Presentation at Reading, Jan. 2013

Presentation at Reading, Jan. 2013

2010年9月18日 星期六

Reminders

Don't think that you can become an expert of something through one or two seminars.

Don't be hurried; philosophy just can't be.

2010年9月14日 星期二

Desperate, So Far

I cease to attend Kripke's Frege and Pryor's Lambda seminar, as expected. I will keep Longuenesse's Third Critique; it is even better than I expected. And Mind&Language is fantastic as well, especially they have a preparation seminar for students.

Still, I am even more desperate about applications. First about the letters. Last year I really thought my letters were going to help me, but that was a big mistake. Now I even suspect that they hurt my applications. But what can I do? For one thing, I have no way to confirm my hypothesis, and secondly, even if we assume it is correct, how can I repair the situation? Before this round I only have one complete semester or less, and that will not help me too much as far as the letters are concerned.

And I am worried about the sample as well. My best try is to use the term paper for "Linguistic Pragmatism" (Devitt), but the time is just not enough. Worse still, recently I am reading Insensitive Semantics by Cappelen and Lepore, and try to meet some of their challenges. They are tough. These days I finally came up with some ideas, with a tentative title "Context Sensitivity and Indirect Discourse." Unfortunately, when I randomly browse the latest PPR I found there is an article "Context Sensitivity and Indirect Reports," and the author is also arguing against C&L at exactly the same point. What an unhappy coincidence for me.

The only thing I can be happy about is that I thereby avoid a possible plagiarism accusation.