ABSTRACT. One of the central ideas about logic that emerged in Frege’s work is that logic is not (just) a calculating system, but a system of representation, and that it is in virtue of this that logic can be understood as an abstract characterization of thought. On this view, the accuracy of representations — their truth — becomes of central importance. Frege’s views of truth and logic, however, have been found perplexing and at odds with other Fregean commitments. These issues set the theme for this symposium, which explores the connections among Frege’s theses on truth in his mature philosophy.

ABSTRACT. This symposium is about epistemic relativism, understood as a metaphysical view about the nature of justification, rather than a semantic view about the semantics of sentences involving epistemic vocabulary. We have two aims. The first aim is to reassess standard objections to epistemic relativism. While these objections are common in the literature, we will focus on their influential articulation by Paul Boghossian in his Fear of Knowledge. The second aim is to situate epistemic relativism within new and broader contexts. In particular, we explore the connections between relativism, scepticism, epistemological naturalism, feminist epistemology, and the history and philosophy of science.

ABSTRACT. As opposed to mainstream (or ‘classical’) mathematics, all logical symbols have computational content in constructive mathematics: Most notably, to state the existence of an object, one must exhibit an algorithm to generate this object. A further fundamental difference is that the trinity 'foundations, practice, and philosophy' are virtually inseparable in constructive mathematics, making it an ideal topic for a mini-symposium, in our opinion. We shall discuss two related topics in logic and the foundations of mathematics, namely (i) formality and rigour in constructive mathematics and (ii) salient applications of constructive mathematics in computer science, economics, and epistemic logic.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I argue that it’s wrong to think that, unlike naïve realists, representationalists have no difficult reconciling the so-called ‘transparency of experience’ with the fact that a pure hallucination can in principle be a conscious experience of exactly the same type as a successful perception. And I propose a new way of understanding the options available to proponents of transparency, based on this insight, which cuts across the standard distinction between representationalism and naive realism.

ABSTRACT. Byrne and Fernández aim to explain how it is possible for our access to our own mental states to be both privileged (comparatively error-proof) and peculiar (only available for knowledge of my own states). According to Byrne, this is because we self-ascribe belief by following the rule BEL (“If p, believe that you believe that p”). Fernández differs subtly, suggesting that we form our second-order beliefs on the same bases as the first-order beliefs they are about. I examine a few objections to both transparency theories and argue that Fernández has difficulties explaining how we could acquire the Bypass procedure.

ABSTRACT. I argue that a necessary condition to an intentional omission is a metacognition, in which the possibility of an action that is intentionally not done is perceived by the agent. Without this metacognition the agent cannot intentionally try to not do something, resist doing an action or decide not to do something. It is argued that mental or physical struggling is too strong condition for an omission to be intentional whereas the mere guidance-control is too weak. Some mental activity is needed, however, for an omission to be intentional. The content and timing of this metacognition is further clarified.

ABSTRACT. The debate on extended mind has flourished in the last twenty years, but there is an important question that remains unanswered in the literature: is the past-endorsement criterion valid? The past-endorsement criterion is among the criteria proposed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) to respond to the “cognitive bloat” objection. In this paper we want to discuss the problem arisen by the introduction of this criterion – criticized by Rupert (2004, 2009) as a reintroduction of an internal privilege – and to suggest a different solution to the problem of the cognitive bloat, based on the concept of transparency.

ABSTRACT. Authenticity is valued in everyday life as well as in various philosophical contexts including discussions on autonomy and aesthetics. Why is authenticity important? The question is answered by spelling out several possible contrasts and synonyms of the term ‘authentic’. It is argued that ‘authentic’ is an ambiguous term. Authenticity is prima facie valuable in those senses of the term that are epistemic in nature. Then value of authenticity to a great extent follows from the values generally associated with truth and knowledge. The term ‘authentic’ also has senses which do not offer good reasons for our choices.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is twofold: I will first present a new deprivation account of the evil of death, according to which said evil consists in the deprivation of the opportunity to fulfill one’s categorical desires which takes place when the dying process reaches the point of irreversibility (but is not yet completed). This account can meet prominent objections. Secondly, I will argue that immortality equipped with a suitable form of memory-loss would avoid this evil and could also escape the often predicted eternal boredom, since such an immortal being would most likely continue to develop and fulfill desires.

ABSTRACT. Final value accrues to objects that are good for their own sakes, while instrumental value accrues to objects that are good for the sake of their effects. The following talk aims to show that the distinction between final and instrumental value might cut across large areas of the evaluative domain. What this means is that there may be many types of value, seemingly distinct from the distinction in question, which can nonetheless come in the final or instrumental form. This is illustrated by focusing on the so-called 'attributives', understood in terms of the concepts of kind-value and personal value.

ABSTRACT. According to L.A. Paul, transformative choices cannot be both rational and ours unless we choose for the value of revelation because at the time of our choice we cannot know what the value would be of this new experience. In this paper, I use the case of a slave choosing to be free to develop two challenges to Paul’s view. The spirit of both challenges is to show how we can have knowledge of the subjective value of something without experiencing that thing and then to explain how choosing on the basis of this knowledge would not be alienating.

ABSTRACT. Our concern is to examine the categories of action in criminal law in light of concepts drawn from philosophy of action. Bearing in mind that a criminal action has got as a hallmark a requisite mental element, I will first highlight action sequencing issues: to charge someone with a crime, one has yet to triumph over a concurrence between rival descriptions of an action, since it can be picked out under various descriptions. Secondly, I will turn to criminal attempts and excuses to see how they provide us with a "reverse" image of full agency.

ABSTRACT. What is the relevance of epistemology of disagreement (mainly conciliationist and steadfastedness theories of disagreement) to legal theory? I will show how epistemically oriented thinking about theoretical disagreement in law (in its different understandings of ‘theoretical’) helps better understand certain theories (like institutional theory of law, Shapiro’s exclusive positivism and Dworkin’s law-as-integrity) and evaluate their explanatory force (assuming that theoretical disagreement is an important legal phenomenon). I will also present a form of conciliationist account of disagreement that best fit philosophical disagreements about institutional world that always are both descriptive (theoretical), as well as normative (practical) debates.

ABSTRACT. Legal Theory’s Claim To Necessity Legal theories define their task as discovery of necessary features of law. It is unclear what “necessary” means. This paper claims that what is meant is metaphysical necessity. The clue to metaphysical necessity is the ideal secondary conceivability. The basis for such conceivability is the folk theory of law. As it is contingent which folk theory is actually adopted legal theories apply a very weak understanding of necessity. Theoretical claim that a certain feature of law is necessary has the function of explaining beliefs, forming the folk theory of law.

ABSTRACT. In this essay, I develop an analytically precise account of the harm experienced by refugees out of being de facto stateless, and of the resulting obligations of refugee-receiving states to alleviate this harm. I develop Hannah Arendt's notion of "ontological" harm, harm that consists in losing a dimension of our humanity due to losing effective citizenship, into a more precise notion, by showing how effective legal identity is a precondition for acting in socially meaningful ways, and must hence be granted by a person's (original, or new) social context.

