Seminar with Bianca Cepollaro (Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano)

On Deniability

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in room 28 on Grodzka 52, Kraków and Teams on March 30, 2023 (Thursday, 17:45 GMT+1). 

Abstract:

Dinges and Zakkou’s 2022 analyze deniability as an epistemic notion. For them, a speaker has deniability with respect to the proposition that they meant something just in case their audience does not know what they meant, possibly thanks to their denial. In this paper, we illustrate two kinds of cases that challenge their account, in order to argue that deniability cannot be so understood. The first kind of scenario shows how their epistemic understanding of deniability does not provide sufficient conditions for deniability; the second one suggests that their conditions are not necessary either. Our goal here is entirely negative: we aim to do a ground-clearing job, providing reasons why deniability cannot be understood in certain ways, and leave the articulation of an alternative proposal for future work.

This research was funded by the Priority Research Area Heritage under the program Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow