ABSTRACT. In this paper I seek to distinguish between two kinds of knowledge of other minds: a propositional kind, whereby we say “We can see (or: we know) that he is in pain," and an objectual (object-related) kind of knowledge which underlies reference to (for example) the pain which I feel now, the way things look to me now, or my present desire to eat. Two skeptical problems arise in connection with these two kinds of knowledge. The burden of my argument will to suggest that while the first may be amenable to a satisfactory treatment, the only route to take with latter is dissolution.

ABSTRACT. The term ‘post-truth’ has been widely used in recent years to characterise a broad epistemic trend in which persons or groups form opinions by systematically disregarding the informed judgements of the experts and, more generally, the epistemic authority of scientific institutions. In this talk we will focus on some core epistemological features of post-truth especially in relation to science denialism—namely a variety of anti-scientific movements such as the anti-vax supporters, the flat-earth society, the climate-change deniers, the creationists, etc. In order to provide an explanation of this phenomenon we elaborate an epistemological model for normative deviance where epistemic norms are twisted by limiting what counts as relevant evidence for enquiry.

ABSTRACT. Item: Epistemology

Relativism about truth has been, and still is, one of the most important topics in philosophy, particularly in neopragmatist tradition. In this contribution, I shall analyse 1) how Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack face alethic relativism; 2) which problems arise from their philosophical proposals; and 3) why Peter Gärdenfors’s conceptualist approach to cognitive sciences and semantics is a solid solution to these problems in neopragmatist authors. In conclusion, Gärdenfors’s rejection to an absolutist epistemic worldview preserves pluralism about truth and conceptual schemes without going into a context-dependent alethic relativism.

ABSTRACT. Cornell realism (CR) posits that moral facts are non-reductive natural facts and that moral knowledge can be acquired along the lines of scientific knowledge. Street’s Darwinian dilemma, and Tropman’s ‘epistemological objection’ are recent challenges to CR. The central objection raised from both Street and Tropman, can be reduced to Timmons’ ‘moral input objection’, which we claim is the strongest objection to CR. This paper explores a new social epistemological solution to the moral input objection. Instead of perceiving formation of moral judgments as a solitary, isolated affair, the paper attempts to recognize the sociality of moral knowledge, building on Alvin Goldman’s work. A new adaptive account of reason developed by Mercier and Sperber lends support to this social epistemological approach.

ABSTRACT. Topic: Epistemology.

The notion of uncertainty is central to both epistemology and decision theory. While much work has been done on empirical uncertainty and on its implications for decision-making, non-empirical uncertainties are still largely overlooked. In this paper, I focus on what I call relevance uncertainty, i.e. the predicament of the decision-maker that does not know whether she has considered all and only the factors relevant to cause and to evaluate the outcomes. Due to cognitive limitations, this predicament is unavoidable, and hence any normative decision theory should take it into consideration.

ABSTRACT. By fitting the practice of cognitive science and meeting the “job description challenge”, structural representations are held to provide a sharp vindication of representationalist accounts of cognition. For this reason structural representations are also typically contrasted with detectors, which paradigmatically fail in vindicating cognitive representationalism. In this paper, I argue that when it comes to assessing their representational functioning, structural representations fare no better than detectors. I will show both kind of posit share a common functional profile, and thus that structural representations are vulnerable to the same arguments that put an end to the representational career of detectors. (Philosophy of Science).

ABSTRACT. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an invasive medical procedure for individuals with various psychiatric conditions. Despite its beneficial effects, DBS may pose threats to patients. After the emergence of qualitative studies on the use of this treatment many neuroethicists expressed concerns about the influence of DBS on the Self of patients. In my presentation, I will focus on several crucial dimensions associated with DBS impact on the Self, namely, free will, autonomy, and responsibility. I will center around the issue of freedom and autonomy of patients’ decisions, actions, as well as their capability of self-management, and their personal responsibility under DBS (especially in the context of therapies employing brain-computer interfaces (so called BCI-DBS systems), and the possibility of closed-loop therapy.

