ABSTRACT. The status of the pseudo-propositions of the Tractatus has long puzzled interpreters. On the one hand, they are nonsensical (unsinnig) and therefore lack sense. On the other, their nonsensical character seems to depend on the very views on language they appear to express. This tension has traditionally been addressed in two ways. Traditional readings distinguish between substantial and accidental nonsense, allowing the Tractatus to express substantive views through substantial nonsense. By contrast, resolute readings reject this distinction and maintain that all nonsense is accidental, so that the pseudo-propositions express no philosophical doctrines. This presentation proposes a third alternative. I argue that Erläuterung (elucidation) and Unsinn (nonsense) are used analogically in the Tractatus. Treating these notions as analogical explains how the pseudo-propositions can perform a distinctive philosophical role, while also clarifying the source of the tensions underlying both traditional and resolute interpretations. If time permits, I will conclude by suggesting some implications of this interpretation for contemporary debates in metaphilosophy.

ABSTRACT. The discussion of conceptual engineering has focused on kind terms, and then kind terms for both natural kinds and socially constructed kinds. Singular concepts, concepts of individuals, have so far not been a part of the discussion. But singular concepts can be engineered and the nature of singular concepts and how they can be engineered can shed some light on the very nature of conceptual engineering. After presenting an account of singular concepts and some examples of their engineering, the lessons learned will be applied to two prominent accounts of conceptual engineering, namely the austerity framework of Herman Cappelen and the practical role account of Jennifer Nado. Neither account is satisfactory, and one way to show so is to bring singular conceptual engineering into the picture.

ABSTRACT. Conceptual engineering aims at evaluating and revising concepts for the better, yet a common objection holds that such revisions risk “changing the subject”. This is problematic in two ways: theoretically, subject-change may undermine a concept’s identity; practically, it may generate communicative disruptions and threaten inquiry-continuity. Drawing on psycholinguistics, I argue that the practical (and partly, the theoretical) challenge is better understood through the notion of “metalinguistic awareness”. Empirical studies suggest that metalinguistic awareness is poorly distributed among speakers. This supports a reinforced version of the challenge, whereby limited awareness may facilitate unnoticed subject-changes and communicative failure. I then argue that, surprisingly, psycholinguistics data also offer some hope for resisting the challenge. Since (based on further literature) metalinguistic awareness seems to come in degrees, sweeping assumptions about speakers’ lack of awareness may be unwarranted. Moreover, practices involved in introducing engineered concepts may themselves raise metalinguistic awareness – following the language-learning literature.

ABSTRACT. It is regarded as generally wrong to correct or disbelieve in first-person sincere pain reports. Call this the norm of near-incorrigibility. There is an apparent tension between this norm and naturalism. One popular strategy of reconciling them says that with the development of the pain sciences this norm will lose some of its force. This prediction didn’t pan out; while the pain sciences have seen significant development during the past 60 years or so, the norm of near-incorrigibility only became more firmly entrenched and defended by pain scientists. This paper argues that the (surprising) coherence between these scientific developments and this norm suggests a different and more plausible strategy of reconciliation. It requires that we take seriously the expressive dimension of the pain concept, as voiced in Wittgenstein’s dictum ‘the verbal expression of pain replaces crying’, and regard pain reports as expressing the need for help, treatment, attention, acknowledgement, etc.

ABSTRACT. This paper challenges the common view that scientific theory confirmation must be contrastive (requiring examination of rival theories). Drawing on scientific practice, it argues that theories can be confirmed by evidence alone when that evidence is exceptionally strong. The argument is supported by three case studies: (1) Perrin's work on atomism, where he completely ignored rival theories; (2) modern biology textbooks' presentation of evolution, which emphasizes evidence quality rather than rival theories; and (3) scientists' current treatment of well-established theories like atomism as uncon-tested facts. The paper examines four possible explanations for (3) – scientists' implicit justification of these theories – arguing that it stems from their immersion in overwhelming evidence with strong confirmatory features, rather than from considering rival theories or historical chains of testimony.

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses a methodological problem concerning the applicability of Carnap’s method of explication to the social sciences. While Carnap’s original model of explication was developed for the exact sciences and emphasizes formal precision, its criteria of adequacy are often restrictive for interdisciplinary and methodologically heterogeneous domains. The central question is how conceptual replacement can remain epistemically legitimate when methodological adequacy depends on explanatory and problem-oriented considerations rather than strict formalization. I propose a pragmatically modified model of Carnapian explication—Pragmatic Explication—which preserves the core operation of conceptual replacement while reinterpreting its epistemic role in context-sensitive terms. Unlike standard explication, this model does not treat exactness and similarity as fixed formal constraints, but evaluates conceptual adequacy relative to explanatory and methodological purposes. The approach is illustrated through the replacement of sex with gender in the social sciences, arguing that this transition exemplifies epistemically fruitful conceptual replacement rather than mere terminological change.

ABSTRACT. The SkShSi hypothesis (henceforth, H-SkShSi) explains competence—the disposition to succeed reliably—as constituted by skill (Sk), shape (Sh), and situation (Si). Popularised by Ernest Sosa, it is used to argue that knowing requires exercising skill in suitable conditions. This article shall argue that H-SkShSi is incorrect in two respects. First, the hypothesis is incomplete because it omits knowledge as a competence component: one cannot be competent at A without knowing essential facts about A. Second, H-SkShSi fails to adequately distinguish skill from competence, equating skill with Sk, innermost competence, whereas research outside philosophy identifies skill as task-specific and competence as a broader, domain-wide resource. It follows that knowledge is explanatory prior to competence, as competence requires knowledge. Ultimately, an alternative theory of competence must clarify the distinguishing features of skill and competence, the necessary and sufficient components of competence, and whether and how to include shape and situation.

