Conference Booklet

FFI-2016-75323-E

PGC2018-093982-B-100

MINISTERIO

DE CIENCIA, INNOVACIÓN

Y UNIVERSIDADES

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Agustín Vicente

María José Alcaraz

Jesús Navarro

Neftalí Villanueva

Manolo Martínez

Marta Jorba

Javier González de Prado

LOCAL COMMITTEE

Marc Artiga

Ana L. Batalla

Virginia Ballesteros

Félix Bou

Marta Cabrera

Josep E. Corbí

Joan Gimeno Simó

Tobies Grimaltos

Valeriano Iranzo

Carmen Martínez Sáez

Carlos Moya

Saúl Pérez González

Sergi Rosell

Pablo Rychter

Chon Tejedor

Jordi Valor

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

María José Alcaraz (Universidad de Murcia)

María Álvarez (King's College London)

Antonio Blanco (Universidad Complutense)

Fernando Broncano (Universidad Carlos III)

María Cerezo (Universidad de Murcia)

Cristina Corredor (Universidad de Valladolid)

Vincenzo Crupi (Università di Torino)

Stefaan Cuypers (University of Leuven)

María José Encinas (Universidad de Granada)

Olga Fernandez Prat (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Antonio Gaitán (Universidad Carlos III)

Toni Gomila (Universitat de les Illes Balears)

Dan López de Sa (ICREA,Universitat de Barcelona)

Josep Macià (Universitat de Barcelona)

Josep L. Martí (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Concha Martínez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela)

José Medina (Northwestern University)

Jesús Navarro (Universidad de Sevilla)

Diana Pérez (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Francisca Pérez Carreño (Universidad de Murcia)

Manuel Pérez Otero (Universitat de Barcelona)

Salvador Rubio (Universidad de Murcia)

Miguel Àngel Sebastián (Universidad Autónoma de México)

Carlos Thiebaut (Universidad Carlos III)

Josefa Toribio (Universitat de Barcelona)

Luís M. Valdés Villanueva (Universidad de Oviedo)

Margarita Vázquez (Universidad de la La Laguna)

Jesús Vega (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Agustín Vicente (Ikerbasque)

Neftalí Villanueva (Universidad de Granada)

K. Brad Wray (Aarhus University)

José Zalabardo (University College London)

Table of Contents
INVITED TALKS
CONCEPTUAL AMELIORATION: EPISTEMIC AND SEMANTIC PROJECTS
Sally Haslanger......................................................................................................................7
VAGUE BELIEFS AND VAGUELY BELIEVING
Rosanna Keefe.......................................................................................................................7
BEYOND AUTOMATICITY: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY OF SKILLED ACTION
Elisabeth Pacherie..................................................................................................................8
BIASES AND VICES
Josefa Toribio.........................................................................................................................8
SYMPOSIA
OPACITY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Marta Cabrera, Josep E. Corbí, Carlos Moya and Chon Tejedor..........................................10
METAPHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING (MICE)
Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Sarah Sawyer and Manolo Martínez...............................................15
CINE Y FILOSOFÍA: ARGUMENTANDO SIN PIEDAD
José Alhambra Delgado, Antonio Blanco Salgueiro, Antonio Duarte Calvo, Marcia Martínez 
Garcia, Saleta de Salvador Agra, Ángeles Jiménez Perona and Javier Vilanova Arias........19
PERSPECTIVISM IN SEMANTICS
David Rey, Dan Zeman and Max Kölbel...............................................................................27
FOUNDATIONS OF MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
André Bazzoni, Josep Macià and Neri Marsili.......................................................................31
CONTRIBUTED TALKS
AGENTIAL GUIDANCE, ACTION IDENTIFICATION, AND INTENTIONAL REPERTOIRES
Jesús H. Aguilar...................................................................................................................36
WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE HALLUCINATIONS?
Rami Ali................................................................................................................................37
EXTENDING KNOWLEDGE HOW: ABILITIES AND SELF-REGULATION
Gloria Andrada.....................................................................................................................38
DOING WITHOUT STRUCTURAL REPRESENTATIONS
Marc Artiga...........................................................................................................................39
MENTAL ILLNESS: NOSOLOGICAL VALIDATION AND REALITY
Virginia Ballesteros...............................................................................................................40
1

ERRORS OF REASONING IN MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS?
Cristina Barés Gómez and Matthieu Fontaine......................................................................41
LIBERTAD, RESPONSABILIDAD MORAL Y ALTERNATIVAS DE ACCIÓN: 
UNA CRÍTICA A LA TEORÍA COMPATIBILISTA DE DANIEL DENNETT
José Óscar Benito Vicente...................................................................................................43
IS LOGIC REVISABLE? THE WRONG KIND OF QUESTION
Mathieu Berteloot.................................................................................................................45
MUTUAL GROUNDING FOR WEAK MATHEMATICAL STRUCTURALISM (WMS): 
THE ‘IDENTITY PROBLEM’ RECONSIDERED
Silvia Bianchi........................................................................................................................47
A DISPOSITIONALIST ACCOUNT OF SYMMETRIES AND CONSERVATION LAWS
Bruno Borge.........................................................................................................................49
BULLSHIT AND FORMS OF VERBAL DECEIT
Adrian Briciu.........................................................................................................................51
WHEN IS IT OK TO CALL SOMEONE A BASTARD? AN EXPERIMENTAL 
INVESTIGATION OF PEJORATIVES
Bianca Cepollaro, Isidora Stojanovic and Filippo Domaneschi.............................................53
3D/4D METAPHYSICAL EQUIVALENCE: LESSONS FROM THE SPECIES DEBATE 
FOR THE METAPHYSICS OF CHANGE AND PERSISTENCE
María Cerezo and Vanessa Triviño.......................................................................................55
GROUNDING LEGAL POSITIVISM
Samuele Chilovi....................................................................................................................57
(I CAN’T GET NO) ANTISATISFACTION
Pablo Cobreros, Elio La Rosa and Luca Tranchini...............................................................59
SIMPLICITY FOR (LINGUISTIC) UNDERSTANDING
María Inés Corbalán and Giulia Terzian................................................................................59
EXPERIENTIALISM AND TWO CASES OF HEARING
Maria Giovanna Corrado......................................................................................................61
PRAGMATISMO, CIENCIA Y DEMOCRACIA EN LA ERA DE LA POSVERDAD
Ana Cuevas Badallo and Daniel Labrador Montero..............................................................61
HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE MEINONGIANISM
Andreas de Jong..................................................................................................................63
A DEFLATIONARY VIEW OF ONTOLOGY FOR SCIENTIFIC THEORIES:
A NEO-CARNAPIAN APPROACH
Xavier de Donato-Rodríguez and José L. Falguera..............................................................65
STOP REPLICATING, START CLASSIFYING. ACT-BASED PROPOSITIONS FOR 
INDEXICAL COMMUNICATION
Ainhoa Fernández................................................................................................................66
ON READING THE TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS: WITTGENSTEIN 
AND METAPHYSICS
Jordi Fiarhurst......................................................................................................................68
SOCIAL STRUCTURES, IDEOLOGY, AND BAD SEX
Dr Jade Fletcher...................................................................................................................70
2

IMPLICIT BIAS AND QUALIEFS
Martina Fürst........................................................................................................................70
MUSICAL MEANING OF PURELY INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: EXPRESSION AND 
REPRESENTATION
Nemesio García-Carril Puy and Juan José Acero Fernández...............................................72
FUNDAMENTAL YET GROUNDED
Joaquim Giannotti.................................................................................................................74
COMPLEX SYNTAX, SIMPLE SEMANTICS: A TRADITIONAL ACCOUNT OF 
COMPLEX DEMONSTRATIVES
Joan Gimeno-Simó...............................................................................................................76
IS THERE A GOOD MORAL ARGUMENT AGAINST MORAL REALISM?
Camil Golub..........................................................................................................................78
MULTI-TRACK EPISTEMIC VIRTUES AND DISPOSITIONAL REALISM
Modesto Gómez-Alonso.......................................................................................................80
NO NORM FOR (NON-ASSERTED) IMPLICATURES
Javier González de Prado....................................................................................................82
COMMON SENSE EPISTEMOLOGY AS A GENERATIVIST META-PHILOSOPHY
Jean-Baptiste Guillon...........................................................................................................84
PRAGMATICS, LEVELS OF MEANING, AND SPEAKER COMMITMENT
Alison Hall and Diana Mazzarella.........................................................................................86
THE CONTINGENT VALUE OF RATIONALITY
Julen Ibarrondo Murguialday................................................................................................87
ON COGNITIVE AFFORDANCES
Marta Jorba..........................................................................................................................89
THE MIRROR THESIS OF CONSENT
Maximilian Kiener.................................................................................................................91
TOO QUEER? ASEXUALITY MEETS SEX POSITIVITY
Abigail Klassen.....................................................................................................................92
THINKING THE IMPERCEIVABLE: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PHILOSOPHY OF 
AUDITORY PERCEPTION
Giulia Lorenzi.......................................................................................................................93
RADICAL ENACTIVISM, PRIMITIVE INTENTIONALITY AND BIOLOGICAL NORMATIVITY
Carlos Mario Márquez Sosa.................................................................................................94
VARIETIES OF DEEP DISAGREEMENT
Guido Melchior.....................................................................................................................96
THE POLITICAL ASPECT OF A RELATIONAL APPROACH TO AUTONOMY
María Méndez......................................................................................................................98
INFALLIBILISM AND INQUIRY
Joe Milburn.........................................................................................................................100
HOW TO TELL IF ANIMALS CAN UNDERSTAND DEATH
Susana Monsó...................................................................................................................100
3

BEYOND THE CONVERSATION: A NON-PROPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT OF SLURS
Alba Moreno Zurita and Eduardo Pérez Navarro................................................................103
DOXASTIC OWNERSHIP AND EPISTEMIC AUTONOMY
Jesús Navarro....................................................................................................................104
WHAT’S BETTER FOR YOU: FUTURE-BIAS OR TEMPORAL NEUTRALITY?
Quan Nguyen.....................................................................................................................106
INCLOSURE AND INTOLERANCE
Sergi Oms and Elia Zardini.................................................................................................108
COMMUNICATION AS COORDINATION
Andrea Onofri.....................................................................................................................108
DENOTATION AND QUANTIFICATION IN COPREDICATIVE SENTENCES
Marina Ortega-Andrés........................................................................................................110
A NON SUBJECTIVIST ACCOUNT OF THE “NECESSITIES OF LOVE” 
AND EUDAIMONIA
Eduardo Ortiz.....................................................................................................................112
HIGHER-ORDER COUNTER EVIDENCE: THE AGENCY-FIRST VIEW
Michele Palmira..................................................................................................................113
CONCEPCIONES FILOSÓFICAS SOBRE LA DELIMITACIÓN DE LO CÓMICO
Manuel Pérez Otero............................................................................................................115
WHAT DOES DECISION THEORY HAVE TO DO WITH WANTING?
Milo Phillips-Brown.............................................................................................................117
ON WHY WE CAN BE GLAD TO BE ALIVE
Christian Piller....................................................................................................................119
SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATION, METROLOGY, AND THE EXPLANATORY GAP 
ARGUMENT: A RESPONSE TO SCHEELE
Yunus Prasetya..................................................................................................................120
ON MEANING ASCRIPTIONS
Andrea Raimondi................................................................................................................122
SEEING OPAQUE OBJECTS AND SEEING SURFACES
Carlo Raineri......................................................................................................................124
REALISM AND THE A PRIORI: REASONS FOR PLURALISM
Mariano Sanjuán................................................................................................................126
A DEFENCE OF EXPERIENTIALISM ABOUT THE SENSE OF BODILY OWNERSHIP
Carlota Serrahima..............................................................................................................127
MENTAL CAUSATION AND QUALITATIVE PERSISTENCE
Radivoj Stupar....................................................................................................................129
THE HUMEAN PROPENSITY INTERPRETATION OF ‘PROBABILITY’
Nicos Stylianou...................................................................................................................130
FREGE ON PERCEPTION: A DILEMMA FROM DUMMETT AND TRAVIS?
Manuela Teles....................................................................................................................131
4

AN EXPRESSIVIST APPROACH FOR COVERT DOGWHISTLES
José Ramón Torices Vidal and Manuel de Pinedo..............................................................131
THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF INTELLECTUAL AUTONOMY
Jesús Vega Encabo............................................................................................................134
DYNAMIC CONCEPTS AND DISAGREEMENT
Víctor M. Verdejo................................................................................................................136
HOW I REALLY SAY WHAT YOU THINK
José Manuel Viejo..............................................................................................................137
TOWARDS A RIGHT TO MATERNAL TOUCH IN ANIMALS
Birte Wrage and Judith Benz-Schwarzburg........................................................................138
5

INVITED TALKS

CONCEPTUAL AMELIORATION: EPISTEMIC AND SEMANTIC PROJECTS

Sally Haslanger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In response to oppression or injustice, we must (collectively) change the existing social

structures; this requires more than thinking differently. However, cultural change is also

necessary. Ideological oppression is at least partly sustained by a cultural technē,

specifically the conceptual and symbolic tools it affords. Recently I’ve argued that one form

of conceptual amelioration is epistemic, another is semantic. Today I will review this

distinction and elaborate it by developing an externalist account of concepts. I will then argue

that one form of semantic amelioration often thought impossible – change of content without

change of concept – is coherent and sometimes valuable.

VAGUE BELIEFS AND VAGUELY BELIEVING

Rosanna Keefe, University of Sheffield

Belief ascription can be a vague matter. There are all sorts of clear cases of belief and clear

non-cases; but there can be borderline cases too. Putative borderline beliefs can arise from

a number of different sources and in this paper I explore some of these and the significant

epistemological and semantic issues they interact with, offering a rough sketch of relations

between vague beliefs and fine-grained degreed states. A first potential source of borderline

beliefs arises in (not uncommon) situations where the subject has high, but perhaps not

sufficiently high, confidence in the content. Second – especially for 3

-person ascriptions –

there are cases where there are conflicting features of the subject’s dispositions that speak

both for and against ascribing the belief, such as when a subject sincerely endorses one

view but exhibits implicit bias that appears to reveal the opposite commitment. Third, we can

consider the subject’s attitude to “a is F” when a is borderline F.

Considering the first of these scenarios requires us to consider the relation between so-

called “all-or-nothing” or binary/categorical beliefs and credences or degrees of belief. A

central focus will be the merits of and challenges for the Lockean thesis which, roughly

summarised, identifies binary beliefs with credences above some threshold (a threshold

which may or may not be vague and/or context-dependent). Among other issues, I will

consider a role for beliefs that, according to influential arguments from Buchak,

demonstrates a divergence between beliefs and credences that looks incompatible with both

the Lockean thesis and the picture of vague beliefs that I sketch. I will argue that this helps

show how aspects of credences, as traditionally conceived, make them unsuitable for the

degreed elements of the vague belief picture sketched.

Before that, though, I will consider and reject some reasons to think that “believes” is not

a vague predicate, including some arguments from a recent paper in Philosophical Studies

entitled “Why ‘believes’ is not a vague predicate”, which considers, in particular, the second

of the above types of putative borderline beliefs. The paper will finish by briefly considering

the story about vague beliefs in the light of different theories of vagueness and also the third

putative source of borderline cases listed above involving beliefs with vague contents.

BEYOND AUTOMATICITY: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY OF SKILLED ACTION

Elisabeth Pacherie, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, PSL University, Paris

Acquiring a skill requires practice. Practice leads to an improvement is the ability to select

appropriate actions, to select them rapidly and to execute the selected actions accurately,

while at the same time leading to a reduction of the cognitive load required to perform the

action. These properties are not unique to skill learning, however. They are also

characteristic of the formation of (good) habits. What is it then that sets apart skilled from

merely habitual action?

It is common to draw the contrast between skills and habits in terms of intentional, goal-

directed vs. automatic, stimulus-driven actions. Intentional actions, however, are not

intentional through and through. They typically involve an interplay of automatic and

intentional processes. What form does this interplay take in the case of highly skilled or

expert action? The classical view of the interplay of automatic and intentional processes in

intentional action is hierarchical. It is thought that the cognitive architecture underpinning

intentional action involves a hierarchy of representations and processes that specify and

control the action in a more and more fine-grained way and that processes at higher levels

present most of the marks of intentionality, while the more we go down the hierarchy, the

more automatic the processes become.

I will argue that in the case of highly skilled action, the intentionality-automaticity gradient

is not necessarily aligned with the action hierarchy. Rather we have a more flexible interplay

of automatic and intentional processes. I will further argue that this flexible interplay depends

on the acquisition of detailed and well-structured action representations and internal models

and on the concomitant development of metacontrol processes that can be used to shape

and balance it.

BIASES AND VICES

Josefa Toribio, ICREA-UB

Beliefs formed on the basis of implicit biases pose a problem for accessibilism, since implicit

biases are consciously inaccessible, yet they are relevant to epistemic justification. Recent

empirical results suggest, however, that we are more aware of the content of our implicit

biases than we had previously assumed. I here discuss the notion of accessibility vis-à-vis

these empirical results and argue that accessibilism can meet the challenge posed by

implicit biases in two different ways. The accessibilist can enrich the supervenience base for

justification by including in such base facts that the subject is in a position to know.

Alternatively, the accessibilist can appeal to a distinction between first- and second-order

facts and argue that, while the former may be inaccessible, the latter need not. Ultimately

both strategies fail, but the way in which they do, I conclude, reveals something general and

important about our epistemic obligations and our epistemic vices.

SYMPOSIA

OPACITY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Marta Cabrera, University of Valencia; Josep E. Corbí, University of Valencia; Carlos

Moya, University of Valencia; Chon Tejedor, University of Valencia

Descartes' skeptical arguments regarding the external world favor an image of the mind as

an inner theater. On this basis, one might think that a first-person access to one's

psychological condition is inextricably bound to what might be transparent to one's mind's

eye and, therefore, immune to error; on the contrary, a third party access to an agent's

mental states will essentially depend on gathering uncertain evidence. Whenever the agent

herself might be involved in this sort of investigation, her access to her own mind would not

be strictly first-personal, but exposed to the same degree of opacity and vulnerability to error

as a third party. Hence, it sounds as if a strictly first-personal perspective constitutively

involves self-transparency while opacity will emerge as a constitutive feature of the third-

person perspective. This a common assumption in the current debate about self-knowledge,

regardless of the particular way in which the transparency of a strictly first-personal

perspective might be elucidated. In this symposium, we intend to explore various ways in

which this assumption could be challenged or, at least, qualified.

