ABSTRACT. According to psychologism about work completion, whether a work is complete is a matter of psychological states of the artist whose work it is. Some writers, however, have recently raised circularity objections to the psychological accounts. We can distinguish between two different circularity objections: the circular analysis objection, and the catch-22 objection. I defend the accounts against the objections by clarifying their aims and specific content.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to offer a general schema for how successful debunking arguments work and to defend it against recent objections. I argue that previous attempts to formulate such a schema have been unsuccessful, and I offer an alternative schema which avoids not only the problems facing earlier suggestions, but which also explains the various ways in which debunking arguments can undermine the justificatory status of the target belief. Lastly, I defend the schema against three recent objections offered by Srinivasan (2015).

ABSTRACT. [Epistemology] We want a theory to allow us to say that oppressed people who suffer injustice have knowledge of it even if their testimony is not believed. Recently, Srinivasan (2015, 2016, forthcoming) has defended a particular kind of epistemic externalism for this purpose. However, we contend that Srinivasan’s epistemological externalism is a form of descriptivism that requires assuming that there are moral facts. As an alternative, we offer a form of evaluativism (see Field 2009, 2018) that doesn’t depend on moral realism to attribute knowledge to the oppressed.

ABSTRACT. Recently, people have suggested that our knowledge of non-actual possibilities might be justified through similarity-reasoning (cf. Hawke 2011, Roca-Royes 2017). For example, I know that this cup could break, because I know that a relevantly similar cup that actually did break. The main challenge for these accounts is spelling out what 'relevant similarity' is.

I suggest that we use the notion of 'kind' to do so. I first develop a technical notion -- 'fundamental kind' -- in order to get a valid, rational reconstruction of the justification of our beliefs in non-actual possibilities. Then, I argue that we are justified in all the crucial steps in this rational reconstruction, e.g., making such sameness-of-kind judgements.

ABSTRACT. [Epistemology]

Daniel McKaughan has recently argued that the view that Judeo-Christian faith is an essentially action-centred attitude whose cognitive aspect need not involve belief in the propositions that articulate its fundamental presuppositions can be used as the central plank of a successful explanation of how having such faith can be not only practically, but epistemically rational – even for an agent whose current evaluation of the evidence favours naturalism over the truth of Judaism or Christianity. I resist McKaughan’s claim by arguing that hope, the attitude that replaces belief in his account of faith, is not cognitive enough to fit the bill.

ABSTRACT. Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative inquiry starts by asking: What legitimate reasons do we have for wanting a concept of theory of X in the first place? Then, it aims to develop a theory that is up to the task. I argue that using ameliorative methodology in epistemology does two things. First, it opens the way towards endorsing pluralism about epistemic value, as there may be a range of good answers to the normative question that begins ameliorative inquiry. Second (and relatedly), it motivates the claim that the concerns of feminist and liberatory epistemology are a core part of epistemology proper. Some of the reasons for wanting normative epistemic concepts stem from the practical and moral importance of representing the world well.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is naturalized vice epistemology that has taken a lesson from cognitive and social psychology. When we base our position on behavioural sciences, we can see that the epistemic character of believers in pseudoscience is mostly determined by two related factors. Firstly, these epistemic agents show a higher level of cognitive laziness. By this I mean an unwilingness to engage in reflective thinking and a reluctance to account for counterevidence. Secondly, they yield more easily to metacognitive incompetence, the inability to recognize one’s own intellectual limits. The deficiency usually stems from a misunderstanding of the division of cognitive labour and of agent’s role in epistemic society.

Topic: Epistemology

ABSTRACT. Plausibly enough, epistemic progress can be made by conceptual engineering, i.e. evaluating and improving concepts. And it’s also plausible that epistemic progress consists in the acquisition of some epistemic good, such as truth, knowledge, or understanding. The question then arises: what epistemic good is gained when we make epistemic progress through conceptual engineering? I will argue that at least in some important cases of conceptual engineering, the epistemic good gained is a certain kind of non-factive understanding. However, some revision of the current notions of non-factive understanding is needed, in order to make sense of non-factive understanding by conceptual engineering.

ABSTRACT. (Congress section: epistemology.) I argue that we should solve the Lottery Paradox (Kyburg 1961) by denying that rational belief is closed under classical logic. Indeed, I show that (a slight variant of) McGee’s famous election scenario (McGee 1985) is just a lottery scenario. This implies that the sensible ways to deal with McGee’s scenario are the same as the sensible ways to deal with the lottery scenario: we should either reject the Lockean Thesis or Belief Closure. I show, then, that a McGee-like argument can be provided in which the Lockean Thesis plays no role: this supports the view that denying Belief Closure is the right way to deal with both McGee’s scenario and the Lottery Paradox.

ABSTRACT. When does knowing mathematical claim p entail knowing mathematical claim q? We outline the 'challenge of mathematical omniscience' -- an acute instance of the problem of logical omniscience. We construe it as concerning the nature and mereology of mathematical content. We highlight intuitive logical desiderata that illustrate the challenge. We show that prominent proposals for meeting logical omniscience miss our desiderata, including those based on: impossible worlds, truthmaker semantics, fragmentation, aboutness preservation. Finally, we motivate and detail a novel framework for epistemic logic that *does* meet the desiderata.

ABSTRACT. In the contemporary epistemological debate on peer disagreement, it is usually taken for granted that only actual peer disagreements, if any at all, are epistemically significant, and that merely possible ones can safely be ignored. This, however, is not only a bit hasty, but is also of no real help when it comes to distinguishing significant from insignificant peer disagreements. The reason is that an exactly analogous problem reappears when we turn to extreme cases of disagreement. I will present an account of how to deal with both extreme cases of disagreement and merely possible ones.

ABSTRACT. Does reasoning (i.e., inferring) require self-knowledge of one’s inferential mental states? One reason to think so is that reasoning is plausibly subject to a ‘Taking Condition’. According to the Taking Condition, inferring q from p requires that one appreciates how one's premise-attitudes confer inferential support on some possible conclusion. This seems to entail that one must have self-knowledge of one's premise-attitudes. In this paper I consider three motivations for the Taking Condition and argue that they do not motivate the view that reasoning requires self-knowledge. Even granting the Taking Condition, I argue that it is possible to reason by appreciating propositions and relations of epistemic support, whether or not one metarepresents one's own attitudes de se.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I present two arguments to show that logical irrefutability alone is not a reliable criterion for the irrefutability of sentences. The first argument is based on a pluralistic view of logic and claims that logical irrefutability only makes sense if it is clear in which logical system one speaks of logical irrefutability. The second argument arises from the conviction that logical possibility does not necessarily underlie all other possibilities. With this argument I try to show that metaphilosophically speaking there are different concepts of irrefutability and that logical irrefutability is only one of them.

[Topic: Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics, Epistemology]

ABSTRACT. In a recent paper Worsnip (forthcoming) argues that endorsing moderate pragmatism, i.e. the view that practical factors can make a difference to what a subject ought to believe by determining how much evidence is necessary for a subject to believe rationally cannot be successfully distinguished from pragmatism about reasons to believe. In this paper, I argue that Worsnip’s argument against moderate pragmatism fails and that the Risks/Costs Principle actually succeeds in explaining why practical factors can make a difference to what one ought to believe in some cases (e.g. Bank cases) without having to endorse reasons pragmatism.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Philosophy of Language. Abstract: Williamson (1996) has convinced many that assertions are governed by a knowledge norm: One must assert that p only if one knows that p. Since assertions are not the only means of conveying information, it is natural to wonder whether similar norms apply to other means as well. We argue that conversational implicatures are also governed by a knowledge norm: One must implicate that p only if one knows that p. So far, this norm hasn't been popular. We want to show that this is undeserved, by defending it against what we take to be the most serious worry: that it is too demanding. (Goldberg 2007, Green 2017)

ABSTRACT. I define Common Sense as a capacity to detect problematic forms of extreme revisionism, not via Reid’s “emotion of ridicule” (criticized by Reed 2006) but rather via a sensitivity to a specific epistemic vice. Two theories of this epistemic vice are examined. The first interprets violations of Common Sense as coming from a lack of perseverance or epistemic inertia (Cassam 2016). The second (which I defend) interprets them as coming from a liability to commit a kind of fallacy, namely taking a trilemma in the reverse order – i.e. the kind of fallacy that justifies a “GE Moore shift” (Moore 1939).

ABSTRACT. This epistemology paper concerns non-epistemic values in relation to a naturalistic epistemology of science. Specifically, I focus critically on Laudan’s (1990) normative naturalism via an argument Kelly (2003) has given. Laudan proposed that we should construe epistemic rules as hypothetical imperatives. Kelly has argued that our treating epistemic reasons categorically is evidence that they are categorical, and any attempt to argue otherwise will face the dilemma of rejecting one of two plausible theses: epistemic intersubjectivity or goal idiosyncrasy. Drawing on work from Foot (1972), I show that Kelly’s argument fails and the dilemma can be avoided.

ABSTRACT. Our aim in this talk is to defend the reductionist (or deflationist) view on group testimony from the attacks of divergence arguments. We will begin in section 1 by presenting how divergence arguments can challenge the reductionist view. However, in section 2, we will argue that these arguments are not decisive to rule out the reductionist view; for, these arguments have false premises, assuming dubious epistemic principles that testimony cannot generate knowledge and understanding. Section 3 will be devoted to presenting the advantages of the reductionist approach to explaining the phenomenon of group testimony.

ABSTRACT. Some philosophers have argued that there is something morally objectionable about moral realism: for instance, according to realism, we are justified in believing that genocide is wrong only if a certain moral fact obtains, but it is objectionable to hold our moral commitments hostage to metaphysics in this way. I argue that no version of this moral argument against realism is likely to succeed. More precisely, minimal realism ― the kind of realism on which realist theses are understood as internal to moral discourse ― is immune to this challenge, contrary to what some proponents of the argument have suggested, while robust non-naturalist realists might have good answers to all versions of the argument as well.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to analyze the concept of subjective rate of time, which derives from the concept of speed superintelligence and relates to the speed of information processing in future artificial minds: the faster a mind runs, the slower it perceives the external world. Besides the ethical issues raised by Bostrom and Yudkowsky in “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” (2014), this novel concept gives rise to many other interesting questions concerning the very nature of how a fast AI experiences the world, which differs from ours not only quantitatively, but mainly qualitatively.

ABSTRACT. The common construal of Prioritarianism as an additive function of weighted welfare is flawed. It misunderstands the Priority View by giving greater weights to the absolute welfare of individuals rather than to their comparative gains, and it yields implausible results in variable population comparisons. I develop an alternative construal: Comparative Prioritarianism. It is concerned with the specific individual gains and losses and weights individuals’ gains and losses more the worse-off the individuals are. This captures the underlying intuition of the Priority View and avoids the problems in variable population comparisons. Eventually, I consider and rebut certain objection.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a new theory of well-being—well-being as need-satisfaction. Needs have often been considered unviable as a basis for a theory of well-being, often regarded merely minimal and/or purely instrumental means to persons’ further ends. However, I provide a novel analysis of the concept of need on which some needs—‘personal needs’—are valuable ends in their own right; indeed, they are the central components of some people’s well-being. The personal-need satisfaction theory provides a distinctive account of how well-being is in some respects subject-dependent and in others objective. It also offers a new way of representing well-being’s pluralistic structure; it is because needs are non-substitutable that they are mutually irreducible in value to other goods.

Topic: Ethics

ABSTRACT. Metaethical expressivism predicts that sentences, like

1. Murder is wrong, but I don’t disapprove of it. 2. Murder is wrong, but I’m not against it.

should be infelicitous along the same lines as Moore-sentences:

3. It is raining but I don’t believe that it is raining.

Woods (2014) claims that sentences like (1) and (2) are not infelicitous to the same degree as (3), and argues that this constitutes a major problem for expressivism. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study concerning the degree to which language speakers find sentences like (1) and (2) infelicitous, and discuss what consequences these results have for metaethical expressivism.

ABSTRACT. Transformative experiences are decisions that can significantly change one’s identity and in which the value of the options is not known in advance. Such choices threaten the concept of agent, which requires planning ability and thus stability in identity, and entail the non-identity problem, as the individual’s present decisions shape her future self. In my contribution, first, I delineate a concept of the self as agential unity that accounts for identity changes and the planning ability; second, I identify the future self's vulnerabilities in transformative experiences and propose a new approach to protect the future self.

ECAP 10 topic: Ethics

ABSTRACT. I will challenge the standard view of consent that a person’s given consent can only have its intrinsic normative power to make acts permissible which would otherwise be impermissible if it is free of deception, manipulation and coercion. I will show that the introduction of this procedural constraint of validity has a paradoxical and therefore untenable consequence: In all three cases it must allow the impossibility of someone allowing and not allowing something. Therefore, we need an alternative explanation of the permissibility or impermissibility to do something without denying the validity of a given consent.

ABSTRACT. Ethics

Whether or not emotions and intuitions have a normative relevance is a controversial issue. According to some deontologists, they constitute the “input” we have to endorse or reject through rational reflection. However, since they are sensitive to irrelevant factors (e.g. proximity), and related to epistemically dubious processes, some scholars see judgements, principles and even moral theories which rely on them as unjustified. In this paper I try to briefly re-map the debate, suggesting the criteria that Sidgwick outlines in the Methods (1874) as a useful procedure to value the reliability of moral intuitions. I will also discuss a Neo-Smithian constructivist approach in order to tackle the risk of a sharp division between normativity and evolutionary explanations of moral behavior.

ABSTRACT. Well-being in philosophical debate refers to what is non-instrumentally or ultimately good for a person. Since Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, standard philosophical discussion distinguishes three philosophical approaches to defining well‐being: hedonism, desire‐based theories and objective list theories. I aim to show that such standard taxonomy neglects important aspects of well-being and as such cannot give full account of the nature of well-being. Therefore, I propose an account of well-being based on Nussbaum’s capability approach that can solve the problems: it keeps both subjective and objective aspects of well-being and is empirically applicable.

ABSTRACT. Imagine you are offered a gamble in which another individual stands to gain or lose. If you refuse the gamble, nothing will change for the individual. If you take the gamble there is a chance that she will be much better off than she currently is but there is also a chance that she will be much worse off. Should you take this gamble?

Contra a recent proposal by Lara Buchak (2017), I argue that it is permissible to be risk-inclined within reason when taking risks for others if a) the individual falls below the Entitlement Threshold and b) there is a chance that by taking the risk the individual is brought up to or above the Entitlement Threshold.

ABSTRACT. While a desirable good, there is no consensus on what trust is and what motivates it. Between rationality and morality, my paper explores the possibility of a unitary understanding of trust. Against the rational choice conceptualization of trust, recent studies show that trust in strangers may be triggered by other-regarding motivations, including moral commitments. In support of accounts emphasizing the normative dimension of trust, an explanation of the concept should account for the conceptual link between trust and morality. My aim is to suggest that we need a theory of preference formation of trust that could integrate these fragmented views.

ABSTRACT. CRISPR/Cas-based human genome editing is widely considered a step towards the causative treatment of genetic diseases, the reduction of health risks, and genetic enhancement. Although this new technology appears promising, a glance at recent biomedical literature on the preferential treatment of sensational results raises the suspicion that hopes are premature. In this talk, we argue that publications on recent advances in CRISPR/Cas-research indeed tend to be sensationalist in tone, but differ in positive ways from the unbalanced reporting criticized in biomedical research. We propose an explication of “sensation bias” in biomedicine that allows for distinguishing between several types of the preferential treatment of evidence in scientific publishing.

philosophy of science

ABSTRACT. I defend the claim that moral generalizations (both hedged and unhedged) are genuinely explanatory given plausible assumptions about the normative constraints that govern explanations. First, I argue that we have good reasons to rescue the explanatory import of moral principles. Then, I argue that a moderately pluralistic theory of explanation can successfully meet the challenges raised by Berker (2018), Skow (2016), and Rosen (2017). Roughly, such a theory takes explanatory relevance constraints to be relative to the aims of once’s explanatory project.

ABSTRACT. (history of philosophy)

John Schuster in his recent book Descartes Agonistes (Schuster 2013) offered a detailed interpretation of Descartes’ method from his Discourse as method talk. Schuster understands method talk as an ideologically charged form of discourse that by means of particular literary effects creates an illusion that it, for reasons rooted in the very structure of that discourse, cannot fulfill. In the paper I will argue, that this description, if fitting to Carnap, Lakatos or Popper, gives us an alternative vision of the methodological debates in the 60-ties. Nevertheless, I will show that it is misguided when applied to Descartes.

ABSTRACT. Dorothy Wrinch (1894-1976) was a student of G. H. Hardy and wrote a thesis under the supervision of Bertrand Russell. She had a career in mathematics and biochemistry, and is perhaps best-known for her work on x-ray crystallography and on protein structure, particularly her cyclol hypothesis. I argue here that Wrinch was a logical atomist using writings on the relation between science and philosophy wherein she advocates a logical atomism. I further claim that Wrinch's work in mathematics and chemistry are emblematic of logical atomist methodology.

ABSTRACT. The starting point of this paper is Thomas Reid’s anti-skepticism: our knowledge of the external world is justified. The justificatory process, in his view, starts with and relies upon one of the main faculties of the human mind: perception. Reid’s theory of perception has been thoroughly studied, but there are some missing links in the explanatory chain offered by the secondary literature. In particular, I will argue that we do not have a complete picture of the mechanism of perception of bodies. The present paper, relying, in part, on a particular theory in psychology – the feature integration theory of attention – will make a contribution in this regard.

ABSTRACT. Topic: History of Philosophy

It has become a common practice among analytic philosophers to write extended acknowledgments in their academic publications. These texts are a rich source of information about the social context of analytic philosophy since they mention seminars, institutions, funders, and, most interestingly, the persons who contributed to the publications. I will present a large-scale analysis of the acknowledgments contained in 2073 articles published between 2005 and 2019 in five prestigious analytic philosophy journals. The main results consist of a ranking of the most mentioned persons and a map of the social network of contemporary analytic philosophy based on the mentioned persons.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I argue that Descartes's philosophical system does not include the thesis of the privacy of mind. First, I criticize the traditional reading of Descartes's ontology as a substance dualism by distinguishing between two senses of the concept of substance - the "stuff" sense and the logical sense. Descartes's use of the last one means that the mind/matter distinction is theoretical and not a metaphysical one. Second, I propose an argument for the primacy of conceptual thinking over the Ego principle, which is equivalent to the publicity of mind over the privacy of mind in Descartes's philosophy.

Topic: History of Philosophy

ABSTRACT. I offer here a reappraisal of Hume’s relationship with Pyrrhonian scepticism. On my view, the most informative point of comparison between Hume and Sextus Empiricus is a point of difference, namely, their stands on the connection between suspension of judgement (epochê) and tranquillity (ataraxia). For Sextus, tranquillity flows naturally from suspending judgement on all opinions. Hume, by contrast, consistently treats radical suspension of judgement as resulting in despair and social detachment. I take a firmer stance than past commentators on this issue by affirming that Hume and Sextus do not merely disagree on this issue, but that Hume’s view is more plausible. Reading Hume’s sceptical crisis, I propose, reveals an insightful criticism of Pyrrhonism, one that sheds light on human nature’s response to radical doubt.

ABSTRACT. In his 'Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic', David Lewis states that his counterpart relation 'is very like' the relation of intersubjective correspondence in Carnap's 'Aufbau'. This reference must appear surprising to anyone familiar with the history of analytic philosophy, since it likeńs a central building stone of Lewis's metaphysical system to a relation introduced in an early manifesto of the most prominent critic of metaphysics of the 20th century. This paper aims to answer the question of whether Lewis similarity claim is true by arguing that Lewis could not have intended a purely formal reading of it and that a reading in terms of theoretical roles only partly vindicates the claim.

Section: History of philosophy

ABSTRACT. Analysis of notional attitudes (e.g., "Alice is thinking about Pegasus") has a long tradition in semantic analysis of natural language. In this talk, we will be interested in a more general class of these sentences that can be obtained by replacing the concrete objects by non-specific ones (e.g., "Alice is thinking about something"). This possess a specific challenge to type-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics for obvious reasons: since we cannot know in advance what type of object is being referred to by "something" (e.g., Alice can be thinking about people, numbers, functions, etc.) we have to adopt polymorphic properties that can be applied to an unspecified range of objects.

topic: Philosophy of Language (and/Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics)

ABSTRACT. Linguistic theory of verb-valency frames is applied to the conceptual analysis of processes and events applicable in artificial intelligence, particularly in multi agent systems (MAS). Each process can be specified by a verb (what is to be done), possibly with parameters (so called verb-valency participants) like the agent of the process (who), the object to be operated on, resources, etc. In verb-valency frames each verb is characterized by its participants. Using verb-valency frames we can thus obtain a fine-grained specification of a process. The specification tool is Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) with its procedural as opposed to denotational semantics.

ABSTRACT. We explore the question of whether cost-free uncertain evidence is worth waiting for in advance of making a decision. A classical result in Bayesian decision theory, known as the value of evidence theorem (VET), says that, under certain conditions, when an agent updates her credences by conditionalizing on some cost-free certain evidence, then the subjective expected utility of obtaining this evidence is never less than the subjective expected utility of not obtaining it. We extend this result to a type of update method, called virtual conditionalization, where uncertain evidence is represented as a set of likelihood ratios.

ABSTRACT. We discuss how the informal notion of "being equinumerous", and hence the resulting ordinary notion of cardinal number, can be considered vague. We first build some borderline cases (e.g. "the naturals are equinumerous with the evens") and a sorite sequence based on Mancosu (2016). We then sketch the consequences that endorsing one theory of vagueness as opposed to another bears on the view - in particular, we survey epistemic theories, supervaluationism, degrees of truth, and ontological vagueness, drawing some conclusions for the logic and philosophy of mathematics.

ABSTRACT. From the limitation of the logical space I derive theorems that show an inevitable limitation of an explication of knowledge, belief, assertion, necessity and truth. The result is achieved within a higher-order modal logic: a type theory that handles both possible-world propositions and fine-grained (structured) hyperintensional `propositions', on which the modal notions are applicable.

ABSTRACT. Numbers as abstract objects arose from a prior practice of counting. However, one can have a practice of counting without referring to numbers. I will show that counting is a dynamic process that can be captured by a modified version of Pratt's First-Order Dynamic Logic. I will argue that the resulting logic is of great philosophical significance since it captures directly the logical form of counting without strong ontological commitments. In particular, though it does not refer to numbers, it is strong enough to simulate on the level of quantifiers any primitive recursive arithmetical predicate.

ABSTRACT. In bilateral logic formulas are signed by + and −, indicating the speech acts assertion and denial in terms of which meanings are determined, according to bilateralism. I argue that making an assumption is also speech act. Speech acts cannot be embedded within other speech acts. Hence we cannot make sense of the notion of making an assumption in bilateral logic.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of a relation of logical consequence is to make explicit the normative distinction between valid and invalid arguments. But is the notion of truth is the best expressive resource to do that? I discuss this question by focussing on logical pluralism, because, as I try to show, the debate about it is significantly oriented by intuitions concerning the expressive resources of its model-theoretic truth-conditional framework. I suggest reorienting the debate by proposing a mild logical expressivist stance and an alternative semantics based on the notion of compatibility. Such semantics is then used to discuss logical pluralism about negation.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this talk is to present a formal semantics for plural predication that capitalises on the tools of fuzzy logic. My focus is on two aspects of plural predication. The first aspect is partial involvement, which occurs whenever a predicate can be seemingly truthfully applied to a plurality of objects even if some of these objects fail to instantiate it. The other one is graded predication, which concerns the fact that some predicates apply to the world in degrees. In this talk I will present a formal semantics based on Fuzzy Class Theory that manages to account for both phenomena and their interaction.

ABSTRACT. When are two logical systems equivalent? I discuss equivalence between logical systems under the metaphysical grounding theory, which yields the notion of ground-equivalence. Specifically, I consider the view that intertranslatability is an adequate criterion for ground-equivalence between logical systems.

I show that Jason Turner's recent argument on the relationship between classical first-order quantified logic and predicate functor logic can be generalized to demonstrate the ground-equivalence of intertranslatable logical theories.

I argue, however, that this argument is unsuccessful since it faces a dilemma, which shows that ground-equivalence between intertranslatable logical systems cannot be taken for granted.

ABSTRACT. Section Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics:

In this presentation, we will introduce and further develop John Kearns' many-valued non-deterministic hierachical semantics for modal logics. Those are semantics for modal logic that come with no ontological commitment to possible worlds. Instead, every sentence is evaluated with respect to a many-valued non-deterministic semantics, combined with an additional filter condition on the set of all valuation. In particular, we will introduce many-valued non-deterministic hierachical semantics for various normal modal logics and discuss phenomena and issues like correspondence theory, decidability and, the notion of modality, that comes with such an approach to modal logics.

ABSTRACT. I present the traditional debate about the so called “explanation” of Russell’s paradox and propose a new way to “free” Frege’s system from the contradiction. I briefly examine two alternative explanatory proposals - the Predicativist explanation and the Cantorian one - presupposed by almost all the proposed solutions of Russell’s Paradox. From the discussion about these proposals emerges a controversial conclusion. Then, I examine some particular zig zag solutions and I propose a third explanation, presupposed by them, in which I emphasise the role of an implicit premise in the derivation of the paradox. In conclusion, I propose a different zig zag solution obtained by the adoption of a negative free logic.

ABSTRACT. The paper exposes epistemic underpinnings of physicalism and aims to show how physicalist thinking involves elements that undermine rather than support the supposedly scientific physicalist agenda and make physicalism appear as a worldview question. The pitfalls of physicalist thinking are illustrated through three intertwining issues: the reductive individuation of neural basis, the seeking for the fundamental level of reality, and the notion of really real, which are all shown to incorporate faith-like elements into the physicalist outlook on the world.

Section: Philosophy of Science

ABSTRACT. The paper analyses the grounding objection to presentism, arguing that presentists who claim that only present things exist have no ontological basis for their claims. It attempts to demonstrate that the objection is invalidated when we consider a dynamic version of presentism based on the notion of dynamic existence which is a generalisation of becoming. Not only does this approach allow us to explain why the future is open but most importantly it facilitates the introduction of a metaphysical category of the past (past things and past facts) which provides an ontological basis for past-tense propositions.

ABSTRACT. The main goal of this paper is to show that the widely accepted view that powers can exist unmanifested is inconsistent with the view (known as dispositional monism) that all fundamental natural properties and relations are powers. To this end, two kinds of manifestation-relation (token-level and type-level, respectively) are introduced and it is then argued that dispositional monists need the former in order to offer a metaphysically clear view of the transition from non-manifestation to manifestation of a power. Finally, an argument is given that the token-level-manifestation-relations are not powers.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Metaphysics

The debate about the question whether the ethical realm is autonomous focuses on logical characterizations of the autonomy thesis. Maguire (2015) has claimed that this focus is misguided. He argues that a metaphysical autonomy thesis in terms of grounding characterizes the important sense in which ethics is autonomous. I will show that Maguire’s specific approach fails to establish the relevant kind of autonomy. I will suggest a different way to understand the autonomy thesis that requires a distinction between those propositional parts that are responsible for the grounding relation and those that are responsible for the ethical status of the proposition.

ABSTRACT. Explanatory realism is the view that explanations work by providing information about worldly relations of dependence or determination (e.g. causation or grounding). The view has gained considerable popularity in metaphysical debates about non-causal explanation. What makes the view particularly attractive is that it fits nicely with the idea that not all explanations are causal whilst avoiding an implausible pluralism about explanation. Recently, Elanor Taylor has presented four types of explanations that realism allegedly cannot account for: analogical explanations, explanations by rules, explanations by reductio ad absurdum, and certain statistical explanations. The talk defends explanatory realism against Taylor’s alleged counterexamples.

ABSTRACT. Grounding is claimed to offer a promising characterisation fundamentality in terms of ungroundedness. Against this view, it has been argued that there can be fundamental and yet mutually grounded entities. Proponents of this objection argue that (1) we should renounce the link between grounding and fundamentality and (2) we should reject the characterisation of the fundamental in terms of grounding. I show that the possibility of fundamental and mutually grounded entities entails neither (1) or (2). To accomplish this aim, I defend a reformulation of fundamentality in terms of grounding based on Karen Bennett’s account (2017).

ABSTRACT. My talk concerns the difficult relationship between Humean Supervenience (HS) and quantum entanglement. The most conservative strategy to defend HS is to add the problematic entanglement relations to the supervenience basis, alongside spatiotemporal relations. I’m going to present a novel argument against this strategy, making explicit one necessary condition that has to be posited to save HS from being trivial and then showing how entanglement relations fail to satisfy that condition in some cases of tripartite entanglement states. These states are also critical for the thesis of locality. I conclude that the defence fails and the Humean is therefore forced to pursue more demanding and controversial strategies.

Topic: Metaphysics

ABSTRACT. Topic: Metaphysics

In 2016 Chris Illingworth, Nick Blacka, and Rob Turner, as the music group GoGo Penguin, released their third album Men Made Object. It is indisputable and yet unclear what it means to say that the album was authored by them. In the philosophy of artifacts, the question of what it means that the authorship of an artifact is born by more than one author, what I call “multiauthorship”, has been little discussed. In my talk I will argue that reducible and irreducible types of multiauthorship can exist in the process of creating one and the same artifact, using the authorship of the album Man Made Object as an example.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I critique Vetter’s (2015) potentialist account of modality. Specifically, I show that her picture entails the truth of contradictory modal claims. To do so, I begin (§1) by quickly sketching Vetter’s conception of potentialities, including five key points concerning the interplay between degrees of potentiality and time. I then demonstrate (§2) how these jointly entail the truth of contradictory modal claims. Finally, I conclude (§3) by anticipating and rejecting some possible responses to this argument.

ABSTRACT. Tahko recently argued for a hybrid view of the laws of nature, according to which some physical laws are metaphysically necessary, while others are metaphysically contingent. We show that his criterion for distinguishing between these two kinds of laws is on its own insufficient and propose an alternative way of drawing the metaphysically necessary/contingent-distinction for laws of physics based on the central kinematical/dynamical-distinction used in physical theorising. We argue that this criterion can be used to amend Tahko’s own account, but also that it can be combined with different metaphysical views about the source of necessity.

Section: Metaphysics

ABSTRACT. There are different metaphysical views that distinguish between fundamental and derivative reality. The common idea is that while fundamental entities exist and we are ontologically committed to them, derivative entities exist but they are not addition of being. I will present different fundamental/derivative views and suggest a new argument for accepting this distinction. Certain metaphysical views can lead us to a metametaphysical position. The argument has as premises the existence of different levels, the existence of a fundamental level, the soundness of Kim’s exclusion argument, the truth of an anti-Humean account of causation or laws of nature, and the truth of the Eleatic Principle.

ABSTRACT. Most philosophers treat ontological dependence and metaphysical dependence as distinct relations. A number of key differences between the two relations are usually cited in support of this claim: ontological dependence’s unique connection to existence, differing respective connections to metaphysical necessitation, and a divergence in their formal features. Alongside reshaping some of the examples used to maintain the distinction between the two, I argue that the additional resources offered by the increased attention the notion of grounding has received in recent years potentially offer us a way to unite the two relations, promising the attendant benefits parsimony offers as a result.

ABSTRACT. The possibility of exchanges in location amongst indiscernible tropes (swapping) and the difficulty of relating particulars without invoking further relations (Bradley’s regress) are problems for most versions of trope ontology. Some philosophers claim that adding substances to tropes and appealing to dependence relationships solves these problems. I argue that existential dependence permits to evade Bradley’s regress but it does not block swapping. On the other hand, the avoidance of swapping relies on endorsing a stronger relation of dependence (identity dependence), which leads to Bradley’s regress. The upshot is a dilemma: either to bypass Bradley’s regress at the expense of dealing with swapping scenarios or to evade the swapping problem at the expense of facing Bradley’s regress.

ABSTRACT. Multi-thingists philosophers claim that hylomorphs and their matter are numerically different because they instantiate different properties. However, multi-thingist solutions always result in the rejection of some principle of classical extensional mereology. I propose a multi-thingist approach according to which hylomorphs are extended simples, which come into existence when specific mereological fusions collectively instantiate the proper “principle of unity” for a hylomorph. The hylomorphist core of the approach lies in its endorsing a constitutional ontology and a dualism between matter and hylomorphs. Moreover, the atomicity of hylomorphs leads to several theoretical advantages for philosophers with multi-thingist inclinations.

ABSTRACT. Hylomorphism claims that objects such as a statue and the lump of clay out of which it is made are two different colocated objects which have different forms even though they share the same matter. Megan Fairchild has recently presented what she claims to be a minimal version of hylomorphism and she has argued that it is inconsistent. Our purpose in this paper is to show that her argument to purportedly show that the minimal version she presents is inconsistent is not sound. We show this with the use of a usually accepted distinction by hylomorphists between derivative and non-derivative properties.

