Syllabus   |   Discord Server   |   First Essay   |   Second Essay

Thursday, January 25th   |   Introduction

Monday, January 29th   |   Language as an Internal Computational System

Thursday, February 1st   |   Semantics: Computing Meanings

Monday, February 5th   |   Reference as a conceptual capacity

Thursday, February 8th   |   Language as an innate structure

Monday, February 12th   |   No Class

Thursday, February 15th   |   Syntax and Semantics in Animal Communication?

Monday, February 19th   |   No Class

Thursday, February 22nd   |   Language as a Social Activity

Monday, February 26th   |   Language and Rule Following

Wednesday, February 28th  |   No Class

Thursday, February 29th  |   No Class

Monday, March 4th   |   Language and Performativity

Thursday, March 7th   |   Speech Acts

Monday, March 11th   |   Reference as a social activity

Thursday, March 14th   |   Meaning and use

Required Reading

Monday, March 18th   |   Formal system *and* social activity

Thursday, March 21st   |   Language as a game with rules

Monday, March 25th   |   Animal Pragmatics

Thursday, March 28th   |   Grice on Indirect Communication

Monday, April 1st   |   Insinuation

Thursday, April 4th   |   Bullshitting

Required Reading

Monday, April 8th   |   Bullshit

Thursday, April 11th   |   Metaphor and Ineffability

Monday, April 15th   |   Metaphor and Ineffability

Thursday, April 18th   |   The Limits of Effability

April 22–30   |   Spring Break

Thursday, May 2nd   |   Hermeneutical Injustice

Monday, May 6th   |   Artificial Intelligence and Language Models

Required Reading

Thursday, May 9th   |   What (if anything) can we learn about human language from current AI?