ABSTRACT. Recent research, backed up by new paradigms on cognition, has defied the traditional view of plants as unintelligent creatures. Empirical studies suggest that plants exhibit sensorimotor capacities, decision-making, and even learning and memory, supporting the claim that plants may be minimally cognitive. While endorsing this research program ontologically, this paper offers an epistemological critique of its prevailing individualistic and highly idealized methodologies. Much plant cognition research isolates individual organisms, relies on artificial experimental setups, and generalizes results from a small number of model species, risking pernicious reification. To address these limitations, the paper argues for a symbiotic-ecological turn in plant cognitive science. Drawing on work on mycorrhizal networks, extended cognition, and collective intelligence, it advocates field-based, ecosystem-sensitive approaches and more cautious generalization across taxa.

ABSTRACT. Recent work in plant science has prompted claims that plants qualify as cognitive agents, often motivated by appeals to complex forms of information processing. Yet this strategy faces two main difficulties: the notion of “information” remains underspecified, and there is no consensus on the nature of cognition itself. This paper tackles both issues. First, it critically examines leading conceptions of information under which plants might plausibly be said to process information. Second, it introduces the Explanatory Parity Heuristic (EPH), a methodological proposal that shifts the debate from metaphysical criteria to explanatory practice. According to EPH, when explanations of plant behaviour appeal to information-processing structures that play explanatory roles analogous to those invoked in paradigmatic cognitive cases, this provides defeasible but non-trivial support for extending cognitive-style inferences to plants. Thus, the contribution is twofold: it clarifies the conceptual foundations of plant information-processing claims and reframes the debate in epistemically tractable terms.

ABSTRACT. Debates on bacterial cognition, intelligence, and agency have intensified as researchers increasingly describe bacterial collectives in cognitive terms. While these descriptions are often metaphorical, they raise deeper questions about the role of concepts in biological explanation. This paper treats the “bacterial minds” debate not as a semantic dispute, but as a case study in how conceptual frameworks shape scientific practice. Drawing on pragmatic and integrative pluralist accounts, I examine how mechanistic, individualistic, and cognitive or collective perspectives frame explanatory possibilities differently. Focusing on bacterial virulence as a test case, I show how each framework highlights certain phenomena while obscuring others, with concrete epistemic consequences for research design and interpretation. Rather than settling whether the behaviours of bacterial swarms are best captured in mental terminology, I argue for conceptual clarification and relaxed pluralism as essential for studying biological collectives.

ABSTRACT. The philosophical tradition in quantum foundations has worked toward distinguishing several distinct conceptual problems, collectively referred to as the "measurement problem", in pursuit of conceptual clarity. In contrast to this tradition, I argue in favor of attempting to formulate one problem, mapping its space of resolutions to that of the "interpretations" of quantum mechanics. Only this will warrant normative and comparative evaluation of different families of interpretations.

The difficulty is this endeavor is that different actors, partial to different interpretations, formulate the 'measurement problem' differently, thereby affecting one's evaluation of its possible solutions. Yet, I claim that formulating an interpretation-neutral measurement problem can be achieved, not by focusing on measurement itself, but by redefining the problem as an incompatibility between a referential and inferential conception of physics, which could be articulated without inconsistency in classical mechanics, but not in quantum mechanics.

ABSTRACT. My question is whether the emergence of many parallel worlds in the (contemporary) Everettian solution to the quantum measurement problem can be understood in a mechanistic fashion. Whereas the answer first appears to be “No”, I will eventually conclude with a clear "Yes!". One crucial element in my argument will be quantum decoherence, a process that partly explains why our world appears so very classical, and which rescues the original many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics from a fatal objection. However, while my positive answer may first sound like good news for the mechanistically inclined lover of parallel worlds, it comes with a big grain of salt: It is a proper physical mechanism that produces parallel worlds, but due to the nature of this mechanism, these worlds are not quite what one may hope for.

ABSTRACT. Inferentialism has recently been proposed in the philosophy of physics as a way of avoiding representational commitments in the interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM). This paper argues that prominent inferentialist approaches—especially those developed by Richard Healey (2012, 2014, 2017) and Tushar Menon (forthcoming)—fail to provide an adequate account of the meaning of QM statements. These views rely on material inference, according to which meaning is constituted by socially mediated scorekeeping practices. I argue that this makes the content of quantum statements problematically dependent on intersubjective agreement, thereby undermining objectivity in scientific discourse. Healey’s account collapses the normative grounding of inferential roles into social convention, while Menon’s attempt, following Huw Price, to reconcile inferentialism with representationalism reintroduces external naturalistic criteria to secure meaning. I conclude that inferential expressivism (Incurvati and Schloeder 2023) offers a more promising alternative by preserving inferentialism’s pragmatic insights while grounding material inferences in a functional account.

ABSTRACT. This essay is about one way in which we draw distinctions, a phenomenon I call pliant distinction. Pliant distinctions have been neglected by theorists, but I'll argue that they are ubiquitous in philosophy and science - thus, understanding how our thought and talk works in these domains requires understanding pliant distinctions. I begin by contrasting pliant distinctions with two more familiar ways in which we draw distinctions, i.e., by drawing a distinction among distinctions. I develop a semantic and logical profile for pliant distinctions, showing that this profile can be found in the vicinity of many key philosophical and scientific concepts. I close by characterizing the conditions under which pliant distinctions can be expected to and should arise, drawing on some ideas in information theory and cognitive science.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, I explore the epistemic significance of scientific disagreement. I argue that, when properly handled, scientific disagreement plays a vital role in advancing scientific understanding. I begin by developing a three-dimensional account of scientific understanding, according to which understanding involves (i) the skillful deployment of epistemic mediators, (ii) an appropriate noetic commitment, and (iii) a reflective evaluation of relevant alternatives. I show that disagreements in science can improve scientific understanding along all three dimensions: they can help identify misunderstandings and eliminate unfruitful epistemic mediators; they can strengthen the evidential grounding and safety of scientists’ commitments; and they can expand modal insight by revealing alternative, viable ways of conceptualizing a phenomenon. My arguments lend support to a normative conclusion that runs against widespread intuition: a scientific community in which there is disagreement is, ceteris paribus, more epistemically trustworthy than one that speaks with a single voice.

ABSTRACT. Scientific understanding is traditionally conceived as a theoretical epistemic aim of science and sharply distinguished from applied or practical aims. However, I argue that such a distinction is inadequate, at least with respect to practice-oriented domains such as climate change research, pandemic science, and economic risk analysis. In these contexts, scientific understanding is not only a theoretical achievement but also an action-guiding capacity. Building on existing accounts of understanding, my paper suggests that current frameworks fail to capture the pragmatic role of understanding in guiding intervention and response. To address this gap, I introduce a novel concept: understanding-for. The latter consists in the ability to use knowledge to intervene in, anticipate, and manage phenomena in pursuit of specific goals. Through a case study of climate-change-driven extreme events, it is established how understanding-for integrates theoretical insight with practical reasoning under conditions of uncertainty and urgency, supporting decision-making, mitigation, and adaptation strategies.

ABSTRACT. Until relatively recent times, analytic philosophers would quickly dismiss debunking genealogies as involving a trivial genetic fallacy. More recently, the appearance of reliabilist accounts of knowledge and epistemic justification and the formulation of evolutionary debunking arguments (henceforth: EDAs) drawing on scientifically respectable evolutionary psychology rather than speculative socio-historical reconstructions has led many analytic philosophers to reevaluate the status of debunking genealogies. Unfortunately, in current literature the topic is often discussed rather generically in terms of beliefs, largely ignoring the distinction between doxastic and propositional justification. In this talk, I bring this distinction to bear on the conclusions that are allegedly established by different types of EDAs. In particular, I focus on EDAs that function by providing higher-order evidence that purportedly defeats the prima facie justification of their target beliefs and discuss whether such arguments, if successful, affect propositional justification as well as doxastic justification.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues against the debasing view of higher-order defeat (HOD). The bare bones of the debasing view are that HOD affects the proper epistemic basing of a subject’s belief that p (a constitutive element of doxastic justification) but not the propositional justification for p constituted by the subject’s evidence for p. My argument is based on the distinction between performance-error and epistemic-disability cases of HOD. The first part of my argument is that when a higher-order defeater constitutes evidence of performance error, it is not true that the subject loses available doxastic justification. The second part of my argument is that when a higher-order defeater constitutes evidence of epistemic indisposition, the debasing view faces a dilemma: either it loses motivation for the claim that the subject loses available doxastic justification or it makes the subject prone to akratic irrationality.

ABSTRACT. The paper examines the defeasible nature of reasoning and argumentation in natural language, focusing on the role of normative (external) defeaters. Many common argument forms are defeasible, meaning that additional information can undermine their conclusions. While epistemology has extensively discussed defeaters for knowledge and justification, including normative defeaters that depend on information an agent should have even if they do not possess it, this notion has received little attention in theories of reasoning and argument evaluation. Traditional models of defeasible reasoning are largely internalist, treating defeaters as beliefs or information available to the agent, and align well with dialogical approaches to argumentation. However, the paper argues that this internalist framework fails to account for cases in which unpossessed but available expert knowledge is normatively relevant to evaluating reasoning. It proposes that normative defeat in reasoning depends on contextual factors, including awareness of missing information, its availability, and background epistemic requirements.

ABSTRACT. In this talk we discuss knowledge collapse and how to mitigate it in our epistemic environments. Knowledge collapse is a dynamic between inquirers and LLMs, where agent knowledge tends to be built upon an overly standardized sample because models have a “central tendency” of question-answering behavior, leading to homogeneous outputs. The main consequence is a loss of epistemic diversity. Drawing on network epistemology, we define a goal of healthy epistemic environments: transient diversity, that is, the property of a network starting from an explorative phase and progressively narrowing its sources of information towards the best available set. Using transient diversity as a goal, we claim that knowledge collapse can be contrasted by avoiding LLMs usage in early sections of one’s inquiry. Once agents form stronger priors and develop a clearer epistemic stance, accessing AI assistance can be useful for stress-testing their knowledge without directly attacking the environment’s epistemic diversity.

ABSTRACT. Philosophers dispute whether we should directly engage with individuals endorsing unjustified conspiracy theories. Recent AI tools, paired with social research findings, promise neutral, scalable intervention; yet little attention has been paid to the conditions under which such discussions proceed. I argue that the outcome depends less on chatbot design than on users’ epistemic agency. I propose a layered account of “doing your own research” (DYOR) – as a normative ideal, an epistemic practice, and an identity-signalling commitment – and argue that conspiracy theorists remain primarily at the surface layer, occasionally venturing into the middle, while rarely engaging with the base. Meanwhile, chatbots typically engage only the practical layer while leaving deeper commitments intact. As a result, they may at best produce local and temporary belief revision. I further identify a novel epistemic risk, wishful prompting: a form of motivated reasoning combined with delegating responsibility for this transgression to a chatbot.

ABSTRACT. Recent developments in epistemology (Carter et al 2018b; Ryan, Palermos & Farina 2024; Amico-Korby, Harrell, and Danks 2024; Elgin 2025) have moved from the traditional paradigm—arguably focused on the agent—to broader approaches that consider the interaction between the agent and the environment. This has been especially the case when examining impactful digital technologies like social media and AI. However, a careful reading of these proposals shows that we still need to narrow down the environmental framework to apply it to digital environments, and more clarity on what kind of environments we should have in mind when assessing the digital.