ABSTRACT. Debates on testimonial knowledge have traditionally focused on speaker reliability or content transmission, yet such approaches struggle to account for testimonial injustice and other cases that resist transmission-based explanations. This paper shifts attention to the hearer’s normative evaluative role, conceiving testimony as an epistemically structured practice that requires active assessment rather than passive uptake. Drawing on a perspectivist account of epistemic normativity, it argues that testimonial success depends on responsible reception and evaluation, not on transmission alone. Four guiding criteria structure the hearer’s role: credibility correction, truth-connection, epistemic balance, and perspectivist reflexivity. These criteria are not proposed as strict conditions for testimonial knowledge, but as normative parameters shaping the hearer’s contribution to epistemic success. The resulting framework explains both the epistemic harm characteristic of testimonial injustice and testimonial successes that standard transmission models fail to capture, while preserving the core insights of contemporary theories of testimony.

ABSTRACT. Virtue reliabilists readily employ the concept of epistemic virtue or competence to positively assess our beliefs, in the same way that we positively assess athletic performances if they manifest one’s athletic competence. Interestingly, they have had far less to say about the role of epistemic vice or incompetence in their performance-theoretic account of epistemic normativity. This talk develops a performance-theoretic conception of epistemic vice, which I call the incompetence conception. In doing so, I argue that this conception fills a lacuna in virtue reliabilism by allowing its proponents to evaluate a broader class of bad beliefs. Moreover, I argue that it provides “vice epistemologists” with a properly reliabilist conception of epistemic vice, thus bringing their enterprise into closer contact with virtue reliabilism and performance normativity. I conclude by drawing out the broader implications that this conception of vice has for an account of propositional ignorance in the literature.

ABSTRACT. Logical and mathematical inferentialists are generally thought to face various worries about semantic determinacy, stemming from the fact that the validity of the first-order natural deduction rules (as usually formulated) is compatible with unintended interpretations of our logical expressions, the fact that the Peano axioms are satisfied by models that don't have the structure of an omega sequence, and the related fact that there are arithmetical sentences that don't obviously have a determinate truth values since they're true in some models of the axioms but false in others (along with analogous facts about other branches of logical and mathematical language). I argue, though, that these worries aren't genuine: by considering what logical and mathematical inferentialism implies about the metalanguage in which model-theoretic semantics is formulated, we can see that all of the relevant determinacy questions have trivial answers..

ABSTRACT. What makes logical and mathematical terms meaningful? What are the meanings of logical and mathematical terms? We explore model-theoretic inferentialism, which combines an inferentialist answer to the (former) metasemantic question and a denotation-based, model-theoretic answer to the (latter) semantic question, and defend it against rivaling accounts, orthodox denotationalism and orthodox inferentialism. We then offer a way to classify different variations of model-theoretic inferentialism based on the normative basis of correct inferences and the ontological status of model-theoretic entities. Then, we introduce the Categoricity Problem: a major formal problem where the model-theoretic meanings of logical and mathematical terms are not uniquely determined by the inferences. We discuss the solutions in the literature to uncover how they match up with different approaches to model-theoretic inferentialism. Based on these considerations, we develop three philosophical accounts of model-theoretic inferentialism: Deflationary, Inflationary and the Middle Ground Approaches.

ABSTRACT. On several occasions, Feferman claimed that the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) is an indeterminate statement -- it lacks a truth value. He advanced three main theses: (i) the meaning of the concept of the continuum is ambiguous; (ii) the concept of an arbitrary set -- fundamental in the standard interpretation of CH -- is inherently vague; (iii) the natural numbers are a definite totality -- in the domain of classical logic -- whereas their powerset is an indefinite totality -- in the domain of intuitionistic logic. My goal is to assess and further develop these claims. Special focus is on the third, which I will reconstruct with the aid of recent work by Linnebo (2022).

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates whether rigid designation can be represented through formulas within the object language, moving beyond traditional metalinguistic definitions. The study examines whether the validity of a formula constitutes a sufficient condition to guarantee that the constants involved behave rigidly. Using semantic tableaux and lambda-abstraction, a "witness formula" is applied to evaluate the proposals of Salmon, Garson, Priest, and Fitting & Mendelsohn. The results indicate that Salmon’s formulas only achieve rigidification in de dicto readings within reflexive frames (System T). Conversely, the schemes of Garson and Priest prove insufficient by allowing for trans-world covariation of referents. Only Fitting & Mendelsohn’s formulation effectively guarantees rigidity even within System K. This results in a strong but local rigidity and a practical collapse of the de re/de dicto distinction, as referential variation is blocked across accessible worlds.

ABSTRACT. Tanaka and Sandgren propose a framework in which logical impossibility is relative to a world whose facts and logical laws may vary. Building on their framework, I develop a precise formalization of worlds that contain both facts and world‑specific logical laws. These laws may be inconsistent or incomplete, thus modeling non-classical metatheories. In this framework I define logical difference, openness, and violation, and other forms of logical impossibility discussed in the literature, showing how these notions interrelate. I also draw out the philosophical consequences of letting logical laws be world-specific, and argue that any adequate account of logical impossibility must be relativized to a world.

