Daniel W. Harris
I am Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. I have also co-organized the The New York Philosophy of Language Workshop since it began in 2011.
Most of my work is about what's happening in our minds when we communicate—for example, how our psychological capacities for planning, mindreading, and language come together to allow us to customize what and how we communicate for our interlocutors, to organize our conversations together with them, and to interpret their context-sensitive and non-literal communicative acts. This involves lots of philosophy of language and mind, and also interdisciplinary collaboration with linguists and cognitive scientists. I also write about the history of these topics.
Sessions in which Daniel W. Harris participates
Friday 29 May, 2026
Theme : Linguistic perspectives on reasoning and decision-making
- Introduction
- Conversation without common ground
- Mental states, questions and the Multiple Perspectives Theory of communication
- What's in common ground? Studies on the omission and inclusion of redundant information
- Common Ground, Acceptance, and Conversation Plans
- Panel of the session
- Poster session
Common ground is the information that interlocutors treat as true and shared for the purpose of their interaction. I will highlight the fact that some of what we treat as common ground comes apart from what we believe, and some of it we treat as true only for certain conversational purposes. This will lead to a discussion of conversation plans in general.References