ABSTRACT. How Dependence Can Ground Grounding

Topic: Metaphysics

Schnieder (2017) argues, against Orilia (2009) and Koslicki (2013), that claims of existential grounding of the form The fact that x exists is grounded in the fact that y is F cannot be grounded in claims of existential dependence of the form x existentially depends on y. I will firstly argue that Schnieder argument is not conclusive. Then I will make a proposal concerning how claims of existential grounding can be grounded in claims of existential dependence and I will relocate the disagreement between the advocates of the two competing views.

ABSTRACT. TOPIC: Metaphysics

ABSTRACT: The necessity of origin has usually been conceived as applying equally to organisms and other material objects. McGinn (1976) is one of the few authors who defends a necessity of origin thesis specific to organisms, grounded in a relation of biological continuity. This continuity of life processes holds both in cases of diachronic identity of the same organism and in the origination of new organisms at reproductive events, where organisms transmit not only genes but the life process itself. For organisms, the necessity of origin consists not in sameness of material origin, but in biological continuity from certain previous organisms.

ABSTRACT. In his metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes between two types of universals, namely attributes and kinds. While attributes merely characterize their subjects, kinds account for the existence and identity of particular objects. The Aristotelian theory of kinds, however, attracts criticism. The most important objection claims that the postulation of a separate category of kinds is unnecessary because all kinds can be reduced to conjunctions of ordinary attributes. Against this, the present talk argues that there must always be something in reality by virtue of which properties are conjoined and that it is precisely kinds which provide that conjunctive nexus.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I will argue against two recent objections against presentism, namely (1) the achronality objection (Savitt, 2000), and (2) the PrePre objection (Costa et al., 2016). More specifically, these objections concern two forms of presentism that have emerged in response to the challenge from special relativity, so called cone presentism (Hinchcliff, 2000) and so called bow tie presentism (or 'elsewhere-ism', as Costa et al. (2016) call it). In my presentation I will (1) argue (pace Savitt (2000)) that the achronality objection only affects cone presentism but not bow tie presentism; and, (2) argue (pace Costa et al. (2016)) that neither cone presentism nor bow tie presentism are dismissed by the PrePre objection.

ABSTRACT. The objective of our paper is twofold: firstly, we aim at developing a formal semantics framework to account for the truthmaker conditions of modal statements, i. e. the conditions for something in the world (a state) to be a truthmaker (falsemaker) of modal statements like "Necessarily A" and "Possibly A". This semantics employs a relation of compatbility among states to account for truthmaker conditions of modal sentences and it seems to have some theoretical advantages over Kit Fine's truthmaker semantics. Secondly, we show how our semantics could serve as a unified conceptual framework to analyse some among the most relevant conceptions of truthmakers for modal truths (Lewis's conception, Armstrong's conception and Linsky's conception) and promote a pluralist approach to them.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Metaphysics

The aim of this talk is to argue that if we take paraphrase strategies seriously, we have to embrace a Principle of Tolerance. I argue that paraphrase strategies need criteria for adequate paraphrase and that such are not forthcoming. Thus, we either have to abandon paraphrase altogether (which is absurd), or we have to accept several paraphrases. To make sense of the latter, we need to understand the paraphrases as concerned with different theories. This also means that we have to re-evaluate our conception of ontological commitment.

ABSTRACT. Regarding the Problem of Universals, (Pereyra, 2002) distinguishes between two main kinds of object resemblance nominalism, namely Egalitarian Resemblance Nominalism and Aristocratic Resemblance Nominalism. Although a convincing case has been made in favor of the former one by (Pereyra, 2002), the latter one is still underdeveloped and considered to be both unmotivated and flawed. The aim of this talk is to introduce a new formal model for aristocratic resemblance nominalism that solves some of the technical difficulties that this account faces, offering a partial solution to Goodman’s famous objections.

ABSTRACT. According to Amie Thomasson correctly understood ontological questions are formulated on the basis of conceptual apparatus and they are answered in reference to our conceptual competence and empirical investigations. Thomasson claims that ontological issues are relatively easy to solve or resolve. She calls ontology which is understood in this way “easy ontology”. The purpose of the presentation is to justify the thesis that the views of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, an eminent philosopher from the Lvov-Warsaw School, make it reasonable to claim that he could accept the consequences of so understood ontological program. I shall present the arguments stating that the Polish philosopher is one of the forerunners of “easy ontology”.

ABSTRACT. I am going to argue that an ascriptive legal utterance is a specific (illocutionary) speech act with its unique structure. Moreover, I will present the original linguistic formula of an ascriptive that accurately reflects its nature.

ABSTRACT. This paper characterizes the phenomenon of successful communication (SC) within a contextualist approach to meanings and concepts. My aim is to show that SC does not require that the participants in a conversation attribute the same meanings to the same expressions, nor share the concepts associated to the intervening linguistic terms. My proposal consists in a weak definition of SC, whose success is determined by the end point of the conversational exchange –and not by an agreement between speaker and hearer–, on the basis of a set of communicative principles that guide the conversational behaviors of the participants.

ABSTRACT. Most direct reference theorists adhere to what I will call the orthodox view when it comes to acquaintance and singular thoughts, namely the view that one can obtain a singular thought about an object in virtue of being at the receiving end of a use of a name of the object that stretches back to an initial baptism of it. I will argue that we have good reasons to doubt the truth of the orthodox view and favor instead an account that advocates a strong acquaintance requirement.

ABSTRACT. In our paper we shall present the dual intention model (DIM) of demonstrations and demonstrative utterances that differentiates between three factors: the basic act of demonstration (indication), the intention to communicate a proposition (locutionary intention), and the intention to invite the addressee to form a hypothesis regarding the act of indication (abductive intention). We shall compare DIM with the alternative accounts of demonstrative utterances. We will show how DIM applies to the analysis of cases of missing demonstrations and complex demonstratives. We will also argue that it sheds light on the debate over discriminating intentions.

Topic: Philosophy of Language

ABSTRACT. A simple view about "now" and "here" is that they pick out, respectively, the time and place of the speech act in which they are used. This token-reflexive view assumes that we have fairly clear intuitions about the locations of speech acts, both in time and in space. In this paper, I point out that there is a type of action, which includes certain speech acts, for which we have no such intuitions. I then propose a different token-reflexive view: that speakers set detonation conditions for tokens of "now" and "here", which, when the conditions are met, pick out the time and place of their detonation.

ABSTRACT. This paper offers an account of how hate speech expresses hate. In so doing, it answers two objections to expressivist views. It further gives a hypothesis to explain how and when hate speech can correlate with hate crimes. It combines an account of the illocutionary structure of conversational contexts and of the normative requirements that speech makes on context, and recent accounts of the attitudes or sentiments expressed through hate speech. It concludes that hate speech is illocutionarily expressive, and presupposes ongoing hate as a sentiment which “organizes people’s social world” (Fischer et al 2018, p, 311).

ABSTRACT. I argue for explanatory eliminativism about topics relative to the domain of conceptual engineering. It has become standard to think that topics serve an important explanatory role in theories of conceptual engineering, namely to determine the limits of revision. I argue, first, that said limits can be understood either as the normative limits, as the metaphysical limits, or as the terminological limits. Second, I argue on the basis of general reasons that none of the accounts of topics that have been presented in the literature determine the limits of revision in either of these three senses.

ABSTRACT. We are still lacking a proper semantical analysis of concept designators such as ``the concept wisdom'', which cannot function exactly as ``the property wisdom'' functions. In my talk I will discuss two different ways of providing such an analysis. I will present and dismiss an account in terms of certain higher-order concepts. My favored analysis is inspired by Davidson's demonstrative theory of quotation. Accordingly, when we use ``the concept wisdom'', we express the concept wisdom in order to point to what we have just expressed, which avoids a variety of objections the earlier suggestion has.

ABSTRACT. Hate speech is harmful not only because of the causal effects it can have on the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the targeted group. In some sense, the speech act itself, independently of the causal effects it might have, also constitutes subordination. I criticize proposals by Ishani Maitra and Rae Langton to explain the sense in which this is the case and develop my own proposal, building on Rebecca Kukla’s interpretation of Eric Swanson’s thesis that slurs cue an ideology.

ABSTRACT. Local expressivists hold that the function of some but not all expressions is expressive rather than descriptive. They have been challenged by global expressivists, but I argue that their objections are all unsuccessful. In particular, semantic deflationism does not conflict with local expressivism, and despite the success of various local expressivist accounts these cannot be generalized. From this, it should be concluded that there is no substantial conflict between local and global expressivism, rather than concluding that global expressivists are wrong. Their position boils down to an endorsement of a use theory of meaning for all parts of language.