ABSTRACT. The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining our judgments about consciousness. As such, it is an “easy” problem. I criticize the fundamental distinction between easy and hard problems by relying on Chalmers’ writings: It implies that me and my Zombie twin are physically and functionally, thus cognitively, alike, e.g. regarding judgments about consciousness. But since my judgments about consciousness contain phenomenal concepts – partly constituted by experience (Chalmers 2010) – while the Zombie’s concepts cannot be so constituted, all our phenomenal judgments differ conceptually. Therefore, we are not cognitively alike and we have to give up the initial easy/hard-distinction. Given Chalmers’ acceptance of phenomenal intentionality, no aspect of cognition can be an easy problem.

ABSTRACT. Although the distinction between creature consciousness and state consciousness is widely acknowledged in philosophy of mind, most contemporary theories of consciousness aim at explaining state consciousness, paying scant attention to creature consciousness. The assumption behind this attitude is that the latter can be fully analyzed in terms of the former. Accordingly, state consciousness is explanatorily prior to creature consciousness. I call this the priority of state consciousness (PSC) thesis. This paper aims at challenging PSC. I argue that this thesis, when combined with the claim that a mental state is conscious when it acquires the property of for-me-ness, is false and that what constitutes the problem of consciousness is primarily a problem of explaining (a kind of) creature consciousness.

ABSTRACT. TOPIC: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. It has been proposed that perception and cognition differ in format. Whereas perceptual representations have an iconic (picture-like) format, thoughts have a discursive (sentence-like) format. While the consequences of format differences to the bearing of perception on cognition has been explored in the past (Burge 2010; Openshaw & Weksler 2019; Quilty-Dunn 2019), the consequences of format differences in the opposite direction – from cognition to perception – has not. In this paper we will argue that because of the differences in format, logical structure from cognition cannot influence perception. This amounts to a (weak) kind of modularity: perception is impenetrable to logical structure.

ABSTRACT. According to unconscious perception hypothesis (UP), mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously. The proponents of UP often support it by invoking empirical evidence for a more specific hypothesis, according to which colours can be seen unconsciously (UPC). The aim of this talk is to investigate the ramifications of UPC for the debate about the phenomenal character of visual perception. The upshot is that UPC constitutes a good reason to think that the phenomenal character of visual perception is comprised of primitive mind-independent properties.

ABSTRACT. Sharing a large part of our lives with various kinds of artificial systems, it is likely that we might consider them as social agents instead of mere tools. To clarify under which circumstances we are justified to characterize artificial systems as social agents, this paper will question our contemporary conception of sociality. Thereby, I will do justice to a multiplicity of cases that might otherwise fall through the cracks of the current restrictive models of sociality. Since human-machine interactions also raise questions about how we should treat them, I will, in addition, discuss the development of social norms.

Philosophy of Mind and Action

ABSTRACT. Topic: Social and Political Philosophy

In contemporary society, security seems to occupy people a lot. Intuitively, how certain we are of our enjoyment of goods in the future – be it our health, job, or relationship – matters a lot for how well we are doing today. In contemporary analytical political philosophy, security seems to occupy people surprisingly little. This paper contributes to the understanding of security, understood as certainty of future good, by exploring one particular question: how does security relate to human flourishing? It provides an oversight of the direct and indirect ways in which security contributes to individual well-being, how it might inhibit it, and what securities seem to be most valuable to people in current-day society

ABSTRACT. Panel: Political Philosophy According to relational egalitarianism, equality is not primarily about the distribution of some good but about people relating to one another as equals. However, relational egalitarians have said comparatively little on what role personal responsibility should play in their theories. In this talk, I fill this lacuna. I develop a relational egalitarian framework for personal responsibility and show why responsibility matters from within egalitarianism. I first draw on relational theories of moral responsibility – particularly Strawsonian views – to show that relational equality implies dispositions to hold one another responsible. Second, I show why relational equality often requires responsibility-sensitive economic distributions.

ABSTRACT. I will propose that the theory of joint commitment supplements the theory of team reasoning. Team reasoning is when the agent thinks “What should we do?” instead of “What should I do?”. Joint commitment is the idea that when people cooperate there is an obligation for each to perform their parts. I will argue that high degrees of group identification can trigger the agents into recognising publicly that they are a group, and this form the non-reducible ‘we’. In short, joint commitment gives the necessary stability for team reasoning and team reasoning explains the strength of a joint commitment.

