ABSTRACT. Fiction is often taken to offer a distinctive way of understanding vicious perspectives, allowing audiences to enter alien perspectives in a safe and illuminating context. Yet attempts at first-personal or deep understanding of such perspectives frequently fail. This paper asks what it takes to first-personally understand a vicious perspective, and why such attempts sometimes break down. A shortcoming of existing discussions is that they do not sufficiently thematize the role of moral character in such failures. I develop the idea that moral character functions as a second nature that structures affective and evaluative perception, such that moral development can limit deep understanding of vicious perspectives. I respond to recognition-based accounts and to the problem of rough heroes by arguing that first-personal understanding goes beyond mere recognition and is aspectual, such that moral development constrains access to different affective elements of vicious perspectives.

ABSTRACT. This communication examines Manuel Liz’s perspectivist philosophy and its relevance for analyzing first-, second-, and third-person perspectives in popular culture. It focuses on how these perspectives contribute to the configuration of narrative structures in television series and on the ways they generate different degrees of intimacy and complicity with audiences. The work begins with a presentation of Liz’s perspectivist proposal, with particular attention to his notion of perspective or point of view and its philosophical significance. It then develops an analysis of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives as narrative devices and applies this conceptual framework to selected cases from contemporary television series. The central claim is that the systematic use of these perspectives has a significant impact on narrative dynamics. By modulating distance, identification, and forms of address, they produce distinct modes of audience engagement and differentiated experiences of intimacy and complicity that are crucial for understanding contemporary televisual storytelling.

ABSTRACT. In this talk I propose an enactivist approach to deal with the ontology of narratives, with a main focus on fictional entities and their ontological status. In particular, I will argue that narrative experiences are primarily enactive experiences, rather than merely intentional experiences. The aim of this talk consists in applying, from 4E cognitive science, the Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris, 2013) and the concept of “enactive signification” (Malafouris, 2007) to discuss the ontology of narrative practices and offer a novel artifactualist account with respect to Thomasson’s. My main claim is that narrative meanings and narrative entities emerge through enactive signification, and exist in the material engagement with those special objects that have been recently defined as “concrete cultural artefacts” (Consiglio, 2025a). Therefore, I commit to the account of imagination as material (Koukouti & Malafouris, 2020) before than mental, and likewise I argue that narratives too are ‘material’ before than ‘mental’.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary discussions of abilities account for what I call someone’s ‘agential possibilities’ – what she can do as an agent – in terms of different types of abilities possessed by the agent. Accordingly, they distinguish between ‘general’ vs ‘specific’ abilities to mark the distinction between what an agent can do in general, and what she can do on a particular occasion; and some authors also invoke more or less ‘global’ or ‘local’ abilities; ‘object-specific’ abilities, etc.; and between ‘robust’ and ‘simple’ abilities to account for what an agent can do ‘reliably’ vs what she does (can do) through luck, etc.. In this paper, I propose a different account of agential possibilities in terms of two fundamentally different factors: abilities and opportunities. I explain the attractions of this, over the ‘types of ability’ approach, for some thorny problems about ability attribution and about claims about what agents can and cannot do.

ABSTRACT. Proper functions are used to explain why some hearts malfunction, why some neural states misrepresent, and why certain psychological and physiological conditions are considered disorders. We treat the question "What is it for something to have a specific proper function?" as a real-kind question. We argue that proper functions — the proper function to Φ — constitute etiological natural kinds. From the explanatory roles proper functions play in philosophical and scientific projects, we extract three hallmarks: selectivity, normativity, and an existence-link. We then propose a minimal, reinforcement-based etiological core that satisfies these hallmarks. Building on this core, we identify a space of recurrent "modules" concerning temporal profile, depth of iteration, competition, reproduction, and service embedding that sharpen selectivity and strengthen the normative and explanatory profile without altering the underlying kind. This framework unifies disparate etiological accounts, clarifies counterintuitive cases, and provides tools for adapting function concepts to different explanatory projects.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a refinement of Skyrms's (2010) concept of misinformation. Skyrms defines misinformation as “diminishing the probability of the state in which it is sent, or raising the probability of a state other than the one in which it is sent” (Skyrms 2010, 80). However, this definition has been criticized by Godfrey-Smith (2011) and Fallis and Lewis (2019), especially because it includes cases where the agent makes clear epistemic progress. This paper argues that the limitation in Skyrms’s account lies in its focus on individual probabilities rather than the overall probability distribution. The proposed refinement asserts that a signal conveys misinformation if it moves the probability distribution farther away from the true distribution than it was in the prior state. The Jensen-Shannon divergence is employed to measure the distance between the two probability distributions, demonstrating that this refinement overcomes the criticisms of Skyrms while preserving his core idea.

ABSTRACT. The project of naturalizing semantics faces two persistent forms of indeterminacy: vertical and horizontal. While most theories struggle with these challenges, Ruth Millikan’s biosemantics offers a compelling alternative by grounding representation in mathematical isomorphism. This paper proposes that the notion of isomorphism can be formally construed as requiring the existence of a group homomorphism, which aligns biosemantics with the principles of symmetry learning in machine learning. First, symmetry learning restricts the hypothesis space to prevent shortcut learning, resolving vertical indeterminacy. Second, content determination is reframed as the task of disentangling representation. Under this framing, environmental transformations are mapped onto independent subspaces of internal representation, resolving horizontal indeterminacy. By implementing Millikan’s insights through group theory, this paper demonstrates how mathematical modeling provides a resolution to long-standing aporias in the naturalistic theory of content.

ABSTRACT. When asked about their method, philosophers often offer vague gestures toward “standard analytic” techniques without explaining why those tools fit the problem at hand. Although meta-philosophy has recently grown, its influence on everyday methodological self-scrutiny in philosophy remains limited. A key mistake, I argue, is that meta-philosophical debate often begins with a purported methodology (e.g., reflective equilibrium, the method of cases, appeals to intuition) and then infers philosophy’s aims from that practice, assessing the method by how well it serves the inferred aims. This strategy would be plausible only if philosophy had a single dominant method and were conspicuously successful with it; both assumptions are doubtful. I propose reversing the order: start from philosophical problems and justify methods by the demands and assumptions of those problems. This “Problems First” approach can be systematized via a decision tree, yielding a dual pluralism of available methods and rationally divergent methodological pathways.

ABSTRACT. Loev has presented a new account of the nature of philosophical intuitions - affectivism - as an alternative to doxasticism and perceptualism, two long-standing opposing views which have led to a stalemate in the debate on the nature of intuitions. According to affectivism, intuitions are emotional experiences. Although affectivism might initially look like a viable middle ground between doxasticism and perceptualism, the account raises significant concerns. Firstly, it crucially relies on the concept of valence, which remains an obscure notion in the literature, diminishing its supposed explanatory power. Secondly, given the gradeability feature of intuitions and assuming, as Loev seems to do, that valence has a bipolar dimensionality, affectivism predicts the existence of intuitions which assert indifference towards their content, which is implausible. Finally, while affectivism implies that so-called positive intuitions and their counterparts feel different, there are cases in which the purported phenomenological distinction between them is not present.

ABSTRACT. Thought experiments have always played an important role in moral philosophy as sources of moral intuitions, which are in turn used to support premises in arguments for or against ethical theories or principles. This epistemic function has come under criticism from the findings of experimental philosophy, which have been deployed as a higher-order defeater against the reliability of moral intuitions. I argue that the appropriate response to these findings is to challenge thought experiments as currently designed, rather than questioning the general reliability of moral intuitions. Furthermore, I argue that addressing this challenge requires focusing on the redesign of thought experiments themselves, rather than on developing debiasing strategies for moral intuitions.

ABSTRACT. Beall and Restall (2006) have offered an influential and controversial characterisation of logical pluralism (LP) as the thesis that our pre-theoretic notion of validity is indeterminate and admits multiple admissible precisifications, singling out different correct logics (e.g., classical, constructive, relevant). In this paper we critically assess the so-called “Collapse Problem” originally discussed in Priest (2006) and argue that it fails to establish its conclusion that LP collapses into monism. To this end, we first argue that the collapse problem comprises two distinct arguments: one from truth-preservation and one from normativity. We then consider each argument in turn and argue that both rely on a problematic understanding of some of the core tenets of LP. Accordingly, we conclude that neither of these arguments effectively undermines LP.

ABSTRACT. Truth pluralism has been criticized for its difficulty to vindicate the traditional truth-theoretic account of logical validity, when so-called mixed-inferences are involved. In the initial phase of the debate, it has been argued that resorting to the notion of designated values, routinely used in many-valued logic, was helpless. Consequently, different strategies have been proposed and one eventually favoured. In this talk, we argue that a different problem, which takes the form of a fragmentation of validity, undermines that solution. We present the new difficulty and argue that a strategy based on designation solves both the mixed-inferences problem and the fragmentation problem, thus proving to be a superior solution. The talk contributes to exploring the connections between truth pluralism, many-valued logic, and logical pluralism.

ABSTRACT. On an influential account (cf. Langton, Maitra) ordinary acts of speech can be consitutively subordinating because their illocutoniary effect is to enact oppressive norms. This leads to a difficulty in explaining how hate speakers can gain the required authority. I will argue that the so-called Authority Problem is unsolvable, but we can circumvent it with a more empirical, social science-inspired account of social norms (cf. Bicchieri who defines social norms as behaviors motivated by normative expectations). McGowan also offers an account of subordinating speech that doesn't require speaker authority, but it suffers from similar problems relating to the overly abstract notion of normativity implied in it. However, the constitutive-illocutionary approach to subordinating speech can be salvaged if we understand its function as directly influencing normative expectations and only indirectly social norms and norm-governed behaviors.

ABSTRACT. The term fear speech commonly denotes forms of expression aimed at portraying various social groups – such as Muslims, Jews, or LGBT+ persons – as threats to society. Although fear speech is increasingly identified as a common tool of radicalisation, the phenomenon has so far received little attention within applied philosophy of language, which has otherwise devoted considerable attention to various forms of dangerous speech. This paper aims to begin filling this gap. I defend an account of fear speech as a type of illocutionary act whose aim is to manipulatively present fear towards a particular out-group as fitting. I argue that fear speech is manipulative insofar as it is in the audience’s interest to hold epistemically plausible beliefs about x, while fear speech seeks to induce beliefs about x that are epistemically defective. The paper illustrates this account through representative real-world cases.

