ABSTRACT. The symposium aims to investigate the complex relation between self-knowledge - that is, knowledge of our own mental states – and rationality. Topics will include: the challenge posed to self-knowledge and to rationality by empirical findings in cognitive psychology, self-deception and thought insertion, and the bearing of Moore's paradox to our understanding of beliefs, rationality and self-knowledge.

ABSTRACT. This symposium aims at assessing the progress made in the philosophy of mathematical practice by presenting some representative and very recent advances in the area. The invited speakers will bring in tools from other areas of philosophy such as aesthetics and virtue epistemology, as well as from other disciplines such as psychology and cognitive neuroscience, in order to address central questions about mathematical reasoning and how we obtain knowledge in everyday mathematical practice.

ABSTRACT. Traditionally, a sentence like

(1) Jim knows what added to 5 makes 8

is taken to express the holding of a relation between two relata: Jim, and the proposition that is the answer to the question “What added to 5 makes 8?”.

In this talk, I will show that there are issues for this traditional account.

I will then conclude that mathematics shows that not all attitudes are propositional and that we should re-think the role of clauses like “what added to 5 makes 8” as they occur in attributions like (1).

ABSTRACT. I will present Jeshion’s cognitivism; a view that holds that one should characterize singular thoughts by their cognitive roles. In the second section I will argue that, contrary to Jeshion’s claims, results from studies of object tracking in cognitive psychology do not support cognitivism. I will argue that conscious attention should replace Jeshion’s significance condition as a necessary condition for one to have a singular thought. The paper will show that we need to take seriously the acquaintance requirement for singular thoughts, as even the easy transmission of singular thoughts with the use of names will be called into question.

ABSTRACT. Belief is generally considered as prototypical and representative of all propositional attitudes. This brings to conclude that the same kind of propositions that are the objects of belief can also be the objects of emotional attitudes. We remark that whereas no rational subject can be knowingly ambivalent as far as her beliefs are concerned, rational ambivalence is possible with respect to being surprised, happy, etc. We argue that rational ambivalence is an obstacle to taking singular Russellian propositions to be the objects of emotions in particular, and of all propositional attitudes generally.

ABSTRACT. In ``That-clauses as Existential Quantifiers'' Recanati proposes to treat that-clauses as restricted quantifiers of the form `For some p such that p is true iff S', where `p' is an objectual variable ranging over truth-bearing entities, and `S' stands for the embedded sentence. In this talk I argue that together with Kripke's disquotational principle this leads to unacceptable consequences. Since the solution cannot be to reject Kripke's disquotational principle for sentences of the form `A believes that S', this will show that that-clauses aren't restricted quantifiers of the form `For some p such that p is true iff S'.

ABSTRACT. There is almost a unanimous consensus among the theorists of consciousness that the phenomenal character of a mental state cannot exist unconsciously. We argue for a reappraisal of this consensus. We distinguish two models of phenomenal consciousness: unitary and dual. Unitary model takes the production of a phenomenal character and it’s becoming conscious to be one and the same thing. The dual model, which we describe and defend in this paper, distinguishes the process in which the phenomenal quality is produced from the process that makes this quality conscious.

ABSTRACT. This paper will draw on ontology and apply it to a puzzle concerning consciousness. Specifically, I argue that if we think of conscious experiences on the model provided by Kim’s view of events, we can answer what I call the intimacy question: what is the particularly intimate relationship between a subject and her conscious experiences? Specifically, I develop a view on which the relationship is one of constitution: subjects constitute conscious experiences (essentially). I also argue that this view has advantages over the views of Matthew Soteriou and Galen Strawson.

ABSTRACT. In its interesting form, Representationalism combines a supervenience claim with an explanatory commitment: necessarily, for any two experiences E and E*, if E and E* are different in their phenomenal character, then there is some difference in representational content between E and E* that renders their phenomenal difference intelligible. I contend that representationalism is false. I'll argue that exceptional episodic memory--viz. hyperthymesia and savants with prodigious visual memory--provide evidence that there can be a perceptual experience and a memory of that perceptual experience that differ in phenomenal character, yet lacking in any representational difference that renders their phenomenological difference intelligible.

ABSTRACT. According to some philosophers every experience comes with experience of that very experience. Some (most notably Zahavi) have further claimed that having experience also involves a pre-reflexive consciousness of the subject of experience: my conscious states are experienced as experiences-given-to-me, and so as possessing, and phenomenally manifesting, for-me-ness. My talk offers a new model for understanding ‘Zahavian’ for-me-ness, a model according to which in having any experience E, one is directly aware of the content presented by E and E itself, and via this direct awareness one is also indirectly aware of the giveness relation, and the experiencing subject.

ABSTRACT. I provide reasons which justify the claim that auditory experience is temporal. To this end, I will discuss three ways of experiencing time auditorily in comparison with the temporal experience of color. One way to experience time auditorily is to hear the temporal edges which mark sound’s boundaries (temporal contour); another way is to hear the temporal phases sounds are made of (temporal phases). Finally, sounds can be perceived as semi-persisting items over time despite some qualitative changes (temporal semi-persistency). I will conclude that only with regard to the experience of temporal contour, auditory experience and visual experience are disanalogous.

ABSTRACT. Laurie Paul questions the rationality of transformative decisions. Her argument rests on the premise that the expected experiential value plays the central role in a transformative decision. We challenge this premise by presenting two empirical studies in which we investigated the role of the experiential value in both epistemically as well as personally transformative choices like deciding to become a parent. The results of both studies show that people do not take the expected experiential value to be of central importance when making transformative decisions. We will discuss these results in the context of multicriteria decision making (MCDM) problems.

ABSTRACT. L.A. Paul argues that certain experiences are epistemically transformative in the sense that subjects who haven’t had those experiences cannot know what it is like to have the experience. Paul makes two central claims: (i) we cannot come to know what these experiences are like unless we undergo the experiences ourselves, and (ii) we cannot come to know the value of the corresponding outcomes unless we know what the relevant experiences are like. In this talk I will argue that the recognitional account of phenomenal concepts provides the best method in order to assess whether an experience is epistemically transformative.

ABSTRACT. People often make comparative value judgments about conscious experiences: enjoying an ice cream in the sun is preferable over being tortured. Furthermore, subjective values of conscious experiences are to some extent additive: having two positively valenced experiences in a row is better than having a single positive experience. However, some negative utilitarians argue that there is an asymmetry between positive and negative experiences: the absence of suffering is always better than the presence of happiness. This paper shows how to analyze this asymmetry by assigning subjective values to experiences, while holding on to the assumption that subjective values are additive.

ABSTRACT. The error-theory of responsibility is the claim that responsibility-attributions will be systematically wrong for an attributer who believes determinism to be true. I will show that there is a natural commitment to conceiving the act of attributing to be uncaused. He is in a performative contradiction then whoever believes determinism to be true and makes responsibility-attributions. But reactive attitudes theory shows that we have a natural commitment to the reactive attitudes such that whether or not an attributer believes determinism is true will not affect his responsibility-attributions. Combined, these two natural commitments result in systematic performative inconsistency: an error-theory.

