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International Cognitive Science Conference to Honor
Pomona College Professor Jay David Atlas
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Pomona College will host an international linguistics and
philosophy conference, “Asserting, Meaning, and Implying” on
April 1 & April 2. The conference, being held in honor of
the 60th birthday of Pomona Professor Jay David Atlas, will
feature 11 internationally renowned scholars in the fields
of pragmatics, semantics, logic and philosophy of language.
The topics were chosen to reflect the broad and profound
influence of Atlas' research over three decades of
scholarship.
Atlas, who is the Peter W. Stanley Professor of Linguistics
and Philosophy at Pomona College, is internationally
recognized for his work in philosophy of language, meaning
and ambiguity, and conversational inference. He is the
author of Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical
Underdeterminancy, Implicature, and Their Interface
(2004) and Philosophy Without Ambiguity (1989), as
well as numerous articles in professional journals. Two
prominent theories of language use, Horn and Levinson's
developments of Grice's account of conversational
implicature and Wilson and Sperber's Relevance Theory, were
both influenced by Atlas' research on informativeness and
semantical underdeterminacy. He also influenced research on
Negative Polarity and Generalized Quantifiers, both central
topics of current research in Semantics and Logic.
Speakers include: Barbara Abbott, Michigan State University;
Paul Benacerraf, Princeton University; Anne Bezuidenhout,
University of South Carolina; Noel Burton-Roberts, The
University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Laurence R. Horn, Yale
University; Ruth Kempson, King’s College London; George
Lakoff, University of California, Berkeley; Jerry Sadock,
University of Chicago; Scott Soames, University of Southern
California; Deirdre Wilson, University College, London; and
Frans Zwarts, University of Groningen.
Atlas, a member of the Pomona College faculty since 1972, is
a former chair of the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive
Science, which offers a multidisciplinary approach to the
study of language and the mind. Linguistics focuses on the
scientific study of human language, its theoretical,
descriptive, social and behavioral bases. Cognitive science
is concerned with a unified approach to the human mind and
the nature of intelligent behavior: language, meaning,
knowledge, thinking, perceiving, remembering and other
mental phenomena.
Atlas earned his A.B., summa cum laude, from Amherst College
and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been a
research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton and a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycho-Linguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
The conference, which is sponsored by the Pomona College
Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, will be
held primarily in the Pomona College Smith Campus Center,
Room 208 (170 E. Sixth St., Claremont). It will begin on
Friday April 1 at 1:15 p.m. and concludes on Saturday, April
2, with a reception at 5:30 on. There is no charge to
attend, and all sessions are open to the public. More
information, including a complete schedule, is available on
the Web at
http://www.lcs.pomona.edu/JayFest/ or by calling (909)
621-8947.
Pomona College, one of the nation’s premier liberal arts
institutions, offers a comprehensive program in the arts,
humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Its
hallmarks include small classes, close relationships between
students and faculty, and a range of opportunities for
student research. Visit Pomona College on the Web at
www.pomona.edu
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