ABSTRACT. A common criticism of classical rational choice theory (RCT) is that it is does not explain choice. I pose two such explanatory problems for RCT. The first argues that RCT gets the causes of choice wrong, and the second argues that the explanations given by some RC frameworks are circular. These two problems have something surprising in common: Each can be resisted by adopting a unificationist theory of explanation. This response reveals a deep disagreement within theories of choice over the nature of explanation, and makes a strong case for explanatory pluralism in science more generally.

ABSTRACT. The most important feature of Popper’s methodology is that scientists must ‘take refutations seriously.’ This requires all theories to have pre-defined refutations which would both be instantaneous (i.e., we abandon a theory once its falsified) and decisive (i.e., theory will always be falsified once falsified) (Popper 1935; 1963). This hallmark of Popper’s view allows him to distinguish falsificationism from conventionalism. However, Popper also concedes that observation statements are intersubjectively testable and, therefore, fallible. In this paper I argue that this reveals a deep tension in Popper's philosophy which he is unable to accommodate without collapsing into conventionalism.

ABSTRACT. In 1976, Mario Bunge advocated a “vigorous and symmetrical interaction between science and philosophy … to close the gap between the two camps and to develop a scientific philosophy and a science with philosophical awareness.” The aim of this paper is to defend both parts of Bunge’s thesis. Drawing on examples from behavioral economics and the economics of happiness, I will argue that the relationship between the relevant science and philosophy is remarkably symmetric: just like scientists cannot avoid making philosophical assumptions, philosophers often cannot help but proceed from empirical premises.

ABSTRACT. Andrew Peet has recently argued: firstly, that when a certain kind of context-sensitive expression is used to make an assertion, the audience of that assertion cannot discern precisely which proposition was expressed (this is “the recovery problem”); and secondly, that when the recovery problem arises, audiences generally cannot acquire knowledge on the basis of the assertion (testimony). One way to block this implication of the recovery problem is to defend the hypothesis that audiences only form highly coarse grained beliefs in response to testimony. Peet argues that this hypothesis is false. In this paper, I defend the hypothesis against Peet.

ABSTRACT. On one plausible view, these cases can be seen as semantically ill-formed and that they do not express propositions when taken literally. In the conception of what-is-said as exact wording, even a semantically ill-formed sentence can be a subject of what-is-said. This is a theoretically positive result, because as these examples show, a semantically incomplete utterance or even a sentence fragment can trigger pragmatic inferences, so a unified theoretical notion of what-is-said should also capture them. What-is-said as exact wording succeeds in this purpose.

ABSTRACT. It’s commonly taken for granted that there is an objectively correct answer as to which the actual meaning of an utterance is and that it is incumbent on theorists to work out the theory identifying this meaning. I argue that interpretive practice is dominated by the questions ‘What is S’s intended meaning?’ and ‘What was S most reasonably taken to mean?’, neither of which has any implications for utterance meaning. It’s possible to do justice to S’s intended meaning as well as H’s assigned meaning without identifying any of them with such a thing as the meaning of the utterance.

ABSTRACT. Perceptual experiences are normally better at providing us with justification for believing their content than episodes of the imagination; but why? What tells these two mental states epistemically apart? Focusing primarily on the imagination: what makes episodes of the imagination worse-off as propositional justifiers?

One answer points to our agential involvement in imaginative episodes: we have control over their content in a way that we do not when we perceive. An alternative explanation looks at differences in their respective attitude-related phenomenologies. I like Dorsch’s (2016) idea of blending the two: by looking at the way in which imaginative episodes have a ‘phenomenal sense of agency’.

However, my understanding of the ‘phenomenal sense of agency’ that comes with imagining is rather different to Dorsch’s. I suggest that we think of this as an associative cognitive phenomenology - distinct from the sensory phenomenology - which is distinctively missing in perceptual experiences. Crucially, (in agreement with Dorsch) this phenomenal difference between the two different kinds of mental state can tell us a great deal about why they are different epistemically.

ABSTRACT. Recently, a number of philosophers have pressed that naïve realism (a.k.a. relationalism) cannot deliver a plausible account of unconscious perception. The main goal of this paper is to show that the core idea of naïve realism, as well as its main motivations, retain in force even if it is assumed that unconscious perception is possible.

ABSTRACT. « What is the difference between perception and mere sensation? » This question arises immediately when one considers perception as a form of « openness to the world ». It would be argued that, unlike perceptions, sensations are not intentional. The perception-sensation distinction is based most often on the relation of perception and sensation to the external world. Therefore, some philosophers enplain the perception-sensation distinction in terms of the externalization of sensory experiences. In this work, I try to study, from a non-conceptualist point of view, the possibility of the perception-sensation distinction in the sense of touch.

ABSTRACT. The subject of the paper is the ontological status of actual and non-actual worlds. According to one version of contemporary Meinongianism, while the actual world exists, merely possible and impossible worlds are nonexistent objects. Moreover, they do not have any other form of being. The aim of the paper is to indicate some problematic consequences of this kind of Meinongianism, and to develop an alternative view, which is based on ontological pluralism – the view according to which there are many kinds of being.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to underline the problems arising from an essentialist theory of fictional characters. By claiming that characters are fictional objects, realist interpretation of fictions pretends to explain that we can have intentional attitudes about them, to concede that they have the ability of persistence through time, and also to explain their ability to overcome the limitations of the texts which they come from. But since the descriptions of characters can be modified between different fictions, to give them the status of inexistent or abstract objects involves several paradoxes that we want to emphasize.

ABSTRACT. Everett (2005 and 2013) argued that a fictional realist (i.e. a philosopher who believes that there are fictional objects) is committed to fictional objects’ vague existence, which is unintelligible according to Everett himself, and therefore to be avoided. Thomasson (2010) claimed instead that a fictional realist (as herself) is not committed to fictional objects’ vague existence, preventing Everett’s objection. Contra Thomasson, I contend that the realist is committed to fictional objects’ vague existence and, contra Everett, I defend vague existence against the charge of unintelligibility.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I assess the ontological commitments of frame-based views of theories. Frames decompose concepts (statements, theories) into recursive attribute-value structures. The question is: are the attribute values in frames to be interpreted as universal properties - abstract entities which can be instantiated by multiple objects - or as tropes- particularized properties which uniquely pertain to the object in which they inhere? I shall argue that universals realism and trope theory are both compatible with frame-based representations as far as terminal values are concerned, but face similar complications as far as non-terminal values are concerned.

ABSTRACT. I argue that in tackling the epistemological question of what makes some scientific kinds projectible, problems regarding the metaphysics and semantics of natural kinds play a smaller role than what the debate has taken them to. The reason is that even if all natural kinds support inductive inferences, not all inductive inferences involve natural kinds. It might be that for some kinds, projectibility is due to their metaphysical properties, but this might not be necessarily so; other kinds might be projectible in virtue of other non-metaphysical properties.

ABSTRACT. Retraction data is at the centre of the motivation for the assessment-sensitive relativist semantics defended by John MacFarlane. The paper argues that if we interpret the retraction data as a form of trumping of perspectives, Evans' challenge to truth-relativism is effective against the assertion rule adopted by MacFarlane.

