The Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol invites applications for two fully funded, 4 year PhD-studentships with the ERC-funded project 'Truth and Semantics' directed by Johannes Stern.

Details of the studentships can be found on the project website< https://sites.google.com/site/jssternjohannes/trust/phd-studentships> and below:

Candidate requirements: We encourage applications from students with a background in fields relevant to the project's research aims and training in logic and/or formal semantics. Successful candidates will work with the Principal Investigator and the project team (two Postdocs) on the project's research questions. The main tasks are to complete a dissertation within four years and to participate in organising the project's events.

Project description: "Anne believes that Bob assumes that Anne believes that Bob's assumption is false. Does Anne believe that Bob's assumption is false?" Don't try too hard answering the question - any straightforward attempt will lead to paradox."But what are we to make of sentences such as "Anne believes that Bob's assumption is false." Is the sentence true or false? On the face of it, it would seem that answering this question is a pressing problem for natural language semantics that assigns truth conditions to sentences of natural language. However, semanticists have largely ignored problems of this kind, leaving the field to philosophical logicians working on paradoxes, in particular, the paradoxes of truth such as the Liar paradox. But research on the paradoxes of truth has often focused on exploring the space of possible coherent "solutions" to the paradoxes thereby ignoring desiderata ofnatural language semantics. The project provides a unified perspective on natural language semantics, conceived of as truth-conditional semantics, and the research on the so-called semantic paradoxes in form of theories of self-applicable truth. A unified approach to truth and semantics will need to answer two principal challenges, which divides the research project into two interrelated parts. The first part, Truth in Semantics, aims at developing semantic accounts for rich fragments of natural language, that is, fragments in which, besides the notion of truth, we allow for, e.g., modal expressions, propositional attitudes but also natural language conditionals. The second part, Truth and the Foundations of Semantics, assumes a metasemantic perspective and explores the role of the notion of truth in the foundations of natural language semantics, conceived of as truth-conditional semantics. The project constitutes the first systematic study of truth and natural language semantics from such a combined perspective.

Location: Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol
Eligibility: Home/EU students
Funding amount: Fees and stipend in line with RCUK (currently £14,777 p.a.)
Dates: Oct 2019 - Sept 2023 (4 years)

How to apply: To apply, please visit http://www.bris.ac.uk/pg-howtoapply. Please select Philosophy (PhD) on the Programme Choice page and enter details of the studentship in the Funding and Research Details sections of the form. Applicants are also asked to send a one page letter of motivation and CV to Johannes Sternjohannes.stern@bristol.ac.uk> by the closing date.

For any queries relating to the application process, please contact PG Arts Admisisons teamartf-gradschool@bristol.ac.uk>. For further information on the studentship, please contact Johannes Sternjohannes.stern@bristol.ac.uk> directly.

Deadline: 24 March 2019