The Burman lectures 2025. Lecture 3: Panvariabilism
Thu
9
Oct
Thursday 9 October, 2025at 13:15 - 15:00
HUM.H.119, Humanities Building, Umeå University
The Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies invites you to the annual Burman lectures in philosophy. This years invited lecturer is Professor John Macfarlane, UC Berkeley. He will give three open lectures over three days.
Lecture 3: Panvariabilism Friday 10 October at 13.15-15.00 PM in Lecture Hall HUM.D.220
Abstract: Several philosophers have argued recently that pronouns and proper names should be treated semantically as variables. This treatment allows us to see them both as directly referential (in agreement with Kaplanian orthodoxy) and as potentially shifting their reference in modal and doxastic contexts (against Kaplanian orthodoxy). I show that if the arguments for variabilism are any good, they generalize to all semantic categories and therefore support panvariabilism, the view that all lexical items should be treated as variables. I then give an independent motivation for panvariabilism: it is needed to solve an analogue of the problem of felicitous underspecification that arises, not for the contextual supplementations of lexical items, but for the lexical items themselves. Panvariabilism is the semantics we need to fit the pragmatics argued for in the first two lectures.