This paper tackles this task by reviewing recent accounts and drawing on arguments by Goldberg (2021) and Tanesini (2025) to identify a blindspot: that they overlook the power and epistemic asymmetry between users and designers of digital spaces. I suggest an ‘architectonic shift’ to address this issue.

ABSTRACT. Mathematical theorems are often proven in multiple ways, reflecting various motivations. One such motivation stems from philosophical ideals of proof—for instance simplicity, elegance, or generality. Most proof ideals lack exactly the type of rigor that mathematical definitions are commonly thought to possess, yet they play a legitimate role in guiding mathematical practice. In this talk, we present new formalizations of two proof ideals, shedding light on both the nature of these ideals and the broader concept of formalization. In particular, we will discuss our formalizations of ‘purity’ and ‘semantic pollution’ through constraints on formal derivations. Purity concerns the idea that a proof should only draw upon notions that belong to the content of the theorem. Semantic pollution describes the incorporation of elements from a model-theoretic semantics into proof-theoretic syntax, where syntactically pure proof systems are free from such elements. Our efforts provide the first elaborate formal understandings of these ideals.

ABSTRACT. Formal methods, especially logical systems, are now widely used in philosophical analysis, yet their methodological justification is rarely examined. This paper examines the claim that formal systems can fruitfully formalise target phenomena—such as concepts or forms of reasoning—without presupposing their meaning. We argue that this claim is not self-evident and requires philosophical support. Our central hypothesis is that formal systems carry content in the form of commitments: syntactic, axiomatic, inferential, and semantic. These commitments interact with the pre-formal core meaning of the phenomenon under study and may either clarify or distort it. Recognising this interaction allows for a more controlled and methodologically informed use of formal tools in philosophy.

ABSTRACT. Formal philosophy is a methodological position whose proponents hold that it is an effective way of doing philosophy to start with vague intuitions and operationalize them using formal tools. The idea is to draw formal conclusions and then go back and either challenge or support the initial convictions. However, philosophers can disagree about a problem expressed in formal terms just as they can disagree about one expressed in natural language. Formalization does not provide a straightforward route to the algorithmization. The aim of this talk is twofold: (i) to provide a concise overview of the prevailing tendencies within the field of formal philosophy; (ii) to evaluate this field’s current state, with a particular emphasis on the importance of the informal insight in formal philosophizing. The upshot is the presentation of a more intricate interplay between formal and informal elements, thereby demonstrating the complexities of the field of formal philosophy.

ABSTRACT. This paper defends Rudolf Carnap’s position in "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950) against the charge of self-defeat raised by Coffa (1991) and generalized by Warren (2016). According to this challenge, any global attempt to deflate philosophy by appeal to language undermines itself by rendering its own claims defective. I first argue that Warren’s preferred escape from this trap is unavailable to Carnap. I then argue that Carnap avoids the trap altogether by reorienting the aims of philosophical inquiry. The objection, I suggest, rests on a mischaracterization of Carnap’s project as positing a metasemantic theory rather than offering a proposal for how philosophical inquiry should proceed. By denying that his position is intended as a theoretical refutation of rival views, Carnap dissolves the appearance of self-defeat. I conclude that Carnap’s response offers a general model for metaphilosophical deflation without collapse into self-defeat.

ABSTRACT. In Part IV of "The Logical Syntax of Language", Carnap develops the "General Syntax," formal methods applicable to any language, by taking consequence as the fundamental syntactic notion. This paper examines Carnap's neglected account of content-preserving translation, arguing that it reflects his inferentialist conception of content, where the content of a sentence is identified with the set of its non-analytical consequences. Carnap's exchange with Ajdukiewicz illuminates this inferentialist commitment, as Ajdukiewicz's broader, more pragmatic inferentialism generates a rival notion of translation that Carnap explicitly rejects. I distinguish three roles translation plays in Carnap's programme. (1) It explicates translation between natural and formal languages and the shift from the material to the formal mode of speech. (2) It serves as a metatheoretical tool for transferring results about decidability and consistency, partly anticipating Tarski's later work on relative interpretation. (3) It underpins an innovative translational account of modelhood for axiomatic systems.

ABSTRACT. I argue that Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation is best understood in the context of mid-twentieth-century American structural linguistics rather than as a purely abstract philosophical doctrine. Quine’s rejection of meanings and his behaviourist approach to language, closely parallel the methodological commitments of Bloomfieldian structuralism—especially descriptivism, anti-mentalism, and the exclusion of semantics from core linguistic theory. His famous scenario of radical translation mirrors fieldwork practices in American comparative linguistics, particularly Pike’s “monolingual method,” which relied on observable stimulus–response patterns. Key Quinean notions, such as stimulus meaning, resemble Bloomfield’s behaviourally defined account of meaning. The indeterminacy thesis reinforces Quine’s critique of meanings as theoretical entities, while echoing structuralist scepticism about semantics. Although later rendered unfashionable by Chomskyan generative linguistics and formal semantics, Quine’s views emerge as a philosophically refined expression of once-dominant linguistic methodology rather than an isolated position.

ABSTRACT. Hilary Putnam is famous for defending semantic externalism (SE)—the view that meaning depends partly on a speaker’s physical environment—while rejecting metaphysical realism (MR), the idea that thought is answerable to a world independent of our conceptual activity. A central question is whether this combination of views is stable. I begin by examining Sandford Goldberg’s argument that SE naturally commits one to a form of MR, and reject Tim Button’s response to this claim. I then consider a more recent attempt to vindicate Putnam’s position by Jussi Haukioja and Daniel Cohnitz, who argue that one can endorse SE while cleaving to semantic meta-internalism, rejecting MR. I argue that although this combination is logically possible, given what we can reasonably expect to learn about our dispositions to judge cases—the basis of semantic claims, according to meta-internalism—any apparent support for SE would presuppose a tacit commitment to MR.

ABSTRACT. The relationship between metaphysics and the philosophy of language is often strained, especially in linguistically oriented approaches such as Amy Thomasson’s Rethinking Metaphysics. This paper examines that tension from a metasemantic perspective and asks to what extent Thomasson’s deflationary conclusions threaten metaphysics as such. Drawing on Burgess and Sherman’s distinction between metasemantic projects, it is argued that basic metasemantics is intrinsically committed to metaphysical explanations and is therefore particularly vulnerable to deflationism, whereas certain theories of meaning allow for non-metaphysical accounts, such as use theories. The paper contends that the strongest deflationary consequences of Rethinking Metaphysics arise from its focus on linguistic functions rather than use. In response, it suggests a Brandomian vocabulary-based theory of meaning, which treats vocabularies as normative, holistic units and enables a more flexible and constructive metasemantic approach to metaphysical discourse.

ABSTRACT. Metametasemantics, proposed by Theodore Sider in his Writing the Book of the World (2011) to resolve indeterminacy of reference problem, is typically framed within a realist semantics that posits semantic facts. According to Sider, metametasemantics privileges reference magnetism, which prefers more “natural” metasemantic theories, which are “craving nature at its joints”. This talk challenges the assumption that metametasemantics applies only to semantic realism. I first argue that the indeterminacy problem (via Putnam’s Model-Theoretic Argument) relies on an untenable scheme-content dualism. I then propose expanding the metametasemantic framework to include anti-realist, non-factualist approaches – where meaning is governed by norms, not facts. Using Davidsonian triangulation as an example, I outline a view where meaning is partially determined through intersubjective experience and communicative negotiation, offering a coherent anti-realist metametasemantics.

ABSTRACT. I examine Williams' 'powerful persistence' account: an object persists iff later object stages are the manifestations of powers exercised by earlier ones. I raise six problems: it is limited to physically fundamental entities; endurantists may reject or not invoke object stages; persistence can also be caused by parts or by entities in the environment; manifestations need not be power instances; it is committed to powers whose exercise does not result in any change and to power instances' causing their own subsequent existence. I propose alternative characterizations of powerful persistence, endurance and perdurance, based on the following: an entity can persist from t to an immediately subsequent time t’ iff it and/or something numerically distinct has the power at t to cause its existence at t'. Finally, I face three objections.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I present Noneist Five-Dimensionalism, a metaphysical theory that addresses the problem of modal persistence. According to this view, ordinary objects are five-dimensional, nonexistent entities that have distinct modal parts at different possible worlds, while only their actual modal parts exist. I provide formal semantics for the theory, demonstrating that it is a valid alternative to Transworld Identity and Counterpart Theory. Through the formal semantics, I resolve the two major problems of Five-dimensionalism: its unintelligibility and its alleged extravagant ontological commitment. In doing so, I introduce an original treatment of quantification.

ABSTRACT. This paper compares two non-classical approaches to future contingents: supervaluationism (paracomplete) and subvaluationism (paraconsistent). Both reject bivalence in order to account for an open future, either by allowing truth-value gaps or truth-value gluts. The paper first outlines the standard supervaluationist framework based on branching-time models and discusses the objection from retrospective assessments, according to which supervaluationism conflates truth with necessity. It is argued that this objection rests on a temporal ambiguity and can be answered by distinguishing the propositions evaluated at different times.

The paper then develops a branching-time version of subvaluationism and examines a parallel objection from retrospective assessments. A structurally analogous reply is offered. Finally, the paper connects both approaches to Geach’s thesis of a mutable future, arguing that resolving indeterminacy involves a radical kind of change that does not allow for the simultaneous recovery of pre- and post-resolution perspectives.

ABSTRACT. The work aims at bringing conceptual clarity over the notions of efficacy, effectiveness, and efficiency of law. It claims that efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency are conceptually independent notions and factually independent properties of law: in the account I present, the first concerns compliance with the law; the second the achievement of legal purposes; the third the legal allocation of economic resources. As a consequence, there can be law that is wanting in one or more of these respects. For instance, there can be law that is efficacious but neither effective nor efficient, or law that is efficacious and effective but not efficient. In particular, the work focuses on some such misalignments and on different notions of efficiency of law. All of this helps see different problems that can affect the law, and how to fix them.

ABSTRACT. I wish to address the problem of whether our legal concepts and corresponding legal terms successfully preserve institutional identity across different legal systems and cultures. I’ll start by illustrating the problem through an analogy with the controversy about the semantic stability of the theoretical terms of scientific theories. Were e.g. Newton and Einstein talking about the same thing when they employed the term ‘mass’ in their theories? I’ll argue that a surprisingly similar problem arises when we discuss apparent identity of legal institution of ‘ownership’ in English or ‘所有权’ in Chinese law. I will discuss notions of legal transplants, irritants and transfers and generalize concerns about them to legal institutions in general so as to stress importance of specific legal consciousness of citizens and officials in reconstructing content of legal concepts. I conclude that ‘sameness’ in legal discourse is based on normative rather than descriptive conditions.

ABSTRACT. In „Law’s Empire” (1986) Ronald Dworkin famously rejected “criterial semantics” for manifold reasons (theoretical disagreements, antirealism, problems with semantic criteria, evaluative character of legal terms etc.). In this paper we will scrutinize Dworkin’s attack on criterial semantics. After summarizing the current state of the debate, we argue, that Dworkin’s claim that so-called pre-interpretive theories (like a „naive” version of positivistic theory) rely on such semantics is wrongheaded and spreads misunderstanding regarding their theoretical commitments. Dworkin’s picture is inadequate (with the exception of strictly formalist theories of interpretation). Moreover, he fails to provide a satisfactory interpretive theory himself, for his account of „fit” and “justification” is too vague to provide adequate (truth-) conditions for legal propositions. We will focus on the corollaries and relation between pre-interpretive, interpretive and post-interpretive stages of interpretation. While concluding, we will also track certain „criterial” elements in Dworkin’s own version of interpretivism.

