Dr. Lukas Lewerentz

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter

About

I'm a postdoc (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Department of Philosophy at JLU Giessen. Since February 2024, I'm also a postdoc at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, at the Chair of Epistemology and Philosophy of Language.

My main research focus is on the philosophy of language and communication. I work on questions in semantics as well as pragmatics. I also have research interests in epistemology.

Much of my work has to do with how meaning depends on the context in which language is used. Currently, I think about the role of questions under discussions for semantics, the semantics and pragmatics of referential expressions, the semantics of quantifiers, and how we communicate with pictures.

In 2022, I received my Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) from the University of Oxford, supervised by Prof Paul Elbourne and Prof Ofra Magidor. My thesis dealt with challenges for situation semantic accounts of definite descriptions. Before that, I studied at the University of Edinburgh and at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Publications / Veröffentlichungen

1. Truth and Directness in Pictorial Assertion. In: Linguistics and Philosophy (2023). (co-authored with Emanuel Viebahn)
   
   abstract

   This paper develops an account of accuracy and truth in pictorial assertion. It argues that there are two ways in which pictorial assertions can be indirect: with respect to their content and with respect to their target. This twofold indirectness explains how accurate, unedited pictures can be used to make false pictorial assertions. It captures the fishiness of true pictorial assertions involving target-indirectness, such as true pictorial assertions involving outdated pictures. And it raises the question whether target-indirectness may also arise in linguistic assertion.
2. Metasemantics, Intentions, and Circularity. In: Synthese 195, 4 (2018), pp. 1667-1679. (co-authored with Benjamin Marschall)
   
   abstract

   According to intentionalism, a demonstrative d refers to an object o only if the speaker intends d to refer to o. Intentionalism is a popular view in metasemantics, but Gauker has recently argued that it is circular. We defend intentionalism against this objection, by showing that Gauker’s argument rests on a misconstrual of the aim of metasemantics. We then introduce two related, but distinct circularity objections: the worry that intentionalism is uninformative, and the problem of intentional bootstrapping, according to which it is impossible to have referential intentions. We also show how intentionalists could respond to these new objections.
3. Doctoral thesis: Situations, presuppositions, and contexts
   
   abstract

   Definite descriptions (such as ‘the cat’) can often be used felicitously even when more than one object satisfies the overt descriptive material (such as ‘cat’). Situation semantics has been invoked to reconcile this observation with the idea that definite descriptions presuppose uniqueness. This thesis examines some of the challenges that this reconciliatory project faces. The focus is, in particular, on anaphoric uses that cross sentential boundaries and on the question of what role situations could play in modelling global and local conversational contexts as well as assertoric update.

Work in progress:

• A paper on quantification (with James R. Kirkpatrick)
• Bishops and Uniqueness (with Rory Harder)
• A paper on context-dependence and questions under discussion
• A paper on the triggering problem for presuppositions
• A paper on negation in situation semantics