Book Symposium - Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance", Matt Duncan (RIC)
EXTRA: 10 August 2024 / MIS10 01.04
Programme
9:00–10:00: Chapter 3, “Strong Acquaintance Exists”
Discussant: Bruno Cortesi
10:15–11:15: Chapter 5, “Awareness is Knowledge”
Discussant: Roberto Keller
11:30–12:30: Chapter 6, “What is Knowledge of Things?”
Discussant: Davide Bordini
14:15–15:15: Chapter 8, “Acquaintance is Aesthetically Significant”
Discussant: Alessandro de Cesaris
15:30–16:30: Chapter 9, “Acquaintance is Emotionally Significant”
Discussant: Isabel Kaeslin
24/6/24 Robert Hopkins (NYU): The Birth of an Icon
Abstract
Pictures are semantically structured, but how? And how does that structure relate to their spatial structure? One answer to these questions is offered by the Parts Principle: where a picture P depicts some object or scene O, every spatial part of P depicts some spatial part of O. Taking that principle as my point of departure, I will introduce some further notions needed to refine it in the face of serious challenges, and use the result to raise some novel questions in picture semantics.
22/5/2024 Julien Bugnon: Welfare Subjectivity and The Unifying Power of Consciousness
Abstract
I present an argument based on the unifying power of consciousness in favour of what Bradford (2022) has termed “the View”: the view that consciousness is necessary for being a welfare subject. Welfare subjects are bearers of welfare goods and bads: things that affect the well-being or welfare of these subjects, things that are good or bad for them. While determining what exactly should count as welfare goods and bads is a fiercely contested issue, there is a temptation to believe that we should focus on the nature of welfare goods and bads to explain the truth of the View (see van der Deijl 2020, Lin 2020) or its falsity (see Bradford 2022). Contrary to this, I suggest that we should not focus primarily on the nature of welfare goods but rather on the nature of their bearer to evaluate the View.
The first premise of my argument for the View builds on the idea that welfare subjects are not mere locations where we find alleged welfare value. Things are not just good or bad in them, but good or bad for them (compare McDaniel 2014, Orsi 2015). I argue that we should account for this intuitive difference between welfare subjects in a genuine sense as opposed to a mere locational sense in terms of how unified they are. Genuine welfare subjects are individuals unified in a non-arbitrary manner, while mere locations of alleged welfare value are not. There is a non-arbitrary answer to the question of how many genuine welfare subjects there are in a given region of space R, which is not deducible from mere information that there is some welfare value instantiated in R. Yet individuating welfare subjects non-arbitrarily is crucial to uphold some intuitive ethical principles, for instance that when it comes to compensating something being bad for x by something being good for y, whether or not x=y will have ethical significance.
My second premise argues that having consciousness is necessary to be unified in the way required to be a genuine welfare subject. There is an objective fact of the matter as to how many conscious subjects there are in a given region of space R. Once we take the conscious perspective of such a subject seriously, the question of whether it is identical to another subject cannot be given an arbitrary answer. In contrast, any alternative unifying principle, whether functional, biological, or otherwise, will leave room for arbitrariness and fall short of providing sufficiently sharp individuation conditions.
I conclude that the problem with attributing welfare goods to entities without consciousness is not that we cannot make sense of the value of these goods without presupposing that consciousness is a constitutive part of them. We can indeed make sense of a state of affairs A being good for an entity E in a way that A’s goodness for E does not require any conscious experience for E. However, we cannot make sense of a state of affairs being bad for entity E if E is not an entity sufficiently unified to make it appropriate for us to take its valenced point of view.
8/5/24 Claire Field – The Value of Incoherence
Abstract
I argue that level-incoherence has distinctive epistemic value in a specific set of epistemic environments: those in which it is easy to acquire justified false beliefs about normative requirements of epistemic rationality. I argue that in these environments level-incoherence is the rationally dominant strategy. Nevertheless, the idea that level-incoherence is always irrational has proved resilient. I evaluate three candidate explanations for the intuitive pull of level-coherence requirements of rationality, only one of which is the traditional view that epistemic level-coherence is a requirement of rationality. I argue that, instead, level-incoherence is a defeasible reason to undertake further inquiry and reexamine one’s beliefs, and this can explain why it has often been mistaken for a requirement of epistemic rationality.