ABSTRACT. This paper establishes a master argument for grounding responsible agency called the argument from acquaintance, introducing the notions of the agential properties of responsibility enabler and responsibility disabler. If my argument is sound then it also provides a solid defence against the argument from regress and the argument from luck.

ABSTRACT. According to ‘ought implies can’ it is never the case that you ought to do something that you cannot do. Unfortunately, most readings of ‘can’ in the debate give rise to unfair moral requirements. Any reading that avoids this has the result that it is seldom the case that we ought to perform successful actions; rather, we only ought to try our best to perform them. In addition to faring better than alternative readings when faced with various counterexamples, the proposed reading also answers a pressing objection in the debate on how normativity transmits from ends to means.

ABSTRACT. Many compatibilists claim that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility, even if there are no alternatives for agents. According to them, alternatives are unnecessary for being moral responsible because moral responsibility only need moderate amount of control. However, we claim that these theories are unable to explain how this kind of moderate control grounds moral responsibility since the degree of this kind of control is no higher than the degree of the control which exercised by mundane inanimate objects.

ABSTRACT. I argue that it is possible to confirm a theory by some piece of evidence without knowing or consider-ing any concrete rival theories of the theory. I offer two arguments. The first argument is an argument from scientific practice concerning theories that enjoy very strong empirical support. When scientists discuss and assess the empirical support of a very well-confirmed theory, they usually merely mention the evidence supporting the theory, point out its good-making features such as diversity, but barely discuss any rival theories. The second argument employs a Bayesian framework and concerns the ac-curate prediction of a precise measurement.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I defend a novel non-reductive, non-restrictive epistemic account of scientific TEs, compatible with empiricism and built on case studies from the history of physics. I shall argue that TEs function as inconsistency revealers and eliminators and are characterized by a common general structure. This structure offers a proper justification method – i.e. why TEs succeed and why they fail – identifies the nature and role of each element involved in their scenarios, appraises TEs as autonomous, sui generis scientific tool (thus non-reductive), describes their “evolution” and accounts for unrealisable in principle TEs (thus non-restrictive).

ABSTRACT. The paper reconsiders Goodman’s paradox and argues for the following theses. (i) The conflict between the grue- and green-hypotheses is generated by induction-undermining, “defeating” background knowledge alone. (ii) The unprojectibility of “grue” depends on epistemic context. Epistemic context, however, includes not only our total evidence but also relations of epistemic dependence between our evidential beliefs. Both theses are developed first with respect to what I call the "disjunctive riddle": if the projection of “P” is defeated, then so is the joint projection of “P-or-Q” and “P-or-non-Q”, although none of them individually is defeated.

ABSTRACT. I will present the problem of belief reports that has puzzled philosophers of language for over a century. The difficulty is that it seems impossible to accommodate the thesis of Opacity of Belief Reports while respecting the following three plausible and widely held semantic principles: Direct Reference, Compositionality, and Semantic Innocence. Against the classical line of response to the problem of belief reports, I will defend that there is no logical incompatibility between these four theses. While these principles seem inconsistent, this is because we are presupposing a Traditional Analysis of Belief Reports.

ABSTRACT. According to an approach that has been dominant since the beginning of the 20th century, the primary truth-bearers are abstract, mind-independent entities, such as Fregean Gedanken or Russellian propositions. In a recent book, Peter Hanks argues that the primary truth-bearers are concrete cognitive and linguistic acts. This paper applauds Hanks’ attempt to provide an alternative to the rampant Platonism of the dominant approach, but maintains that he does not go far enough. It argues (i) that there is some residual Platonism in Hanks’ proposal, (ii) that this residual Platonism is problematic, and (iii) that we can do without it.

ABSTRACT. I am in favour of structured propositions. However, one problem is how to avoid regress when explaining how the proper parts of a structured proposition are interconnected so as to form a whole. I present a theory of structured propositions that does not trigger a regress. My theoretical framework is Transparent Intensional Logic which construes propositions as complex procedures whose parts are sub-procedures. The parts interact because their output is organized as functions and arguments. Regress fails to arise because a proposition is identical to a procedure, or logical flow-chart, detailing the interaction between functions, arguments and their output values.

ABSTRACT. Ontological questions are often expressed using quantificational vocabulary. The standard model-theoretic semantics invokes a domain to explain the truth of quantified statements. Metaphysicians tend to picture the world as consisting of mind-independent, ’ready-made’ objects, and thus assume that there is one absolute domain which is determined solely by the way reality is, independently of what language or concepts we employ. First, I will argue that this view, domain realism, fits with a realistic metaontology, but is incompatible with metaontological deflationism, according to which ontological questions are easily answered. Secondly, I will explore what positive story deflationists should tell about domains.

ABSTRACT. According to an influential line of thought, some ordinary language ‘There is’-statements are literally true but have no ontological import at all (henceforth “Neuthereism”). This paper explores a certain kind of philosophical motivation for Neutherism: the view is widely thought to help us avoid philosophical puzzles about problematic kinds of entities, such as numbers, properties, propositions, and fictional characters. However, I will argue that problem avoidance is a poor motivation for Neuthereism. This is because the puzzles that motivated the position have close analogues that are no less serious for Neuthereism as the original ones are for mainstream realist views.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that some metaphysical debates are ‘metalinguistic negotiations’ (to employ a recent term coined by David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell). I will take the dispute between the two dominant approaches to understanding scientific models - Neo-Meinongians and Fictionalists - as a case-study and I shall argue that a normative and non-factual question may be involved in it: how the relevant piece of language ought to be used. Even though I will generally assess the prospects for a broadly deflationist approach, I shall outline a sense the dispute would be ‘minimally substantive’.

ABSTRACT. This paper challenges Estlund's liberal epistemic view of political quality, according to which inequalities in the informal political public sphere (e.g. campaign contributions) can be publicly justified provided that they increase the total level of political input, thus increasing the epistemic quality of political decisions. The paper argues that unequal distribution of political influence might introduce some (conjectural and empirically latent) epistemically damaging features that the procedure cannot compensate for, thus endangering the quality of outcomes. Since this is a reasonable (though not necessarily true) objection, liberal epistemic view cannot satisfy the liberal criterion of legitimacy, and should be rejected.

