ABSTRACT. An interdisciplinary investigation of the relations between language and prejudice, this symposium sits at the intersection of philosophy of language and related areas in the philosophy of mind, social psychology, social ontology, and race and feminist theory. We use a mixture of traditional philosophical and experimental investigation. Bowker presents empirical work on the linguistic and cognitive factors that lead to prejudice, Lemeire considers how prejudice language can corrupt discourse, Fus-Holmedal investigates how language can be used to mitigate criticism by maintaining plausible deniability, and Thakral considers the best ways to intervene and correct for prejudiced language.

ABSTRACT. Ontology of food has established itself as an emergent area of inquiry within analytic metaphysics. This interest is, at least in part, motivated by the philosophical demand of more precise and fine-grained theoretical tools for addressing extant disputes on food. This panel will show some new trends and topics focusing on specific objects: wine, meat, and food waste. The talk by Amoretti and Porello proposes new criteria for an ontology of wine. Bossini and Bacchini address the ontological status of plant-based and artificial meat. Finally, Piras deals with the topic of food waste scrutinizing extant accounts.

ABSTRACT. In this talk I use the classical Indian school of philosophy known as Nyaya to respond to Bence Nanay’s recent objections to Disjunctivism about perception via amodal completion illusions. Nyaya holds a causal disjunctivism as opposed to a veritic disjunctivism that allows them to draw a distinction between perception, illusion, and non-perception in the visual field where there are perceptual seemings that are non-perceptions.

ABSTRACT. Disjunctivism is a well-established position about outer sense experience. In this paper I discuss whether disjunctivism is also a viable theory about the deliverances of inner sense. If we accept the description of certain empirical phenomena as instances of hallucinations, we first need to examine which theories of inner sense experience can accommodate hallucinations of inner sense. Alternatively, we have to challenge that inner sense hallucinations are possible, f.i. on the basis of Wittgenstein’s private language arguments. I defend disjunctivism about inner sense with an appeal to Martin’s ‘limits to self-awareness’, based, however, on a different motivation.

ABSTRACT. High-levelists about perceptual experience claim that we can perceive not only low-level properties but also high-level properties such as natural kind properties. Although various proponents of opposing theories of perception agree on this high-levelist view, it is seldom asked which theories of perception have resources to account for high-level perception. Here, I argue that if perceptual experiences present “high-level” properties, certain high-level illusions pose a problem for naive realism. Specifically, I maintain that the naive realist’s strategies for addressing illusions of low-level properties are unpromising when it comes to addressing illusions of high-level properties.

ABSTRACT. In my talk, I discuss formal criteria of good arguments. Good arguments are strong arguments. But what means argument strength? I argue why classical logic is inappropriate for investigating argument strength and make a case for probability logic. I critically discuss the measure of argument strength by Pfeifer (2013), which also provides a solution of the Ellsberg paradox. In my talk I observe undesirable consequences of this measure and propose a new one, which also solves the Ellsberg paradox. Finally, I discuss under which circumstances both measures can be used for distinguishing good from bad arguments.

ABSTRACT. Logic is widely applied in ontology and metaphysics. Even so, it has been standardly distinguished from them, and commonly used as a tool to articulate and assess different views in a neutral way. What does “neutral” in logic mean? The purpose of our talk is twofold, even though the two goals are largely connected. On the one hand, we provide a critical reconstruction of the relation of logic with ontological and metaphysical neutrality. On the other, we put forward a formal way to understand, or to constraint, the alleged metaphysical neutrality of logic by elaborating on the notion of conservativity.

ABSTRACT. There are two main opposing views on absurdity in natural deduction for both intuitionistic and classical logic: absurdity is (1) a logical notion or (2) a structural notion. Both these views, however, seemingly collapse together in the end by identifying absurdity with the empty set. In this talk, we will examine this collapse. Our main claim is that it is a result of a problematic identification of the structural absurdity, understood essentially as empty space ("nothing"), with the empty set (which is not "nothing" but something with nothing in it).

ABSTRACT. Many advocates of Metaphysical Eternalism, the view that there aren’t any tensed facts, embrace Psychological Temporalism, the view that there are tensed propositions. On the resulting combination – call it Two-faced Eternalism (TFE) – tensed propositions are something of a psychological ‘free lunch’: they play the role that propositions are traditionally supposed to play as objects of psychological attitudes but there aren’t any facts ‘out there’ making them true or false simpliciter. This paper argues that – much like Moorean-paradoxical claims of the form ‘p but I do not believe that p’ – TFE is not a rationally tenable position.

ABSTRACT. The growing block theory of time (GBT) aspires to be a dynamic theory of time. Recently (Rosenkranz and Correia 2018) defended the GBT in a new guise paired with an understanding of dynamicity as Temporaryism (Williamson 2013). My submission aims to challenge that understanding of dynamicity and argue that the new GBT by Correia and Rosenkranz can only account for "having grown" and not ongoing growth. If the argument goes through, the latest version of GBT fails to set itself apart from static theories, most notably Eternalism. Finally, I propose a direction towards a more promising account of dynamicity.

ABSTRACT. The fatalist views the future as we all view the past. The metaphysical basis of fatalism is often accompanied with a certain outlook on the lives and endeavours of humans. If what will be will be and we have no control over the future, then why should we get excited about our goals, invest in our projects, or put any effort into our existence?  In this paper, I will not attempt to present an argument for how it is that the B-theoretic block universe can avoid fatalism at the ontological level. What I do want to suggest, though, is that the fatalist mindset of resignation and surrender in the face of a certain fate can be avoided by the B-theoretic block universe theorist.  Tackling this mindset would help to alleviate the primary reason why theorists have sought to evade the conclusion that the B-theoretic block universe is committed to fatalism.  This, in turn, would help to further support the underlying space-time framework of the B-theoretic block, which I will argue supports the idea that both free will and moral responsibility are illusions.

ABSTRACT. Neural structural representations have allegedly been observed, so we should have compelling evidence of their existence. Here, I claim we haven’t. First, I’ll sketch an account of structural representations, highlighting that they are individual vehicles playing an action guiding role. Then, I examine two prominent alleged cases of structural representations in the brain: cortical maps and certain patterns of neural responses that “mirror” the stimulus domain. Yet the former fail to play the desired action guiding role, whereas the latter are not individual vehicles. I thus conclude we don’t have compelling evidence favoring the existence of neural structural representations.

ABSTRACT. The mechanistic account of computation (MAC) maintains that computational implementation is best explicated within a mechanistic framework (Piccinini 2007, 2015; Milkowski 2013). Computational explanation is a species of mechanistic explanation, and computational mechanisms are a special type of functional mechanism. Recently, a number of problems have been raised against MAC. These problems threaten to undermine MAC’s status as a workable theory of implementation. The aim of this paper is shore up MAC’s conceptual foundations. The paper looks to not only rescue a prominent theory of implementation but also secure the foundations of computational cognitive science more generally.

ABSTRACT. It is often assumed that David Marr’s influential distinction between computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels of explanation cannot be used for understanding the hierarchical relation between personal and subpersonal levels of explanation. This might be because Marr's analysis paradigmatically applies to subpersonal and lower-level modular cognitive processes. This paper explores recent advancements in the active inference framework suggesting that even non-modular personal processes can be computationally analyzed and algorithmically implemented. More specifically, the paper argues that under the active inference conception of the mind, Marr's distinction might indeed serve as a general explanatory template for understanding psychological phenomena.

