ABSTRACT. The symposium aims to both sharpen and broaden the ongoing discussion on metaphysical indeterminacy by

1. Articulating new ways of characterizing the phenomenon that aim to obviate the limitations of some of the extant proposals (A. Torza); 2. Providing a better understanding of temporal indeterminacy (F. Cariani); 3. Offering a new angle on the issue of quantum indeterminacy (V. Allori); 4. Introducing new case studies, so as to broaden the abductive justification for theorizing about metaphysical indeterminacy (C. Calosi, L. Letertre & C. Mariani).

ABSTRACT. This symposium focuses on the meaning and aboutness of divine names and how they compare with other names, such as proper, empty, fictional, or mythological names. Divine names pose a special problem because there is an open question between believers and atheists about whether their referent(s) exist or not, and among believers of different religions, whether the different divine names they use refer to the same being(s) or not. The question then is whether there can be a unified semantics of all divine names. If so, what is the right semantics of such expressions?

ABSTRACT. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science seeks to offer explanations of cognitive phenomena from a situated and non-representationalist standpoint. However, as Heras-Escribano and De Pinedo have remarked (2018), most of the research keeps working on a shared assumption with representationalism: a factualist conception of psychological concepts and explanations, based on a descriptivist view on language. Our goal is to show how a non-factualist framework can offer a better explanatory basis for 4E Cognition, through the notions of affordance and intention.

ABSTRACT. At first glance, enactivism seems to face a harder task than other brands of situated cognition when discussing abstract objects like numbers. While some have argued that the notion of affordance can help enactivists here (e.g. Jones, Hutto & Myin 2021; Hutto 2019), I argue that varieties of enactivism — especially the ‘radical’ kind — are ill-equipped to explain key developmental data and research methods used in the study of numerical cognition. I pose a challenge to enactivists based on developmental data (e.g. Carey 2009) and the role played by the violation-of-expectation method in acquiring these.

ABSTRACT. I am interested in exploring the significance of touch in the formation of the self. I will take, for this project, the premise that the formation of human-type consciousness requires the faculty of touch, which in turn, is central for the development of even simple feelings such as the feeling of being cold, to the most complex feelings of compassion and empathy through the sense of kinship. The paradigmatic self, then, is, I will argue, an embodied self. One of the focal points of the current project is the exploration of peripersonal space is central for the sense of self.

ABSTRACT. The proof that the rule of distribution fails in quantum mechanics is neither rule-circular, nor unsound. Thus, albeit not necessary, it is nevertheless possible for the classical logician to rationally accept quantum logic.

ABSTRACT. I argue that absolute generality is incompatible with a broad class of revision theories of definitions which are anti-instrumentalist about their preferred revision-theoretic semantics. I first argue the point for the revision theory defended in Gupta (2018), S, applied to the first-order language of ZFC. Working in a higher-order setting which accommodates unrestricted quantifiers, I show that there are definitions in the signature of the language of ZFC that, in higher-order S, trivialize truth on unrestricted interpretations that interpret set-membership as intended. Finally, I argue that alternatives to higher-order S either have parallel problems or are otherwise unsatisfactory.

ABSTRACT. Relevance logic is weaker than classical logic but some systems of relevance logic (e.g., LP, R) include all tautologies of classical logic. This article examines conditions for models for relevance logic to validate classical tautologies and formulates the minimal system that includes them all. The condition for validating all classical tautologies relates to a generalization of the law of excluded middle but does not require validation of the double negation rule. Thus the minimal system is weaker than LP. The article also formulates conditions for validating all substitution instances of classical tautologies for languages with non-classical connectives (e.g., \rightarrow).

ABSTRACT. Epstein (2015, 2019a, 2019b) presents a powerful argument for the introduction of a novel relation of metaphysical determination he calls “anchoring” and, correlatively, against identifying anchoring with metaphysical grounding. In this paper, I provide a novel diagnosis of where the argument goes wrong. Contrary to extant responses, I argue that anchoring may be a form of grounding even if all the argument’s premises are true. What Epstein’s argument does provide, however, is a compelling reason for thinking that social rules play no role in the metaphysical explanation of particular social facts.

ABSTRACT. Metaphysical grounding is commonly taken to be fundamentality inducing, such that if x grounds y, then (necessarily) x is more fundamental than y. Some say that grounding is a kind of ontological dependence. This squares with the standard view that ontological dependence is fundamentality inducing as well. We argue that not all forms of ontological dependence are fundamentality inducing. In particular, we argue that Finean essential dependence (x depends on y iff y figures in the essence of x) fails to be fundamentality inducing. This result has some interesting consequences for the relation between essence, grounding, dependence, and fundamentality.

ABSTRACT. Can x ground y, yet also essentially depend on y? This is an important question in general, that has a major impact on how we conceive of the metaphysical structure of the world. But it is particularly important in the case of Dispositional Essentialism (‘DE’), the view that the natural modalities find their sources in essentially dispositional properties. Recently, several philosophers have argued that there cannot be such patterns of dependence and ground, and that DE is therefore incoherent (Coates 2020; Jaag 2014; Kimpton-Nye 2021; Tugby 2022). In this talk, I defend DE against this Argument from Essential Dependence.

ABSTRACT. Intuitively conscious states are not physical states, and therefore physicalists need to explain why we have this intuition, even though it is false. It is natural to assume that the intuition of dualism arises because of special features of phenomenal concepts – in particular, because phenomenal concepts are somehow constituted by the experiences they refer to. I argue that if we adopt a certain weak understanding of this constitution, explaining the intuition of dualism is not possible. On the other hand, if we adopt a stronger understanding, the intuition of dualism is hardly an illusion.

ABSTRACT. I offer an argument for why constitutive panpsychists ought to endorse powerful qualities and reject quidditism. Given that, on quidditism, the causal-dispositional profile of properties is contingent, we lack a principled way to account for why microphenomenal properties combine to yield discrete macroexperiences with discrete boundaries.I argue that a powerful qualities metaphysic can provide us with the resources to understand composition as restricted by the manifestations at which the powerful qualities of microobjects are directed. The boundaries of macroexperiences will be provided by the structure imposed on systems of microbjects by their properties qua powerful qualities.

ABSTRACT. I argue that recent arguments designed to give more credibility to dualism with mental causation at the expense of epiphenomenalism are invalid and that the former should not be treated as a default option for dualists. I show that Bradford Saad’s causal argument for dualism gives equal support to strong physicalism, which significantly decreases the argument’s attractiveness. I also consider the same author’s new exclusion problem for epiphenomenalism and demonstrate why it should be weakened to the point that it is no longer a problem. The conclusion is that epiphenomenalism is still no less credible than causal dualism.

ABSTRACT. Some intellectual virtues have practical counterparts, while others do not. Examples of the former include intellectual humility and intellectual courage, examples of the latter include open-mindedness and curiosity. Accounts of individual intellectual virtues that have a practical counterpart are subject to the similarity condition: they must allow for a sufficiently structurally analogous account of the practical virtue that is the counterpart. This condition is not met by three recent accounts of individual intellectual virtues. The reason is the particular way in which these accounts build in reference to epistemic values.