ABSTRACT. Fricker argues that we epistemically objectify when we instrumentally treat another’s testimony as a ‘mere means’ to our own ends [Fricker,2007]. Pohlhaus challenges this as an analysis of testimonial injustice, arguing that precisely because we can rationally disbelieve and prejudicially discredit testimony, the harmed testifier is unlike an epistemic object [Pohlhaus,2014]. I suggest however that Pohlhaus has misplaced faith in the ontological status of our beliefs about objects, and that both Fricker and Pohlhaus’ focus on instrumentalism obscure the nature of genuine epistemic objectification. Epistemic objectification is widespread, and opportunities for alleviating it are more restricted than Pohlhaus’ interpretation suggests.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I discuss the relationship between self-respect and the disrespect of others. Firstly, I argue that there are three kinds of connection that can obtain between these two stances, namely either a causal, a constitutive or a rational one. Of these, only the rational warrants further philosophical investigation. Secondly, I show that under certain conditions the disrespect of B can provide A with a reason to lose her self-respect but not because B’s attitude somehow negatively affects A’s value properties, but because A has reason to take B’s attitude as an indicator for the value properties she has.

ABSTRACT. Practices of abstraction and idealization have been quite well analyzed in the modeling literature (cf. Weisberg 2007), yet -- surprisingly -- little has been said about it in the context of modeling mechanisms. Only a few analyses are explicitly devoted to spelling out the functions of abstraction (Levy & Bechtel 2013) and idealization (Love and Nathan 2015) in this domain. In this contribution I assess the functions of idealization in mechanistic models. I argue that there is an important function of idealization that has been (largely) overlooked in the mechanism literature: making salient difference making factors for a target explanandum.

ABSTRACT. What is the relation between mechanisms and processes? The New Mechanists literature focuses on embodied mechanisms and mechanism types (“machines”). But much scientific literature uses “mechanism” and “process” interchangeably for unembodied processes that are explanatory important. Absent a standard physical housing, such processes are not well analogized to machines. Thus: processes/mechanisms of crystal formation, catalytic action, soil erosion, and gene transcription. Chemists’ talk of “chemical mechanisms” is almost always in the unembodied, process sense. This approach to organizing the material will, for example, cut the Gordian knot of whether the process of evolution counts as a mechanism.

ABSTRACT. The moving spotlight theory of time is a conceptual framework which help us to understand the temporal dynamics without giving up the advantages of an eternalist conception of time. In such a framework the present moves from instants to instants like a spotlight in a fixed scenario. The aim of our talk is twofold: firstly, we intend to clarify the notion of presentness in the framework of the spotlight theory; secondly, we want to provide a modal semantic frame for modelling how time passes, so as to characterized in a precise way the conceptual basis of the spotlight theory.

ABSTRACT. According to the well-known Bradley’s Regress argument, one cannot explain the unity of states of affairs by referring to instantiation relations. This argument has been widely discussed, but has not been recognized as relevant for the philosophy of perception. I argue that the mainstream characterization of visual content is threatened by the Bradley’s Regress, and the most influential metaphysical solutions to the regress argument cannot be applied in the context of vision. However, I show that a proper solution to Bradley’s Regress can be formulated by taking into consideration features of visual content suggested by empirical research in vision science.

ABSTRACT. Moral exemplars are often held up as objects to be admired. Such admiration is thought beneficial to the admirer, inducing him to emulate virtuous conduct, and deemed flattering to the admired. This paper offers a critical examination of admiration from a broadly Kantian perspective, arguing that admiration – even of genuine moral exemplars – violates the duty to self-respect. It also offers an explanation for the fact that moral exemplars themselves typically shun admiration. Lastly, it challenges the assumption that admiration leads to emulation, using scientific findings that indicate that admiration induces passivity rather than an incentive to self-improvement.

ABSTRACT. Whereas responsible conduct of research is usually explained in terms of principles, virtue-based approaches focus exclusively on behavioral dispositions of scientists (Macfarlane, 2009) which presumably ensure undisturbed research processes. The problem of moral luck (Williams, 1982) poses a challenge for virtue-based accounts and their handling of demanding requirements such as the obligation to report supposed cases of scientific misconduct. Virtuous behavior often depends on favorable institutional conditions, a manifestation of moral luck. I will show that virtue-based approaches cannot account for this fact and discuss whether extending the domain of virtues to organizational features of institutions is a viable solution.

ABSTRACT. Structural realism à-la-Worrall is the view that inasmuch as scientific theories provide us with (partially) adequate descriptions of reality, they do so by shedding light on how reality is structured, rather than on the nature of existing objects. Although it’s not clear where we should draw the line between structure and nature, it’s clear that, following this view, something about reality lies beyond our grasp. This ‘negative stance’, however, has a positive side: by placing a constraint to our knowledge, structural realism reveals us something about the nature and the conditions of possibility of our scientific understanding of the world.

ABSTRACT. There are two issues that a good account of emergence should address. First, it must offer a positive and informative definition of that notion. Second, it should explain how downward causation is possible. The first issue can be tackled by characterizing the emergence of a system’s novel state as the abrupt increment of its effective complexity. With regard to the second one, I will argue that emergent states are reducible in a certain sense and irreducible in another. Downward causation can be appropriately described if emergent states are rendered as irreducible in the right sense.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I argue that there are good reasons to reject the epistemic analyticity account of a priori knowledge. A priori knowledge is not grounded on sheer conceptual understanding or implicit definitions. After presenting the epistemic analyticity account and the objections to it, I sketch an alternative account of a priori knowledge. Roughly, the alternative says that suppositional reasoning is a source of a priori knowledge.

ABSTRACT. Model-simplifying assumptions come in two kinds: abstraction and idealization of features of the phenomena. Some regard these two kinds of assumptions as two facets of their own generic notion of idealization. Others attempt to spell-out ways by which to explicate the distinction. Such examples include Cartwright (1989), Jones (2005), Godfrey-Smith (2009), Levy and Bechtel (2013). I offer six arguments why the latter attempts to distinguish the two fail to meet the desired goal, and I defend the thesis that it is possible to explicate the two as two facets of the same cognitive act which I call selective attention.

ABSTRACT. In the interventionist account of causality, interventions are thought of as ‘regulative ideals’ that need only be applied in idealized situations, regardless of whether such interventions are physically possible. Somewhat overlooked is the fact that idealization can also perniciously distort the identity of systems, so that the causal relations identified in the idealized system can no longer be ascribed to the actual system. In this paper I argue that the holistic causal structure of certain complex systems – such as financial markets or traffic flows – are more problematic for interventionist analysis than previously realized, rendering interventions conceptually impossible.

ABSTRACT. Models qua idealized representations are tools to answer specific questions about their target, e.g., by running a computer simulation. Idealization in modeling has implications for confirmation. I adopt a pragmatist justification for trading confirmation for idealization in modeling to defend the claim that trading is legitimate if the cognitive values that come with idealization, i.e., properties of models such as simple or complex structure, and broad scope, are relevant for the intended application. I use this pragmatist justification to advance the debate on legitimate and illegitimate uses of epistemic, cognitive and social values in modeling.

ABSTRACT. Circular definitions are definitions that include the definiendum in the definiens. The aim of the talk is to define and analyze some special classes of circular definitions that have a simple revision-theoretic semantics (in the sense defined by A. Gupta and N. Belnap). Some of the classes introduced correspond to the class of finite definitions and others are either generalizations or restrictions of this class.