ABSTRACT. Tim Sundell recently argued that disputes over aesthetic value can be explained as metalinguistic negotiations (Sundell 2016). Metalinguistic negotiations (Sundell 2011, Plunkett & Sundell 2013) are processes through which we negotiate how best to use a word relative to a context. Resorting to this mechanism allows language theorists to be ontologically uncommitted. But metalinguistic negotiations are limited in their range of application and unable to satisfactorily explain the unifying features of the varieties of value talk. A comprehensive account of value talk that covers its diversity of roles in human action requires stronger ontological commitments than metalinguistic negotiations afford.

ABSTRACT. I suggest axiological account of blame: the phenomenon of blame indicates the values that the blamer regard as worth keeping with respect to others. A blamer judges X to be blameworthy when the blamer’s value system does not correspond with X. The blamer blames S when the degree of non-correspondence in the blamer’s value system steps over the blamer's threshold, and when the blameworthy action or the consequences can be ascribed to X. The blamer’s threshold indicates the values that the blamer regards as worth keeping. The axiological account can explain how and when the values of agents are expressed.

ABSTRACT. Definitions of evil fall into two main categories: the victim/harm approach and the perpetrator approach. Harm-based approaches are too broad, while perpetrator-based approaches are too narrow. I propose a relational account of evil and argue that harm isolated from the manner in which it occurs is metaethically trivial. Victims of evil are not simply experiencers of severe, excessive harm, although they are that as well. The manner in which they are open to being harmed in a severe way is essential for any definition of evil. I label this evil-making status “extreme moral vulnerability” and shall elucidate its essential properties.

ABSTRACT. The received interpretation of Donald Davidson’s philosophy has it that his thoughts underwent a significant change between his work on radical interpretation and his work on triangulation. It is maintained that the kind of semantic externalism Davidson advocated in his later work is importantly different from that advocated in the early work. I argue that Davidson’s semantic externalism has always been social, holistic, historical, and non-reductionist. His work on triangulation reinforces these earlier conclusions and vindicates his early assumptions that language and thought are essentially public and that their possession requires having the concept of objectivity.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I develop an interpretation of Frege's notion of fruitful definition from §70 of Grundlagen. As many commentators have noted, this notion appears to conflict with his repeated insistence that definitions must be eliminable and non-creative (i.e. conservative). However, I offer textual evidence that shows Frege considered sentences, in addition to the thoughts they express, as targets of proof and argue that he considered definitions fruitful when they make the proof of a new sentence possible. On this interpretation, the above noted conflict vanishes. I conclude by considering why Frege tied the worth of definitions to their fruitfulness.

ABSTRACT. There is unambiguous evidence that Wittgenstein had a deep and life-long appreciation of Hertz's seminal work, "Principles of Mechanics". In a passage that resonated deeply with Wittgenstein, Hertz gestured at contradictions in the Newtonian notion of force and remarked: 'When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.' In my paper I explicate the significance of Hertz’s remarks by accounting for the ‘logical obscurity’ that motivated Hertz to write “Principles” in the first place.

ABSTRACT. Rasmussen et al. (2016) propose a novel extension to the Equal Weight View (EW) in the epistemology of disagreement. Their extension is called the Variably Equal Weight View (VEW). In this paper, I raise two objections against VEW which cannot be raised against EW simpliciter. These objections challenge the plausibility of the mathematical function that Rasmussen et al. use to measure the disagreeing peers’ reliability. I conclude that there is good reason to reject VEW as an extension of EW.

ABSTRACT. The aim of my talk is to put forward a type of asymmetric disagreement that has been largely ignored in the epistemology of disagreement debate. I propose that disagreements about one’s mental states are an interesting type of asymmetric disagreements that we should inquire. In the paradigmatic cases these disagreements feature interlocutors that both have epistemic advantages on their respective sides. Moreover, full disclosure of evidence seems to be difficult, if not impossible in such disagreements. Hence it is unclear how one ought to rationally respond to disagreements over one’s mental states.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses an issue within the epistemology of peer disagreement and defends a specific version of conciliationism called the Equal Weight View against Thomas Mulligan’s recent criticism. After introducing Mulligan’s paradoxes I suggest that the Straight Average rule strategy helps to avoid the paradoxes and defend the general view against the objection composed by Jehle and Fitelson (2009). Finally I introduce my own version of the Straight Average rule based on Jeffrey conditionalization and argue that it successfully avoids the difficulties raised by Mulligan’s three paradoxes.

ABSTRACT. While biology is questioning any over simplistic sex dimorphism, most of contemporary medicine still regards intersexed people as somehow diseased. In this paper we shall argue against the idea that intersexuality is a disease by considering two normative accounts of health and disease: Nordenfelt’s holistic theory of health and Reznek’s idea of disease as a harmful and medically treatable condition. Moreover, we shall claim that the best way to articulate sex pluralism should meet two constraints: (i) sex should be regarded as a purely biological notion, (ii) sex categories should be conceived as continuous, overlapping, and dynamic categories.

ABSTRACT. The theories of disease, (i) axiologism, for which disease is a negative vital value, (ii) dysfunctionalism, for which disease is a biological dysfunction, rely on different intuitions: that “x is diseased” is a negative evaluative judgment; that to be diseased is to malfunction. Any complete theory of disease should account for (i) and (ii). This talk purports to provide such a theory: essentialism about disease. After presenting (i) and (ii), I argue for the following definition: x is diseased, iff x is (a part of) an organism, x has a negative vital value, and x’s essence is being annihilated.

ABSTRACT. The issue of defining the concept of DISEASE is much discussed in philosophy of medicine. Diverse as they are, disease definitions offer a classical view of the concept of DISEASE. However, as none of them is entirely satisfactory, some scholars have proposed to regard the concept of DISEASE as a non-classical one. In this paper, we won’t take a side in favour of either a classical or a non-classical approach, but critically evaluate the most relevant attempts to characterize the concept of DISEASE in non-classical terms, showing some of their limits and misunderstandings.

ABSTRACT. One puzzle concerning highly idealised models is whether they explain. Some suggest they provide so-called 'how-possibly explanations' (HPEs). However, this raises an important question about the nature of HPEs, namely what distinguishes them from how-actually explanations? My paper purports to provide an account of HPEs that clarifies their nature in the context of solving the puzzle of model-based explanation. I argue that the modal notions of 'actuality' and 'possibility' provide the relevant dividing lines between HPEs and HAEs. My proposal both contributes to the literature on the puzzle of model-based explanation and, more generally, to the literature on HPEs.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we argue that normative reasons are hyperintensional, and put forward a formal account of this thesis. In the first part we consider three arguments for the hyperintensionality of reasons: (i) an argument from the nature of reasons, (ii) an argument from substitutivity, (iii) an argument from explanatory power. In the second part we describe a hyperintensional logic of reasons based on justification logics. Eventually we discuss the philosophical import of this proposal and highlight some limitations and possibile developments.

ABSTRACT. Familiar arguments involving belief sentences show that possible world semantics, employed by standard epistemic logic, is untenable, since it misrepresents intuitively (in)valid inference. We confess hyperintensional, neo-fregean semantics according to which meaning is an algorithm determining the expression's denotation. Analysis of belief sentences then yields an explicit model of belief. Such models are known to be too restrictive; we thus supplement it by a specific novel version of rule-based implicit approach. Derivable belief consists of beliefs an agent is capable to achieve using derivation systems she masters. The notion of derivation system enables an apt modelling of agent's inference resources.