ABSTRACT. This paper challenges the prevailing "content-delivery" accounts of mental action by analyzing Vimalakīrti’s silence through the lens of Tiantai philosopher Zhiyi. While contemporary analytic philosophers (e.g., Strawson, Peacocke, Mele) generally converge on the view that mental actions must involve the fostering or delivery of mental content, the Buddhist meditative state of "noble silence" suggests a robust category of mental action defined by the intentional removal of content and the cessation of discursive proliferation. By examining Zhiyi’s taxonomy of "Noble Silence" as a form of self-cultivation (zi-xing), I argue that silence is not a mere absence of speech or a logical paradox, but an embodied mental action with specific pedagogical and normative functions. Using John Cage’s 4’33" as a heuristic device, this paper demonstrates how meditative silence functions as a performative instruction, ultimately proposing that current analytic definitions of "trying" and "intentionality" must be expanded to accommodate content-reductive mental actions.

ABSTRACT. Religious seekers are people inspired by more than one religious and wisdom tradition without committing exclusively to any one of them. Religious seeking is found among Spiritual But Not Religoius (SBNR), Multiple Religious Belongers (MRB), and various liberal faith traditions. This paper offers a proper account of this type of faith position. Following the method of constructive theology of Gordon Kaufman, the faith of religious seekers is described in six steps of faith, covering their conception of ethics, religious interest, spiritual growth, truth, and religious diversity. These steps lead from an agnostic starting point to a well-considered religious seeker position. Key ingredients in this theology are an aim for instability, that is, leaving as much as possible open without becoming incoherent, and a new approach to religious diversity based on Nicholas Rescher's treatment of aporia, which I coin antinomical pluralism.

ABSTRACT. Reilly (2023) raises two challenges to no-norm theism, the view that God is not subject to moral norms. First, no-norm theists cannot appeal to inductive arguments for theism, which presuppose divine moral goodness. Second, no-norm theists lack reason to think that God would not create a world where all its inhabitants are systematically deceived. Both challenges stem from the same concern: no-norm theism seems unable to generate predictions about the kind of world God would create. To meet both challenges, no-norm theists need a principle that allows predictions about creation while remaining non-normative. I argue that the doctrine of the imago Dei fulfills this role. Properly understood, it is non-normative and enables no-norm theists to employ the inductive arguments for theism in question and to predict that rational creatures created by an omniscient God can acquire knowledge and therefore are not inhabitants of a world, where they are systematically deceived.

ABSTRACT. Representations are a central conceit of the mind and brain sciences. The part of representations that can be observed, manipulated and bear a functional profile is the vehicle of the representation. The current lack of attention dedicated to vehicles is problematic because, despite no account of what such vehicles are, their nature and reality are taken for granted in philosophical theorizing about representations. This symposium aims to (partially) amend this situation by making some preliminary steps in the philosophical analysis of representational vehicles. In particular, we will investigate how representational vehicles are identified - both metaphysically (1st talk) and epistemically (2nd talk) - and theorize about the kinds of vehicles that can be found in a variety of systems, from simple biological agents (3rd talk) to our neurocognitive apparatus (4th talk). The symposium promises to bring about fruitful philosophical analyses about representational vehicles

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes Transformative Experience (TE) by Paul [2014] through the Deprivation Account of Death (Nagel; Feldman). While Das and Paul [2020] suggest TEs are not bad by drawing an analogy to the Non-Identity Problem, arguing they involve a new future self with distinct values, I contend that TEs are prudentially bad for the present self. By framing the dissolution of the present self as analogous to death, I argue that TE deprives the pre-transformative self of its future trajectory. I formalize the Deprivation Thesis for TE : Self-dissolution is bad if it deprives the original self of a future that would have been on balance good. Using the case of Mary the scientist, I conclude that resistance to TE is a rational impulse to avoid metaphysical death. Ultimately, the normativity of choice must account for the present self’s loss, moving beyond the multi-self frameworks of Pettigrew [2020].

ABSTRACT. The Principle of Maximizing Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) faces a severe challenge: infectious incomparability. Even minimal credence in moral incomparabilism – the view that some options lack any fact of the matter about their relative value – renders MEC inapplicable, since any credence multiplied by an undefined value is undefined. This paper proposes a Threshold View to address this problem. The core intuition is that incomparability, at least for local incomparability, has a threshold-like structure: small differences between options are blocked by incomparabilist doubt, but sufficiently large differences override it. Drawing on Wilhelm's Typical Principle, I argue that comparabilist theories provide a "dataset" of value differences, from which we can derive a context-sensitive benchmark representing the typical scale of differences. The threshold is then calculated as a function of benchmark and the agent's credence in incomparabilism, allowing MEC to proceed even under incomparabilist uncertainty.

ABSTRACT. Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958) is often read as a polemic against consequentialism or a call to revive virtue ethics. This paper instead focuses on a constructive account of absolute prohibitions implicit in her work, arguing that they function as logoi: deliberation-constitutive constraints that exclude certain act-descriptions from just practical reasoning altogether. This interpretation addresses a central tension in modern moral philosophy: if practical reasoning is essentially deliberative and outcome-sensitive, how can some actions be ruled out in advance, and how can claims of intrinsic injustice retain their intelligibility if no option is absolutely excluded?

The paper proceeds in four stages. First, it outlines the consequentialist challenge to intrinsic injustice as diagnosed by Anscombe. Second, it develops her account of absolute prohibitions as exclusions from practical deliberation. Third, it analyses their heterogeneous rationales. Finally, it shows how logoi-constraints ground the structure of just practical reasoning, resisting consequentialist collapse into outcome-optimisation.

ABSTRACT. Mary, we tend to suppose, doesn’t know what it’s like to see red in her black-and-white room. Call the knowledge that she supposedly lacks "phenomenal knowledge" of red. How should this knowledge be understood? I consider and reject three proposals: one that focuses on a connection between phenomenal knowledge of red and experiences of red; a second that focuses on a connection between phenomenal knowledge of red and ability to imagine red; and a third that focuses on a connection between phenomenal knowledge of red and ability to recognise red. I then advance an alternative “phenomenal knowledge-first” approach, which does not seek to explain phenomenal knowledge in more primitive terms but instead takes this knowledge as a primitive and seeks to explain other things – including imaginative and recognitional abilities – in terms of it and to thereby cast light both on those other things and on phenomenal knowledge itself.

ABSTRACT. Phenomenal structuralism states that the phenomenal character of an experience is exhaustively determined by its relations to other experiences. On a metaphysical reading, it claims that phenomenal character is relational by its very nature. A recent objection against this view is the Lonely Experience Argument: metaphysical phenomenal structuralism is committed to the claim that a system with a single experience is impossible. Yet such a system is conceivable, and therefore phenomenal structuralism is false. I will argue that this objection relies on an unwarrantedly occurrentist construal of the relevant relations. Phenomenal structuralism need not treat phenomenal character as fixed by relations among actually instantiated experiences, but rather by relations to mere possible experiences. Assuming that phenomenal state spaces are fixed by the cognitive and sensory architecture, metaphysical phenomenal structuralism can even provide a positive account for lonely experience scenarios.

ABSTRACT. Abstract: I introduce the notion of a phenomenal schema (PS): an amodal cognitive structure that organizes what experiences feel like, enabling us to grasp phenomenal character without undergoing the corresponding state. PSs are distinct from embodied sensorimotor schemas, from access consciousness, and from emotion labeling. They arise through cross-modal correspondences among dimensions such as valence, intensity, and temporal dynamics, which structure similarity across modalities. This explains how we recognize sadness in music or guilt in a face without undergoing the corresponding feeling. Neuroscientific distinctions between bodily regulation and integrative cortical processes support the PS as a relatively autonomous level of experiential organization.

ABSTRACT. We argue that widespread inferences from brain-model alignment (BMA) to algorithmic or computational similarity (ACS), which are widespread in contemporary research in computational neuroscience, rest on a shaky epistemology of confirmation. BMA, understood as representational similarity between artificial neural networks and human brains, is often taken to evidence shared computational structure. However, we contend that this sort of inference is fallacious, partly because it affirms the consequent. Our argument is further supported by the fact that alignment is multiply realizable. Against the backdrop of standard philosophies of science such as Popperian falsificationism, hypothetico-deductivism, and epistemic holism, BMA results at best fail to falsify ACS. We conclude that, while BMA may be probative for comparative model selection, it is insufficient on its own for grounding many of the claims we find in the literature which connect alignment to shared algorithmic structure.

ABSTRACT. The distinction between personal and subpersonal levels of explanation plays a central role in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. However, there is persistent disagreement about how these levels are related. This issue—often referred to as the interface problem—is commonly framed as a contrast between autonomist and functionalist approaches. Zoe Drayson has influentially argued that only functionalist approaches provide a genuine account of the personal/subpersonal distinction, while autonomist approaches misuse the terminology in ways that depart from Daniel Dennett’s original motivation for introducing it. In this paper, I challenge this claim by revisiting Dennett’s original discussion of the distinction. I argue that, for Dennett, personal-level constructs can sometimes be autonomous from subpersonal explanation, sometimes be functionally implemented at the subpersonal level, and sometimes be revised in light of subpersonal considerations. I illustrate this by examining Dennett’s treatment of (folk-)psychological concepts such as pain, reasons, and consciousness.

ABSTRACT. The semantic conception of theories claims that theoretical laws do not describe the world directly, but a family of structures, its models. I believe that this view stems from a confusion between two different meanings of "models": as what represents and what is represented. The distinction was acknowledged by early semanticists, but scientist's usage was dismissed in favour of the logical one, introducing a tension in the semantic view. Semanticists resolve it by assuming that models play different roles in theoretical and experimental activities. However, it makes more sense to view these activities as continuous. Semanticists can maintain that scientific representation is non-linguistic either because it is informal, pictorial or idealised, but I will argue that a linguistic account fares better than a structural one on all counts. In conclusion, I will explain how linguistic pragmatics could help account for the mediation role of models in theory application.

ABSTRACT. This presentation attempts to connect model‑based semantics (MBS) and conceptual engineering (CE). MBS treats semantic theories not as attempts to uncover metaphysical facts about meaning but as models for explicating linguistic behaviour, drawing on Quine’s behavioural evidentialism and Carnap’s explication. Once semantics is understood as modelling, the plurality of incompatible semantic frameworks becomes an instance of model pluralism rather than a metaphysical problem. MBS dissolves grounding worries, reframes indeterminacy as an expected feature of partial modelling, and interprets theoretical disagreement as a difference in modelling strategies. The presentation then turns to CE, which evaluates and improves concepts according to theoretical and practical aims. I argue that MBS provides a metasemantic rationale for CE: if semantic theories are models, conceptual revision is a continuation of modelling practice. A case study on autonomy illustrates how pluralism about a concept enables targeted conceptual redesign. Together, MBS and CE yield a unified, practice‑oriented metaphilosophy.