1/5/24 Bruno Cortesi – On the Supposed Metaphysical Neutrality of the Phenomenological Approach
My talk will be about phenomenology understood as a discipline, an enterprise or an inquiry in philosophy, rather than as a movement in the history of philosophy: as the title suggests, it will be about the (so-called) phenomenological approach and not – or not just – about the (so-called) phenomenological tradition. To be even more precise, a discipline or an enterprise may be defined in terms of three facets: (1) its domain of study, (2) its methodology and (3) its main results (Woodrof-Smith, 2018). My talk will be concerned with (1) and possibly (2), but I won’t say much on (3). If one has a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on phenomenology (Ibid.), in the very first few lines of the introduction one finds: «The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. […] Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first-person point of view.». There’s a widespread tendency to assume that the phenomenological approach so understood is metaphysically neutral (Siewert, 2007 and Kriegel, 2015, among many others, are particularly explicit on this point). The idea seems to be that an effort to describe the way given (kinds of) experiences are experienced firsthand as accurately as possible does not imply, per se, any commitment about the ontological/metaphysical status of those experiences. I will try to make a case that the latter assumption, intuitive and prima facie appealing as it may be, is nonetheless misguided. For, as I will suggest, phenomenology is in the business of describing the core essence or nature of experiences. In turn, the latter implies that the essence of experiences is immediately and directly presented to subjects in the very having of those experiences: we are immediately and directly presented with (or aware of) what it is for our own experiences to exist or to be part of reality. As I will argue, this is incompatible with (almost) any coherent form of physicalism about the mind (that I know of), at least given how the latter view (or family of views) is conceived in the contemporary debate in philosophy of mind. In fact, I will argue that given certain minimal and rather widespread assumptions, physicalism turns out to be a much more radical view than one might think, for it commits one to at least one of the following claims if not, possibly, to a combination of them: (I) there is nothing it is like for a subject to undergo certain experiences: an experience makes no difference whatsoever for the subject who has it in virtue and only in virtue of its occurring; (II) we have no cognitive access whatsoever to the way it is like for us to undergo given experiences: no way to think about our experiences in terms of the way it is like for someone to have them, no grasp of the latter …; (III) it is not essential to an experience that it is experienced precisely in the way it is experienced rather than in another way. Hence, experiences may keep on being the entities they are without being experienced in the way they are experienced. There is a very strong prima facie case that (III) is false, and embracing a phenomenological – hence eminently first-personal – standpoint in the study of consciousness commits one to deny both (I) and (II).
24/4/24 Anthony Taylor – Usurping Official Power
Abstract
Public officials—such as legislators, judges, and law enforcement officers—sometimes make mistakes. The question that this paper focusses on is whether the individuals who make these mistakes, by virtue of occupying their official role, sometimes possess a right against interference or harm that a private individual who made the same kind of mistake would not possess. Those who defend the possibility of legitimate injustice argue that public officials sometimes have more extensive rights against interference with their mistaken decisions than those held by equivalently situated private individuals. I consider and reject a recent attempt to vindicate the possibility of legitimate injustice, and defend an alternative approach.
17/4/24 Mario Schärli – Kant on Merely Possible Objects
It is commonly held that Kant’s account of existence foreshadows Frege’s, Russell’s, and Quine’s disdain for non-existent objects. This interpretation has consequences for the interpretation of Kant’s modal metaphysics because it excludes attributing an ontology of merely possible objects (possibilia) to Kant. Consequently, it has become standard in the literature to deflate Kant’s talk of merely possible objects, reducing them to features of the content of judgments. I oppose this line of interpretation and attribute a pivotal role to an ontology of possibilia beyond mere intentional objects to Kant. In this talk, I’ll offer a negative and positive argument for my interpretation. The negative argument criticises the claim that Kant’s account of existence implies the impossibility of non-existent objects. The positive argument shows that Kantian possibilia exceed our representational capacities in determinacy, which is why they cannot be mere intentional objects.