More specifically, Carlos Moya will dispute Peter Carruthers' argument to the effect that

there is no strictly first-person perspective, since an agent accesses her own psychological

attitudes roughly the same way as she might access those of a third party. Moya will argue

that this approach implies an intolerable degree of self-opacity, since it seems that an agent

could always be wrong about her own mental states and this seems to be inconsistent with

her capacity to act intentionally. So, it will follow that a strictly first-person perspective

imposes some limits to self-opacity. Marta Cabrera, Josep Corbí and Chon Tejedor will

examine, however, various ways in which self-opacity is constitutive of our agency and, more

specifically, of a strictly first-person perspective.

Cabrera will consider two dimensions in which the rationality of our emotional response

can be assessed and insist on the idea that some such responses, even though

inappropriate, reveal an aspect of the agent's character that needs to be taken into

consideration in order to elaborate a suitable response to the situation. The way in which the

agent relates to this aspect will emerge as alien to that of a third party. Corbí will challenge

the skeptical interpretation of situationist experiments concerning the explanatory relevance

of an agent's character; for this purpose, she will study the importance of a character's

psychological profile concerning the ability of a narrative to create a fictional world. She will

as a result distinguish between agential and explanatory character. The former is strictly first-

personal and conveys the sense of struggle that sounds most attractive in narratives and,

needless to say, part of this struggle lies in the idea of opacity, that is, on the character's

capacity to discern what the situation demands from her and whether she would be able to

honor such demands. Along similar lines, Tejedor will stress the inescapability of opacity in

determining one's moral responsibility once we acknowledge that the latter may depend not

only on our own intentions or decisions but on the conditions themselves that we confront.

1. IN DEFENSE OF ASYMMETRY BETWEEN FIRST- AND THIRD-PERSON MENTAL

ATTRIBUTIONS

Carlos Moya, University of Valencia

Many philosophers have defended the existence of an asymmetry between first- and third-

person attributions of propositional attitudes. Many first-person attributions of attitudes are

apparently made in a direct, non-inferential way, without relying on observation of one’s own

behavior or other empirical evidence, and, in this sense, a priori. Moreover, those attributions

enjoy a special presumption of truth. However, these traits are absent when we attribute

attitudes to other people. Though asymmetry has been assumed in many views of self-

knowledge, not everybody shares this assumption. The first clear negation of asymmetry

was Gilbert Ryle’s. But in recent times a position akin to Ryle’s has been vigorously

defended by other thinkers, especially Peter Carruthers.

Carruthers assumes that we introspect our phenomenal attitudes, but not our

propositional attitudes. Concerning the latter, our access to them goes in roughly the same

way as to those of other people, by turning our “mindreading” abilities onto ourselves. I

agree with Carruthers that we sometimes ascribe attitudes to ourselves in roughly the way

we ascribe them to others. Moreover, in my view, adopting an objective, third person

perspective is an important tool for gaining self-knowledge. However, at the basis of self-

ascription of mental attitudes through interpretation of our own behavior, we find attitudes

that are not the result of interpretation, which we can be immediately conscious of and

express directly. These expressions are akin to what Burge has called “cogito-like

judgments”. To hold that all self-ascriptions of propositional attitudes result from an

interpretative stance leads to unacceptable consequences. Let me argue for this by

reflecting on purposeful action.

In the case of other people, overt behavior is often a more reliable criterion of their

intentions than their statements. Can we apply this to ourselves? This would threaten the

possibility of acting purposefully, in order to fulfil prior intentions or desires, for a person can

start acting with a certain intention or desire and be led to discover, by observing her own

behavior, that in fact she doesn’t have that desire or intention, but some other, quite different

ones. And the latter could equally be subject to revision because of new empirical evidence,

and so on. This also implies that a person can never be sure that her desires have been

satisfied or that her intentions have been realized, because she can never be sure what

desires or intentions she had to begin with. This may well be incompatible with rational

agency and control over our actions.

An important argument in Carruthers’ hands are experiments designed to uncover the

phenomenon of confabulation. I argue, however, that the weight of that experimental work as

an argument against asymmetry is quite dubious, to say the less. I conclude that the denial

of first- and third-person asymmetry is a shaky and very problematic position.

2. EMOTIONS, REASONS, AND THE SELF

Marta Cabrera, Universitat de València

In the last four decades there has been a big shift in philosophy of emotions from the view

that emotions have an irrational effect on our choices and behaviour to the intuition that

emotions may have a fundamental role in our decisions about what to do and how to live.

Philosophers of emotion, however, struggle to understand the ways in which emotions might

contribute to our making rational and good decisions and to explaining our actions. In this

paper, I (i) question the idea that the rational role of emotions in action is to reinforce the

reasons that an agent has for doing something only in the case in which her emotions are

representing their objects correctly (Greenspan 2011, Tappolet 2016 and Carman 2018) and

(ii) introduce the distinction between what emotions represent and what they reveal in order

to show that an emotion that misrepresents a situation may still carry practically relevant

information for an agent about herself and provide her with reasons for action.

My aim is to introduce a reflection on the epistemology of incorrect emotions that

captures the special role they perform as a source of self-knowledge that can guide the

actions of the agent that experiences them. Through an emotional experience, an agent can

gain access to a particular kind of evidence about herself which has the normative force to

inform her reasons for action insofar as it makes intelligible the kind of action that counts as

addressing her emotion regardless, in some minimal sense, of the correctness of the

emotion. We will see that this kind of evidence is in many cases unavailable to her as long

as she does not feel an emotion that brings it to the forefront of her experience. I will argue

that the particular way in which an agent relates to this evidence about herself, and hence

the special role that incorrect emotions play in action, is alien to that of a third party.

It will be important for my discussion that we bear in mind that we are talking about

emotions and self-knowledge in the context of action and practical deliberation – a context in

which the agent must make up her mind about what to do and how to live. In so doing, I will

defend, the agent is not observing herself from a third-person perspective and choosing the

path that would be best for her given the available possible courses of action made

intelligible by the incorrect emotion. This would leave no room for the intimacy that seems to

characterise the relationship we have with our own emotions and decisions (in contrast to

the one we have with the emotions and decisions of others). Rather, as Moran (2001) and

Corbí (2010) have pointed out, when an agent decides what course of action to follow –

which is informed by the evidence provided by her emotions about how she is – she is, at

the same time, shaping who and how she is.

References

Carman, Mary. 2018. “How Emotions do not Provide Reasons to Act”, Philosophia, 46: 555–

574.

Corbí, Josep. 2010. “First‐Person Authority and Self‐Knowledge as an Achievement”,

European Journal of Philosophy 18 (3): 325–362.

Greenspan, Patricia. 2011. “Craving the right: Emotions and moral reasons”, in C. Bagnoli

(ed.), Morality and the Emotions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 39–60.

Moran, Richard. 2001. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tappolet, Christine. 2016. Emotions, Value, and Agency. Oxford University Press.

3. NARRATIVITY, OPACITY AND A STRICTLY FIRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE

Josep E. Corbí, University of Valencia

In Narrative and Narrators (OUP, 2010), Gregory Currie examines what makes a narrative

high in narrativity. The degree of narrativity is proportional to its capacity to engage the

reader or the viewer, that is, to immerse her in a fictional world. We may thus say that a

proper analysis of narrativity might help us to elucidate the cement of fictional worlds, to

adapt John Mackie’s famous phrase. Currie stresses the importance of Character -with an

initial capital letter to distinguish it from the characters in a narrative- in narratives. He

underlines how much Character contributes to enhance the narrativity of a story and also

how narratives contribute to increasing the role of Character in our lives. He fears, however,

that situationist experiments like Milgram's and the Good Samaritan's may challenge our

well-entrenched conviction that each agent has a specific Character and that it is the traits of

her Character that mainly account for the way she responds to any given situation;

moreover, Currie is convinced that this skeptical conclusion will have a rather negative

impact on the literary value of some narratives. I will sketch, however, an analysis of our

identity as subjects that will favor a non-skeptical interpretation of the impact situationist

experiments on the role of Character both in narrative and in our lives.

For this purpose, I will firstly distinguish between trivial facts about oneself and facts that

form a part of one’s identity. Williams is thus approaching the idea of Character from a first-

person, agential perspective (A-Character, hereafter) as opposed to the third-person,

explanatory perspective (E-Character, hereafter) that inspires situationist experiments.

Having a Character from a first-person, agential perspective is not a fact that one could take

for granted but an achievement on the agent’s side. Complementarily, I will argue that having

a Character when examined from a third-person, explanatory perspective (E-Character,

hereafter) tends to be the product of an iterative process of subordination. For this purpose,

I will explore not only Williams' approach to practical necessity but Judith Butler's analysis of

gender and Richard Wollheim's view of guilt as well. And I will conclude: (1) that there is no

subject without identification and (2) that there is no identification without subordination to

the powerful. Hence, it seems that what situationist experiments reveal is not the irrelevance

of Character, but the prevalence of subordination to authority as the primary mechanism by

which the subject is formed and her pattern of response to the world -and, therefore, her E-

Character- established.

Currie could quite reasonably object to my previous line of reasoning that one common

assumption about Character is that it varies from one to another individual, while my

approach proposes a rather uniform account of Character, which is what situationist

experiments seem to confirm. Still, as Butler, Williams and Wollheim repeatedly stress, there

is always room for various kinds of resistance and for attempts to rearticulate one's position

with regard to the regulatory ideal. The effort a character may make to discern her way or to

be faithful to the fate that a given situation has imposed upon her, that is the sort of

dynamics we are fascinated by when reading a novel or watching a film. Of course, success

or failure in this kind of endeavor is a rather personal and uneven matter, which is the feature

that Currie presented as constitutive of Character.

4. OPACITY, MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Chon Tejedor, University of Valencia

In this paper, I argue that moral responsibility can arise directly from the structural conditions

in which one finds oneself operating. I call this Conditioned Responsibility.

I motivate the Conditioned Responsibility view by looking at situations where there is a

strong case for ascribing moral responsibility, but where such responsibility cannot be

cashed out in terms either of intentions or of the consequences of individual actions. The

situations I have in mind typically satisfy three criteria: firstly, the combined actions of

numerous individuals cause significant harm; secondly, the actions of any one such

individual, in isolation, do not cause harm; and thirdly, individuals do not intend the resulting

combined harm, even though they may anticipate or expect it.

Often the harm in question is merely the cumulative effect of these actions, such as in the

case of human generated climate change (Broome, 2012). I call this aggregated harm. At

other times, the harm results, not simply from the cumulation of individual actions, but from

the way in which such actions dynamically interact with each other given the cultural, social,

economic or legal norms in place. I call this dynamic harm. The proliferation of sweatshops

(cf. Young 2010) is, in my view, a case of dynamic harm: the cumulation of individual

purchasing actions would not give rise to sweatshops if the required labour laws were

enforced everywhere.

I argue that, in situations meeting the three above mentioned criteria, moral responsibility

can arise directly out of the conditions in which one finds oneself operating, irrespective of

one’s intentions or of the consequences (actual or expected) of one’s actions. This, in turn,

poses a problem. For these conditions are often unclear to the agent and, even when they

are not unclear, the agent may be unable to understand why they should give rise to

responsibility in her case, given that her intentions and the consequences of her actions are

not being called into question. I call this the Opacity Problem of Conditioned Responsibility.

The Opacity Problem is sometimes epistemological, i.e. resulting from a lack of knowledge

on the part of agents, but is also, most fundamentally, hermeneutical: agents lack the

concepts capable of rendering their individual responsibility intelligible to themselves and

others (cf. Fricker 2007).

My paper is divided into two sections. In the first, I defend the Conditioned Responsibility

view. In so doing, I argue against Iris Marion Young’s claim that only political responsibility

– not moral one – can arise out of conditions (Young, 2010) and for an alternative proposed

but insufficiently articulated by Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1987, Arendt 2005, Arendt 1963). In

section two, I address the Opacity Problem. I argue that a static, fact-like understanding of

conditions and of their relation to responsibility makes the hermeneutical problem in

particular look more intractable than it actually is. When the notion of condition is understood

in normative and relational terms, individual conditioned responsibility reveals itself as a

matter of our positioning with respect to others and to ourselves.

References

Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility”, in Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and

Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. J. W. Bernauer (Springer, 1987): 43–50.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking Press,

1963).

Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility”, in Essays

in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, (Schocken

Books, 2005): 121–32.

John Broome, Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (Norton Global Ethics Series,

2012).

Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University

Press, 2007).

Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2010).

METAPHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING (MICE)

Manuel Gustavo Isaac, University of Barcelona; Sarah Sawyer, University of Sussex;

Manolo Martínez, University of Barcelona

Conceptual engineering is a new exciting movement in analytic philosophy that promotes a

renewed approach to philosophical methodology conceived as the study of concepts. One

key feature of this renewed approach lies in its normativity, meaning that conceptual

engineering aims to prescribe what concepts we should have, instead of merely describing

the concepts we do have as a matter of fact.

Although there is no common framework unifying conceptual engineering as research

program, current work in conceptual engineering shares a number of core commitments.

First, concepts are usually taken to be representational devices serving cognitive purposes.

Second, it is basically assumed that the quality of one's concepts determines the quality of

one's correlated cognitive activity. And third, in current work on conceptual engineering,

conceptual engineering itself is commonly construed as the method to assess and improve

the quality of one's conceptual apparatus, that is, for the identification conceptual

deficiencies and the elaboration of ameliorative strategies, namely, for fixing the identified

deficiencies.

There are two main directions of research in current work on conceptual engineering:

Case study research that focuses on specific conceptual deficiencies and then advocates for

specific conceptual ameliorations (e.g. Haslanger 2000 on WOMAN; Scharp 2013 on TRUTH);

Metaphilosophical research that mostly deals with the theoretical foundations of conceptual

engineering (e.g. what are concepts for conceptual engineering? how does conceptual

engineering fit in an overall theory of mind and language? what is the relation of conceptual

engineering to similar methodological frameworks? etc.), its practical application (e.g. how,

why, and when to implement conceptual engineering? does conceptual engineering work in

the same way across different conceptual domains? etc.), and its methodological framework

(e.g. what are the criteria for the quality of concepts? how can a conceptual deficiency be

ameliorated? etc.) (cf. Cappelen 2018).

The MICE Symposium is about the metaphilosophical issues in conceptual engineering. It

will be divided into 3x40min. talks (including 10min. Q&A). The first talk will address the

issue of how to best construe the subject matter of conceptual engineering. The second talk

will take up the challenge of topic preservation through semantic change in instances of

conceptual engineering. And the third one will deal with the issue of devising a (formal)

methodological tool that suits the normative purposes of conceptual engineering. The main

goal of the symposium is thereby to contribute to a better understanding of what conceptual

engineering is all about, and its expected outcome is then to improve the prospect for

conceptual engineering to be an actionable method.

References

Cappelen, Herman (2018). Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Haslanger, Sally (2000). “Gender and race: (What) Are they? (What) Do we want them to

be?” Noûs 34 (1): 31–55.

Scharp, Kevin (2013). Replacing Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1. WHAT SHOULD CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING BE ALL ABOUT?

Manuel Gustavo Isaac, University of Barcelona

Conceptual engineering aims to be the method to assess and improve the quality of our

representational apparatuses working as cognitive devices. But conceptual engineering still

lacks, to date, an explicit account of how to construe the representational apparatuses that

form its very subject matter. And without such prior understanding of its subject matter, or so

it is claimed here, conceptual engineering is bound to remain a useless, piecemeal method,

with no overall grip over its target domain (Isaac forthcoming). My purpose in this talk is to

contribute overcoming this foundational gap by providing some guidelines for developing the

theory of representational apparatuses that would be the most conducive for the research

program of conceptual engineering. With this in mind, I will proceed in three steps,

progressively specifying what conceptual engineering should be all about.

In the first part of the talk, I will address the issue of whether conceptual engineering

should be about concepts. To tackle this issue, I will categorize the several different positions

that have been taken so far on the subject matter of conceptual engineering — whether in

favor, against, or indifferent to conceptual engineering being about concepts. And I will then

argue that the representational apparatuses that form the subject matter of conceptual

engineering should be construed as concepts on pain of conceptual engineering being

inconsistent otherwise.

In the second part of the talk, I will address the issue of how to best conceive concepts for

the purposes of conceptual engineering. To tackle this issue, I will draw upon a widely

acknowledged distinction between two frameworks for theorizing about concepts — namely,

the philosophical and the psychological ones. And I will then argue that, in order to ensure

the strongest impact for the method of conceptual engineering on our cognitive life, concepts

should be psychologically conceived in the theoretical framework of conceptual engineering

(cf. Machery 2017).

In the third and last part of the talk, I will address the issue of how to develop a

psychological conception of concepts that is the most conducive for the purposes of

conceptual engineering. To tackle this issue, I will present a pretty consensual psychological

characterization of concepts along with a now commonly received distinction between three

different basic kinds of concepts thus characterized — namely, exemplars, prototypes, and

theories. And drawing upon some radical versions of conceptual pluralism (Machery 2009,

Weiskopf 2009), I will then argue that, in order to ensure the broadest scope and the highest

flexibility for the method of conceptual engineering on our conceptual apparatuses, concepts

psychologically conceived should be taken as multiply realizable functional kinds.

In the conclusion of the talk, I will recap my proposal for what conceptual engineering

should be all about in the claim that conceptual engineering should be: (i) About concepts,

(ii) psychologically conceived, (iii) as multiply realizable functional kinds. I will further develop

why and how I thereby expect to theoretically secure and justify the maximum impact, scope,

and flexibility for the method of conceptual engineering on conceptual apparatuses in our

whole cognitive life. And I will eventually defend my proposal against several possible

objections.

References

Isaac, Manuel Gustavo (forthcoming). “How to conceptually engineer conceptual

engineering?” Inquiry. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

Machery, Édouard (2009). Doing without Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— (2017). “Conceptual analysis rebooted”. In: Philosophy within its Proper Bounds.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chap. 7: 208–244.

Weiskopf, Daniel Aaron (2009). “The plurality of concepts”. Synthese 169 (1): 145–173.

2. TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING

Sarah Sawyer, University of Sussex

I characterize conceptual engineering in the broad sense as a form of theorizing that

involves a proposed change in linguistic practice. Sometimes this can take the form of a

proposal to eliminate the use of a term on the grounds that it is defective in some way (e.g.

‘phlogiston’, ‘élan vital’); sometimes it can take the form of a proposal to introduce a new

term on the grounds that it is required for explanatory purposes that have not hitherto been

recognized (e.g. ‘antimatter’, ‘epistemic entitlement’); and sometimes it can take the form of

a proposal to keep a term that is currently in use, but to revise the current use on the

grounds that this would constitute some kind of improvement, whether theoretical, practical

or normative (e.g. ‘belief’, ‘woman’). But the paradigms of conceptual engineering fall into

this last category, involving the revised use of a term. These are instances of conceptual

engineering in the narrow sense; they essentially involve topic preservation through

semantic change, and the challenge is to explain how this is possible.

I argue that conceptual engineering in the narrow sense is to be explained by appeal to

the externalist distinction between concepts and conceptions: concepts are determined by

non-conceptual relations to objective properties rather than by associated communal

conceptions, and this is what makes topic preservation through semantic change possible. I

go on to argue that the requisite level of objectivity is exhibited not only by natural kinds, but

also by a wide range of philosophical kinds, social kinds and artefactual kinds. Finally, I

argue that the alternative externalist metasemantic frameworks given respectively by

Cappelen (2018) and Ball (forthcoming) undermine the objectivity of the properties of

concern to conceptual engineers, and unwittingly return to a descriptive theory of reference

that we ought to reject. The arguments of this paper build on my previous work in this area

(cf. Sawyer 2018, forthcoming [a], forthcoming [b]).

References

Ball, Derek (forthcoming). “Could women be analytically oppressed?” In: Conceptual

Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. Ed. by Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and

David Plunkett. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cappelen, Herman (2018). Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Sawyer, Sarah (2018). “The importance of concepts”. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

118 (2): 127–147.

——— (forthcoming a). “Talk and thought”. In: Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual

Ethics. Ed. by Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and David Plunkett. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

——— (forthcoming b). “The role of concepts in Fixing Language”. Canadian Journal of

Philosophy.

3. AN INFORMATION-THEORETIC INVESTIGATION OF CONCEPTUAL AMELIORATION

Manolo Martínez, University of Barcelona

The project variously called conceptual engineering (Cappelen 2018) or conceptual

amelioration (Haslanger 2000) aims at identifying ways in which language (or conceptual

repertoires) can be improved so as to better fulfil whatever roles we have tasked them with:

e.g., categorizing entities, or carrying out inductive inference, in ways that respect socially

important desiderata.

In this paper I present a formal model of concept possession and use it to identify

constraints that cognitively plausible processes of conceptual amelioration must typically

meet. In the model, the main idea is that concepts are to be thought of as lossily

compressed encodings of the state of the world: They say a lot, but not everything, about the

world that is relevant to the thinking subject, in an economic way. The right way to reason

about these encodings is by using rate-distortion theory (Cover & Thomas 2006: chap. 10;

Shannon 1959). The kinds of constructs that psychology has identified concepts with (e.g.,

prototypes, exemplars and theories) arise naturally as an answer to the following question:

Given the available rate in a certain channel (say, from perception to higher cognition), how

should signals encode the world so as to minimize errors in the picture that the thinking

subject forms of it? It turns out that optimal solutions to this compression problem, in

ecologically realistic contexts, rely on encoding-decoding strategies that fit the bill of what

psychologists call ‘concepts’.

Now, the application to the amelioration program comes from noticing that lossy

compression requires the formulation of distortion criteria, which measure the “closeness or

fidelity of a reconstructed source sequence to the original” (Sayood 2017: 224). An

amelioration program can be formally reconstructed as stemming from the perception that

the compression scheme embodied by the currently available conceptual repertoire is

suboptimal, as judged by a certain distortion criterion.

With this formal redescription at hand, I discuss several (soft) constraints an amelioration

program should observe:

First, it might be that the optimal conceptual repertoire for a certain domain + distortion

criterion be extremely different from the repertoire currently in use. This introduces a

cognitive burden on the change, that can be formally measured as the computational

complexity of implementing the new repertoire, given an implementation of the old one. I will

argue that conceptual amelioration must trade off this cognitive burden with fitness for

purpose.

Second, fitness for purpose (i.e., fidelity in compression) always improves with the size

and complexity of the conceptual repertoire (in the limit of lossless compression, distortion

will be zero if the conceptual repertoire has the same entropy as the extramental domain

being conceptualized [Cover and Thomas 2006]). I will argue that there is a second trade off

between repertoire size and fitness for purpose.

Conceptual amelioration should therefore be seen as a kind of multiobjective optimization

problem. Different weights given to the different optimization objectives (which might occur

naturally, e.g., as we change focus from the linguistic to the mental domain) will inform what

is feasible or desirable.

References

Cappelen, Herman (2018). Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Cover, Thomas M., & Thomas, Joy A. (2006). Elements of Information Theory. New York:

Wiley.

Haslanger, Sally (2000). “Gender and race: (What) Are they? (What) Do we want them to

be?” Noûs 34 (1): 31–55.

Sayood, Khalid (2017). Introduction to Data Compression. San Francisco: Morgan

Kaufmann.

Shannon, Claude E. (1959). “Coding theorems for a discrete source with a fidelity criterion”.

IRE Nat. Conv. Rec 4 (1): 142–163.

CINE Y FILOSOFÍA: ARGUMENTANDO SIN PIEDAD

José Alhambra Delgado, UAM; Antonio Blanco Salgueiro, UCM; Antonio Duarte Calvo,

UCM; Marcia Martínez Garcia, UCM; Saleta de Salvador Agra, UCM; Ángeles Jiménez

Perona, UCM; Javier Vilanova Arias UCM.

El uso del cine como instrumento para la reflexión filosófica ha sido algo común desde el

nacimiento del séptimo arte (valga como ejemplo la propuesta de Deleuze 1999 de usar el

cine como medio alternativo al discurso filosófico estándar, o la puesta en práctica de la idea

por Sartre en su guion cinematográfico “El Engranaje”). Sin embargo, ha sido mucho menor

en el ámbito de la Filosofía Analítica que en el de otras escuelas. Las excepciones han

venido en el pasado desde autores más bien heterodoxos como Feyerabend 1993 (donde

propone una superioridad del discurso cinematográfico sobre el pensamiento) o Cavell 1999

(donde como había hecho con escritores como Beckett o Shakespeare desarrolla aquí su

exploración filosófica a través de una serie de comedias de Hollywood) y 2008 (donde

promueve un uso “terapéutico” del cine), si bien más recientemente podemos encontrar algo

más de atención en autores más ortodoxos y con un tratamiento más académico como

Hansom 2006, Carroll 2006 o Wartenberg 2007.

En tiempos recientes se pude apreciar un vuelco de atención e interés hacia el fenómeno

cinematográfico en el panorama filosófico anglosajón. Valgan como ejemplo la revista de

Edimborough U. P., Film-Philosophy, o el congreso que se celebró en verano del 2019 en

Brighton con el mismo nombre. En España hay varias propuestas muy visibles del uso

pedagógico del cine para la enseñanza y divulgación de la Filosofía (Rivera 2003, García

2007), pero no es fácil encontrar un uso más teórico, especialmente en el ámbito analítico.

Es por ello que los autores consideran que la inclusión de eventos como este simposio en

el contexto de congresos académicos como el de la SEFA no solo puede servir como un

soplo de aire fresco, sino como un acicate de la siempre obligada renovación y actualización

de sus modos y medios.

En este simposio se exploraran las relaciones entre filosofía y cine a través de un caso

práctico. Tomando como referente la película 12 Angry Man (1958) de Sydney Lumet, cada

uno discutirá un problema filosófico reconocible como propio de la Filosofía del Lenguaje, la

Teoría de la Argumentación o la Epistemología.

References

Carroll, N. 2006. “Film and Knowledge”, en Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, Malden:

Blackwell Publishing.

García, R. (2007). ”El cine como recurso didáctico Eikasia”, Revista de Filosofía, año III,

13.IA

Hanson, K. (2006). “Minerva in the Movies. Relations Between Philosophy and Film”, en N.

Carroll (Ed) 2006.

Rivera, J. A. (2003). Lo que Sócrates diría a Woody Allen. Cine y filosofía, Madrid: Espasa.

Wartenberg, T. 2007. Thinking on Screen. Film as Philosophy. Nueva York: Routledge.

1. ARGUMENTACIÓN Y AGENTES SOCIALES: EL CASO DE 12 HOMBRES SIN PIEDAD

José Alhambra Delgado. Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Una de las características distintivas de los estudios contemporáneos sobre argumentación

es la incorporación de cuestiones de orden pragmático en el análisis del argumento. En este

ámbito, la interpretación y evaluación de las razones presentadas para una conclusión no es

sólo una cuestión formal, sino que depende de factores como el tipo de interacción, la

información de fondo o los compromisos adquiridos por el individuo. Ahora bien, desde el

momento en que consideramos la argumentación como una práctica surge la siguiente

cuestión: ¿qué papel desempeña la figura del agente en este contexto? El tema suele

abordarse desde dos ángulos distintos: por un lado, el dialéctico, que diferencia entre

protagonista y antagonista y aborda cuestiones como la carga de la prueba o el orden de

intervención en la discusión, y, por otro, el retórico, que distingue entre argumentador y

auditorio y concibe la interacción como un medio de persuasión. El objetivo de mi

exposición será introducir un tercer nivel: el social o socio-institucional; en concreto,

analizaré el papel de los denominados estigmas sociales en la argumentación pública y lo

haré basándome en el film 12 Hombres sin Piedad. Esta película es una buena muestra de

cómo el estatus de un sujeto interviene en la argumentación, ya sea a través de los

estereotipos que dan forma a los personajes o mediante lo recursos argumentativos que

despliegan. Así, pues, servirá a la vez como objeto de estudio y como contrapunto a la

intervención.

References

Eidheim, Harald. 1976. «Cuando la identidad étnica es un estigma social», En Barth F.

(comp.): Los grupos étnicos y sus fronteras. La organización social de las diferencias

culturales. México D. F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Chicago,

Prentice-Hall, Inc. Traducción: Estigma. La identidad deteriorada, Buenos Aires,

Amorrortu Editores, 2006.

Laar, Jan Albert. 2007. «Pragmatic Inconsistency and Credibility». Argumentation 21:317-

334.

Sbisà, Marina. 2009. «Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution», Lodz Papers in Pragmatics

5.1/ Special Issue on Speech Actions, pp. 33-52.

Searle, John R. 1975. «A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts». University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis. Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, pp.

344-369. http://hdl.handle.net/11299/185220.

2. EL PORTENTOSO ACTO DE HABLA DE 12 IRACUNDOS (REFLEXIÓN SOBRE EL

UPTAKE AUSTINIANO)

Antonio Blanco Salgueiro, UCM

Un acto de habla protagoniza la película: una declaración para la que se exige el acuerdo

unánime de doce miembros de un jurado, ejercido a través de un portavoz que usará un

realizativo en plural: “Declaramos culpable / inocente al acusado”.

El caso parece anómalo, incluso portentoso. Pocos actos de habla necesitan un portavoz

que hable por un grupo. Lo extraordinario parece residir en que el acto no es unilateral,

depende de la coordinación entre agentes, está sujeto a negociación. Además, la

negociación requiere otras ilocuciones interconectadas de los partícipes. En la tradición

“griceana”, según la cual las ilocuciones dependen de intenciones individuales, estaríamos

ante un caso atípico. Otra razón por la que el acto sería periférico para esta tradición es que

depende de instituciones extralingüísticas (un sistema legal).

Sin embargo, dentro del marco austiniano el acto está en continuidad con otros. Un

ejemplo de Austin es apostar. Si digo “Apuesto 5 euros a que el Celta gana la liga”, no habré

apostado hasta que el otro conteste “Acepto” (o algo así), momento en el que también él

habrá apostado (5 euros a que no gana la liga).

El tema se conecta con una noción que Austin deja en el aire: el uptake (que suele

traducirse como “aprehensión” o “comprensión”). Cabe adoptar una interpretación débil,

según la cual se trata simplemente de que para que un acto de habla se produzca es

necesario que sea tomado como tal por aquellos a quienes se dirige. Si digo “Prometo ir a tu

fiesta” de espaldas y en un tono inaudible no habré prometido, con independencia de mis

intenciones. En este sentido, prácticamente todos los actos de habla comparten con la

declaración de los iracundos su carácter intersubjetivo, no unilateral.

Una lectura más interesante tiene que ver con asumir el acto de habla del emisor. La

importancia del fenómeno queda oscurecida por el hecho de que, excepto en casos

especiales, el acuerdo es implícito. El otro no necesita decir “Acepto tu promesa” o “Acepto

tu advertencia”, aunque no se excluye la posibilidad (decir: “Gracias por tu consejo” es

aceptarlo). Un modo de comprobar cuándo se exige la corroboración por parte de otros es

preguntar si estos pueden desactivar la ilocución. En el caso de prometer, pueden decir

“¡Guárdate tus promesas!”, lo que anula el compromiso (luego no podrán reprochar

incumplimiento). El mismo fenómeno se da para las aserciones. Si dices: “Te informo de que

p”, y contesto: “No me fío de ti, mentiroso”, si luego actúo a partir del presupuesto de que p

es el caso y eso me perjudica, no podré hacerte un reproche por impartir información

errónea. Es decir, los efectos deónticos de los actos de habla dependen esencialmente de

que otros los hayan asumido, y dado que esos efectos son parte constitutiva de ilocuciones

prototípicas, estas serán prototípicamente actos en los que participan varios agentes.

Nuestro portentoso acto de habla no resulta, después de todo, tan extraordinario.

3. ARGUMENTOS ABDUCTIVOS EN 12 HOMBRES SIN PIEDAD

Antonio Duarte Calvo, UCM

En esta contribución abordaremos los argumentos abductivos dentro del contexto del

presente simposio. Siguiendo la formulación de Peirce, la abducción, en sentido amplio,

sería un argumento cuya conclusión es una hipótesis, siendo, por tanto, el único tipo de

argumento capaz de introducir una nueva idea no contenida en las premisas. En los últimos

años, diversas propuestas han sido desarrolladas donde se utilizan el marco y los

conceptos propios de la teoría de la argumentación para analizar las características y la

justificación de los argumentos abductivos.

Resulta clarificador el análisis de los argumentos abductivos que se presentan en un

marco comunicativo cotidiano como el que se muestra en Doce hombres sin piedad para

descubrir el carácter eminentemente dialógico de la abducción. La abducción se presenta

generalmente como un continuo diálogo entre dos agentes (ya sea explícito o implícito) y

respondería a esta comunicación necesaria para conectar los “contextos paralelos” que se

dan en esta forma de argumento.

Veamos lo que ocurre, por ejemplo, alrededor del minuto 40 de la película que nos

ocupa. Ahí se comienza a discutir la posibilidad de que el testimonio que el anciano del piso

de abajo ha presentado no sea veraz. Ante la presentación de evidencias, los miembros del

jurado han de enfrentarse con lo que sería un hecho sorprendente en ese contexto: el señor

del piso de abajo ha mentido. El jurado número nueve, presenta una hipótesis que explica el

porqué: el anciano buscaba algo de atención. Lo que proporciona una explicación del

contexto del argumento, y a la vez nos remite a un contexto paralelo donde se proporciona

una teoría sobre el carácter del anciano. Veamos, primero, la forma del argumento

abductivo, según la formulación Peirce:

1. Se observa que el anciano ha mentido en su testimonio.

2. Pero si fuera cierto que lo que buscaba con su testimonio era tan solo llamar la

atención, no sería extraño que el anciano mintiera.

Por lo tanto, hay razones para sospechar que lo que pretendía era atraer la atención.

La hipótesis trata de normalizar lo que sería una observación anómala o que no cuadra

en un contexto dado. La hipótesis de que el anciano trata de llamar la atención (segundo

contexto) “normaliza” el primer contexto, el hecho de que mienta. Si la hipótesis se

confirmara, ya no resultaría extraño que el anciano esté mintiendo. El carácter dialógico

viene dado debido a que la conclusión a la que se llega con este tipo de argumento es

altamente falible, provisional y sujeta a nuevos descubrimientos. El diálogo se establecerá

con la búsqueda de nuevos datos que conecten (o no) los contextos paralelos que surgen

en la abducción. Este diálogo será clave para, o bien desechar la hipótesis, o bien aportar

mayor plausibilidad a la misma.

La abducción, por tanto, se desarrolla y justifica si se añade la exigencia de mantener

una comunicación siempre abierta entre ambos contextos, dotando, así, a la abducción de

un marcado carácter dialógico.

4. NOTAS SOBRE “DOCE HOMBRES SIN PIEDAD” (12 ANGRY MEN). DELIBERACIÓN

Y VULNERABILIDAD COGNITIVA

Ángeles Jiménez Perona, UCM

Por el contexto geo-político donde trascurre, la película (EEUU) sería un ejemplo de

deliberación democrática. Cumple con ciertas características que así lo indican: (1) votan

varias veces para tomar decisiones y se comprometen con el resultado. (2) Se rigen por una

igualdad de oportunidades para participar. (3) Emplean la justificación argumentativa. (4)

Manejan una idea de bien común: aplicar la ley para hacer justicia en beneficio de toda la

sociedad estadounidense del momento. (5) Se respetan bastante mutuamente. (6) Hacen

contribuciones constructivas. (7) Aunque los participantes están despersonalizados, realizan

un uso discursivo de historias y testimonios personales. (8) El elenco de participantes es

variado en su identidad, pero eso no los invalida como participantes en la deliberación.

Pero, la película es también un ejemplo de algunas de las insuficiencias que puede sufrir

este tipo de deliberación: (i) exclusión de amplios sectores de participantes afectados: en

principio los afectados son todos los miembros de esa sociedad, pero no hay ni mujeres, ni

negros, ni indígenas… Por entonces no eran ciudadanos plenos ni de iure ni de facto, lo

cual vulneraba el principio de igualdad recogido en el ideario de aquella democracia.