ABSTRACT. In model-theoretic logics there is a standard definition of relative expressiveness, based on the capacity of characterizing structures. The problem is that it only allows the comparison of logics defined within the same class of models. The urge for a broader definition of expressiveness is not new. Nevertheless, the enterprise is complex and a reasonable approach is still wanting. Recently there appeared two proposals in this direction, one from Väänänen-García-Mattos and other from L. Kuijer. We will argue that they are not adequate, since they over-generate. We analyze why they fail and propose some ways to overcome their limitations.

ABSTRACT. The Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM) – roughly, a belief/desire-pair that causes an event in the right way constitutes that event as an action – has recently been defended by appeals to its explanatory power and simplicity. But it is unclear if HTM provides the simplest explanation, if the best version of HTM is the simplest, or if its components are simple. (Moreover, there are other virtues.)

However, HTM remains virtuous. Some actions are best explained by belief/desire-pairs, we should generalise this explanation to all actions, and this unified explanation is virtuous. (Moreover, HTM remains virtuous relative to other virtues.)

ABSTRACT. The problem of thinking about non-existent objects (=PNE) is closely related to the problem of intentionality. This talk critically assesses Drummond’s “presentationalist” proposal. By distinguishing between (i) intentionality as characteristic of the mind “as a whole”, and (ii) as property of particular mental phenomena, he claims that: (A) Only (ii)-intentionality is susceptible to PNE. (B) Intending the non-existent derives from and is founded on ‘modifying’ or ‘combining’ directedness(es) towards the existent. While taking Drummond’s claims to be basically correct, I argue that (B) is not an adequate solution to PNE. I conclude that intending the non-existent remains irreducible.

ABSTRACT. Consciousness is scientifically challenging to study because of its subjective aspect. This leads researchers to rely on report-based experimental paradigms in order to discover neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). I argue that the requirement of reports has biased the research for NCC, thus creating what I call “methodological artefacts”. This paper has three main goals: first, describe and justify the existence of a measurement problem and methodological artefacts in consciousness science. Second, provide a critical assessment of the NCC put forward by the global neuronal workspace theory. Third, provide the means of dissociating genuine NCC from methodological artefacts.

ABSTRACT. Humans and non-human animals are social beings and both can anticipate behavior of others. Anticipation can be realized by mindreading or behavior-reading. Up to now it is not clear what justifies an ascription of mindreading to non-human animals and how to distinguish mindreading from behavior-reading. Especially the debate about animal mindreading created deep and unresolved disputes. The aim of this paper is to carry out a causal analysis of this intricate situation and to argue for the suggestion to take a minimal notion of mindreading (Butterfill & Apperly 2013) into account.

ABSTRACT. Creative cognition is a process that enables us to understand and to change the world we live in. Previous research has mostly neglected that creative processes are situated in a socio-cultural environment in which artefacts and representational and notational systems abound. The present paper argues that enculturation – understood as transformative acquisition of cognitive embodied practices (e.g., reading, writing arithmetic) – plays an indispensable role in the development and refinement of creative products. The proposal is to explore the interaction of enculturated human organisms with their local environment in order to arrive at a coherent account of creative cognition.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the connection between the indispensability argument and the metaphysics of mathematical objects. I will contrast two conceptions of the nature of mathematical objects: the conception of mathematical objects as preconceived objects (Yablo 2010, Introduction) and heavy duty platonism (Knowles 2015). I will argue that there are some theses friends of the indispensability argument need to subscribe to and that one promising way to motivate such theses is to adopt heavy duty platonism. On the other hand, combining the indispensability argument with the conception of mathematical objects as preconceived objects yields an unstable position.

ABSTRACT. For millennia, philosophers have discussed whether divine omniscience is compatible with human freedom – conceived of in a libertarian way – or not. Ockham argued that it is. According to him, propositions about God’s past foreknowledge of human actions are not strictly but only secundum vocem about the past (they describe “soft” rather than “hard” facts). Despite Plantinga’s efforts of clarification, Ockham’s way-out faces a number of problems. We defend Ockham’s solution by defining in new terms both the notion of a hard fact and the idea that we are, in some sense, able to do otherwise.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, we consider two common formulations of Ockham’s razor and the Principle of sufficient reason. We argue that some interesting thematic and inferential connections exist between these two (formulations of the) principles. Among other things, under a causal, metaphysical understanding of the two principles, they provide a uniform, albeit puzzling, characterization of the causal order of the physical world. We conclude that the two principles are better dealt with and discussed together, within a unitary, comprehensive setting, in which their thematic and inferential connections are taken into the account.

ABSTRACT. Scanlon thinks that agents can be blameworthy without acting impermissibly, because he believes the reasons for which an agent acts cannot affect her action’s permissibility, although they can make her blameworthy. Why an agent acts is irrelevant to her action’s permissibility, because agents cannot choose their reasons for action, and an action’s permissibility is determined by what the agent has chosen. I argue that Scanlon is wrong to infer from the fact that reasons aren’t chosen to the conclusion that they are irrelevant to permissibility, and thus wrong that there exist cases in which agents are blameworthy without acting impermissibly.

ABSTRACT. Perverse agents act on contrarian grounds: they take themselves to have good reasons to act based on facts such as the action being bad, wrong, unreasonable etc. In this talk I explore three accounts of what is wrong (in a broad sense) about perverse agents qua perverse: the immoral grounds account, Sussman's instability account, and the buck-passing account. Having noted the weaknesses in each account, I proceed then to develop my own account, based on the claim that the perverse make it impossible by non-perverse others to blame them by using concepts such as wrong or bad.

ABSTRACT. The dirty hands debate comes down to the following question: Do we sometimes have to act wrongly to do the right thing? The author addresses a meta-question about this question: is there really a fact of the matter to it? It is argued that the debate between proponents and opponents of dirty hands does not necessarily turn on extensional differences. Furthermore, neither does it look like additional theoretical virtues can decide the case, nor is it plausible to assume the solution to be evidence-transcendent. There are therefore good pro tanto reasons for a negative answer to the meta-question.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary recognition theory based on Axel Honneth’s (1995) foundational work is a well-established research programme in social and political philosophy. However, some of Honneth’s (2001; 2008) own relatively recent writings on pathologies of recognition, and especially on the notion of antecedent recognition threaten to undermine the carefully built systematic foundations of the theory. In my paper, I will present a detailed critical analysis of the very notion of antecedent recognition, arguing that because of its unclear nature, the concept is highly problematic, and should therefore be eliminated from the systematic foundations of the theory.