ABSTRACT. Recently, logical anti-exceptionalism (AEL) has become the orthodoxy of logical epistemology. Borrowing some of Quine's tenets from his philosophy of logic, advocates of AEL have offered diversified accounts of this domain. In this paper, I argue that if we distill three versions of AEL, we can show that all suffer from epistemological shortcomings. Although this survey will be critical, I consider it relevant to highlight the suspicions about this diversification. While these variations have solved some theoretical problems, they have also granted a more relaxed conception of logical empiricism that is not in line with established epistemological results.

ABSTRACT. I present a view of Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of "abductive reasoning" in its narrow technical sense as an inference from ’consequent to antecedent’ and in a more broad sense as an `explanatory inference.’ I argue that this best captures Peirce’s meaning across various characterizations of the notion throughout the corpus of his writings. The advantage of this view of the matter is that the charges made against the coherence of Peirce's view in much of critical commentary may be avoided and many seemingly puzzling attributes of Peirce's discussion on abduction can be rendered coherent.

ABSTRACT. This paper defends objectivism about risk against recent challenges from contextualists. I argue that contextualists have been mistaken in claiming that we cannot make judgements about objective risk without taking a position on whether the corresponding risk events obtain. Moreover, I show that we must understand risk in objective terms in order to capture intuitions in broadly two kinds of case. The argument from risk minimisation shows that contextualism licences irresponsible risk management. The argument from risk retraction shows that contextualism is unable to account for how we retract risk judgements after having acquired new evidence.

ABSTRACT. Supersubstantivalism is a thesis about the ontological status of material objects: they are not a category of fundamental substances in addition to spacetime regions. Material objects, however, are not the only putative concrete particulars an ontological theory needs to account for. While not uncontroversial, events are often also thought to be entities deserving of the status of concrete particulars. Nevertheless, the recent discussions surrounding supersubstantivalism have thus far neglected the topic of events. This paper aims to make up for that oversight in the literature by exploring what positions concerning the ontological status of events are available to the supersubstantivalist.

ABSTRACT. I present a novel account of Spatial Extension (SE) according to which to be Spatially Extended just is to be Extended Simpliciter (SEES): a spatial entity is extended simpliciter iff some part of it is one-dimensionally Lebesgue-extended. By contrast with the mereological and Lebesgue accounts of SE (SEME and SELE, respectively) present in literature, SEES provides a physics-like measure of SE and is absolute rather than relative to the geometrical dimensions owned by entities’ locations, respectively. I defend that the measure and absoluteness are essential for SE and conclude that SEES is a better candidate than SEME and SELE.

ABSTRACT. Ontological pluralism, that is, the view that there are multiple ways of being, enjoys today a significant revival (McDaniel 2017, Turner 2010, Eklund 2022). This has also to do with the various contexts in which ways of being have been applied, from metaphysics, to meta-ethics. However, there is one field of application which remains unexplored as of today, i.e. the metaphysics of universals. In this paper, we explain how ways of being can be employed to characterize the dichotomy between Aristotelian and Platonic universals, and explore whether this could block several ground-theoretic arguments recently moved against the Aristotelian view.

ABSTRACT. It is often claimed that, when nudging, an important moral consideration is whether a nudge is easy to resist; if it is not easy to resist, then we have a strong reason not to implement it. However, authors tend to rely on an intuitive understanding of what it is for a nudge to be easy to resist, without offering an explicit account; and in other work with a co-author, I have argued against both exceptions to this. In this paper, I begin to provide a foundation for a new account of what it is for a nudge to be resistible.

ABSTRACT. Serious wrongs committed by our loved ones seem to be normatively significant for us. Even when those wrongs cannot be traced to our culpable acts or omissions, we typically take responsibility for them: we offer apologies, experience guilt-like attitudes, seek forgiveness, and make amends. The aim of this paper is to explain the practice of taking responsibility for the wrongs caused by those dear to us - for which we are not at fault - in a way that that enables us to understand its social and personal significance.

ABSTRACT. On the classical conception of excuses, an agent is fully excused for φing iff φing was not blameworthy, yet still all-things-considered wrong. Here, I challenge this view by showing that it yields incorrect verdicts in situations where agents only have two options – one excused and one supererogatory. I then sketch an alternative view holding that excuses are a special agent-centred class of Dancy-style disablers. I flesh out and defend this view, showing how it allows us to retain crucial conceptual features of excuses without committing us to the problematic idea that excuses can remove blameworthiness without affecting permissibility.

ABSTRACT. A phenomenon that we call 'linguistic imposters' has become pervasive in contemporary social and political discourse. Linguistic imposters are the expressions that are systematically and collectively used in violation of their conventional usage, but whose misuse is covert in the sense that most of their misusers falsely believe that they are using these expressions conventionally. Our paper investigates the nature of linguistic imposters by addressing the following questions: What effects are linguistic imposters conducive to? What are the working mechanisms of linguistic imposters? What makes linguistic imposters normatively objectionable? When, if ever, is the deployment of linguistic imposters justified?

ABSTRACT. “Conceptual inflation” means problematic expansion of normatively loaded concepts, such as ‘human rights’, ‘racism’, and ‘addiction’. It is currently unclear what the problem with conceptual inflation is and whether there is a problem at all. I will propose a new rational reconstruction of the underlying disagreement between the proponents and opponents of a concept’s expansion. Terms like those listed above are particularly apt for guiding attention to the phenomena they cover. I suggest that the parties debating a concept’s expansion disagree about whether the phenomena at the disputed borders of the term’s extension deserve the attention afforded by the term.

ABSTRACT. Reference Magnetism is a popular metasemantic theory, on which the reference of concepts (expressions) is partly determined by the relative naturalness of candidates for the concepts’ reference. I argue (a) that reference magnetism provides a good model for understanding certain paradigmatic examples of conceptual engineering and (b) that we should interpret conceptual engineering projects as attempts to change the inferential role (and not necessarily the reference) of concepts. Roughly, on the presented view, conceptual engineering projects consist in revising the inferential role of concepts, so that they more adequately describe the joint-carving (natural) properties that constitute their reference.

ABSTRACT. Physical modality best accounts for the modal status of physical laws. We live in a world which is full of physical possibilities and necessities. They are thoroughly empirical, hence being investigated by means of theory and model construction processes, improving inductive practices, and weighing evidence supporting modal claims. Laws are not restricted to yield summaries of actual phenomena, but we rather expect them to inform us about ranges of possibilities and necessities in physical domains. We shall disentangle physical and mathematical modalities in laws, hence resisting the assumption of primitive mathematical constraints.

ABSTRACT. According to Lewis (1973), laws of nature are axioms of a true deductive system that achieves the best balance between simplicity and informativeness. Callender (2017:140) calls laws in the sense of the best system account “algorithms” that “generate some pieces of the domain of events given other pieces”. In my talk, I will discuss certain precisifications of both Lewis's and Callender's proposals, using the logical consequence operator. I will argue that these two analyses of laws of nature are not equivalent and that the latter fits better to the currently known examples of laws of nature.

ABSTRACT. My aim is to analyse the status of the wave function in quantum mechanics and examine the prospects of a dualist model in the metaphysics of science with laws and powers equally fundamental. I will discuss views that attribute law-like status to the wave function and views that give power-based descriptions of it. In this light, I will examine whether there is room for unifying the law-like and the power-based views about the wave function in order to suggest a better understanding of its role in the context of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics.

ABSTRACT. It is debated whether Wilfrid Sellars adopted a first-order expressivist understanding or a second-order metalinguistic understanding of normative statements. The aim of my talk is to discuss relevant unpublished archive material from the mid-1960s and its implications. I argue that we can reasonably assume that Sellars at least toyed with a metalinguistic understanding of normative statements at a crucial point in the development of his practical philosophy. Further, I suggest that the two readings of Sellars on normative statements have different implications concerning the place of normativity in Sellars’s naturalistic understanding of the world.