ABSTRACT. The gatecrasher paradox results from conflicting intuitions concerning different types of fallible evidence in a court of law. This paper defends a solution to the gatecrasher paradox, building on a sensitivity account of checking and settling a question. The proposed sensitivity account of legal proof not only requires sensitivity simpliciter but sensitivity of each relevant step of the proof procedure and/or sensitivity concerning all relevant alternatives. This account avoids problems that have been identified for other sensitivity views of legal proof. Moreover, it is argued that sensitivity, rather than safety, is the crucial modal condition for legal proof.

ABSTRACT. This paper identifies the bootstrapping problem for epistemological disjunctivism (ED). ED claims that factive perceptual experience bootstraps the process of justification and vindicates itself as an indefeasible subject’s reason. My general claim is that, pace ED, merely having factive experience is not sufficient for having it as an indefeasible subjective reason due to the subjective indistinguishability of good and bad cases. I analyse three variants of a response to the bootstrapping for ED problem currently available in the literature proposed by John McDowell, Duncan and Heather Logue.

ABSTRACT. My aim is to present a dilemma for Quine and Quinean metaontology. I show that Quine distinguishes between a theory's ontology and ontological commitments - suggesting that interpreters get this wrong. A theory's ontological commitments are what the theory says there is, whereas a theory's ontology is its range of variables. I argue that this gives rise to the following dilemma: either a theory's ontological commitments are irrelevant to its ontology or a theory's ontological commitments are relative to its ontology. As Quine's criterion of ontological commitment is widely accepted, this problem carries over to Quinean metaontology more generally.

ABSTRACT. Abstract objects like properties and propositions, I believe, are the result of reification, which can intuitively be characterized as the metaphysical counterpart of nominalization (like the shift from ‘is a horse’ to ‘the property of being a horse’), and occurs paradigmatically in the well-known bridge laws for instantiation, truth, etc. In my talk I explicate reification as higher-order construction, and thus combine two recent approaches that can both be seen as alternatives to classical platonism: constructionism and higher-order metaphysics. Thus we may move beyond either, and in addition find a way to reconcile platonism with its opponents.

ABSTRACT. The Quinean orthodox regiments our ontological commitment in terms of existential quantification. Fine (2009) recently objects that the approach is mistaken and that the proper formalisation should be in terms of universal quantification with a predicate for existence (or, for “being real”), in order to account for an implication between our thoughts of ontology. In this paper, I argue that Fine’s approach nevertheless fails to capture another implication in our ontological thinking. I propose an alternative approach by appealing to the resources of generics. I argue that my approach can accommodate both of the implications discussed.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I rely on Spinozian Ethics to argue for what I call Virtue Constitutivism. Bearing in mind that Moral Constitutivism is the view that the content of our moral and practical judgments comes from some constitutive feature of agency, Virtue Constitutivism holds that such a feature is a combination of a constitutive aim and a constitutive principle. Such a combination results in the idea that promoting virtue, as the idea that keeping acting is an end in itself, constitutes agency and the normative substance of our moral concepts.

ABSTRACT. Taking into account the recent uptake of Artificial Intelligence solutions in football coaching, my presentation will have two main normative claims. Drawing from a broad virtue ethics framework, I will show why job displacement of human football coaches is highly unlikely since robo-coaches endowed with AI lack some of the necessary core coaching skills and abilities (administrative leadership and psychological insight, alongside accountability). Secondly, I will provide an argument in favor of the idea that, far from being a threat, human - AI cooperation could actually enhance the prerequisites for meaningful work in football coaching.

ABSTRACT. The application of AI in Medicine (AIM) is producing health practices more reliable, accurate & efficient than traditional Medicine by assisting partly/totality the medical decision-making. Nevertheless, the nature of this technology will create a “trust gap” in the relationship between patients and medical experts: that nature will become doubtful and ambiguous.

The goal of this talk will be to analyze the main arguments in favour and against the use of “AI Medicine”, focusing on three ways of offering an answer to the problems raised by the use of “black-box” artificial systems.

ABSTRACT. Since at least McCawley´s remarks in McCawley 1981, the semantic equivalence between if A then B and A only if B (indicative) conditionals advertised by the typical logical textbook has been put into question. Interestingly, the meaning shifts displayed in “if”/”only if” pairs can also be found within the realm of “if” conditionals alone. In this paper, I will argue that the whole of these meaning shifts are truth-conditionally relevant, pace sceptics like Bennett, Williamson and others, and that they are nicely accounted for by a general Stalnakerian approach to indicative conditionals.

ABSTRACT. We define a formal model for evaluating probabilities of conditionals in terms of Markov chains. It is a useful method not only in the cases known from the literature, but can cover also more complex situations. In particular, it allows us to describe diverse interpretations of the conditional and to formalize some intuitively valid but formally incorrect considerations concerning the probabilities of conditionals. The formal model provides a satisfactory answer to Lewis triviality arguments, and defends important intuitions which connect the notion of probability of a conditional with the standard notion of conditional probability.

ABSTRACT. Many philosophers of language advocate an approach to the semantics of modal connectives that evaluates all sentences as acceptable or not relative to a set of possible worlds. The modal sentence “Vivian might be in Vienna” is acceptable if and only if there is a world in the set in which Vivian is in Vienna. The pertinent set of worlds is commonly modeled as the information state of the speaker. An alternative is to model it as a set of objectively relevant possibilities. I explain what an objectively relevant possibility is and argue that this approach better explicates modal discourse.

ABSTRACT. Aesthetic considerations played a substantial role in the development and acceptance of plate tectonics, the highly successful, unifying theory of the earth sciences. Many of the key scientists involved in its development showed a clear preference for explanations that are simple, elegant, and unifying, and such broadly aesthetic considerations acted as important restrictions on potential explanations and guided the theoretical development. Far from disrupting research or acting merely as a tiebreaker between empirically equivalent hypotheses, aesthetic satisfaction acted as an important and useful restriction on theory development, showing that aesthetic considerations have an important part to play in scientific research.

ABSTRACT. The democratisation of science has always generated debate. Critics have raised objections related to the excessive idealistic burden of the models and the possible stagnation of research that would result from the application of such proposals. This paper presents an alternative based on the functions of "Boundary organizations". It will be shown that 1) through these institutions the democratisation project finds a non-idealistic way to materialise and 2) that such organisations allow the participation of science in social debates without implying a change in the conventional logic of scientific research.

ABSTRACT. This paper will analyze the relation and necessity between naturalism and realism thesis defended in “The advancement of science” (1993), book in which Kitcher presents his theory of science. We will focus on whether naturalism and realism go hand by hand in the book and whether they actually need one another. In the second part of the paper we will compare the naturalistic features of the “advancement” with what Kitcher calls pragmatic naturalism, present in posterior works such as “Science in a democratic society” (2011), and stated in his own paper “Pragmatic Naturalism” (2013).

ABSTRACT. In response to a doubt Russell raised concerning §6 of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes in a letter of 1919, "You are quite right.... But this doesn't matter! I suppose you don't understand the notation of 'ξ'. It does not mean 'for all values of ξ'...". These lines have engendered puzzlement and misunderstanding among commentators concerning both the involvement of truth-functionality in general propositions and the meaning of the barred variable. I seek to explain the lines and reconcile them with the text of the Tractatus, along the way arguing against some of the contrary commentary.