ABSTRACT. A figleaf is a statement or part of a statement that is uttered to prevent another statement (“covered statement”, henceforth) from being considered racist, sexist, or otherwise unacceptable, or to prevent the speaker using it from being considered a supporter of racism, sexism, or otherwise unacceptable positions. The study of figleaves focuses on communicative effects in combination with politically or ideologically motivated statements expressing negative attitudes towards individuals or groups based on their affiliation with women, people of color, people of a certain nationality, etc. However, figleaves are more widespread. The generalization can be considered with regard to the politically or ideologically based motivation of covered statement, the negativity of covered statement, and group affiliation. It will be argued that figleaves sustain the facticity, objectivity, and neutrality of covered statements. This enables them to succeed in changing the way the covered statements are perceived in communication.

ABSTRACT. My aim in this talk is to investigate the relationship between the following three doctrines: (i) normative non-naturalism, (ii) the supervenience of the normative on the natural, and (iii) essentialism about metaphysical necessity, the view that metaphysical necessity is reducible to essence. Gideon Rosen (2020), elaborating on an argument by Kit Fine (2002), has recently argued that these three doctrines form an inconsistent triad. I will argue, based on the higher-order logic of essence HLE developed in Ditter (2022, 2025), that Rosen’s argument fails, and establish the joint consistency of the three doctrines within the framework of HLE. The talk will also illustrate how methods from hyperintensional higher-order metaphysics can be brought to bear on questions about the metaphysics of properties.

ABSTRACT. For the modal essentialist the necessary propositions are all and only those that are essential to some entities. In my talk I will discuss the relevance of (what I call) downward essential constraints for essentialists who claim that the domain of objects grows across modal space. A downward essential constraint is a case in which (i) for no entities xx such that (the proposition that) p depends on xx, it is essential to xx that p and (ii) for some yy it is essential to yy that p. The claim that there are no downward essential constraints affords a novel motivation for the domain axiom and for some contingentists it is a prerequisite for the stability of their position.

ABSTRACT. A theory of non-representational hyperintensional metaphsics is developed, which, in opposition to its Neo-Aristotelian alternatives, views our speak of hyperintensional relations, such as arising from grounding, essences and real definitions, to not represent facts about the world, but rather about our adopted linguistic rules. The conceptual resources developed in proof-theoretic semantics are used give characterizations of these hyperintensional phenomena. More concretely, the notion of a formula being used in a canonical derivation in normal form of another formula is used to provide analyses of the notions of real definitions, essence and grounding. This analysis is motivated by the close connection between introduction-rules for terms in natural deduction calculi and definitions already observed by Gentzen. It is shown that this theory can capture all the structural properties of these notions that an intensional analysis is unable to capture. Furthermore this theory avoids central ontological and epistemic problem of its Neo-Aristotelian rivals.

ABSTRACT. Within contemporary analytic metaphysics, there have been major developments in the field of the theory of location. Proposed theories of location, however, deny the possibility of ‘nested multilocation’, a situation which may be interpreted as follows: an entity is exactly located in region R, as well as exactly located in region S, which is a proper part of R. Thus, they are incompatible with views such as Armstrongian immanent realism. I suggest looking for alternative formulations of theory of location, which would not yield verdicts on possibility of multilocation merely by definition. To remedy this, I put forth two sets of definitions of locational concepts, which can provide neutral theoretical background for more precise formulations of views such as Armstrongian immanent realism. The choice between these sets rests on the decision whether additional primitive notion is worth postulating in order to accommodate some metaphysically non-standard scenarios.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines why we intuitively regard truth as valuable. Philosophical theories of truth are often divided into normativist views, which treat truth as inherently normative, and non-normativist views, which do not. Non-normativist accounts must explain truth’s value separately, typically through object-given (truth itself is valuable) or state-given (truth-oriented states or activities are valuable) approaches. While state-given theories avoid problems facing object-given views, they struggle to explain the widespread intuition that truth itself matters. I offer a solution using Nguyen’s notion of striving-play games: truth-seeking resembles a game whose immediate goal (i.e., truth) is provisional, serving a deeper purpose—promoting understanding. The perception that truth itself is valuable arises from overgeneralizing the provisional value of truth within inquiry. This framework preserves state-given strengths while explaining the object-given intuition, offering a novel account of why truth is intuitively esteemed.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a new account of natural kind terms that is based on inferentialist semantics – the view that the meaning of linguistic expression is identical with the role played by that expression in our inferential practices. The main thesis of the paper is that “natural kind term” is ambiguous between two different sorts of things (“fundamental kinds”, and “explanatory kinds”) and that recognizing this fact helps us resolve the tension between philosophers inclined to essentialism and those trenchantly opposed to it. I specify the purpose and characteristics of both “fundamental kinds” and “explanatory kinds” and demonstrate that they play different roles in our language and scientific inquiry. Finally, I argue that my account has an edge over some other accounts appealing to ambiguity because (1) it properly recognises the role of experts in meaning-determination and (2) it is suitable for theorising about kinds that are not directly observable.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I lay out a unified account of institutional action and use it to reconsider the public/private distinction. Building on an interactive social ontology, I present institutional action as interrelated: persons-in-roles jointly enact, specify, and sometimes revise an institution’s raison d’être, i.e. the ideals and values that justify its establishment and regulate its functioning. Institutions vary in open-texturedness, which shapes both the exercise of powers of office and accountability among officeholders. On this background, I argue that institutional architectures should be classified by the contrast between institutions with simple and focused raisons d’être and institutions with complex and composite ones. Public institutions often instantiate the latter architecture through practices of office accountability. The neo-classical view of corporations models them as oriented to closed-textured corporate purposes and governed by office liability. But this distinction is not set in stone and hybrid cases are possible as well as reforms that transform institutional architectures by modifying institutional justificatory practices.

ABSTRACT. Recent work in epistemology advocates for a more inclusive focus of normative evaluation. In addition to familiar doxastic attitudes such as belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgement, increasingly more attention is being devoted to the epistemic normativity of the inquiring attitudes taken when answering to questions. Epistemologists are now interested in the zetetic domain, and a range of issues on the nature and normativity of inquiry have become pressing.

The aim of this symposium is to showcase and discuss new perspectives on both the zetetic and the epistemic. A total of four research presentations will tackle foundational issues on epistemic norms of inquiry and more traditional doxastic states. The debate on nature and norms of inquiry and their relationship to traditional epistemic norms is generating a rich discussion in contemporary normative epistemology. The symposium will thus be of interest to many researchers working on these timely and interrelated topics.

ABSTRACT. This symposium addresses central topics in contemporary logical expressivism, a view concerning the meaning of logical vocabulary, in the context of an inferentialist semantics. According to logical expressivism, as developed by Robert Brandom (1994)—who traces it back to Frege (1879) and is recognisable in Wittgenstein (1922)—the function of logical vocabulary is to make explicit speakers’ inferential commitments. Logical expressivism analyses logical vocabulary as belonging to the broader class of higher-order, normative notions, an approach that also finds its modern origin in Frege’s philosophy (Frápolli 2023). The symposium aims to explore both the historical roots of logical expressivism in twentieth-century logic—identifying Frege’s work as a central antecedent and offering a more historically accurate and philosophically deeper interpretation of his project—and its more recent developments (e.g. Incurvati and Schlöder 2023; Hlobil and Brandom 2024).

ABSTRACT. Consider normative symmetry: there are alternative normative concepts that might have played similar roles in our practical deliberation while having different extensions. A community might use ought* in the same functional way we use ought, but such that ought* applies to killing children for fun. The problem is distinguishing between ought and ought*. I provide a general framework for a solution by introducing good and bad tiebreakers, arguing that good tiebreakers are central features that our normative practice attribute to ought. Then I show that non-naturalism, construed as being committed to fundamental normative facts and properties, provides a good tiebreaker: substantivity (not being up to us and being determinate). I argue that ought is substantive while ought* is not (given the metaphysics of non-naturalism), and substantivity is central to our practice of normative and moral deliberation (by noticing features of normative practice). Thus, ought* doesn’t form a symmetry with ought.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores under what conditions conceptual ethicists can reliably extend assessments about how a concept should be designed in their own culture to similar concepts in other cultures. The question raises a dilemma: cross-cultural assessment can easily become overgeneralizing by imposing local evaluative standards on other cultures for which they are ill-suited. Conversely, refraining from such assessment risks fostering ignorance of non-English conceptual frameworks. I argue that this dilemma can be addressed if conceptual ethics remains open to extending assessments across cultures, but only through reliable extrapolation. Extrapolation is reliable when conclusions about a familiar domain are extended to a less familiar one based on strong evidence of relevant similarity. I show that, to obtain such evidence, conceptual ethicists cannot focus solely on semantic features of concepts, but must also focus on functional similarities between them. I then articulate a function-based criterion for reliable extrapolation in cross-cultural conceptual ethics.

ABSTRACT. This paper offers a realist and cognitivist account of faultless moral disagreement. I argue that moral predicates such as right and wrong are univocal and context-independent, and that disagreement arises instead from contextual variation in the intensional content of what is being morally evaluated. The relevant context extends beyond standard Kaplanian parameters to include an agent’s centred attention, which determines which aspects of a situation are salient in fixing the evaluatee. Consequently, different parties may evaluate distinct intensional contents associated with the same description, yielding divergent yet true moral judgments. Building on anti-luminosity argument, I show how agents can know the truth of their own moral judgments while remaining ignorant of the contents and the contexts. The resulting disagreements are substantive and genuinely moral, because each agent's judgment is true relative to one's contextually determined evaluatee, and agents may disagree or lack moral knowledge of =judgments made under other contexts.

ABSTRACT. In recent years, interest in the value of consciousness has gained momentum. Much of the debate has focused on its epistemic and ethical value. At least in principle, there is a third kind of value that may be attributed to consciousness: aesthetic value. The question concerns not (or not just) whether consciousness is a necessary condition for the existence or instantiation of aesthetic value, but whether consciousness itself instantiates aesthetic value. Research on the aesthetic value of consciousness in this sense has been virtually inexistent until very recently. Due to its embryonic state, almost everything about this potential new research area is yet undefined. In this paper, I attempt a preliminary articulation of some of the questions an aesthetics of consciousness may investigate, suggest a tentative evaluation of possible answers and lines of investigation, and offer some reflections on whether an aesthetics of consciousness is a philosophical enterprise worth pursuing.

