IL LLFP researchers spoke at the conference "Current Issues in Analytical Philosophy" in Tomsk.

On September 25, laboratory staff memebers Mikhail Smirnov and Anna Moiseeva presented at the conference "Current Issues in Analytical Philosophy" in Tomsk.

Mikhail Smirnov gave a talk entitled ‘‘Reference’ as a metaphysical notion and non-referential view on meaning’. He began discussing the standard logico-semantic definition of sign based on the notion of reference: a ‘sign’ is defined as an entity that, in the eyes of some interpreter, stands for some other entity called ‘referent.’ However, the logico-philosophical reflection in the works of such analytic philosophers as W. V. Quine, D. Davidson, H. Putnam shows that this view is too abstract and hardly applicable to actual situations when linguistic expressions are used, due to such problems as ‘inscrutability of reference.’ The speaker discussed possible ways to solve problems with reference: (1) adjustment of ontological apparatus; (2) correction of the view on the mechanisms of reference, e. g. introducing the notion of multi-reference; (3) turn to non-referential view of meaning. He proposed basic ideas for non-referential conception of meaning. The talk gained interest of the audience and was followed with a discussion.

Anna Moiseyeva made a poster presentation entitled "'Intentional Identity' in the Context of Reasoning About Fiction." The presentation addressed a long-standing problem in philosophical semantics, namely, the problem of intentional identity, as applied to a particular type of context — the context of reasoning about fictions. The paradigmatic case of intentional identity is the relation between the objects of two different agents' propositional attitudes, such that these agents can be said to possess attitudes toward "the same" individual, despite the fact that there is no publicly accessible correlate of the objects of these attitudes. In the context of the semantics of fiction, this problem takes on a new twist: intentional identity can be defined as the relation between the objects of propositional attitudes that arise as a result of two agents' imagining the same "object" (e.g., a character) in a work of literature or art. The poster presented a sketch of a logic (specifically, language and semantics) in which intentional identity, or more precisely, intentional counterparthood as a special kind of equivalence, is ascribed to concrete imaginations that instantiate this character for subjects. The character itself is then considered an abstract object, defining a canonical description that any correct instantiation of it must correspond to. The poster formalized and explained the criterion of intentional counterparthood, and then went on to explore examples of how this logic can be used to interpret statements in natural language.