ABSTRACT. The paper deals with mereology of algorithmically structured procedures. I show that procedures are structured wholes consisting of unambiguously determined parts, which are such subprocedures as must be executed whenever the whole procedure is to be executed. Procedural constituents interact with each other in this process of producing an output object, if any. I am going to prove that this part-whole relation is a partial order. On the other hand, this mereology is non-classical, because the principle of extensionality and idempotence do not hold.

ABSTRACT. The semantic value of expressions involving certain concepts can have bad effects. These effects fall into a category of conceptual deficiency that Cappelen (forthcoming) classifies as objectionable effects of semantic value. He further distinguishes between: (i) effects on theorizing; (ii) morally, politically, or socially objectionable effects; and (iii) cognitive effects. I follow his classification and focus on detecting and disentangling these effects of conceptual deficiency for generic statements in order to shed light on some pressing problems for generics. I find this step to be necessary before considering options for their adequate treatment.

ABSTRACT. Expressivists maintain that evaluative discourse expresses desire-like states of mind in a similar way to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an assertion that p with the denial of being in the corresponding belief-state that p famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity: (1) # It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining. A problem for expressivists is evaluative discourse not exhibiting similar infelicity when the speaker denies that she is in the kind of mental state that expressivists take such discourse to express. In this talk, I address this problem of “missing Moorean infelicity” for expressivists.

ABSTRACT. Recent literature on slurs has primarily focused on English, with very few studies of slurs from other languages. On the other hand, the current discussion focuses on several well-established uses of slurs: derogative, internalized or appropriated. My aim in this presentation is twofold: first, to bring to light a hitherto unexplored use of slurs, which I dub “self-identificatory”, illustrated by the Romanian word “țigan” (“gypsy”); second, to put forward a semantic framework that accounts for all the uses of slurs without either postulating ambiguity or making slurs’ meaning depend solely on the intentions, beliefs or attitudes of speakers.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to show that a relativist approach to the analysis of opaque attitude ascriptions is able to cope with some of the problems that both Russellian and Fregean alternatives face, such as the transparency of iterated attitude ascriptions, cross-attitudinal anaphora, and the challenge of accommodating modes of presentation within the logical form of the proposition expressed. Moreover, this analysis would cash out on the usual benefits of relativist semantics concerning disagreement.

ABSTRACT. In this work, I survey some attempts at giving relativist semantics for indicative conditionals, and whether they could be said to handle two problems involving conditionals: (1) Gibbardian standoffs, and (2) Future Indicatives. The first problem involves disagreements over assertions of pairwise incompatible conditionals. Following MacFarlane, I devise the relativist semantics and suggest to fit the 'disagreement' data within a broader theory of communication, which connects the semantics to a pragmatic account of attitudes targeting speech acts. The second problem, Future Indicatives, stands in an overlap between 'conditionals' and 'time', and asks whether the same strategy could be applied.

ABSTRACT. The argument from connectivity is one of the most important arguments for the claim that apparent sub-sentential speech acts (henceforth: SSAs) are in fact ellipses. I’ll argue that the argument is by no means conclusive and the defenders of SSAs need not be worried by connectivity effects. Firstly, the failure of connectivity is much more widespread than it appears at first glance. Secondly, I’ll suggest a moderate relativist account (Recanati 2007) of SSAs on which connectivity can be explained. I’ll also argue – somewhat paradoxically – that SSAs are not an argument in favour of contextualism in any interesting sense.

ABSTRACT. We seem to perceive properties of objects, but what does perceiving properties consist in? A natural assumption to make is that, if we see the object o, then a sufficient condition for seeing the property F of o is simply a matter of o phenomenally appearing F to the subject, where this appearance matches the way o is. I will argue against that assumption by drawing out an analogy between object perception and property perception. For us to actually see the F of o we must be perceptually connected to the F-ness of o in the right way.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, using thought experiments and empirical findings, I shall examine whether in perceptual experience we are conscious of spatial phenomenal properties, which are mind dependent and if this is so, how different accounts of perceptual content such as Russellian, Fregean and Edenic can cope with the problem of phenomenal space. I shall argue that Edenic properties cannot mirror phenomenology if they are just abstract entities, so we could understand Edenic content as consisting of mental properties lying in phenomenal space and I shall defend the indirect realist view that phenomenal content mediates between the observer and the world.

ABSTRACT. The analysis of perception in terms of de re attitudes or states seems to be appealing, first and foremost because it guards against intellectualization. In this paper, I examine how such views can cope with the problem of explaining propositional perceptual knowledge. Using the example of Burge’s representational framework, I shall argue that the acquisition of perceptual knowledge requires propositional capacities.

ABSTRACT. Radical enactivism and radical embodied theories of cognition present themselves as alternatives to a representational theory of mind. They derive their understanding of mentality not from the way in which minds represent reality, but from how minds adapt to their environment by repeated interaction. In this paper, I consider whether such a conception of mental states can explain simple reflective processes that occur in the minds of children and animals. I argue that immature forms of reflection require to develop the representational framework further, but not to to give it up in favour of enactivism.

ABSTRACT. Several writers have recently argued that evolutionary explanations undermine the justification of moral beliefs only in virtue of the epistemic significance of disagreement. However, the kind of disagreement implied by evolutionary explanations of morality, which those writers consider to be the direct source of the undermining power of evolutionary explanations, is too far removed from our actual moral beliefs to be epistemically significant. Our counterfactual selves are not our peers if they even disagree about the explanatorily basic moral beliefs. Disagreement with them is irrelevant. In conclusion, evolutionary explanations do not reveal problematic kinds of disagreement. Debunkers need to look elsewhere to fuel their sceptical argument.

ABSTRACT. One of the deepest objections to normative realism is to be found in the practicality requirement. But what, exactly, does the practicality requirement require? Realists should take a keen interest in this. Too often, however, they have allowed their opponents to specify the content of this requirement. I propose a version of the requirement that levels the playing field, before demonstrating that even it creates serious problems for many versions of realism. I finish by considering how realists may have to adapt their view if they are to have a fighting chance of surviving this debate.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, the analysis of the applicability of the concepts of grounding and supervenience to the view which implies the existence of a relation between legal and social facts will be carried out. Secondly, the resulting conceptualizations of the relationship in question will be evaluated against the background of the positivistic conceptions of law. The research hypothesis of the paper is that neither the relation of supervenience, nor that of grounding provide a sufficient explanation of the kind of correspondence between legal and social facts as described in the contemporary legal positivism.

ABSTRACT. My talk aims at investigate the ontological status of collective persons, e.g. plural entities provided with personality, in relation to time. I deal with the problem of persistence, or rather stability, of collective person that remains itself in spite of its members change through time. After setting out two opposite theses about this problem (the first one belongs to legal science, the second one to individualism in philosophy) and underlining their heavy aporias, I propose an ontological perspective that investigates collective persons as freestanding entities.

ABSTRACT. According to Stephen Davies, the fact that some of our attributions to musical works are not reducible to attributions of performances constitutes a good reason to endorse realism about musical works. We defend that the existence of this sort of attributions also provides a good reason for being anti-realistic about aesthetic properties. Three kinds of attributions will be distinguished: ones that primarily apply to musical works, those that primarily apply to performances and those that equally apply to both. We will argue that Levinson’s theory, the most prominent realist view on aesthetic properties, cannot account for such diversity of attributions.