ABSTRACT. Why do people enjoy sad music? Recently, empirical studies on this issue exploded and offer valuable insights. People listen to sad music especially when they feel sad. Personal traits, notably empathy and absorption, predict the enjoyment of sad music. And the perils of sad music, particularly rumination, are well documented. This article uses these findings to refine the paradox of sad music. I argue that the main philosophical accounts fail to address the refined paradox. As a remedy, I offer a solution that relies on the epistemic value of sadness. Sadness motivates reflection and comes with epistemic benefits, such as more realistic beliefs and an analytic mindset. I claim that people listen to sad music, especially when they feel sad, because they exploit the reflective mindset of sadness. As sad music helps us to reflect on what truly matters, it is no wonder that people often deem it profound.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I explore imagination as the primary way of engaging with literature. I identify three questions: (i) what do we do when we read?; (ii) what do we engage with when reading?; and (iii) is our engagement with literature aesthetic? By focusing on the first two, I firstly explore the make-believe theory as an account of propositional imagination, and discuss its shortcomings. From this argument I identify two features that turn into requirements to be met by proposals on the status of literary entities: their publicity and their medium dependence. Secondly, I explore two approaches to sensory imagination and argue why they also fail to address (i) and (ii). Thirdly, I discuss briefly two alternative contributions that take a phenomenological turn, to then go back to (iii) and rethink the issue by changing the focus of imagination’s creative purpose from literary entities to aesthetic experiences.

ABSTRACT. It is often assumed that acquiring a certain kind of insight into oneself and one’s life situation can be therapeutic. Indeed, the achievement of therapeutic insight is commonly considered an important element of successful psychotherapy. Notably, most proponents of this view suggest that genuine therapeutic insight cannot be merely “intellectual” or “epistemic” but must also be “emotional” or “affective.” However, it remains unclear what exactly the epistemic and affective aspects of insight are, and how they are related to each other. In this paper, I develop an account according to which therapeutic insight consists in a deepening of one’s self-understanding, which elicits a therapeutically appropriate affective (emotional and motivational) response. I argue that both the epistemic improvement and the affective response it elicits are jointly constitutive of therapeutic insight.

ABSTRACT. Recent work in the philosophy of psychiatry emphasizes the central role of self-understanding in mental health. This highlights the need to examine how hermeneutical injustice can undermine self-interpretative capacities and agency, thereby worsening individuals’ mental health. We focus on distorting or impostor concepts—whether via undue normalizing or pathologizing narratives—whose internalization may result in harmful self-understanding. This poses a central question: What makes a concept legitimate? How to spot—and whack—moles in our self-understanding repertoire? Against realist views that treat legitimacy as a matter of tracking pre-existing boundaries between self and illness, we draw on mindshaping accounts of self-understanding to argue that these boundaries are constituted through open-ended, socially situated regulative practices. This does not imply an “anything goes” account of the distinction between bona fide and impostor concepts; rather, the legitimacy of a concept lies in its genealogical ties to communities of epistemic resistance.

ABSTRACT. Michael Tye has recently advanced an argument that takes consciousness to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon and, on that basis, supports panpsychism. We examine two central weaknesses of this argument:

1. The inadequately justified premise that all physical properties are necessarily vague. i. Tye’s claim that the reality described by quantum mechanics is “vague” is controversial and merely asserted rather than argued for. ii. Even if this claim were granted, Tye provides no justification for the assumption that there is a principled connection between the alleged quantum vagueness and the vagueness of all other natural properties. iii. Straightforward counterexamples can be given to Tye’s definition of vagueness. 2. A misinterpretation of evolutionary biology, specifically the identification of evolution with Darwinian gradualism. i. We challenge this identification by examining well-known cases of sudden emergence of biological novelties, drawing on research traditions in evolutionary biology that are hardly suspect of speculative heterodoxy.

ABSTRACT. Chalmers (1995) has presented the hard problem of consciousness: human conscious experiences do not seem to arise from merely functional and structural physical properties. Panpsychists argue that their view can solve the hard problem of consciousness by claiming that micro-objects possess phenomenal properties, which constitute human phenomenal properties. However, Nagasawa (2021) has argued that panpsychism leads to a cognitive dead end: even if panpsychism is true, we cannot know how it might solve the hard problem of consciousness. I propose a new metaphysical account of the mind: panmentalism. According to panmentalism, micro-objects possess the ability to be conscious, but they are not conscious. This ability of micro-objects cannot be activated. Nevertheless, conscious experiences and their phenomenal properties are fully grounded in microphysical properties and microabilities to be conscious. I will argue that this view solves the hard problem of consciousness and addresses the issues raised by Nagasawa.

ABSTRACT. There is an epistemic gap between phenomenal truths and physical truths, namely, phenomenal truths are not deducible from physical truths. I argue that this raises a deep epistemic problem for a posteriori materialism. A consequence of the epistemic gap is that psychophysical identities are not deducible from the complete physical description of the world. One can therefore assume, consistently with our complete physical knowledge, that the relation between conscious states and physical states is mere correlation rather than identity. For this reason, it is arbitrary to assume that conscious states are identical with physical states as opposed to being merely correlated with them. And, in this sense, the claim that conscious states are physical states is far from intelligible, even if it is true.

ABSTRACT. My contribution addresses the question whether motion is fundamentally relative or absolute which is an age-old dispute in physics and the philosophy of physics and remains prevalent in contemporary philosophy of physics. While the success of Einstein's relativity theory could be taken to vindicate a thoroughgoing relationism about motion, this paper argues that such a conclusion is premature – unless one specifies further the sense of relativity involved. More specifically, I contend that the relativity of motion - properly understood - does not preclude what one can call local absoluteness: the existence of privileged local reference frames that ground a non-reductive, primitive conception of motion. This challenges the widespread assumption that relativistic physics necessitates the so-called at-at theory of motion. What results is a view according to which motion is primitive and absolute, yet in a peculiar sense local.

ABSTRACT. Do black holes contain a spacetime singularity according to general relativity? This apparently straightforward question becomes unexpectedly difficult under closer scrutiny. The standard view that spacetime singularities are not located in spacetime – since they are singularities of the spacetime metric itself – seems to conflict with the well-known prediction from general relativity of a singularity inside the event horizon of a black hole. After formulating the problem, I resort to location theory (Parsons, 2007; Gilmore et al., 2024) to offer a novel perspective on this issue. Location theory provides formal tools to challenge the idea that black hole singularities cannot have a location at all. In particular, it introduces different notions and logical systems of location. I use these conceptual distinctions to argue that even though black hole singularities cannot be exactly located at any spacetime region, they can be weakly located at some regions.

ABSTRACT. In this talk I discuss inquiry within the context of a broad normative framework I have defended called feasibilism. I begin with a dogmatist puzzle. Assume that knowledge is the goal of inquiry. If you know p, the answer to a question you are inquiring into, then the goal of this inquiry has been achieved. Are you nevertheless permitted to continue inquiring, gathering more evidence bearing on whether p? There is an argument for thinking that you are not, at least if gathering more evidence could not further the goal of any other inquiry you are engaged in. After all, by gathering more evidence you risk losing knowledge, whether by defeat or by losing your belief. However, many find a prohibition to gather more evidence implausible. I first apply feasibilism to inquiry by distinguishing between successful inquiry and inquiry that manifests the best feasible zetetic dispositions. According to the approach defended, we can assess zetetic dispositions by proxy, by assessing the doxastic dispositions rendered feasible by manifesting the zetetic dispositions. I then walk through an example involving ex ante dogmatist reasoning, showing how a feasibilist norm of inquiry permits inquiring even if one already knows and hence, even if one’s inquiry has already succeeded. Interestingly, the reasoning can be seen as an application of a well-known formal result (Good 1967/Oddie 1997), but with a novel interpretation of the formalism that diverges from that of epistemic decision theory.

ABSTRACT. Our dominant metaontology is Quinean and puts ontological commitment at its centre. Following Quine, a form of the following criterion is widely accepted: a theory T ontologically commits to a kind of entity F iff Fs have to exist in order for T to be true. Quine's criterion has only undergone minor revisions. However, the criterion and similar ones have been criticized. I argue that we need a notion of structural ontological commitments of theories in order to address the criticisms. Moreover, I develop and assess a corresponding criterion; structural commitments are not commitments to particular kinds of entity, but to structures or entities realizing a structure.

Provided that such a notion is coherent, there might be a new argument for structuralism forthcoming, starting from the widely accepted idea of considering the ontological commitments of theories. I want to develop and discuss such an argument.

ABSTRACT. The paper develops a framework for analysing the ontological and metaphysical neutrality of formal philosophical theories (FPTs), arguing that standard accounts of commitment lack the fine-grained distinctions required by FPTs’ peculiar epistemological status. I propose a quadripartite criterion of neutrality (N1–N4), obtained by combining ontological vs. metaphysical commitment with existential vs. realist interpretations of a theory. The framework is then applied to Truthmaker Semantics (TS) in its exact formulation. The latter was chosen due to the subtleties it involves, which make it an ideal test case for the framework. The analysis shows that TS fails to be neutral in all four respects and, if taken to be true, forces a realist interpretation of its content. The paper thus clarifies both the epistemological role of FPTs and the notion of neutrality in meta-ontological and meta-metaphysical debates.

ABSTRACT. Predicates apply correctly to some things, but not others. Explaining this is a central task for the metasemantics of predicates. I distinguish between two views about how metasemantics should provide such an explanation. According to the first view, generalism about predication, metasemantics should primarily explain how predicates get assigned to something general, such as properties or extensions. From this, the correctness or incorrectness of particular applications of the predicate will follow trivially. According to the second, particularism about predication, metasemantics should primarily explain how predicates come to possess conditions of correct application in particular cases. From this, we can generalise, and talk about extensions, intensions, etc. Many influential theories of meaning and content are committed to generalism, although the commitment is typically not made explicit. I will argue that particularism is an underexplored alternative, and that influential indeterminacy arguments (such as Kripkenstein’s) are easier to answer for a particularist.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I use J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts (Austin 1962, 1975, 1979) to develop a version of anti-representationalism (Travis 2008) that combines Meaning Eliminativism (ME) and Dynamic Conventionalism (DC). According to ME, words do not have meanings construed as relatively stable entities (Recanati 2004). According to DC, linguistic conventions and lexicalized concepts are best understood as lineages of past uses (Millikan 2005, 2017), which simultaneously constrain and underdetermine new applications. As a result, each act of concept use necessarily involves interactional negotiation (Sbisà 2024), more often tacit than explicit. I argue that developing ME and DC within an Austin-inspired framework reconciles eliminativist intuitions with the view of language use as a convention-governed practice. I propose an interactionalist extension of Austin’s four-part model of assertions and show that similar discursive mechanisms underlie both concept unity and conceptual change.