ABSTRACT. This paper contributes to recent discussions concerning functions in conceptual engineering (CE). It does so by evaluating a recent proposal by Amie Thomasson according to which Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) represents a good starting point for analysing linguistic function. In this paper I show that Thomasson’s proposal is inadequate for the framework of CE because it does not satisfy three desiderata for a theory of function: the function/accident distinction, the normativity of function, and the unification desideratum. It is also vulnerable to the Relevance Question. I propose an alternative forward-looking goal-contribution theory of function and address key objections to such theories raised by Aneta Zuber. I conclude that a goal-contribution theory satisfies the three desiderata, the Relevance Question, and is able to answer key objections. It therefore represents a strong contender for a theory of function for CE.

ABSTRACT. Suspension of belief is often conceived as a third stance, distinct from belief and disbelief. On the privativist view, to suspend belief with respect to a proposition p is to neither believe p nor believe not-p. Drawing on Sextus Empiricus’ characteristic negative self-ascriptive skeptical phrases such as “I don’t know…”, this conception has recently been challenged (Dunphy 2023). According to the argument from skeptical phrases, suspension must be a positive, contentful mental state. This paper defends privativism by diagnosing a mistaken assumption underlying this argument: (dis-)avowal descriptivism, the view that negative mental state self-ascriptions are ordinary assertions reporting facts about the speaker’s mental life. Drawing on expressivist accounts of (negative) avowals, I argue that skeptical phrases are better understood as explicit expressive acts that manifest doxastic neutrality rather than describe the contents of beliefs. Properly analysed, the linguistic expression of suspension supports, rather than undermines, the privativist conception.

ABSTRACT. We often have reasons for our beliefs, and when asked why we believe that p, we may respond with a first-person “because”-utterance of the form: “I believe that p because q.” The fact that the agent cites q itself—rather than the belief that q—has been taken to show that the operative reason for a doxastic state is not a propositional attitude but a fact or proposition, in this case q. On this basis, first-person reason-giving has been thought to support anti-psychologism. This paper re-examines that argument and challenges its conclusion. We argue that the reason-giving use of “because” does not describe explanatory relations between propositions or facts. Rather, it functions expressively, indicating basing relations between attitudes. Once this expressive role is acknowledged, the linguistic data appealed to by anti-psychologists no longer support a non-psychological ontology of epistemic reasons. Instead, they fit more naturally within a psychologistic account.

ABSTRACT. The discrepancy between people’s actions and their explicit convictions has been typically interpreted as a result of implicit cognition. However, the nature of the implicit mental states is still poorly understood. This paper is an attempt to redirect the focus of the debate to so-called explicit beliefs. I will argue that at least in some cases, what people report as their beliefs are not beliefs at all, but williefs — complex belief-like attitudes towards propositions, which a person may be justified in accepting, but which are not sufficiently well integrated in their belief system to guide behaviour. In other words, williefs are propositions that we want to and have a good reason to, but nevertheless fail to believe. I will argue that the existence of williefs helps to explain a whole range of phenomena related to biased decisions, susceptibility to implicit messaging, and virtue signalling.

ABSTRACT. Logic is commonly regarded as neutral. Although this neutrality is not always explicitly articulated or defended, it is often assumed to be one of its typical traits: for instance, since logic is supposed to be neutral on substantial issues, it is traditionally seen as an impartial arbiter in extralogical disputes. Classic accounts of the neutrality of logic include topic-neutrality and ontological neutrality. A third way of understanding neutrality concerns logic's instrumental character, related to the traditional conception of logic as an organon, that is, a neutral tool for theorizing. In this talk, I present an account devoted to capturing this aspect of logic's neutrality, discussing various logics that model it in different ways. The guiding idea is to understand logic's neutrality in theory building in terms of mere theory closure, further specifying what a neutral logic should not do and what it should do.

ABSTRACT. Richard Rorty once said that “[Donald] Davidson's work seems to me the culmination of a line of thought in American philosophy which aims at being naturalistic without being reductionist."

Davidson’s naturalism rests on two claims – one to the effect that people’s motivating reasons causally explain their intentional actions, another to the effect that the contents of people’s basic motivating reasons are fixed by their typical causes. Davidson’s non-reductionism rests on his understanding of these processes – on how he thinks people’s intentional actions are causally explained by their motivating reasons, and how he thinks the typical causes of people’s basic motivating reasons come to by typical.

My claim is that Davidson’s broadly Humean views about causality lead him to underestimate the obstacles confronting his non-reductionism, and that, pace Rorty, the culmination of this line of thought is therefore still some way off.

ABSTRACT. It might appear that the logical empiricists had little to say about the self, beyond their verificationist claim that the postulation of a non-empirical ‘metaphysical self’ is meaningless rather than merely false. But this is wrong. I will show this by presenting various logical empiricist views about the scientific concept of self, to be explained against the background of the physicalism debate. I will discuss the following arguments having in common that they all utilize telepathy scenarios (perhaps a suprising subject for logical empiricists): (1) Carnap’s (1932b) argument from telepathy for physicalism, i.e. that psychological statements must be formulated in physical language; (2) Schlick’s (1936) argument to the opposing view that phenomenal language is intersubjective, hence a phenomenal concept of self is also meaningful; (3) Ayer’s (1940) and Reichenbach’s (1938) views on the meaning of telepathic observation reports, and the notion of self in counterfactual situations where telepathy is real.

ABSTRACT. Traditional approaches to the normativity of assertion draw a sharp line between epistemic and pragmatic norms. The former uphold standards such as truth, knowledge, and evidential support, whereas the latter uphold standards such as relevance, clarity, and manner. This article challenges that picture. Focusing on Grice’s (1975; 1989) conversational maxims as a canonical articulation of the epistemology-pragmatics divide, I argue that there are genuine epistemic norms captured by all Gricean maxims, not just Quality, as is standardly assumed. To reach this conclusion, I draw on familiar resources for theorising both about epistemic normativity in general and the epistemic normativity of assertion in particular. If I’m right, the upshot is significant: the boundary between epistemic and pragmatic normativity must be reconsidered, as the two domains are far more tightly intertwined than has hitherto been assumed.

ABSTRACT. The notion of a conversational common ground is central to contemporary pragmatics. Building on Stalnaker’s account, Seth Yalcin characterizes common ground in terms of common knowledge of what is accepted, and introduces the notion of "conversational tone" to explain why common knowledge functions as its default setting. This paper argues that this treatment of common ground and conversational tone has both normative and descriptive problems, and argues for an alternative. My proposal treats acceptance as the foundational attitude grounding common ground, and reconceives conversational tone as a higher-order expectation governing how acceptance is to be interpreted epistemically. This approach allows for a separation between common ground and common knowledge, accommodates cases of divergent epistemic attitudes among speakers who share presuppositions, and avoids problematic commitments to iterated knowledge. I conclude by developing an account of acceptance as a context-sensitive policy of action, supporting a joint-action conception of conversation.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this talk is to explore a novel case that problematizes word individuation and complicates the relationship between words and languages, and in the process, contributes to the discussion surrounding the metaphysics of words. Imagine a possible world that mirrors ours in every way, much like Twin Earth might. In this other world, everything is the same, except that instead of English, there is a phonemically distinct language, which is otherwise identical to English in terms of its syntax and semantics, and has a congruent lexis and morphology. Now imagine that a new term is coined in both worlds, and that this new expression has the same phonetic form in both, meaning they are effectively identical. This case allows us to address the issue of whether this is one word that appears in two languages, broaching issues of individuation along with the possibility of transworld identities involving types.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that there is grounding indeterminacy: it is sometimes indeterminate what grounds what, or whether a grounding relation obtains. I distinguish this claim from others that may go under the label of grounding indeterminacy, such as the failure of full grounds to metaphysically necessitate what they ground, or grounding involving vague entities. I develop cases of grounding indeterminacy with different structures, including cases in which all the relevant facts determinately obtain but the direction of grounding is unsettled, and cases in which it is indeterminate which of a plurality of possible grounds obtains, and therefore which grounding relation obtains. Drawing on a methodological analogy with causation and recent work on causal indeterminacy, I argue that grounding is sometimes indeterminate without incurring some of the difficulties that causal indeterminacy faces. I further maintain that this indeterminacy is worldly, and that introducing it into our metaphysical toolkit is theoretically fruitful.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I argue that the notion of metaphysical ground forms an irreconcilable tension with qualitativism. Roughly speaking, qualitativism is the view that fundamental reality does not contain facts about particulars, but only facts about relational qualities. Qualitativism’s most important recent defender, Shamik Dasgupta, aims to ground facts about individuals in facts about qualities. However, he points out that ground and qualitativism seem to clash because the two notions face a dilemma: the qualitative facts will either fail to necessitate or fail to be explanatorily relevant to their groundees. I will argue that Dasgupta’s proposed solution to this dilemma fails because it amounts to the introduction of two distinct grounding-relations which fail to logically chain. I will then broaden this conclusion and argue that this tension is not merely a problem for Dasgupta’s specific proposal but reflects a structural incompatibility between grounding and radically relational ontologies.

ABSTRACT. Public non-compliance with expert-led policies is typically framed as a trust deficit or communication failure. I argue that such framings miss an epistemic dimension: the systematic dismissal of the public's epistemic agency. When institutions demand compliance based solely on epistemic deference, they fail to engage with the normative choices embedded in policy recommendations, choices that the public is fully equipped to evaluate but rarely has access to.

Drawing on Elizabeth Anderson's distinction between local knowledge (LK) and general/scientific knowledge (GK), I propose a relational analysis of non-compliance as an interface failure between these epistemic domains. The novelty lies in reconceptualising compliance not as a problem of trust or information deficit, but as requiring bidirectional understanding: institutions need to make value trade-offs explicit and transparent, while learning from publics' local knowledge about how general policies function in particular contexts. This reframes understanding as the epistemic good that democratic coordination requires.

ABSTRACT. This article develops and defends a normative account of deliberative journalism as the form of journalism best suited to deliberative democracy. Drawing on the work of deliberative scholars from different fields, it argues that journalism’s core function is to promote high-quality democratic deliberation—an obligation captured by what I refer to as the general duty of deliberative gatekeeping. The article then identifies three more specific duties that deliberative journalists should honour to fulfil this function: first, the duty to set a deliberative agenda, which requires focusing on issues worth being deliberated about by citizens qua citizens; second, the duty to explain those issues; and third, the duty to actively promote public reasoning about them. Finally, the article identifies and addresses five lines of criticism of this ideal, which concern: its compatibility with deliberative democracy, freedom of speech, conceptual consistency, excessive rationalism, and the journalistic standards of neutrality and objectivity.

ABSTRACT. Scientific understanding arises through reasoning and practices, guided by a plurality of methods, and forms of representations. Visual representations provide orientation essential for understanding, participating in social processes and transformation. In so-called post-factual spaces, they play a central role in the formation of beliefs, as they extend beyond a factual-propositional level and contain affective and suggestive elements. In this paper we will critically discuss the potentials and challenges of “visual thinking and argumentation”, involving text-image combinations, as a method of systematic scientific representation and knowledge transfer in postfactual societies. This is based on Neurath’s concepts of visual education and recent discussions in philosophy and the sciences, in particular Elgin’s account of “felicitous falsehoods”. The aim is to demonstrate how such forms of information transfer not only promote better and deeper understanding, but can also, if successful, transform knowledge transfer in the public sphere and at the political level.

ABSTRACT. According to Christian doctrine, the resurrection of bodies requires that a person be the identical body one had in earthly life. This raises a metaphysical problem concerning the persistence of material substances over time. Late medieval philosophers held that persistence over time involves having essential properties at each time. William of Ockham, however, endorses mereological essentialism according to which a material substance is identical to the sum of its essential parts, accordingly, there cannot be numerical identity with discernible essential parts. I argue that, given these commitments, Ockham denies that material substances persist over time, and consequently that bodily numerical identity is preserved in resurrection. This is because, for Ockham, what grounds eternal reward is the persistence of the soul as principle of moral agency.