10/4/24 Vera Hoffmann-Kolss – Degrees of Causation
Abstract
There is a growing consensus that causation can come in degrees. For instance, if two companies both emit effluents into a river, the degree to which they should be held responsible for the resulting damage depends on the degree to which they causally contributed to it. In general, if an event e has two contributing causes, c1 and c2, the causal contribution of c1 to the occurrence of e may be greater than the causal contribution of c2.
In this paper I investigate what a theory of degrees of causation should look like. Most theories currently on the market are quantitative and measure closeness to necessity: they assign a concrete numerical value to each cause in a given causal structure, and assume that this values depends on how close the cause comes to providing a necessary condition for the effect. However, I argue that a theory of graded causation should be comparative and measure closeness to sufficiency: it should only rank causes according to their relative contribution to a given effect, and assume that this ranking depends on how close the cause comes to providing a sufficient condition for the effect. My argument is based partly on the relationship between degrees of causation and degrees of responsibility mentioned above, and partly on more general considerations about the role of degrees of causation in scientific and everyday contexts.
20/3/24 Léna Mudry – Suspension of Jugment, Inquiry and High Stakes
Abstract
Suspension of judgement is often closely associated with inquiry (Friedman 2017, 2019; Fritz 2020; Lord 2021). Interestingly these philosophers have also provided an inquiry-based explanation of high stakes cases. In a nutshell, a belief that P is justified only if one ought not to inquire further. Due to insufficient attention paid to cases in which a subject already has a belief, they are liable to counter examples, as well as a stability worry – just as other encroachment views. In light of these difficulties, other have provided an alternative picture of inquiry: inquirers aim at epistemically improve in ways which goes beyond knowledge. On their view, high stakes subjects aim at certainty (Falbo 2021) or higher-order knowledge (Woodard 2021). Suspension of judgement plays no role withhin this new framework. As I see it, the two camps are talking past each other. In this talk, I will take a step back. I will first develop an action-account of suspension of judgement. Second, I will specify its relations to belief and inquiry. Finally, I will account for the intuition behind high stakes scenarios while avoiding the pitfalls of encroachment views.
13/3/24 Miloud Belkoniene – Moral Intuitionism: Between Reasons and Inclinations
Abstract
This paper examines moral intuitionism as formulated by Tropman. In Tropman’s view, moral intuitionism is best construed as the claim that some moral beliefs can be justified without being based on reasons. While this construal of the view has several advantages, it raises an important question: how can a subject be doxastically justified in believing a moral proposition without that belief being based on reasons? I argue that a plausible answer can be provided in light of a specific conception of the bases of intuitively justified beliefs. Such beliefs result from doxastic inclinations and because those inclinations can, depending on the circumstances, explanatorily cohere with the support provided to their object by reasons, beliefs that result from those inclinations can be justified.
6/3/24 Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette: Two Problems with Bullshitting
Abstract
Bullshitting is prima facie wrong, and sometimes blameless. Harry Frankfurt’s famous account, according to which to bullshit is to manifest indifference to truth, fails to explain the wrongness of bullshitting and impliess that it is always blameworthy, or at least inexcusable. We should instead follow Cohen and Wreen and describe it as something like the production of nonsense that is presented as sensical.