ABSTRACT. I argue that Wittgenstein was both a non-reductionist and a non-quietist about meaning. Both reductionist and quietist commentators fail to distinguish between two ways in which Wittgenstein employs 'use'. 'Use' sometimes refers to the non-semantically characterized use of signs, inviting a reductionist interpretation, and sometimes refers to the semantically characterized use of signs, inviting a quietist interpretation. In my view, Wittgenstein believes that, though we cannot describe the uses of words that constitute their meaning without employing the idea of meaning, we can give necessary conditions for words being meaningful, which are suggested by Wittgenstein’s remarks about non-semantically characterized use.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the talk is to sketch a view explaining what is the mechanism behind the ‘understanding’ of the nonsensical Tractarian sentences (TLP: 6.54) and how their ‘understanding’ differs from the understanding of meaningful sentences of other philosophical and scientific works. I take up Diamond’s proposal (2000) that the understanding of nonsense requires a kind of imaginative activity of taking of nonsense for sense and I reinterpret her view in terms of the pretense theory. Futhermore, I indicate why this approach is superior to some other proposals (McManus 2014, White 2011).

ABSTRACT. Why should we avoid any contact with uncontacted indigenous peoples, even if our intervention could safeguard basic human needs in a way otherwise widely held to trigger duties of aid? I argue that several prima facie plausible responses fail to justify non-intervention. Consequently, it seems that this little-explored and seemingly marginal policy problem raises an all but trivial dilemma for theorists of global justice: Either we must revise the widely heeded policy of non-intervention – or we must attribute intrinsic value to a communal way of life worthy of protection independently of the well-being of those engaged in it.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a framework of accounting for option value in climate policy, and in other areas of policy that impact what valuable things are left for future generations. It argues that the value of delaying the loss of potentially valuable things is likely to be systematically undercounted because some sources of future value are neglected. We should protect a wide range of things that could be valuable across diverse scales of valuation in order to avoid the loss of this kind of value.

ABSTRACT. I argue that the value of self-determination, which plays a central role in justifying territorial rights according to most theories, should be reconceptualized in eco-political terms. In particular, a people’s right to self-determination should be understood as normatively bound up with a duty to ecologically sustain its own territory and a right to its territory’s ecological integrity. The duty of ecological sustainability serves as an internal constraint on a people’s right to self-determination whereas the right to ecological integrity corresponds with the external dimension of self-determination—a people’s right to be free from illegitimate outside interference.

ABSTRACT. “Correlation does not prove causation” we are told, and this is true enough. Even so, causes and correlations are closely related, and much scientific research relies on this. A wide range of “causal inference” techniques—including Bayesian networks, potential outcomes, and instrumental variables—allow causal structures to be inferred from observed correlations. This symposium will explore the metaphysical underpinning of these techniques. What in the nature of causation leads causal structures to display themselves in distinctive correlational signatures?

ABSTRACT. The idea that in order to desire something, or to do something intentionally, we need to think there is something good about it, or some reason in favour of it, aka the guise of the good, is at the centre of lively debates cutting across philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of normativity in general (both practical and theoretical). It can be argued that the guise of the good follows from minimal assumptions about what it means to be an agent who acts for reasons. But this argument has come under serious attack—why should the reasons for which one acts always be taken as good ones by the agent? Moreover, a lot of the debate has focused on how to interpret apparent counterexamples to the guise of the good. In both cases there is a danger of parties to the debate just declaring each other’s arguments question-begging. In our symposium we aim to develop a better rounded picture of the guise of the good in terms of its attractions, its alternative formulations, its role in both our practical (including social) and epistemic lives, as well as in our own account of ourselves. We carry out this positive program by introducing new arguments (Orsi), presenting different options regarding what it means to “think as good” (Hlobil, Keeling, Orsi), analysing how the mental action of thinking as good relates to the basing relation (Keeling), and exploring the role played by the guise of the good in one’s own self-understanding (Tooming): 

Lovers of the Good, Trackers of the Best (Francesco Orsi) 

Believing One's Reasons to Be Good is Not Enough (Ulf Hlobil) 

Reasoning, Mental Action, and the Basing Relation (Sophie Keeling) 

The Guise of the Good in the Story of One’s Life (Uku Tooming) 

ABSTRACT. Classic definitions of mental imagery and motor imagery are unable to keep the phenomena separate according to two arguments: one from scepticism about kinaesthetic sensations, the other from the existence of unconscious imagery. I show that, although a functional definition of motor imagery allows us to keep the phenomena separate, adopting it results in a far poorer characterisation of the content of motor imagery. Under this new characterisation, decades of research into mental practice/training in sports psychology need to be reinterpreted, given the brute, subjective epistemic limitation the argument for the functional definition implies.

ABSTRACT. Parosmia is an olfactory dysfunction that causes altered and typically disgusting olfactory experiences in response to smelling familiar things (e.g. coffee smells burnt and dirty, wine like sewage). These experiences are difficult to accommodate within existing theories of olfaction. I argue that parosmia teaches us a surprising lesson about the objects of olfactory experience: we need to reject the orthodox view that we smell only odours, and not their sources. I conclude the paper by outlining two alternative accounts of parosmic experience that will appeal to different theories of perception.

ABSTRACT. This paper applies insights from our leading philosophical theories of free will and the phenomenology of the passage of time to the data on dementia and well-being.  There are four main parts to our analysis of the perception of the passage of time and free will to well-being.  First, we begin by introducing recent research that identifies trends in distortions of time perception found in those with dementia.  Second, we delve into the conscious processing of the passage of time within the human mind and suggest that, in line with the B-theoretic, block universe, the passage of time is purely a phenomenon of the human mind rather than part of the objective reality of our world.  Third, we propose that there is an important relationship between our perception of temporal passage, free will, and well-being that is highlighted by the experience of those with dementia.  Finally, we conclude that, as shown by the available research with individuals who are living with dementia, the human sense of well-being has a strong basis in both our perception of time and our sense of our own free will.  

ABSTRACT. Turing machines operate on strings. Turing computation over any other domain therefore requires a notation system for the domain. Ever since Montague's observation that different notation systems in general yield different notions of Turing computability, the task of distinguishing those notation systems that are admissible for computation from those that are not continues to be a much debated and open problem in the philosophy of computation. In this talk, I will introduce a generalized version of Montague's problem. I will then formulate and defend a solution to this problem. Finally, I will draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of computation.

ABSTRACT. A solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem is proposed. It is argued that the “Halfers” are correct about the outcome of the coin toss, but the “Thirders” are correct about the moment of Sleeping Beauty’s awakening. This apparently inconsistent solution is shown to be consistent and to be bolstered by the consequence that it maximizes one’s probability of guessing the truth, which is the very essence of a “best guess”.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I argue that there are two approaches to the access problem – the Head On Approach and the Tweaking the Question Approach. The two approaches are characterised by different views on what counts as an adequate epistemological account. A consequence of this is miscommunication between the two camps, as the epistemological story of each approach violates implicit demands and premises for what counts as adequate for the other. This paper demonstrates how the two approaches deal with the epistemological challenge, and shows that the Tweaking the Question Approach is superior to the Head On Approach.

ABSTRACT. Regarding moral evaluation in architecture, analytical philosophers focus on the architectural object and argue whether a moral flaw is an aesthetic flaw. We claim that moral evaluation in architecture is the result of the architectural experience and an action-response process. Sometimes morality in architecture is not fixed in the work, we cannot just contemplate it or understand it if we don’t experience the building in a different way, a participatory and interactive way. We experience as immoral the buildings which don’t encourage our responsiveness, which don’t invite us to a participatory relation, but on the contrary, establish an ‘alienating relation’.