ABSTRACT. Most architectural theories of the 20th century highlighted emotion in architecture. The expressive variety of these movements, arouse questions about the nature of these emotions. Based on researches studying emotions in music, we will try to figure out whether architecture can possess, arouse, express or represent genuine emotion and if it is essential to architecture to do so. We claim that architecture can be about emotions because architecture welcomes life and life is about emotions. But the intentional object of these emotions is not the building itself. Architectural experience exclusively directed onto architectural features and qualities is not about emotions.

ABSTRACT. The aesthetic subjectivism-objectivism debate addresses three related, but still different questions: first, how do we make beauty judgements (epistemic question), secondly, which semantic status do beauty judgements have (semantic question), and, thirdly, is beauty a mind-independent property (ontological question)? Answering the epistemic question, this paper defends epistemic subjectivism: beauty judgements are essentially experience-based. Answering the semantic question, it argues for semantic objectivism: beauty judgements are genuine judgements which can rightfully claim universal validity. To do justice to this subjective-objective dual nature of beauty judgements, this papers finally develops a position of dispositional realism as an answer to the ontological question.

ABSTRACT. In this proposed lecture I intend to discuss Frege’s position about the double sense theory of existence. In the first part of the lecture we can conceive, similarly to numerical statements, the same assertions of existence as concepts of “second order”. The subordination in the following section, between the first and second order concepts, in contrast with the subsumption between an object and a concept of first order, it will be analyzed in parallel with the dual meaning of ens ut nomen and ens ut participium in F. Suarez’s Disputationes Metaphysicae.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to challenge a standard interpretation, according to which Frege’s view of logic differs from contemporary ones, because on the latter’s view logic is formal, while on Frege’s view it is not, given that logic’s subject matter is reality’s most general features. I show evidence that Frege – in his Begriffsschrift – retained the idea that logic is formal; Frege assigns logic the task of providing the ‘logical cement’ (the formal – structural – scaffolding) that ties up together the contentful concepts used in specific sciences. I finally connect this task with Frege’s oft-repeated normative role of logic.

ABSTRACT. The first part of the paper brings out Russell’s version of neutral monism. The second part deals specifically with Russell’s theory of memory after 1921. I argue that his theory of memory after 1921 moves away from dualism, but still retains features from the earlier theory of cognition. This helps to retain the integrity of Russell’s overall epistemological project. At the same time, the metaphysical changes neutral monism brings are important for accounting for the subject of cognition, a problem category for Russell. Finally, I will link Russell’s theory of memory after 1921, to the contemporary debate of personal identity.

ABSTRACT. My paper is a discussion of acquaintance in the framework of Frege’s philosophy, and is also a reaction to two recent papers of Saul Kripke and Palle Yourgrau. Both endorse a very Russellian interpretation of Frege’s theory of sense, based on the fact that somehow Frege needs to make room in his system to a kind of sense-acquaintance notion. Both argue that Frege needs this in order to account for our ability to refer in indirect discourse to sense. There is no other way out for them. I shall argue against this interpretation of Frege’s philosophy of sense and reference.

ABSTRACT. Hilbert space underlying quantum mechanics and pseudo-Riemannian space underlying general relativity share a common base of quantum information. Hilbert space can be interpreted as the free variable of quantum information, and any point in it, being equivalent to a wave function (and thus, to a state of a quantum system), as a value of that variable of quantum information. In turn, pseudo-Riemannian space can be interpreted as the interaction of two or more quantities of quantum information and thus, as two or more entangled quantum systems

ABSTRACT. I assess both the dispositionalist and the nomological interpretation of the wave function in Bohmian mechanics. Most authors consider that the universal wave function represents a single holistic disposition instantiated by the entire universe. I defend here an alternative interpretation—often rejected—that attributes a diposition to each individual Bohmian particle. After clarifying how the nomological interpretation should be understood in the context of non-relativistic Bohmian mechanics, I claim that this interpretation forces us to revise the modal content that is naturally attributed to Bohmian mechanics and I show that dispositionalists need not embrace this form of revisionism.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, a new, ‘coherentist’ account of composite quantum systems is put forward. According to it, symmetric relations of ontological dependence play a twofold key role: on the one hand, they characterize the peculiar features of entangled systems, i.e., collections of actual particle-tokens; on the other, they ground the mutual interconnections between particles of the same type.

ABSTRACT. The principle of 'information causality' can be used to derive the Tsirelson bound. Typically it is motivated by appealing to the intuition that a world in which information causality is not satisfied would be 'too simple', 'too good to be true', etc. In this paper I argue that one should rather motivate information causality, and our inquiries in general into the characterisation of the quantum/super-quantum divide, in terms of a methodological interpretation of Einstein's principle of mutually independent existence (MIE) of spatially distant things. I argue that correlations which violate information causality run afoul of a generalised version of MIE.

ABSTRACT. The goal of this paper is to develop a theory of partial mastery of a mathematical concept, and to establish how and when we attribute partial mastery to someone. This is not done from any established metaphysical theory, but from an investigation of partial mastery attribution in historical practice. Starting from a case study of Newton and Leibniz, I argue that the frequent re-interpretation of historical mathematicians offers an argument for an attributive, projective theory of concepts, and against more Fregean theories of grasping fixed concepts.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to defend the Fregean account of reference to abstract objects against Dummett’s objections. In the first part, Frege’s CP is briefly discussed, with an eye to its criticism of nominalism. In the second part, Dummett’s two objections to Frege are evaluated. One objection is answered by showing that the Fregean account actually has the resources required to respond to the objection; and the other is answered by questioning the premises on which the objection is based.

ABSTRACT. A recent proposal due to Oystein Linnebo defends a version of ontological minimalism. Under certain conditions, putatively referring expressions refer only in a thin way: they refer at no further cost to ontology. The background to this view is the polemic between Dummett and neo-Fregeans, but I will touch on this only briefly. My objective is to examine two arguments that Linnebo brings in favour of his view. I argue that both arguments are inconclusive. I finish by considering a fictionalist interpretation of Linnebo's notion of thin reference.

ABSTRACT. An alleged connection between mathematical understanding and the operation of algebraic closure is analysed in terms of linear factorization, quantifier elimination, and uncountable categoricity. It is suggested that, since there is no effective method for linear factorization and quantifier elimination is a computationally hard procedure, uncountable categoricity provides the most plausible explication of this connection.

ABSTRACT. How can we adequately account for recent observations in animal cognition? The hypothesis we propose in this symposium is that we have to change our philosophical concepts of belief, theory of mind, and meaning/communication. We propose to supplement the usual top-down perspective with a bottom-up perspective according to which we need to ground the notions of concept, belief as well as communication in non-linguistic abilities to account for empirical results and evolutionary considerations. This approach promises to radically change the perspective concerning central philosophical views on the nature of belief, theory of mind, communication and even consciousness.