ABSTRACT. According to Intentionalism the nature of artifacts is explained in terms of the intentions of their original makers. Although it is the most extended position, there are different criticism of it. In the present work we will analyse a recent criticism made it by Koslicki (2023) focusing on the overestimation of makers about their productive power, specifically with religious artifacts that never will be able to perform the intention of their original maker. The aim will be to dismantle the Koslicki’s criticism by offering different responses that Intentionalism could offer to the criticism and showing how in fact the essence of religious artifacts is explained by maker’s intentions.

ABSTRACT. It has been argued that the concept of religion is the result of modern western imperialism. This is contradicted by evidence that non-modern and non-western imperialists shared our concept of religion. One response would be to treat religion as a natural kind, having an essence. However it is argued that this implies the false conclusion that some religions are pure and others, being more political, are impure. The solution is to treat religion as a historical kind (using Millikan’s classification of kinds), something that is produced in a certain way. The implications of adopting this classification of the concept of religion for debates about essentialism are explored.

ABSTRACT. What is an adequate concept of empathy and how can we apply it to humans, nonhuman animals and AI systems? Maibom argues for a holistic approach to empathy. Since empathy is typically coming as a mixed bag of many feelings, we cannot do with simply understanding one element of it. Thus, she defends a holistic embedding of empathy. The second question is how we can fruitfully distinguish different types of empathy. Griem proposes a classification which is inspired by theories in developmental psychology. She starts to discuss whether the proposed types of empathy can also be found in nonhuman animals. She highlights the limits of the developmental perspective. Therefore, Newen proposes a multidimensional account of empathy to adequately integrate animal behavior (a case of helping behavior in rats); furthermore he outlines how this framework can also be fruitfully used to investigate empathy in humans, nonhuman animals and in AI systems.

ABSTRACT. Over the last fifteen years, the philosophy of risk has emerged as a rapidly expanding domain at the intersection of epistemology, decision theory, ethics, and the philosophy of science. Its growing significance is reflected in an increasing body of publications, dedicated journal initiatives, and the emergence of research centers and projects across Europe. The proposed symposium brings together principal investigators, senior researchers, and members of four major European projects in the field: “SAFER” at Politecnico di Milano, “DeEP” at IUSS Pavia, “Metaphysics, Ethics, and Epistemology of Risk” at the University of Helsinki, and the recently concluded “Varieties of Risk” at the University of Stirling and the University of Edinburgh. The aim of this symposium is to advance our theoretical understanding of the concept of risk and its application, while also mapping the key directions of contemporary European philosophical research in this area.

ABSTRACT. This paper first develops a novel objection to metanormative constructivism. Second, it proposes a dual-role account of practical reason and argues that it can meet this objection. Constructivists like Korsgaard and Street maintain that normativity is constructed within agents’ first-personal practical standpoints, shaped by their evaluative input. Valuing is prior to, and metaphysically grounds, value. However, a basic feature of our normative experience is that our evaluative judgements also respond to pre-existing normative facts. Thus, evaluative commitments appear to play two seemingly contradictory roles – creating and responding to normative reality. This tension forms the basis of my Duality Objection. I respond in two steps. First, I show how constructivists can reconcile their metaphysical commitments with agents’ normative experiences by distinguishing between first- and third-personal levels of explanation. Second, I develop a Korsgaardian dual-role account, which elucidates the passive-responsive and active-creative roles that practical reason plays within agents’ first-personal standpoint.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to clarify some key questions in metanormative theory regarding the nature of normative reality and the structure of normative explanation, and to outline some theoretical options addressing them. These questions concern the way the normative realm is structured, how its domains relate to each other, the nature of the normative force they possess, and whether there exists an ultimate notion of authority – of what ought to be the case simpliciter, or all things considered. To do so, I first develop an account of the distinction between formal and authoritative normativity, and then I use it to raise some neglected questions, to systematize existing theories, and to introduce some novel views worthy of serious consideration.

ABSTRACT. Ostensibly the debate between weight monists and weight pluralists concerns whether normative reasons have a single or multiple weight values. Monism is the default view, but pluralism -- which comes in different forms -- has been gaining traction due to its promise to resolve various puzzles in ethics. This paper aims to explore the underlying structure of both kinds of views using the logic of reasons in the tradition of Horty (2012). Building on existing work, which in effect captures different kinds of pluralist view, the paper develops a general framework that brings out the structure of monism and pluralism. In it, these views are understood in terms of functions they associate with reasons. Monism emerges as saying that all reasons invariably have three functions, whereas pluralism as denying this, subject to principled constraints. This reframes the debate and reveals unexpected affinities between pluralism and the more sophisticated monist views.

ABSTRACT. I offer a general theory of agency. I argue that the capacity for agency is the capacity to guide a process towards an end. This theory is broad enough to capture a wide range of agential phenomena (both intentional and nonintentional). Thus, it does not suffer from the limitations of some other theories found in the literature that I identify (specifically, causal history, trying, and settling accounts). The theory of agency is broadly causal. A neo-Aristotelian metaphysic of powers is recruited to flesh out how the synchronic guidance of a process by an agent is a causal process. I compare the guidance theory to causal history, trying, and settling theories. I argue that the guidance theory can capture a wider range of agential phenomena than either a causal history or a trying account, and that we settle whether p by guiding a process, making guidance more fundamental than settling.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I offer an analysis of cases involving deviant causal chains. Such cases are usually presented as counterexamples to causal theories of action. The core of such theories can be understood as an account of action explanations according to which they express some kind of causal relation. The analysis developed in this paper links the occurrence of examples with deviant causal chains to a difference in the transitivity of ‘because’ and ‘cause’. While ‘cause’ is transitive, ‘because’ is not. This difference allows causal relations to be inferred for which there is no corresponding inference on the side of ‘because’. In this way, examples with deviant causal chains can occur which are characterized by intact causal chains but broken explanatory connections. According to this analysis, every theory of action that holds that action explanations express some kind of causal relation should be subject to counterexamples involving deviant causal chains.

ABSTRACT. Standard theories of reasons for action—from Davidson to Alvarez—struggle with forward-looking action in discovery and enterprise contexts. Because their normativity derives from the present (facts, beliefs, obligations), they struggle to explain when conjectures about novel futures are rationally warranted. When SpaceX pursued reusable rockets against aerospace consensus, its reasoning relied on conjectures about possibility spaces and search conditions that could not be validated by facts. Similarly, theories of future-directed action or theory-based view of economic actors, lack the resources to epistemically distinguish such cases from mere delusion. An informational theory of reasons addresses this gap by grounding reasons in actionable data. It introduces normative conditional reasons that epistemically support both departure points and future-oriented conjectures under uncertainty. Combined with familiar distinctions, the theory explains how warranted conjectures differ from delusions. Unlike standard approaches, this theory targets methodological soundness when conjectures deserve to count as normative reasons.

ABSTRACT. The concept of multispecies poses epistemological challenges for classifying lineages that do not fit traditional species concepts. This paper explores these challenges through the case of Messor ibericus, an ant that gives rise to two distinct species. First, we compare the multispecies concept with paradigmatic species concepts, assessing their respective limitations and the types of evidence they incorporate. Second, we examine M. ibericus alongside other cases of ecological integration and mutualism to delineate the contexts in which the multispecies concept is most applicable. Based on this analysis and considering its role in guiding research programs and its key function in taxonomic classification, we provide a solid epistemic justification for the multispecies concept.

ABSTRACT. Evolutionary Epistemology (EE) has so far struggled to reconcile its biological account of cognition with a robust form of epistemic realism. Specifically, latest proposals of EE have developed a relativistic framework, arguing that ideas such as the existence of a mind-independent reality should be left behind. In response, this paper defends the idea that these relativistic conclusions do not necessarily follow from current approaches to evolutionary theory. By exploring the notion of “experiential niche construction”, it concludes that, while a classical realistic response (i.e., a God-like point of view) is indeed not compatible with the current biological framework, other ways of approaching the realism debate leave room for a realistic response to the problem. To show this, the paper draws on contemporary approaches to the problem of scientific realism, stating that the strategies adopted in this literature can provide key insights to the future development of a realist EE.

ABSTRACT. Ignorance is lack of knowledge – or so dictionaries and standard theories in epistemology say. In recent years, however, some epistemologists have suggested deviating accounts that view ignorance, for instance, as lack of true belief or as lack of true belief or knowledge that issues from the violation of a duty to inquire. Against all these approaches, I will argue for a conception of ignorance that is both more useful for philosophical purposes as well as sufficiently close to the everyday meaning of 'ignorance' to earn the name. According to my conception, ignorance regarding a proposition is the lack of any justified doxastic attitude towards that proposition. Unlike its rivals, this conception of ignorance reflects a more nuanced understanding of suspension of belief, allows for a more internalist framework due to its emphasis on justification rather than truth, and is a more appropriate basis for deliberating normative aspects of ignorance.

ABSTRACT. The way we attribute ignorance to each other is often connected to normative considerations. By drawing on the different communicative functions that ignorance attributions (IAs) play in our epistemic practices, this paper aims at expanding the current understanding of the normativity of ignorance attributions and at illuminating how they can be used both as a tool of epistemic oppression and epistemic resistance. In §2 I first distinguish three broad communicative functions of IAs: (a) criticizing agents' epistemic performance, (b) assessing knowledge gaps and encouraging inquiry, and (c) flagging structural deficiencies in shared epistemic resources. I then proceed to show that not all these functions are aptly captured by the proposed Normative Account of Ignorance (Meylan 2020, 2024; Pritchard 2021 a, b). §4 draws upshots: this analysis enables a more comprehensive understanding of ignorance's normativity and explains how IAs can be both tools of epistemic oppression and resources for epistemic emancipation.

ABSTRACT. According to standard Epistemological Disjunctivism, in the most favorable circumstances, subjects have conclusive perceptual reasons that favor external-world propositions over skeptical hypotheses. While this strategy blocks the familiar underdetermination argument, it faces a novel iteration: although we normally cite states of seeing that p, we do not treat such reasons as ultimate grounds of perceptual knowledge. We treat them as the upshot of recognitional routines whose grounds are themselves underdetermined, which leads to a renewed skeptical challenge.

This paper sketches a solution to this iteration of the underdetermination argument. The key idea is to shift the grounds of perceptual justification from states such as seeing that p to the exercise of perceptual-recognitional competences. Competences are reliable dispositions whose constitutive transition principles need no further justification. If such competences can only be exercised in circumstances that are not completely unfavorable, their exercise favors propositions about external objects over radical skeptical hypotheses.

ABSTRACT. I argue that successfully using reasons requires appreciating their relevance. This holds both for using reasons to reach rational decisions and using reasons to form rational beliefs. While this idea is common, the requirement has never been fully defended in detail. This paper aims to do so. In particular, I will introduce common core cases that cannot be accounted for without invoking appreciation. It will be shown that potential alternative notions to appreciation, like knowledge, having reasons, grasping propositions, or Boghossian-style Taking, do not work. I will also tackle various objections to appreciation, for example that it is too demanding or that there seem to be counterexamples in which reasons are successfully used without appreciation. Since requiring appreciation is needed to account for certain core cases, alternatives are lacking and objections to it fail, appreciation indeed is required for successfully using reasons to obtain rational beliefs and make rational decisions.