ABSTRACT. I suggest we view Arne Naess's deep ecology as having two dimensions. The first is the relationship between humans and other species, this he defines as "biospheric egalitarianism". The second is the relationship between humans and nature, which he considers as a revising of humans "self-realisation". After examing the two dimensions of deep ecology, I argue this theory is self-contradictory. Although the second dimension is approved as the core and foundation of deep ecology by some philosophers, the half approval of the deep ecology still leads me to question the completeness and integrity of this theory. So I argue the deep ecology seems not enough as a foundation in environmental ethics and also not enough to guide real environmental policy.

ABSTRACT. The aim of my paper is to develop an account of sound moral reasoning, in order to reply to two skeptical challenges raised by recent psychological research, which underscores the primacy of intuition in moral judgment. I will provide an account of sound moral reasoning that integrates two modes of cognitions (system 1 and system 2) by making them epistemically beneficial for each other and that is a reliable and effective procedure for being aware – and eventually overriding – moral intuitions. My account is based on two conscious procedures: mental simulation and metacognition.

ABSTRACT. I explore the combination of two influential and independently plausible hypotheses about moral language. According to Morality-As-Cooperation (MAC), our capacity for and use of moral language is an adaptation to increase mutualistic cooperation. According to Concepts-As-Tools (CAT), we engage in disputes about language-use and many apparent moral disagreements are linguistic disagreements in disguise. I show that the combined MAC-CAT perspective weakens sceptical claims based on deep moral disagreements and that it explains the evidence from recent moral anthropology

ABSTRACT. The evolutionary debunking of moral realism relies on naturalists failing to put furth an evolutionary account of how moral cognition tracks moral facts. Recently, enticed by the received view of moral cognitive evolution, which claims the biological function of morality to be increasing the benefits of social living, some naturalists proposed the metaethical hypothesis that moral facts are grounded in facts about cooperation [e.g. Sterelny & Fraser 2016 and Curry et al. 2019]. But an analysis of these hypotheses shows incompleteness, inconsistency, or that our morality might be ill-adapted to our current world, lastly entailing the debunking of epistemic moral realism.

ABSTRACT. What should we do when we do not know what we should do? A growing philosophical literature attempts to answer to this question by considering what agents should do given their particular ethical beliefs. Non-cognitivists, however, argue that ethical judgements express a conative attitude, more akin to a desire than a belief. Such attitudes appear to lack the structure required to accommodate doubt in ethical judgements.

This paper presents a scientifically informed reconciliation of non-cognitivism and moral uncertainty. The central claim is that attitudinal ambivalence, a well-established phenomenon in social psychology, can play the role of moral uncertainty for non-cognitivists.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that undertaking the “objective stance” – as defined by P.F. Strawson – is an agential prerogative, which marks a privileged position, and it investigates its ethical implications by focusing on some paradigmatic cases. On the one hand, reactive attitudes are second-personal demands, which help to draw the line between the objective and the participatory stance. On the other hand, whether to undertake the participant’s or the objective stance is an opportunity open to subjects capable of practical concerns and practical engagement with others. This argument departs from current debate, and shows that Strawson’s distinction between the objective and the participant reactive stance is morally problematic, rich in ambivalences, and ultimately untenable.

ABSTRACT. Moral Error Theory is the view that all moral judgments are false, because there are no moral facts and properties. Rape is not morally forbidden, and respect for people is not morally obligatory. Nothing is morally obligatory and forbidden. Scientism is the view that facts which cannot be scientifically explained have to be expelled from our ontology. The aim of this paper is to examine the connections between Ontological Scientism and the Argument from Queerness, the main support for Moral Error Theory. In short: does Scientism entail Moral Error Theory? Yes. Does the Argument from Queerness presuppose Scientism? No.

