Does Hyperintensionality Earn Its Keep? - Workshop at St John's College, Oxford
Abstract: Intensionalists claim that necessarily equivalent propositions are identical; hyperintensionalists deny this. Whereas possible worlds semantics provides a canonical intensionalist framework, there is no canonical hyperintensionalist framework. Recent years have rather seen a thousand flowers bloom with the development of truthmakers semantics, aboutness theory, grounding theory, and logics of essence, to mention but a few hyperintensionalist theories.
A lot of recent work has focused on various paradoxes that threaten hyperintensionalism - the so-called Russell-Myhill paradox in particular. We now have reason to think that these paradoxes can be resolved.
The mere consistency of hyperintensionalist theories does not, obviously, mean that they are worth having. Even staunch adherents of hyperintensionalists approaches would admit that they are more complicated than their intensionalist competitors. So, what work can be done by hyperintensionalists theories that cannot be done by their intensionalist competitors? Is the work being done worth the price of the greater complexity? The goal of the workshop is to bring together some leading proponents and opponents of hyperintensionalism to discuss these questions.
The workshop will be held at St John's College, Oxford, 1-2 October 2026, and is organised in collaboration with Øystein Linnebo’s "C-FORS: Construction in the Formal Sciences” project at Oslo.
Speakers:
- Fabrice Correia (University of Geneva)
- Andreas Ditter (University College London)
- Nicholas K. Jones (University of Oxford)
- Stephan Kraemer (Universität Hamburg)
- Øystein Linnebo (University of Oslo)
- Jon Litland (University of Texas at Austin)
- Anna Mahtani (London School of Economics)
- Friederike Moltmann (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
- Gideon Rosen (Princeton University)
- Benjamin Schnieder (University of Vienna)
- Timothy Williamson (University of Oxford)
Due to space constraints, we ask participants to register in advance at the following address: https://forms.office.com/e/mFnskUJKAb.
Registration deadline is 2 weeks before the workshop, or once the available spaces are filled.
Updates to the timings and schedule will appear on the PhilEvents site: https://philevents.org/event/show/149345