Invitation to guest lectures by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Natalia Karczewska (Warsaw) within the CEEPUS exchange program
21/04/2026Natalia Karczewska is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, where she has worked since 2020. She received her PhD in 2019 from the University of Warsaw. Her research interests are in philosophy of language, with a particular focus on subjective and evaluative discourse. She was a visiting student at the Institut Jean-Nicod in spring 2015 and a Fulbright visiting student during the 2015–2016 academic year.
On Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at 14:00 in lecture hall A101, she will deliver two lectures:
Common Ground and Disagreement
Common ground is often understood as the background information shared by participants in conversation (Stalnaker 2002), but there is disagreement about how exactly this notion should be analyzed. Influential proposals treat common ground as a set of possible worlds (Stalnaker 1970), as a structure of mutually recognized beliefs or knowledge states (Bach and Harnish 1979), or as a normative configuration involving commitments or reasons (Lewis 1969). This lecture surveys these competing approaches and asks how well they account for disagreement in conversation. I focus in particular on evaluative disagreement and argue that, when combined with a contextual semantics for predicates such as “good” or “beautiful,” such cases create difficulties for non-normative accounts of common ground. Evaluative disputes suggest that conversational conflict cannot always be explained solely in terms of incompatible beliefs or informational states.
Evaluative Disagreement and Relational Common Ground
This lecture explores a normative alternative to non-psychological and non-modal accounts of common ground. Drawing on recent work by Geurts (2019, 2020), I consider the idea that common ground should be understood relationally, in terms of the commitments that speakers are prepared to undertake, attribute, or reject in conversation. This framework offers a promising way of understanding evaluative disagreement. Rather than treating such disagreement as merely a clash of beliefs or truth-conditions, it can be seen as involving resistance to accepting certain evaluative commitments. I argue that this approach better captures the persistence and significance of disputes about value, even in cases where interlocutors fully understand one another and contextual variation is acknowledged.
All those interested in consultations with Professor Natalia Karczewska are kindly asked to contact her at: natalia.karczewska@uw.edu.pl