Por ello, el modelo de agencia colectiva que muestra la película está sesgado por los

prejuicios que laten en la exclusión de los grupos sociales mencionados.

La situación cae bajo lo que Fricker denominó “injusticia epistémica”: la que sufre alguien

en su capacidad de sujeto de conocimiento/acción.

La injusticia epistémica pone de manifiesto no sólo la vulneración de las normas de la

deliberación pública democrática, sino la condición de vulnerabilidad de toda interacción

deliberativa racional. Es un indicio de la vulnerabilidad como una condición de la

racionalidad humana.

Las críticas falibilistas al fundamentismo evidenciaron la contingencia de las normas de

la racionalidad. También han ofrecido modelos alternativos de racionalidad en los que el

error y la duda no quedan fuera del ámbito de las actividades racionales. Modelos en los

que la fijación de creencias, decisiones y vías de acción dependen de dar, pedir y recibir

razones.

Cada falibilismo ha extraído consecuencias sobre los límites de las actividades

racionales, sobre las posibilidades de acierto y de error, sobre la fiabilidad de nuestras

interacciones racionales o, dicho de modo general, sobre el alcance de nuestra

vulnerabilidad cognitiva.

Con vulnerabilidad cognitiva me refiero a una manera de tener presente los límites de

nuestras interacciones cognitivas. Incluye la falibilidad, pero también alude a cuestiones

como: ¿cuáles son las condiciones que permiten la atribución de credibilidad y fiabilidad a

unos sujetos y no a otros?; o ¿cuáles son las condiciones que permiten contar (o no) con

infraestructuras materiales para las interacciones racionales como interacciones

deliberativas?

Cuando las condiciones de este tipo se cumplen tal y como se refleja en la película, la

vulnerabilidad potencial se distribuye de manera desigual entre los grupos implicados. Así

se abre el camino para que se produzca el resultado contrario al que este tipo de

deliberación busca: hacer justicia en relación con una idea de bien común máximamente

inclusiva.

References

Fricker, M. 2017. Injusticia epistémica. Barcelona: Herder.

Fricker, M. (2018) “Epistemic Injustice and Recognition Theory: A New Conversation.”

Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (4). Article 8.

Vega-Reñon, L. 2017, Lógica para ciudadanos. Ensayos sobre lógica civil. Saarbrücken:

Editorial académica española.

5. EN TORNO AL USO DE LOS CALIFICADORES MODALES EN LA PRÁCTICA

ARGUMENTATIVA: A TRAVÉS DE 12 HOMBRES SIN PIEDAD

Marcia Martínez García, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Partiendo del marco teórico de la Teoría de la Argumentación y la Teoría de los actos de

habla trataré de exponer el papel pragmático que cumplen los calificadores modales (tales

como necesario, posible, probable…) o, en general, los modalizadores epistémicos (tales

como estar seguro de, considerar probable algo etc.) en la práctica argumentativa real; para

destacar dos roles fundamentales del uso de dichos modalizadores: por un lado, el carácter

compromisivo que estos implican y generan y, por otro, su importancia en tanto explicitación

o gestión de los criterios de relevancia discursiva.

Para ello se empleará como objeto de análisis el proceso deliberativo que tiene lugar en

la película 12 hombre sin piedad, ya que este permite ilustrar adecuadamente dichos roles.

La elección responde a dos motivos:

1. Su utilidad; al tratarse de una ilustración permanente y accesible a la que todos podemos

referirnos con facilidad para contrastar nuestras interpretaciones.

2. Su carácter ilustrativo; derivado del hecho de que lo que se representa es un proceso

deliberativo en un marco judicial -marco ideal para mostrar el giro pragmático acontecido

en la Filosofía de la Lógica del pasado siglo, una de cuyas claves (al estilo toulminiano)

fue la sustitución de la analogía matemática por la analogía jurídica como marco

orientador para el estudio de los procesos argumentativos.

De este cambio de analogía general se derivan ciertas consecuencias no triviales para el

tema a tratar. Por ejemplo, la comprensión toulminiana de los calificadores modales como

poseyendo, ante todo, una función compromisiva, surge como crítica a la interpretación de

dichos calificadores desde la perspectiva lógica hegemónica en su tiempo, esto es, como

expresiones del vínculo lógico existente entre las premisas y la conclusión de un argumento.

Desde la perspectiva toulminiana se abandona el análisis focalizado en la corrección formal

en vistas a un análisis centrado en cómo los términos modales son muestra de distintos

grados de compromiso con respecto al “salto deductivo” que nos lleva a la conclusión de un

argumento (explicitando, ante todo, “qué hacemos” cuando los empleamos en nuestras

prácticas discursivas). Es fácil rastrear distintos ejemplos en el filme en cuestión que

permiten ilustrar lo que hacemos cuando empleamos calificadores modales (y que

expondremos brevemente):

Por un lado, muchos de ellos parecen apoyar la tesis de Palmer según la cual la

modalidad epistémica es la expresión lingüística del grado de compromiso que el hablante

asume respecto a la factualidad de los enunciados que profiere.

Por otro, permiten explicitar el hecho de que los calificadores modales resultan ser una

herramienta fundamental a la hora estipular lo que se habría de incluir y lo que se habría de

excluir en el proceso argumentativo; sirviendo para determinar qué resulta relevante para el

diálogo en cuestión y qué debería dejarse de lado por su irrelevancia. Y, por ello, se los

puede entender (siguiendo también a Toulmin a este respecto) como medios a través de los

cuales se ejecutan ciertos movimientos discursivos (como “estipular que una hipótesis a de

ser tomada en consideración”, “excluir una hipótesis”…).

References

Toulmin, Stephen. 2007. Los usos de la argumentación. Barcelona: Ed. Península.

Austin, John, L. 1998. Cómo hacer cosas con palabras. Barcelona: Paidós.

Palmer, Frank, R. 2001. Mood and Modality. 2ª edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

6. SILENCIO EN LA SALA (COMO NO HACER COSAS CON PALABRAS)

Saleta de Salvador Agra, UCM

Desde los años noventa del pasado siglo, varias filósofas feministas del lenguaje (Langton,

Hornsby, Saul, Wyatt, Kukla, entre otras) han centrado sus esfuerzos en conceptualizar el

silencio, más en concreto, se han preguntado sobre el silenciamiento en términos de la

teoría de los actos de habla o, dicho de otro modo, se han interrogado sobre las condiciones

del “no hacer cosas con palabras” (Wyatt, 2009). Concentradas en aquellos casos donde la

pertenencia a determinados grupos sociales impide realizar cosas con sus palabras, han

analizado como un tipo de injusticia de corte lingüístico el hecho de que el sistema sexo-

género condicione y moldee la propia pragmática del discurso. Esto es, se han centrado en

aquellos casos en que la identidad personal socava la capacidad locutiva, ilocutiva y

perlocutiva del acto de habla. Desde la clásica tríada austiniana se han detenido en

diferenciar en el habla silenciada las nociones de “deshabilitación locutiva”, “silenciamiento

ilocutivo” y “frustración perlocutiva”. A partir de dicha distinción, y con la finalidad de analizar

los aportes feministas a la conceptualización del silenciamiento, tomaremos como punto de

partida la película Doce hombres sin piedad como ejemplo paradigmático de un evidente

contexto de enmudecimiento femenino.

La inhabilitación locutiva de las mujeres como miembros de un jurado popular, las

palabras, en boca de los doce hombres, de la única mujer cuyo testimonio muestra la

película serán el marco desde el cual interrogarse sobre el silenciamiento, esto es, cuando

tienen lugar los llamados “actos indecibles” (Langton, 1993) o cuando las palabras no

pueden tener los efectos esperados. Igualmente para analizar aquello que impide a las

mujeres hacer todo el rango de cosas que se pueden hacer con las palabras nos

detendremos en el lugar central que juegan los estereotipos. La mención a una profesora, el

gran plano general del inicio de la película donde encontramos la única referencia visual a

una mujer, el protagonismo de las palabras indirectas de la anciana o el contradictorio cartel

del baño de mujeres que las nombra en un espacio en el que están ausentes, constituyen el

corpus de análisis que nos permitirá reflexionar sobre la función que estas imágenes juegan

en los fallos de credibilidad lingüística y del consecuente silenciamiento. Así, para ahondar

en la teorización sobre el habla silenciada, por último, echaremos mano de la función que

los estereotipos tienen en lo que Fricker (2007) ha denominado la “injusticia testimonial” y

su distinción de los dos tipos de silencio, lo que nos permitirá completar, desde una

perspectiva epistémica y política, el análisis de la no presencia del discurso directo de

mujeres sin piedad.

References

Austin, John L. (1962), How to Do things with Words, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1975

Langton, Rae (1993), “Speech acts and unspeakable acts”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22

(4), pp. 293-330

Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford

University Press, Oxford

Wyatt, Nicole (2009), “Failing to do with words”, Southwest Philosophy Review, 25 (1), pp.

135-142.

7. EL VALOR DE LOS EJEMPLOS CINEMATOGRÁFICOS PARA LOS ENFOQUES

PRAGMÁTICOS EN FILOSOFÍA

Javier Vilanova Arias, UCM

En esta comunicación se defiende la relevancia de los referentes cinematográficos para los

enfoques pragmáticos en filosofía. Por enfoque pragmático entendemos toda propuesta

filosófica que considere que los únicos objetos de reflexión filosófica son los fenómenos

concretos que tienen lugar en el seno de prácticas y comunidades humanas reales, de lo

que se sigue:

(1) que la reflexión filosófica solo puede producirse a través del examen de casos reales,

o que al menos podrían ser reales (no siendo relevantes casos meramente posibles,

hipotéticos, abstractos…),

(2) que los casos o ejemplos de estudio (sean de proposición, argumento, conocimiento,

justificación…) son inseparables del contexto o la situación en que aparecen.

Esto supone un doble problema para el filósofo que opera desde el enfoque pragmático,

pues por un lado no puede introducir un ejemplo por el simple expediente de reproducir un

texto en su discurso (se pierde el contexto), y por otro lado se encuentra limitado a la hora

de obtener los ejemplos que precisa (recuérdese la necesidad de producir “casos

intermedios” que lleva a Wittgenstein a imaginar a juegos de lenguaje ficticios o

directamente fantásticos, o la necesidad de contar con diferentes ejemplos de infortunios o

anomalías que obliga a Austin a inventar historias ficticias en ocasiones de marcado corte

humorístico). En esta comunicación se defenderá la capacidad y pertinencia del cine para

producir esta “base de datos”. Para ello, se presentarán cuatro tesis de ambición creciente:

1) El repertorio cinematográfico es una excelente fuente de ejemplos (que se añade a los

ejemplos reales tomados de mass media, foros institucionales, obras filosóficas…, y

otros ejemplos ficticios tomados de la literatura, la mitología…).

2) Los ejemplos ofrecidos por el repertorio cinematográfico son a la vez más fáciles de

entender y más susceptibles de ser analizados teóricamente que la mayoría de los casos

reales.

3) Al menos algunos ejemplos ofrecidos por el repertorio cinematográfico tienen una

naturaleza a medio camino entre la práctica real y la reflexión filosófica.

4) El cine, junto con otros medios culturales “populares”, puede y debe ser uno de los

puntos de partida de la investigación filosófica. El cine es actualmente el producto

cultural más extendido en nuestras comunidades, y por su propia intención de tener un

carácter público y una audiencia mayoritaria, las ideas que se postulan indirectamente en

él son reconocibles como propias por el hablante o ciudadano corriente, y los problemas

planteados son los problemas compartidos por la comunidad de referencia. De ahí, que

sea no solo una fuente de genuinos problemas filosóficos (que, recordemos, tanto para

Austin como Witgenstein como Toulmin son los del hablante y el argumentador común),

sino una fuente de evidencias filosóficas imprescindible.

Se discutirán estas tesis a través de un ejemplo: la moderna Teoría de la Argumentación

(TA) por un lado, y la película 12 Angry Man (12AM) por el otro.

References

Cavell, S. 1999. La búsqueda de la felicidad. La comedia de enredos matrimoniales de

Hollywood. Barcelona: Paidós.

Cavell, S. (2008). El cine, ¿puede hacernos mejores?. Buenos Aires: Katz Editores.

Deleuze, G. (1999). “Sobre la imagen movimiento”, en Conversaciones. Valencia: Pre-

Textos.

Feyerabend, P. (1993). “De cómo la filosofía echa a perder el pensamiento y el cine lo

estimula”, en ¿Por qué no Platón?, Madrid: Tecnos.

PERSPECTIVISM IN SEMANTICS

David Rey, University of Barcelona; Dan Zeman, Slovak Academy of Sciences; Max

Kölbel, University of Vienna

Natural languages contain a large number of expressions for the interpretation of which

appeal to perspectives (or points of view, or subjects etc.) seems to be needed. On one

hand, there are expressions that “locate” subjects in the world – temporal expressions like

“now”, “three years ago”, “in the future”, tenses; locational expressions like “here”, “in Paris”;

modal adverbs like “possibly”, “actually” etc. On the other hand, there are expressions that

involve standards of some kind - predicates of taste like “tasty”, “disgusting”; aesthetic

adjectives like “beautiful”, “balanced”; moral terms like “good”, “bad”, “ought to”; epistemic

modals like “might”, “must” etc. In a broad sense of “perspective”, all such expressions can

be said to be perspectival.

Perspectivism in contemporary semantics is a thread that takes the idea that the

aforementioned expressions are perspectival at face value and attempts to account for this

trait. In recent years, the literature on perspectives and perspectivism has grown

substantially, and a number of issues, both involving foundational semantic questions and

applications to specific types of natural language expressions, have been pursued. This

workshop aims to contribute to that literature by focusing on less discussed, yet important

aspects of perspectivality.

There are at least two ways in which perspectives can be accommodated in a semantic

theory. According to (broadly speaking) contextualist views, perspectives are part of the

content of utterances. Thus, according to contextualism about, say, predicates of taste,

when a speaker utters the sentence “Licorice is tasty”, the content of her utterance specifies

a perspective – for example, the speaker’s. According to eternalism, times are specified in

the content of tensed utterances and their truth is not time relative (i.e., eternal). Another

(broadly conceived) way to capture perspectivality is relativism, according to which

perspectives are not part of utterances’ content, but part of the circumstances of evaluation

(Kaplan’s term). For relativism about predicates of taste, when a speaker utters the sentence

“Licorice is tasty”, the content of her utterance is perspective-neutral, while its truth is relative

to a perspective. According to temporalism, times are not specified in the content of tensed

utterances and their truth is time-relative (i.e., temporal). The same options are viable in the

case of the other perspectival expressions.

In this workshop we aim to explore several issues, of both kinds mentioned above. First,

we attempt to theorize about perspectives in general: what exactly is their role in semantics

and how exactly to capture perspectivality in a semantic theory, what are the best arguments

for each way of capturing perspectivality described above, what (and how many) specific

perspectival parameters should be postulated, what are the implications of postulating

perspectival content for assertion etc. Second, we aim to flesh out the details by putting

forward specific proposals that tackle the issues mentioned.

1. AN ARGUMENT FOR SEMANTIC PERSPECTIVISM

David Rey, University of Barcelona

In this talk, I want to propose an argument that seeks to justify the postulation of a

perspective parameter in the semantics of English (and other natural languages). My

argument begins with the observation that intensional verbs have a systematic shifting effect

on the interpretation of embedded clauses.

Consider reports (1)–(3).

i. Mary said that John lost his wallet

ii. John believes that it might be raining

iii. Mary thinks that this cake is tasty

The truth-value of an utterance of (1) – or, if you prefer, the truth-value of the expressed

content – depends on whether John lost his wallet in every world compatible with the content

of Mary’s speech act – here I am adopting a Hintikka-style analysis of attitude reports and

speech-act reports (Hintikka 1969) – at some time prior to Mary’s speech act. The truth-

value of an utterance of (2) depends on whether it is raining (at the time of utterance) in

some world compatible with what John knows – I am following Kratzer’s analysis of modality

(Kratzer 2012). In a typical use of (3), the truth-value of an utterance of (3) depends on

whether the referent of this cake is tasty to Mary in every world compatible with the content

of Mary’s thought. Thus, the time, world, and standard of taste that are relevant to evaluate

the embedded clauses of (1)-(3) are, respectively, a time prior to the speech act of the agent

of the report, a world compatible with the agent’s state of knowledge, and the agent’s

standard of taste. The intensional verbs of (1)-(3) seem to produce an agent-based

interpretation of the embedded clauses.

The argument that I want to explore offers an account of this phenomenon by positing a

perspective parameter. On this account, sentences get truth-values relative to perspectives.

By default, unembedded sentences are evaluated with respect to the perspective of the

speaker. However, some linguistic items are perspective-shifters. Specifically, attitude and

speech-act verbs shift the value of the perspective parameter to the perspective of the agent

of the report. The key element that (1)-(3) have in common is the presence of a that-clause

embedded under an intensional verb. Thus, if we assume that intensional verbs turn the

agent’s perspective into the current perspective of evaluation, we can predict the existence

of readings for (1)-(3) in which the perspective of the agent – rather than the perspective of

the speaker – is the one that is relevant to evaluate the embedded clauses of (1)-(3).

One important virtue of the account outlined in the previous paragraph is that it offers a

uniform analysis of tenses, modals, and predicates of personal taste. In any embedded or

unembedded sentence, the past tense provides a time that is prior to the current semantic

perspective, the modal might provides a world compatible with what is known in the current

perspective, and the adjective tasty attributes the property of being tasty with respect to the

standard of the current perspective.

References

Hintikka, Jaakko. 1969. “Semantics for Propositional Attitudes.” In J. W. Davis, D. J. Hockney

and W. K. Wilson (eds.), Philosophical Logic, Dordrecht: Reidel, 21-44.

Kratzer, Angelika. 2012. Modals and Conditionals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. MULTIPLE INDEXING RELATIVISM

Dan Zeman, Slovak Academy of Sciences

Many natural language expressions, such as predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral

terms, epistemic modals etc. are perspectival, in the sense that they require a perspective to

be supplied for their semantic interpretation. Recently, a related but interestingly different

phenomenon has been brought to the surface: “perspectival plurality”, the phenomenon

whereby sentences containing two or more perspectival expressions require two or more

perspectives for their interpretation. To illustrate, imagine that Halloween has just passed

and the parents in the neighborhood have gathered to talk about what their kids did. When

Johnny’s parents’ turn comes, one of them utters

(1) Johnny played a silly prank and had a lot of tasty licorice.