ABSTRACT. A natural way to capture the insight that one can be rational even when systematically deceived, as in sceptic scenarios, is to understand epistemic rationality as responsiveness to apparent reasons (Kolodny 2005). While the most promising definition of this kind of reason comes from the Attraction Account (Sylvan 2015), it violates the principle that ought implies can (OIC). This is a big problem, given the role of rationality in assigning epistemic praise and blame. In this talk, I propose a revised version of the Attraction Account that respects OIC. I will prove that, on this new version, if an agent ought to φ in response to her apparent reasons, then she can do so. An important part of my argument here will rest on an interpretation of OIC according to which “A can φ” is interpreted as “A can form the intention to ψ, and ψ implies φ.”

ABSTRACT. Every time we face a choice and have to pick one from many alternatives, we deliberate and then act on a particular reason. But sometimes we are left with a lingering feeling of missing out on something and worry about the merits of the choice we did not make. This regret over the unchosen course of action, which shows the weight of defeated reasons, was called rational regret by Dancy. We are trying to show that this feeling of rational regret can be used as an epistemic tool to show not just moral particularism (as Dancy proposed) but also epistemic alternatives an agent has. The existence of this regret implies the existence of other viable alternative courses of action and thus can be used as an epistemic tool. In doing so, it situates rational regret within the broader framework of affective epistemology.

ABSTRACT. This paper revisits Hume’s account of arithmetic in the Treatise and connects his views on the topic with contemporary research on numerical cognition. According to Hume, our knowledge of number is rooted in (i) a natural capacity for quantity or set-size discrimination, and (ii) a standard of numerical equality based on the one-to-one correspondence between sets or collections. While the latter—now widely known as Hume’s Principle—has figured prominently in contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mathematics, Hume’s broader epistemological framework has received comparatively little attention, particularly his account of the limits of our natural numerical capacities and of how these limitations pave the way for the introduction of an exact standard of equality. This paper seeks to recover that framework and to reassess the epistemic status of Hume’s Principle against the background of his broader views, which align in striking ways with contemporary findings in cognitive science.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I will explore a notion of “weak impredicativity” (Gödel, 1970), and its potentially fruitful application in revising Frege’s Grundgesetze. This notion is today formalised via finitely stratified polimorphism (Leivant,1991), (Van Atten, 2016). I will suggest that this notion could inspire a consistent revision of Frege's system that is stronger than the predicativist subsystems developed so far, and able to derive a “weakly impredicative” version of Frege's arithmetic.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that two competing reasons for adopting or rejecting a mathematical innovation or discovery can be incommensurate in strength, meaning that there is no objective way to determine which should prevail. Historical case studies, such as the heated controversy between Kronecker and his followers and the emerging tendency toward abstraction, illustrate, in my view, the central role of rhetorical argumentation in guiding choices of action, even within a mathematical domain. Rhetorical resources are the means by which mathematicians attempt to gain the adherence of their community, especially when arguments rely on qualitatively different warrants. I think that a renewed philosophy of mathematical practice should provide a more nuanced picture of mathematical progress, replacing the traditional view of cumulative knowledge by considering it in relation to a shifting set of goals and values that are not always compatible nor consistently pursued.

ABSTRACT. The determinacy challenge constitutes one of the most forceful challenges to the feasibility of a naturalistically acceptable mathematical realism. It asks how a mathematical realist can claim to have achieved successful reference to intended mathematical structures in light of the existence of non-standard models of important mathematical theories. It then further argues that any attempt to overcome this issue entails immodesty — appeal to naturalistically unacceptable mechanisms of reference determination. Despite its frequent invocation in criticizing realist positions in the philosophy of mathematics central aspects of the challenge remain under-investigated. In this talk, I want to clarify the scope and force of the challenge: I argue that the mathematical realist has the resources to meet it in a naturalistically acceptable manner, allowing her to escape the vicious circularity her argument is often accused of. Nonetheless, the challenge puts into focus inherent limitations on what a moderate mathematical realism can achieve.

ABSTRACT. The core of the Neologicist foundation is the epistemological project of securing a priori knowledge of arithmetic from our a priori knowledge of second-order logic and Hume’s Principle (HP).

One of the most pressing challenges to this program is overgeneralisation challenge: The issue of whether whatever justification for HP generalises and justifies APs possibly incompatible with HP. Recently, Crispin Wright proposed that agents have an a priori warrant, an entitlement, to accept HP. This talk discusses whether the entitlement strategy avoids the overgeralisation challenge. We will show that mathematical entitlement is generous in the following way: Given two distinct abstractionist projects D and D′ employing two different, incompatible APs, AP1 and AP2, agents in D are prima facie entitled to accept AP1 and agents in D′ are entitled to accept AP2. We investigate the consequences of generosity for the abstractionist program.

ABSTRACT. Arbitrary objects play an important role in the mathematical and logical reasoning about generality. An arbitrary object is informally characterised as one that represents a class of individuals insofar as it exemplifies exactly the properties shared by all members of that class. This key principle for arbitrary objects is known as the Principle of Generic Attribution (PGA).

In this talk, we investigate various ways to formally capture the PGA and present a new version based on a typed hierarchy of arbitrary objects. This approach allows us to address well-known criticisms of the PGA and, more generally, of the notion of arbitrary objects.

ABSTRACT. It's well-known in literature that Frege distinguishes between the logical and the psychological act of judgment. Van der Schaar 2018 has recently reconstructed and defended Frege's logical-psychological dualism by appealing to the first-person and third-person perspectives. I aim to show that, despite the reconstruction, Frege's view is ultimately unfortified. Van der Schaar's supposedly singularized distinction between the first and third person is oversimplified. It conflates two sets of distinctions: one formulated with respect to a pair of notions of the first and third person within the logical notion of judgment, the other with respect to the contrast across the logical and the empirical notions. This criticism further develops into an internal critique of Frege: to think that the logical and psychological notions of judgment stand in a merely dualistic contrast is in fact self-undermining and intrinsically inconsistent. Along the way, I shall offer some positive characterizations of judgment.

ABSTRACT. Louis Couturat is often depicted as a failed French disciple of Bertrand Russell who unsuccessfully tried to introduce modern logic into a resistant French context. His Les Principes des Mathématiques (1905), intended as a synopsis of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903), has been shown to rest on a misunderstanding of Russell’s philosophical aims. This paper challenges that narrative. I argue that Couturat was deeply indebted to the French spiritualist tradition, which provided him with a conception of philosophy fundamentally at odds with Russell’s. For Couturat, philosophy was “the science of the mind”, namely the mind’s reflection upon itself, its operations, and its products. It was this Platonic conception of philosophy, already articulated in his doctoral dissertation, that led Couturat to recast Russell’s philosophical project as a form of neo-Leibnizian rationalism. Contra Gandon, I will maintain that this reading of Russell was productive rather than ‘outrageously simplifying’ (Gandon 2017, 129).

ABSTRACT. The contemporary debate on Transparency is largely shaped by Harman’s (1990) and Tye’s (1992) claim that introspection reveals only the features of the external objects of experience, but not of the experience itself. As has often been noted, both Harman and Tye drew from Moore’s (1903) remarks on the ‘transparent’ character of consciousness, but misconstrued them as supporting a strong form of the thesis rather than a weak version (Kind, 2003; Hellie, 2007). In this talk, I will argue that both interpretations of Moore’s transparency are mistaken. Moore’s transparency is directed not at the qualitative properties of experience, but at “that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact” – namely, intentionality. This interpretation gives rise to a New Problem of Transparency for ostensive definitions of intentionality, such as the ones put forward by many Phenomenal Intentionality Theorists (see e.g., Horgan and Tienson 2002, Mendelovici 2018: 215).

ABSTRACT. The paper addresses the issue of language logicality, focusing on the prominent proposal whereby contradictions and tautologies are ungrammatical unless they can be made informative via modulation with a RESCALE operator attaching to nonlogical/lexical items in their LF. The goals are threefold: i. To argue that RESCALE differs from the meaning modulation of truth-conditional pragmatics, but also from covert optionals, which it should resemble. ii. To question the explanatory power of RESCALE: often, the intuitive readings of acceptable superficial trivialities are obtained by flouting conversational maxims, therefore via a trivial content to begin with. iii. Finally, to sketch a new proposal inspired by the works on automatically triggered scalar implicatures which generate readings conflicting with the common ground and therefore perceived as odd. The new proposal has several advantages: it dispenses with the distinction between logical and nonlogical items, and accounts for the importance that trivialities do have, even conversationally.

ABSTRACT. We build on a recent observation concerning logicality, the idea that the language system contains a logic, and is sensitive to the information of structures. The observation is that, in the relevant literature, such sensitivity takes two forms, which are, however, arguably incompatible. First is illustrated by the exclusion of contradictions (and tautologies) on account of they being uninformative. Second is illustrated by suspension of scalar implicature in de-environments based on an information maximization principle. But note that contradictions come out as maximally informative from second phenomenon. This has been dubbed the Contradiction Puzzle for Logicality, a version of Bar-Hillel and Carnap’s Information Paradox. One possible solution involves imposing a veridicality requirement on semantic information. This solution can be shown to predict an asymmetry between tautologies and contradictions. We report the results from an experiment conducted to assess whether this asymmetry is reflected in grammaticality judgments.

ABSTRACT. Recent work in philosophy of language has developed a critique of the ideal of neutrality (Crary, 2018; Stanley and Beaver, 2023). This critique targets two related assumptions: first, that conceptual content is purely descriptive rather than evaluatively charged; second, that there exists a neutral space of reasons in which what counts as a good reason can be assessed independently of the perspectives of the agents involved. This paper argues that such a critique can be articulated from within a framework in which neutrality might seem least contested: semantic inferentialism. While inferentialism is often taken to rely on a neutral notion of inference, I argue that it contains a structural feature that undermines this assumption, namely the nonmonotonicity of material inferences (Brandom, 1994, 2018; Kaplan, 2022; Hlobil & Brandom, 2024). Nonmonotonicity shows that the validity of reasons is context-sensitive and defeasible, thereby rejecting the ideal of neutrality from within inferentialism itself.

ABSTRACT. Pregnancy is commonly regarded not as something that a woman does but as something that happens to her – an affliction that befalls her like a disease or disability, stripping her of agency. My paper challenges this passivist view of pregnancy, drawing on the philosophy of biology and its intersections with analytic metaphysics, in particular the emerging field of metaphysics of pregnancy. I argue that the passivist view of pregnancy is rooted in the historically dominant Containment View of pregnancy, in conjunction with an intellectualist conception of agency as intentional bodily behaviour, as set out in classical analytic philosophy of action. Revising these metaphysical presumptions in favour of an inclusive and graded conception of agency as a biological capacity and a Process View of pregnancy allows us to see pregnancy in a new, agentive light.

ABSTRACT. The metaphysics of temporal passage faces a persistent dilemma: either passage is taken to be a primitive feature of reality, or it is dismissed as a merely phenomenological illusion. I argue for a third option: temporal passage is a real but non-fundamental feature of the world, emerging at the level of biological organization. My argument does not appeal to temporal experience or cognition, but to the metaphysical structure presupposed by biological explanation itself. I develop a dynamic relationalist account according to which biological systems instantiate networks of events and relations whose ongoing reconfiguration constitutes genuine temporal passage. This supports a pluralist and emergentist metaphysics of time, according to which passage is a domain-restricted and objectively real feature of certain organized systems, paradigmatically living ones. I suggest that biological organization provides a novel and largely unexplored ontological route for defending objective temporal passage.

