6 - 8 March 2019, Post-truth: The semantics and pragmatics of saying "what you believe to be false", Bremen

Grice's first maxim of quality says "do not say what you believe to be false", but we often do. We tell lies ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman"), we deceive (e.g. by lying by implicature), we bullshit ("Trade wars are easy to win"), we make up stories ("When Harry Potter first came to Hogwarts …"), we pretend (Kids playing: "You were Batgirl and I was Wonder Woman"), or we use irony ("Losing the key was very smart!"). In all such speech acts there is a clear sense in which we're not, or at least not literally, speaking the truth. In this workshop we want to discuss the challenges that these and other deviations from the Gricean norm of quality pose for semantics and pragmatics and see if we can incorporate ideas from philosophy, literary theory, cognitive science and other related fields to extend the coverage of our theories of meaning and our understanding of the dynamics and logic of (non-)cooperative conversation.

Invited speakers: Regine Eckardt (Konstanz) and Jörg Meibauer (Mainz). Organized by Daniel Gutzmann (Cologne), Emar Maier (Groningen), and Katharina Turgay (Landau).