ABSTRACT. I propose to shed some light on an often-neglected aspect of the work of a (recently) neglected philosopher, that is, the transcendentalism of Stanley Cavell. Cavell’s philosophical approach can indeed be read to continue, by re-interpreting through Wittgensteinian lenses, the tradition that Kant famously inaugurated. Here I start developing my interpretation of Cavell’s transcendentalism, and explain why it is worthy of attention. By distinguishing it from Kant’s approach, I argue that Cavell’s (i) makes (ordinary) language central to transcendentalism, (ii) exhibits a naturalism that dovetails with its transcendental ambitions and (iii) motivates the confusion that can affect our philosophical reflection.

ABSTRACT. The discarding of a Hegelian brand of idealism has long been understood as the founding act of analytic philosophy, most famously by Russell. However, progressively during the second half of the twentieth century, this account proved less and less satisfactory, as the reference to Hegel has been reintroduced through the works of the members of the “The Pittsburgh School”. We will describe this shift and make sense of its consequences for analytical philosophy – issued into a “Hegelian stage” according to Rorty - and for a renewed Hegelianism: most notably, the promotion of a normative understanding of conceptual thinking.

ABSTRACT. It was recently argued that sentient nonhuman animals not only matter morally but also politically. A new body of literature has emerged that discusses how to best represent the interests of animals on a political level. I will argue that this focus on the best political representation model of animals’ interest is too short-sighted. Politial representation is a requirement of procedural fairness, but as sole means insufficient to achieve political justice for animals. In addition, animal ethicists should focus more on fair decision-making principles that can be applied on a political level when conflicts between human and animal interests arise.

ABSTRACT. Moderate contingentism combines two theses: first-order contingentism, the view that it is contingent what individuals exist, and higher-order necessitism, the view that it is necessary what higher-order entities exist. It has been argued, that moderate contingentism cannot be upheld because of the Haecceity Objection: how can haecceity of an individual exist in worlds where the corresponding individual does not? In this paper, we develop a new moderate contingentist metaphysics, according to which individuals are realized essences. We dub it Fundamental Essentialism, we provide model-theoretic semantics for it, and we argue that it allows us to solve the aforementioned problem.

ABSTRACT. Human rights have been contested on many different grounds, with one of them being a charge of speciesism or anthropocentrism (Singer, 1975; Cavalieri, 2001; Regan, 2003). This paper argues that person is a fitter candidate than human to be the subject of such rights, because 1) person can better deal with the interconnectedness between practical and metaphysical questions present in such issues (Korsgaard, 2003,2009; Schechtman 2008, 2010, 2014) and 2) person, although a western concept in origin, can avoid the criticisms of eurocentrism and parochialism, if understood according to a relational rewriting of Parfit’s original theses (1984).

ABSTRACT. Epistemology concerns itself with the evaluation of epistemic states, norms, and practices. Traditionally, these have been understood in doxastic terms, with knowledge and belief as paradigmatic. The focus of epistemic analysis and evaluation has then been on attitudes like believing, judging, or accepting. In this symposium, we explore limitations of this doxastic view. Adham will outline alternatives to the doxastic framework, Oscar will show that understanding is not doxastic, Pablo will suggest a novel norm for inquiry, and Paula will critically examine epistemic promises and dangers of metaphorical speech. 

ABSTRACT. There is a growing debate on politically relevant phenomena, like conspiracy theories, extremism, fanaticism, or ideology. The goal of this symposium is to improve our grip on normative questions surrounding the conceptualization of such politically contested phenomena, and the relation between their conceptualization and evaluation. From an epistemological, philosophy of education, social philosophy, and philosophy of language angle, we address questions concerning the kind of concepts politically contested concepts are; the relation between their conceptualization and evaluation; the impact of prior social attitudes/practices on our conceptual choices; and the kinds of tolerance required for analyzing and evaluating politically contested phenomena.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I give an account of attachments, such as those involved in love and friendship. I argue two things. First, an attachment is not an emotional disposition, but a mental state underlying and manifesting itself in an emotional disposition. Second, this mental state is what I call a drive, directed at the other person, that encapsulates the fact that we care about them not as a part of a broader concern.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I shall provide a contrastive analysis of three types of recalcitrant mental states, namely emotions, perceptions, and intuitions, which persist despite being in tension with a corresponding judgement. I shall present their distinctive features, including the different expectations and evaluations they come with, while focusing on how such states interact with motivation, character, and action, and thereby pointing out why we have good reason to care about them. Finally, I shall question the common claim that someone having recalcitrant emotions or intuitions is ipso facto irrational.

ABSTRACT. Various philosophers claim that emotions are best understood as specific evaluative attitudes or properties thereof taken towards non-evaluative representational contents, and not as peculiar judgment-like or perceptual evaluative contents themselves. This talk discusses three of the major motivations underlying this branch of theories – which I call “same evaluative content different feel motivation”, “same evaluative content different state motivation“ and “dual direction of fit motivation” – and explores three metaphysical directions in which this approach could be developed - which I name “adverbialism”, “attitudinalism” and “relationalism”. I will argue that only relationalism can account for all three motivations introduced previously.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I will first draw attention to a difference between two types of beliefs a mathematician might have. First, a mathematician might believe, that 97 is the largest prime under one hundred. Second, one might believe that there is a well-ordering of real numbers. On the surface these beliefs are similar. However, the first belief is de re belief about the number 97 and the latter is de dicto, since it does not seem to be about the particular set that orders the reals. I will argue that this distinction serves to clarify Benacerraf’s access problem.

ABSTRACT. Mathematical pluralism is traced back to Hilbert and Poincaré's conception of the continuum, where it figures implicitly – entailed by their shared commitments to two assumptions: (1) The legitimacy of an axiomatic approach to the definition of mathematical concepts. (2) A consistency-criterion for mathematical existence. (2) is nowadays usually rejected based on the incompleteness of higher-order mathematics, but my aim in the paper is to show that the principle regards satisfiability, not deductive consistency. It is argued that it is not commitment to (2), but the extension of (1) which determines the scope and hence the radicality of mathematical pluralism.

ABSTRACT. Clarke-Doane (2020) argues that the pluralist stance in the philosophy of mathematics (any consistent mathematical theory produces a legitimate mathematical universe) can provide an answer to Benacerraf problem iff we interpret it in terms of safety: our set-theoretic beliefs are reliable iff, for any one of them P, we couldn't have easily had a false belief as to whether P. However, he also argues that it's not clear how the pluralist can show that her set-theoretic beliefs are safe. In this paper, I argue that the V-logic multiverse, a mathematical characterization of the pluralist position, can provides such an answer.

ABSTRACT. Metaphysical presentists face problems regarding talk about the past and future. If only present things exist, does that make sentences about the non-present false, non-referring, or 'empty', since they lack anything real to ground them? Many presentists have gone through great pains to introduce `proxies' for the past, to provide grounds for past-tensed sentences. In this paper I explore an alternative: intepreting tensed talk using fictionalism. I respond to recent work by Kristie Miller, who considers several forms of non-present fictionalism. I argue that a view Miller considers implausible, meta-fictionalism, is in fact an attractive option for presentists to consider.

ABSTRACT. This paper takes issue with fictional creationists—according to whom there exist fictional objects such as Sherlock Holmes and they are artifacts created by our literary practices—on a problem with negative existentials about fictional objects. I will first briefly explain fictional creationism and its problem with negative existentials. Then I will critically examine accounts, which appeal to paraphrase, proposed by fictional creationists including van Inwagen (1977), Salmon (1998, 2011), Thomasson (1999, 2003), Predelli (2002), Kripke (2011, 2013), von Solodkoff (2014 a) and Spewak (2016), and argue that they fail to solve the problem.