ABSTRACT. One of the challenges that any theorist of vagueness faces is to account for there being two kinds of disagreement over vague predicates like “tall” and “rich”: canonical disagreements concerning clear cases and faultless disagreements concerning borderline cases. I’ll argue that one needs to maintain that the illocutionary force of borderline utterances is different from that of clear utterances. Whereas the latter might be correct assertions, the former should be assertives weaker than assertions, since they express only a weak belief of the speaker. They are social commitments made without corresponding strong private commitments. Their point is to prevent the opposite claim from being made.

ABSTRACT. The idea that linguistic competence requires knowledge of the meanings of linguistic expressions seems intuitively true and plays an important role in influential theories on language (Dummett (1996)). This intuitive idea, however, has come to be challenged on various empirical grounds (Collins (2007), Devitt (1996), Gross (2010)). In this paper, I outline and defend a framework that admits two layers—the personal-level (conscious) and the sub-personal (unconscious) layers—in the cognitive system that constitutes semantic competence, and argue that in this framework one can vindicate the original Dummettian-philosophical intuition by postulating a cognitive mechanism that systematically connects the two layers.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Philosophy of Language

In this paper, I offer arguments for the theoretical possibility to coherently formulate a notion of minimal subjective disagreement, a critical notion for the debates centered on the semantics of the perspectival expressions. Using the methodology of semantic ascent, I show that the truth-conditions of the ascriptions of subjective disagreement licensing interogative complements are reducible to the truth-conditions of their propositional counterparts. I also offer evidence that when the main predicate used to ascribe subjective disagreement semantically governs both the interogative and the declarative environments, it triggers a doxastic presupposition of excluded middle which casts doubt on the reduction-unfriendly view which threatens the coherence of the notion of minimal subjective disagreement.

ABSTRACT. There have been heated debates about what should be taken as a natural-kind term. Most often they take on a strong epistemological or metaphysical dimension. We think the issues can be clarified within the limits of the philosophy of language: by looking into what ranges of general terms are perceived by speakers as rigid designators. The first step to take is to ground the various kinds of semantic externalism in distinct brands of semantic deference: to the community usage, to the experts, to the ‘world as it is’. The second step is to measure lay speakers’ semantic deference for different kinds of words. This is what we do in an ongoing survey.

ABSTRACT. Our contribution aims to characterize the normative nature of hate speech. The normativity of hate speech has been largely understood in terms of prescriptivity (McGowan 2017, 2018, 2019). After illustrating the drawbacks of this view (§1), we identify a special kind of permissive norms that we call ‘non-neutral permissives’: they introduce a ‘can’, but also mark one alternative as preferable (§2). The notion of non-neutral permissives is employed to solve the problems raised in §1 and to sketch a finer-grained account of the normativity of hate speech (§3). The concluding coda highlights how non-neutral permissives can also be used to enact beneficial norms.

ABSTRACT. I contrast two accounts of assertoric contexts. The Frege-Geach-style ‘externalist’ account keeps force (judgment) and content (proposition) separate. The act-theoretic ‘internalist’ inverts the Frege-Geach point by making force integral to content. Assertoric contexts being hyperintensional, act theory cannot assume that extensional logic (such as introduction and elimination rules) applies to its propositions; nor that intensional logic (e.g. the distribution axiom) applies. I present two objections to internalism, bearing on assertion distributing over conjunction and the particular generation of the truth-table for conjunction. I show how externalism successfully tackles both objections.

ABSTRACT. [philosophy of language]

In Neo-Davidsonian semantics, sentences with prepositional phrases (PPs) and adverbs are analysed as a conjunction of predicates and thematic functions, both predicated of events. However, PPs may be also used to indicate two-place relations between new participants introduced by prepositions and one of the main verb’s arguments, but not a whole action described by the main verb. Such uses are especially challenging for Neo-Davidsonian semantics, since they constitute counterexamples to its essential claim that only events may have properties. I will explain why all known proposals for dealing with these problematic examples fail.

ABSTRACT. There is no consensus on what a speaker S’s responsibility for her utterance U amounts to. Is she responsible for the meaning she explicitly commits herself to or for the meaning a reasonable hearer H takes U to convey? I will argue that holding S responsible for U is possible only in so far as accountability depends on H’s most reasonable interpretation of U. Consequently, neither S’s actual intention nor the explicit/implicit distinction are decisive. What matters is whether H is epistemically justified in taking U to convey what she takes it to convey.

ABSTRACT. Humans manage to navigate the world with a limited stock of concepts, but their cognitive skills enable them to build new structures such as the so-called ad hoc concepts and categories. The present work investigates the two main accounts of ad hoc concepts, i.e. Barsalou’s cognitive psychological works and Relevance Theory, in order to outline a unified, integrated theory. Such a integrated perspective may shed new light not only on the construction and use of ad hoc concepts in communication and categorization tasks, but also on the role of contextual constraints in human conceptual creativity and compositionality.

Topic: Philosophy of Language

ABSTRACT. Linguistic understanding is a central element of our social lives; it contributes to the achievement of communicative success, facilitates action coordination, and enables acquisition of testimonial knowledge. Nevertheless, characterizations of linguistic understanding offered by philosophers of language are very heterogeneous. Building on the strengths of available philosophical accounts and drawing from empirical research on various aspects of language comprehension, this paper offers a model of the representational structure of linguistic understanding consisting of multiple interdependent representations. It is demonstrated that some controversies between the available philosophical accounts originate from the exclusive focus on selected aspects of linguistic understanding. Some other controversies, however, turn out to be more substantial. Luckily, we can tackle them relying on insights from empirical language sciences.

ABSTRACT. There is a well-known conflict between Externalism, the view that mental contents are individuated by reference in the external environment, and Transparency, the thesis that we can know on a priori grounds what we are thinking. Boghossian (1994) argued that Externalism, because it violates Transparency, blurs the line between empirical and logical errors. In response to this challenge, Stalnaker (2008) accepts that theories of content should not blur that line and argues that his Externalist theory can preserve it. In this talk, I argue that his account fails.

ABSTRACT. Acceptable analyticities constitute problematic evidence for the idea that language includes a deductive system. In recent discussion, two accounts have been presented in the literature to explain the available evidence. According to one of the accounts, grammatical analyticities are accessible to the system but a pragmatic strengthening repair mechanism can apply and prevent the structures from being actually interpreted as contradictions or tautologies. The proposed data, however, leaves it open whether other version of the meaning modulation operation are required. Novel evidence we present argues that a loosening version of the repair mechanism must be available. Our observation is based on acceptable contradictions that cannot be rescued if only a strengthening version of the pragmatic strategy is available.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Philosophy of Language

In my talk, I want to approach the semantics of complex demonstratives from two perspectives at the same time: (1) how demonstrate reference is determined in a context? (2) What is the logical form of sentences containing complex demonstratives? I will try to answer these two questions in a theoretically uniform way. My main theses will be that (1) demonstrative reference is heterogenous and it employs different "modes" of reference, (2) complex demonstratives are referential expression (yet, not "directly" referential). Based on these claims, I argue that we are able to explain very different uses of complex demonstratives, which do not conform to the referential treatment at first glimpse.

ABSTRACT. It has been argued that modulated contents are difficult to share, especially among non-co-situated interlocutors. My aim here is to sketch a similarity view explaining how we can (imperfectly) share contents with non-co-situated interlocutors. I start by noting that very often different interpreters attain different levels of accuracy. We can model this with propositions with different granularities. Communication can be successful even though the proposition recovered by the non-co-situated interpreter is a coarser-grained version of the proposition originally intended, with the cut-off point determining which coarser-grained versions are permitted being set by the purposes of the reporting context.

Philosophy of Language

ABSTRACT. The aim of this presentation is to critically consider the notion of higher-order speech act (Grice 1989), in order to suggest that the question of whether there can be such type of acts must be answered in the negative. My intuition is that the units of communication that Grice termed higher-order speech acts are not illocutionary acts in the original sense of Austin’s (1962) or Searle’s 1969. In order to substantiate my doubts, I will question whether it is theoretically plausible to assign this type of act a conventional, illocutionary effect.

