Opening

'Blocking as Counter-speech'

It has been said that ‘evil’ speech should be fought with more speech, rather than bans (Brandeis). There are familiar handicaps on counter-speech, but unnoticed scope as well. Counter-speech can sometimes work by retroactively ‘undoing’, rather than refuting, such speech, I shall argue: by blocking its presuppositions, and, relatedly, its felicity conditions. This can silence harmful speech, by disabling the force it would otherwise have had. Putting together Austin, on speech acts, and Lewis, on presupposition (and time travel), we can bring out an unnoticed dimension to counter-speech, and to the powers of ordinary hearers and bystanders.

Opening Reception

Ockham’s Razor and the Mind/Body Problem

Philosophers often view the competition between the mind/brain identity theory, functionalism, and dualism as nonempirical, since all three theories are compatible with the discovery that a mental property and a physical property are perfectly correlated. Given this, it has been suggested that parsimony considerations can justify the choice of a mind/body theory even though observations are unable to do so. In this talk I’ll describe an epistemological framework used in science in which parsimony is relevant to estimating a theory’s predictive accuracy. I’ll show how this framework applies to the three mind/body theories just mentioned.

'Dis-contented Animals'

What is ‘content’? And what is it for a mind to be such as to traffic in it?  In this talk, I shall examine recent arguments put forward by Dan Hutto and Erik Myin for the claim that many indisputably mental capacities of animals, including many quite sophisticated human ones, can be fully understood without any invocation of the notion of content; and consider them in the context of the opposing view, recently forcefully argued for by Tyler Burge, that having a real psychology (as opposed to some other form of animal sensitivity) requires the possession of distinctively representational states.

Logic Will Get You from A to B. Imagination Will Take You Everywhere.

One would think that imagination is logically anarchic — a runabout inference ticket: one who imagines that A may also imagine whatever B pops to one’s mind by free mental association. Still, imagination has to obey some normative constraints if is to have some role in our reliably forming new (conditional) beliefs. In this talk I attempt a formal treatment combining a modal semantics with a mereology of topics. Imagination is a variably strict quantifier over worlds with a topic-preservation constraint. Variability models the contextual selection of background information to be imported into the imagined scenario. Topic-preservation models how cognitively valuable exercises of imagination respect constraints of relevance with respect to what the act of imagination is about.

Graduate Student Gathering

ATTN Graduate Students:  On Tuesday, August 22nd from 6:15 - 7:15 pm in room Audi Max A030 there will be a Graduate Student Meeting.  This meeting will provide refreshments and an opportunity to discuss issues in analytic philosophy with other likeminded graduate students in your field.

What Is so Special about Human Social Cognition?

Mindreading or theory of mind is the social cognitive ability to ascribe psychological states to self and others for the purpose of predicting and explaining their behavior. I disagree with recent attempts at deflating the central role of mindreading in human social cognition by some advocates of embodied and enactivist cognition on the grounds that the metarepresentational architecture of mindreading would make its use un-parsimonious. On the one hand, much recent developmental evidence suggests that it is present early in human infancy. On the other hand, some recent comparative evidence suggests that it may have been present in the last common phylogenetic ancestor to humans and great apes. I will argue that what may be unique to human social cognition is not mindreading per se, but its use for the purpose of ostensive communication, which, I will argue, amounts to the capacity to overtly manipulate another’s mind.

Grounding & Explanation: A Cautionary Tale

Grounding theorists insist that grounding and metaphysical explanation are intimately – and uniquely – related, a fact that supposedly justifies positing grounding in the first place. This talk argues that their relationship is truly unique only if grounding is a kind of explanation, but that only if grounding and explanation are distinct can we make reasonable sense of either. But this means that whatever role grounding plays in explanation should not be taken as a reason to think grounding exists, which means that at least one important justification for the existence of grounding has been compromised.

Beyond Consequentialization: How to Represent Moral Theories in a Canonical Form

This talk will revisit the debate on whether all moral theories admit a consequentialist representation, i.e., whether every theory has a consequentialist counterpart theory with the same action-guiding recommendations. A positive answer is often thought to challenge the distinction between consequentialism and deontology. I will defend a negative answer, but show that moral theories can be represented in a more general form, namely by “reasons structures”: specifications of which properties of the options matter, and how they do so. Reason-based representations capture several key distinctions: consequentialism vs non-consequentialism, universalism vs relativism, monism vs pluralism, atomism vs holism, teleology vs its absence. The analysis clarifies the extent to which moral theories are underdetermined by their action-guiding content.

The talk is based on joint work with Franz Dietrich. An accompanying paper is available at:

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/PDF-files/WhatMatters.pdf

City Hall Reception

City Hall Munich

Marienplatz 8, 80331 Munich, Germany

Graded Membership, Typicality, and Subjectivity

How well do judgments of typicality predict membership for vague concepts? Douven and Decock (2014) proposed a derivation of membership degrees from prototypes within Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces framework. The account has since been tested empirically on predicates of color and predicates of shape (Douven et al 2016, Douven 2017). In this paper, based on joint work with Steven Verheyen, I will present work done on more abstract categories, namely dimensional adjectives such as "tall" or "expensive", for which the notion of prototype is more problematic. Our findings suggest that the CS account can be extended successfully to that class. However, they also point to three limitations, which concern (i) the assumption that typical values are equally typical (ii) the problem of inter-individual differences in typicality judgments and (iii) the interaction of typicality judgments with subjectivity in decisions of membership.

What Analytic Philosophy Can Do For the Historian: the Case of Islamic Philosophy

Historians of philosophy often claim that their findings can be of interest to those with contemporary concerns in analytic philosophy, even if they work on texts from distant times and cultures. In this paper, I will ask whether the reverse is the case: can the tools of analytic philosophy be put to use in understanding philosophy of the Islamic world? The dangers of anachronism are obvious. But I will argue by way of several case studies that the historian can benefit from the careful use of such modern-day concepts as the contrast between internalism and externalism in epistemology, or the idea of possible worlds.

Women's Caucus Meeting

Two Cheers for Equality

Equality is a helpful idea in thinking about dignity, but mostly unhelpful in thinking about honor. So far as political equality is concerned, it involves a mixture of requiring like cases to be treated alike in the law and governing by an ideal of neutrality not among individuals but among identities. And when it comes to distributive concerns, we should worry about sufficiency rather than equality, though considerations of the justice of the market transactions that distribute goods matter too. Where it comes to influence on the political outcome, I think that what matters is not equality but competence, though I concede that the incorporation of expertise into democratic deliberation is a challenging problem.

Current Issues in the Epistemology of Modality

The talk will be focused on providing an overview of recent tendencies in the epistemology of modality and a sense of direction for the discipline. The emphasis will be placed on identifying the dialectical rationales for each of the following: anti-exceptionalism, non-uniformity, the increasing anti-rationalist tendency, and for wanting a possibility-first epistemology as far as concrete entities are concerned. Placing the emphasis there will make easier the task of identifying exactly what problems the latest developments in the discipline are a response to.