ABSTRACT. I follow Williamson’s methodological admonitions in Overfitting and Heuristics to argue against standard accounts of generic generalizations. The postulation of a tacit operator of genericity, an adverb of quantification, is the result of overfitting. It forces us to build a complex semantics for an intractable operator, resulting in important explanatory cost, to accommodate data that are merely the product of a fallible heuristic. Linguists and philosophers of language have wrongly assumed that a useful and often reliable heuristic, inductive generalization, also accounts for the truth-conditions of generic sentences. They have given a semantic solution to an epistemic problem. I vindicate Liebesman and Magidor’s non-standard accounts of generics. Their property versatility view of generics appears correct once we understand that type-restriction on instantiation of properties by individuals and by the kind to which they belong is grounded in the convenient heuristic of inductive generalization rather than metaphysical facts of genericity.

ABSTRACT. Recent philosophical accounts of sexual consent emphasize its communicative and socially embedded character. Kukla (2018) conceives of consent as an ongoing performative process that generates normative permissions and obligations within structured social practices. Tilton and Ichikawa (2021) offer a metasemantic account on which consent is fixed by social conventions determining what is consented to in each context. While both approaches provide important insights, I argue that neither fully captures how consent functions in communicative practice.

I propose an account of consent grounded in presupposition and common ground. Drawing on Stalnaker’s theory of presupposition and a dispositional understanding of common ground (Kölbel 2011), I argue that sexual consent is typically established as part of the shared conversational background. Consent functions as a dispositional presupposition – a standing, mutually recognized readiness to proceed – which remains in force unless challenged. This reconceives consent as a fundamentally relational and symmetrical communicative act.

ABSTRACT. In this talk I analyse utterances involving gendered expressions, focusing on innovative uses of gendered terms in slang. The main focus is on the term „babygirl” and how it is used in online discourse. The talk is structured as follows: first, I explain what are gendered expressions and the notion of conceptual gender; secondly, I briefly explain the key characteristics of slang; then, I go over the recent history of the use of the term „babygirl” focusing on the expressed evaluative content and the changes in its valence; finally, I explore two possible explanations of the pragmatic mechanisms at play — metaphoric framing effects (Camp, 2017) and echoic uses of language (Wilson and Sperber, 1986).

ABSTRACT. Constitutionalists assume that a statue is distinct from the lump of clay that constitutes it. Despite this, the two objects do not seem to differ in the way paradigmatically distinct objects do, since they share a striking number of properties, such as weight and shape. One way to account for this similarity appeals to property inheritance: some properties are inherited by one object from another with which it stands in the constitution relation. This raises three questions, which constitute what we call the Property-Inheritance Problem: (i) which properties can be shared by objects in the constitution relation? (ii) which of these properties can be inherited by one object from another? and (iii) under what conditions one object inherits a given property from another? After critically examining the main existing proposals addressing these questions, we develop and defend our own solution.

ABSTRACT. According to McDaniel, if a property is analogous, there are multiple ways of having that property. If, for example, being is analogous, it fragments into different modes of being. In this essay I discuss a serious concern for proponents of this view: that analogy is curiously similar to, or perhaps just is, the determinable–determinate relation. Significantly, both are ontological unities that involve specification. Notwithstanding their similarities, I argue that analogy is a distinct kind of connection. First, I show that analogous properties must bear the feature of being disjunctive (e.g., existence is absolute being or being-in). In contrast, determinates may form continuous ranges, say, as shades of a colour. Second, I demonstrate that analogates don’t have to specify a generic property, whereas determinates always do (a scarlet object is necessarily red). Given these distinctions, my conclusion is that analogy is unique and deserves more attention in the contemporary metaphysics literature.

ABSTRACT. In philosophy of chemistry, it is standard to assume that if one is a reductionist about chemistry then they are an eliminativist about chemical ontology. Looking at the chemical bond, I offer an account of how we can defend the bond’s reality in a way that retains the spirit of reductionism, yet coheres with an emergentist position. Specifically, I bring together ideas developed by Daniel Dennett on real patterns, James Ladyman and Don Ross on structural realism, and Jessica Wilson on weak emergence. I show how their ideas about reductionism and emergence can coherently apply to chemistry in a way that accommodates two key worries raised by reductionists and anti-reductionists respectively. For the reductionists, the worry concerns properly acknowledging the existing metaphysical and epistemic interconnections chemistry has with physics. For the antireductionists, the worry is not to collapse into an eliminativist view of chemical ontology. The proposed account circumvents both.

ABSTRACT. Scientific pluralism holds that a plurality of models, theories, and methods is often necessary to understand complex phenomena. This view is widely regarded as successful in contemporary science and philosophy, particularly in biology, where pluralism is commonly grounded in the assumed complexity of natural systems. Complex systems are said to exhibit emergence, adaptivity, and context-sensitive interactions that resist reductionist explanation. This appeal to complexity, however, raises three problems.

First, is pluralism genuinely dependent on claims about the metaphysical complexity of the world, or could it be defended on epistemic or methodological grounds alone? Second, the notion of complexity is deeply ambiguous, yet it frequently plays a justificatory role in philosophical and scientific reasoning. Finally, influential pluralist accounts rely on a metaphysical reading of complexity that risks circularity. I argue for a weaker, pragmatic conception of complexity that better supports pluralism without metaphysical excess.

ABSTRACT. Despite the extensive theoretical literature on civil disobedience (CD), it either does not distinguish between democratic and non-democratic contexts (Gandhi's theory) or focuses exclusively on democracies (liberal and democratic theories). This paper argues that key features of CD making sense in democracies do not apply to non-democratic contexts. The paper also challenges two tacit assumptions that there is no need for a theory of CD tailored to non-democratic contexts. The first, associated with Arendt, holds that CD cannot succeed under non-democratic conditions and is therefore not worth theorising. I show that CD has, in fact, succeeded in Chile (1988), Czechoslovakia (1989), Serbia (2000), and, especially, Armenia (2018). The second assumption, articulated by Rawls, holds that CD outside democracy is easy to justify and thus philosophically uninteresting. I reject this by arguing that CD in non-democratic regimes is more radical, disruptive, and transformative, and therefore philosophically more interesting than in democracies.

ABSTRACT. Implementation of immunity and vaccine passports (IP/VP) during the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a vivid ethical debate concerning permissibility of these measures. Ethical justification requires the policies to be proportionate, in a sense of health-related gains from their implementation outweighing potential losses connected to interferences with people’s rights and freedoms. However, contrary to the dominant view, Persad and Emanuel propose an account on the matter (lockdown-as-baseline-view; LBV) according to which the policies in question increase the overall freedom in the society instead of decreasing it. That’s because, according to LBV, the policies should be compared with a proper alternative, lockdown, which interferes with freedom to a greater extent. The author will argue in favour of rejection of LBV by claiming that it offers an oversimplified picture of interferences with rights and freedoms by IP/VP policies question. Author’s own account will allow for a proper estimation of such interferences.

ABSTRACT. I analyse the teachings Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl offers for reasoning about justice and its implementation. Riefenstahl manipulatively portrays the Nazi Nuremberg rally as fostering togetherness and safety, presenting individuals as empowered members of a loving, vigorous collective. The movement’s appeal is deceptively framed as a response to genuine human needs. By comparing the film’s portrayal of the early stages of Nazism with contemporary manifestations of radical right-wing populism, I derive insights for reasoning about justice and for developing policies that address these needs in order to counter such movements. These insights are reflected in egalitarian liberal conceptions of justice and in policies that affirm not only individual rights and liberties, but also other goods already highlighted by classic egalitarian liberal authors yet perhaps insufficiently affirmed today, such as well-being, affiliation, flourishing, community membership, safety, and a sense of feeling at home in one’s social environment.

ABSTRACT. In a series of recent articles, Megan Hyska (2025, forthcoming) has argued that uses of AI in propaganda, as in so-called ‘deepfakes’, undermine our capacity to acquire knowledge from shared media. Hyska has further argued that deepfakes also undermine “our relationships in the context of collective political action” by interfering in our capacity to show each other information. Although an environment rich in fake images or videos may arguably undermine knowledge, this paper disputes some of Hyska’s assumptions and her conclusion that digital propaganda can undermine collective political action. I suggest instead that the effects and power of propaganda are explainable by how propaganda (digital or otherwise) can shape collective political action.

ABSTRACT. How does authoritarian propaganda succeed in shaping citizens’ behavior when genuine trust and belief are absent? This talk argues that propaganda’s effectiveness often operates not through belief formation, but by motivating a distinctive practical stance toward information - what I call epistemic as-if trust. Drawing on philosophical work on trust and testimony, I distinguish genuine epistemic trust, understood as a disposition to update one’s beliefs in response to a source’s testimony, from a condition in which agents knowingly lack such trust yet nevertheless act as if they are trusting the source. I argue that epistemic as-if trust does not aim at belief-updating, but at acceptance: agents treat testimonial content as a premise for action, without believing it to be true. This framework helps explain how authoritarian propaganda can shape behavior even when it's widely distrusted, illuminating how citizens can coherently engage with and act upon narratives they recognize as unreliable.

ABSTRACT. The study, development, and applications of non-classical logics has constituted a very fruitful area of research since the birth of contemporary mathematical logic. The target of this symposium is giving visibility to new results of young scholars participating on two research projects in the area of non-classical logics and their application to paradoxes and beyond (the titles of these projects omitted in this short abstract for reviewing purposes). The symposium includes four talks with the following topics: (i) topic-transformative and topic-cancellative negations in containment logics, (ii) duality of super- and subvaluationist theories of truth, (iii) sorites paradoxes and deontic modals, and (iv) linear logic and the structure of the free-choice paradox.