ABSTRACT. (Symposium) Many approaches to quantum gravity suggest a puzzling picture of the natural world by claiming that time, space and spacetime are not fundamentally real. The natural world we live in is made of strange structures and entities, different from the familiar spatial and temporal entities we naturally refer to in daily life, and even from the ones posited in empirically confirmed theories like general relativity. How are we going to conceive of the connection between the two realms, namely the fundamental non-spatio-temporal, and the derivative spatio-temporal?

ABSTRACT. Gettier thought experiments (GTEs) reveal the non-obvious possibility of justified true belief without knowledge: they provide us with modal evidence. This is not how they have been understood in recent metaphilosophical debates, which make two basic assumptions: first, GTEs should be reconstructed as deductively valid arguments, and second, intuitive verdicts about GTEs should be understood as modal judgments. I argue that both assumptions are problematic. This clears the way for an alternative understanding: GTEs are exercises of suppositional thinking, guided by an implicit aim to suppose a coherent scenario. These suppositions provide us with evidence for the relevant possibilities.

ABSTRACT. An important function of philosophical thought experiments is to test various theories or claims. To this end, philosophers stipulate a particular scenario, supposed to elicit a judgement concerning some target property or aspect. A number of proposals have recently been offered concerning the logical form of such thought experiments and judgements (Williamson 2007; Ichikawa and Jarvis 2009; Malmgren 2011). I argue that these proposals err in eschewing singular terms. I offer an alternative proposal which – I suggest – partly remedies problems with so-called “deviant realizations”. Finally, I illustrate how the proposal applies to a couple of interesting specimens.

ABSTRACT. Proponents of a young philosophical movement believe that experimental methods can be deployed productively to test the reliability of the intuitive premises used by philosophers. In other words, they believe in an experimental philosophy. Cappelen (2012) and Deutsch (2015) have argued that this idea is mistaken since (analytic) philosophers do not, in fact, rely on intuitive premises. The paper examines their counter-arguments against experimental philosophy and concludes that, even if Cappelen and Deutsch are correct in their assumption that philosophers do not base their arguments on intuitions, experimental data can still be relevant to philosophy.

ABSTRACT. Recently there has been a lot of interest among philosophers in drawing metaphysical and epistemic analogies between mathematics and other non-empirical domains of (a priori) truth, such as metaethics, logic, and modality. These arguments share a common form: a local structural parallel is identified, based on which a global conclusion is drawn about one or both of the compared domains. I argue that judging the validity of such inferences requires developing a criterion of relevance for analogical inferences about non-empirical domains of truth, and I suggest two principle ways of developing such a criterion, one material and one formal.

ABSTRACT. The assumption that agents are morally responsible only for what is under their control is a central point of contention in the debate about the problem of moral luck. However, there has been little attention devoted to the content of the control principle. In my paper, I show (a) that the standard positions in the debate crucially depend on the control principle, (b) that there are stronger and weaker interpretations of the notion of control (c) that a plausible formulation helps to solve or to at least to minimize the problem of moral luck.

ABSTRACT. I here motivate the idea that although interpersonal aggregation of well-being is permissible in principle, we sometimes ought to go against what would be best in aggregate. After motivating such limited aggregation under certainty, I extend the idea to conditions under risk. I revisit arguments from the debate concerning the importance of “identified” vs. “statistical” lives and arrive at a mode of justification that forges a new middle ground between familiar ex ante and ex post approaches. Together this new mode of justification and limited aggregation pose an intuitively attractive alternative to thoroughgoing aggregative and thoroughgoing nonaggregative distributive ethics.

ABSTRACT. My talk investigates differences in permissibility between imposing certain harm and imposing the risk of harm. Our intuitions in this respect seem paradoxical: On the one hand it is usually impermissible to expose others to certain harm. On the other hand it is often permissible to expose others to a small risk of harm, although it is almost certain that someone will be harmed if many persons perform the risky action. It seems paradoxical that bringing about a state of affairs in which a person is harmed is impermissible in the first case but not in the second.

ABSTRACT. Deontological moral theories face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a deontological constraint? In this paper, I argue that the solution lies in stochastic dominance reasoning: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, morally safe options will stochastically dominate risky alternatives iff the likelihood that the risky action violates a moral constraint exceeds some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). I then show that this approach avoids the two most compelling objections to the threshold approach in the recent literature.

ABSTRACT. I offer a theory rooted in the principle of parental freedom. This theory can be summarized in the following propositions: A. Only a risk from a certain level (which I refer to as H) justifies state intervention: As we will see, there are important moral differences between the two arguments made below: 1. State interference in childrearing constitutes the kind of harm that gives exclusionary reasons. 2. The state is not competent to make childrearing decisions. B. The act of divorce does not reach level H C. There is no justification for state involvement in divorce

ABSTRACT. This paper examines three arguments, drawn from Elizabeth Brake (2012) and Clare Chambers (2013), which claim that the political institution of marriage is incompatible with political liberalism. The Neutrality Argument holds that it violates the principle of neutrality. I question whether a violation really occurs. The Unjustified Discrimination Argument claims that it involves the state in unjustified discrimination. I consider whether there are grounds for the differential treatment. The Public Reason Argument maintains that it violates the principle of public reason. I argue that a suitably public justification can be provided. I conclude that none of the arguments are successful.

ABSTRACT. A white man does not date black women because they are black. Is this wrongful discrimination? In this paper I will revise the objective-egalitarian theory of discrimination developed by Deborah Hellman (2011) and apply it to cases of private differential treatment, such as dating preferences. I will argue that racial dating preferences can indeed be wrongful. A principle of non-discrimination for the private could be seen as a necessary but not sufficient component of an egalitarian ethos, i.e. of the social norms that should guide private interaction in a society of relational equals.

Author note:‘Ethics’ or ‘Social and Political Philosophy’

ABSTRACT. The time is right for desert to reenter the debate about distributive justice. Our primary purpose in this essay is to rebut those who wish to claim that desert has already made a comeback, in the form of luck egalitarianism. For example, Nicholas Barry regards luck egalitarianism as “both an egalitarian and a desert-based theory” (2006: 102), and Richard Arneson (2004) and Larry Temkin (2011) advance accounts of desert and luck egalitarianism which have little conceptual space between them. Getting clear about the differences between the two theories and analyzing which is more plausible is the purpose of this essay.

ABSTRACT. Hume raises two objections against the teleological argument on the ground of his causal theory: (i) Since the universe is a unique phenomenon the occurrence of which cannot be observed repeatedly, we cannot make any causal claim about it and (ii) there is no exactly similar phenomenon to the universe to draw an analogy in terms of causation. Drawing on Reid’s argument that causality itself cannot be observed, I argue against Hume’s supposition that our causal judgments depend ultimately on observation. I also argue that an analogy between minds relying upon “the signs of wisdom” in their effects is possible.

ABSTRACT. Grim uses a Cantorian style diagonalization argument to show that there can be no set of all truths. Since what an omniscient being knows would constitute just such a set, it follows, according to his reasoning, that there can be no omniscient being. I argue in response that his proof assumes that such terms as 'truth' and 'proposition' are sortal terms, dividing their extensions into sets with determinate cardinalities. I show that similar cardinality problems arise, if we construe the referents of mass terms as sets of discretely existing individuals.