ABSTRACT. The puzzle of imaginative resistance (IR) is concerned with the phenomenon that imaginers experience a constraint in taking part in an imaginative activity. Take, for example, Walton's well-discussed example: “In killing her baby, Giselda did a right thing; after all, it was a girl” (Walton 1994, 37). In the debate about IR, imagination is attributed a key role, causing other cognitive and emotional processes to take a back seat. The aim of my talk will be to argue that a specific kind of IR can best be explained in terms of empathic resistance.

ABSTRACT. I will address an overlooked issue in aesthetics: What is the impact of an artist’s moral ill repute on how we understand the meaning of their work? I’ll argue that it can lead (i) to participatory resistance to an art work, as viewers abstain from a response to the work’s illocutionary force, (ii) to the isolation of the work from the ‘quality context’ that normally allows the work to be taken as true or false, (iii) to the reinterpretation of the work, and (iv) to the perception of the work as a lie. I’ll focus on affairs in contemporary art.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to develop a multi-component model of empathy that is applicable to humans and other species. This is done by developing five core dimensions of empathy, namely (1) sensitivity for bodily and affective states of others, (2) perceiving others as individuals in a situation, (3) cognitive perspective taking, (4) other-oriented response, that (5) flexibly relates to (1)-(3). These can be assessed by empirically testing for specific features of each domain. A flexible framework like the here proposed multi-component model allows for both, the characterization of concrete example phenomena as well as comparability across species.

ABSTRACT. Previously, philosophical studies on extended cognition have focused exclusively on humans. Here, we will argue that it is possible to talk about extended cognition in non-human animals too. Thus, we will discuss a number of paradigmatic human cognitive extensions showing that such extensions can be found amongst non-human animals. So, if human cognition is extended, then non-human cognition is extended too. This gives us a strong reason to revisit the anthropocentric bias that has characterized the debate over (extended) cognition

ABSTRACT. Two types of theories of motivating reasons dominate the action-theoretic debate. While psychologistic accounts identify motivating reasons with belief-desire pairs, content theorists argue that motivating reasons are just the representations that make up their content. While the former group typically subscribes to event-causal theories of action, the latter explicitly rejects this Standard Story. I argue, however, that we have good reason to be content theorists concerning motivating reasons while retaining a roughly Davidsonian theory of action. This seemingly innocuous move then allows us to more robustly theorize non-human animal action along Davidsonian lines than is currently done in the literature.

ABSTRACT. Pragmatic arguments against skepticism treat skepticism as a decision to believe nothing and argue that it is a bad one. These have a long history in philosophy. But previous versions of these arguments have overlooked how the decision against skepticism is affected by our possible future preferences, which pragmatic arguments must see as radically unbounded. In order to show that skepticism is irrational, we need an account of how to choose in light of known current and unbounded possible future preferences. I canvas a range of possibilities and show how they affect the rationality of skepticism in surprising ways.

ABSTRACT. Doubt-mongers selectively raise doubts to undermine beliefs. As I see it, doubt-mongers, just like the philosophical sceptic, try to raise the epistemic standards by making salient error possibilities that we cannot rule out. Is their attempt appropriate? Should we take seriously every salient error possibility? A first line of answer targets the motivation underlying their doubts. If the doubt-monger is motivated by non-epistemic reasons, his doubt ought to be ignored. I will first discuss the limits of this view and second suggest an alternative reply, highlighting the mistakes of doubt-mongering. Doubt-mongers underestimate how farfetched some error possibilities are.

ABSTRACT. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, transcendental arguments (TAs) became ubiquitous in philosophy. Their logical form is as follows.

(Factual Premise) p. (Transcendental Premise) p is possible only if q. (Weak or Strong Conclusion) q or it is necessary that q.

The distinctiveness of TAs (closely related to modus ponens) consists in the Transcendental Premise (TP). In my paper I intend to: (1) discuss four ways of formalizing TP, (2) show that TP can be fruitfully understood as a strict conditional, (3) provide semantics for TP, and (4) argue for both the logical and historical adequacy of this model.

ABSTRACT. Animalism is the view that each of us is essentially a human organism. The most pressing problem for animalism is that of explaining the apparent asymmetry that takes place in cases of dicephalic conjoined twinning, where there seem to be two of us, but a single organism. In this paper, I reject the two main solutions that animalists have developed to deal with this problem and I offer a new solution, the psychological disunity view, according to which in conjoined twinning cases there is a single human person (i.e., just one of us) with two minds (or psychological centers).

ABSTRACT. Animalism faces a significant challenge from cerebrum transplant thought experiments, which seem to support the intuition that we have psychological persistence conditions. In this paper, I suggest that animalists should adopt sentience animalism, which claims that we are animals and have biological persistence conditions, but that a minimal form of sentience is necessary for the homeostatic regulation of the life processes of human animals, and therefore, for our persistence. This minimal sentience, instantiated primarily in the brainstem, grounds all forms of subjective experience. Sentience animalism can therefore reconcile biological persistence conditions with a minimal form of psychological continuity.

ABSTRACT. Libertarian free will, requiring that one could have wanted and, accordingly, acted differently from how one actually did, has a hard time in contemporary analytic metaphysics given its incompatibility with universal determinism. This paper demystifies libertarian free will by advancing a functionalist perspective within a bio-processual framework. Grounded in the processual organisation of bio-agents, ‘natural freedom’ is a measure of the agential autonomy of bio-agents and serves the main function of ensuring behavioural flexibility. The paper clarifies the notion of function used by the functionalist approach and shows how the functionalist approach to free will entails the truth of indeterminism.

ABSTRACT. In philosophy (and many similar academic disciplines), our prevailing journal practices are exploitative and unjust. I argue that this is the case, and that this provides each of us with a defeasible duty to resist the morally pernicious practices, and support If we fail to do so, we are complicit in the current corrupt system. I consider several ways that academics at varying levels may discharge this duty, what our desired outcomes are when we partake in such initiatives, and the limitations of proposals I describe.

ABSTRACT. This paper challenges the common understanding of polyamory, which is based on romantic love in a narrow sense, i.e., including sex and excluding friendship. Rejecting the thesis that romantic love is inconceivable without sex leads us to the claim that romantic love is constituted by other goods. However, these goods can also be realized in friendships. We conclude that romantic love and friendship love hardly differ in a normatively relevant sense. Ultimately, polyamory can only be based on romantic love in a broad sense, which makes the concept more inclusive and provides space for friendships and non-sexual romantic relationships.

ABSTRACT. A prominent position in climate ethics holds that there is a significant connection between procreation and increased carbon emissions, and that this connection supports an ethical argument for an obligation to have fewer children. Against this “proclimate antinatalism”, we argue that this connection is weaker than assumed, and that due to its malleability, the connection cuts the other way: Rather than supporting a obligation to have fewer children, it supports a collective obligation to move society to net zero carbon emissions, so that procreation becomes carbon neutral and hence morally permissible.

ABSTRACT. I argue that pragmatic enrichment, i.e., in language, the contextual modulation of the truth-conditional meaning of the utterance, is a widespread phenomenon in the pragmatics of maps, which is therefore contextualist in nature. This goes against previously held assumptions in philosophy that a semantic treatment of maps is sufficient to account for how these representations express propositions. In particular, I analyze two types of cartographic pragmatic enrichment, i.e., pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening, which pertain to the two main components of the semantics of maps, i.e., the attribution of properties through symbols and geometric structure.