In such a context, “tasty” should be interpreted with respect to Johnny’s perspective, but

“silly” shouldn’t (since he thought the prank was anything but): it should instead be

interpreted with respect to the speaker’s, or a third person’s, perspective. This example

shows that predicates of taste exhibit perspectival plurality. Similar readings are available for

the other expressions mentioned.

In this presentation, my aim is twofold. First, I motivate and defend the move to a novel

form of relativism: what I call “Multiple Indexing Relativism” – the view that not one, but a

sequence of perspectives has to be introduced in the circumstances of evaluation. (The

system is similar to the one proposed by Vlach (1973) for times and Cresswell (1990) for

possible worlds.) The main motivation to do so is that it neatly accounts for perspectival

plurality. The truth-conditions of the reading of (1) made salient above are as follows:

(2) [[Johnny played a silly

prank and had a lot of tasty

licorice]]

c, w, <p1[speaker], p2[Johnny]>

= 1 iff

Johnny played a silly prank in w according to the speaker’s perspective and had a lot

of tasty licorice in w according to Johnny’s perspective,

where “c” stands for context, “w” for possible world and pn[v] should be read as “v’s

perspective is the value of the pn-th perspective”. I defend the view by showing that multiple

indexing is already part of the traditional Kaplanian picture, that it helps solve pressing

problems related to communication and that complexity worries (raised, for example, by

Glanzberg (2007)) can be circumvented.

Second, I show how the view can account for perspectival plurality in more complex

linguistics environments. For example, both (3) and (4) have readings for the interpretation

of which two perspectives need to be provided:

(3) Every kid played a silly prank and had a lot of tasty licorice.

(4) The mother snipe thinks the ugliest baby birds are beautiful. (Sæbø, 2009: 337)

Accounting for perspectival plurality in such environments requires adopting a view on

quantification and attitude verbs that is compatible with relativism. Regarding the first,

Lasersohn’s (2008) “index binding” can be modified and adapted to a multiple indexing

framework by making binding in the index more selective – that is, as binding certain but not

all perspectives from the sequence. Regarding the second, a semantics for “think” and other

attitude verbs can be given so that certain, but not all perspectives in the sequence, fall

under it. With this extension, Multiple Indexing Relativism should come out as powerful

candidate for providing the semantics of perspectival expressions.

References

Cresswell, M. (1990). Entities and Indices. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Glanzberg, M. (2007). “Context, Content, and Relativism”, Philosophical Studies, 136

(1), 1-29.

Lasersohn, P. (2008). “Quantification and perspective in relativist semantics”,

Philosophical Perspectives, 22, 305–337.

Sæbø, K. J. (2009). “Judgment ascriptions”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 34, 327–

352.

Vlach, F. (1973). ‘Now’ and ‘then’: A formal study in the logic of tense anaphora. PhD

thesis, UCLA.

3. REBUTTING STALNAKER’S OBJECTIONS AGAINST LEWIS 1980

Max Kölbel, University of Vienna

In this talk, I intend to rebut Stalnaker’s 2018 objection to Lewis’s 1980 “Index theory”. In the

1980 paper, Lewis argued against Stalnaker and Kaplan’s view that a semantics should

assign intermediate semantic values (Kaplan’s “contents" and Stalnaker’s “propositions") as

interpretations of sentences in context. More specifically, Lewis argues that

the compositional semantic values of sentences cannot do double duty as Kaplanian

contents or Stalnakerian propositions as objects of assertion. He concludes from this that

there is no useful intermediate semantic value, and that semantics should simply take the

form of an “index theory”, i.e. assign functions from contexts and indices to extensions, and

do without the intermediate semantic objects.

Stalnaker agrees with Lewis’s premiss, i.e. that the compositional semantic values cannot

play the role of objects of assertion. But he does not accept the conclusion Lewis draws from

this: namely that propositions have no role to play in semantics. He argues that if

the compositional semantic values cannot play the role of assertoric objects, then the

conclusion should be that semantics needs objects of assertion in addition to compositional

semantics values (CSVs). He proposes that these can be determined by the CSVs. He also

claims that Lewis’s index theory fails to differentiate between someone who has the

knowledge about the context needed for interpreting an utterance and those who don’t.

I shall argue a) that the point on which Stalnaker agrees with Lewis 1980 is in fact

incorrect, and that Lewis came to see this error in close temporal proximity to his 1980

paper, i.e. in Lewis 1979. (That Lewis’ change of mind was a change from the view he

expressed in Lewis 1980 to the view he expressed in Lewis 1979, and not the other way

around, is clear from a footnote in the 1998 reprint of Lewis 1980.) I shall argue b) that

Stalnaker’s own preferred view of the relationship between CSVs and assertoric contents

(that the former determine the latter), a view shared, e.g., with Rabern 2012, entails that

separate assertoric contents are dispensable. This does not mean that there is a problem in

introducing dispensable assertoric contents, or that introducing them might not make a

theory of conversation more elegant. It simply means that Lewis is right about the

dispensability of intermediate semantic objects. I shall argue c) that Stalnaker’s

objection against Lewis’s index theory does not work. It does lead to a failure to recognise

the difference between understanding what was said and not understanding it.

References

Lewis, D. (1980). "Index, context, and content". In S. Kanger and S. Ohman (eds.),

Philosophy and Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in Lewis 1998, 21-44.

Lewis, D. (1998). Papers in Philosophical Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stalnaker, Robert (2019). "David Lewis on Context”. In D. Ball and B. Rabern (eds.), The

Science of Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

FOUNDATIONS OF MEANING AND COMMUNICATION

André Bazzoni, LOGOS / BIAP / Univ. Barcelona; Josep Macià, LOGOS / BIAP / Univ.

Barcelona; Neri Marsili, LOGOS / BIAP / Univ. Barcelona

This workshop will address several foundational issues regarding communication and its

connections with language and meaning.

General questions to be addressed by the talks include:

– What makes an act of communication successful?

– What types of commitment successful communication imposes on speakers? What is the

nature of such commitments?

– To what extent (if at all) can the notion of communication help illuminate the

semantics/pragmatics divide?

- Can speech acts be appropriately characterized in terms of the commitments that they

involve?

More specific questions related to the ones above include:

– Which specific conditions (if any) do proper names and other referential expressions

impose on the success of communicative acts involving them? What is the communicative

import of proper names? Does it differ from their semantic import?

– Is the stipulation of different levels of semantic value necessary for a correct account of

meaning?

– What characterizes the speech act of assertion? In what exactly consists the normative

nature of assertion? What is the relationship between assertion and truth?

The primary aim of the symposium is to promote a fruitful exchange between researchers

working in interconnected foundational issues in the philosophy of language, as well as the

general audience of SEFA 2019.

1. COMMUNICATING WITH NAMES: COMMITMENT AND SEMANTIC CONTENT

André Bazzoni, LOGOS / BIAP / Universitat de Barcelona

It is usually assumed that besides its being evaluable with respect to truth, the utterance of:

iv. Blorapnek is arriving on Tuesday.

actually commits the speaker to the truth of (1). The paradigm case in which an utterance of

(1) is deemed infelicitous is when the speaker (S) lacks any evidence for the fact that the

hearer (H)’s friend Mr. Blorapnek is arriving from Armenia on Tuesday (cf. Marsili’s talk in

this symposium).

There is, however, a different reason for infelicity in connection with an utterance of (1) by

S. Suppose indeed S knows of nothing at all called ‘Blorapnek’; she just heard in the news

that Blorapnek is arriving on Tuesday. Suppose further that H doesn’t know of anything

called ‘Blorapnek’ either. Now it seems that a more fundamental question than, “How do you

know?” is pressing H, namely, “What’s ‘Blorapnek’?” If S’s answer is along the lines of, “I

don’t know, I heard in the news that Blorapnek is arriving on Tuesday,” then (1) is arguably to

be deemed infelicitous—even though it turns out that the hurricane Blorapnek is arriving on

Tuesday.

At least two questions arise in connection with this second situation. First, why is the

associated assertion infelicitous? I will argue that infelicity stems from S’s lacking minimal

information about the referent of ‘Blorapnek’. In general, I will suggest that one cannot count

as a competent user of a name ‘N’ if one simply utters a cluster of sentences containing ‘N’

without being able to provide if requested any information about the referent of ‘N’. (See also

Macià’s talk in this symposium for a different view on this issue.)

It seems that in a sense H’s question (‘What’s ‘Blorapnek’?’) is more fundamental than

the one (‘How do you know?’) relevant to the first situation above. Now our second question

is, why is this so? The answer on offer here is that since H (just as S) is equipped with no

minimal information about the referent of ‘Blorapnek’, he cannot felicitously use the name in

the how-question, for the latter is an elliptic form of the full question, “How do you know that

Blorapnek is arriving?” The hearer is able but to mention the name felicitously in the what-

question above.

More general questions about the semantics of proper names might then ensue. Indeed,

our discussion suggests that names are introduced by linguistic communities as part of a

general linguistic system that must be learned by competent users of that system.

There is a difference in this respect from the case of assertion, in which the respective

felicity rule can be described in pragmatic terms. In the case of names it seems one cannot

postulate a purely pragmatic component associated with the minimal-information

commitment, for without being able to associate any such information with a name there

remains nothing to be learned about its semantic value.

One may roughly situate different theories of names with respect to the degree of

minimality involved in competent uses of a name according to each view. I will finish the talk

by presenting problems for some of those views.

2. WHAT DOES THE DATA REGARDING (UN)SUCCESFUL COMMUNICATION TELL US

ABOUT THE MEANING OF PROPER NAMES AND OTHER DIRECTLY REFERENTIAL

EXPRESSIONS?

Josep Macià, LOGOS / BIAP / University of Barcelona

Consider the following two scenarios (in the talk, we will consider some additional ones,

including Bazzoni’s “Blorapnek” example from his contribution to this symposium):

Case-1. George Orwell, the patient: A new patient who suffers from amnesia arrives at a

clinic. His doctor, Alex, names him ‘George Orwell’. Unknown to everyone in the clinic, the

patient happens to be George Orwell, the writer. Toni, who doesn’t know about the new

patient but who knows about the writer, tells Alex, “George Orwell wrote 1984.” Alex takes

Toni as intending to refer to the new patient. The name ‘George Orwell’ has the same syntax

and the same referent for both Alex and Toni. Even so, it seems clear that there was some

failure of communication between them. (Heck 1995)

Case-2. Sunny day in Edinburgh: I think that Ann knows that I am in Edinburgh, and I send

a WhatsApp message to her with the text “It is very sunny in here today”. Suppose, though,

that she does not know at all where I am. Then, it seems, there was lack of successful

communication.

One might think that these cases can help support a Fregean view of proper names and

indexicals. Say, in case-1, the hearer failed to grasp the sense that the speaker was

attaching to “Orwell” (‘the famous writer’).

I will argue that these cases, rather than forcing us to accept a Fregean view of the

expressions involved, help to bring to attention some important facts regarding the nature of

communication. I will focus on two:

- The existence of what I call the coordination requirement (that, very roughly put, requires

that there be the right kind of connection between the use of the word by the speaker and

the hearer) (Macià 2004). This will allow us to account for scenarios like our case-1.

- The fact that when speakers make an assertion (similarly for other speech acts) they

typically communicate several propositions in addition to the one that is the literal meaning

(in context) of the sentence that they uttered. I will argue, for instance, that in case-2, the

hearer does understand the main proposition meant by the speaker –the one that is the

literal meaning (in context) of the sentence uttered. It so happens, though, that the speaker

thought also that his utterance would bring the hearer to believe some additional

propositions –in particular, that it is sunny in the place called “Edinburgh”. And the speaker

believed furthermore that the hearer would be aware of this. Whether we should conclude

that this additional proposition was also meant or not (an interesting issue in itself, and one

for which Marsili’s presentation in this symposium is relevant), we should, in any case, grant

that it was a proposition that the speaker was assuming that it would be communicated to

the hearer; and, the fact that it was not, accounts for our intuition that communication was

not successful. Notice, finally, that this explanation is perfectly compatible with a direct

reference view regarding the meaning of proper names and indexicals, and, relatedly, with

the view that the proposition that was literally meant was a singular proposition.

References

Heck, Richard G. Jnr. 1995. “The Sense of Communication.” Mind 104: 79–106.

Macià, Josep. 2004. Proper names: Ideas and Chains. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34

(sup1):129-155.

3. ASSERTORIC COMMITMENT

Neri Marsili, LOGOS / BIAP / Universitat de Barcelona

Several philosophers argue that the speech act of asserting can be characterised in terms of

its distinctive normative consequences – a view that can be traced back to the work of C.S.

Pierce (Marsili 2015, Shapiro 2018). This paper aims to analyse the notion of assertoric

commitment, and how it relates with the act of asserting something. Building on previous

scholarship, I propose to characterise assertoric commitment as the conjunction of two

deontic notions – ‘accountability’ and ‘discursive responsibility’.

The notion of ‘accountability’ captures the fact that in asserting that p, the speaker

becomes reproachable if p turns out to be false. As Alston puts it, “the speaker “knowingly

takes on the liability to (lay herself open to) blame (censure, reproach, being taken to task,

being called to account), in case of not-p”. The notion of “discursive responsibility” is meant

to capture the independent fact that, in asserting p, the speaker confers some specific

conversational rights on the hearer: eminently, the right to demand that the speaker provides

justification for p in response to conversational challenges (for elaboration, see Brandom

1994, MacFarlane 2005).

After analysing in better detail the notions of accountability and discursive responsibility, I

will show that a definition of assertion incorporating both notions can draw the right

distinctions, differentiating genuine assertions from other illocutionary acts. I will then

proceed to consider some known arguments against commitment-based accounts of

assertion.

First, there are conversational contexts where it is possible to assert, but it seems that the

relevant commitments cannot obtain, because it is clear to all participants in the

conversation that it is not possible to challenge or criticise the assertion. Examples are

“written ‘speech’ acts or utterances which are on radio, television or are recorded, [… in

which] the audience is somewhat remote” and unable to reply (Bird 2002:13), cases in which

the hearer is physically unable to reply due to severe illness, temporary muteness, etc.

A second counterexample is presented by Goldberg (2013), who discusses ‘anonymous

assertions’: statements made anonymously on message boards or comment threads on the

internet. These assertions pose a problem for discursive responsibility because “when it is

mutually known by all parties that a claim was made under conditions of anonymity, this has

a diminishing effect on the sort of (assertion-generated) expectations that speakers and

hearers are entitled to have of one another” (Goldberg 2013:135).

A third problematic case is discussed by Hiller (2016:38-41): assertions accompanied by

a clause by means of which the speaker disavows discursive responsibility, as in (3-3’).

(3) There will be a downsizing in your department next week

(3’) But I won’t say more: do not ask me how I know it or why

I will argue that these three counterexamples can be defused by appealing to fine-

grained distinctions about what it means to be subject to an obligation in general, and to

‘discursive responsibility’ in particular.

CONTRIBUTED TALKS

AGENTIAL GUIDANCE, ACTION IDENTIFICATION, AND INTENTIONAL REPERTOIRES

Jesús H. Aguilar, Rochester Institute of Technology

A significant explanatory challenge for causalist models of agential guidance in any of their

systemic versions is to specify with some minimal precision which of the events belonging to

a complex agential network qualify as the action under guidance.

Just as whatever is exercising action guidance must preserve its identity throughout the

execution of the action, say, be the same sustaining intention, on the opposite side of the

controlling relationship the same action must be under the guidance of its agent. For

instance, in the case of a feedback agential system, the very same action must be

continuously related to its guiding agent through a feedback causal loop. This means that

throughout its execution the very same guided action must be causally connected to its

causal source, produce the intended consequences for which it was brought forth, and keep

informed whatever functions as the guiding control center about the status of the ongoing

performance. Moreover, for every modification during the execution of the guided action

there will be some corresponding informational exchanges increasing still the number of

events participating in the causal loop. This very complex network of causal events will go on

until the main intended goal of the action is accomplished.

Typically, for a causalist the identification of an action with an event like a bodily

movement is somewhat straightforward. The identification takes place in the form of some

specific correspondence between the content of the mental item that is causing the action

and the event that corresponds to the action. In such cases the identity of an action will

depend directly on the specific content of such antecedent mental item. However, in the

dynamic and complex causal context of guidance this strategy does not seem to work.

If the content of an antecedent mental item is going to play the role of identifying which

event or sequence of events is the guided action, such representational content has to be

flexible enough to allow for a whole array of potential event modifications that would qualify

as belonging to the same action. The only way in which this flexibility can be accounted for is

by the absence of content specificity. But then the idea that the corresponding content will

serve as the source of identification for an action under guidance loses its force. Now all we

have in the form of a guiding content is some sketchy action type linked to some general

goal. That is, an action type that is vague and flexible enough to accommodate the

necessary adjustments in the actual guiding performance. The problem with this loosening of

the relevant guiding content is that most guided actions are very specific and fine-tuned to

accomplish their goal. And, yet, if the corresponding guiding content is narrowed down by

making it very specific in the form of an equally specific action type, then the modifications

and adjustments that take place in guided actions would not be accounted for. Again, the

identification of the relevant action is lost. It appears then that in the case of agential

guidance both strategies to adjust the relevant content to the requirements of action

identification run into a dead end.

What may seem to be a metaphysical complication for causalist systemic models of

agency bears directly on the way in which such models are supposed to capture the relevant

mechanisms involved in action guidance, particularly those involved in the formation of

intentional repertoires containing the available types of actions that an agent may intend to

perform. Generating such intentional repertoires presupposes some way of distinguishing

the different types of actions in the form of some corresponding behavioral correlates. The

problem with the dynamic and yet exact nature of guided actions is that the corresponding

behavioral correlates are very hard to pin down for the reasons mentioned above. Therefore,

this problem makes the very formation of the relevant action-types that make up the

intentional repertoire of an agent a mystery, and, a fortiori, their use in providing guiding

intentions with their relevant content.