ABSTRACT. According to Hempel explanations and predictions have the same structure: An explanation of a past event shows why it was to be expected. However, examples show that one can have explanations that do not yield predictions and predictions without explanatory grounding. Econophysics is another candidate for this asymmetry, with good explanations but hardly any predictions. I will argue that the asymmetry is not as pronounced as it first seems. The main predictive power of econophysics consists in what call “structural predictions”, i.e. predictions about the role of structural background conditions, usable e.g. for policy advice in regulating financial markets.

ABSTRACT. There are several approaches to approximating Leśniewskian names to the Russellian tradition. Arthur Prior’s suggestion of class names has been rejected by prominent Leśniewskian scholars such as Peter Simons. From the formal point of view, this approach could be, however, justified by a formal approximation of the two previously mentioned systems of logic. This was suggested by Czesław Lejewski.

ABSTRACT. Quine’s mature ideas about metaphysics and ontology are intimately connected to his dismissal of the analytic-synthetic distinction. This raises the question of how he thought about these issues in the earliest stages of his career, before he rejected the distinction. In this paper, I reconstruct Quine’s early perspective on the relation between language, ontological commitment, and metaphysics by tracing the evolution of his views throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Building on a previously unexamined series of notes related to his first (unpublished) philosophical book project, I show that Quine struggled to formulate a satisfying perspective on metaphysics until the mid-1940.

ABSTRACT. The question whether thought experiments in science bring us fresh information about nature or not, has been a popular one in the past decades. Norton (Norton, 1996) claims that thought experiments are just explanations, arguments, but “epistemically unremarkable”. The same question can be asked about computer simulations, which are widely used nowadays in very different fields. Whether computer simulations deliver fresh so far unseen scientific knowledge or not is an important epistemological question. I show that no general answer can be given, the “demarcation should rather be decided on a case by case basis.

ABSTRACT. Group epistemology is on the rise. Recent years have seen a flurry of proposals defending the existence of what I call *robustly collective attitudes*, such as group belief or group knowledge. However, different proposals for understanding robustly collective attitudes implicitly rely on different methodological and substantive assumptions about when and why groups have robustly collective attitudes. As a result, it’s often unclear whether disputes in collective epistemology are genuine or merely verbal. In this paper, I want to make methodological progress by advancing a form of methodological pluralism for collective epistemology.

ABSTRACT. The tradition of Common Sense epistemology contains a variety of epistemological arguments, some of which are more represented in the contemporary litterature. I want to develop Reid's chronological conception of common sense as the starting point of philosophy, or the original system of belief from which all subsequent philosophical system must come. In order to develop this line of thought, I will use the conceptual tools of contemporary "dynamic epistemology" (Levi, Harman). In the proposed framework, every philosophical system must be conceived as (ultimately) "generated" from the principles of an original (common sense) system, through a series of justified revisions.

ABSTRACT. Williamson argues that evidential probabilities can neither be adequately interpreted as the credences of human agents nor as the credences of ideal agents. He concludes that no credence interpretation is adequate. This result is not only fundamental to his epistemology but also relevant for epistemology in general.

In the first part of my presentation, I argue that his criticism of credence interpretations is flawed. In the second, final part, I propose and defend a new interpretation, that he does not consider and that neither refers to the credences of human agents nor to the credences of ideal agents.

ABSTRACT. David Lewis understands knowledge as truth in every possible world, but the domain of ‘every’ is restricted by context. While typically such domain restrictions are understood semantically, I suggest to follow semantic minimalists in understanding it pragmatically. This has the advantage that we are free to appeal to conversational implicatures. My adaption of Lewis involves an infallibilist semantic meaning of ‘knowledge’, but I suggest to shifts the focus to the more flexible conversational meaning of the term.

ABSTRACT. The view that propositional knowledge is knowledge of facts (rather than propositions) has some philosophical appeal, but is in tension with the referential opacity of ordinary knowledge attributions. For how could Lois Lane know that Superman can fly and ignore that Clark Kent can fly if knowledge is a two-place relation between an agent and a fact and the fact that Superman can fly is the fact that Clark Kent can fly? I explore a way to resolve the tension that relies on the contrastivist claim that knowledge is a three-place relation between an agent, a fact and a contrast.

ABSTRACT. A common assumption in the philosophical tradition states that the phenomenon of self-knowledge is grounded on the fact that we can know what we think, believe, desire, in a different way to the way we know the other's mental states: the so called first-third person asymmetry. My aim in this work is to rethink this asymmetry by introducing another kind of access that we have to the mental states of others. I call it ‘second-person access’. I will analyse the special features that first-personal access has to find out whether they are exclusive or they are shared by second-person access.

ABSTRACT. Competent language users experience states of utterance understanding. What epistemic roles do these experiences play? One initially plausible idea is that they are part of the justification required for knowledge of what a speaker said, pace reliabilism about linguistic understanding. In this talk I argue that this claim is hard to establish. I analyse one influential argument for the claim (Fricker 2003) and show that it begs the question against a reliabilist. Instead, I explain why the idea that experiences of understanding have epistemic bearing is, nevertheless, plausible and offer an alternative explanation in terms of the epistemic basing relation.

ABSTRACT. In this symposium, we propose to start a programme for the study of dualities, equivalence and emergence which goes beyond the specific interests of these notions for the philosophy of spacetime, and addresses them by making an extensive use of the available philosophical tools. The workshop will address the following topics: (1) Implications of dualities for philosophical accounts of emergence. (2) Implications of the phenomena of emergence and duality for questions of fundamental ontology in physics. (3) Recent semantic and syntactic construals of theoretical equivalence.

ABSTRACT. In Beyond the Limits of Thought (2002) Graham Priest presents the Inclosure Schema as the underlying structure of the paradoxes of self-reference. I argue that though the Inclosure Schema correctly incorporates the paradoxes it does not capture what is essential to each of them. In particular, the Liar, Russell and Grelling deserve to be distinguished. For this group I construct its own Schema that reveals their highly analogous structure and proof of contradiction. Further it reveals that they can be characterized by self-negation. The role of self-reference in those paradoxes is different from the one suggested by the Inclosure Schema.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that two prominent logical theories, the truth-conditional account of the logical connectives and the negation-denial thesis, are inconsistent with one another. While the truth-conditional account proposes that the meanings of the logical connectives are fixed by their truth-conditions, the negation-denial thesis proposes that the negation of a proposition is identical to the denial of that proposition. We demonstrate the theories are incompatible by introducing a new family of logics, dual-valuation logics, and showing that the truth-conditional account is committed to admitting that at least one of these logics contains a negation that contradicts the negation-denial thesis.

ABSTRACT. Karl Popper developed a theory of deductive logic in the late 1940s. We will discuss some of his ideas and results. Our focus is on Popper's notion of duality and his treatment of different kinds of negation. We will indicate how his works on logic anticipate some later developments in philosophical logic, pertaining to trivializing (tonk-like) connectives, the duality of logical constants, dual-intuitionistic logic, the (non-)conservativeness of language extensions, the existence of a bi-intuitionistic logic, the non-logicality of minimal negation, and to the problem of logicality in general.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I present a system of logic for analyzing rejection by building on explicit epistemic logic. The general result is that rejection is to be identified with a frame-dependent epistemic act, where a frame for an epistemic act is assumed to consist of a set of subject matters and a set of reference theories. In the proposed system is possible both to provide an intuitive interpretation of the phenomena of para-completeness and para-consistency connected to rejection and to interpret contextualist and contrastivist positions in the analysis of knowledge and knowledge attributions.