ABSTRACT. There is an orthodoxy in formal semantics, which is to treat bare plural as covertly quantificational. On this account, generics have a tripartite structure, along with some kind of ‘quasi-universal’ quantificational force. The only alternative which has drawn serious attention is the kind-predication account, on which generics have the simple form of the predication of the name of a kind. In this paper, I propose an alternative regimentation of bare plural generics, which takes their surface form at face value and analyses them in terms of plural predication, on analogy with plural definite descriptions.

ABSTRACT. What is the relationship between syntax and logic? Is the former autonomous and independent of the latter? If it is not, what kind of logic syntax interfaces with? In the generative tradition, logic cannot provide a model for linguistic behaviour. Conversely, according to the logicality of language hypothesis logical considerations are relevant to syntactic formation and explain the ungrammaticality of certain constructions. The talk intends to offer a brief overview of the logicality of language hypothesis and to propose new evidence indicating that accepting the said hypothesis does not necessarily require assuming a “natural” (i.e. purely linguistic) logic.

ABSTRACT. In recent years, philosophers have debated whether conspiracy theories are indeed theories or merely (systems of) beliefs (Dentith 2019, Deutz 2022, Napolitano 2021). In this talk, we present a corpus-linguistic study that aims to identify markers of scientific theories that will allow us delineate real theories from theories in name only. Our results show that conspiracy theories do not have the same epistemic and scientific standing as theories. Instead, they are promoted and spread like falsehoods and misinformation. In short, conspiracy theories are not theories.

ABSTRACT. Computational modelling and simulations are often compared with experiments. It has been argued that these methods should be distinguished from experiments, that they are theoretical or that they require new epistemology. Many of these position are based on the intuition that as these methods rely on computation which can be reconstructed as series of deductive steps, the results they produce are conclusions of deductive arguments. Through a model-theoretical reconstruction of in silico experiments, I will demonstrate that the deductivist framework is not entirely adequate to capture their epistemology. Consequently, deduction is not an adequate criterion demarcating simulations from experiments.

ABSTRACT. Difference-making is commonly understood in terms of counterfactual conditionals. If the cause had not occurred, the effect would not have occurred either. In this paper, we devise an indicative variant of difference-making. We show that the resulting analysis of causation agrees with our causal judgements to a larger extent than any counterfactual account to date.

ABSTRACT. According to the received view, logical empiricist physicalists (Carnap, Neurath, Hempel) did not contribute to later-day metaphysical physicalism about the mind. Their views are interpreted as mental anti-realist or eliminativist, and their contribution to physicalism as consisting only of a simplistic logical behaviorist view. I contend that this view is defective. I focus on Carnap’s accounts of belief and argue that (1) Carnap was a realist about belief, (2) he never advocated logical behaviorism or dispositionalism, and (3) he held that belief terms were theoretical terms that might refer to neural states, already in the mid-1950s, predating reductionist materialist suggestions.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I argue that Bas van Fraassen’s voluntarist reading of logical empiricism should play a central role in our understanding of the historical trajectory of the movement and its institutional failure. I claim that a voluntarist perspective on philosophy was the central motivating factor for Carnap and Reichenbach’s shared agenda in the 1930s and 1940s. I also show that this agenda failed from the 1950s onward in the USA, because Reichenbach and Carnap did not clearly develop their voluntarist meta-philosophy and failed to communicate its aims to their followers in the budding intellectual field of philosophy of science.

ABSTRACT. In the late 1930s, a relatively young Filipino philosopher by the name of Ricardo R. Pascual pursued a PhD at the University of Chicago. During this time, two prominent analytic philosophers were at the same institution, viz. Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap. The interactions between these three philosophers paved the way for the birth of the analytic tradition in Pascual’s home country, the Philippines. In this paper, I retrace Pascual’s development as an analytic philosopher and show how his interactions with Russell and Carnap served as a catalyst in the development of analytic philosophy in the Philippines.

ABSTRACT. Philosophers of group agency argue that corporations are agents capable of a will and therefore the appropriate target of our responsibility ascriptions. Economist and legal scholars on the other hand view groups as tools that have an institutional function, such as shareholder value maximization and are thereby restricted in the aims they may adopt.

In this talk I propose a novel theory of group agency that is inspired by Constitutivist theories of agency aiming to ground the normatively of reason in what is essential about agency. This account allows us to make both faces of the corporation transparent.

ABSTRACT. Transgenerational social actions shape the normative relationship between present and future subjects. I suggest framing them as long-term joint commitments, with the caveat that future generations can only participate once they are concrete groups. Until then, they are abstract artifacts and cannot be members. And yet, current generations have a moral duty to care for them at this stage as well. By jointly committing to this in the present, three desiderata are met: transgenerational normativity finds grounds outside of morality, the responsibility is elevated to the collective level, and future generations can be represented without resorting to paternalism.

ABSTRACT. Pettit (2023) has recently brought forward a genealogical account of the state. He says his account has nothing normative but is simply functional. To illustrate this, he presupposes that the state and the polity are the same. I disagree with this claim. In this paper, by employing desiderata for the state to be the polity (Collins and Lawford-Smith), I argue that only one type of state can be the polity, which I call ‘the Rawlsian people’. Based on the Rawlsian people, I also show why the state is normatively organised as opposed to what Pettit’s account suggests.

ABSTRACT. Aristotle famously claimed that the only coherent form of infinity is potential, not actual. However many objects there are, it is possible for there to be yet more; but it is impossible for there in fact to be infinitely many objects. Although this view was superseded by Cantor’s transfinite set theory, even Cantor regarded the collection of all sets as “unfinished” or incapable of “being together”. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in potentialist approaches to the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. This talk provides a survey of such approaches, covering both technical results and associated philosophical views.

ABSTRACT. Conscious mental states have several puzzling features. One is their phenomenal unity (PU) – viz., their being experienced together. Several theories have been proposed to explain PU at the personal level, none of which has settled the debate. A largely unexplored account appeals to the phenomenal character of conscious states. This talk aims to examine the prospects for such an account. I argue that, when so-called for-me-ness (the conscious states’ property of being given to their subject) is incorporated into the structure of phenomenal character, the account at issue looks very promising, as it avoids the shortcomings of extant theories.

ABSTRACT. Tracking representationalism holds that phenomenal character is identical to what conscious experience tracks. However, it encounters several objections, all due to the externalist commitments that come with endorsing the tracking theory. I suggest that representationalists should adopt an internalist account of mental representation, such as the structuralist approach found in recent neuroscientific theorizing. On this view, mental states represent in virtue of structural similarity, just as cartographic maps represent by preserving structural features of what they correspond to. Accordingly, I claim that phenomenal character can be explained in terms of an experience’s representational content, which is based on structural similarity.

ABSTRACT. Greco (2014) and Kearl (2020) have defended fragmentalist accounts of epistemic akrasia: there is not one unique belief-formation system, and the possibility of epistemic akrasia rests on the possibility of conflict between the different systems. I’ll argue that both their versions fail, for their responses to pressing worries about the meta-epistemological theory that underlies them – epistemic expressivism – are unsatisfactory and no better alternative response seems to be available for them. I will then rescue fragmentalism by proposing a version that focuses, not on the linguistic/non-linguistic nature of the systems, but on the constraints under which beliefs are formed.

