Acquaintance, Familiarity & Value

Date: 06-Nov-2025 - 07-Nov-2025
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Contact: Andrés Soria Ruiz
Contact Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Semantics

Submission Deadline: 31-Jul-2025

We invite contributions to the upcoming workshop Acquaintance, Familiarity & Value, to take place at the University of Barcelona on November 6-7th, 2025. Invited speakers include:
- Natasha Korotkova (Utrecht University)
- Justin Khoo (MIT)
- Nils Franzén (University of Umeå)
- Carla Umbach (University of Cologne).

We will explore topics surrounding the phenomenon of the “acquaintance inference" of aesthetic language. The use of aesthetic language to describe an object (e.g., predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, subjective attitude verbs) invites the inference that the speaker has first-hand acquaintance with that object. E.g., if I tell you that The Birth of Venus is a wonderful painting, you are likely to assume that I have seen The Birth of Venus. This seemingly trivial observation has intrigued linguists, aestheticians, and philosophers of language, especially in the last 10+ years (Pearson 2013, Ninan 2014, Franzén 2018, Anand & Korotkova 2018, Khoo 2024). Recently, researchers have turned their attention to other phenomena with similar features, e.g., the "practical opinionatedness" inference of moral predicates (Willer & Kennedy 2020), the familiarity inference triggered by verbs like ‘consider’ (Kennedy & Willer 2022), or acquaintance inferences triggered by other expressions, e.g. appearance predicates (Rudolph 2020).

We call for contributions touching upon these and related topics, such as: the semantics & pragmatics of subjective, evaluative, and metalinguistic expressions/language, multidimensionality, expressivism, and faultless disagreement. Please send a 1-page abstract to [email protected] by July 31st. Selected papers will be announced by early August.