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Kenneth Black

@kennethblack.bsky.social

500 followers 420 following 550 posts

PhD candidate at MIT philosophy, doing philosophy of: mind/cog sci, language/linguistics, science. Intentionality with a few interlopers, basically. (he/him) kennethblackphi.com

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · Jul 17

Pleased to announce that my paper, “Common Ground, Conditionals, and Ceteris Paribus Pragmatics,” is forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy! 🧵

Kenneth Black, Common Ground, Conditionals, and _Ceteris Paribus_ Pragmatics - PhilArchive

In conversation, we make use of shared information in order to communicate. But what shared information? In theorising about conversation, it’s popular to allot a privileged position to a single body ...

philarchive.org

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 6d

Yikes!

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 6d

Reminder that if someone on the plane (etc) asks your favorite philosopher you can just lie

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 9d

Every lit needs its Thesis

b(B if A) = b(A&B)/b(A).
Call this "The Thesis".
Edgington, “On Conditionals” 263

Reposted by Kenneth Black

Paolo Santorio @paolosantorio.bsky.social · 10d

FARM is happening next Friday and Saturday at UMD!

We have a great roster of speakers and commentators, and I'm beyond excited for it.

If you want to join us, the conference is open to all and free. Please just register following the link from the website:

sites.google.com/view/farm202...

FARM 2025

FARM is a new conference that aims at bringing together researchers working on meaning (including, but not limited to, semantics of natural language) and researchers working on reasoning and rational ...

sites.google.com

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 10d

this post is not to be taken as an endorsement of the theory theory of concepts, I just believe in verbal disagreements

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 10d

Learned today that I’m a “comfortable muddlehead.” Thanks, Jerry

Since you and I have different concepts of dogs, we mean different things when we say "dog". So the disagreement between us is, as comfortable muddleheads like to put it, "just semantic".

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 10d

What David Lewis was really worried about

🎃 Spooky Chip bitney 🎃 @fragboner.bsky.social · 11d

🐸

Did You Know?
@frog-page
When provoked, FROGS will defend themselves by traveling back in time to make sure you were never born!

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 12d

Ick.

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 16d

I always preferred baseball quasi-realism myself

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 16d

You can hope someone writes a review

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 16d

gonna change how people view contemporary philosophy by putting out an anthology called The Metalinguistic Turn

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 23d

Little do my colleagues know we’re messaging about work stuff while I’m in the woods looking at birds

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 28d

Man the preface to Dummett’s Truth and Other Enigmas is chock full of tea about other philosophers at the time, people don’t write like this anymore

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 28d

I take it someone with extremely positive attitudes toward “clankers” could be offended—I suspect disagreements about whether a term is a slur could be downstream of value judgments which may give rise to offense. But I’m definitely with you on 4️⃣

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 29d

I myself am not certain about the view, but I don’t think it’s less plausible than saying eg “I know that Frodo brought the ring to Mordor (but I don’t know what happened next)” can be true

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 29d

Not certain but I think it’s the fiction-factive idea? Fictional events are real on the view

The proposal I want to explore here is that fictional entities are constituted by fictional works (films, plays, novels, and so on)— call this fictional constitutivism.

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 29d

Extra tricky for fiction

Seeing the Fictional

When we see a movie or a play, do we see the fictional entities and events depicted? On the one hand, it seems incredibly natural to think we do. For instance, it seems obvious that one thing that di...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Reposted by Kenneth Black

Ersatz Doctor @ersatzdoctor.bsky.social · Sep 13

I’m tired of hearing about “the Left” as if that term has a meaningful referent.

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Reposted by Kenneth Black

Gavin Foster🦧 @gibbonitathought.bsky.social · Sep 10

Really excited to share my first ever published paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology: "From Monkeys to Infants: The Empirical Challenges Facing Mental Fictionalism"

It's open-access, which I'm really happy about.

Brief 🧵 on what it's all about!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · Sep 6

Actually strawmen really are ghosts in the machine, pretty wild

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · Sep 4

There’s always a class cartesian

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · Aug 22

Atomists beware

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · Aug 19

I mean, the fact that you made it that long without getting the headache is impressive

Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · Aug 19

That’s why they stopped stocking phenomenological research a while ago

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · Aug 17

Alright who’s been dissing Noam’s published work

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