ABSTRACT. Today’s treatment of nature affects future people. The question about a ‘right’ treatment of nature hence is intertwined with the question of intergenerational justice. What we owe to future people depends on how we perceive them: as members of their respective generations, or as members of transgenerational communities. Existing theories of justice implicitly follow the first procedure, focusing on justice between generations, simpliciter. An alternative route to consider posterity is to see future people as members of communities that span across time. Two arguments suggest we should rather take this latter route. The first is epistemological: while the preferences of future generations as collectives are unbeknown to us, we can make inferences about future people through intertemporal relationships. The second is motivational: concern for future members of one’s intertemporal community can be aligned with the desire to fulfil one’s lifetime-transcending interests.

ABSTRACT. Derek Parfit was one of the most influential philosophers to take a stance against pure time preference (PTP), or a view that it is justified to care about the well-being of others differently depending on how close in time that well-being takes place. Andreas Mogensen develops one of the most promising lines of argument in favour of PTP – treating it as a proxy for discounting for kinship. This paper aims to point out the hidden assumption that certain special relationships may form limitless chains, which, especially in the case of extreme timescales, leads to a counterintuitive conclusion that contemporary ‘strangers’ are closer related to us than our far descendants. I propose to adopt a more communitarian approach, which admits that our communities have boundaries in time as well as in space and allows us to justify caring for near-future people without being crushed by commitments towards the far-future.

ABSTRACT. It is nowadays common to think that we owe it to future generations to preserve the earth’s habitability. My talk would explore how a theory along the lines of Scanlon’s (1998) moral contractualism can be adapted to accommodate this judgment. Two major obstacles prevent Scanlon’s own account from doing so: a specifically contractualist version of Parfit’s non-identity problem, and contractualism’s difficulty in avoiding moral gridlock. To address the former, I propose amendments to the Scanlonian framework that relax its cross-world identity commitments and recognize complaints by future persons against being brought into existence with insufficient resources for decent lives. To address gridlock, I propose a headcount version of contractualism, according to which a moral code is reasonably rejectable if an alternative would impose the most severe burdens on fewer people overall. I conclude by defending the resulting view against the charge that it is not genuinely contractualist.

ABSTRACT. Citing her two essays ‘On Transubstantiation’ (1974) and ‘Faith’ (1975), Anscombe wrote in her Collected Philosophical Papers (CPP) III (1981), that her interest in philosophy of religion was in particular religious questions (in contrast to abstract natural theology). On the other hand, she also wrote (in CPP II) that what got her into philosophy was dissatisfaction with and efforts to improve upon a version of the First Cause argument. And in the 1960s she carried on an extensive correspondence concerning such proofs. Later in the 1980s she explored the nature of Anselm’s Proslogion argument proposing that it was not intended as an ontological proof. In other unpublished material she reflects on the relation between religious belief and philosophical argument, seeming to suggest that rather than the latter supporting the former it is aspects of the former that give meaning to concepts featuring in theological metaphysics. I will be exploring both her ventures into natural theology and her thoughts about the relation between philosophy and religious belief.

ABSTRACT. Recent work in the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence (AI) asks whether the internal states of artificial neural networks, especially large language models (LLMs), can have representational content and, if so, what facts make this possible. This symposium brings together four approaches to answering this question. The first three talks take a teleosemantic approach, arguing that proper functions are required for representational content. Hundertmark and Turner argue that training involves forms of differential retention that can impart proper functions to ANN components. Mallory then uses circuit-level decomposition to address the level-of-ascription problem by asking where proper functions should be located within complex networks. Williams challenges influential etiological-function strategies in AI metasemantics, proposing function-like roles that are partly determined by the intentions and practices of designers, deployers, and users. Lastly, Heine presents an additional constraint on understanding, claiming that LLM-style training alone cannot produce intentional, world-directed representation without perceptual grounding.

ABSTRACT. In the last decades, philosophers have argued that belief can be a locus of moral responsibility (Hieronymi, 2004; Smith, 2005), laying the groundwork for an ethics of belief. The next step has been to explain what makes a certain belief morally objectionable. It seems to be a prerequisite of a particular belief’s immorality that we can be morally responsible for them. The case of belief provides a point of comparison for another mental state undergoing a process of moralization: emotions. Here, however, the literature has moved too quickly. Rather than first establishing that we can be responsible for our emotions, recent work has jumped to claims that we have emotional obligations (Attie-Picker, 2021), or that they can be unfair (Blatter, 2025). These claims may be correct, but in the absence of an account of responsibility for emotions, they rest on shaky ground. This paper aims to address that foundational issue.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the moral permissibility of accepting blame one does not deserve and its tension with the duty to answer for wrongdoing, i.e. explain why one acted wrongly. It is generally permissible (even admirable) to take blame without deserving it. Yet our responsibility practices impose an obligation to answer for non-culpable wrongdoing. Some argue that Williams’ lorry driver, who kills a child out of bad luck, is required to explain that he did everything he could to avoid the accident in order to reassure the family. This generates a trilemma: blameless agents must answer for their wrongs; answering deflects blame; yet it is permissible to accept blame. I argue that the mistake lies in identifying answerability with reason-giving. The aim of answerability is emotional closure, not reassurance, and we can provide closure by taking the blame. I suggest a new definition of answerability as the duty to provide closure.

ABSTRACT. Apologising requires responsibility: one can only intelligibly apologise for what one is, in some way, responsible for. But how exactly are we to understand this relationship between apologies and responsibility? We propose the following Responsibility-Requirement: An apology for φ-ing implicates responsibility for φ-ing – an implicature which is non-cancellable – and the apology is felicitous only if the apologiser is perceived as responsible for φ-ing. This raises the question of what kind of responsibility is required. We reject the views that apologising requires culpable responsibility or agential responsibility by showing that merely causally responsible people can sometimes felicitously apologise. We propose that apologisers bearing culpable, agential, and/or causal responsibility can meet the requirement. We then discuss what the Responsibility-Requirement entails for the relationship between apologies and forgiveness, remorse, moral wrongdoing, and repeating what one is apologising for. Finally, we discuss the role of responsibility in the ethics of apology.

ABSTRACT. People often resolve to do difficult things, despite having evidence that they might fail. This present a puzzle: How can these resolutions be rational and sincere, given the evidence of likely failure? Adding to the puzzle, studies have shown that people are overly optimistic about their own success while offering realistic assessments of other people’s prospects. Research on the planning fallacy, maintaining evidentialist commitments, argues that people’s overconfidence in their own success prospects is irrational. By contrast, some philosophers claim that agents must divorce practical from evidential reasoning, allowing them to rationally and sincerely intend difficult actions despite the evidence. I argue for an empirically informed, evidentialist account of how agents can rationally and sincerely resolve to do difficult actions. By forming the right kinds of implementation intentions, agents can raise their probability of success in many cases. Further, the view explains how the observed self-other asymmetry can be rational.

ABSTRACT. Characterizing the role generative AI systems can play in interactions with humans, we face controversial positions. Disputes revolve around whether AI systems can qualify as social interaction partners or should rather be described as tools. Focusing on agency, particularly the ability to act jointly, this talk will explore what forms of agency are conceivable within a multidimensional spectrum. With reference to the manifold forms of agency, ranging from animate, sentient, and volitional agency of self-moving creatures to forms of inanimate agency, one can find in philosophy, I will argue that in asymmetric joint actions, we do not need to pose the very same conditions on all involved participants and sketch how AI systems may qualify as interaction partners with a minimal form of agency and socio-cognitive abilities.

ABSTRACT. This presentation aims to address the problem of mental causation—how mental states can exert causal influence in a physical world—by developing an account of knowledge inspired by the framework of epistemic agency. I will argue that emphasizing agents’ capacity to actively engage with reasons, manage inquiry, and cultivate understanding, epistemic agency first allows to understand mental states as components of structured, normatively guided epistemic activity explanatorily indispensable and then irreducible to microphysical causation. This approach reconceives control and causal efficacy at the level of patterns of rational engagement, where beliefs and understanding shape outcomes through organized cognitive activity rather than as isolated events. By integrating normative responsiveness, epistemic achievement, and dispositional patterns, the epistemic agency framework shows how mental states can both guide epistemic outcomes and address the explanatory demands of mental causation, offering a coherent bridge between epistemology and philosophy of mind.

ABSTRACT. Since Frege, it has been widely acknowledged that “I” admits of a plurality of ways of thinking and forms of awareness, including introspective, primitive, bodily, and agentive. This raises two questions: (i) is there a form of self-awareness that is foundational for self-reference, and (ii) how is the apparent unity of the self actually sustained across the multiplicity of ‘awarenesses’. Susanna Schellenberg (2025) recently answers by defending a ‘polysemous view’ on which “I” has different referents tied to distinct perspectival anchors, with self-unity rendered illusory. Against this account, I defend a ‘rich self’ view. I argue that the plurality of self-awareness need not entail polysemy in reference. Instead, a single token-reflexive reference rule for “I” is pragmatically enriched by different informational channels. I contend that this framework better explains first-person reasoning and supports a genuine, though flexible, unity of self.

ABSTRACT. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein imagines a diary – “The World as I Found It” – that inventories every fact yet cannot mention its author: the subject is “a limit of the world.” We turn this image into a formal tool – a notion of epistemic mirror, the mapping of objects to evidential states in which objects’ non-tautological features are, in principle, knowable. This, among other things, yields an object-level analogue of epistemic blindspots and a taxonomy of five notions of self: three transcendental and two non-transcendental. Finally, we discuss applications of the framework. For instance, if justification is closed under known entailment, then an ego with a “complete individuality profile” drives a strong idealization: either widespread decidability or an omniscience-like justification of every proposition. Our analysis pinpoints exactly where “unknowability of the self” enters, and what it costs.

ABSTRACT. Abstract: The aim of this paper will be to disentangle the various parts of John Wheeler’s vision of quantum reality, which he often intentionally conflated. These are (i) participatory realism, that reality is created in acts of “observer-participation”, (ii) it-from-bit, that this reality is generated more specifically in the form of answers to yes/no questions, and (iii) law-without-law, the claim that the stable regularities we observe in nature are the result of an underlying reality in which there are no laws. These theses are clearly logically independent, but were, for Wheeler, crucially interconnected. Several contemporary proponents of participatory realism, including the QBists, follow Wheeler in taking these theses to be a package deal. I will argue that they should be disentangled, by considering especially the arguments that led Wheeler to endorse them.

ABSTRACT. Gnosticism is the view that it’s rational to believe something iff it’s likely enough that one knows it (Littlejohn and Dutant 2024). This paper addresses a dilemma for the view. On the one hand, if potential beliefs are evaluated based on whether they would likely maximise knowledge, conditional on forming them, the view gives wrong verdicts in epistemic bribes cases (Greaves 2013). On the other hand, if (following Konek & Levinstein 2019) potential beliefs are evaluated based on the unconditional likelihood that the corresponding propositions are known, the view seems to wrongly imply that suspension is hardly ever irrational. For, on the assumption that knowledge requires belief, if one is confident enough that one doesn't believe p, then one is confident enough that one doesn't know p. The solution, independently supported by Goodman (2023), is to deny that knowledge requires the kind of belief that it is the norm of.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates rational geometric constraints on the logic of reasons which are derived from hierarchical Conceptual Spaces – a cognitive theory of the structure of conceptual content. Constraints are derived for three areas. (i) Reason identity is level-relative: distinct evidence can count as the same reason once abstraction filters out irrelevant dimensions or introduces new ones. (ii) Reason aggregation is constrained by non–double counting: reasons add only when they remain distinct at the target level rather than collapsing under abstraction. (iii) Support by reasons transmits upward without exception, but downward transmission is defeasible; the paper extends a prototype-based expectation-ordering account of non-monotonic reasoning in conceptual spaces to the hierarchical, cross-level case.