ABSTRACT. Essentialists about artifacts argue that objects are grouped into artifact kinds based on shared non-trivial artifact essences, while anti-essentialists argue that there is no such essence to be found. However, the prominent essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts suffer from extensional and definitional problems. I argue that the problems current essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts face stem from the assumption of artifact concept monism. According to artifact concept monism, there is only a single way to group objects into artifact kinds. To remedy, this paper offers an alternative framework by drawing parallels from the debates on species concept pluralism and art concept pluralism.

ABSTRACT. I argue that mental types can overlap. A token mental state can be multiple types. In particular, a perceptual experience can simultaneously be a belief. When a subject perceives with content p, that content is usually accessible. By endorsing p, the subject comes to believe that p. The perceptual experience, while retaining its content and phenomenology, becomes a belief. Positing overlap has epistemic benefits, especially in the face of arguments by Alex Byrne and Kathrin Glüer. I consider several objections to overlap, including the idea that perception and belief differ in content and that beliefs tend to outlast experiences.

ABSTRACT. Gendler engineers a concept that she calls alief (Gendler 2008a, 2008b). She claims that the concept is novel, and that we need it to explain certain responses. Mandelbaum challenges the alief engineer. He claims that alief has either propositional content or associative content, and that this gives rise to a dilemma. I show that the dilemma is relevant to whether alief is a successful conceptual engineering project (cf. Pinder 2022). I argue that Danón's attempt to evade the dilemma (Danón 2021) fails, but describe a way to achieve this aim. I then show that Gendler's project nevertheless fails.

ABSTRACT. Stephen Turner’s anti-normativism is based on the idea that the normative can be explained away by social science. Turner argued that normative accounts are better understood as “Good Bad Theories” (GBT), false accounts that play a role in social coordination like magical/religious rituals in primitive societies (e.g. Tabu and the like). According to Turner, ‘obligations,’ ‘reasons,’ and ‘commitments’ are like Tabu and can be explained away as GBT. By focusing on the Sellarsian distinction between social and natural norms and on certain normative features of belief, I will point out some interesting implications and problems for Turner’s anti-normativism.

ABSTRACT. Phenomenal conservatism is challenged by cases in which the experience has a bad basis. Etiologically restricted conservatism explains the bad cases, but departs from the key tenets of phenomenal conservatism that etiology does not matter for an experience´s justificatory power. I propose a novel version of a restricted conservatism that focuses on intrinsic features of the experience. I argue that the condition for an experience to have justificatory power is an overall phenomenology that contains no mismatching phenomenal aspects. The proposed account is explanatorily powerful with regard to the bad cases while staying true to the spirit of phenomenal conservatism.

ABSTRACT. In my talk, I argue for the following thesis: Perceptual hallucinations cannot be perfectly veridical. This allows us to introduce the following analysis of experiential knowledge: If subject S is undergoing a perceptual experience E for which it is true that (i) E has a presentive phenomenology with respect to p and (ii) E is perfectly veridical, and based on this experience S believes that p, then, in the absence of defeaters, S knows that p. One takeaway of my talk is that contemporary epistemology has unreasonably ignored the epistemological significance of phenomenology.

ABSTRACT. The paper explores an account of the role of perceptual experience in conferring positive normative standing upon perceptual judgments and beliefs. The proposed view is an alternative to simple given and hypothetical given accounts of this role. I show that criticism of simple given which motivates the hypothetical given is structurally similar to metaethical concerns with detaching problems. Additionally, hypothetical given is structurally similar to wide-scope rational requirements deployed to solve metaethical detaching problems. I exploit the fact that detaching problems can be solved in a contextualist manner as well, and apply such solution to the case of perceptual judgments.

ABSTRACT. A metametaphysical normative view is that metaphysics should partially be about discovering which entities are fundamental (i.e., which entities exist and are addition of being) and explaining why other entities are derivative (i.e., why other entities exist but are no addition of being). I call this view the ‘Fundamental/Derivative Distinction Thesis’. I'll argue that this view can be motivated, if an anti-Humean account of causation or laws of nature is true and some other claims are true. This argument can also be used to show that one-many identity theories are false and that we can carve reality at its joints.

ABSTRACT. Bigelow, Hall, Lange, and many others, have argued that Humeanism about laws faces difficulties in reproducing expected judgments about laws, chances, and counterfactuals (particularly nested counterfactuals) under counterfactual suppositions about the mosaic. Close attention to the semantics of counterfactuals, disentangling the context-sensitivity and contingency of counterfactuals, shows that Lange’s charge has no force against the Humean, who is not forced to give the verdicts Lange claims they must. I will also argue that similar considerations can defuse the problem of undermining for Humean chance laws, and, in passing, note the role of two-dimensional semantics in understanding this cluster of objections.

ABSTRACT. My talk aims to propose a novel approach to the question of counterfactuals. This view is inspired by the notion of explanatory realism, which has it that the explanation aims to reveal a dependent relation between explanandum and explanans. Together with the "Humean" claim that a dependence relation is merely a description of the pattern of facts, this results in the claim that: A counterfactual 'A>C' is true at the world of evaluation iff there is a relation of dependence that hold between referents of A and C, and the same relation of dependence holds in the world of evaluation.

ABSTRACT. Like theories in other domains of inquiry, normative ethical theories seem to aim at making sense of or explaining something. But what do they aim to explain? Current ethical research usually assumes that such theories aim most basically at explaining ‘ethical properties’: the properties of being good, of being right, and so on. In this talk, I propose an alternative to the property view, according to which normative ethical theories rather aim most basically at explaining people. I outline the view with reference to Kant’s ethical theory, and I offer an error theory of the property view.

ABSTRACT. Many scholars fear that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to a responsibility gap, i.e. a situation in which no one is responsible for the effects of AI. In this paper, I propose the opposite view, namely that the use of AI leads to responsibility abundance, i.e. a situation in which many people are responsible for the effects of AI. In so arguing and explaining why an abundance is problematic too, I shall reframe the challenge about responsibility and AI and facilitate a novel solution, based on the social practices rather than metaphysics of responsibility.

ABSTRACT. Perspectivism is the view that what we ought to do depends on our current epistemic position, i.e. currently available reasons. While intuitive, it faces a deep problem: negating the normative importance of unavailable facts has bad repercussions in deliberation, where we are concerned with facts outside of our perspective In this talk, I forward a proposal for how to bring objectivity to perspectivism. I argue for the idea that there is a deliberative, enquiry-governing meta norm, which attaches to our meta evidence and prompts us to enquire for counterfactual reasons, i.e., unknown but potentially relevant facts, in specific circumstances.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to present an outline of a potentially novel theory of propositions that differentiates between the structure (of a proposition) and the form (of a proposition). Roughly speaking, the propositional form might be defined as a class of all equivalent propositional structures taken jointly with or without conceptual structures of some of their terminal elements. In the paper, I shall discuss various possible versions of the theory as well as its relation to the problem of the fine-graininess of content.

ABSTRACT. The fine-grained conception of propositions is at odds with ordinary speakers’ assessment of same-saying. Jeffrey King argues that speakers are unreliable about these matters. While convincing, this is also unsatisfactory for ordinary reasons of charity. In this paper, I defend the fine-grained conception of propositions indirectly, by showing how it can be maintained consistently with a charitable interpretation of ordinary uses of ‘that’-clauses, namely, by treating it as a species of loose talk.