ABSTRACT. Recent discussions of the mind-body problem have been dominated by a small number of arguments and a narrow range of ontological options and outmoded ontological categories: dualism, physicalism, substance etc. Although some form of physicalism is orthodox in many areas of the philosophy of mind, what physicalism exactly is remains unclear, and the arguments for it are often sketchy or based on implausible assumptions. This symposium will provide an overview of some new ways of looking at the mind from a non-physicalist point of view, focussing (inter alia) on emotions, perception, the causal nature of the mind, and panpsychism.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we present philosophical justifications of property rights of personal data. We argue that property of personal data provides control over a moral realm of personhood and at that same time sustained ownership of a resource that produces a basic income for people who hitherto have little or no access to income from productive assets. Personal property of personal data can bring substantive progress on the path towards the realization of a property-owning democracy (POD), which is a social system that offers widespread access to productive assets.

ABSTRACT. Prioritarianism has attracted different versions of the levelling-down objection, although it was initially proposed as a view that can avoid the objection. Some critics provide counterexamples in which the objection applies, and others rely on idiosyncratic readings of the targeted position. In this paper, I seek to develop what I call the semilevelling-down objection, which applies to all reasonable forms of prioritarianism. I begin by offering a set of mathematical formulas of prioritarianism and turn to the assessment of various levelling-down arguments. Then, I show that all plausible formulas of the view are susceptible to the semilevelling-down objection.

ABSTRACT. This paper develops a sensible understanding of economic decision-making, especially herding behaviour in financial markets. I delineate the roles rational and non-rational models play in moral philosophy, psychology and economics and argue that these areas of research exhibit a parallel shift from rational to non-rational models. I claim that this similarity justifies an integration of decision-making models from moral psychology and economics. To make this claim plausible I modify and transfer the Social Intuitionist Model from moral psychology to economics. This results in a model of herding that is descriptively more accurate and predictively more powerful than current economic models.

ABSTRACT. Many governments have enacted population policy in response to demographic challenges such as low fertility rate, ageing population, diminishing labor force, growing dependency ratio etc. Four Asian societies, namely, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Singapore, are no exception. Their population policies include importation of labor (both professionals and ordinary workers), promotion of population growth, and encouragement of procreation. The purpose of this paper is to examine if there are morally problematic assumptions behind these apparently value-neutral, demographically necessary, and economically beneficial measures. It will be argued that these policy measures are not conducive to social, global, and environmental justice.

ABSTRACT. When it comes to optimisation of scientific research, it is crucial to consider external experimental data, such as the number of teams working on an experiment, its duration and the number of publications. Using data mining techniques, an optimal number of researchers for an experiment might be established. In order to conduct an analysis based on external data, it is necessary to systematize them. We argue that such systematisation needs to be time- and field-specific. We discuss the ethical aspects of data availability and advocate for anonymizing the personal data, but making all data about the resources and results public.

ABSTRACT. Replication is central to scientific self-correction, but many findings in the behavioral sciences don't replicate (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). We evaluate two competing hypotheses about how to make science more self-corrective. Social reformists hypothesize that changes in inference methods alone do not make science more self-corrective unless we change the social structure of science. On the other hand, methodological reformists hypothesize that scientific self-correction would be greatly improved by moving from significance tests (NHST) to Bayesian statistics. Using a computer simulation study, we provide evidence for the second position.

ABSTRACT. Jean-François Bonnefon’s Theory of Utility Conditionals (2009) proposes a model for formalizing arguments that involve conditional statements and utilities, either explicitly or implicitly. He does this with two tools: first, a representation tool he calls a utility grid that describes the antecedent and the consequent of the conditional in terms of actors and utilities; and second what he calls “folk axioms of decision.” I will show that Bonnefon’s theory makes no new predictions that cannot already be made in a decision-theoretic framework, and as such does not justify the additional formal and ontological complication his model brings.

ABSTRACT. Most open-class words that we use are polysemous, that is, a word form associated with several related senses. The proposal that I develop is that some polysemes stand for conceptual complexes and polysemous senses are parts of such complexes. I argue that this proposal solves the problems that polysemy generates to the Underspecification Hypothesis that some relevance theorists have recently adopted. These problems are the following: (1) the difference between polysemy and homonymy; (2) the explanation of co-predication; (3) the generation of intermediate representations that seem unnecessary and generate ontological and psychological puzzles.

ABSTRACT. Ambiguity, vagueness and indeterminacy are similar but surely different phenomena. Surprisingly, some authors defend an ambiguity-vagueness continuum, there would be no clear boundary between ambiguity and vagueness but it would be rather a question of degree whether a term or a sentence is vague or ambiguous. I don’t agree with this view. It’s probably the lack of an adequate ambiguity criterion that leads people to assume an ambiguity-vagueness continuum. The aim of my contribution is to argue for a pragmatic ambiguity criterion of rational assert ability in order to distinguish ambiguity from vagueness or indeterminacy.

ABSTRACT. The traditional theories of polysemy attempt to account for the multiplicity of stable senses for one linguistic unit, where the sense of a word determines its propositional contribution. Combining the ideas of Kaplan concerning the concept of linguistic meaning with the traditional accounts of polysemy, I will propose a two dimensional account of the latter that allows for connecting words not just with sets of stable senses, but also with sets of content generating rules. I will apply this generalised notion of polysemy to account for the multiplicity of kinds of uses of proper names.

ABSTRACT. On constitution views of personal identity we are constituted by – but not identical to – human animals. Yet persons and their constituting animals seem to share many properties: both are conscious, bipedal, etc. An influential explanation is Baker’s “Two-Way-Inheritance” thesis (TWIN): persons and animals inherit their animalistic and personal properties, respectively, from each other. TWIN faces what I call the Bodily Awareness Puzzle: it implies that persons have some of their properties in jointly incompatible ways. I'll argue for this claim by focusing on the phenomenology of bodily exercise and the possible token identity between self-awareness and bodily awareness.

ABSTRACT. Color objectivists such as David R. Hilbert claim that color is a property of objects that obtains independently of the existence or experience of any perceiver. The property that Hilbert identifies with color is surface spectral reflectance (SSR), or the unitless ratio of the average powers, per wavelength, of reflected and incident light at an object’s surface. This paper applies Fourier analysis to argue that the SSR property is not well defined for incident light pulses of short duration, and that as a consequence, Hilbert’s definition must appeal to the existence of mathematical objects to render color an objective property.