ABSTRACT. The “conciliatory” norm in epistemology and meta-ethics requires that an agent, upon encountering peer disagreement with her moral judgment, lower her confidence about that judgment. But whether agents actually abide by this norm is unclear. Although confidence is excessively researched in the empirical sciences, possible effects of disagreement on confidence have been understudied. Addressing this lacuna, we report a study that measured confidence about moral beliefs before and after exposure to moral disagreement. Our findings indicate that moral disagreement seems to boost confidence. We also find a correlation between the extremity of moral views and confidence. One possible explanation of our findings is that participants' ethical beliefs become more extreme through social interaction, which raises their confidence about them.

ABSTRACT. The aim of my talk is to introduce the link between Prior and the members of the Lvov-Warsaw School. Certain logicians of the Lvov-Warsaw School influenced Prior’s views, even though the amount and the form of the impact are still intensively discussed. My talk focuses on four topics in which Prior admitted adopting ideas from the Lvov-Warsaw School: propositional calculus, the history of logic, modal and temporal logic and ontology. Prior’s published works and the correspondence which is stored in Prior’s Nachlass is used to describe the link.

Topic: History of Philosophy

ABSTRACT. Submission in History of Philosophy

This paper differentiates between two readings of Aristotle’s argument that unity and being are not genera of things (UBANG for short). On the first reading, UBANG entails the proposition that beings exist in more than one way (currently on the standards of McDaniel and Turner, hereafter OP). On the second reading, UBANG does not entail OP. The paper argues that only on the second reading does Aristotle’s argument succeed, that the second reading is, in fact, the correct reading of UBANG, and that anyone who thinks that UBANG succeeds and entails OP probably equivocates between two different senses of ‘genos’.

ABSTRACT. Toipc: History of Philosophy

The gap between the analytic and the continental philosophy is a subject of continuous discussion. The aim of this paper is to show one of the examples of the influence of Husserl’s ideas on the philosophy of Lvov-Warsaw School, i. e. on Ajdukiewicz’s argumentation pursued when introducing his directival conception of meaning. Ajdukiewicz adapts (and transforms) not only some of Husserl’s concepts form "Logische Untersuchungen" but his own conceptual framework is, at least to some extent, of phenomenological provenience. I want to show another, not quite recognized side of Ajdukiewicz’s philosophy and point to some new possible ways of looking at the legacy of Lvov-Warsaw School.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the talk is to outline and evaluate different conceptions of holistic elements in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.There are three groups of remarks in Tractatus which can be associated with some forms of holism. Accordingly, I distinguish three positions towards holistic elements in Tractatus: i) Minimal Holism (E. Anscombe, M. Black, D. Pears); ii) Moderate Holism (G. Bar-Elli, P. Carruthers, H. Ishiguro) iii) Radical Holism (J. Conant, M. Kremer, G. Ryle). In the course of the talk I will present textual evidence and arguments in favour of and against each position. I will conclude by brief methodological remarks.

Topic: History of Philosophy.

ABSTRACT. Prior to the 21st-century, Kant’s philosophy of mathematics had not received much attention from scholars, with any explicit mentions relegated to footnotes in discussions of his notions of space and time. In this work, I address the role of constructivism and Euclid’s geometrical operationalist tradition in Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. Kant’s prioritization of the constructability of mathematical objects led him to devise a comprehensive philosophy extending to metaphysics and natural philosophy. Understanding the constructivist and operationalist traditions in the history of mathematics thus becomes critical to understanding Kant’s natural philosophy and the larger, historical debate surrounding Leibniz’s and Newton’s paradigms.

ABSTRACT. The talk aims to show how Frege’s Puzzle emerged in the context of his constant struggle against arithmetical formalism. For Frege, any conception which lacks the distinction between sign and thing signified counts as formalism. Furthermore, any formalist arithmetic should be rejected, for it could not explain the applicability of arithmetic, and thus one could not talk anymore about either arithmetical truths or arithmetic as science. The novelty of this interpretation is the reading of Frege’s puzzle in the light of his rejection of arithmetical formalism, providing a coherent view of the development of Frege’s system.

ABSTRACT. Section: Philosophy of Language

Philosophical logic has been busy working on Aboutness – the relation between a text and a subject matter – at least since the 2014 publication of Stephen Yablo‘s book of the same title. While more and more proposals have come forth of how to represent – and, indeed, use – it to cater for old logical worries such as hyperintensionality and relevance, little has been done to conceptualise aboutness explicitly, and the conception of subject matter has undergone a tacit change. This symposium brings together four philosophers who have worked on the philosophical aspect of aboutness and subject matter to debate their conceptualisation.

