Philosophy of Language (Research Seminar) 1 

We interpret natural language utterances against a background that is established by the preceding discourse. This background comprises linguistic and non-linguistic information as well as assumptions that are shared by the speaker and the hearer, including the information both share about the goals of their exchange. This guides the interpretation of utterances, and each utterance changes, in being interpreted, the information pool on which the discourse builds. A speaker typically utters a sentence as a part of a discourse or conversation, and in order to capture the meaning of an utterance a recipient has to integrate the information conveyed in his mental representation of the ever-changing context. The notion of information integration is thus a central aspect of natural language interpretation and, as current research shows, turns out to shed new light on philosophical and psychological theories of propositional attitudes and mental content.
The seminar is connected with the research projects that are currently being carried out within the section Philosophy of Language and Logic. Typical themes that will be addressed are context dependence and the dynamic theories of meaning, discourse and discourse structure, the analysis of propositional attitudes and their relation to mental states, and the relation between interpretation and psychological processes.