ABSTRACT. The concept of soft fact is crucial for the Ockhamist solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. However, there are many definitions of soft facts in literature and it is often difficult to see if they try to capture the same notion or different ones. I show that these definitions can be gathered in two large families and I argue that the soft facts of first kind are not problematic facts, but cannot help the Ockhamist; the soft fact of the second kind are helpful for her attempt, but are questionable from the metaphysical point of view.

ABSTRACT. I shall argue that the laws of nature are evidence for the existence of God. In my view, laws of nature say that there are forces of certain kinds in situations of certain kinds. More generally, laws say that states of affairs of certain kinds are heading in certain directions. Unlike most theories of laws, I do not assume that laws entail regularities of succession. With H meaning 'There is a God' and E meaning 'There are laws of nature of the kind we have discovered', I shall argue that P(E|H) is significantly higher than P(E|¬H).

ABSTRACT. Recent years have seen a surge in publications on the epistemology of ignorance. I argue that texts in the epistemology of ignorance contain conflicting conceptions of ignorance. Since these tacit differences impede the foundations of the epistemology of ignorance they need to be uncovered. In the paper I identify three conceptions of ignorance – (1) ignorance as lack of true belief/knowledge, (2) ignorance as actively upheld false outlooks, (3) ignorance as substantive practice. After analyzing advantages and limitations of these conceptions, I introduce a unified conception of ignorance that may serve as the foundation of the epistemology of ignorance.

ABSTRACT. The default view about justification seems to be that there are absolute facts about a belief being justified. The epistemic relativist rejects this idea, for she claims to have discovered that the facts we are talking about in epistemic discourse – beliefs being justified or unjustified – are actually relative in nature. A recent and highly sophisticated version of epistemic relativism has been offered by Kusch. In my talk, I shall argue that Kusch’s version cannot cope with the problem of eliminativism. The immediate upshot of that finding is that Kusch’s relativistic claim of discovery is false.

ABSTRACT. Several studies have found a robust effect of truth on epistemic evaluation of belief, decision, action and assertion. Thus, truth has a significant effect on normative participant evaluations. Some theorists take this truth effect to motivate factive epistemic norms of belief, action, assertion etc. In contrast, I argue that the truth effect is best understood as an epistemic instance of the familiar and ubiquitous phenomenon of outcome bias. I support this diagnosis from three perspectives: (1) by epistemological theorizing, (2) by considerations from cognitive psychology and (3) by methodological reflections on the relationship between folk epistemology and epistemological theorizing.

ABSTRACT. The territorial demarcation problem is concerned with articulating the criteria that suitably demarcate between two classes of sentences, those that are empirically significant and those that are not. However, it is not controversial to conclude that philosophical folklore holds that demarcationism is dead. The death of demarcationism, however, has been greatly exaggerated; I show that this obituary was premature by examining the most popular autopsies for demarcationism. I then set out two proposed demarcation criteria (verificationism and falsificationism) and explain why a misidentification of the purpose and aims of these demarcation criteria leads to an unjustified rejection of both.

ABSTRACT. Thomas Kuhn (1977) suggested a list of values that scientists consider in theory choice: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Since then, several philosophers have discussed the meaning and role of these values. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to fruitfulness. In this paper, I suggest a new approach to assess fruitfulness. Such an approach is focused on the methods and tests used by research programs to formulate and validate predictions. Moreover, I make use of a specific case study, i.e., the Adaptationist Programme in Evolutionary Psychology, to show how this new approach improves the understanding and assessment of fruitfulness.

ABSTRACT. Realism about the special sciences has been primarily supported with respect to their relation with lower-level theories. This is based on the fact that realism about theories is considered with respect to theory change and commensurability. However, this is not a useful way of constructing a realist thesis about the special sciences because it is based on unwarranted assumptions concerning the epistemic and ontological status of special science theories. In this context, I examine realism about chemistry and about quantum mechanics by disentangling the issue from questions concerning the truthfulness of a theory, and its substitution from another theory.

ABSTRACT. The standard kaplanian model regards indexicals as a category lacking semantic homogeneity: the context of utterance plus the linguistic rule is enough to fix the referent of pure indexicals, but not of demonstratives. Such model is challenged by atypical uses of pure indexicals (recorded messages, post-it notes, indirect discourse, fictional uses, etc.). Criticisms range from the rejection of the whole standard definition of indexicals to revised versions of the standard model. I offer an alternative view homogenously accounting for both typical and atypical indexical uses, which exploits Bühler’s distinction between perceptual and phantasmatic deixis.

ABSTRACT. Recording devices are generally taken to present problems for the standard Kaplanian semantics for indexicals. In my talk, I’ll argue that the remote utterance view (the view that recording devices allow agents to perform utterances at a distance) offers the best way for a Kaplanian semantics to handle the recalcitrant data that comes from the use of recording devices. Using the essential, but widely ignored, distinction between tokens and utterances, and an observation about two ways in which recording devices are used, I develop the view beyond the initial sketch given by Sidelle, and I answer two important objections.

ABSTRACT. In the Blue Book (1958), Wittgenstein argues that there are two uses of “I”: besides the “use as object”, there is also the “use as subject”. An influential tradition beginning with Shoemaker (1968) takes immunity from error through misidentification (IEM) to be Wittgenstein’s – and the correct – distinguishing criterion for the two uses: “I” is used as subject if and only if it occurs in judgements that are IEM. The present paper disputes this contention and claims that the IEM-criterion is unable to distinguish two different uses of “I”. I sketch an alternative criterion based on psychological expressivsim.

ABSTRACT. According to Frege, the process of grasping abstract senses is the most mysterious of all, but he does not clearly tell us why he takes this to be the case. Bolzano provides us with detailed informations in his theory of subjective ideas, which are the processes in question. I will sketch the crucial claims and show how several candidates to account for the mystery can be rejected with means provided by Bolzano. Finally, I will use the rejection of the alleged mystery to illustrate how Bolzano and Frege disagree concerning the scope and aims of logic.

ABSTRACT. Following the foundationalist reading of Brentano, only inner perception deserves the name “perception”; there is no outer perception in an analogical sense; there are probalistic inferences that this physical phenomenon corresponds to something in the outside world, but our relation with the outside world is not perceptual, but strictly inferential. The foundationalist view is usually based on affirmations like “true perception is inner perception”, or that “outer perception is false-taking (Falsch-nehmung). But there is no reason to take this as meaning that there is nothing like “outer perception”. I will argue that Brentano had good reasons to defend that view

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we show how one can be an epistemic consequentialist about epistemic justification. We argue that epistemic consequentialism (and reliabilism in particular) can avoid Selim Berker’s recent challenge. Berker argues that epistemic consequentialist approaches fail because they allow for illicit trade-offs between propositions. According to Berker, illicit trade-offs commit consequentialist approaches to epistemic justification to counterintuitive evaluations regarding the status of epistemic justification of beliefs in certain cases. We argue that the most common epistemic consequentialist approaches to epistemic justification avoid counterintuitive results in the Berker-Firth cases.

ABSTRACT. The paper seeks to examine how, if at all, Bayesianism addresses the problem of induction. I distinguish three problems: the weak epistemic one (associated with Popper), the strong epistemic one (associated with Hume), and the metaphysical one (associated with Goodman). I examine how the Bayesian machinery can be used to formulate each. This leads me to discuss some deep problems about Bayesianism, including that of the priors and of underlying algebras. The hope is that the formal machinery of Bayesianism can help clarify what the problems are precisely, and sketch the sort of responses that would be adequate for each.