ABSTRACT. Impossible worlds semantics successfully addresses hyperintensionality, but it threatens the connection between semantic content and compositional truth conditions. Existing proposals attempt to restore compositionality within an impossible worlds framework, yet they do so at the cost of an excessively fine-grained individuation of contents. That is, the resulting models distinguish even between obvious synonyms, such as simple permutations of conjuncts, and therefore lack the resources to capture any intuitively adequate notion of same-saying in natural language. In order to overcome this difficulty, we develop a new canonical translation method, conceived as a general strategy for modifying the basic linguistic ersatzist picture, which allows us to recover compositionality while accommodating different intuitions about same-saying.

ABSTRACT. The Sorites is one of the central paradoxes in contemporary philosophy of logic and language, yet its transmission remains poorly understood. Historical scholarship has largely focused on reconstructing the ill-documented views of Chrysippus and, to a lesser extent, those of Leibniz, often with an eye to their relevance for contemporary debates on vagueness. In this talk, we highlight two neglected Early Modern treatments of the Sorites by Pierre Bayle and Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. Despite some relevant similarities in approach and style, they portray the challenge posed by the Sorites in a very different light. Whereas Bayle describes the Sorites as a potential tool for the sceptic, in that it is a hard problem that calls for a satisfactory solution within the proper remit of logic, Feijoo portrays it as a sophism that is caused by an overreliance on dialectical technicalities, which is best solved by recourse to natural reason.

ABSTRACT. Famously, Kant holds that being is not a real (i.e. differentiating) predicate, which means that necessarily everything exists. Famously again, Kant holds that there are no necessary beings so that not everything necessarily exists: Hence, a Barcan formula is violated and Kant requires free logic, as recently argued by Stephenson. However, Kant nowhere offers a theory of names, elementary cognition based on intuition rather involves irreducible demonstratives instead of names. As it seems, crucial questions of free logic regarding the relation between quantification and reference with names cannot even be addressed. My paper provides a solution to this problem by developing a theory of how one could introduce names in Kant’s theory of cognition.

ABSTRACT. According to a "constitutivist" paradigm dominant in speech act theory, speech acts are defined by the unique set of rules that governs their performance. I argue that this view faces serious difficulties: widespread scholarly disagreement about illocutionary rules is hard to explain if possessing the concept of an illocution requires knowledge of its rules, and it is doubtful that speech acts are regulated by precise requirements that can be synthesised into uniquely correct formulas. I sketch an alternative, naturalistic view inspired by Millikan's work. Illocutionary concepts are understood as contingent products of cultural evolution, and illocutions have "proper functions" broadly aligning with their directions of fit. Illocutionary rules can be modelled as expectations of rational cooperation that emerge within the constraints set by each illocution's proper function. This approach takes illocutionary norms to be loose, ever-evolving, and context-sensitive, offering a plausible genealogical story about their emergence.

ABSTRACT. There is a longstanding debate on the norms of assertion: Which it is (truth, justified belief, knowledge), what kind of norm it is (robust, formal), and wherein its relation to assertoric practice consists (constitutive or merely regulative). A largely parallel debate concerns the norms of successful communication. Both debates can be addressed by considering assertoric practice as a reproductively established family with etiological functions. I argue that this approach is essentially correct: assertions do form a reproductively established family with an etiological function. It follows that they are subject to constutive, formal-conventional norms which underwrite robust norms governing speaker behavior. However, I further argue that these facts will not give succour to either side in either of the two debates mentioned above. There is no specific norm of assertion nor of successful communication. Rather, the historical "precedent" defines a paradigm which actual episodes of communication approximate in various respects.

ABSTRACT. The goal of this paper is to produce a dynamic, socially embedded, externalistic, and pluralistic account of the determination of illocutionary force based on the notion of presumptive defaults towards which the dynamics of speech act exchanges are oriented, but by which they are not permanently fixed. This account builds on recent discussions in speech act theory on the role of speaker’s intentions, hearer’s uptake, and applicable conventions in phenomena such as “illocutionary disablement” / “silencing” (Langton 1993; McGowan 2017), “discursive injustice” (Kukla 2014), or “illocutionary harm” (Schiller 2021). While analyses of these phenomena raise the normative question of “the proper” illocutionary force to be attributed in communicative exchanges, they also produce partial responses tied to a simplified Speaker-Act-Hearer ontology of communication. Our aim is to unify this fragmented field in a single account of “fixing” illocutionary force.

ABSTRACT. This paper defends a directional account of identity criteria. I argue that identity conditions, Rs, are informative not by defining identity through equivalence, but by standing in because-relations to identity claims. This contrasts with the classical biconditional approach, which collapses informativeness in domains where equivalence fails − such as artifacts, perceptual qualities, and physical systems. Using the Bar-Hillel–Carnap framework, I model content-because relations in terms of semantic informativeness as a probabilistic reduction of surprisal, showing that even non-equivalent identity conditions can yield genuine informational gain. I then draw on the notion of evidential-because to explain how such directionality underwrites the epistemic justification of identity claims. Finally, following Lewis, I show how identity judgments are stabilised by shared conventions. The result is a unified account of identity criteria as directional explanatory tools.