ABSTRACT. Self-control – the ability to pursue valuable goals in the face of conflicting motivation – is fundamental for moral development. In light of widespread phenomena such as weakness of will and digital addictions (gaming and social-media addictions), the prospect of enhancing self-control is more pressing than ever. Yet in the contemporary enhancement debate, self-control enhancement (SCE) has received little attention. In this paper, we question whether technological improvements of self-control would be prohibited, permissible, or even necessary according to Kant’s theory of virtue. SCE technologies such as brain stimulation and neurofeedback devices pose distinctive ethical concerns in a Kantian framework. We explore whether such technologies reduce opportunities for self-control development and whether they risk undermining autonomous moral agency and moral motivation by promoting automaticity and overreliance. By situating SCE within Kant’s theory of virtue, however, we argue that such technologies can be permissible, and even necessary means to moral improvement.

ABSTRACT. With LLMs paving the way for creating digital duplicates (DDs) of humans, some are enthusiastic about this prospect, as they see such tools as allowing for new forms of academic enhancement. My claim is that this optimistic case has to be weighed with the dangers of cognitive dis-enhancement and academic deskilling. I will make my case by looking into the emerging literature on avatars, digital duplicates, and on recent trends of outsourcing cognitive work to chatbots. If students can easily create avatars of themselves that take the form of a DD cognitive duplicate, then we should also naturally expect them to use such avatars to do their homework and write their papers by emulating their writing style, personality, ideas, etc. My talk will end with a policy proposal in favor of introducing a new form of hybrid plagiarism, one which combines elements from self-plagiarism and contract cheating.

ABSTRACT. On the noetic account, aesthetic experience is primarily defined in terms of an explorative thought-process grounded in our abilities for sense-making, problem-solving and making associations; a seeking-to-understand (Schellekens 2022; 2024; 2026). Aesthetic experience is i) inquisitive, ii) epistemically generative, iii) processual and iv) psychologically integrated. In this paper, I further unpack the explorative aspect of such experience, and identify the main epistemic benefits which can be seen to arise from exploration in general, especially conceptual mapping and mental navigation. I connect these epistemic benefits to the aesthetic case and open up for a new cognitivist argument in aesthetics.

ABSTRACT. We present a novel argument for the substrate flexibility of consciousness. While current debate focuses on the possibility of fine-grained functional equivalents to human beings made of different substances, we eschew this route as it does not speak to the consciousness of beings functionally unlike us. Rather, we argue:

1) There are at least 1000 behaviorally sophisticated beings across the observable universe, 2) A substantial proportion of these beings are conscious, and 3) At least some of these conscious beings have minds composed of substrates distinct from ours.

1) is supported by common cosmological assumptions. 2) is supported by our "Copernican Principle of Consciousness" (redacted): among behaviorally sophisticated beings across the universe, we are not special with respect to consciousness. We extend this reasoning to support 3) by arguing that absent evidence otherwise, our physical substrate is neither unique among behaviorally sophisticated beings, nor itself special with respect to consciousness.

ABSTRACT. Recent discussions of acquaintance typically assume three claims: (i) acquaintance is a form of knowledge of qualitative character, (ii) acquaintance constitutes phenomenal consciousness, and (iii) necessarily, mental qualities are phenomenally conscious. This paper argues that, although each claim is independently attractive, together they generate a trilemma. Drawing on a general anti-triviality constraint on knowledge, I argue that if acquaintance both constitutes consciousness and is directed at necessarily conscious qualities, then the object of acquaintance becomes metaphysically dependent on the epistemic relation itself. Thus, acquaintance fails to disclose an independently existing object and thereby its epistemic significance is trivialized. Acquaintance theorists can retain any two of these commitments but not all three. I map the resulting logical space, sketch the principal costs of abandoning each limb of the triad, and call on acquaintance theorists to take a stand on which limb of the triad they are willing to abandon or revise.

ABSTRACT. Chalmers’ (1997) replacement arguments demonstrate that gradually replacing neurons with silicon-based functional equivalents would lead to absurd consequences when biological naturalism is assumed. Qualia could fade or change without one being able to form beliefs about these changes. This paper argues that these arguments rest on two additional and debatable assumptions. The first assumption is that neuron-by-neuron replacement is the appropriate level of analysis. In light of recent research on coupling biological brain organoids with silicon-based AI systems, I argue that system-level replacement offers a more suitable level of analysis. This already mitigates the arguments. The second concerns temporal properties of consciousness. If consciousness is assumed to be temporally extended to an extent that exceeds the functional input frequency of belief-updating systems, replacement under functional equivalence becomes impossible. Therefore, biological naturalism can be defended by accepting additional metaphysical views about consciousness. These conceptions directly impact the possibility of artificial consciousness.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the prospects of a naturalized account of scientific rationality through a critical engagement with Harvey Siegel’s critique of instrumental conceptions of rationality and Philip Kitcher’s practice-based framework in The Advancement of Science. Siegel argues that instrumentalist accounts fail to account for the rationality of scientific goals, neglect the epistemic justification of scientific products, and undermine the timeless normative core of scientific rationality. After reconstructing these objections, the paper turns to Kitcher’s influential proposal, which evaluates scientific rationality diachronically in terms of the advancement of scientific practices relative to epistemic goals. I argue that while Kitcher offers a sophisticated and normatively non-trivial naturalized account of rationality, his framework relocates epistemic normativity from the justification of scientific claims to the assessment of practices and transitions. The paper concludes by assessing whether this shift successfully responds to Siegel’s concerns or instead leaves unresolved tensions between naturalism, normativity, and epistemic justification.

ABSTRACT. The argument from inductive risk is widely considered the most compelling criticism of the value-free ideal of science (Douglas 2009). Recently, Menon and Stegenga (2023) proposed a new ideal of science: the Sisyphean ideal. According to this, although a fully value-free state is unachievable, scientists ought to act “as if” science should be value-free by persistently eliminating value-dependent bifurcation points. In this talk, I present some of criticism of the Sisyphean ideal. First, the reduction of bifurcation points involves value judgements. Second, regarding the guidance problem (the unachievable goal is impotent to guide our actions), the "as if" pretense of value-freedom does not appear to do better. Third, it does not answer the feminist critique based on value enrichment (Rolin 2017; Intemann 2017). I conclude that the Sisyphean struggle is a futile and misguided effort that obscures the legitimate role of values in science.

ABSTRACT. This talk applies Bas van Fraassen’s concept of “philosophical stances” – clusters of attitudes, commitments, and goals – to the field of bioethics. I argue that prominent positions like bio-liberalism and bio-conservatism are best understood as stances that functionally “modulate” moral theories and mid-level principles (e.g., principlism) rather than as competing theories themselves. By analyzing debates such as puberty suppression and human germline editing, I demonstrate how these stances determine the epistemic salience of facts and the normative weight assigned to principles like autonomy or non-maleficence. Finally, I propose three criteria for the rational evaluation of these non-propositional stances: internal consistency, empirical adequacy, and their impact on flourishing. Distinguishing between stance and theory fosters a more transparent bioethical discourse and potentially improves deliberative practices regarding controversial biomedical advancements.

ABSTRACT. Many hold that games and assertion are governed by constitutive rules which define the practice in that if one violates the rules one is no longer engaging in the practice. Ishani Maitra has argued for the contrary, by showing that one can flagrantly violate norms of assertion, and assert, but one can’t flagrantly violate rules of games and continue to play. In this talk I do three things. First, I strengthen Maitra’s argument by demonstrating that there is a further disanalogy between asserting and playing. Second, I argue that these disanalogies don’t obtain between playing and inquiring. Hence, we can seek to define inquiry by uncovering the constitutive norms that govern it. Third, I offer a method for identifying the constitutive norms of inquiry. The constitutive norms of inquiry are the norms one must comply with in order for it to be metaphysically possible that one succeeds in one’s inquiry.

ABSTRACT. The current debate on the aim of inquiry centers on the question which epistemic mental state in particular constitutes the aim of inquiry. In this talk, I propose a different approach to the debate, which starts from the idea that reasons for engaging in inquiry are always instrumental reasons. After defending the application of this claim even to cases where an agent engages in inquiry purely for the sake of intellectual curiosity, I will argue that the epistemic mental state which constitutes the aim of inquiry is simply the epistemic mental state required by the end, for the sake of which the agent engages in the inquiry, assuming that they have a reason to pursue said end. I will conclude by assessing the implications of this analysis of the aim of inquiry for the plausibility of the mental states which have been proposed to constitute the aim of inquiry.

ABSTRACT. I explore rational inquiry by combining two influential ideas in epistemology: that inquiry aims at knowledge, and that rational inquirers pursue this aim in an instrumentally rational way. Drawing on epistemic decision-theory to spell out these ideas, I discuss three challenges to their ability to explain why investigation is an instrumentally rational means to the aim of knowledge: that they can’t explain the rationality of double-checking, and that they must sometimes regard investigation as irrational, either because one fears that investigation might produce misleading evidence, or because it might defeat the knowledge one already has. I argue that these objections can successfully be rebutted, but only at the cost of making strong and controversial assumptions about knowledge and its relationship to rational belief.

ABSTRACT. The claim that understanding is a source of epistemic justification has been closely tied to the debate about the a priori. How do we know a priori truth like knowledge entails truth? A common view holds that we do so by understanding alone—and that understanding is the source of the a priori. I examine this view. I begin by showing that it is ambiguous between semantic and rational understanding. Focusing on the former, I distinguish a weak role of semantic understanding—on which it justifies beliefs about meaning—from a strong role—on which it justifies beliefs in non-semantic a priori truths. The weak role is uncontentious and unmysterious; the strong is neither. I argue that semantic understanding is the source of justification by which we know semantic truths, but not non-semantic truths. I conclude with a defence of rational understanding as a source of justification.

ABSTRACT. We acquire epistemic goods – such as knowledge and epistemic warrant – through a variety of methods. Among these, the method of proof has traditionally been associated with the a priori sciences, including logic and mathematics. However, in a series of papers, Timothy Williamson challenges this traditional view. He argues that by carefully examining how an epistemic agent comes to know a mathematical claim via a proof reveals the limited significance of the a priori-a posteriori distinction. In this paper, we critically examine Williamson’s arguments and maintain that his skepticism is unwarranted.