ABSTRACT. My paper explores the possibility of non-attributive and non-referential uses of definite descriptions. These are cases where the speaker intends to talk about the object which uniquely satisfies one description, the F, but for the rhetorical or communicative purposes uses a different description, the G, which she believes to denote the same object. These cases do not fit Donnellan’s two-fold distinction, which relates the attributive/ referential distinction to a type of content (general versus singular). Building upon Kripke’s notions of general and singular intentions, I will account for the phenomenon and explore the possibility of plurality and indeterminacy of contents.

ABSTRACT. The counting problem concerns which counting sentences are true in situations involving partial objects (Salmon 1997). Current solutions to the counting problem universally presuppose that partial x are not x (Liebesman 2016, Snyder & Barlew forthcoming). I argue on the basis of linguistic evidence that this universal presupposition is mistaken: Partial x are x. I propose the wholeness account as a new solution to the counting problem: Counting objects means summing their levels of wholeness. Wholeness is a property which stands in the determination relation (Johnson 1921, Wilson 2017) to levels of wholeness such as halfness or quarterness.

ABSTRACT. The orthodox view of belief-ascribing sentences is that they specify the content of the ascribed belief, and that this content is the proposition which their embedded sentence would express, were it uttered in isolation. Call this ‘Harmony’. The goal of the present work is to challenge this orthodoxy. To this end, I shall do two things. First, I shall cite uses of belief-ascribing sentences which harmony theorists cannot handle without getting into difficulty with the concept of singular thought. Second, I shall cite uses of belief-ascribing sentences which harmony theorists cannot handle without getting into difficulty with the attributive/referential distinction.

ABSTRACT. An account of what sort of causal integration is necessary for an agent to exercise agency is offered in support of a soft-line response to Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument. It is argued that, in cases of manipulation, the manipulative activity affects the identity of the causal process. It is assumed that the identity of a causal process is determined by the causal powers active in the process. Manipulation cases involve the introduction of causal powers whose manifestations render the victim’s behavior a tokening of the wrong type of causal process to count as an exercise of agency.

ABSTRACT. The mind is said to be populated by unconscious phenomena. However, one central question, to date, has not been satisfyingly answered: What renders unconscious phenomena mental? In this talk, I propose a novel strategy for answering this question. I will argue that the search for the mark of the mental should be understood as the search for the explanatory value of ascribing mentality, and that the aim of researchers investigating the unconscious mind is to provide mechanistic explanations of behaviors. The leading question, thus, is rephrased: What is the explanatory value of ascribing mentality to an unconscious mechanism that is responsible for a given behavior? Based on insights from the mechanistic literature, I will provide an answer to this question.

ABSTRACT. Section: Philosophy of Mind and Action

It is frequently assumed that phenomenality is associated solely with conscious states. We offer an alternative account of phenomenality, one that allows for aspects of what is usually called “phenomenal” to be unproblematically unconscious. The starting point of our suggestion is the idea that phenomenal states are not unanalyzable. Instead, they are composed of sets of properties. From componential point of view, at least some phenomenal properties can be unconscious. We also argue that componential approach opens a new avenue for investigating issues in animal consciousness.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to apply classical argumentative machinery to a more recent topic in the philosophy of mind. I introduce two knowledge arguments, analogous to Jackson’s (1982) but centered on the unity of consciousness (see Bayne, 2010), with the following objectives: (1) to stimulate an intuitive grasp on the concept of phenomenal unity, (2) to demonstrate that phenomenal unity is a real aspect of the mind and does not merely correspond to a different level of description of disunited phenomenal facts, and (3) to build a case against physicalist and in particular panpsychist theories of consciousness.

ABSTRACT. When you hear a person speaking in a familiar language you perceive the speech sounds uttered and the voice that produces them. The speech sounds and the voice appear united. The nature of the experienced relation between speech sounds and voices has not been systematically investigated in philosophy of mind. I will argue that the experienced relation between speech sounds and voices can be explained in terms of the mereological view on sounds and their sources (O’Callaghan 2017). It is a part-whole relation between speech sounds and voicing events. By being participants in such events, both the voice of the speaker and the speaker to whom the voice belongs are what hearers typically become aware of when listening to speech.

ABSTRACT. The epistemic side-effect effect consists in the fact that people are more inclined to attribute knowledge that the side-effect will occur when norms are violated than they are when norms are conformed to. I argue that the account has problems with explaining what happens in norm-violation cases (i.a. it fails to explain the Knobe effect or slight-chance of harm studies). I show that the problems can be solved on an alternative consequence account, according to which the content of the knowledge claim is that it was a possible consequence of an action that the side-effect will occur. I present the results of a new empirical study which confronts the two accounts.

[PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND ACTION]

ABSTRACT. Mental fictionalism is a view about folk psychology, which holds that folk ascriptions of mental states are similar to statements in fiction. They do not commit their users to the folk ontology. Sometimes fictionalism has been grouped together with interpretivism, the view that interpretation has a constitutive role in the possession of mental properties. I examine whether one specific interpretivist account – the Ascription Theory – can be classified as a version of mental fictionalism and argue that this theory is not a fictionalist position and that there are reasons to prefer it to mental fictionalism.

ABSTRACT. Most current research on consciousness suggests that the phenomenal character contains a subjective character. The subjective character is most commonly characterized as an awareness that an experience belongs to oneself. So far it remains quite unclear how one is supposed to understand the nature of this component of experience. An underappreciated answer to this question conceptualizes the subjective character as part of the modality of experience rather than as a constituent of its representational content. The aim of this talk is to offer a more elaborated version of this particular approach. I claim that the best way to account for the subjective character is to accept that mental relations shape the phenomenal character and that it is grounded in such.

ABSTRACT. Conceptualism claims that perceptual content is constituted by concepts. I distinguish between two versions of this thesis: strong and weak conceptualism. Strong conceptualism presupposes that having a language is necessary to have concepts, whereas weak conceptualism rejects this condition. According to weak conceptualism, perceptual content is constituted by concepts identified in a way that is independent of a creature’s linguistic abilities. I argue that weak conceptualism avoids the main problems of strong conceptualism, specifically the over-intellectualization of perception and circularity. Moreover, I suggest that weak conceptualism provides a straightforward account for the phenomenal character of adult human perception.

(Philosophy of mind and action)

ABSTRACT. Perceptual psychology’s standard framework is constructivism, whose main assumption is that perceptual systems ‘interpret’ sensory signals, ambiguous and noisy, and produce representations of their distal causes. It also assumes that perceptual experiences’ representational contents are directly based off of these ‘products’ of perceptual processes. Some philosophers maintain that constructivism’s empirical success is itself proof that a theory of perceptual content endorsing constructivism’s assumptions is likely correct. We first observe that the outputs of perceptual processes need not be themselves representational, thus leaving open the possibility that personal-level perceptual content does not look anything like the ‘products’ of sub-personal perceptual processes. From this, we conclude that a theory of perceptual content cannot be justified simply by a psychological framework’s empirical success.

ABSTRACT. Dualism holds that experiences are non-physical states that are systematically correlated with physical states. Dualism leads to the postulation of psychophysical laws that generate experiences by operating on certain sorts of physical states. What sorts of physical states? To the limited extent that dualists have addressed this question, they have tended to favor nomic internalism, on which experience has a narrow physical basis. However, I argue for a nomically externalist form of dualism on which experience has a wide physical basis. The argument uses a puzzle about spatial experience to support a nomically externalist theory I call tracking dualism.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Philosophy of Mind and Action

I distinguish two different arguments in support of the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT). The envatted brain hypothesis, which leads to a weak form of internalism, and the disembodied mind hypothesis, which leads to a radical form of internalism. I argue that the latter is more coherent and that implies solipsism. This is a problem for PIT. I develop a solution by investigating the temporal character of experience, arguing that phenomenal intentionality is an emergent feature of series of experiences whose qualitative basis is neither internal nor external but neutral between the two. This leads to embody and naturalize phenomenal intentionality.

ABSTRACT. A widely shared view understands first-person thought as an essential element of human cognition. The original cases presented in support for this assumption typically emphasize its motivational role for action. (Castañeda 1966; Chisholm 1981; Lewis 1979; Perry 1979) Even if this might be true, there seems to be one crucial question which is rarely addressed in current debates: Why do first-person thoughts have this motivational force for their bearer? To explore this motivational feature of first-person thought will be the central task of this talk.

Topic: Mind and Action

ABSTRACT. In this talk I intend to develop a philosophical analysis of the conceptual and interpretative foundations of the current informational approaches to statistical mechanics, especially those that start both from Jaynes (1957) and his 'Principle of Maximum Information' and from Brillouin (1956) and his 'Negentropy Principle'. I will defend that the systematic misapplication of physical concepts and the serious interpretative inconsistencies of thermophysical informationalism will incapacitate this scientific current to carry out adequate descriptions, valid explanations and correct predictions of thermal phenomena. Therefore, information-based thermal physics would be scientifically meaningless.