ABSTRACT. Philosophical analyses often take the form of identity statements, such as to be a vixen is to be a female fox. Yet such claims appear paradoxical: if correct, they express necessary truths, but if they merely restate identities, they seem uninformative. This tension between necessity and informativeness constitutes the paradox of analysis.

This paper proposes a novel response by rethinking the metaphysical status of conceptual analyses. Rather than treating analyses as identity statements, I argue that they should be understood as law-like claims—specifically, as laws of concepts. On this view, analyses articulate stable patterns of dependence within the conceptual domain, analogous to the way laws of nature describe dependence among natural properties.

The proposal combines a dependence-based semantics of counterfactuals with a generalized Best System framework. Together, these resources explain how analyses can be both necessary and informative, dissolving the paradox by grounding necessity in lawful dependence rather than identity.

ABSTRACT. The generalized exclusion argument holds that, given the causal closure of lower-level domains and the rejection of systematic causal overdetermination, higher-level causation appears reducible to the causal relationships among lower-level relata upon which higher-level phenomena supervene. Recent attempts to address this problem have proposed replacing supervenience with grounding as the key relation articulating physicalism (Kroedel & Schulz 2016; Stenwall 2021). Yet these accounts still cannot avoid causal overdetermination; they merely aim to render it harmless. In this talk, I examine whether certain naturalized grounding relations between higher- and lower-level causal relata might eliminate overdetermination. Specifically, I explore whether conceiving higher-level causal relata as being multiply constituted by their lower-level counterparts can achieve this goal. If non-reductive physicalism is formulated in terms of such a naturalized grounding relation, I argue that the exclusion argument can be rejected, thereby preserving genuine, non-overdetermining higher-level causation.

ABSTRACT. Mellor’s iterated causation argument suggests that causal statements refer to facts rather than events. In response, Noordhof posits the existence of ‘causal events’. But is there room for such entities within an event-based ontology? This paper examines this possibility within Kim’s influential property-exemplification account. Against recent claims that causal events can be accommodated as complex events (e.g. Kovacs 2022), I argue that Kim’s framework leaves no space for them. The strategy of modeling causal events as complexes trades on an ambiguity in Kim’s notion of ‘inclusion’ between mereological and conceptual–logical forms (Kim 1973), neither of which can sustain the required structure. Additionally, I argue that even construing causal events via monadic properties would violate an ‘Entity Preservation Principle’, a constraint necessary for the internal coherence of Kim’s account. Consequently, the attempt to ground causal events in Kim’s framework collapses.

ABSTRACT. Parfit’s Reductionism asserts that survival consists of psychological continuity via the "right kind of cause," yet this causal condition remains largely underdetermined. This paper remedies this ambiguity by deploying James Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation to formulate the Interventionist Criterion of Survival (ICS). I argue that the relation relevant to survival is not mere qualitative similarity, but a causal structure defined by invariance under hypothetical interventions. This shift from qualitative continuity to structural invariance offers a decisive advantage in analyzing puzzle cases, particularly the fission (branching) scenario, yielding conclusions that better align with our intuitions regarding death. By strictly analyzing the perspective-dependent nature of causal invariance, the ICS demonstrates why the existence of a remote replica does not mitigate the annihilation of a local branch. This proposal offers a naturalistic refinement of Reductionism, grounding the metaphysics of personal survival in precise counterfactual dependence.

ABSTRACT. Some theorists hold that moral blameworthiness is fixed- once an agent is blameworthy, they remain so forever. Others reject this by arguing that blameworthiness is fluid and may diminish over time.

This paper reconstructs this debate in the context of structured collectives and artificial intelligence systems. It distinguishes between two senses of blameworthiness- fixed-historical and fixed-present. In the former, when an entity is blameworthy, it remains forever true that the entity is at that time blameworthy to that degree. However, such historical fixity does not by itself entail that blameworthiness persists into the present or future. Fixed-present blameworthiness, by contrast, depends on the persistence of agency, which rests on continuity and connectedness in an entity’s aims and objectives across time.

The paper argues that these two senses are conflated in practice. It explores the implications of this conflation by adopting an agnostic rather than a definitive one.

ABSTRACT. The explosive growth of machine learning models has raised a host of new concerns, among them the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and vulnerability. On the one hand, humans, social institutions, and the environment each appear to be vulnerable in distinct ways to the advent of AI systems. On the other hand, AI systems themselves have been treated as vulnerable in a myriad of ways. What does “vulnerability” mean in such a broad context? In this talk, we will offer a conceptual analysis of “vulnerable” that can accommodate both the normative character of the concept – “vulnerability” appears to involve something “going wrong” in some weak sense – as well as the very different kinds of entities that we can consider to be vulnerable, from human individuals across ecosystems to AI systems. This analysis allows us to explicate the interdependences between all of these systems.

ABSTRACT. One of the unexpected consequences of the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence is the silencing of certain groups because it is believed that they are not the authors of their own words, but rather that these are the product of AI. Those who suffer most from this epistemic silencing are groups who do not have English as their first language and therefore, are not familiar with current expressions, abbreviations or regional slang. This occurs to a greater extent in countries where English language learning stems from a colonial education system, where language is also the survival of the empire through the rigid imposition of a rigid language learning. This silencing is the convergence of two different problems: the delegitimization of testimony based on accent and the need to effectively establish whether testimony is worth considering or whether it is the product of AI.

