Speaker: Amir Anvari (MIT)
Title: How to be ignorant
Time: Wednesday, February 11th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: I discuss two observations that are puzzling for a rather plausible, pragmatic conception of the etiology of ignorance inferences. The first is that certain sentences do not trigger certain ignorance inferences even in highly favorable contexts (Feinmann 2023). The second is that uninformative sentences cannot be used as acceptable vehicles to convey ignorance. I will argue that the latter observation provides a strong motivation for the claim that relevance is closed under speakers’ beliefs (Fox 2016). This claim, in turn, requires adopting Meyer’s (2013) grammatical theory of ignorance computation. I will then show that the two puzzling observations can be addressed using two independently motivated assumptions about exhaustion.