ABSTRACT. According to dynamic approaches to meaning, a theory of meaning for some fragment of language should be given in terms of a compositional theory of the context change potentials of the sentences of that fragment, a compositional theory about how assertions of the sentences in question affect the context of a conversation. In this paper I argue, against dynamic approaches to meaning, that there is a robust sense in which it is impossible to give a compositional theory of the context change potentials of simple indicative conditional sentences.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, I will argue that formal philosophy of science is excessively 'theory-centric' and explore some ways in which this theory-centrism may be overcome. In particular, I consider the prospects for formalizing ‘supra-theoretical units of analysis’ (for short: ‘macro-units’). To this end, I examine existent attempts to formalize two particularly prominent macro-units, namely: Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm and Larry Laudan’s notion of research tradition. I will argue that these attempts only partially succeed in formalizing their respective macro-unit, and draw from these reflections some general criteria which, I argue, any formal analysis of macro-units ought to satisfy.

ABSTRACT. Lower-order Feynman diagrams, decoupled from the theoretical framework of perturbation theory, are frequently used as pictorial representations in physics education. Their clarity makes them easily accessible, even though the underlying processes are not factually represented. This raises the question of whether these diagrams can facilitate some form of understanding, as a veridity criterion cannot be fulfilled. This criterion however can be weakened to accommodate so-called toy models, highly idealised and simplified models. I argue that the use of Feynman diagrams as literal pictorial representations can be considered as a toy model and in this capacity facilitate how-possibly understanding.

ABSTRACT. Elucidating the epistemic status of scientific models constitutes one of the main areas of research within the current philosophy of science. Traditionally, philosophers have tried to explain their value by appealing to their supposedly representational character. However, several criticisms have called these analyses into question. An alternative approach has emerged in recent years: artifactualism. In the talk, I analyze the artifactual account of Knuuttila, stating that it still faces a major problem: it does not provide clear evaluative criteria. I address this problem by proposing an alternative notion of epistemic artifact.

ABSTRACT. Current philosophical investigations into love’s nature tend to conceive of love as a fairly narrow subjective or interpersonal phenomenon - as a specific mental state, or an attitude a person takes towards another. In this paper, I suggest that the history of philosophy can offer us a window into some dimensions of philosophical thinking about love which eludes analytic’s philosophy’s present cartography. I then argue that while these ways of thinking about love may seem far removed from present-day conceptions, they can indeed still offer valuable impulses for contemporary views.

ABSTRACT. There is a debate in Kant scholarship on what the target of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is. One line of interpretation takes it to be a response to Cartesian skepticism regarding the external world, and another one takes it to be a ‘regressive’ argument which is not supposed to answer to any kind of skepticism. In this talk, I will argue that both parties get something right and something wrong. The former is right in taking it to be a response to skepticism, though the latter is right in rejecting that it is a response to Cartesian external world skepticism.

ABSTRACT. Is Kant's antirealism safe from the knowability paraodox? Stephenson (2022) has argued that Kant's thesis that all transcendental truths are transcendentally a priori knowable leads to omniscience of all transcendental truths. His arguments depend on luminosity principles, closure principles and a factivity principle for transcendental knowability, which we will critically examine. Furthermore, Stephenson (2015) has argued that Kant's thesis that, for any empirical truth, it is possible to have a justified belief in it, is safe from the knowability paradox, on the condition that justified belief does not satisfy a certain reflection principle. We will critically discuss this claim.

ABSTRACT. Democratic theorists that adopt a proceduralist approach to the justification of democracy often claim that a commitment to public respect commands that we take the political judgements of citizens as given and refrain from questioning or assessing the quality of the epistemic conduct underpinning these judgements. In this paper, I contend that such claim is incorrect because premised upon an interpretation of the demands of public respect that fails to consider how citizens’ practical accountability in democratic practices encompasses an epistemic dimension. Consequently, a proper democratic ethos should accommodate assessments of citizens’ epistemic conduct rather than treat them as disrespectful.

ABSTRACT. The state neutrality principle is widely contested in contemporary political theory. In the paper, I focus on one aspect of state neutrality which has not gained much attention, namely the issue of the strength of the principle. There are three main answers to this question: the first one states that neutrality is a gradual concept; the second as a binary concept, and the third claims that neutrality is best understood as presumptive standard. In the presentation, I examine weaknesses of these answers and argue in favor of the second one, which grounds the most coherent account of state neutrality.

ABSTRACT. Liberals mostly agree that liberal neutrality obtains when the justification of policies is neutral rather than when their effects are neutral. Neutrality of effect, they believe, is neither possible nor desirable. In this paper we revise this account by considering the effects that manifest due to how the deliberative arena is designed, pertaining to frames, agenda setting, and media presence. We consider cases where these aspects have non-neutral effects and suggest institutional mechanisms that could mitigate them. Our conclusion is that liberal neutrality requires not only justificatory neutrality, but also a reduction of certain differential impacts within a limited scope.

ABSTRACT. The “problem of mice” is a trilemma that arises when we (i) affirm egalitarian or prioritarian principles of distributive justice (ii) deny the relevance of species membership to the distribution of burdens and benefits, and (iii) hold that nonhuman animals capable of suffering (“mice” or “animals” for short) are worse off than us. Unless we can abandon one of these claims, we arrive at a counter-intuitive conclusion: we must shift most resources from most humans to most mice. The standard solution posits a status hierarchy that is then employed to discount the moral importance of any interest animals may have. The paper shows why this solution fails and offers alternative solutions.

ABSTRACT. Social psychology uses the concept of dehumanization to understand and better explain everyday forms of discrimination such as sexism or racism. Gray et al. (2012) propose a “mind perception” approach to dehumanization. Here, dehumanization can occur along the dimensions of what they call “Agency” and “Experience” and may lead to loss of moral status (moral standing). Varga (2021) criticizes this using a direct perception approach to dehumanization in which agency isn’t spontaneously perceived in the thusly dehumanized. I argue that, if successful, Varga’s approach poses a problem for simulation approaches to mindreading since ‘unequal’ minds can’t be read using perspective-taking.

ABSTRACT. I defend the Theory of Mind (ToM) account of social cognition from objections formulated by the proponents of Embodied Social Cognition (ESC). ESC states that social cognition does not employ propositional attitude concepts and that it is non-inferential. I analyse two objections against ToM: (1) ESC conforms better than ToM to phenomenological evidence and (2) the interpretation of a target in terms of propositional attitudes is redundant. Countering (1), I claim that ESC overestimates the importance of phenomenology and ignores the fact that mindreading often proceeds tacitly. Regarding (2), I claim that inferences are indispensable in interpretation of overt behaviour.

ABSTRACT. Moral psychology has identified cultural group differences in the scope of the moral domain [e.g., Sachdeva et al. 2011, Sinnot-Armstrong & Wheatley 2014, Buchtel et al. 2015, Stich 2018, and Levine et al. 2022]. People can (dis)agree on the truth of a norm while (dis)agreeing as to its metanormative status (as moral vs. non-moral). This, we argue, supports the thesis that the existence of moral normative properties is metaphysically dependent on us believing a norm to be moral [vide Tiffany 2007 and Eklund 2017], whereas the moral domain is partly a function of the sociocultural development of our norm psychology.

ABSTRACT. What is the “right” course of actions when the decisions of individuals are interdependent, unraveling complex group dynamics? Game-theoretic approaches to ethics aim to remedy such interdependencies, disentangling the consequences for all parties involved. However, such approaches have so far been inherently anthropocentric: They ignore the consequences for non-human players, although animals in particular do well qualify as “players”. This contribution shows why an inclusion of sentient animals into the language of games is both warranted (normatively) and possible (methodologically). It provides a pathocentric extension of game theory.