ABSTRACT. Consequentialists often argue that their opponents’ views can be consequentialized or that their own view is partly self-effacing. These arguments resemble the quasi-realist moves that many expressivists make. I argue, however, that consequentializing and self-effacement are surprisingly hard to accommodate within an expressivist framework. This threatens to show that expressivism is false, since it threatens to show that there are meaningful normative sentences that do not express noncognitive attitudes. I then argue that this threat can be neutralized by taking expressivists’ quasi-realist moves further than they are normally taken. This also reveals a deeper resemblance between quasi-realist moves and self-effacement.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that habits are best understood as dispositional properties and that this ontological account clarifies central issues in contemporary virtue theory, particularly Aristotle’s notion of hexis. Virtues are commonly described as stable and acquired features of character, yet their ontological status often remains unclear. This makes it difficult to explain how virtues persist when not exercised, how they can fail to manifest in particular situations, and how they play a causal role in action.

The paper proposes interpreting hexis as an enduring causal capacity rather than as a behavioral regularity or merely normative category. Drawing on analytic accounts of dispositions and causal powers, it argues that habits structure perception, motivation, and action by making certain responses available under appropriate conditions. This framework explains the distinction between possession and manifestation and preserves agency without reducing virtue to consistent behavior.

ABSTRACT. This essay addresses the “problem of parts” in the philosophy of pain, namely which of pain’s characteristic components (physiological, phenomenal, behavioral, or cognitive) is necessary and sufficient for an experience to count as pain. I argue that none of these components alone is sufficient, though the phenomenal component is necessary. To resolve this issue, I adapt Schwitzgebel’s (2002) liberal dispositional account of belief to the case of pain. I propose that pain should be understood as a cluster of manifestations of stereotypical dispositional properties, divided into four categories: behavioral, phenomenal, cognitive, and physiological. This model explains how borderline cases (e.g. itches) can share some but not all of the manifestations typical of pain. The account thus accommodates both mental and bodily aspects of pain, avoiding the need to treat pain as a primitive phenomenal kind while preserving our everyday intuitions about its nature.

ABSTRACT. What do three major superficialist models of the mind – dispositionalism, mental fictionalism, and interpretivism – tell us about the attitudes of chatbots based on large language models? These approaches attribute attitudes on the basis of superficial features such as behavioral patterns. The focus of my talk is on assessing the merits of superficialist approaches by examining whether they contain sufficient internal constraints to restrict indiscriminate attitude attribution to chatbots. I use Blockhead as a test case, since Blockhead clearly does not have attitudes. If a superficialist account extends to Blockhead and allows it to have attitudes, then the account is too permissive. I argue that, in general, superficialist approaches impose too few restrictions on the attribution or possession of attitudes. On this basis, I defend a version of interpretivism that incorporates principled restrictions on attributing attitudes to chatbots.

ABSTRACT. The perceptual theory of emotions, which treats emotions as perceptions of value, has gained significant attention. This paper raises four objections to that view. First, perception tracks real-time events, whereas emotions often do not. Second, perceptual phenomenology is systematically tied to representational content, but this is not true of emotions construed as perceptual states. Third, perception is non-conceptual, while emotions can have cognitive bases, which creates problems for a perceptual account. Fourth, there are cases of radical perceptual misrepresentation that do not seem to have analogues in emotions. For these reasons, emotions should not be identified with perceptions. It is suggested that the appeal of the perceptual theory lies in its emphasis on the non-conceptual representation of value, which helps explain recalcitrant emotions. This paper proposes that we can preserve this insight by taking emotions to involve “affect tags”, without treating emotions as perceptual states.

ABSTRACT. This paper defends the claim that emotional properties can be represented in perception. Drawing on recent findings from neuroscience and cultural neuroscience, I argue that emotionally charged stimuli elicit heightened activity not only in regions traditionally associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala and the limbic system, but also across large-scale neural networks that integrate these areas with the regions involved in perception. Cross-cultural evidence further shows that, although the emotional valences attributed to stimuli vary across cultures, they consistently engage perceptual processing. Taken together, these results provide empirical evidence for the thesis that emotionally valenced properties are represented in perception. Since these findings indicate that at least some high-level properties - namely, emotional ones - are perceptually represented, they also strengthen the case for a richer conception of perceptual content and bear directly on debates concerning the nature and scope of perceptual representation.

ABSTRACT. The application of the notion of 'observable' from gauge theory to diffeomorphism-invariant theories---most relevantly to general relativity---has led to numerous conceptual and technical issues when interpreting classical theories with this symmetry and building quantum versions of them. In this talk I distinguish between two senses of gauge transformation: local and global, and I argue that the notion of observable appears more naturally in the local sense of gauge transformation. Then, I argue that diffeomorphism invariance can be understood as a gauge symmetry only from a global point of view, and hence, that the concept of observable applies only in a restricted manner. This has the consequence that some popular claims in the literature, such as the claim that the physical content of diffeomorphism-invariant models is encoded in correlations, are unfounded. Similarly, it raises serious concerns about some approaches to quantum gravity, which treat diffeomorphisms as local gauge transformations.