ABSTRACT. Nowadays, the identity of objects that are subject to changes is called genidentity. The term was introduced to the language of science by Kurt Lewin in 1922, although the problem of continuity and change has been present in philosophy since its inception. Among the various kinds of genidentity there is mereological genidentity, which is connected with the part-whole relationship. We aim at conducting a critical analysis of the existing formalizations of this type of genidentity, and at suggesting new formalizations.

ABSTRACT. Whereas philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis are primarily concerned with answering ‘What is X?’ questions, conceptual re-engineering focuses on ‘What should X be?’ questions. A number of philosophers working in different fields have recently started asking this kind of questions about concepts as diverse as ‘belief’, ‘knowledge’, ‘race’, ‘gender’ or ‘truth’. However, there is little in the way of a general account of the methodology applied in answering such questions. My talk addresses a variety of constraints of this project; in particular, it aims to provide criteria for when the re-engineering of a concept is successful.

ABSTRACT. In light of severe challenges to conceptual analysis (criticism pertaining to issues like the paradox of analysis, the origin, reliability, and significance of linguistic intuitions or the structure of mental representation) some of its proponents have resorted to foregrounding its merit as a means of revising concepts. This move seems to work towards a convergence of analysis and Carnapian explication, which are usually construed as distinct, even rival approaches to conceptual clarification. I will argue, against some contemporary adherents of explication, that analysis can be an integral part of the former, as an almost obvious means of isolating the explicandum.

ABSTRACT. A traditional epistemological practice (P) appeals to a case which is taken to count as a counterexample to a theory in virtue of a certain claim C holding true of it. According to the Standard View (SV), C is typically supported by an intuition. According to the Argument View (AV), C is typically supported by an argument. AV holds that being able to provide or being in possession of a good explanation of why C is the case is what ultimately makes us justified in believing C. The talk intends to challenge this assumption.

ABSTRACT. Moral cognition can be fast or slow. But recent research in cognitive science suggests that for moral thinking to be done well, a third type of cognition is needed: critical thinking. In this paper, I develop and defend a novel account of moral judgment and reasoning in terms of triple-process moral psychology.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that non-determinacy problems (e.g. parity, cyclical outcome rankings, imprecise equality) that arise in light of practical reasons that are in Ruth Chang’s terms ‘given’ (i.e. not of anyone’s making) give us reason to accept the existence of ‘precisifying reasons’ (i.e. reasons that dissolve non-determinacy problems) and thereby a pluralism of practical reason types. Three suggestions of what sort of precisifying reasons there might be are presented: precisifying reasons grounded in individual commitments, precisifying reasons grounded in collective commitments, and precisifying reasons that are not of anyone’s making.

ABSTRACT. Enoch (2005) argues that subjectivist theories of normative reasons that essentially invoke some kind of idealization condition might have a problem in justifying the need for idealization. I argue, instead, that response-depedentist accounts that are able to distinguish between appearance and reality have sufficient resources to answer Enoch's objection. In order to show this I use the analogy with response-dependentist accounts of color.

ABSTRACT. İbn Sînâ’s claim that there is no ontological and conceptual disctinction between God’s self and properties and between his different properties raises the problem that different expressions about God refer to the same meaning and have to be reduced the proposition that “God exists.” İbn Sînâ attemps to solve this problem arguing that we can talk about God by his concomitants, viz the necessary effects of his being what He is. Based on his divisions between essential, concomitant and accidental predicates I will argue that Ibn Sînâ’s concomitants theory is not coherent and doesn’t solve the conceptual identity problem.

ABSTRACT. There is much confusion about Gregory of Nyssa’s responses to the Logical Problem of the Trinity, stemming, I argue, from taking them to form an integrated whole, intended to be true, whereas Gregory intends only one response to be true, and the other only to be a defeater-defeater for a particular audience, though he explicitly rejects its key premise. Finally, I show why Gregory's most controversial claim - that not only is there just one God, but that strictly speaking there is only one man - is in fact a valid inference from his opponents' presuppositions.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I want to point out several aspects of Bernard Bolzano’s (1781–1848) philosophy of religion that seem valuable for the contemporary discourse in analytic philosophy of religion. For example, Bolzano developed a Swinburne-like argument for divine infinity from simplicity and presented a solution to the maximization problem of divine properties. Furthermore, he developed a theory of knowledge by testimony and the outlines of a theory of probability which he used to assess the epistemic value of testimony.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to shed light on and develop what I call a phenomenological conception of perceptual justification (PCPJ). According to this phenomenological conception, perceptual experiences gain their justificatory force from their distinctive phenomenology. Such an approach closely connects epistemology and philosophy of mind and has recently been proposed by several authors, most notably by Elijah Chudnoff, Ole Koksvik and James Pryor. In my contribution I shall argue for a version of PCPJ that focuses on what is given within experience and not on how what is given pushes me towards believing something.

ABSTRACT. In order to understand how how perceptual experiences and beliefs are intertwined, we need to look for an intelligible connection between the content of cognitive states like beliefs (whose content is propositional) and the low-level content of perceptual experiences. Hitherto, nobody has suggested an intelligible connection between perceptions and cognition that is based on semantic considerations. The first aim of the talk is to provide a theory that allows to reason from non-propositional, low-level content of perceptual experience to propositional beliefs . The second aim is to provide an outline of how beliefs might might influence perceptual experience.

ABSTRACT. Stability of reference across scientific theory change (SR) is a necessary condition for the no-miracles argument for scientific realism (NM). Laudan challenges NM by providing counterexamples to SR: successful scientific theories whose central terms are no longer thought to refer. Yet Laudan provides no account of reference to support his claims. I give a positive account of reference of natural kind terms (a development of Psillos's) that traces the process of scientific investigation, and moreover undermines the force of Laudan's strongest counterexamples. I thus provide a plausible defence of NM against Laudan's challenge.

ABSTRACT. The scientific realist debate is in stalemate. I invite you to consider a radically different version of the traditional no-miracles realist debate. My ‘dynamic epistemic realist’ account of science focuses on a proposal to expand the current realist debate into a continuum of realist stances and formulating a time-indexed epistemic causal-descriptivist theory of reference. If my invitation is accepted, it implies accepting a pluralist, pragmatic, naturalist epistemic realism and re-thinking the role of reference so as to include it also as an epistemic tracking device and not only (or at all, perhaps) as an indicator of ontological existence.

ABSTRACT. The reductionist retreat claims that reductive research strategies are always appropriate to adopt because they are productive and instructive, even when they fail. The retreat creates an asymmetry between reductive and non-reductive research strategies such that, whereas the former is universally applicable, the latter becomes applicable only in situations in which the former has failed. In this paper I argue that there are good reasons to resist the reductionist retreat and these reasons are to be found precisely by playing close attention to the current practice of scientists investigating certain kinds of phenomena in certain contexts.