In this paper I explore the traditional ways in which causalists are inclined to offer a

systemic account of agency to deal with the problem of identifying a guided action by

appealing to the content of guiding intentions. I exhibit the limitations that such a traditional

strategy has when accounting for the relevant content of guiding intentions, in particular, the

negative impact that these limitations have in the case of accounting for the intentional

repertoires required to generate the production of an action. Nevertheless, I offer a positive

suggestion to cope with this problem by reviving a strategy often identified with the debate

between coarse-grained and fine-grained theories of action individuation; a strategy which

favors the earlier theories by introducing a key role for the description of actions. My claim is

that a similar strategy can relax the way in which the content of guiding intentions performs

its identifying work without running into the difficulties distinctive of agential guidance.

WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE HALLUCINATIONS?

Rami Ali, Lebanese American University

Visual hallucinations (henceforth I omit visual) have traditionally been characterized as

perceptual experiences that are phenomenally indistinguishable from perception but which

do not involve perceiving worldly objects. This characterization has troubled naive realists

who offer their view as an alternative to representationalism about perceptual experience

This is because according to naive realists perception is the sensory awareness of worldly

objects, and the phenomenal character of perception is (at least partly) constituted by

perceived worldly objects. While illusions seem to broadly fit the naive realist account,

hallucinations seem resistant since they do not involve perceived worldly objects. This has

led to various modifications of hallucinations as well as the adoption of disjunctivism by naive

realists.

But more recently some naive realists and naive realist-friendly views (Watzl 2010,

Raleigh 2014, Ali 2018, Masrour 2019) have argued that we should reject the idea that

hallucinations involve no perceived worldly objects. If these views are right, this would pave

the way for common-factor naive realism, a view on which all perceptual experience involves

perception. In what follows I contribute to this new understanding of hallucinations. I consider

one set of obstacles facing these views––focusing on hallucinatory objects––and offer a

solution.

References

Ali, Rami. 2018. “Does Hallucinating involve Perceiving?” Philosophical Studies 175 (3) 601-

627.

Masrour, Farid. 2019. “On the Possibility of Hallucinations”, Mind fzy088,

https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzy088

Raleigh, Thomas. 2014. “A New Approach to “Perfect” Hallucinations.” Journal of

Consciousness Studies, 21(11-12), 81–110.

Watzl, Sebastian. 2010. The Significance of Attention. Columbia University. Retrieved from

http:// gradworks.umi.com/34/47/3447994.html

EXTENDING KNOWLEDGE HOW: ABILITIES AND SELF-REGULATION

Gloria Andrada, IFILNOVA/UAM

According to the extended cognition theory, cognition can radically extend beyond the

bounds of the biological agent and comprise some of the artifacts and gadgets that they

pervasively interact with. Cognition thus can ‘extend’ beyond the familiar bounds of skin and

skull.

During the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the extent to which

knowledge and not only cognition can be extended. Carter and Czarnecki (2016) and Carter

and Poston (2018) argue that knowledge-how can be extended in virtue of the hybridization

of the categorical base or seat of an ability.

In this paper, I argue that their view falls prey to the delineation problem and the cognitive

bloat objection. A straightforward answer to the question concerning what makes an action

an intelligent action is that the agent knows how to do it. The problem is that if we endorse a

simple ability view on extended knowledge-how, then there seems to be nothing that

distinguishes abilities from states of knowledge-how. This is worrisome given that intuitively

when we attribute knowledge-how to somebody, we are attributing a state that is more

cognitively demanding and more epistemically valuable than the mere possession of an

ability to do something. That is why, according to the delineation problem, if knowing how to

do something means having the ability to do it, then we cannot properly delineate between

actions that are intelligent and actions that are not. Moreover, if all it takes for extending

knowledge-how is the hybridization of the seat of an ability, then knowledge how is extended

far too indiscriminately. This takes us to the cognitive bloat.

In order to overcome these objections, I propose the self-regulated ability view on

extended knowledge-how drawing from Elzinga (2018). In this view, an agent knows how to

do something when they possess an ability to do something together with the capacity to

self-regulate their action. This allows me to solve the delineation problem. On the other

hand, I show how knowledge-how is genuinely extended by attending to the structure of

cognitive abilities and to the mechanisms underlying self-regulation in cognitive psychology. I

use this to block the cognitive bloat objection. I finish by illustrating my account on extended

knowledge-how with some examples.

References

Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David J. (1998). The extended mind.>

Analysis

>58 (1):7-19.

Carter, J. Adam & Czarnecki, Bolesław (2016). Extended Knowledge-How.>

Erkenntnis

>81

(2):259-273.

Carter, J. Adam & Poston, Ted (2018).

A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-How

. Blooms-

bury Academic.

Elzinga, Benjamin (2018). Self-Regulation and Knowledge How.

Episteme

15 (1):119-140.

DOING WITHOUT STRUCTURAL REPRESENTATIONS

Marc Artiga, Universitat de València

Despite the fact that the notion of a representation is a cornerstone of cognitive science, a

definition of this central concept remains elusive. In this paper I would like to concentrate on

the notion of 'Structural representation' (or 'S-representation'), which has become a recent

focus of attention in the specialized literature. Very roughly, a particular cognitive mechanism

M is a structural representation of S iff (1) there is a homomorphism between M and S

(roughly, a mapping between relations in M and relations in S) and (2) some cognitive

mechanism uses this homomorphism to behave adaptively (O'Brien and Opie, 2004;

Ramsey, 2007; Gadziejewski and Milkowski, 2017). Crucially, the notion of S-representation

has recently been employed to distinguish the set of genuine representations from the

category of receptors, that is, those internal mechanisms that reliably correlate with certain

environmental features but which, according to these authors, should not qualify as proper

representations. Thus, the concept of S-representation plays a fundamental role in recent

attempts to defend a form of representationalism that can escape the objection of being too

liberal, i.e. attributing representations to many processes that intuitively lack them.

This paper has two main goals. On the one hand, I will argue that the notion of S-

representation fails to appropriately specify a theoretically significant kind of cognitive

phenomenon (which, a fortiori, implies that it fails as a criterion of demarcation for the

category of 'cognitive representation'). On the other hand, I will offer a set of alternative

concepts that are in a better position to draw important distinctions between cognitive

representations and, accordingly, might be more suitable for playing the theoretical role that

the concept of S-representation is supposed to fulfill.

The main argument against the notion of S-representation has the form of a dilemma.

More precisely, I will argue that the previous definition can be understood in at last two ways

and that neither of them provides a satisfactory and significant distinction between cognitive

phenomena that can underpin the distinction between genuine representations and mere

receptors. On the one hand, if the notion of S-representation is understood as merely

requiring that there is a homomorphism between a cognitive mechanism M and a structure S

and that M is exploited to behave appropriately, then mere receptors seem to satisfy this

requirement (Morgan, 2014). A mechanism that can be in two states, which reliably covary

with certain world events exemplifies a homomorphism that the system employs to deal with

the environment.

To avoid this result, one could provide a more restrictive interpretation of the notion of S-

representation, according to which the use of the homomorphism mentioned in (2) above

necessarily implies using the relations between M off-line in order to learn about S. The

problem with this interpretation, however, is that it is too narrow, since processes that clearly

should be classified as representations (even as 'structural representations', in an important

sense of the term) would be excluded, such as waggle dances produced by bees or certain

kinds of cognitive maps. Therefore, a broad understanding of S-representation is too liberal

because it does not exclude mere receptors, and a more restrictive interpretation is too

narrow since it excludes clear cases of representations. Consequently, the notion of S-

representation cannot satisfactorily play the theoretical role that some philosophers are

suggesting, namely to distinguish genuine representations from mere detectors.

Of course, this negative result should not be taken to imply that there are no interesting

differences between mere receptors and more complex forms of representation. In the final

part of my presentation I will point at some notions that, in combination, are in a better

position the make some important distinctions between cognitive processes. I think that at

least two notions are specially relevant in that respect: first, the distinction between what we

might call 'structural productivity' (the capacity to produce new meaningful representations

by employing some form of combinatorial syntax) and 'lexical productivity' (the capacity to

produce new meaningful atomic representations), since receptors typically exhibit the latter,

whereas more complex cognitive processes such as cognitive maps often employ the

former. Secondly, the distinction between mere exploitability and actual exploitation of

relations between representations (Shea, 2018). I will argue that these concepts are much

more useful for cutting the nature of cognitive representations at its joints than the concept of

S-representation.

References

Gladziejewski, P. and M. Milkowski (2017) Structural representations: causally relevant and

different from detectors. Biology and Philosophy 32(3): 337-355.

Morgan, A. (2014) Representations gone mental. Synthese, 191(2): 123- 214

O'Brien, G. and J. Opie (2004) Notes Towards a Structuralist Theory of Mental

Representation. In Hugh Clapin, Phillip Staines and Peter Slezak (eds.),

Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Elsevier. 1-20.

Ramsey, W. (2007) Representation Reconsidered. Cambdridge University Press.

Shea, M. (2018) Representation in Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press.

MENTAL ILLNESS: NOSOLOGICAL VALIDATION AND REALITY

Virginia Ballesteros, Universitat de València

This talk aims to address the problem of nosological validation in psychiatry, presenting the

fundamental lines of its development since the seventies, exposing its relationship with the

reality of mental illness and reflecting on its limits. The question of the validation of

psychiatric classifications involves not only empirical but also philosophical problems, as it is

based on numerous metaphysical assumptions. Broadly speaking, we can delineate two

conceptions of nosological validation: pragmatic and realistic. The first equals validity and

utility: a diagnostic category should be considered valid if it is useful for certain purposes; the

second establishes that a diagnostic category can only be validated if the real entities that

fall under it are discovered. It is this realistic conception that prevailed in psychiatric research

and also marked clinical practice.

The path followed by medically oriented psychiatry was to develop a set of criteria for the

validation of mental illnesses and also for their diagnosis - a project that culminated in 1980

with the introduction of the third version of the well-known DSM. This laid the foundations for

the medical paradigm of mental illness, especially in the field of research, which had a good

set of strong realistic metaphysical assumptions: mental illness was characterized as a

natural class, existing independently of classifications, clearly delineated in the structure of

the natural world. Likewise, mental illnesses were considered to be clearly delimited from

normality, presupposing a natural fact that marked certain symptoms or syndromes as

pathological. Furthermore, together with the take-off of neurosciences in the 1990s, mental

illness was conceptualized as a brain disease: although psychiatric writings are usually

ambiguous about the metaphysical mind-body relationship, it is easy to find in them positions

ranging from some version of type identity theory to eliminativism. All this led to the

understanding of nosological validation as the discovery of the reality of mental illness––the

discrete, biological, natural entities behind classification.

Faced with this realistic approach, I will explore the limits that the natural world presents

for the classification of mental illnesses and I will advocate a reformulation of realism that

takes into account the reality of mental illness also as a social fact.

ERRORS OF REASONING IN MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS?

Cristina Barés Gómez, Universidad de Sevilla; Matthieu Fontaine, Centro de Filosofia

das Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa

What can be considered as an error of medical diagnosis? If medical diagnosis is taken to

be a kind of reasoning, then error of diagnosis is probably an error of reasoning. We usually

refer to errors of reasoning as fallacies. Therefore, we might try to define error of medical

diagnosis in terms of fallacies. But such a strategy is doomed to fail if we do not specify what

is a fallacy and which kind of fallacy would we be concerned here with. Our point is to show

that when non‐standard (i.e. non‐deductive) criteria of correctness of reasoning are taken

into account, inferences that are sometimes considered are fallacies are not and can even

display some kind of pragmatic and cognitive virtue. This is indeed the case of abductive

reasoning, which allows acting despite a persisting state of ignorance. We will argue that,

concerning the inferences at stake in medical diagnosis, we should not blame the physicist

on the basis of deductive criteria of error or for his action in a state of relative ignorance.

More concretely, medicine is considered as an experimental science. In fact, we may explain

various processes by taking into account the symptoms, or signs, displayed by a person who

is not in a well‐being state, and finally think in the illnesses which cause them. We usually

distinguish between two types of medical diagnosis. First is an inductive probability based

diagnosis. This is a quite common diagnosis very often used in statistical programs or

methods in diagnosis. The second one is the causal reasoning for etiological diagnosis. This

one is endorsed by the doctors who generate a set of hypotheses and then they test them.

This is the one we are interested in. The hypothesis is about a malady which is usually

tested and confirmed or refuted.

Nevertheless, is it always like this? If we check the history of medical diagnosis (Barés

2018), and even nowadays medical diagnosis, the testing step does not always occur. So, if

we do not test the hypothesis, it is still an experimental reasoning? Which kind of reasoning

are we talking about? Our point is to analyze the medical reasoning without test by giving

concrete examples.

First we define what is an experimental reasoning following Claude Bernard (1966) and

we conclude that even without test we are in front of an experimental reasoning. But what

kind of reasoning? Second, we introduce a model to analyse the causal reasoning in medical

diagnosis that take into account the test. This is ST model for medical diagnosis (Magnani

2001). This model considers that we are in front of a first abductive step that is completed

with other inferential steps. When we introduce the clinical trials we arrive into what he calls

a cycle of abduction/deduction‐induction. Nevertheless, as we have said before, the

diagnosis is not always followed by the clinical trial due to practical or financial problems.

Usually we have limited resources and the diagnosis lacks of testing reliability. In this case,

we are in front of a conjecture that is not confirmed and we continue acting in an ignorance

preserving way. Such inferences have nevertheless a cognitive virtue. For this cases, we will

use and compare ST‐ model with GW model for abduction applied to medical diagnosis.

Abduction is considered as an inference that is not deduction, either induction. The

canonical definition is due to Peirce (Collected Papers 5.189):

The surprising fact C is observed.

But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.

Hence there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Actually, we will consider medical diagnosis in terms of “full abduction”, in the sense of

Gabbay and Woods (Woods 2013). It consists in setting a conjecture that is followed by an

action, that is to say, by treating the patient in an ignorance preserving way. We are in front

of an inference from the best explanation that is still a conjecture. The conjectural aspect

carries us to the problem of maybe is a well decision, but it could be the wrong malady.

After establish that the medical diagnosis with test is still a reasoning (experimental

reasoning) and an abduction, we will enter into the debate about what is an error of

reasoning. In medical diagnosis, we talk about an error of reasoning when we have a wrong

diagnosis. Nevertheless, we need to specify what exactly a good reasoning is in a

nondeductive inference. The point is that we are not actually in front of an error of reasoning

when we talk about a wrong diagnosis, but just in a non‐confirmed hypothesis.

References

Barés Gómez, Cristina, and Fontaine, Matthieu. 2019 (forthcoming) “Between Sentential and

Model‐Based Abduction: a Dialogical Approach”. Logic Journal of the IGPL.

Barés Gómez, Cristina. 2018. Abduction in Akkadian Medical Diagnosis. Journal of Applied

Logics ‐ IfCoLog 5(8): 1697‐1722.

Bernard, Claude. 1966. Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale. Paris: Garnier‐

Flammarion.

Magnani, Lorenzo. 2001. Abduction, Reason, and Science. Processes of Discovery and

Explanation. Cham: Springer.

Woods, John. 2013.

Errors of Reasoning. Naturalizing the Logic of Inference

. London: Col-

lege Publications.

LIBERTAD, RESPONSABILIDAD MORAL Y ALTERNATIVAS DE ACCIÓN: UNA CRÍTICA

A LA TEORÍA COMPATIBILISTA DE DANIEL DENNETT

José Óscar Benito Vicente

Daniel Dennett ha defendido en múltiples ocasiones (1984, 1992, 2001, 2004) que, aunque

la teoría compatibilista respecto al libre albedrío fuera cierta y viviéramos en un mundo

causalmente cerrado, la ausencia de alternativas no pondría en peligro el carácter agencial

de las personas ni su responsabilidad moral. Así, al examinar la célebre afirmación de

Lutero ante el emperador Carlos V en la Dieta de Worms (“Aquí estoy, y no puedo hacer

otra cosa”), tanto compatibilistas como libertaristas podrían concordar en que, con ella,

Lutero no estaba tratando de eludir su responsabilidad; más bien, estaría afirmando que su

conciencia le forzaba a actuar precisamente del modo en que estaba haciéndolo. En un

caso como este -señala Dennett- veríamos claramente que no eximiríamos de culpa o de

mérito a alguien simplemente porque pensáramos que no podría haber hecho otra cosa.

Sin embargo, tal y como el propio Dennett reconoce, un libertarista podría alegar que la

decisión de Lutero fue moralmente relevante precisamente porque sí podría haber hecho

otra cosa: quizá, en última instancia, podría haber traicionado sus convicciones y haberse

resignado a acatar la autoridad del Papa y el Emperador. Por ello, Dennett propone un

ejemplo alternativo en el que claramente nos encontramos en un universo determinista: un

maratón de partidas de ajedrez entre computadores. Cuando se enfrentan dos de ellos -

argumenta- sólo puede pasar lo que, de hecho, pasa; pero ello no implica que este sea un

mundo sin prevención, sin ataque y defensa, sin oportunidades perdidas, sin el toma y daca

de la agencia genuina y sin auténticas posibilidades. Dennett afirma que la determinación

de su mundo no les priva de sus diferentes capacidades y habilidades para aprovecharse

de las oportunidades que se les presentan y que, por ello, dicho mundo no estaría tampoco

exento de autoría y mérito.

Dennett reconoce que un computador de ajedrez sería un agente demasiado simple

como para ser candidato plausible a un libre albedrío moralmente significativo. Y

agudamente señala que, posiblemente, la diferencia más importante entre este tipo de

artefactos y las personas, más allá de su superior grado de complejidad, es que las

personas tienen creencias que influyen en su comportamiento; y que, más concretamente,

suelen tener la creencia de que son libres y responsables. Y dado que no contamos con

libertad y responsabilidad moral desde nuestro nacimiento, sino que las vamos adquiriendo

de forma progresiva, es perfectamente posible admitir que un agente libre y responsable,

que considera que el futuro es “abierto” y depende de él”, puede haber surgido a partir de

un agente no responsable que siempre actuó en el pasado de la única forma en que podía

hacerlo. Libertad y determinismo no serían, por tanto, incompatibles.

Ahora bien, y tal y como puntualiza Dennett, el éxito de esta maniobra depende en buena

medida de tengamos la creencia de que disponemos de libre albedrío: “Es muy probable-

acepta Dennett- que el hecho de creer que se tiene libre albedrío sea una de las

condiciones necesarias para tener libre albedrío: un agente que gozara de las otras

condiciones necesarias -racionalidad y capacidad de autocontrol y de introspección de

orden superior-, pero que fuera inducido engañosamente a creer que carece de libre

albedrío, estaría tan inhabilitado por dicha creencia para elegir libre y responsablemente

como por la falta de cualquiera de las otras condiciones” (1992, p. 191).

