Elisabeth Camp of Rutgers University to Give Department of Philosophy 2019 Kraemer Lecture

The Department of Philosophy in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is proud to present the 2019 Kraemer Lecturer, Elisabeth Camp, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. This year's lecture is titled "Just Kidding: Sarcasm, Jokes and Willful Deniability in Speech" and will be given at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21, in Gearhart Hall Auditorium (GEAR 26).

Professor Camp has provided the following abstract for her lecture: In political discourse and personal conversations, speakers often turn to jokes and other forms of indirect speech as a way to preserve 'plausible deniability' about what they meant. Interlocutors typically let them get away with such evasions, even when the speaker's intended meaning is palpably obvious to all parties. I distinguish several species of willfully manipulative speech; diagnose some common factors that help explain their rhetorical effectiveness; and suggest some ways in which resistant audiences can fight back.

After receiving her doctorate, Camp spent several years at Harvard University as part of the Harvard Society of Fellows, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 where she served as an associate professor of philosophy until 2013. In 2013, Camp accepted a tenured offer from Rutgers University where she is currently an associate professor of philosophy, and where she is additionally affiliated with the Center for Cognitive Science.

As an undergraduate, Camp attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1993 and double majoring in philosophy and English.  After graduating, Camp worked as an educational organizer in Chicago, creating and putting into practice programs designed to help residents of public housing study for their GED's and programs to provide instruction in English as a second language to members of Chicago's Latino community. Camp eventually decided to return to school and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. As a graduate student, her advisors were John Searle, Richard Wollheim, and John MacFarlane

Much of Camp's research has focused on forms of thought and speech that do not fit neatly into standard propositional models. An especial focus of her research has been figurative speech such as sarcasm and metaphor, although she has also worked significantly in other areas, including the effects that loaded language (such as slurs) can have on conversational dynamics, and how conversations are affected when a speaker and a listener are uncertain about whether or not their interests agree. Camp has strongly defended the idea of the indispensability of metaphor. She has also written on philosophical issues involving concepts as well as on animal cognition. Camp has also made an effort to counter arguments used against the classical Gricean implicature account of metaphor, making a number of arguments intended to show that contextualist approaches to metaphor are flawed and that it is, in fact, possible for what is meant by a speaker to differ from what is literally said by a speaker, even in situations where the speaker appears to be quite candid in their speech.

Besides her academic appointments, Camp is also active in efforts to encourage the participation of women in academic philosophy. Along with Elizabeth Harman and Jill North, Camp is one of the organizers behind a series of workshops aimed at providing mentorship to women in graduate philosophy programs.

The Kraemer Lectures commemorate William S. Kraemer, who was chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1953-1976. The annual Kraemer lecture is a public lecture that presents cutting-edge research by a major philosopher to a wide audience; everyone is encouraged to attend.