ABSTRACT. The distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence leads to the general belief that these two concepts are radically different and that it is impossible to find a general unifying framework for them. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that both concepts are in agreement rather than divergence and that creating an acceptable unifying framework for both types of emergence is already possible. Accordingly, emergence can be understood as a universal principle based in the unity of its synchronic and diachronic aspects.

ABSTRACT. Temporal externalism (TE) is the view that the contents of thoughts and utterances can be partly determined by contingent linguistic and/or conceptual developments that take place after the time of utterance. TE has received considerably less attention in the literature than other externalist views of content. My aims in this paper are twofold. First, I’ll clarify exactly what it would take for TE to be true. Second, I’ll argue that the example standardly discussed in debates about temporal externalism is not the most convincing one we can find, and suggest a new example which gives stronger support for TE.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I aim to give a new theory of how reference change is possible despite an unbroken chain of communication between a dubbing and a speaker removed from the dubbing, relying on the notion of a retraction disposition.

ABSTRACT. In my paper I bring to light and analyse the relation between currently prevailing theory in the philosophy of language which is Contextualism and a theory that appears to be its close relative, namely Meaning Holism. I am going to argue, that the relation is much weaker that it is usually supposed to be; in particular, I will show that without further assumptions neither Contextualism entails Holism, nor the other way around. Besides, I am going to attempt to answer the question if Holism can be reconciled with Contextualism or some anti-contextualist accounts.

ABSTRACT. It is argued that epistemic modals (as:"It is possible that the coin landed heads") have truth values that depend neither on what is known at the context of use (as in: what the speaker knows) nor on what is known at the context of assessment (as in: what an eavesdropper knows). The objective truth values of epistemic modals depend only on what factually is the case. Contrary to what is often assumed, this position is coherent. Furthermore, it arguably provides the best explanation for the empirical findings on how people evaluate epistemic modals.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I reconstruct and discuss the line(s) of argument from introspection to the Phenomenal Intentionality View (PIV)—i.e, the view according to which phenomenal character is in some strong sense prior to intentional content—and argue that our introspective intuitions do not push us in the direction of PIV. On the contrary, I claim, the line of argument from TE to PIV is (at best) simply too weak to force us to conclude that intentionality depends on phenomenal character in the sense required for PIV to be true.

ABSTRACT. According to Robert Stalnaker, a belief can be modeled as a set of possible worlds. Stalnaker thus faces the “problem of deduction”: on his account, anyone who has a belief believes every necessary proposition. Therefore, anyone who believes that 1 > 0 also believes Fermat’s Last Theorem. This consequence appears implausible. In response, Stalnaker has suggested that a subject’s doxastic state consists of different “fragments” which are not coordinated and harmonized with each other. Stalnaker’s fragmentation solution has been criticized by Jeff Speaks. In this talk I will use Rayo’s (2013) account of deduction to answer Speaks’ challenge.

ABSTRACT. There is a long-standing controversy as to whether reality is fundamentally qualitative. Recent literature has it that such issue – the issue of Haecceitism – boils down to the question whether there are fundamental individuals: we tend to assume that anti-Haecceitism is incompatible with there being such things. This attitude, I argue, is misguided: getting rid of fundamental individuals is neither sufficient nor necessary to exclude cases of primitive identity. And against a wide-spread assumption, there is no reason to think that only individuals may give rise to cases of primitive identity. But it is such cases that anti-Haecceitism excludes.

ABSTRACT. It is often said that counterpart theory enables anti-haecceitists to have an account of de re representation to match the haecceitists'. In this paper, I look at how closely related the two accounts are. The main result is the construction of a haecceitist semantics and an anti-haecceitist semantics which are appropriately equivalent: that is, which generate the same modal logic. Moreover, the two semantics are intertranslatable in the following sense: any haecceitist model naturally gives rise to some anti-haecceitist model and vice versa, in such a way that the maps bewteen the classes of models are inverse to one another.

ABSTRACT. Expressivism has often been accused of meta-ethical relativism. Contemporary expressivists argue persuasively that the accusation is misguided. I show that nevertheless, expressivism shares a crucial feature with relativism. It accommodates the possibility of moral disagreements that cannot be settled through the acquisition of knowledge by one of the disagreeing subjects. Thus, expressivism is not a relativist, but a quasi-relativist view. My argument turns on a dimension of ethical objectivity that realism, subjectivism, constitutivism and constructivism but not expressivism can fully account for: true moral beliefs are mental states which are non-accidentally connected with the truths they represent.

ABSTRACT. According to the relativist, moral norms possess local validity, relative to a culture, but do not hold absolutely or across cultures. We argue that anyone who affirms a relativist view is thereby forced into contradicting herself even in her own language. We consider various ways of replying to our argument, including a reply stemming from the relativist view espoused by David Velleman. We conclude that Velleman’s view, if interpreted so as to avoid our anti-relativism argument, actually abandons relativism—rather than making moral norms relative to culture, he effectively gives up the idea of moral obligation altogether.

ABSTRACT. According to Mark Schroeder (2008a, 2008b) an adequate solution to the negation problem consists in interpreting any given moral claim as the expression of a non-cognitive attitude, like ‘being for’, directed at a descriptive property or relation, like ‘blaming for’ that is being predicated of the referent of the sentence. I argue that Schroeder’s solution i) doesn’t account for the meaning of agnostic claims about the moral status of certain types of acts; ii) doesn’t take into consideration the possibility of amoralism; and iii) doesn’t account for the logical relations between moral claims in an appropriate way.

ABSTRACT. Call the following situation a moral dilemma: you are under an all-things-considered obligation to perform one action, and you are under an all-things-considered obligation to perform another action, but it is practically impossible for you to perform both these actions. Brink has developed two arguments to the effect that the assumption of moral dilemmas, in combination with certain plausible principles of deontic logic, leads into contradiction. I examine one of these principles and argue that it admits of no tenable formulation strong enough to make Brink’s arguments valid.

ABSTRACT. Recent political developments like “Brexit” and the presidential elections in the United States show that citizens require better capacities to handle information in the modern media landscape. One way to provide these capacities is to teach them how to assess the value of information for their political decisions. This would strengthen citizens’ political autonomy and immunise them against the spread of populist ideas on the basis of limited and heavily framed information. Furthermore, this requirement can be justified by reference to political autonomy and can thus be promoted even by a neutrality-minded liberal state.

ABSTRACT. Successful ideology critique--fixing certain epistemic shortcomings--will presumably stop agents from helping maintain oppressive social arrangements. Some argue that ideology critique can help overthrow persistent racial hierarchies in the United States by remedying what Charles Mills calls "white ignorance". I argue that at least some racial hierarchy is best explained by appeal to strategic features of interactions among the involved parties; thus even epistemically optimal agents will produce non-optimal outcomes. Consequently, ideology critique is neither necessary nor sufficient to undermine those social hierarchies. I argue that the Schelling segregation model shows this, and I generalize that result to other social hierarchies.