The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Merel Semeijn, Groningen, "Common ground beyond the grave".
Abstract: As recently described by Geurts, the study of the notion of ‘common ground’ in pragmatics takes face-to-face conversations as a model for communication. In face-to-face settings, interlocutors typically update their propositional attitudes (more or less) simultaneously. Likewise, formal characterizations of common ground on offer, (e.g., in terms of common belief, acceptance or commitment) typically assume simultaneous attitudes. However, the concept of common ground has, without much hesitation, been extended to asynchronous non-face-to-face conversations in which speaker and addressee do not have simultaneous attitudes. Consider, for instance, a letter ‘from beyond the grave’. By the time that the addressee has formed any beliefs based on this letter, the writer has already passed away! I suggest that insights from multi-agent systems logics (especially Halpern and Moses’s notion of ‘eventual common knowledge’) may aid philosophers of language in developing a notion of ‘eventual common ground’ between interlocutors that applies to such asynchronous conversations. I propose a shift from defining what is common ground at a certain time between agents, to defining what is common ground between agents at certain times.