ABSTRACT. This paper extends Wendy Parker’s adequacy-for-purpose framework to the evaluation of causal theoretical models. While Parker’s account has shifted model assessment away from representational accuracy and toward pragmatic fitness, it remains focused on practical models whose central aim is empirical prediction. I argue that causal theoretical models, whose aims are explanatory and conceptual, require a parallel but distinct evaluative criterion. Drawing on Potochnik’s analysis of causal complexity and the role of idealization in managing cognitive and representational constraints, I propose that the accuracy of causal theoretical models depends on the alignment between the purposes of their idealizations and the purposes of their use. On this view, a model remains accurate only when applied within the scope of its idealizations. This extension preserves Parker’s pragmatic insight while providing a unified framework for assessing both empirical and causal theoretical models and clarifies how accuracy can remain context-dependent yet epistemically grounded.

ABSTRACT. Multi-scale models that integrate various sub-models into one overarching computational modeling framework are increasingly used to study complex phenomena such as diseases, where relevant processes often span multiple scales and interact in complicated ways. Recent philosophical discussions on multi-scale modeling have examined the strategies for bridging between the respective sub-models, emphasizing that the success of multi-scale models challenges traditional reductionist or emergentist accounts of inter-theoretic relations and scientific explanation. However, another important question that has so far received rather little attention is how multi-scale models are evaluated. Recognizing that sub-models within multi-scale frameworks can differ in their generality, purpose or the types of data and experiments on which they were constructed or tested, we argue that the evaluation of multi-scale models requires further scrutiny. Drawing inspiration from Parker’s adequacy-for-purpose account and focusing on the case of medical research, we discuss complications, trade-offs and challenges that arise in evaluating multi-scale models.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I apply work in the semantics of questions to the epistemology of inquiry. First, I propose that questions can be answered more or less completely. This idea follows directly from some of the most popular accounts on the semantics of questions. On the account developed, questions and their answers exhibit structural similarities to gradable expressions in formal semantics. Answers understood in this way are (partially) ordered by how well they answer a question. This yields two very natural applications in the epistemology of inquiry: (i) a way to explicate inquisitive progress, and (ii) a contribution on the discussion on norms of inquiry. I finally show that even when the gradability of answers is denied, there is an equivalent way to express the applications to epistemology discussed using just a binary notion of answer.

ABSTRACT. Previous works disentangle concept possession from knowledge of definitions by understanding concepts as mental words referring causal-informationally, which will remain stable even as associated beliefs, or "conceptions", change. There is, however, a tension between the stability of concepts and the revisability of conceptions: it seems at least some (minimal amount of) conceptions cannot be revisable, so that they can serve as the recognitional basis to sustain the required causal-informational relation.

This paper attempts to resolve the tension by proposing a forward-looking account of reference-fixation and concept possession. Drawing on the epistemology of inquiry, I argue that possessing a concept is a matter of knowing how to ask questions whose true answers are sufficiently informative about the concept's referent. A thinker remains linked to a referent not because of any stored, static conceptions, but because of the ability to direct effective inquiry toward the referent in future encounters.

ABSTRACT. Narratives have garnered increased interest in epistemology in diverse areas such as self-identity, legal epistemology or as a unique form of testimony. This paper argues that narratives are an important epistemic tool which we rely upon in a more general sense. I introduce the concept of zetetic narratives, a type of factual, non-fictional narrative which helps us understand the world and make the facts contained within them salient to us. Zetetic narratives can guide our inquiry into complex topics and serve both as the motivation for as well as the desired outcome of such inquiries. The concept of zetetic narratives raises normative questions related to inquiry: If we consider zetetic narratives important intellectual achievements around which some of our inquiries are centred, then we need to explore the epistemic and zetetic norms which govern how we should construct zetetic narratives.

ABSTRACT. Leibniz believed in the actual infinite, maintaining, among other things, that there are infinitely many monads and possible worlds, and that space and time are infinite. Our starting point will be the notion of infinity involved in the distinction between necessary and contingent truths. According to Leibniz, the justification of every contingent truth, unlike that of necessary truths, requires an infinite analysis—the formulation of a certain kind of infinite proof, either direct or indirect. Necessary truths are provable in a finite number of steps. Within the framework of the contemporary theory of deductive systems, the distinction between necessary and contingent truths can be applied to the theses of any deductive theory: the former can be viewed as the logical laws of the theory, while the formulas characterizing the theory are treated as contingent truths. The Leibnizian approach to justifying necessary and contingent truths resembles the paradigm of modern infinitary systems for various modal logics. In such systems, infinitary rules of inference are redundant when applied solely within logic, but their use is essential for proving the completeness of consistent specific theories that are extensions of this logic. Our aim is to reconstruct the Leibnizian notion of proof using the contemporary methodology of infinitary systems of modal logic.

ABSTRACT. Linguistic understanding is often characterized as rapid, effortless, and largely unconscious. Yet, communication also involves cases where interlocutors must actively resolve uncertainty or revise initial interpretations. Building on recent philosophical work, this paper develops an action-oriented account that distinguishes unconscious and conscious modes of linguistic understanding. Unconscious understanding reflects default interpretation sufficient to continue interaction, manifested in use and automatic comprehension. Conscious understanding, in contrast, emerges when routine interpretation fails, triggering probing: reflective attention to alternative meanings, clarification requests, and reformulation. This distinction clarifies why linguistic understanding succeeds despite inherent ambiguity: finite expressions interact with open-ended contexts, producing multiple practically relevant interpretations. The framework also provides insight into artificial language systems, which exhibit a form of unconscious understanding but lack conscious probing. By foregrounding probing as the hallmark of conscious understanding, the account integrates pragmatic, epistemic, and cognitive dimensions, offering a unified model of human linguistic comprehension in dialogue.