ABSTRACT. One of the prominent projects in contemporary epistemology is providing an account of higher-order evidence—evidence of epistemic failure. Accounting for its role in a coherent picture of epistemic rationality is challenging. We demonstrate how the role of higher-order evidence can be explained within the context of non-ideal epistemology. While higher-order evidence poses a puzzle for ideal agents, it can help non-ideal agents correct their mistakes and improve their epistemic standing. To show this, we counter arguments by Horowitz (2019) and Heine (2025) that taking such evidence seriously leaves agents with predictably less accurate beliefs.

ABSTRACT. Logical expressivism holds that logical vocabulary serves the expressive function of making explicit the normative features of inferential practices governed by rules of material implication and incompatibility. Its task is to specify, for any piece of logical vocabulary, what feature of reasoning it makes explicit. This paper applies this approach to first-order logic. While Brandom notes that implication and incompatibility are implicitly about the same subject, I argue that this claim must be refined to account for structured patterns of such relations. I therefore characterize repeatable blocks of normatively related judgments that permit local substitutions which do not affect the surrounding normative network, and suggest that these structures correspond to the normative features made explicit by argument places in first-order language. I also distinguish the expressive function of arguments from that of parameters, which make explicit the existence of global substitutions that reconfigure the entire normative framework.

ABSTRACT. One prominent project in the philosophy of mathematics is Neo-Fregeanism, which aims to give foundations for the philosophy of mathematics via the use of Abstraction Principles. An Abstraction Principle can be thought of as an implicit definition that introduces new terms into the language by specifying identity conditions for the referents of the new terms. Neo-Fregeans use a particular Abstraction Principle, Hume’s Principle (HP), to demonstrate the existence of objects referred to by number terms. I argue that a popular route to showing that the referents of number terms are objects depends on a false claim that I call the Identity-Semantics Link. I provide counterexamples to the Identity-Semantics Link. I then diagnose the problem with the existing argu- ments for the Identity-Semantics Link: The features of singular referring terms that supposedly show that they must have identity conditions are also features of predicates.

ABSTRACT. Margaret Cavendish claims that one object cannot transfer motion to another, at least not without also transferring matter, because motion is inseparable from matter. When one billiard ball strikes a second billiard ball, the latter, too, begins making its way across the table – Cavendish has to provide us with an explanation for this phenomenon without claiming that the first ball transfers motion to the second. She does so by arguing that the second billiard ball perceives the motion of the first and then moves itself in the appropriate way. I argue that standard libertarian or compatibilist readings of these approaches cannot properly account for Cavendish’s claims and will defend an alternative libertarian reading. According to my reading, we should take her claims about the abilities for self-motion and perception of ‘mere’ matter seriously – despite their strangeness, they ought not to be read metaphorically.

ABSTRACT. Bernard Bolzano’s account of times as determinations (Bestimmungen) gives rise to a distinctive problem concerning substances. Since temporal determinations on his view belong to the subject-idea of propositions, A at t and A at t′ (with t ≠ t′) count as distinct objects. This threatens the persistence of a substance when it instantiates incompatible properties at different times. Can Bolzano maintain both substance-endurantism and his account of time? Some have suggested a negative answer: either Bolzano should abandon endurantism in favor of perdurantism or sequentialism, or he should adopt an adverbialist treatment of temporal determinations (Textor 2002). Rusnock/Sebestík (2019) propose instead to treat substances as possible objects actualized by temporal determinations. In this paper, I defend a different interpretation on which Bolzano holds a mixed view of persistence: substances strictly endure, while temporally determined objects are dependent, sequential entities constituted by a persisting substance together with a temporal determination.

ABSTRACT. Providing a proper characterization of what presuppositions are should help elucidate the nature of meaning and of the different levels, aspects or kinds of meaning. There is a promising view of presuppositions which treats them as semantic entailments and models them using partial meaning functions. This promising view is challenged by the views of those authors (for instance Soames 1989, Potts 2005, Abbott 2008 and Abrusán 2016) that contend that presuppositions, like conversational implicatures, are cancellable. In this talk I will argue that one main kind of data, that involves negation, that has been commonly taken to establish that the partial function view of presuppositions is flawed, does not in fact succeed in establishing this. I will, therefore, seek to lend support to the claim that there are no good reasons to abandon the simple, clear, promising semantic view of presuppositions.

ABSTRACT. Verbalist diagnoses of stubborn philosophical controversies, often framed as metalinguistic negotiations, are themselves frequently contested. This paper studies the resulting second-order conflicts, disputes over disputes (DoDs), and asks why they so often resist principled resolution. It identifies two interacting obstacles. The proximate obstacle, Equivalent Interpretative Fit, arises when the same dispute facts can be organised into two coherent, non-ad hoc packages, one verbalist and one non-verbalist, with no neutral route from shared evidence to a unique verdict. The background obstacle, Disputed Assumptions and Circularity, emerges when one tries to go deeper to adjudicate the sustaining metasemantic and methodological commitments. These commitments are contested and often dialectically supported by the very classifications they are meant to justify. The paper then draws an asymmetry: by parity of reasoning, verbalists are pressured to treat many unresolvable DoDs as verbal, generating further DoDoDs, and shedding new light on the instability of the verbal/non-verbal distinction.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to solve the following puzzle:

1)Necessarily, all artifacts have authors 2)There are cumulative artifacts such as cities, villages, paths, and natural languages. 3)Not all cumulative artifacts have authors

Many intentionalists (Thomasson 2007; Evnine 2016; Juvshik 2025) bite the bullet and leave cumulative artifacts out of their discussion, and so they reject 2. Simon Evnine (2025) extends his earlier intentionalist framework to accommodate the cumulative artifact cases and so rejects 3.

In this paper, I argue that Evnine’s proposal is valuable in accounting for some cumulative artifacts, such as natural languages, in intentionalist terms, but cannot be extended to cover all cases. After showing that the intentionalist models of (both single and multiple) authorship cannot capture some cases of artifacts such as cities, villages, and paths, I will separate two senses of multiple authorship to capture those cases: co-making and co-creating.

ABSTRACT. This paper answers the question: “What is real about virtual reality?”. The thesis I defend is that virtual reality experiences present virtual affordances, and that these virtual affordances are real affordances. Furthermore, I argue that realism about virtual affordances is compatible with irrealism about virtual objects. That is, one may accept the existence of virtual affordances, even if one thinks that virtual objects are illusions or fictions. The paper effectively reshapes the debate about the metaphysics of virtual reality – whereas previously the literature focused on the question whether virtual objects exist, here the focus is on affordances instead.

ABSTRACT. Since P. Grice, philosophers of language have focused on the non-explicit content of utterances, including conversational implicatures. While implicatures may serve the aims of cooperative conversation, they also enable strategic communication by allowing speakers to convey risky content indirectly and later deny responsibility for it. I aim to examine the plausibility of denying conversational implicatures in legal language, which is strategic rather than cooperative. I argue that such denial should be considered less plausible in legal discourse, as it may lead to unfairness and diminished legal certainty. The analysis focuses on two contexts: contract drafting by private parties and the use of legal language by state authorities. In both cases, strategic reliance on deniable implicatures allows speakers to benefit from implicit communication while avoiding its costs. I argue that conversational implicatures form part of the communicative content of legal texts and should not be easily dismissed by claims of non-intention.

ABSTRACT. We have the practice of misleading our audiences by indirectly communicating contents we know to be false or otherwise improper, by literally making true or otherwise correct speech acts. There is a raging debate engaging psychologists, philosophers and other researchers on the extent and significance of that behavior. Many claim that it is executed for the sake of keeping “plausible deniability”. Several philosophers (e.g., Camp, Dinges & Zakkou, Peet) have offered sophisticated, substantive accounts of this notion, whose clarification is important because it plays a role in philosophical accounts of central notions like truth or assertion and their psychological and normative underpinnings. In my contribution I’ll raise problems for some of those robust accounts, and I’ll offer a deflationary characterization that I take to be apt for it to play its expected theoretical role.

ABSTRACT. This paper develops an account of the logic of theistic metaphysics, understood as covering (1) the logic governing God’s act of creation and (2) the logic governing God’s action within the already created world. While much of the existing literature has focused on (2) (especially in attempts to reconcile divine action with developments in quantum physics), I argue that insufficient attention has been paid to (1). I aim to address exactly this issue, by arguing that the logic governing divine creation (and God’s cognition in general) should be classical, and that being metaphysically and explanatorily prior to any physical processes, this logic cannot be revised in response to empirical theories. At the same time, however, I suggest that the logic of God’s action within the already created world may be described using more specific non-classical systems, including quantum logics, provided that these remain subordinate to classical logic at the meta-level.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we argue for a "collective turn" in religious epistemology, complementing previous externalist and social turns. While traditional approaches focus on individual believers, we contend that religious groups, such as the Catholic Church, can themselves possess epistemic states like belief, justification, warrant, and knowledge. After rejecting summativist accounts of group belief, we develop a non-summativist functionalist model that explains how collective epistemic states emerge from the functional organization of groups. Finally, we apply this model to religious groups, namely the Catholic Church, showing how collective structures enable warranted group beliefs and how individual justification or warrant can derive from group-level warrant.

ABSTRACT. In Wittgensteinian moral epistemology, moral certainties are basic commitments that serve as necessary conditions for moral deliberation, justification, and doubt. However, this tradition often fails to explain why specific commitments function as moral certainties for human beings. We argue that cultural evolutionary theory can provide two resources for fulfilling this ambition. First, we claim that conformity bias, the tendency to preferentially acquire majority cultural variants, explains how humans possess moral certainties. This conformist learning secures the deep agreement and background commitments required for collective practices. Second, we argue that cultural group selection mechanisms, such as differential migration and prestige-based transmission, explain why particular certainties proliferate and persist due to their role in facilitating cooperation. Our novel account combines first-personal philosophical perspectives with third-personal ethnographic data, reframing the problem of moral scepticism as a social question about the pragmatic sustainability of different normative systems under conditions of cultural selection.

ABSTRACT. This presentation examines two intuitive concerns commonly raised against moral abolitionism: that abandoning moral belief undermines cooperation and that it threatens the meaningfulness of life. Moral abolitionism is the normative view that we should abandon moral beliefs, motivated by epistemic considerations from moral error theory and pragmatic concerns about the harmful effects of moral practice. Focusing on the pragmatic dimension, I argue that both concerns can be addressed without appealing to morality itself. First, cooperative behavior can be justified both from the standpoint of self-interest and rational coherence, insofar as agents who value consistency and rationality have reason to avoid non-cooperative behavior. Second, recent work on meaning in life suggests that meaningfulness does not essentially depend on moral belief, but rather on the realization of objective values or engagement in prosocial activities. I conclude that moral abolitionism need not entail social breakdown or existential loss.