ABSTRACT. Practice-based inferentialist accounts of logic neutralize the adoption problem by rejecting the idea that basic logical norms are adopted or justified from outside inferential practice. Normativity begins with proto-norms already operative in communal reasoning. However, this approach faces a different challenge: it allegedly fails to secure sufficient objectivity, especially when communities endorse incompatible logics. If criteria of correctness are practice-bound, logical disagreement seems to collapse into arbitrariness. This paper examines whether this objection presupposes an unrealistic standard. We propose that some logical disagreements exhibit ineliminability of perspective: evaluation is possible only from within a perspective, not from a neutral standpoint. Drawing on MacFarlane's framework, we argue that logical claims like "double negation elimination is valid" function analogously to predicates of taste. Rather than treating this as a defect, we explore whether acknowledging ineliminable perspective clarifies the kind of objectivity logical normativity can genuinely support within inferentialist anti-exceptionalism.

ABSTRACT. Carnap's Categoricity Problem is a problem for the orthodox metasemantic view that the truth-conditional meanings of our logical expressions are determined by our dispositions to treat as valid the deductive rules governing those expressions. The worry is that there seem to be deviant interpretations of both propositional connectives and quantifiers that are compatible with the validity of their I- and E-rules – i.e., that the validity of those rules seemingly doesn't categorically determine the interpretations of our logical expressions. Well-known solutions to this problem are available in the case of propositional connectives, but the situation in the case of quantifiers is far less clear: here, although various attempts to solve the problem have been proposed, whether any of them is at all tenable is a matter of some controversy. The aim of the proposed symposium is to make progress on the Categoricity Problem as it applies to quantifiers in particular.

ABSTRACT. Traditional accounts of lying typically define lying in terms of three conditions: asserting a proposition, believing it to be false, and intending one’s audience to believe it. Much recent debate has centred on whether each of these conditions is individually required. This paper shifts attention to a different issue, arguing that even when all three conditions are satisfied, lying need not occur. I discuss a class of cases in which a speaker appears to satisfy the standard criteria but nevertheless does not count as lying. Such cases suggest that prevailing approaches focus too narrowly on the semantic features of assertion and belief, while neglecting the cognitive perspective from which speakers represent what they assert or believe. The paper outlines an alternative way of thinking about lying that incorporates these cognitive aspects.

ABSTRACT. Since November 2024, Germany's best known news program (Tagesschau) has removed the address "Ladies and Gentlemen" from its opening formula, sparking debate about inclusive language strategies. This paper examines whether eliminating non-inclusive words constitutes effective inclusivity, or whether silence alone suffices. I argue that absence of exclusion does not equal presence of inclusion, therefore for silence to be inclusive it must be communicative. I establish two necessary conditions for meaningful communicative silence: audience expectation and speaker intention. In analyzing Tagesschau's omission through Ephratt's concept of "verbal silence," I argue that this instance of silence semantically conveys both an assertive and expressive speech act. I then explore two consequent implications: first, how silence enables plausible deniability, allowing institutions to suggest progressive values while avoiding substantive commitment; second, how institutional silence can create taboo words through indirect directive force, potentially impoverishing rather than enriching linguistic resources for respectful communication.

ABSTRACT. In our paper, we offer the first philosophical account of the phenomenon of gay silence. Gay silence is a communicative strategy aimed at concealing one’s non‑heterosexual identity and avoiding being outed. It operates through the strategic use of silence—while remaining silent is typically interpreted as agreement, in this case silence is used to redirect the audience’s attention away from one’s sexuality. Rather than straightforwardly confirming or denying the assumptions of one’s sexuality, the speaker manages the conversational exchange so that the topic of sexual orientation becomes sidelined. In doing so, gay silence exploits ordinary conversational expectations, while subtly subverting them in order to protect one’s privacy and minimize social, professional, or physical risk.

ABSTRACT. On Kripke’s causal-historical view of reference, the reference of a name is fixed in a baptism and transmitted through a communication chain, provided each speaker intends to use the name as prior speakers did. A challenge arises from cases – such as the Madagascar case – in which this condition is met, yet the name undergoes a reference shift. We defend a solution that appeals to the independently plausible ideas that speakers can have conflicting intentions, that one intention may be dominant, and that the relative strengths of intentions can change over time. When a speaker unknowingly harbors conflicting name-using intentions, a reference shift in their idiolect occurs once a previously non-dominant intention becomes dominant. Deferential relations among speakers may then help propagate this shift within a linguistic community. We also show how the notion of a dominant name-using intention can be explicated in terms of a speaker’s second-order dispositions.

ABSTRACT. Frege’s puzzle of cognitive significance remains a primary motivation for non-Millian semantic theories. Relationist approaches, specifically the connectedness model, attempt to resolve this by prioritizing coordination relations between thoughts over identical internal representations. However, I argue this model faces an internal tension between its anti-resemblance commitments and its congruence constraint on concept sameness.

In cases of systematic concept variation, this constraint proves either vacuous or reintroduces resemblance-based requirements. Consequently, the connectedness model fails to satisfy Fregean motivations without relying on representational similarity. I propose an alternative framework inspired by Davidsonian triangulation. By modeling coordination as a meta-representational alignment of perspectives, this account preserves relationist flexibility while explaining how communication succeeds at the level of cognitive significance.

ABSTRACT. Two influential approaches in contemporary metaphysics are a Finean Neo-Aristotelian view of essence and a science-based strategy for the justification of metaphysical claims. Several philosophers have combined these approaches in their accounts of the essences of natural kinds. On this view, essentialist claims are justified by appeal to the scientific identification of explanatory properties, while these explanatory essences are interpreted within a Finean Neo-Aristotelian view. I argue that this apparently attractive combination cannot be sustained. Either essences are understood in a Finean sense, or claims about the essences of natural kinds are justified by appeal to explanatory properties. The reason is that explanatory considerations are silent about the source in virtue of which a property belongs to a kind, which is crucial for the Finean distinction between essential and accidental properties. This result undermines attempts to combine the two approaches and raises serious difficulties for each when pursued in isolation.

ABSTRACT. In Appearance in Reality (2021), John Heil has developed a theory according to which the essences of concrete entities are what it is to be something, are that by which we cognize things and are identical with their forms, understood in a moderate, non-entitative sense. Several entities are said to share an essence when their forms are qualitatively identical. This theory has several benefits, in particular that of parsimony due to its sparse ontological base. But its austerity also resigns it to having to deflate the ambitions of traditional essentialism, in particular by only being applicable to microphysical entities and by declining to shoulder the usual theoretical work of essentialism. In this paper, we will see how several modest additions to the theory which preserve its theoretical strengths can make it applicable to macroscopic entities as well as able to do much of the work of traditional essentialism.

ABSTRACT. Natural kinds are typically taken to mark real divisions of nature. This paper revisits the metaphysics of natural kinds by examining their essences and naturalness, with a particular focus on the contemporary causal structuralist accounts (Boyd 1989, 1999, Khalidi 2018). I show that the causal structure taken to underlie classification into natural kinds shares remarkable similarities with the architecture of neural network models in machine learning, whose success in data classification, recognition, and prediction has been stunning nowadays, but whose metaphysical implications are by and large still underappreciated. In this paper, I compare these two models about classification, examine the crucial divergence in the different types of connections and their concepts of priority, and suggest the potential for neural network algorithms to reveal natural divisions for the sake of both special sciences and metaphysics.

ABSTRACT. I analyze the notion of value in the process metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead, focusing primarily on Process and Reality. The main objective is to clarify the meaning of value within Whitehead’s metaphysical system and to delimit the scope of its application in relation to its use in contemporary debates on ecological ethics. To this end, the notion of value in ordinary language—understood as a property attributed through human judgment—is distinguished from the processual conception proposed by Whitehead. The analysis shows that value does not function as an external normative criterion nor as the foundation of a universal intrinsic value, but rather as an internal moment in the becoming of actual entities, expressed through the notion of valuation. It is argued that, although value plays a central role in the dynamics of the world, it cannot be transferred to a normative ecological ethics based on the intrinsic value of nature.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I focus on the strong notion of emergence and argue that the synchronic conception of strong emergence defended by Wilson (2015; 2021) faces two fundamental problems: the so-called Collapse Problem (Taylor 2015; 2022) and the Problem of Emergence Ex Nihilo (O’Connor and Wong 2005; Santos 2015; Humphreys 2016). I argue that these two problems are closely related and that their common origin lies in the strictly synchronic character of the dependence relation that Wilson postulates between the emergent entity and its constitutive base. I further defend the claim that adopting a diachronic perspective on emergence allows both problems to be resolved without abandoning a strong notion of emergence, and that Wilson’s objections to such approaches can be answered by drawing a distinction between two types of composition, namely synchronic and diachronic composition

ABSTRACT. Mental health plays a central role in contemporary policy and clinical discourse, yet it remains philosophically under-theorised. While extensive attention has been devoted to defining mental disorder, mental health is still commonly treated either as the absence of illness or as derivative of psychological well-being. I argue that mental health cannot be adequately understood as illness absence, well-being, or the possession of internal psychological capacities. Rather, it has a distinct positive structure: it varies independently of illness status, resists binary classification as simply healthy or ill and depends crucially on relational and contextual conditions. To capture these features, I propose a capabilitarian account of mental health. On this view, mental health consists in the real capability for psychological functioning, the effective opportunity to exercise psychological capacities under supportive social conditions. This framework offers a principled, non-pathological, and context-sensitive account of mental health as a genuinely positive dimension of human life.

ABSTRACT. Physician aid-in-dying (PAD) is a medical practice intended to end the life of a suffering patient. Although PAD regulations were originally designed for patients with physical illnesses, an increasing number of psychiatric patients are now requesting access to it. This development remains controversial, mainly due to doubts about whether mental suffering can meet the moral and legal criteria. A key justification for psychiatric PAD is the parity argument (Kious & Battin, 2019) and the requirement that mental suffering must be unbearable. This paper analyses understandings of suffering proposed by B. M. Kious (2022), in the context of mental suffering. I argue that ‘value-based suffering’ is morally decisive for PAD requests, regardless of its source. However, research show that physicians assess suffering asymmetrically, being more likely to consider only physical suffering as unbearable. This may be discriminatory and raises questions about the need for legal reform.