4/12/23 – Roberto Keller
Wrong-Kind-of-Reason Skepticism Strikes
Back
Abstract
Reasons of the right kind to believe, desire, or intend that p are reasons which bear, respectively, on whether p is true, desirable, or choiceworthy. Reasons of the wrong kind for these same attitudes, by contrast, are reasons which exclusively bear on whether it would be good, useful, or otherwise advisable for one to believe, desire, or intend that p—and this regardless of whether p is true, desirable, or choiceworthy. Disagreement persists as to how to understand this contrast. The default view, realism, is that while reasons of the wrong kind for one to F—e.g., believe, desire, intend… that p—differ from reasons of the right kind in a number of interesting ways, both are genuine reasons for F. The revisionary view, skepticism, holds that realists are mistaken, and that reasons of the wrong kind to F are not reasons for F-ing, but rather reasons to want, desire, or bring about F. In this presentation, I will defend skepticism against a little discussed objection, namely that it fails to provide an error-theory which could explain why we are systematically mistaken in thinking of reasons of the wrong kind to F as reasons for F-ing. More precisely, I will argue that an explanation of this kind is not difficult to find, and that it receives strong support by a rather plain assumption about the connection between reasons and rationality. This same explanation, I will continue, shows that realism—not skepticism—is the revisionary view here, as it breaks the connection between reasons and rationality. I will conclude by suggesting that the only way out for the realist is to adopt a strategy which makes their dispute with skeptics collapse onto the debate between pragmatists and anti-pragmatists, and this, I will argue, is a desirable result.
30/10/23 – Ursula Renz
What’s the Point of Kant’s Second Maxim?
Perspective-Taking as a Norm of Doxastic
Rationality
Abstract
The paper elaborates on Kant’s views the disanalogy between democratic and epistemic norms by a discussion of the second maxim of common sense as put forward in § 40 of the Critique of Judgment. Demanding that we are to “think in the position of everyone else”, this maxim seems to call for a democratization of knowledge according to which we must consider the opinions of others to form rational belief. In my paper, however, I will advocate a reading of this maxim in context of the entire set of the maxims of common sense that forbids a communitarian approach to knowledge. On the contrary, my point will be that these maxims are to preserve or increase the rationality of individuals in the first place, and this in a manner that they enable people to think for themselves, rather than together with others.
16/10/23 – Davide Dalla Rosa
A Kantian account of the relationship between believing and judging
Abstract:
The paper aims to investigate the relationship between the act of judging in Kant and the doxastic states of the rational subject who performs it. I will argue that Kant’s act of judging is epistemically complex, and that it can be evaluated through four different levels or layers, which are internally divided between two essential and two optional for the performance of the act. I will focus mainly on the theoretical relationship between the two essential levels or layers and the level of evaluation that in Kant involves the functional analogue of beliefs. Finally, I will hint at some combinations among the different levels of evaluation of the act, which should allow us to distinguish between qualitatively different acts of judging.
9/10/23 – Mario Schärli
Possibility, Actuality, and Determinacy:
Baumgarten’s Theory of Ontological Status
Abstract:
Some approaches in the metaphysics of modality use merely possible objects to explain modal facts. But what are merely possible objects, and how do they differ from actual ones? In my talk, I will present A.G. Baumgarten’s innovative answer to this question, according to which the difference between merely possible and actual entities concerns their degree of determinacy with respect to internal properties. What is actual is fully determined in this regard, what is merely possible remains determinable with respect to at least one internal property. Baumgarten’s theory of ontological status thus turns Quine’s (1948) objection to possibilia on its head. Quine’s intuition that possibilia are undetermined in some respects is entirely correct. But that is not an argument against them. It is just a statement of what they are.
11.12.23 Léna Mudry, “Pragmatic Encroachment and Suspension of Judgement”
Abstract missing
OTHER EVENTS
03.05.24 - 04.05.2024 Workshop with Elijah Chudnoff
Friday, 3rd May – Espace Güggi, MIS08 0101
3:15-5pm: Elijah Chudnoff – The Role of Seemings in Deliberate Inference
Saturday, 4th May – Salle Jäggi, MIS04 4112
10:15am-12pm: Elijah Chudnoff – Reasoned Change in Logic
1:30-3pm: Julien Bugnon – On Forming Introspective Impressions
3:30-5pm: Isabel Kaeslin – What’s Philosophy’s Relation to Experience
05.05.24 - Visit the photography museum in Lausanne