ABSTRACT. Assuming that music can be expressive, I try to answer the question whether musical expressiveness has epistemic value. I claim that music has more suitable means than language to articulate and communicate the phenomenal richness of our inner states. Thanks to that, listening to music is a source of phenomenal knowledge. My aim in this talk is to demonstrate, by using the example of expressive music, that phenomenal knowledge is neither exclusively private, nor is it unanalyzable, nor epistemically insignificant. I will argue for each of these in a row.

ABSTRACT. Matters of taste exhibit two characteristics that appear to generate a deep tension. On the one hand, they are subjective: whether an object instantiates a taste property somehow depends on the taste sensibility of the subject. But, on the other hand, they are somewhat objective: sensible disagreement about whether a certain food is tasty is clearly possible. We argue that these two characteristics can be reconciled by adopting a specific kind of relativistic and subjectivist metaphysics and epistemology of taste. In this paper we develop such a philosophy of taste and we show how subjective and objective elements can coexist.

ABSTRACT. I address two problems for strategies appealing to Strawson’s theory of reactive attitudes to motivate the need for doxastic responsibility conditions. Firstly, such strategies risk transferring skepticism about doxastic responsibility onto ‘epistemic’ reactive attitudes themselves. I answer by reviewing a series of alternative epistemic reactive attitudes that do not require special conditions for doxastic responsibility. Secondly, these strategies take the analogy between doxastic involuntarism and determinism for granted. I argue that, unlike what the Stawsonian strategy presumes, doxastic involuntarism is analogous to the excusing conditions described by Strawson, rather than to determinism. I conclude that Strawsonian strategies are not viable.

ABSTRACT. Many epistemologists are attracted to the view that just as there are both positive and negative epistemic obligations. Knowledge-firsters hold that knowledge is the central norm of belief. But while it’s easy to see how the knowledge norm gives rise to negative obligations, it’s harder to see how it would give rise to positive ones. Recently knowledge-firsters have argued that positive epistemic norms should be formulated in terms of ‘being in position to know’. I argue that since obligations agglomerate, but the state ‘being in position to know’ doesn’t, knowledge-firsters have failed to provide grounds for positive epistemic obligations.

ABSTRACT. Standard errory theory faces a consistency problem: by counting all statements of a given domain of discourse false, it threatens to count false both A and ¬A. I give a novel response to this problem within the framework of truthmaker semantics. First, I distinguish a wide and a narrow construal of a given domain D, and show that error theory counts false only the members of D-narrowly-construed. Then, I develop a truthmaker account of negation which ensures that if A is belongs to D-narrowly-construed, ¬A belongs at most to D-widely-construed.

ABSTRACT. I propose a naturalist, neo-Humean, theory of moral principles (NMH) (cf. Stamatiadis-Bréhier 2022). Similar to neo-Humean accounts concerning the metaphysics of scientific laws (e.g. Lewis 1983; 1994), according to NHM, moral principles (in the genetic, non-propositional, sense) are entities that supervene on the Humean mosaic (the set of fundamental, non-modal, physical properties). Specifically, NHM holds that moral principles are nothing over and above the regularities that figure in the Humean mosaic.

ABSTRACT. The orthodox view of action is that its mark is intention. In the past two decades, philosophers have challenged the orthodoxy in favour of a deflationary view: an action is simply the causing of a change. The view is deflationary because it allows plants and chemicals to act. Ethicists are mostly interested in intentional action, or at least in human action. So, it is unsurprising that they mostly stuck to the orthodox view. I argue that this is an ethical mistake: even if our only purpose were to solve ethical problems, it would be best to adopt the deflationary view.

ABSTRACT. What kinds of representations of the moral facts are stably connected with moral motivation? There is a tension between the intuitive idea that bad moral theorists can nonetheless be good people, and that good people on some level grasp the morally relevant facts of their situation and respond to them in their actions. This paper develops this tension and further argues that proper moral motivation is a matter of acting motivated by phenomenal representations: non epistemically mediated representations of the internal states that we take beings around us to experience, and the internal lives that we take them to have.

ABSTRACT. I discuss the expressive function of grammatical gender – speakers of languages with grammatical gender use unconventional gendered forms to express their feelings and attitudes. I consider four types of such uses: the feminization strategy which results in adding feminine versions of grammatically masculine generic nouns; using incorrect gender to express a negative or positive attitude towards the referent and to bring attention to some unusual features of them; the phenomenon of misgendering as an example of hate speech; grammatical innovations and the invention of new words by non-binary people in order to express their gender identities.

ABSTRACT. As a subset of the philosophy of language, writing is crafted, intentionally working within formal genres. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) software program ChatGPT, and other chatbots like it, can create logically coherent texts that meet—or approximate—the formal quality of writing. The widely acknowledged limitations of this artificial writing, acknowledged by the chatbot itself, are evident in the three purposes we expect from language generally and writing especially: 1) subjective truth, 2) objective truth, and 3) rhetorical effects. The limitations highlight the essential features of what might be called a natural philosophy of writing grounded in human consciousness.

ABSTRACT. A number of philosophers have recently argued that non-epistemic values should play a role in ontological choices in science. There are two ways to understand an ontological choice. According to the first, the choice of an ontology is a matter of determining which taxonomic scheme is valid, or how to demarcate the correct boundaries of taxonomic categories. According to the second, it is a matter of which taxonomic scheme to deploy in a given context. I will try to show that while the latter can be determined in part by non-epistemic values, the former ought not to be so determined.

ABSTRACT. In order to study phenomena, scientists must often first organize the world around them into categories. This process can be more or less guided by facts about the topic under consideration. This means it can depend more or less on arbitrary choices made by scientists. This article develops an information-theoretic measure of the arbitrariness of categorization, which tracks how much flexibility there is in researcher choices (following O’Connor (2020), who develops a similar measure to track arbitrariness in conventionality). Applying this measure conceptually clarifies important differences between instances of scientific categorization.

ABSTRACT. Opposites are at the very core of Plato’s metaphysics. They are charged with incredible explanatory power and employed to explain thorny issues such as the tripartition of the soul and the introduction of forms. In his corpus, Plato offers a few core principles governing them. Scholars believe such principles to be under attack in the Sophist, where the pair of opposites change-rest causes more than one interpretative difficulty. I shall show that the principles resist the envisaged attack and present an explanation of the argument from the Sophist which has numerous advantages over the ones currently available in the literature.

ABSTRACT. The counting of arguments in Heraclitus varies from none to a couple. However, lacking arguments does not indicate a pre-philosophical approach. Presenting intuition prompting cases is a legitimate philosophical strategy. To do so, Heraclitus often relies on ordinary artificial objects. This paper argues that these should be seen as exploratory models or manipulatives used in science. Being artificial, they can offer experiences about the nature of things that are unavailable in natural items. The barley-drink needs constant mixing not to lose its unity. Thus, it provides a hands-on experience to prove the elusive point that permanence requires change.

ABSTRACT. This paper offers a new approach to the venerable question of whether faith and doubt are compatible. Drawing on the work of Jane Friedman (2019, 2020), I argue that a plausible account of the nature of inquiry implies that faith and doubt are indeed incompatible. In particular, I develop Friedman's view to argue that when we are inquiring, we are in a state of doubt or suspension of judgment, and when we close inquiry we commit to the truth of a proposition--including truths related to faith--in a way that drives out doubt.