ABSTRACT. I argue that, while most standard cases of epistemic akrasia that are deemed permissible are in fact irrational, there’s a wide range of overlooked cases in which akrasia is likely rationally required. I call this overlooked phenomenon transient epistemic akrasia. It occurs when an agent’s reasoning is still in progress before a conclusion has been reached. By contrast, standardly discussed cases of epistemic akrasia are best interpreted as occurring at the concluding stage of a reasoning process. Yet, those states can only be rational if understood as states of transient akrasia, which occur before the agent has concluded their reasoning.

ABSTRACT. The following are plausible but inconsistent claims about inner speech:

1. Many instances of inner speech are true or false. For example, the sentence, ‘Snow is white’, produced in inner speech, is true.

2. Inner speech consists of auditory imagery: An instance of inner speech represents what a corresponding external utterance would sound like.

These cannot both be true. Images can represent more or less accurately but they cannot be true or false. I argue that inner speech consists of false auditory percepts, rather than images, and show how this avoids the problem.

ABSTRACT. The idea that inner speech is something we do, as opposed to a mere vehicle of thinking, is put forward by the activity view of inner speech. This view is congenial to the Vygotskyan approach to inner speech as a developmental outcome in a process of internalization of outer speech and can also appeal to speech production mechanisms to explain its existence. However, the very notion of ‘activity’ in place here remains underdeveloped. In this talk I respond to some problems that have been raised on the idea that inner speech is an action and I propose to regard inner speech as a kind of mental action embedded in an affordance framework.

ABSTRACT. Philosophical literature on testimony has generally focused on trust. However, I think understanding the rationality of distrust is crucial for our testimonial practices. My general aim is to show that bias-motivated distrust is irrational, and I will use Social Hinge Epistemology to do so. First, I argue that distrust based on negative identity bias can spread across other domains of interaction and jeopardize the basic trust which constitutes the testimonial practice itself. Secondly, I define bias as a defeater to testimonial justification which prevents agents from acquiring testimonial knowledge. Finally, I will argue that distrust is only rational when unmotivated.

ABSTRACT. Recently, epistemologists have turned their attention to core knowledge: The product of innate core cognition modules which encode constraints on how we interpret our experiential input. Zoe Jenkin argues that core knowledge is partially justified by these constraints because they serve as epistemic reasons. In this talk, I argue that these constraints can serve as reasons for our core knowledge because they are Wittgensteinian hinges, i.e. unjustified presuppositions that enable us to be epistemically active. First, this means that some hinges are innate and biologically anchored. Second, it means that core cognition plays a fundamental, constitutive epistemological role.

ABSTRACT. In the first book of the Politics, Aristotle claims that households and cities exist by nature (1252b1-ff). This claim is puzzling, for it implies that households and cities are the result of teleological causation, which is only proper of natural substances. In this paper, my aim is to advance an alternative reading of these claims based on what is known as Axiarchism (i.e. goodness of X explains why X is actual): the reason for the existence of both a complex arrangement of a set of parts and of their hierarchical relationship is that it is a good state of affairs.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to explore Aristotle’s view on the relation between human language and human ultra-sociality. I claim, that while Aristotle considers the sociality of several animal species to be natural (physei), he sees the sociality of the human species as being of greater extent (mallon) because it is achieved and maintained only in the process of cooperation by means of our language. Moreover, I suggest that to achieve a higher degree of our sociality, we must use such a public tool that does not merely follow the principles of obtaining the pleasant and avoiding the painful.

ABSTRACT. In this short talk I will focus on the initial argumentation in Judith J. Thomson’s seminal paper A defense of abortion. Thomson’s argumentation is based on the now classic Violinist example. I will consider one objection to Thomson’s argumentation that she herself considers, as well as her reply to that objection. I will argue that Thomson’s reply is not satisfactory. I will then offer two different alternative replies to the objection. Reply-2 will involve presenting the Hospital visitor example. This example can be used to fulfill Thomson’s aim, while crucially avoiding one undesirable feature of the Violinist example.

ABSTRACT. Philosophers tend to treat meaning in life as a type of value that we ought to seek and promote. In this paper I argue that finding an experience in our past meaningful need not be understood as attributing to it a distinct kind of value, but rather as a non-evaluative attachment to our narrative identity or to our place in a broader story about the world. This proposal fits with recent psychological research on experiences of meaning, and it explains how we can find meaning in past experiences of adversity, hardship, or loss.

ABSTRACT. Dogwhistling covertly encourages an audience to act on their ingroup favoritism. The literature on dogwhistling has recognized this, but it has not fully identified from whom the ingroup favoritism is hidden. The focus has been on how dogwhistling hides ingroup favoritism from outsiders. But my argument will be that dogwhistling also conceals favoritism from the very insiders who exhibit it. In other words, dogwhistling is used to deceive insiders about their own biased attitudes in addition to deceiving outsiders.

ABSTRACT. Dogwhistles are expressions that convey a hidden message to a subset of a general audience without the general audience being aware. Previous accounts of dogwhistles are either fully pragmatic or do not attend to the semantics of dogwhistles. This paper proposes the view that some dogwhistles are semantically ambiguous via conventionalization, carrying both their literal content and a secondary, dogwhistle content. Individuals who belong to groups that regularly use or encounter the dogwhistle will have it semantically registered. Others can understand the dogwhistle content pragmatically if given the relevant context. This view is then applied to other coded expressions.

ABSTRACT. Philosophers of science have variously tried to characterise how-possibly explanations (HPEs) and distinguish them from how-actually explanations (HAEs). However, they disagree over whether HPEs are independent from, or continuous with, HPEs. In the paper, I introduce a distinction between what I call elucidating and embedding HPEs. While elucidating HPEs specify a possible process accounting for a research target, embedding HPEs demonstrate how a research target fits into a relevant possibility space. Both elucidating and embedding HPEs play important roles, but distinct, roles in scientific practice. I argue that this distinction provides new insights into the debate over HPEs and HAEs.

ABSTRACT. Complexity management plausibly underlies the emergence of *structural representations*: long-lived representations usually conceived as mirroring a target structure.

I discuss two routes by which complexity management contributes to structural representations. First, *primitives*: a small vocabulary of operations, compositions of which can approximate arbitrary functions in a target domain. Second, *message passing*: off-loading part of the requisite computations to a graph of primitives, isomorphic in some relevant respect to the phenomenon the computations in question are about. Cognitive maps are plausibly dependent on message passing in this sense. The graph in question is a structural representation.

ABSTRACT. Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” and Kripke’s Naming and Necessity are two of the most influential works of 20th century analytic philosophy. The works have come to be closely associated due to their contributions to our understanding of natural kinds, the development of externalism about mental content, and a resurgence of interest in essentialism. Their association has encouraged conflation of the methods employed and conclusions proposed by these philosophers. This paper carefully examines textual evidence from these and other works in order to show that Kripke and Putnam are motivated by different issues and espouse different methods and conclusions.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this contribution is to show how the search for a semantics for modal logic was parallel to the search for a logic for indeterminism. I will argue that a letter from Kripke to Prior, in 1958, was a crucial point in this search and in the history of logic and analytic philosophy during the twentieth century. In that letter, there is the first presentation of a branching time matrix. Prior will develop it in other papers and, after Prior, branching time structures have been broadly used and studied.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to extend the discussion of silencing beyond the realm of explicit speech and to the domain of conversational silences – that is, silences that have communicative functions. I argue that, insofar as remaining silent can communicate things, we can also be prevented from communicating with silence. Alongside a three-fold taxonomy I show the different ways in which this can happen, utilising accounts from the silencing literature to illustrate the harm arising in these cases. These discussions not only uncover a so far underexplored domain of silencing, but also highlights just how deep linguistic injustices can run.