ABSTRACT. The presentation accepts that the formation of concepts, the posing of questions, and the presentation of arguments are equal parts in the everyday conduct of philosophy. In this awareness, questions will take the centerstage. I will pose foundational metaquestions about how to integrate questions into a general constructive framework which may serve as a method in the philosopher's toolbox. Specifically, conditions of posing questions will be addressed. For this purpose existing proposals, e.g. those of Inferential Erotetic Logic, are taken into account. The issues touched upon are seen as relevant to the development of any philosophically oriented logic of questions.

ABSTRACT. A recent Bayesian model of generalisation and concept learning by Tenenbaum & Griffiths (2001; see also Xu and Tenenbaum, 2007, Lake et al., 2015) has been proposed as superior to a more traditional approach to generalisation and concepts in cognitive psychology, such as Shepard's (1987) Universal Law of Generalisation. I argue that Tenenbaum & Griffiths' Bayesian model of concept learning implicitly relies on Shepard's earlier approach to generalisation and Shepard's geometric theory of similarity (Shepard, 1962).

ABSTRACT. I will argue that, contrary to some suggestions in the philosophical literature, dispositions cannot replace laws in the description of the physical world. If for a certain type of physical situations a well-working law-based account is available, then it is not possible to describe these situations equally well in terms of dispositions. It is shown using an example that when one tries to replace a law-based account by a disposition-based account, the latter turns out to be either less informative or inferior with respect to theoretical virtues such as simplicity, unification, non-triviality of predictions, explanatory power, and fruitfulness in applications.

ABSTRACT. Scientific realism states that our current successful theories are probably approximately true. It is threatened by the pessimistic meta-induction (PMI) which states that many past successful theories were refuted. A common realist response to the PMI is to claim that science has improved significantly since the times of the past refuted theories and these improvements block the PMI. Antirealists reply by arguing that past realists could have said the same thing, but they were proven wrong by subse-quent theory refutations, hence the realist’s response fails. I analyze and assess the antirealist’s argu-ment.

ABSTRACT. I will address the neglected issue of factivty with regard to understanding without explanation (UwE). I will argue that a dual view that requires the action of both condition: a veridicality i.e. factual reference one and the productivity or efficiency one in assessing understanding, is a better choice for UwE. Using Lipton’s account on UwE through cognitive benefits I will discuss some of his examples for the three benefits of causality, of unity and possibility. I will highlight the way different contexts determine which of the condition takes precedence.

ABSTRACT. The goal of this paper is to reconsider and evaluate Friedrich Waismann’s method of philosophy which is based on the clarification of meaning but at the same time it emphasizes insight and freedom. I argue that this dialogical and therapeutic method of philosophy is a powerful means for developing our scientific knowledge because it integrates into itself and overcomes not only Wittgenstein’s philosophical grammar and criticism of language but, more importantly, the idea of the unified science of Schlick’s circle. Moreover, Waismann’s method and its utilization bears comparison with famous similar projects in the history of philosophy that sought scientia universalis by accenting linguistic techniques. --- Section: History of Philosophy (alternatively Philosophy of Science)

ABSTRACT. The Historia Animalium has many resources in terms of practice of inferences. The adoption of the comparative method in anatomy is consistent with a semeiotic way of reasoning. To explore this aspect of the philosophy of science of Aristotle, in parallel with the most rigorous scientific structure present in the Historia, as James Lennox has demonstrated, is a way to show, as recognized by Randall, that Aristotle has not to be intended as a firm Baconian, because his main purpose is to understand why things are in a particular way.

ABSTRACT. This paper pushes back against the Democritean-Newtonian tradition of assuming a strict conceptual dichotomy between spacetime and matter. Our approach proceeds via the more narrow distinction between modified gravity/spacetime (MG) and dark matter (DM). A prequel paper argued that the novel field ψ postulated by Berezhiani and Khoury's `superfluid dark matter theory' is as much (dark) matter as anything could possibly be, but alsoꟷbelow the critical temperature for superuidityꟷas much (of a modification of) spacetime as anything could possibly be. Here we introduce and critically evaluate three groups of interpretations that one should consider for such theories.

ABSTRACT. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze and vindicate Goodman’s principle of rightness and to show that it can be well used for scientific purposes when evaluating theories. Furthermore, I claim that rightness can substitute the conception of truth for its wider applicability and become a more effective means for developing our pluralistic knowledge of reality and overcoming skepticism.

ABSTRACT. (Philosophy of Science) Can some of the physiological processes in plants be called as cognitive processes? Plants ‘sense’ their environment and environmental signals cause many kinds of signal transduction pathways that are intertwined with many other processes in plant bodies. The result of these signalling pathways is a ‘response’ to environment. Moreover, plants can ‘remember’ some parts of their environment, so that the next time they encounter these parts, they would respond differently. Furthermore, they can ‘produce and send signals’ to other plants and other organisms (e.g. fungi), so they ‘communicate’. Are these activities sufficient to say that they have cognition? This paper will discuss different approaches to cognition, while searching whether there is such a thing as plant cognition.

ABSTRACT. Multiple realization occurs when a natural kind is variably realized at more basic levels and the common physical structure of the realizers is not essential for supporting nomological statements. It has been suggested that this phenomenon may be an outcome of natural selection acting over multiple realizers that perform an adaptive function. In this paper, we develop a refinement of this account, which makes three important contributions. First, it sharpens the conditions for the existence of laws involving multiply realized kinds, thereby increasing the explanatory power of the selectional framework. Second, it differentiates between multiple realization at different levels of organization. Third, it provides a plausible account of the differences between across- and within-species multiple realization.

ABSTRACT. Computer programs are ubiquitous, yet stating their ontological status remains a challenging task for philosophy of (computer) science. There are physical systems that compute, but don't execute programs. Based on that, I argue that implementation of computation is not sufficient to explain the relation between programs and concrete systems. Hence, for improving the differentiation of computational systems I propose the introduction of programmability – simply put the ability of a system to be programmed. This notion provides foundational insights when it comes to the understanding of the metaphysical nature of computer programs. Without programmability, one cannot sufficiently explain how some systems execute programs and others don't.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Philosophy of Science

(Short abstract)

Is a Humean objective chance approach for the probabilities of Classical Statistical Mechanics possible?

The aim of the paper is to show that a Humean objective chance approach for the probabilities of Classical Statistical Mechanics is very difficult to be defended. To this end, I’ll present a rather recent attempt to interpret statistical probabilities as Humean objective chances by Carl Hoefer and Roman Frigg. I’ll argue that in their approach the requirement for a chance to supervene on the Humean Mosaic is not satisfied.

ABSTRACT. A feature of a situation is a nudge for an agent just in case it enables a disposition she has to act in accord with a particular fact-and-frugal rule; and an agent is nudged just in case that disposition is triggered in that situation. Moreover, agents’ self-governance need not be undermined by encountering nudges nor by being nudged. This is because her normative point of view (which plays the role of her self-governance) can continue to play a guiding role in her actions, or can otherwise interrupt or prevent the manifestation of the relevant dispositions.

ABSTRACT. This paper brings together discussions on international trade with resources and debates on immigration. Following Wenar’s analysis of resource curse, the aim is to challenge conventional view on immigration, that asserts the right of states to have discretional control over these policies. The right to self-determination and territorial rights are used as a basis for conventional view, and are thus protected in domestic context, while the same rights are violated by unjust “might makes right” trade rule in the international context which causes severe harm to people in these countries and benefits to citizens in affluent countries. This inconsistency in claiming right to self-determination and violating it in case of others presents challenge to moral plausibility of conventional view.

ABSTRACT. Mill is traditionally understood as an opponent of partisan associations. In the first part, Mill is portrayed as democratic instrumentalist and thus his view of the party should take into consideration primarily the consequences such associations will have on the quality of the democratic process. The second part challenges the initial hypothesis: though Mill had little sympathy for political parties as they were, this does not imply that he believed parties cannot introduce some decisive benefits. Building upon instrumental arguments he used to defend partisan associations (their educative and protective function), I reconstruct what a political party, according to Mill, should be. The third part adds some contemporary arguments demonstrating how parties can contribute to the quality of democratic deliberation.