Professor Zoltán Szabó, from Yale University, gave a lecture at the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

Professor Zoltán Szabó, an alumnus of Eötvös Loránd University, currently professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at Yale University, gave an intriguing lecture on the semantics of causation titled “Ordinary causal talk” at our Research Centre on March 25 2025.

Zoltán Szabó graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in philosophy and mathematics, earned his PhD at MIT in 1995, and is currently John S. Saden Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His research focuses on topics in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. He has made important contributions to the study of the semantics of modality, tense and aspect, the nature of compositionality, the interpretation of  quantifiers, the relationship between lexical and ontological categories, the nature of explanations in semantics and the nature of context.  He is the author (with Richmond Thomason) of the CUP textbook Philosophy of Language, and editor of the collections Semantics vs. Pragmatics (by OUP) and A Reader’s Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics (with Louise McNally).

In the talk, after a highly accessible historical introduction to earlier analyses of causation and highlighting several problems with prevailing decompositions of sentences like “Suzy broke the bottle”, Szabó explained why he feels such sentences do not necessarily entail that “something Suzy did was the cause of the breaking of the bottle”, contrary to our intuitions. He sketched the outlines of a novel theory with distinct semantic primitives for initiating and successfully carrying out an action, and demonstrated how it could be used to efficiently account for many of the problematic edge cases and their implicatures.