ABSTRACT. Miranda Fricker defined an ‘epistemic injustice’ (EI) as a “a wrong done to someone purely in their capacity as a knower”, a case in which a knowing subject is denied their rightful opportunity to make sense of or communicate their experiences of suffering. EIs can result from the agential and structural operations of power, or from gaps in our collective epistemic resources that could give expression to such experiences. This talk will demonstrate Jean-Francois Lyotard’s relevance for such a discussion, showing how (using a different vocabulary) Lyotard deals with the same problems of EI in The Differend.

ABSTRACT. Aristotle’s concern with essence and definition, as central to the subject-matter of metaphysics, is shared by contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers. For E. J. Lowe metaphysics is an a priori inquiry that is “perhaps most perspicuously characterized as the science of essence” (Lowe (2008), “Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence”, p. 34). Kit Fine holds that “the concept [of essence] may be used to characterize what the subject [of metaphysics], or at least part of it, is about” (Fine (1994), “Essence and Modality”, p. 1). But whether metaphysics, and metaphysics alone, can be tasked with the study of essence and by what methods this inquiry proceeds depends crucially on how the proposed non-modalist program of explaining metaphysical modality in terms of essence is carried out. This paper investigates a number of important questions which remain open in this area; how these questions are resolved crucially affects one’s conception of metaphysics as a discipline and its connection to the study of essence.

ABSTRACT. This paper offers an account of self-understanding as a type of “objectual understanding,” i.e., the kind of understanding one might have of a subject matter in virtue of grasping a certain body of information regarding this subject matter. In the case of self-understanding, the subject matter is oneself, and the relevant body of information contains information about one’s mental states, bodily sensations, behaviors, and life events. Moreover, I argue that the dimension of self-understanding crucial for our mental health and well-being is its flexibility, i.e., the ability to remodel one’s self-understanding upon acquiring new information.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to offer an account of imagination that makes it possible to explain how we mentally simulate future scenarios of transformative experiences (Paul 2014), that is, unprecedented experiences that alter our epistemic status and the core traits of the person that we are. When properly constructed from past experiences, imaginative episodes do not require more knowledge than we can have at the moment of the decision. On my account, imagination is constrained, creative, and skilled. If imagination succeeds in countenancing transformative experiences, then it fits well with broader frameworks of how we make decisions.

ABSTRACT. Some biases influence the behaviour of people, without the biased person becoming aware of this influence. Here I present one proposal for combatting these biases. Research suggests that, in the case of such unconscious biases, individuals can become aware of the bias' influence (Cooley, 2015). I argue that mindfulness practices, understood as a type of metacognitive skill (cf. Zawidski, 2018), may increase the likelihood of an individual achieving this awareness. Having outlined the proposal, I consider two drawbacks both stemming from the risk of confabulation (cf. Sullivan-Bisett, 2015).

ABSTRACT. Many philosophers have argued that epistemic trust is a genuinely interpersonal relationship, implying that it is a kind of category mistake to say that “trustworthy AI” should be created and that we can and should trust it once this has been achieved. I criticize this view, arguing that there are genuine forms of epistemic trust that can be placed in AI systems. However, I also defend the view – captured by the slogan “caveat usor” – that users should never blindly trust AI systems and that epistemic trust should always be accompanied by a sufficient degree of epistemic vigilance.

ABSTRACT. Dogmatism, understood as the resolution to disregard any future evidence contradicting a known proposition, is commonly regarded as an epistemic vice. The aim of this paper is to argue that, given the biased way in which we usually share and evaluate information, we are entitled to be dogmatists with those who have not achieved our trust. This entitlement, however, may be restricted by the agents' social positioning: rather than being dogmatic, privileged individuals should be worried that their position in the world has made them unlucky in relation to their beliefs about the structures in which they are privileged.

ABSTRACT. Retraction and trust are different phenomena, but they are closely connected. They have a common basis that explains why some of the most important theoretic and practical problems arising in either case can have similar solutions. It consists in the recognition of the existence of a meliorist attitude that seeks to adopt better perspectives. Such an analysis generates some circularities. Attempting to adopt better perspectives requires trust and, eventually, also retreat. We will argue that, against appearances, to assume those circularities can be fully acceptable.

ABSTRACT. Addiction amounts to the puzzle of knowing why some people continue using drugs despite the harmful effects it has on them. Two camps offer a solution to this puzzle: the brain disease and the choice models. As more studies point out that the hypotheses of a biological model are not accurate, a choice model seems to be a better candidate. But if addicts choose their actions, this implies that they are morally responsible for them, which provides justification for judgements of blameworthiness. To escape this undesirable consequence, I defend a responsibility-without-blame model, that implements the concept of the nurturing stance.

ABSTRACT. The compulsive "must" and the agentive "can" is seen as interdefinable. "Must" is standardly defined as “¬can¬”. One must Φ if and only if one cannot ¬Φ. Loets and Zakkou show that this definition is in tension with the intuition that abilities require control. They give a new definition of compulsion, according to which compulsions entail abilities. I argue that abilities are not necessary for compulsions. The relation between compulsions and abilities is rather conditional: S must Φ if and only if S cannot ¬Φ if S can Φ. The conditional is to be read as an indicative conditional.

ABSTRACT. Transparency is the thesis that, if one turns attention to one’s conscious experiences, one will only find features of the objects represented in these experiences. This paper focuses on panic attacks as a case against Transparency. I propose to treat panic attacks as global shifts of attention where Transparency fails: in particular, as shifts that make the conscious field salient as such. I argue that this resolves an apparent tension in the phenomenological and empirical descriptions of panic in the literature, in which panic appears as involving both excessive self-focus and depersonalization.

ABSTRACT. please see attached PDF

ABSTRACT. When we think about paradigmatic examples of real-life disagreements, such as religious or political conflicts, we realize that the disagreeing parties are often not individuals but groups. However, the debate about peer disagreement has focused almost exclusively on disagreement between individuals, thereby overlooking the phenomenon of group disagreement. This paper purports to fill this lacuna, by offering a novel diagnosis of group disagreement and an original account of how to deal with such phenomenon. The question that drives this project is: what ought a group do, from an epistemic point of view, before a case of disagreement with another group?

ABSTRACT. - extended abstract -

ABSTRACT. Joe knows that Biden won the last presidential election. Then Joe knows that either Biden won the last presidential election, or Biden is a reptilian. Minimally rational agents can perform disjunction introduction. Topic-sensitive semantics does not predict this though. One might not grasp the concept of 'reptilian', and not know any proposition dealing with reptilians. I argue that this requirement is too strong and propose a variation of topic-sensitive semantics that is consistent with this thesis. To do so, I exploit the concept of logical grounding to define the minimal topic required to know a proposition.

