Research Seminars @ Illinois

Sandford Goldberg, the Chester D. Tripp professor in the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, will speak on "Communication and the Norms of Inquiry": 

Inquiry is an activity aimed at trying to determine how the world is. So, too, are many of our conversations. Stalnaker’s Common Ground framework enables us to model how the relevant state of information (whether of the inquiry or in the conversation) evolves over time. In this talk I explore how we might modify or expand Stalnaker’s framework to capture a dimension of inquiry and conversation on which Stalnaker himself was mainly silent: the distinctly normative dimension. After characterizing what I have in mind by this, I go on to suggest that we should make room for normative expectations both within common ground and about common ground. This suggestion turns out to have far-reaching implications for epistemology.