ABSTRACT. TOPIC: Philosophy of Science

There is an extensive literature on non-causal explanations of physical phenomena: explanations in which mathematics does not merely represent, but truly explains. Accounts of non-causal explanation are motivated by drawing contrasts with causal explanations. However, there is a confusion over how causation enters a causal explanation. I argue that there is a factive and a non-factive interpretation of causes in accounts of causal explanation, i.e. referring to what the background scientific theory describes, or to the trait that makes answers explanatory. Current discussions over non-causal explanation are too much restricted to a non-factive reading of causal explanation.

ABSTRACT. Unification plays an important role in the philosophy but also the practice of science. In this paper, we briefly outline the most recent discussion about its epistemic merits, indicate how the Bayesian network approach allows for unifying unification, hint at some ``missing pieces'' of the puzzle, and show how this approach allows also for characterising the ``missing pieces''.

ABSTRACT. Since Elster (1983)’s work on the irrationality of adaptive preferences, scholarly contributions have thrived. Most agree with Elster that preferences can be rational only if autonomous. This consensus stems from conflating the rationality of adaptive preferences with their contribution to well-being. If the two are appropriately distinguished, it becomes unclear whether autonomy is a satisfactory criterion of rationality. Instead, I argue that adapting one’s preferences is irrational if one is opportunity-pumped. This is, if the path of adaptation induces the agent to strictly prefer having the opportunities offered by her final restricted set to the ones of her initial set.

ABSTRACT. An important question is whether understanding is factive or not. In this paper, the focus is on understanding that can be gained by using scientific models and it is acknowledged that most if not all models are not true. I will primarily stress the representational qualities of models and deny the conclusion that model-based understanding is non-factive. Two assumptions are: grasping of a model involves the attitude to make-believe; and only representative models can provide genuine understanding. The central claim is that the degree of understanding is dependent on the representational quality of the model and the comprehensiveness and connectedness of the grasping of the model.

ABSTRACT. Authors have made progress studying causes of the replicability crisis and proposing solutions. However, one critical philosophical issue that remains unaddressed is how philosophical theories about scientific self-correction are affected by the crisis. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, argue that the replicability crisis reveals that the statistical view of scientific self-correction is insufficient. The crisis evidences that the human, social, and institutional aspects of science introduce errors that statistical inference alone cannot correct. Second, I present an analysis of scientific self-correction as a process spanning multiple levels on top of statistical self-correction. I show the payoffs of the proposed analysis in two different contexts: social psychology research and neuroimaging research.

ABSTRACT. Expressive terms such as "idiot" and "jerk" are known to occur in free indirect discourse (FID). When so used, their pejorative content reflects the protagonist's rather than the narrator's point of view. This paper broadens the discussion of derogatory terms in FID by looking at occurrences of slurs, such as the N-word. The two main approaches to FID, namely, the two-context approach and the mixed quotation approach, are discussed and evaluated in light of these novel data.

ABSTRACT. Proper names have exercised analytic philosophy since its inception. This is no accident -- ever since Frege and Russell made their seminal contributions, the semantics of singular terms has been intimately linked to the nature of the proposition and the propositional attitudes, and thus to the nature of thought about things in the the world and its very possibility. But lately, the debate has been in a bit of a rut. The anti-descriptivism that swept the field in the wake of Kripke's Naming and Necessity has been more or less deadlocked with various forms of descriptivism for quite a while. That might be about to change, however: Now, both predicativists and variabilists argue that their views allow for breaking the deadlock by explaining expanded, more varied sets of data than those traditionally considered. This is exciting, but there are some quite fundamental questions that we must not lose sight of. Some of these concern the relevance of data: What kind of data hold lessons specific to names? Others concern consequences for the nature of thought: Are the semantic values we work with suitable as contents for the propositional attitudes? In this talk, I shall argue for a fairly conservative take on the data. Breaking the deadlock is possible nevertheless; I'll tell you how.