Mark Hopwood

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1,269 appearances 31 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard Sep 2014

Mark Hopwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 25: Robert Stalnaker discusses conversational context · 18 Jul 2011 podcast

So let's say the local newspaper quotes me as saying, America is a terrible place to live and this creates a great debate

But what they didn't include was that I was talking to a bunch of fellow soccer fans about the difficulty of finding soccer matches to watch and observed that America is indeed a terrible place to live if you're a soccer fan.

Um so there is it right to think that the the context out of which I'm quoted includes those people to whom I'm talking, their interests.

The case of the case.

So this is our intuitive notion of context that we're all to some extent familiar with, but as you said, philosophers and linguists have been interested in coming up with theories of context.

One of the terms that gets invoked often in those theories is one that it might be worth us clarifying.

So philosophers tend to talk about the idea of possible worlds when they talk about context.

So maybe before we get into these theories we could talk about the idea of a possible world.

What do philosophers mean when they say that?

So in your in your earlier example, if you say everyone's here and I say, What, the Queen of England's here?

then I'm including a possibility or I'm including a possible world that you and those others who have been in the conversation have already ruled out.

That's to say the possible world in which the Queen was invited.

Right.

Right,

I might one way of bringing that out be to say something like, So you said earlier, Well I can know that I'm here, I just don't know where here is.

And then you might think, Well, okay, there are problematic cases like that, but we can make it clear.

We can say, Well, here is Chicago.

Now you know where you are But that might still not be enough.

I need to know where Chicago is or what Chicago we're talking about amongst all the Chicago's that there may be.

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