70 - Elisabeth Camp: Emily Dickinson, Figurative Language, and Representation

Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, where she works on the philosophy of language, mind, and aesthetics. As she puts it, her research “focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit standard propositional models.” Liz and Robinson spend the first third of their conversation discussing the poetry of Emily Dickinson and its connections to philosophy. They then move on to the substantial corpus of Liz’s work, touching on frames—or representational devices—various difficult-to-analyze speech acts and devices like insinuation and metaphor, and the semantics of maps. Keep up with Liz and her research at http://www.elisabethcamp.org.

OUTLINE:

00:00 Introduction

3:30 Liz’s Interest in Figurative Language

12:03 Emily Dickinson’s “The first Day’s Night had come”

29:03 Emily Dickinson’s “This World is not Conclusion”

42:36 Mary’s Room as a Literary Creation

49:46 Imaginative Resistance

58:44 Frames as Representational Devices

1:07:34 Liz’s Taste in Problems

1:11:23 Speech Acts

1:16:41 John Searle

1:23:54 Insinuation

1:47:42 Sarcasm

1:51:00 Metaphors

2:19:42 Slurs

2:32:42 Metaphors in Science

2:40:53 Maps and Sentences

2:57:53 Animal Minds and Mental Language

3:05:37 Cognitive Science at Rutgers

Robinson’s Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com

Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.