Incluso desde una perspectiva libertarista, en la que yo mismo me situaría, es posible

coincidir con Dennett en muchos de los puntos que defiende. En primer lugar, parece

razonable aceptar la idea de que nos constituimos como agentes libres y responsables de

forma gradual, tanto a nivel ontogenético como filogenético. Por ello mismo, parece también

sensato aceptar que nuestra libertad no es, ni puede llegar a ser, absolutamente

independiente de todo tipo de condicionamiento. Un libertarista también podría aceptar que

no es necesario que en todo momento tengamos alternativas para que se nos pueda

considerar responsables de una cierta acción y, desde luego, coincidiría con Dennett en

señalar la importancia de la creencia en nuestra propia libertad para que esta sea posible.

Sin embargo, considero que existen ciertas debilidades en los argumentos de Dennett,

que trataré de mostrar en la presente comunicación. En primer lugar, defenderé que los

conceptos de “agencia” o “autoría” pierden buena parte de su sentido original en un mundo

determinista, lo que quedará de manifiesto al examinar con más detalle la analogía que

Dennett establece con las computadoras de ajedrez. Señalaré asimismo que el mérito y la

responsabilidad moral se difuminan si aceptamos una postura compatibilista, y que la

posibilidad de crear alternativas, establecer fines y tomar en consideración valores morales

supera los límites de una racionalidad estrictamente instrumental, como la que parece

defender Dennett. Finalmente argumentaré que, al aceptar que creer que soy libre es un

requisito fundamental para poder llegar a serlo, Dennett está incurriendo en una curiosa

paradoja: dado que creer que somos libres implica, como el propio Dennett reconoce, la

capacidad de proponernos metas y ejercitarnos en el desarrollo de un cierto carácter, y que

el compatibilismo defiende que nuestro futuro está causalmente determinado y que no

disponemos de auténticas alternativas, parece que la creencia en el compatibilismo

supondría un serio problema para poder llegar a ser libres (incluso entendiendo esa libertad

en un sentido estrictamente compatibilista). De forma paralela, la responsabilidad moral, tal

y como la entiende Dennett, sólo sería posible gracias a nuestra ignorancia acerca de cómo

van a desarrollarse (necesariamente) los acontecimientos, y de nuestra creencia (falsa,

según el compatibilista) de que tenemos verdaderas alternativas de acción.

References

Dennett, Daniel. 1984. “I Could Not Have Done Otherwise - So What?”. The Journal of

Philosophy 81: 553-67.

Dennett, Daniel. 1992. La libertad de acción. Barcelona: Gedisa.

Dennett, Daniel. 2004. La evolución de la libertad. Barcelona: Paidós.

Taylor, Christopher y Daniel Dennett. 2001. “Who is afraid of Determinism? Rethinking

Causes and Possibilities”. En The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, editado por Robert

Kane, 257-277. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

IS LOGIC REVISABLE? THE WRONG KIND OF QUESTION

Mathieu Berteloot, UC Louvain

Is logic revisable? If we take anti-exceptionalism about logic (Priest 2016; Williamson 2017)

as the state of the art in the philosophy of logic, then the answer is yes. Anti-exceptionalists

hold that logic is continuous with science both in its subject matter and in its methods.

Therefore we should conceive of logic as theory. Theories are accepted by rational theory-

choice. Evidential standards are empirical adequacy, strength, simplicity, unifying power etc.

Theories that do better with respect to the standards of theory-choice ought to replace – that

means revise – worse theories. In the context of theory-choice, ought implies can; hence,

logic is revisable. Let’s call this the revisionist position.

However, the statement that logic is revisable should not pass for the obvious. In some

unpublished lectures in the 1970s, Saul Kripke has criticized notions like ‘adopting' or

‘revising' a logic (Berger 2011). He opposes the very idea that logic can be adopted or

revised in the same way as a scientific theory. Logical reasoning is constituted by inferential

principles, not by empirical hypotheses. According to Berger’s reading, changing a logic

cannot mean anything else than correcting reasoning mistakes or developing new formal

linguistic means to describe deductive validity. So if we take the Kripke notes as the state of

the art in the philosophy of logic, then the answer is no. Let’s call this the conservative

position.

My thesis is that the question cannot be answered in a straightforward way for revision is

an ambiguous notion. Both the revisionist party and the conservative party mean something

else with ‘revision’ of logic given their respective presuppositions on the subject matter of

deductive logic. So with respect to proposed cases of logical revision the question of

revisability merely induces verbal disputes between revisionist and conservative. In the

revisionist sense it is almost trivial that logic is revisable. In the conservative sense there is a

good case to make against revisability of logic.

I will start with rehearsing the arguments of – what I consider – the best representatives

of the revisionist and conservative position respectively: the anti-exceptionalists versus those

who have worked out Kripke’s ideas. Here it will become clear that both parties understand

quite different things when they discuss examples of purported logical revision. I will identify

some types of verbal disputes that will arise from these examples, and the associated

strategies that the conservative would take to explain away a case as a genuine revision.

Where the revisionist would say that there is revision, the conservative may reply that the

proposed logic

v. is a correction of logic: the case of classical logic as a successor to syllogistic.

vi. is an extension of logic: the case of many-valued logics.

vii. only contains a particular fragment of valid deductive inference: the case of relevant

logics.

viii. is a linguistic change: the case of free logics.

ix. does not have deductive inference within its scope: the case of conditional logic.

The following step is to make the point harder in the sense that no substantive dispute is

possible. I will argue that the revisionist and the conservative are respectively committed to

two distinct presuppositions about the subject matter of logic. Both presuppositions seem

equally permissible, but both will lead to different conclusions about whether logic is

revisable.

The aim of deductive logic is to capture validity – the property of truth-preserving

inference. The revisionist presupposition is that deductive validity can be recovered from

theory. A formal logical theory consists of a formally defined language, a formal semantics,

and a proof theory or decision method. The proof theory or decision method determines

whether a proposed argument is valid or not. The obvious application of a formal theory is

that it is interpreted with respect to a context of reasoning to evaluate proposed arguments

and to regiment that reasoning practice.

The conservative presupposition is that deductive validity can be recovered from practice.

Agents aim to reason deductively using natural language. The epistemic notion of truth-

preserving inference arguably arises from the desire of an agent to force the spectator into

accepting a conclusion as true, when they accept the premises as true (Dutilh Novaes

2015). In other words, an inference is considered to be deductively valid iff ‘for all situations’

the conclusion is true whenever the premises are true. Validity is accordingly determined by

which facts ‘follow from’ which. Note that some constitutive principles of inference, like

modus ponens or universal instantiation, are required here to make this consequence

relation ‘following from’ meaningful in the first place.

The crucial observation is that each presupposition implies a distinct notion of validity: (i)

a theory-relative formal notion of validity – deductive inference is accordingly a mathematical

property; (ii) a practice-based material notion of validity – the property of deductive inference

is grounded in facts and constitutive inferential principles. The logician as theory-builder

wants to capture material validity with the help of formal validity for some context of

reasoning – such facts count as his evidence. Nonetheless, both notions of validity, that

revisionist and conservative respectively have in mind when talking about revision, are

distinct.

So under the revisionist presupposition, theory-change entails revision simply when there

are nontrivial formal differences between two theories and the new theory is more adequate

for instance in capturing deductive inference for the intended contexts of reasoning. Under

the conservative presupposition, revision would mean that we change something about

which facts follow from which, or give a different meaning to that consequence relation. Yet,

in the former case, we cannot revise facts, we can only be wrong about them; in the latter

case, even though their application is fallible, it seems that we cannot dispense with the

constitutive inferential principles that give meaning to deductive consequence. So in that

sense logic seems not revisable.

Finally, I will revisit the described verbal disputes i.-v. The insights about the distinct

conservative presupposition help to explain why the conservative always has a strategy at

hand to explain away cases of purported revision.

References

Berger, Alan. 2011. “Kripke on the Incoherency of Adopting a Logic.” In Saul Kripke, edited

by Alan Berger, 177-207. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Duthil Novaes, Catarina. 2015. “A Dialogical, Multi-agent Account of the Normativity of

Logic.” Dialectica 69 (4): 587-609.

Priest, Graham. 2016. "Logical Disputes and the a Priori.” Princípios: Revista de Filosofia 23

(4): 29-57.

Williamson, Timothy. 2017. “Semantic Paradoxes and Abductive Methodology.” The

Relevance of the Liar, edited by Bradley Armour-Garb, 325-346. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

MUTUAL GROUNDING FOR WEAK MATHEMATICAL STRUCTURALISM (WMS): THE

‘IDENTITY PROBLEM’ RECONSIDERED

Silvia Bianchi, University School for Advanced Studies (IUSS), Pavia

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce what will be called Weak Mathematical

Structuralism (WMS) as further position within the mathematical structuralist debate. WMS

provides a more moderate understanding of Shapiro’s (1997) ante rem structuralism and is

considerably based on a mutual – though not properly symmetric – notion of grounding.

Whereas Shapiro’s (1997) account is committed to a background ontology of mathematical

structures and reduces the nature of individual objects to mere positions in these structures,

WMS applies a non-eliminative approach to both objects and structures.

Shapiro understands mathematical objects in terms of a ‘places-are-objects’ perspective,

in which (empty) places may qualify as legitimate objects. This leads to a typical criticism,

i.e. the identity problem concerning structures with non-trivial automorphisms, composed by

distinct mathematical objects that appear as structurally indiscernible (+ 1 and -1 in the

relative number structure and +i and - i in the complex number structure).

I will propose a variation of the ‘places-are-objects’ perspective in which mathematical

objects are something more than mere positions, but something less than the thicker objects

which occupy these positions in the concrete systems. I will define such objects thin

mathematical objects and describe them as providing a possible solution to the identity

problem.

In contrast to Shapiro’s purely structural entities, which possess structural properties only,

thin objects are endowed with both structural and non-structural properties. In this

framework, I will refer to non-structural properties in terms of kind properties (the properties

which qualify numbers as natural, relative, rational, etc.). Such properties, even though do

not determine their essential identity as individuals, will be useful to introduce them as

numerically distinguished relata, conceivable independently of the structure they belong to.

I will now delineate WMS starting from Wigglesworth’s (2018) formulation of ante rem

structuralism in terms of grounding. In Wigglesworth’s proposal, structures are identified with

unlabelled graphs, composed by nodes and edges between the nodes. On that view, the

identity of objects is partially grounded in the identity of all the other objects in the same

structure and fully grounded in the identity of the structure they belong to. I will handle the

second assumption, that accounts for the relation between objects and structures.

Although Wigglesworth understands this relation as asymmetrical, I advance an

alternative notion, which I shall define Mutual Grounding. This is expressed by two distinct

grounding claims holding at the same time, Object Identity and Structure Existence. A third

Structure Identity claim will specify the identity criteria of structures independently of objects.

I will firstly present the Object Identity claim:

Object Identity: objects are fully grounded in the structure for their identity (a) but not for

their existence (b).

The comparison between mathematical structuralism and graph theory allows grasping thin

mathematical objects more in detail. In this conception, objects can be understood as

unlabelled and edgeless nodes in graph, as illustrated in the following figure:

G: ○ ○

These nodes are interchangeable, because they can be permuted while leaving the graph

unchanged; hence, their identity as individuals is solely determined by the graph G, as

required by Object Identity (a). However, Objects Identity (b) holds as well, since relations

require things to stand in the relations – the nodes in question cannot collapse into one

another, because they are discernible as far as their (non-structural) kind properties are

concerned.

On this basis, two definitions of thin mathematical objects can be outlined:

1. thin objects are things whose essential identity is grounded in the relevant structure,

but whose existence must be acknowledged if relations are to be posited.

2. Thin objects are things that (in addition to their structural properties) possess also non-

structural kind properties.

Let us now consider the Structure Existence claim:

Structure Existence: structures are fully grounded in individual objects for their existence

(a) but not for their identity (b).

Concerning Structure Existence (a), the basic idea is that without distinct things existing

metaphysically prior to the structure, there is nothing to stand in the relations that are

supposed to confer individuality on the relata. At the same time, the identity of structures is

to be settled independently of objects themselves, in accordance with Structure Existence

(b). This introduces the third Structure Identity claim:

Structure Identity: structures are fully grounded in their isomorphism classes for their

identity.

As acknowledged by Wigglesworth, the identity of structures does not depend on the identity

of objects––which can be permuted while leaving the graph unchanged––but on the

operation of adding or removing an edge, that would result in a different graph. In a nutshell,

consistently with Shapiro’s (1997) definition of structures, the identity of graphs is

determined by their isomorphism classes, where no concrete systems are at play.

On the one hand, thin mathematical objects as defined in Object Identity and Structure

Existence appear substantial enough to be introduced in the structural ontology.

Significantly, this conception provides a possible response to the identity problem,

distinguished from those already proposed in the literature: thin objects have been

elaborated as things existing metaphysically prior to the structure and being numerically

distinguished in virtue of their non-structural kind properties. This seems to hold in some

cases of non-trivial automorphisms as well: in the relative numbers structure, the numbers

+1 and -1 are discernible because +1 belongs to the natural numbers kind, that is a subset

of the relative numbers kind.

On the other hand, the introduction of thin objects in the ontology does not commit to

eliminative structuralism, in which abstract structures depend on the concrete systems

instantiating them. By contrast, thin objects are also weak enough to preserve an ante rem

individuation of structures, as showed by the Structure Identity claim.

To sum up, WMS is presented as a middle-ground position which attempts to overcome

some difficulties of ante rem structuralism (i.e. the identity problem) without abandoning its

main intuitions (i.e. the priority of abstract structures).

References

Ladyman, L., Leitgeb., H. 2008. ‘Criteria of Identity and Structuralist Ontology’. Philosophia

Mathematica, 16: 388-396.

Linnebo, Ø. 2008. ‘Structuralism and the Notion of Dependence’. Philosophical Quarterly, 58

(230), 381-398.

Shapiro, S. 1997. Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Wigglesworth, J. (2018), ‘Grounding in Mathematical Structuralism’, in Bliss, R. and Priest,

G. (eds.) Reality and its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

A DISPOSITIONALIST ACCOUNT OF SYMMETRIES AND CONSERVATION LAWS

Bruno Borge, University of Buenos Aires - CONICET

There are three main frameworks to account for the metaphysics of laws of nature: humean

supervenience, the governing views, and dispositionalism. According to the first, laws are a

specific type of regularities in the humean mosaic: they are the ones described by the

axioms (and theorems) of the best systematization of the world that combines (and

balances) simplicity and strength. In governing accounts, the laws are metaphysically robust

—they govern/produce and (metaphysically) explain the regularities. According to

dispositionalism, natural regularities are explained by fundamental, sparse, powerful

properties. Dispositional accounts can be realist or anti-realist about laws. Each of these

metaphysical frameworks faces some difficulties in accounting for the role of symmetries and

conservation laws in modern physics. The reason for this is that, in the dominant

understanding of symmetries, they are in a very particular relation with some natural

properties and fundamental particles. An example of the first kind is the case of rest mass

and spin. On the one hand, they are considered as fundamental, that is, as part of the

ontological bedrock of the world. The very notion of (absolute/relative) fundamentality is

(almost) universally unpacked in terms of (absolute/relative) independence (Cf. Tahko

2018a, Bliss and Priest 2018, and Tahko 2018b for an exception). For this and other

reasons, fundamental properties such as rest mass and spin are considered to be

independent of (more fundamental than) features that belong to higher levels of the

hierarchical order of reality. In particular, they are thought to be independent of regular

dynamical laws, conservation laws and the relevant symmetry (the global Poincaré

symmetry). However, on the other hand, as Wigner (1939) famously showed, computing all

the irreducible representations of the Poincare group on the space of states of elementary

particles generates a classification of all elementary particles in terms of their mass and spin.

So rest mass and spin can be identified via a symmetry-based procedure. As French (2018:

7) puts it, they seem to ‘drop out’ of this particular symmetry. To sum up: on the one hand,

symmetries look as descriptions (or more precisely: specific constraints to our descriptions)

of the fundamental aspects of the world, so they seem to depend upon the fundamental

entities; on the other hand, the fundamental entities, for the given reasons, seem to depend

upon the relevant symmetries.

In the debate on the metaphysics of laws of nature, some take the way of a radical

solution to this issue. French advocates for a reverse-engineering of dispositionalism:

“whereas the dispositionalist takes the laws to arise from or be dependent in some way upon

the properties … I shall invert that order, taking the properties to be dependent upon the

laws and symmetries” (2014: 264-64). In fact, French favors an eliminative version of ontic

structural realism that eliminates everything but structure from the ontology. In the friends of

powers team, Bird’s radical move is to “regard symmetry principles as pseudo-laws”. The

hope is that “symmetry principles and conservation laws will be eliminated [from future

science]” (2007: 229).

In this talk, I put forward a moderate solution within the dispositionalist framework, based

on a novel notion of ontological dependence. It permits accounting for the determining role of

symmetries and conservation laws in modern physics without abandoning the intuition that

dispositional properties are ontologically prior to everything else in nature.

The orthodoxy takes ontological dependence as a strict partial order, that is,

as irreflexive, transitive and antisymmetric. Each of these formal features has been

questioned in the recent literature. In particular, some authors argued that dependence

should be conceived as non-symmetric, rather than antisymmetric (e.g. Thompson 2016,

Barnes 2018). I hope to show that the case of symmetries constitutes an additional reason

that makes that claim plausible. However, the assumption that ontological dependence is

non-symmetric is often taken to imply some undesirable consequences to the standard view

on fundamentality, that is, the idea that reality comes in ordered “levels” or “layers”. To avoid

that result, I put forward an original analysis of the notion of dependence that combines two

existing hyperintensional strategies to characterize it: via essence (Fine 1995) and via

explanation (Schneider 2006). In a nutshell, the new notion of ontological dependence (S-

dependence) distinguishes existential dependence (E-dependence) from identity

dependence (I-dependence), where E-dependence is understood by the means of the finean

approach, and I-dependence is cashed out in terms of the explanatory account.