ABSTRACT. One of the central topics in social ontology is the tension between biological kinds and social kinds. We can see this, for example, in well-known debates about what gender or race is. First, I show that a similar tension arises in the philosophy of psychiatry, rooted in the relationship between neurobiology and so-called folk psychology. Then I point out an important difference: encountering radically different explanatory aims, which in social ontology leads to splitting the concept, in the philosophy of psychiatry does not lead to such a split. My main thesis is that this situation confronts us with a general and interesting methodological challenge regarding explanatory pluralism: we need to find an answer to the question of why, despite fundamentally different explanatory aims, a concept is sometimes split and sometimes is not. A lack of such an answer could be a burden for major debates within social ontology, for example.

ABSTRACT. Perspectivist notions are central to contemporary philosophy, even when they are not explicitly labeled as such. Across semantics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and decision theory, philosophers routinely appeal to notions that presuppose perspectival structure—hyperintensional contents, epistemic standpoints, second-person attitudes, framing effects, or context-sensitive standards of assessment. Yet despite their widespread use, the philosophical status of these notions remains unclear. Are perspectives merely heuristic devices for organizing inquiry, or do they play an indispensable explanatory role that cannot be eliminated without loss?

The Symposium explores the increasing prominence of robust, non-reductive conceptions of perspectives across several philosophical domains. These conceptions do not treat perspectives as optional heuristics, but as indispensable explanatory resources, able of structuring access to content, normativity, agency, and understanding in ways that cannot be replicated by perspective-free accounts.

ABSTRACT. G.A. Cohen has argued that every “sane” person possesses a conservative disposition: we preserve valuable things, even if we can replace them with things of greater value. . From a philosophical perspective, this conservative disposition may seem puzzling, if not irrational, and a mere expression of status quo bias. In this talk, I will present a novel account to explain and justify value conservatism that links the conservative disposition to the preconditions of agency. The idea is that the conservative disposition is rationally justified because it connects us with the past (either with earlier versions of ourselves or with previous generations), and this helps to secure important preconditions for agency, and securing our agency is something that is mandatory for agents from a rational point of view.

ABSTRACT. Moral inferentialism, which has recently received renewed attention, is the view that normative statements (“Teachers ought to be patient with their students”) make explicit commitments to practical inference (“I am a teacher, therefore I shall be patient with my students”). The view can be traced back to Wilfrid Sellars’s metaethical writings. In my talk, I show that a Sellars-derived framework for distinguishing different types of “ought” or normative statements can enrich the contemporary discussion. I critically discuss the contemporary assumption that different “ought”s or norms (e.g., the instrumental “ought”, social and moral norms) can be distinguished by the scope of reasoners for whom the inference codified by the norm is entitlement-preserving. Based on Sellars’s hints, I develop an alternative, two-dimensional framework for classifying practical inferences in terms of availability and objectivity that allows us to distinguish different types of “ought” in a fine-grained way.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that suffering is grounded in an experiential defeat of desire that is uniquely truthful. Against both purely experiential and non-experiential accounts, I claim that suffering begins when an occurrent desire for things to be otherwise is defeated in a way that cannot be accepted or integrated into agency. This defeat makes salient a reality that resists the will, thereby revealing both how things are and one’s powerlessness to change them. I show how this view reconciles paradigmatic experiential cases (grief, heartbreak, bodily violation) with cases often taken to be non-experiential (oppression, affliction, broken agency), and clarifies the relation between suffering and disrupted agency discussed by Brady and Corns. Finally, I argue that although suffering can be truthful in a distinctive way, this does not straightforwardly entail that suffering has value, since the truth it reveals may be unusable—or even hostile—to agency and human life.

ABSTRACT. This proposal’s framework is the recent debate on authenticity in the performance of Western classical music. I adopt Julian Dodd’s concept of 'interpretive authenticity', understood as being true to a work by performing it in a way that evinces its musical meaning, even when this requires sacrificing some score compliance. My central claim is that electronic versions of classical works are prima facie valid, full-fledged performances that may fulfil interpretive authenticity requirements successfully, as long as they serve this meaning-revealing task. I argue that this is especially plausible in the case of works that are culturally ubiquitous, since our familiarity can make us become desensitized to their meaning. A possible objection is that this approach applies only to very frequently performed works. In response, I suggest that the contemporary culture of recordings prompts a reconsideration of what counts as ‘ubiquity’, thereby widening the extent of this interpretive approach.

ABSTRACT. The paper places itself in the emerging field of existential aesthetics by advancing the claim that art may contribute to the realization of the appreciator’s authenticity, understood as the adoption of a system of commitments that one has agentially shaped rather than passively absorbed. I illustrate the ways in which art may promote a person’s authenticity, by examining four considerations. a) Artworks may induce moral disorientation, and hence prompt the appreciator to critically consider their value system. b) By providing what-it-is-like knowledge, art offers a variety of experiences that may inspire a person to reorient their life in a given direction. c) Artworks provide a dimension of playfulness, in which the appreciator may distance themselves from their commitments. d) Aesthetic value may constitute instances of external reasons that the appreciator may appeal to in sustaining their aspirational process towards a new self-created identity.

ABSTRACT. The Extended Mind Thesis (EMT) challenges the assumption that the mind is confined to the brain, yet its implications for personhood remain disputed. This paper reconstructs a prominent line of debate on extended persons, moving from Clark and Chalmers’s suggestion that the extended mind implies an extended self, through Miyazono’s claim that the functionalist argument for EMT supports only wide minds non-identical with biological subjects, to Milojevic’s argument that EMT requires an explicit identity assumption grounded in psychological continuity. The paper then addresses Harris’s objection that, if grounded in psychological continuity, mind extension generates Parfit-style branching cases involving two coexisting persons. It argues that this two-person view faces serious metaphysical difficulties concerning colocation and individuation. Harris’s proposal either undermines numerical identity or leads to an implausible proliferation of coincident persons. The paper offers a solution in shifting individuation criteria of persons from their realization base to their functional unity.

ABSTRACT. This paper theorizes documents as scaffolding objects within the extended mind paradigm. Documents, understood as bundles of status functions sustained by collectively recognized rules, actively organize, guide, and enable higher-order cognition by shaping attention, inference, and coordination across persons and times. Drawing on cognitive artifacts theory and social ontology, I develop a framework where documents function as epistemic and practical anchors that realize cognitive functions and stabilize social facts. These material structures satisfy the constraints of non-accidentality, reliability, and deep integration required for genuine cognitive extension. Documents constitute "cognitive institutions" that enable cognitive processes which would otherwise be impossible. This framework illuminates how agency and responsibility are redistributed in document-rich ecologies and reveals the culturally variable character of cognitive scaffolding. The analysis addresses objections regarding integration, arguing that norm-governed skillful practices secure functional dependence. This approach reframes debates on data governance and AI alignment by recognizing documentation as cognitive infrastructure.

ABSTRACT. I defend the view that pretence should be seen as primary to imagination. In particular, I argue against the view that pretence is identical to imagination, or that pretence is just a subtype of imagination (i.e. imagination plus behaviour) such that imagination is a prerequisite for pretence. I identify and defend three main distinctions between pretence and imagination: a) being a social ability, b) being behaviour based vs. purely mental and c) the connection to reality. Based on these distinctions, I argue that pretence should be seen as distinct and developmentally primary to imagination, providing an important foundation for the development of imaginative abilities. In doing so, I aim to clarify the relationship of pretence and imagination, as well as highlight the developmental significance of pretence for thinking beyond the here and now.

ABSTRACT. Recently, some authors have proposed that the phenomenon of maladaptive daydreaming (MD)—a highly compelling and immersive form of fantasising—should be considered as a distinct dissociative disorder, alongside dissociative identity disorder (DID). Although these proposals emphasise the role of imaginative involvement in the emergence and maintenance of dissociative pathology, it remains unclear how imagination might contribute to its aetiology. In this presentation, I introduce a novel framework that considers imagination as a key cognitive mechanism in MD and DID and reframes these phenomena as states in which imagination becomes the primary cognitive tool for orienting oneself in the world, regulating affect, and sustaining coherence and meaning. By reframing dissociation through a Merleau-Pontian account of imagination, this presentation offers a novel conceptual framework that integrates clinical and empirical psychological research on dissociative absorption with phenomenological positions on imagination, thereby clarifying the role of imagination in MD and DID.

ABSTRACT. I develop a novel semantics for probabilities of causal counterfactuals that generalizes the standard Pearlian semantics: it applies to probabilistic causal models that cannot be extended into realistic structural causal models and are therefore beyond the scope of Pearl’s semantics. This generalization is needed because, as I show, such probabilistic causal models arise even in simple settings. My semantics offer a natural compromize in the long-standing debate between Pearl and Dawid over counterfactuals: I agree with Dawid that universal causal determinism and unrealistic variables should be rejected, but I agree with Pearl that a general semantics of counterfactuals is nonetheless possible. I prove that my semantics is equivalent to two other recent proposals that do not involve structural causal models, and that it is in line with various comments on stochastic counterfactuals that have appeared in the literature more broadly.

ABSTRACT. Suppositions can be classified as indicative vs. subjunctive and full vs. partial. We propose a causal account of suppositional reasoning that naturally unifies all four types of reasoning based on this classification, provides a justification of the rather heterogenous canonical update rules, and gives rise to a new update rule for the partial subjunctive case in terms of generalized imaging.

ABSTRACT. Concepts play a distinctive and underappreciated role in epistemology. I argue for this by showing how manipulative people can harm their victims’ concepts, and how doing so impacts the victims’ doxastic dispositions and belief-forming practices. To begin this project, I draw on recent work in cognitive science to suggest that concepts and doxastic attitudes play distinct functional roles. Doxastic attitudes are propositional attitudes that let us represent the world as being a certain way. Concepts are sub-propositional mental states that are important for categorization, recognition, drawing inferences, combining concepts, and building conceptual networks. Manipulative people can engage in a deleterious form of conceptual engineering, which I call concept commandeering. This involves encouraging people to build problematic conceptual networks that harm their concept’s functionality. Additionally, I argue that concept commandeering undermines people’s epistemic agency – i.e., the manipulator gains some control over their victims’ doxastic dispositions and belief-forming practices.