ABSTRACT. How good is the understanding of climate change that different types of climate models enable and how can it be improved? I address these questions with an account of understanding, according to which a scientist understands a target system with a model to the degree to which she grasps the model (i.e., is able to make use of it), the model represents the target (i.e., the system as depicted by the model resembles the target), and the model is justified (i.e., coheres with background knowledge and performs with respect to accuracy, robustness and virtues such as simplicity and explanatory power).

ABSTRACT. I defend the argument from inductive risk against the claim that scientists can avoid making value-laden decisions by endorsing only appropriately hedged hypotheses. Using the 2 °C climate target as case study, I argue that there are cases with significant moral import in which scientists cannot withhold judgment from uncertain hypothesis by retreating to hedged claims. I consider the decision rule that the hedging strategy recommends, the precautionary principle. I argue that this decision rule cannot underwrite any specific climate target. Yet there is a need for such a target and hence the hedging strategy fails.

ABSTRACT. In a recent insightful paper, Lange (2013) characterizes “certain scientific explanations of physical facts” (p. 485) as ‘distinctively mathematical’ (DMEs), since they are cases of “explanation[s ] that [are] mathematical in a way that intuitively differs profoundly from” “ordinary scientific explanations employing mathematics.” (OEMs) (p. 486). Unlike OEMs, DMEs “do not exploit [the] causal powers” (p. 497) of the structures involved in the scientific context. Although I agree with some of the ideas articulated in the paper, I argue that the dichotomy between DMEs and OEMs doesn’t in fact exist – because, in essence, Lange misconstrues DMEs.

ABSTRACT. Penrose's second argument using Goedel's incompleteness theorems in order to show that a specific mechanist thesis is refutable is a little bit more involved than its predecessors. In the talk we consider possible ways of formalizing the argument within an expressively strong framework based on partial logic. In addition to the usual arithmetical vocabulary we have the epistemic notion of mathematical knowledge or absolute provability and additionally the notion of truth, both as type-free predicates. Besides establishing the adequacy of the system we will give reasons why also in such a framework based on partial logic Penrose's argument is problematic.

ABSTRACT. Before the advent of the current ‘epsilon-delta’ framework, calculus was based on infinitesimals. Such an infinitesimal calculus is still used in physics and was formalised by Robinson in his Non-standard Analysis. We discuss two topics relating to the infinitesimal calculus: (I) Against the well-known critique of Bishop and Connes, we show that Nonstandard Analysis is rich in computational content. (II) Using results from (I), we show how infinitesimals can be replaced by ‘very small’ rationals, as is common in physics. We argue that this replacement is correct and computable for large parts of mathematics relevant to physics.

ABSTRACT. Despite criticism (e.g. Fuhrmann and Levi, 1994 or Morton, 2004), the Ramsey test is still considered to be the default test for the acceptability of indicative conditionals. In my article I will present a new, forceful argument against RT. It is based on the so-called Evidential Support Theory developed by Igor Douven and presented in Douven, 2008 and Douven and Verbrugge, 2012. Both the theory and my argument are supported by results of an experiment conducted by the authors. I will also sketch a version of RT which will not be susceptible to the presented counterexamples.

ABSTRACT. My claim in this paper is that the competing semantics of conditionals share a common point: they all analyse conditionals from the constituents. I suggest that instead of bottom-up analyses (constituents -> conditional), the direction of the analysis should be reversed (conditional -> constituents).

My argument is largely negative. I consider a number of influential semantics of conditionals and demonstrate that they all lead to a number of problems, which cannot be escaped unless the direction of analysis is reversed. I then propose a brief positive account of what conditionals could mean under my proposal.

ABSTRACT. Relationalism claims that the phenomenal character of perception is constituted by the obtaining of a non-representational psychological relation to mind-independent objects. Relationalism has been targeted by the argument from hallucination. However, I argue, a compelling version of the argument from hallucination has yet to be offered. I formulate a novel, original challenge that seriously threatens relationalism. The relationalists need to explain how the phenomenal character of a perception and an introspectively indistinguishable hallucination can be different denying the intuition that phenomenal characters are superficial. This challenge also clarifies what underwrites other currently proposed versions of the argument.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we aim to bring together two allegedly conflicting theories in the metaphysics of fictional objects. That is, we will argue that there are two, equally important, yet non-conflicting, issues that need to be addressed concerning fictional objects and that Artifactual Theory and Meinongianism each address a different one of these issues.

The distinction concerns, what we will call, a metaphysical question and an original question. With the former addressing what kind of entities fictional objects are and the latter addressing how these came into being, they both concern different core aspects in the metaphysics of fictional objects.

ABSTRACT. Necessitism is the thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something. Timothy Williamson is a necessitist and he claims that David Lewis is a necessitist too. However, this seems to be a surprising interpretation of Lewis. I will explain that Lewis’s stance towards necessitism must be understood in terms of a conditional thesis: if the necessitist thesis is read unrestricted, then Lewis is a necessitist; otherwise, he is a contingentist. My proposal will consist in a new understanding of Lewis’s theory, according to which Lewis offers a sort of “compatibilist” view about necessitism.

ABSTRACT. Many contemporary ethicists use case-based reasoning to reach consistent beliefs about ethical matters. The idea is that particular cases elicit moral intuitions, which provide defeasible reasons to believe in their content. However, most proponents of case-based ethical reasoning are not very explicit about how they resolve inconsistencies and how they abstract principles from judgments about particular cases. The aim of this article is to outline a methodology—Consistency Reasoning Casuistry—for case-based reasoning in ethics. Consistency Reasoning Casuistry is in harmony with paradigms of contemporary moral psychology and can accommodate the methodology implicit in the work of many contemporary ethicists.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I argue against moral deference optimism, according to which assuming another person’s moral judgment as one’s own, based on their authority or expertise, is unproblematic. I hold that although this view is right about some cases, it does not cover them all and as such it can be accommodated by the opposing view, moral deference pessimism. However, the existing pessimist accounts face their own challenges. Thus I propose a new approach they can adopt, one which should focus on recurrent moral deference, and suggest that its interference with our practical wisdom is what makes moral deference problematic.

ABSTRACT. According to the recently most promising account of what it is to manipulate a person the manipulator fails to track reasons, i.e., the manipulator is not interested in the justificatory dimension of the reasons for action brought into play, but rather only in its causal dimension. However, this thesis is confronted with two problems: First, the problem of a possible interest in objectivity. Second, the problem of a necessary interest in the first-person perspective of the manipulated person. I will provide a more adequate explanation of manipulation and illuminate the ethical significance of this form of personal influence.

ABSTRACT. According to John Broome the central normative ought is agentive 'ought to do' where this agentive ought is to be accounted for in terms of owned ought. I shall criticize Broome’s account on two fronts. First, I show that unqualified ownership is not a plausible candidate for the hallmark of the truly agentive ought since ownership is not necessarily a normative notion. Second, I show that Broome’s logical interpretation of owned ought fails. I argue that what matters is authorship and not ownership. I also propose a logical interpretation of authorship within the propositionalist framework.