Chiara Tabet
Nationality: Italian
Research interests: Philosophy of Language, Formal Semantics, Philosophy of Logic,
Epistemology
I joined CSMN as a postdoctoral research fellow in October 2008, as a member of the Linguistic Agency. Before that, I was a PhD student at Arché: The Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology, at the University of St Andrews. In 2007-8 I have also been working for Oxford University Press - a useful experience that allowed me to gain a better understanding of the world of academic publishing.
In Arché, of which I am now an associate fellow, I completed my PhD thesis, in 2008, under the supervision of Prof Crispin Wright (Arché / NYU) and Prof Stewart Shapiro (Ohio State University / Arché). My thesis title was 'Inferences in Context: Contextualism, Inferentialism and the Concept of Universal Quantification'. In the thesis, which is published online in the Digital Research Repository of the University of St Andrews, I discuss and defend an account of the logical concepts based on the following two ideas: 1) that the logical concepts are constituted by our canonical inferential usages of them; 2) that to grasp, or possess, a logical concept is to undertake an inferential commitment to the canonical consequences of the concept when deploying it in a linguistic practice. The account focuses on the concept of universal quantification, with respect to which I propose an inferentialist and contextualist model based on the notion of an inferential commitment, as an alternative to what I call the 'domain model' of quantification. The model allows for absolutely unrestricted quantification, and is based on the premise that we should dispense with the notion of a domain when doing foundational semantics for the universal quantifier.
My research interests are in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Logic, Formal Semantics and Epistemology. My research project at CSMN is mainly in Philosophy of Language, and focuses on contextualism, relativism and shared content - this is an interest that I also cultivated during my PhD years. I am currently working on two aspects of this project, namely: a defense of systematic, compositional semantics from the criticisms of pragmatic contextualists, based on the attempt to show the compatibility of that project with a contextualist stance towards semantic content, and a critical articulation of the notion of 'semantic content' (and / or 'proposition expressed) in a relativist semantics.
My teaching experience is mainly at the University of St Andrews, and comprises courses in Critical Thinking, Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science. In 2006-7, I was also special tutor, employed by the University, for a student with learning difficulties - an experience that I very much enjoyed.
With Georg Kjoll, I co-organize the weekly Language and Rationality Seminar, a forum where members of the Linguistic and Rational Agencies at CSMN, as well as visitors, present both their work in progress and finished papers. One of the main aims of the seminar is to allow CSMN researchers (especially the younger scholars) to obtain as much informal feedback as possible on their work, in view of publication and conference presentations.
I am also currently co-organizing three workshops, in collaboration with Arché, to happen in the Fall 2009 - among these, the CSMN/Arché Workshop on Linguistic Intuitions (Oslo, October 2009). Please follow the links from the CSMN calendar for a glance at all the exciting CSMN events to come!
For my full CV, click here.
For a list of select publications, click here.
For a list of select conference and seminar presentations, click here.
Here are some papers on which I am working right now:
- 'Linguistic Competence and Inferential Dispositions' (Draft, PDF)
- 'Semantic Relativism and the Color of the Leaves' (Presentation of the paper, PDF)
- 'Assertion, Presupposition Failure and Expressing a Proposition' (Abstract, PDF)
- 'Inferential Commitments and Absolute Generality: a Domain-free Model of Universal Quantification' (Abstract, PDF)
- 'What do Agreement and Disagreement data really show?'
- 'Perspectives, Shared Content and the Relativist'
When I don't philosophize, I enjoy reading essays in politics and psychology, fiction (especially re-reading Thomas Mann, the greatest writer of all times!), listening to classical music and jazz, playing tennis with Darren, my husband, watching 'The West Wing' and 'Mad Men' (the best TV shows ever...), and, finally, observing my cat Gatto jump around the garden pretending to be a tiger (but looking, sometimes, rather like a rabbit...)
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