ABSTRACT. We are going to look into several first-order connexive logics extending propositional logics C and C3. We will define and compare several possible first-order extensions for each of the two logics. Since the subject is relatively new, we will mainly focus on completeness results.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we introduce an argument that shows that if something is, apparently, a paradox, then it is a paradox. We don’t defend that this argument works in general, but only under certain conditions. Furthermore, we apply our results to a recent debate on the Problem of Change. Traditionally, change has been considered a paradoxical phenomenon. Recently, a number of philosophers have challenged this claim. In the paper, we argue that the Problem of Change is an apparent paradox and that the aforementioned conditions are fulfilled in this case and that, accordingly, the Problem of Change is a paradox.

ABSTRACT. This paper advances a novel account of the intrinsic moral significance of risks, arguing that the moral significance of pure risks (e.g., divorced from outward effects or their bearers’ awareness) lies in their negative impact on the reliability of one’s rights. When functioning correctly, rights are reliable: they are predictive of the future because they are prescriptive of it. Furthermore, rights generate the legitimate expectation that they will function correctly. As this paper concludes, risks to rights disrupt the correct functioning of rights by affecting the predictive dimension of the legitimate expectations the rights generate.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines when and why children’s consent is morally required. I argue that standard accounts of when and why consent is morally required in respect of certain forms of conduct face a number of difficulties when applied to children. I then consider a possible explanation for this, focusing on the way in which concern for children’s well-being structures our duties towards them such that our duties towards children are not consent-sensitive in the same way as our duties towards adults. I then consider two objections, and some implications, including what this might tell us about consent generally.

ABSTRACT. Contrary to the current reasons-first trend in metaethics, I argue that moral obligations cannot be understood in terms of normative reasons. In support of my claim, I present a phenomenological and an empirical consideration. Both of them suggest that the deliberative role of moral obligation is not the role of reasons—that is, to serve as the pros and cons of action alternatives in deliberation. Instead, their role is to shape or constrain deliberation before it even begins. Thus, we should understand obligations in terms of presumptive constraints on deliberation, where these constraints are not (reducible to) normative reasons.

ABSTRACT. The use of indexical expressions within recorded messages is taken raise problems for the standard kaplanian semantics of indexicals. One conservative response to this challenge is the so called remote utterance view: recording artifacts are means by which speakers perform utterances at a distance, just as we perform other types of actions at a distance by means of other artifacts. In my talk I will discuss two objections against this view: one that it gives wrong predictions with respect to data, and the second that it leads to moorean paradoxes, and argue that they are unconvincing.

ABSTRACT. Contextualist approaches posit two broad kinds of ‘free’ (non-linguistically mandated) enrichment contributing to what is said, as opposed to implicatures: (i) ad hoc concepts, where a concept’s denotation is narrowed or broadened so that the concept conveyed differs from that linguistically encoded, and (ii) unarticulated constituents (UCs), which do not correspond to any element of the uttered sentence. A criticism of UCs is that it is unclear how they enter into utterance content. I consider whether it is possible to distinguish clearly between UCs and ad hoc concepts, and to what extent the former can be reanalysed as the latter.

ABSTRACT. According to Nunberg, proper names do not permit deferred reference – unlike indexicals. We will show, pace Nunberg, that there are examples of uses of names that ought to be considered deferred. This might, prima facie, suggest that names actually are indexicals. In this presentation we wish to argue that this is not necessarily the case, i.e. that deferred uses of indexicals can also be recognized by Millians and even by some descriptivists and some predicativists about proper names.

ABSTRACT. A central debate in the philosophy of science concerns the justification of Occam's razor, the principle that a simplicity preference is conducive to inductive reasoning. In machine learning, there is a parallel and likewise unresolved debate around the question whether statistical learning theory can provide a formal justification for a simplicity preference in machine learning algorithms. In this talk, I will present an epistemological perspective that synthesizes the arguments of the opposing camps in this debate, and yields a qualified means-ends justification of Occam's razor in statistical learning theory.

ABSTRACT. We formulate the "Maxim of Probabilism": This maxim states that a necessary condition for a concept to be probabilistic is its invariance with respect to measure-theoretic isomorphisms of probability spaces. The significance of the maxim is that it disambiguates genuinely probabilistic and non-probabilistic contents in reasonings about probabilistic phenomena. We illustrate the maxim on the controversial issue of whether conditional probabilities with respect to probability zero events can be defined using Kolmogorov's theory of conditional expectations. We show that the definition in mathematics of such conditional probabilities is not genuinely probabilistic because it violates the maxim.

ABSTRACT. Pliny the Younger is a well-known figure from ancient history, but one that is rarely thought of as a philosopher. However, in one of his Letters (VIII, 14) he reveals himself as a profound thinker while discussing the only known instance when the Roman Senate was forced to vote between three alternatives, instead of making the usual binary choice. I will argue that one important aspect of social choice theory – the notion of single-peaked preferences – was already anticipated in Pliny’s letter, although this contribution remains overlooked by contemporary sources.

ABSTRACT. My talk will discuss the prospects for a new philosophical movement entitled “Analytic Bergsonism.” I will do so by exploring the possibility of translating the thought of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) into the language of analytic philosophy. My talk will proceed in three steps. First, I will explore “analytic appropriations”—attempts by analytic thinkers to translate the philosophical systems of historical figures into the language and style of contemporary analytic philosophy. Second, I will focus on one specific case of such an appropriation: “Analytical Thomism.” Third, I will explore whether Analytic Thomism could provide a feasible methodological blueprint for Analytic Bergsonism.

ABSTRACT. Donald Davidson spent seven years crafting his landmark paper, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” First presented as a Presidential Address at the APA fifty years ago, it proved to be one of his most influential and widely discussed works. However, the structure of Davidson’s argument against conceptual schemes is notoriously difficult to interpret. In this paper, I evaluate several leading analyses of Davidson’s work, arguing that each of these readings is exegetically inadequate. I then develop a novel interpretation of his argument which avoids these objections and illuminates the structure of his attack.

ABSTRACT. This paper consists of two halves. First, it is argued that Davidson's work on animal minds reveals an implicit commitment to Morgan's Canon, a principle in cognitive science that has recently come under great scrutiny. The second half of this paper argues that Davidson's commitments to naturalism/externalism and evolution as the source of the concepts human beings possess are in tension with his implicit commitment to the Canon and his refusal to ascribe thought to non-human animals. It is argued that his philosophical system is actually made *more* consistent by allowing for the possibility of non-human animal thought.

ABSTRACT. This paper critically surveys our conceptual alternatives for global solidarity and offers an extension of what I call “cooperative solidarity” to a global context. It argues that productive cooperation does not necessarily (or only) divide people and put them in rivalry but it can be a source of solidarity and unity. Can there be ties of solidarity among those who produce the parts of the same pairs of shoes around the world? The paper seeks to examine the conditions for such a possibility. And the reasons why we fail to view ourselves as such.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I explore Immanuel Kant’s possible response to what justifies the multiplicity of political communities. Social contract political philosophers often take it for granted that there are separate distinct societies. In their arguments for the legitimacy of political authority, a principle of community, i.e., a principle for what could justifiably demarcate societies, is missing. I argue that a Kantian notion of freedom, as mutual independence from others, provides what is missing: a principle of community that explains why it is necessary not only to have states in general but also to have distinct multiple political communities.

ABSTRACT. Consideration of care is central to those philosophical accounts of trust that take its nature to be a form of normative expectation. In this paper, I will provide a conceptual analysis of the relation between trust and variations of care to better understand why instances of trust violation result in the experience of betrayal. I will end this paper by suggesting my own definition of trust, which captures an account of trust as a form of attitude in which a person can be carefree.