The speaker

Cameron Domenico Kirk- Giannini is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University–Newark. He obtained his PhD from Rutgers–New Brunswick, having previously studied at the University of Oxford and Harvard College. He specializes in philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and social philosophy.

The lecture

Careful consideration of the relationship between the horizontal and diagonal propositions of an utterance shows that David Lewis’s attempt to ground sentential meaning in linguistic conventions of truthfulness and trust cannot succeed: given Lewis’s theoretical commitments, the facts about convention to which he appeals are in principle unable to distinguish between different languages which make the same predictions about when speakers will be disposed to produce utterances.