturday) June, 2003. 

Invited speakers: 
Mark Johnston (Princeton) 
Stephen Yablo (MIT) 
Crispin Wright (St. Andrews) 

Deadline for receipt of submissions: February 7, 2003

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Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity and Hillary Putnam's "The Meaning of Meaning" pointed out important similarities between proper names and some general terms such as "tiger", "chunk of gold", "gold", "water", "iron pyrites", "light" and "lightning". This third edition of the Barcelona Workshop will be devoted to the study of the semantics of natural kind terms and other general terms. Some questions to be addressed are: What do terms such as "cat", "lightning", "chunk of gold" and "gold" have in common? What sort of entities do they denote? What distinguishes them, if anything, from other general terms such as "red", "chair" or "pediatrician"? What is the significance of the count/mass distinction for our understanding of the semantics of these terms? Mark Johnston's "Manifest Kinds" (1997) and Scott Soames' Beyond Rigidity (2001) are instances of important recent work on the topic of the Workshop. 

We invite submissions for 35-40-minute presentations (with 25-20 additional minutes for discussion). Submitted abstracts will be blind refereed and selected on the basis of general quality and relevance to the special topic of the workshop. Papers on all topics in the theory of reference will be considered though preference will be given to those dealing with the semantics of general terms. Submissions should take the form of a 1200-1500 word summary. Authors' names, postal address, affiliation, phone number and e-mail address should be given separately. Please send your submission by e-mail in an attached file in pdf, RTF or Word format to logos@pcb.ub.es . 

SUBMISSIONS MUST BE RECEIVED BY FEBRUARY 7, 2003. Communication of acceptance: Friday, March 7, 2003. 

The organization will cover the accommodation expenses of the authors of accepted papers. We regret that we can not cover travel and other expenses. 

There will be 10-12 submissions accepted. The Workshop will have no parallel sessions. The Barcelona Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Reference is a small format conference that attempts to provide ample space for discussion and informal interaction among participants 

For further information please check the conference website at http://www.ub.es/grc_logos/bw3   or write to logos@pcb.ub.es 

The workshop is organized by: 
LOGOS -- Grup de Recerca en Lògica, Llenguatge i Cognició / Logic, Language and Cognition Research Group 
Organizing committee: Gemma Celestino, Manuel García-Carpintero, Josep Macià, Genoveva Martí.