ABSTRACT. Normative and descriptive approaches to modality offer different approaches for modal knowledge and philosophical methodology. Descriptivists treat modal discourse as describing modal facts, while normativists argue that its function is to express semantic rules, shifting attention from discovering modal truths to negotiating norms. Critics of normative approaches claim that it renders modal knowledge subjective and unconstrained. The paper proposes an asymmetrical common ground: it takes the functional insights of normativism as primary while engaging seriously with the concerns of descriptivist critics. I introduces the Discovery Challenge, which demands an account of how we can grasp semantic rules not yet established in practice. By drawing on parallels with essentialist accounts of knowledge of essence, I argue that normativism can incorporate a practical capacity to recognize stable patterns of behavior that inform emerging norms. This enriches normativism, answers anti-realist worries, and shows how both approaches can support one another.

ABSTRACT. Today, IBE is generally understood to comprise two distinct branches: philosophical IBE and formal IBE. In this talk, their commonalities as well as their differences will be explored. This will be done using the concepts of strong equivalence and weak equivalence relation.

Regarding strong equivalence, it will be shown that although philosophical and formal IBE share certain structural features, they are not fully equivalent. There are explanatory virtues that are considered critical in philosophical IBE but have not yet been formalized in models based on the AKM framework.

Similarly, it will be argued that even if philosophical IBE is treated as a black box, it is not weakly equivalent to its formal counterpart, since there are several inputs for which the two methods produce divergent outputs.

Hence, the two methods are neither internally nor externally equivalent.

ABSTRACT. Quantum logics have long been caught between two opposed readings: as deviant logics introduced to regiment quantum experimental discourse, or as formally interesting but philosophically inert algebras. I will argue that many of the controversies surrounding quantum logics stem from a historically inherited commitment that identifies quantum propositions with informal, natural-language experimental statements. After tracing the emergence of this continuity assumption from Birkhoff and von Neumann onwards, the paper shows that it is neither required by the quantum formalism nor necessary for a rigorous semantic interpretation of quantum logics. Once this assumption is abandoned, quantum propositions can be understood as theory-level formalisms rather than informal sentence-like experimental propositions, allowing for a clean separation between algebraic structure, semantic interpretation, and informal inferential practice. The result is a principled framework for reinterpreting quantum logics beyond natural-language constraints, together with a clear methodological basis for rebuilding their semantics without any ad hoc criteria.

ABSTRACT. Logics of change are a well-known modal alternatives to Logics of time, introduced by Prior. In these logics, the primary notion is a change of the truth value of a sentence, expressed by the modal operator C. These logics were studied by Świętorzecka, Czermak, Łyczak. The strength of logics of change is closely related to their counterpart logics of time. Nevertheless, syntactical translations between them are quite involved, require extending the length of formulas.

Proof systems for logics of change with linear semantics and infinite rules are known ​​as well as systems for branching change. In the case of branching change, there are no known proof systems satisfying the strong completeness theorem. Recently, Świętorzecka and Zdanowski provided a system satisfying the strong completeness theorem for the branching time logic UB. We adapt their technique to formulate an analogous system satisfying the strong completeness theorem for the branching change logic.

ABSTRACT. We analyze some of the most renowned definitions of temporal part based on parthood simpliciter and existence at a time within a minimal formal framework. The relationships among the definitions are charted, highlighting key interdependencies with choices pertaining to the mereological framework, the characterization of existence at a time (e.g., the endorsement of locational principles such as Delegation and Arbitrary Partitions), and commitments to extended simples and temporal structures. It is shown that non‑linear temporal structures with plausible ontological interpretations generalize issues usually associated with extended simples, suggesting that orthodox definitions and their characterizations rely on implicit, non-neutral assumptions.

ABSTRACT. The later philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap are standardly taken to exemplify a defining schism in mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy between anti-formal ordinary-language philosophy and formal, scientifically-modeled rational reconstruction. This paper challenges that picture. Drawing on Waismann’s claim that Carnap and Wittgenstein differed more in interests than in philosophical commitments, I argue that their later work shares a common, non-doctrinal conception of philosophical problem-solving. For both figures, philosophical problems are not theoretical questions demanding new knowledge, but expressions of conceptual disturbance generated by the overextension of ordinary concepts and the imposition of undue theoretical demands. Philosophical progress consists in dissolving such disturbances rather than discovering propositional truths. Examining Carnap’s method of explication alongside Wittgenstein’s language-games, I show that both aim to restore conceptual clarity for the advancement of our practices. The appearance of a deep divide, I argue, reflects divergent attitudes toward constructed languages rather than purely philosophical opposition.

ABSTRACT. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on agreement in Philosophical Investigations have long been the subject of debate. Should they be understood as the main ingredient in a sceptical solution to a sceptical problem about meaning, as Saul Kripke suggested? Should the relevant notion of agreement be understood as “concurring” agreement, that is, agreement between people who happen to share judgments or beliefs but who may never have met each other, as James Shaw recently suggested? Contra Shaw, I argue that it should be understood as “contractual” agreement, that is, agreement between people who share judgments or beliefs as the result of some interaction between them. This is the notion that is needed to solve the new problem that arises once, contra Kripke, the sceptical problem is dissolved rather than solved.

ABSTRACT. The focus of my talk will be on the reclamation of pejorative terms. My goal is to address the core question of whether reclamation alters the semantic meaning of pejorative terms or merely modifies their pragmatic profile. I will defend the thesis that reclaimed uses create polysemy: the emergence of an additional, distinct meaning alongside the original derogatory and neutral one, rather than the elimination or transformation of the original meaning. Strong anti-reclamation theories hold that the very features that make slurs powerful are what make them unreclaimable: once the harm is gone, so is the slur. The polysemantic thesis actually challenges this view, because the point of reclaiming slurs is to regain some of the discourse dialogue, i.e., to embrace the harm that slurs (and pejoratives in general) cause. The graded salience hypothesis explains how reclaimed meaning is parallel-processed with little cognitive effort in cases of polysemous terms.

ABSTRACT. Implicature-based explanations of slurs are common, with most arguments claiming that slurs’ negative features should be considered conventional implicatures. The primary reason for this is the belief that the implicatures generated by slurs are non-cancellable and detachable. I will argue against this and defend an account of slurs based on conversational implicature, focusing on slurring, not just slurs. In this account, slurring is the implication of negative features contextually associated with a group of people through the use of an expression that refers to that group. This group expression can be a slur or its neutral counterpart, but the underlying linguistic mechanism remains the same. When slurs are used, an additional contextual effect signals that slurring has occurred. Understood this way, the implicatures generated by using slurs are both contextually and explicitly cancellable, and in situations where the contextual effect is strong, these implicatures are also non-detachable.

ABSTRACT. Philosophical theories of demonstratives and other context-sensitive expressions often appeal to salience while leaving the notion unexplained. This paper draws on psycholinguistic work on reference resolution to argue that salience is best understood as the outcome of multiple interacting factors, including perceptual cues, background knowledge, lexical constraints, shared experience, and assumptions about common ground rather than a single objective feature of context. I argue that this psychologically grounded account challenges metasemantic views that take salience to fix the referent.

ABSTRACT. This talk examines Merlo’s (2025) recent defense of Prior’s famous “Thank goodness” argument. Prior argued that tensed relief—relief expressible without reference to any particular time—demonstrates the existence of tensed propositions and thus tensed facts. Absolutists challenge this by taking tensed attitudes to involve tenseless propositions conceived of in a particular way. Merlo challenges Absolutism through a comparison with a subject who desires to eat ‘that flavor’ of ice-cream but denies desiring to eat coconut, despite knowing that they’re identical. If Absolutism is true, Merlo argues, tensed relief is as unintelligible as that desire. I defend Absolutism by arguing that a true attitude report can be misleading due to information conveyed by choice of a singular term. This explains why one may resist expressing relief in tenseless terms even if one knows what time it is and breaks the analogy between Prior’s “Thank goodness” argument and Merlo’s alternative scenario.

ABSTRACT. Ordinary objects are tolerant but not hypertolerant: they could have been somewhat, but not arbitrarily, different from how they are. Yet if tolerance is a necessary property of ordinary objects, then given plausible principles, tolerance entails hypertolerance. Denying necessary tolerance avoids this result, but leaves without any guarantee that the objects we refer to are not already at the edge of their tolerance. Dorr, Hawthorne, and Yli-Vakkuri (2021) propose a solution combining coincident objects with differing modal profiles and semantic plasticity, ensuring that our terms always refer to tolerant objects. Applied to the Ship of Theseus, this view implies that the intension of ‘ship’ shifts as planks are replaced, yielding the implausible result that replacing all planks leaves no ship in the harbour. I argue instead that the intension of ‘ship’ remains fixed while its extension changes, preserving ordinary judgments at the cost of treating shiphood as highly fragile.

ABSTRACT. The notion of a variable embodiment introduced by Fine (1999) has become an influential notion in metaphysics, applied ontology, and natural language ontology. In this talk, I will argue for an alternative to the notion of a variable embodiment, based on the view of positionalismin the metaphysics of relations (Fine 2000). This positionalist alternative avoids notorious weaknesses of the Finean notion of a variable embodiment and allows for a broader range of applications. The talk presents new motivations for positionalism, in part from natural language. While Fine (2000) rejects positionalism, I will show that adopting it will make the notion of a variable embodiment dispensable and permits a much more constrained notion instead.

ABSTRACT. The following paper aims to compare the analytical perspectives of two of the leading figures in analytical political philosophy and law in Italy and the United States: Norberto Bobbio and John Rawls, respectively. The thesis will suggest that, although both thinkers share elements that would allow them to be placed within analytical philosophy, the way in which they do so is diametrically opposed to each other in terms of the idealism/practicality criteria that Bobbio and Rawls apply to their respective theories. In effect, while the American thinker develops a normative political philosophy, tending toward the stipulation of ideal and regulatory principles for the basic structure of society, the Italian thinker, on the other hand, develops a political philosophy understood as a critical analysis of the various existing political and institutional practices, through the clarification and reconceptualization of the political lexicon, rather than ideal normative principles.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I shall address the following question: Is there only one conception of normativity in normative political theory, or are there specific conceptions of normativity for different levels of normative political theory? The ‘monistic view’ answers this question by saying (and arguing) that there is just one conception of normativity. The ‘pluralistic view’ claims that there is a plurality of political normativity and argues in favor of specific kinds of normativity for each level of normative political theory. One of the implications of the monistic view is that it might lead to reductionism and eliminativism. I shall argue in favor of the pluralistic view and against reductionism and eliminativism in political theory. A consequence of this view is a defense of the kind of abstract political thinking that characterizes much of political philosophy while accepting the importance of more realistic and practical view.