ABSTRACT. AI systems are poised to become primary sources of information. Due to advancements in Large Language Models, their linguistic outputs are nearly human-like, prompting debates on AI’s potential for full-fledged communication. While current discussion on AI communication is mostly concentrated on the speech act of assertion — the linguistic tool for knowledge transfer, we focus on explanation — the linguistic tool for disseminating understanding. To address whether and in what sense communicative interactions with AI can contribute to disseminating understanding, we discuss different ways of engaging in the practice of explaining. While the practice of explaining is unified by its function — disseminating understanding — we argue that one can participate in it by offering what we call a minimal explanation, a customized explanation, or an interactive explanation. Each of them is appropriate in different contexts and comes with a set of relevant expectations.

ABSTRACT. The figure of the Shoggoth has emerged as a central metaphor for contemporary unease surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs), capturing anxieties about the opacity of AI reasoning processes. This opacity not only undermines confidence in AI-generated outputs but also raises a deeper normative question: to what extent can AI systems be regarded as participants in our “games of giving and asking for reasons”? Drawing on Robert Brandom’s inferentialist account of epistemic reliability and objectivity, this paper argues that debates about AI rationality are themselves negotiations over the standards of legitimate scorekeeping practices. Given the increasing inaccessibility of AI inferential norms, the paper proposes the use of apophatic language, understood as “metalinguistic negation“. This approach makes the debate about the opacity of AI visible as a a second-order discourse about our own norms of objectivity while acknowledging the limits of our understanding of contemporary AI.

ABSTRACT. One of the great merits of the mechanistic philosophy is that it has revived philosophical interest in the problem of causation. The main aim of our presentation is to provide an analytic reconstruction of Stuart Glennan’s theory of causation and to provide such a formal analysis of his theory in which are admitted infinite chains of causal mechanisms. According to Stuart Glennan for the purpose of building the mechanistic theory of causation, it is not necessary to assume the existence of either fundamental laws (explicated by counterfactuals) or fundamental causal mechanisms. We aim to provide the formal reconstruction of such “a metaphysical intuition” and the detailed examination of the admissibility of the existence of infinite chains of causal mechanisms. One of the logical consequences of such interpretation of the mechanistic causation result in a questioning of the principle of causal determinism (i.e., any cause is caused by another cause).

ABSTRACT. According to the well-known proposal by David Lewis (e.g., 1973, pp. 73-74), in Humean metaphysics, laws of nature should be understood as the axioms of the true deductive system that achieves the best balance between simplicity and informativeness. The aim of my project is to examine different ways of quantifying the latter. I will consider three cases – finite, countably infinite, and uncountably infinite – and, for each of them, discuss some possible ways of comparing the informativeness of different law-candidates. In this talk I want to provide an overview, so I will omit many formal details and focus on the key messages that emerge from my analyses. For example, the countably infinite case can be used to show that Lewis’s view on laws is not extensionally equivalent to the view of laws as the best information amplifiers, which is a Humean alternative to Lewis’s proposal (Dorst 2021).

ABSTRACT. Proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) argue that various recently studied phenomena support a revision of evolutionary causation, claiming that it is bidirectional (Laland and Sterelny 2006; Laland et al. 2013) and even synchronic (Walsh 2021). If these claims were correct, they would subvert the standard view in metaphysics that causal relations are asymmetric and diachronic. I argue that this is not the case. First, I examine the original formulation of reciprocal evolutionary causation in terms of feedback loops and show that, once the fine-grained nature of the traditional categories for causal relata is considered, feedback loops can be modelled without causal bidirectionality. Secondly, I analyse Walsh’s formulation of synchronic reciprocal causation and show that the best account for the causal continuity in it is still through asymmetric causal chains. Moreover, the only acceptable reading of its synchronicity is in terms of simultaneous effects and not simultaneous causal relata.

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses Amie Thomasson’s recent work on the understanding of metaphysics, for which she relies on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), developed by Michael Halliday. The aim of the paper is to provide a challenge to one aspect of Thomasson’s criticism of traditional conceptions of metaphysics. I will argue that, in its original form, Thomasson’s claim that the traditional conceptions of metaphysics are inadequate because they assume the wrong linguistic function of certain terms and concepts depends on the thesis that linguistic functions are absolute. Furthermore, I will show that there are good reasons to believe that linguistic functions can change over time, and I will also raise more questions about the nature of this change. If linguistic functions are relative, the traditional metaphysician’s way of using the controversial terms and concepts could be seen as metalinguistically unproblematic.

ABSTRACT. Quantifier variance is a metaontologically deflationary position according to which ontological disputes are non-substantive in virtue of featuring different but equivalent languages. By contrast, inflationary fundamentalist metaphysics, often motivated by hyperintensional distinctions between necessarily equivalent contents, posits that reality has a fundamental structure, with more fundamental aspects explaining less fundamental ones. Fundamentality comes in two flavours: reductive and generative, according to whether fundamentality holds only between representations or between worldly entities too.