ABSTRACT. In 1974, Alvin Plantinga proposed his famous modal ontological argument. Many have discussed its validity and soundness, but less attention has been paid to the question of what the relationship between God and the modal reality implied by the argument is. However, this is a crucial issue in case the argument is sound and God indeed exists. Here I argue that possible worlds theories are problematic in this respect and offer a novel interpretation of the argument based on modalism. I defend the view that, compared to its rivals, such an interpretation gives us both ontologically and explanatorily simpler account.

ABSTRACT. Some of our mental states are translucent: we can’t fully interpret or elaborate some parts of their content. More generally, mental states come on a spectrum when it comes to whether and how much we can interpret and elaborate some parts of their content. I illustrate the concept of translucency with the help of the contrast between imagination and supposition and then apply it to beliefs. I argue that the translucency of beliefs is especially important as it draws attention to the role of mental imagery in our belief economy. This claim has some big picture implications for the alleged distinction between imagistic and propositional representations and for the ethics of translucent beliefs.

ABSTRACT. The alignment problem is progressively becoming one of the major concerns in AI. We draw from the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and mathematics to develop two strategies to mitigate this problem. First, we conceive the alignment problem as the result of humans being rule-benders and machines being deterministic language users. Second, we present two strategies. The first is that we, humans, natural rule-benders, may stop bending rules to some extent by focusing on what keeps language under control in social practices. The second involves training AIs according to a model which incorporates factors that affect human uses of language.

ABSTRACT. This paper compares three ways of obtaining a supervaluationist theory of truth: Kripke's fixed-point approach; Johannes Stern's theory SSK; and Van McGee's theory of truth. Our first set of results concerns McGee's theory: we establish its truth principles, and carry out its proof-theoretic analysis. The second concerns the relation between this theory and the rest: we show that McGee's fixed-points and the SSK fixed-points coincide. As a corollary, the minimal fixed point of the three approaches to supervaluational truth are identical. We thus close by elaborating a defence of the minimal supervaluationist fixed point as having a privileged position.

ABSTRACT. In the talk, we are investigating different ways to justify the existence of implicit commitments of mathematical theories, such as consistency statements and reflection principles. We compare different strategies to this problem: the non-evidential approach proposed by Horsten, Nicolai, and Leigh, the truth-theoretic approach, and the epistemic approach. We investigate the epistemic theory of believability, proposed by Cieśliński, which determines the scope of implicit commitments of a given theory Th using a primitive epistemic predicate. We compare this approach with other proposals and present formal results suggesting its superiority. We discuss these results and the possible disadvantages of believability theory.

ABSTRACT. Philosophers offer two different views of resentment. The first says that resentment tracks self-directed wrongs, thus underpinning common responsibility ascriptions (Strawson 1962). The second takes resentment to involve a quasi-pathological and therefore normatively unwarranted form of envious hatred (Nietzsche 1887). One way to react to this is by concluding that Strawsonian resentment (SR) and Nietzschean resentment (NR) are distinct psychological phenomena (disunity of resentment claim, DRC). After reviewing the main arguments in favor of DCR, I will argue for the opposite view that there is no essential difference between them (unity of resentment claim, URC).

ABSTRACT. Based on Strawson’s insights, I develop a new argument why our practice of holding others morally responsible doesn’t require an external justification. I argue that we’re not rationally required to give up our moral reactive attitudes, because the targets can follow moral rules, which generates moral expectations; we have a general capacity to identify the appropriate targets for our attitudes; we aren’t rationally required to give up other non-moral reactive attitudes such as proudness and disappointment; and these other reactive attitudes involve the same sense of agency; mechanism of expectations; ‘exempting’ and ‘excusing’ conditions; and sense of desert.

ABSTRACT. Yi (2022) has presented two objections against Miguel and Santos' (2020) analysis of deprivation due to a late birth/early death. According to them the following condition is necessary for such deprivation: Birth/death deprives a person of value only if the historically closest situation where her life has the additional value is one where she is born earlier/dies later. The objections are 1) the condition weakens the explanatory power of deprivationism and 2) it provides a faulty analysis of deprivation. In this paper I argue against the objections and spell out the motivation for deprivationists to endorse the condition.

ABSTRACT. This paper will argue that recent work in the philosophy of art systematically confuses two different issues: the nature of our access to representations and the nature of representations. This confusion occurs across all representational media from literature, through film and video games, to VR. Identifying this confusion shows that much recent philosophy (including the (so-called) ‘philosophy of fiction’) needs to be recast.

ABSTRACT. Nguyen differentiates between object arts and process arts. Traditional art forms such as paintings and music are object arts: an artist creates an artifact and the audience appreciates its aesthetic properties. In process arts, such as games, artifacts are produced so as to elicit different types of action from the audience, and it is these actions, not the object itself, that are the focus of aesthetic appreciation. Here I argue that music is, in fact, a process art, not an object art: listening to The Rite of Spring is more like playing Super Mario than looking at the Mona Lisa.

ABSTRACT. According to the consensus view in philosophy and psychology, creativity is a species of novelty whose differentia is value. This paper argues that such a conception of creativity must face serious problems that make it collapse into a value-neutral conception of creativity. It then argues that a such conception of creativity cannot account for the central notion of a creative practice and its essential tie to value. It then concludes that creativity must be conceived as two-fold: as a species of novelty contingently related to value and as a species of value contingently related to novelty.

ABSTRACT. I argue that epistemic rationality is an elite, referentially magnetic property in the sense that the corresponding predicate must minimally reliably refer to the rationality property (as if the property has magnetic qualities and attracts the predicate’s reference). As I understand eliteness, roughly, elite properties are metaphysically fundamental properties that are objectively explanatorily indispensable for rational argument. I take it that such elite properties and relations include epistemic rationality, reference and truth. If this is the case, then we are somehow stuck with some minimally reliable reference to ‘epistemic rationality’ because it is explanatorily indispensable.

ABSTRACT. I propose an externalist demarcation criterion for rationality that is ultimately self-referential. Kant gives arguments why self-referentiality is necessary. Kant's self is agential, not systemic. I use tools from Luhmann's systems theory to explain how demarcation between the rational and the irrational operates 'autopoetically' rather than 'autonomously.' I depart from Luhmann by maintaining the normativity of rationality. Thus I formalize a Kant-inspired externalist critique of pure reason without compromising rationality's normative claim.

ABSTRACT. Epistemic rationality is a type of rationality that aims at obtaining true beliefs. Traditional epistemology is primarily concerned with how people should form beliefs to be rational, while the study of how belief formation actually occurs falls into the domain of empirical disciplines. I will argue that defining epistemic rationality in a way that is compatible with the concept of bounded rationality, which views rationality as a function of computational capacities of the agents and the structure of the environment, could help bridge the gap between normative and descriptive approaches and contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of epistemic rationality.

ABSTRACT. A number of philosophers and logicians advocate for plural languages in which we can refer, not just to individuals, but to pluralities of individuals. Some go further, advocating for higher-level languages in which we can refer, not just to pluralities of individuals, but to pluralities of pluralities, pluralities of pluralities of pluralities, and so on. But higher-level languages carry a hidden metaphysical commitment. To engage in higher-level reference would require us to embrace a potentially infinite hierarchy of distinct pluralities. I present an alternative language which avoids the hierarchy, and sketch an application in the metaphysics of composite objects.

ABSTRACT. This paper develops a new argument for ontological pluralism - the thesis that being fragments. The argument goes, roughly, as follows. It is conceivable that some beings are ontologically dissimilar. So, it is possible that some beings are ontologically dissimilar. This is sufficient for ontological pluralism. So, being fragments.

