This workshop culminates a graduate seminar that Andy, Dan, and Karen have been teaching at Rutgers, CUNY, and Columbia during the Spring, 2025 semester.

All sessions will take place in the seminar room at the Rutgers Philosophy Department (106 Somerset St., 5th Floor, New Brunswick, NJ). All are welcome at the workshop, not just participants in the seminar. However, we ask that non-participants register to attend, so that we can tell how many people are coming.

Sessions will take one of four forms: (1) 90-minute talks that connect in some way to work by the speaker that we read in the seminar; (2) "Author-meets-critic" sessions, in which one of us summarizes a paper along with some of the questions and criticisms generated by our seminar discussion, the author has a chance to reply, and then we have a general discussion; (3) talks by students from the seminar (20 minutes + 10min discussion); and (4) a poster session featuring work by students.

Monday, May 12th

  • 10:00–10:45
    Breakfast and Coffee at the Rutgers Philosophy Department
  • 10:45–12:15
    Sam Berstler, "Two-Track Communication" (talk)
  • 12:15–2:00
    Lunch
  • 2:00–3:30
    Student Talks
    • Steve Hernandez, "Autism and Comminication Styles"
    • Noah Betz-Richman, "Persona Management in Gricean Pragmatics"
    • Isabel Herburger and Adrian Liu, "Ineffectual Reassurance"
  • 3:45–5:15
    Josh Armstrong, "The Evolutionary Foundations of Common Ground"
    (This is an author-meets-critic with Dan Harris; download the paper here.)
  • 5:30–7:00
    Philippe Schlenker, "The Inferential Typology of Language: Insights from Sign Language (ASL)" (talk)

Tuesday, May 13th

  • 9:30–11:00
    Ethan Nowak, "Creative conception in ordinary language"
    (author-meets-critic with Andy Egan, paper here)
  • 11:15–12:45
    Mandy Simons, "Availability without Common Ground"
    (author-meets-critic with Dan Harris, paper here)
  • 12:45–2:30
    Lunch and Student Poster Session
  • 2:30–4:00
    Elisabeth Camp, "Nicknames as Tools for Managing Face"
    (This is an author-meets-critic with Karen Lewis. You can find the paper here, and Ethan Nowak and Eliot Michaelson's reply here. )
  • 4:15–5:45
    Craige Roberts, “Dynamic pragmatics and enrichment implications” (talk)