I argue that quantifier variance is incompatible with both conceptions of fundamentalist metaphysics, and locate the source of this incompatibility. I first outline quantifier variance and hyperintensionality. After articulating both conceptions of fundamentality and highlighting their hyperintensional nature, I identify their points of tension with quantifier variance, which turn on semantic considerations and disagreements over the extent to which facts are structured. I conclude by outlining possible, though limited, avenues for defending quantifier variance.

ABSTRACT. Liberal democrats have largely accepted that political equality requires restricting certain kinds of influence in the political deliberative model. The central idea is that democratic legitimacy comes from free and fair exchange of reasons. For instance, they have long argued that the influence of excessive wealth poses a threat to political legitimacy by on the one hand distorting the fairness of electoral competition, and on other hand by giving the wealthy undue control over the political process. In this talk, I seek to expand the scope of non-rational influences including political marketing, personalization, and appearance-based voting. Drawing on Rawlsian assumptions about public reason and the moral powers of citizens I propose a normative framework centered on an “ecology of public deliberation” and suggest some solutions to address these worries. While non-rational influences cannot be eliminated, democratic institutions should mitigate some of these effects.

ABSTRACT. Political polarization in Western democracies has intensified in recent years, often accelerating during crises and following highly divisive events. A striking example is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which triggered rapid online polarization, mutual vilification between ideological camps, and the marginalization of moderate voices. In response to such dynamics, this paper examines the permissibility of what I call deliberative silence: the temporary suspension of democratic exchange during periods of acute polarization. Deliberative silence aims to prevent further escalation and help re-establish minimally operative conditions for political deliberation. Rather than rejecting deliberative democracy, the proposal treats silence as a supportive extension of it, grounded in the recognition that certain social conditions undermine the level-headedness required for productive reasoning. The paper situates deliberative silence alongside familiar democratic practices of restraint and evaluates two strategies for its justification, an institutional and a moral one, before defending a middle-ground approach.

ABSTRACT. Political polarization, driven by divisive social media, partisan mainstream media, and citizens' echo chambers, poses a significant 21st-century challenge. This study examines the disparity in political polarization between Europe and the US, attributing it to the unequal representation of weak social ties. Weak ties, such as distant friends and acquaintances, expose individuals to diverse perspectives, fostering civil discourse and reducing animosity. Europe's stronger social safety net and collective responsibility facilitate the presence of weak ties, promoting exposure to differing viewpoints. Given the difficulty of enhancing weak ties individually, the paper recommends government intervention through policies fostering social capital and facilitating exposure to weak ties to mitigate polarization.

ABSTRACT. Meta-metasemantics investigates what makes it the case that a particular metasemantic theory is true of an expression or class of expressions, and thereby bears on how we can know which metasemantics applies. This higher-order question has immediate consequences for current debates about the evidential role of empirical and experimental data in philosophy of language and about whether large language models genuinely use language or merely mimic meaningful use. Yet the meta-metasemantic assumptions that guide metasemantic theorising are often left implicit. By clarifying our meta-metasemantic views and assumptions, we can gain a better understanding of issues such as the nature of understanding, the preconditions of shared content and successful linguistic communication, and deflationism about reference. Further progress in the methodology and epistemology of metasemantics, as well as in the question of the meaningfulness of LLMs’ outputs, requires a systematic theory of meta-metasemantics.

ABSTRACT. A common view is that ethical theories should provide moral guidance – that is ethical theories answer to a guidance constraint. In this paper I argue that this view is mistaken for strong kinds of guidance (SG). SG requires that most ordinary agents will be able to derive the same correct prescription from the guiding rules provided by the theory.

Drawing on the analogous debate concerning moral testimony I make a normative argument against providing SG. Following Allison Hills’ argument for pessimism about moral testimony I argue that SG undermines the development of moral understanding because SG renders agents’ individual dispositions or sensitivities superfluous.

Assuming that moral understanding is a moral good we then have reason to deny that ethical theories should provide SG. A further consequence is that ethical theories which value understanding, f.ex. virtue ethics, cannot be required to provide SG without begging the question against those theories.

ABSTRACT. Michael Smith (1994) famously suggests that motivation to do what is morally right de dicto represents a fetishism incompatible with praiseworthiness. Agents desiring to do what is morally right de dicto are apparently motivated by the desire to do what is right whatever that comes to, which seems arbitrary. This is why recent advocates for the praiseworthiness of moral motivation by rightness de dicto seek to forge a closer link between the motivational part and the subject’s grasp of an act’s moral rightness. Against these attempts to rehabilitate motivation by moral rightness de dicto, this paper presents a new, metasemantic problem for this kind of moral motivation. Drawing on the debate about the semantic stability of thin moral terms in connection to moral disagreement, it argues that the nature of thin moral terms makes a certain arbitrariness in motivation by rightness de dicto unavoidable.

ABSTRACT. Do moral beliefs motivate action? To answer this question, extant arguments have considered hypothetical cases of association (dissociation) between agents’ moral beliefs and actions. In this paper, I argue that this approach can be improved by studying people’s actual moral beliefs and actions using empirical research methods. I present three new studies showing that, when the stakes are high, associations between participants’ moral beliefs and actions are actually explained by co-occurring but independent moral emotions. These findings suggest that moral beliefs themselves have little or no motivational force, supporting the Humean picture of moral motivation.