ABSTRACT. Truthmaking non-maximalism usually assumes that some truths do not have truthmakers. I show that non-maximalism can be understood more broadly. To this aim, I refer to two positions. First to the view distinguishing having truthmakers by truths from the dependence of truths on reality. Second to deflationary truthmaking, some representatives of which assume that no truths have truthmakers. Given the combinations of these positions, I propose a new classification of the four positions available for a non-maximalist. My classification improves on existing ones and highlights a position that has so far been suggested by only one author.

ABSTRACT. Constitutivists think that norms constitutive of agency are authoritative. Many of them also emphasize the inescapability of agency, for inescapability is supposed to be part of the explanation of why the norms of agency are authoritative. Is it? To evaluate whether inescapability explains normativity, I outline some necessary features of normative authority: it does not change with changing desires, ought-implies-can and ought-implies-can-fail, and our criticizability for failure. I then consider four types of inescapability from the literature. Psychological, further factor, and standpoint inescapability do not capture all these features, but plight inescapability does better. The catch? It entails relativism.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a novel, broadly Kantian solution to what is known as ‘the paradox of exploitation’. We argue that the paradox can only be convincingly solved if we recognize that the values at stake in exploitation cases--fairness, consent/freedom, and welfare--are derivative rather than fundamental values. We then show how a Kantian framework, which regards all these values as derivative from the overarching importance of dignity, can defuse the paradox, using its distinction between duties of right and (strict) duties of virtue. Lastly, we extend the analysis to introduce two new, hitherto underanalysed, practical concerns about exploitation.

ABSTRACT. On the increasingly popular Rational Ability View, the ability to be reason-responsive is necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility. Recently, it has been argued that combining this view with two compelling claims leads to a trilemma:

(Rational Ability View) Rational ability entails moral responsibility. (Reflective Ability Requirement) Moral responsibility entails reflective ability. (Tacit Rationality View) Rational ability does not entail reflective ability.

In this paper, I argue that this trilemma can be resolved by disambiguating the notion of moral responsibility figuring in the claims, once we see that moral praiseworthiness and moral blameworthiness require different sorts of agential capacities.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I criticize the now popular view that the reason why irregular polysemes enjoy a processing advantage compared to homonyms is because the meanings associated with irregular polysemes are represented and stored in single lexical entries in our mental lexicons, whereas the meanings associated with homonyms are stored in separate ones. Such a view is too coarse-grained, and struggles to satisfactorily explain why facilitation effects in the processing of irregular polysemes occur to varying degrees. In order to explain the available empirical evidence, I argue that a sophisticated separate entries account of irregular polysemy is required.

ABSTRACT. Recent experimental studies have claimed to find evidence for the view that natural kind terms such as ‘water’ are ambiguous: that they have two extensions, one determined by superficial properties, the other by underlying essence. We performed an experiment using Twin Earth style scenarios, where subjects were asked to imagine novel samples that are different in underlying structure, but identical in appearance, to samples of a familiar kind. Using four different natural kind terms and three different question sets, we found evidence against the view that natural kind terms are ambiguous.

ABSTRACT. Ambiguity is pervasive in natural language. Although often it makes sense to disambiguate, it seems that we also tolerate ambiguity and even exploit it for various communicative and non-purely communicative purposes. In this paper, we explore four types of ambiguity exploitation: puns, jokes and slogans; insinuation, strategic ambiguity, and dogwhistles and internal communication. We argue that, in all these cases, speakers have multiple semantic intentions, i.e., they intend their words to mean two or more things at once. Hence, we argue that multipropositionalism is the semantic view that best explains ambiguity exploitation.

ABSTRACT. A new challenge for scientific realism has recently emerged: The empirical evidence relevant for our best scientific theories is so plentiful that an adequate assessment of this evidence seems entirely infeasible for laypersons like philosophers. I present several strategies how such assessment can be made more feasible. One strategy relies on the insight that we don’t have to examine the whole body of evidence, rather a suitable subset suffices. A second strategy relies on the claim that a rough assessment of the evidence can suffice, if the limited reliability of the assessment is counteracted by the diversity of the evidence.

ABSTRACT. If one believes that it is possible to identify the theoretical elements that are responsible for the success of a theory prospectively – namely, without the benefit of hindsight – and that the theoretical elements responsible for the success a theory are those that are preserved across theory-change (the selective realist’s main credo), then one should believe that we can know which elements of present theories will be retained in the future. I argue that a strong form of selective realism entails such a future-oriented consequence. I examine whether one can deny that consequence while remaining a selective realist.

ABSTRACT. I argue that gravitational forces are real, although fundamental physics seems to tell us they are not. This argument is part of a larger case for a position called ‘effective realism’, which is supposed to apply to all non-fundamental sciences insofar as they enjoy a certain kind of empirical success. Juha Saatsi has recently attacked this position, arguing that effective realism about Newtonian gravity is incompatible with the ontological lessons learnt from general relativity. I will show that this incompatibility can be dissolved by accurately analyzing the ontological status of inertial forces in different contexts.

ABSTRACT. Russell’s Early Philosophy might be understood not just as a residual Hegelianism but also as an attempt to offer a new version of Kantian transcendentalism. Russell initial plan was to develop a comprehensively Hegelian dialectic of the sciences, beginning with the most abstract and proceed to the more concrete, from mathematics to physics and physiology. But in the Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897) he already departs from the Hegelian dialectic and adopts a logical method of analysis based on a reinterpretation of Kant's transcendental project.

ABSTRACT. As the subtitle of his book "Our Knowledge of the External World" reveals, Russell considers the problem of the external world “As a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy”. His goal is to construct the physical world and its objects from sense-data on the basis of the laws of logic, and to dispense with inferring unobserved objects. As I will argue, Russell’s own discussion shows that an attempt to consistently dispense with inferring objects is ultimately untenable. In the field of ontology, there seems to be no way around inferences to the best explanation.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we revisit the debate between Bradley and Russell on the nature of relations, focusing especially on a series of papers published in Mind between 1910 and 1911. Bradley’s criticisms and Russell’s response to them as developed in these papers are crucial for understanding their views on the nature of relations, but have not been given much attention in the recent literature. The main argument of the paper is that at the core of the disagreement between Russell and Bradley was a fundamental difference concerning the methodology of metaphysics.

ABSTRACT. Philosophers of anti-colonialism have appropriated and developed a passage in Kant’s political philosophy. In this passage, Kant discusses “nomads” as they have come to be called in the literature and rejects the right of settlers to imposes the European state model on them. This paper argues for caution when appropriating the argument of this passage. Kant argues the nomad-settler interaction should be governed by contract. Drawing on the work of by Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, this paper argues the role of contract in the historical process of settler colonialism needs to be factored into any anti-colonial philosophy.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that McGowan’s (2019) account of ordinary hate speech as the enactment of oppressive norms in social interactions does not fully meet the general challenge of showing how an ordinary speaker can have the power to alter norms for others in a non-cooperative social setting. For this reason, an extension of the model is proposed, where the enacting of oppressive norms is intended as a form of normalization, brought about by: (i) the hate speaker’s implicitly conveying of empirical and normative expectations regarding harmful behaviour in a social interaction and (ii) the bystanders’ accommodating silence.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on the epistemic dimensions of Du Bois’ writings, I argue for the existence of a philosophical colour line at the boundary of the discipline that marginalises the insights of non-European philosophical traditions. This is epitomised by the popular view that philosophy has Greek origins, which has roots in racist 18th century debates concerning the nature of philosophical activity. This view demonstrates how racist ideology and philosophy can become intertwined, thereby perpetuating, and sustaining, exclusionary narratives. Attempts to promote diversity in philosophy must therefore tackle this underlying ideology, or risk leaving a latent racism undiagnosed in the discipline.