(S-dependence) x S-depends upon y =

x E-depends upon y, and y I-depends upon x.

So, turning to the case of symmetries, let be PROP a base of fundamental (dispositional)

properties and SYM the relevant symmetries, this view holds that

SYM S-depend upon PROP

which means that SYM E-depend upon PROP, and PROP I-depends upon SYM. That is to

say that fundamental properties are ontologically prior to the symmetry principles, but

depend on them for their identity.

After illustrating the new approach with some different examples from physics and

metaphysics (e.g. applications of Noether theorem and metaphysical theories about the

fundamental category of ontology), I argue that, to a reasonable extent, this notion of non-

symmetric dependence is coherent with the central intuitions of the standard view on

fundamentality. Finally, I try to show how my approach provides a comprehensive

understanding of the role of symmetries and conservation laws in modern physics within a

dispositionalist framework.

References

Bird, Alexander. 2007. Nature's metaphysics: Laws and properties. Oxford: Oxford University

Press on Demand.

Fine, Kit. 1995. “Ontological Dependence”. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95: 269-

90.

French, Stephen. 2014. The structure of the world: Metaphysics and representation. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

French, Stephen. 2018. Between Factualism and Substantialism: Structuralism as a Third

Way. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 26(5), 701-721.

Schnieder, Benjamin. 2006. A Certain Kind of Trinity: Dependence, Substance, Explanation.

Philosophical Studies 129: 393-419.

BULLSHIT AND FORMS OF VERBAL DECEIT

Adrian Briciu, West University of Timisoara

It has become almost a cliché to say that we live in a post-truth world; that people of all

trades speak with an indifference to truth. Speaking with an indifference of how things really

are is famously regarded by Frankfurt (1986) as the essence of bullshit. I’ll build on recent

work in pragmatics (mainly by Dynel 2011) to give an account of bullshit that is more

encompassing than Frankfurt’s initial characterization. Ever since Grice (1967) linguists and

philosophers dealing with the inner workings of communication treat conversation as a form

of joint-action, and by now there is a large corpus of evidence that suggests this is correct.

However, time and again we are reminded that people also use language to deceive and

manipulate their audience. Nonetheless, as it has been widely discussed in pragmatics, the

gricean view on conversation can also explain a wide range of cases in which the

conversational partners are intentionally uncooperative, in which case they engage in deceit.

One type of such deceit is bullshit

According to Frankfurt, the essence of bullshit “is just [the speaker’s] lack of connection to

a concern with truth” (Frankfurt, 2005, 29). Still, Frankfurt gives a description of what the

bullshiter does, which offers a good starting point for a more encompassing view. According

to him the bullshiter “offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely

submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of

reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even

trying.” (Frankfurt, 2005: 32). I suggest that we treat bullshiting is a type of deviant speech

that mimics informed statements. The bullshiter intends his speech to look like an informed

statement, and to be taken as such by the audience. What the he hides from the audience is

the fact that he says things for which he lacks evidence. In gricean terms, bullshit is the

result of the violation of second submaxim of Quality: do not say that for which you lack

adequate evidence.

Bullshit, as opposed to lying or misleading by untruthful implicatures, is not a form of

deceit about content. Bullshit is, as Frankfurt aptly points out, not as much a matter of falsity,

as a matter of fakery. His deceit is not necessarily about the truth of the information

communicated, but rather deceit about his enterprise. Whereas the liar and the one falsely

implicating deliberately promote falsehood, the bullshitter doesn’t. What the bullshiter says

might turn out to be true, or might turn out to be false. He doesn’t care. What the bullshiter

misrepresents is not necessarily the state of affairs about which he speaks, after all, some of

the things he says might be true, but his epistemic attitude towards what he is saying. This,

according to Frankfurt, shows that “the fact about himself that the bullshiter hides … is that

the truth-values of his statements are of no central interests to him” (Frankfurt, 2005: 55).

Given that Frankfurt defines bullshit as indifference towards truth but his account gives us

the tools to understand it as indifference towards evidence, I argue that we should prefer the

latter one since it is a more encompassing characterization of bullshit than the former, and

thus it can account for more cases. Imagine someone who makes statements for which he

has no evidence whatsoever, but nevertheless believes them to be true because “his guts

tells him so”. We can further imagine that such statements are contradicted by specialist’s

opinion, but this doesn’t move him a bit. We do judge statements “based on guts alone” that

run against proper evidence to be bullshit, even if they are made by someone concerned

with truth. Accordingly, one may care about the truth, and nevertheless bullshit if, for

example, he fails to observe the evidential requirements of his claims.

Frankfurt also takes bullshit always to be a matter of intent. In fact, this is precisely what

Cohen (Cohen, 2012, 104) criticizes him for. But Frankfurt himself asks, without answering,

though, whether an utterance can qualify as bullshit given that “the utterer’s heart is in the

right place”, that is, given that the utterer is an honest but confused producer of bullshit. I

think that the answer should be ‘yes’. True, some bullshiters might turn out to be real

charlatans. They intentionally mislead their audience about the lack of adequate evidence for

what they say. But then there are their honest followers and true-believers. There are those

duped and ensnared into believing and promoting claims for which there is no adequate

evidence. For example, there are those who express and promote pseudo-scientific content

and honestly believe it. If we understand bullshit as a violation of the second submaxim of

Quality we can make sense of this possibility and it capture well both the form of pedestrian

bullshit that Frankfurt characterized and the “deeper” form that concerned Cohen. Bullshit is

a deviant speech-act in which one says something for which she lacks adequate evidence.

I’ll end with an application: I’ll argue that this account of bullshit meshes well with recent

delineations of pseudo-science within philosophy of science, and that it helps us make sense

of certain narrative tropes found in some (in)famous philosophical texts discussed by Sokal

& Bricmont and by Bouveresse.

References

Cohen, G.A. (2012) “Deeper into Bullshit”, republished in his Finding Oneself in the Other.

NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dynel, Marta (2011) “A Web of Deceit: A Neo-Gricean View on Types of Verbal Deception.”

International Review of Pragmatics 3: 139-167.

Grice, H. Paul (1967/1989) “Logic and Conversation” republished in his Studies in the Way

of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Frankfurt, Harry G. (1986/2005). On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sokal, Alan D. & Bricmont, Jean (1998). Intellectual Impostures. London: Profile Books.

WHEN IS IT OK TO CALL SOMEONE A BASTARD? AN EXPERIMENTAL

INVESTIGATION OF PEJORATIVES

Bianca Cepollaro, University of Milan; Isidora Stojanovic, Institut Jean-Nicod; Filippo

Domaneschi, University of Genoa

Background. A striking characteristic of expressives like ‘that bastard’ is that their expressive

content projects out of semantic embeddings and becomes hard to address in conversation.

In this paper we focus on the question of when one may felicitously refer to somebody using

such a pejorative. Tonhauser et al. (2013) claim that pejoratives do not impose any strong

contextual felicity constraint (SCFC); that is, they claim that an utterance in which a person is

being referred to as ‘That bastard’ is acceptable regardless of how the other conversation

participants feel towards the person at stake. If that were correct, then such pejoratives

would not require the audience to share a certain perspective with the speaker. In our study

we faced three research questions: (RQ1) whether expressives like ‘That bastard’ impose a

SCFC and, if it is the case, whether (RQ2) the that- construction or/and (RQ3) ‘bastard’

alone are responsible of the activation of the SCFC. In this short abstract we address (RQ1)

only.

Our study. Participants. 90 participants (Italian native speaker) participated as volunteers

[MA= 23.59; SD=6.83; 59f; 31m]. The experiment was administered online.

Stimuli and Method. We created 8 written vignettes in Italian. Each story was composed

of a context scenario composed of three sentences followed by a target sentence. The

context scenarios presented a fictional circumstance introducing a conversation between two

individuals speaking about a third person. The target sentence described an utterance of

one of the two interlocutors expressing a judgment on the third person. Three independent

variables were manipulated: two on the target sentences, one on the scenarios. First, target

sentences could express a judgment including either the pejorative expression stronzo

(Engl. tr. ‘bastard’) (PEJ) or a controller sentence including a non-pejorative expression

(CON). The target sentences could also be realized either with or without a that- construction

in both conditions PEJ and CON, for example: PEJ: “Marco is a bastard” (it. Marco è

bastardo); CON: “Marco is a Sicilian” (it. Marco è siciliano); That-PEJ: “That bastard Marco”

(it. Quel bastardo di Marco); That-CON: “That Sicilian Marco” (it. Quel siciliano di Marco).

Moreover, the information provided in the second sentence of the context scenarios was

manipulated in such a way that it generated either a m-positive (m-Pos) or a m-neutral

condition (m-Neu). In the former, the second sentence provided the information expressed

by either the pejorative or by the non-pejorative expression; conversely, in the latter, no

information was provided (see Example 1). This experimental manipulation resulted in a 2x4

Latin square within-subject design where six experimental conditions were considered: m-

Pos/PEJ, m-Pos/CON, m-Pos/That-PEJ, m-Pos/That-CON, m-Neu/PEJ, m-Neu /CON, m-

Neu /That-PEJ, m-Neu/That-CON. The procedure consisted in reading the context

scenarios. Participants were then asked to rate on a 5-points Likert scale the degree of

acceptability of a list of 12 sentences describing utterances of one of the two interlocutors

about the third person of the story. The list contained 11 filler sentences plus the target

sentence, presented in random order.

Rationale of the study. The study aimed at investigating whether the availability of the

relevant contextual information (m-Pos vs m-Neu) is a predictor of the degree of

appropriateness of an utterance containing a pejorative expression: a lower average rate in

m-Neu condition as compared to m-Pos could be legitimately interpreted as the result of a

contextual infelicity prompted by a strong contextual constraint. Note that our paradigm is

designed in order to rule out any priming effect generated by the availability of the contextual

information in the preceding context: if pejorative expressions impose a strong contextual

constraint, then in condition m-Neu we should also observe lower average rates in That-PEJ

as compared to That-CON.

Results. We analysed whether there are any differences in response combinations

between (i) m-POS vs. m-NEU, (ii) That-PEJ vs. That-CON and (iii) PEJ vs. CON. We

present only (and all) the significant results. However, we will discuss those related to RQ1

only. First, the two-sided Wilcoxon sum-rank test with Yates’ continuity correction revealed

that the responses in m-Pos/PEJ significantly differed from the responses in m-Neu/PEJ

(W(1677); p< 0.0001), with higher rates in m-Pos/PEJ than in m-Neu/PEJ; m-Pos/CON

significantly differed from m-Neu/CON (W(3254); p< 0.01) with higher rates in m-Pos; m-

Pos/That-PEJ significantly differed from m-Neu/That-PEJ (W(1422.5); p< 0.0001) with higher

rates in m-Pos and, finally, m-Pos/That-CON significantly differed from m-Neu/That-CON

(W(2417.5); p< 0.0001) with higher rates again in m-Pos – see Fig. 1. Second, two-sided

Wilcoxon sum-rank test with Yates’ continuity correction revealed that the responses in m-

Pos/PEJ significantly differed from m-Neu/CON (W(1707.5); p< 0.0001) with higher rates

again in CON; m-Neu/PEJ significantly differed from m-Pos/CON (W(4901.5); p< 0.01) with

higher rates again in CON and, finally, m-Neu/That-PEJ differred significantly from

m-Neu/That-CON (W(5523.5); p< 0.0001) with higher rates in m-Neu/That-CON.

Interestingly, a significant difference was observed between m-Neu/CON vs. m-Neu/That-

CON (W(4926.5); p< 0.009) with higher rates in m-Neu/CON – see Fig. 2.

Conclusion. Pace Tonhauser et al., ‘that bastard’ (quello stronzo) does impose a strong

contextual felicity constraint, as it is not really acceptable when uttered in a context neutral

with respect to the question whether the target deserves to be regarded as a bastard.

Although all sorts of expressions are less acceptable in m-neutral contexts than in m-positive

contexts, pejoratives are so in a much stronger way (Fig. 2). Note also that the

unacceptability of pejoratives in m-neutral contexts cannot be due to a ‘taboo’ effect of using

a bad word, given that ‘bastard’ (stronzo) is perfectly acceptable in m-positive contexts (i.e.

contexts where the person referred to deserves a negative attitude).

Example 1. The context scenarios

Pos_PEJ. Sara and Luca are at a graduation party. The guest of honour has invited also

Marco. Nobody stands him because of his arrogance. When Marco arrives at the party, Luca

says to Sara:

Pos_CON. Sara and Luca are at a graduation party. The guest of honour has invited also

Marco. Marco is Sicilan and he brought a dessert typical of his place. When Marco arrives at

the party, Luca says to Sara:

Neu_PEJ/CON. Sara and Luca are at a graduation party. The guest of honour has invited

also Marco. When Marco arrives at the party, Luca says to Sara:

Fig 1. Mean rates to the target sentences (PEJ and Fig 2 Comparison between PEJ and T hat-PEJ with the

That-PEJ) vs. controllers in m-POS vs. m-NEU. controllers in m-POS vs. m-NEU.

References

Tonhauser, J., Beaver, D., Roberts, C. and Simons, M. (2013), Toward a taxonomy of

projective content, Lang, 89 (1): 66-109.

3D/4D METAPHYSICAL EQUIVALENCE: LESSONS FROM THE SPECIES DEBATE FOR

THE METAPHYSICS OF CHANGE AND PERSISTENCE

María Cerezo, University of Murcia; Vanessa Triviño, University Rey Juan Carlos

In a recent paper, we explored the consequences that the species-as-individuals thesis

together with the species concept problem have for metaphysical theories of persistence. In

particular, we addressed the question whether the species-as-individuals thesis together with

the species concept problem threaten the thesis of metaphysical equivalence (ME) between

three-dimensionalism (3D) and four-dimensionalism (4D). In this regard, Reydon (2008) has

offered a positive answer to this question. He considers ‘species’ to be a homonymous term

(Reydon 2005), that is, a term that refers to two different ontological entities, i.e., evolverons

(synchronic entities) and phylons (diachronic ones). He associates evolverons with a 3D

theory of persistence of species, and phylons with a 4D theory. If there were equivalence

between these two theories, intertranslation between them would be possible. However,

Reydon argues, intertranslation is not possible due to the presence of problematic cases in

species (hybridization and asexual species), and therefore, there is not equivalence between

a 3D and a 4D conception of species.

In our previous work we challenged Reydon’s conclusion and offered a positive answer

regarding the 3D/4D ME. We proceeded by questioning Reydon’s crucial assumption, namely

that the term ‘species’ is homonymous, and arguing that evolverons and phylons are not two

different ontological entities, as Reydon claims, but one entity that can be considered under

two different perspectives (Triviño and Cerezo 2015). We deployed several arguments. The

main one was based on the difficulty to make sense of the evolving species (the evolverons)

as being different from the evolved ones (the phylons) if the latter results precisely from the

activities and interactions of the former. We also dealt with Reydon’s biological examples to

motivate his challenge to intertranslatability, namely: asexual species and hybridization. In this

regard, we argued, among other things, that these are problems for biology itself, rather than

consistent parts of the biological theories on which philosophical reflection should base its

arguments.

Yet, the detractor of 3D/4D ME might insist that the nice biological examples invoked in

Reydon’s paper (Reydon 2008) are valid as problematic cases that challenge the idea that

evolverons and phylons are just two dimensions of the same entity. In this talk we assume this

consideration and argue that, even if evolverons and phylons are two different entities and

sentences involving them are not intertranslatable, the 3D/4D ME is not challenged because

the persistence of each of those entities can be adequately described in both 3D and 4D

terms. Our strategy, therefore, is not to challenge the idea that evolverons and phylons are not

intertranslatable, but rather the association between evolverons and 3D entities and phylons

and 4D ones.

We will proceed by distinguishing two different issues that we think are confused in

Reydon’s work: the issue concerning the temporal consideration of an object (synchronic and

diachronic) and the issue of the persistence of an object (endurance or 3D and perdurance or

4D). Regarding the temporal consideration of an object: given two organisms A and B of a

species S, they are synchronic iff A and B coexist at some time, even if they exist at more

times than the time at which they coexist. And they are diachronic iff they exist at different

intervals of time, so that there is no time at which A and B coexist, but there is a chain of

organisms existing at times between the times of existence of A and the time of existence of B

which can link A and B through synchronic relations by means of biological reproduction. The

synchronic and diachronic character of an entity pertains, therefore, to the relation of such

entity to other ones with regard to the time of existence. However, persistence as endurance

or as perdurance refers to the way in which an entity (regardless of how it is temporally

considered) exists in more than one time while remaining the same entity. By taking into

account this distinction, we will show that both evolverons and phylons can be associated with

endurance and perdurance such that intertranslatibility holds for each of the entities and the

3D/4D ME can be restored. We will offer different arguments to support these associations,

namely the process argument and the gene-flow argument. These arguments are grounded in

the dynamical and temporal nature of both synchronic and diachronic views of species, and

we will reinforce them by appealing to Kunz’s recent work on the notion of species (Kunz

2012). Stamos’ conception of species (Stamos 2003) and the way in which Reydon discusses

it will also be used as part of our arguments in the paper. Finally, we hope that this debate

helps to illustrate a misunderstanding behind contemporary reflections on metaphysics of

change and persistence, namely a misunderstanding between the explanation of change and

persistence (which is what is behind Reydon’s approach) and the description of the entities

persisting through time.

References

Kunz, Werner. 2012. Do species exist?: principles of taxonomic classification.

Weinheim: Wiley-Blackwell.

Reydon, Thomas. 2005. “On the Nature of the Species Problem and the Four Meanings of

‘Species’.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History

and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (1): 135-158. https://doi.org/

10.1016/j.shpsc.2004.12.004

Reydon, Thomas. 2008. “Species in three and four dimensions.” Synthese 164 (2): 161-184.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9221-6

Stamos, David N. 2003. The Species Problem: Biological Species, Ontology, and the

Metaphysics of Biology. Lanham (Maryland): Lexington Books.

Triviño, Vanessa and Cerezo, María. 2015. “The Metaphysical Equivalence between 3D and

4D theories of species.” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 71 (4): 781-806.

https://doi.org/10.17990/rpf/2015_71_4_0781.

GROUNDING LEGAL POSITIVISM

Samuele Chilovi, Law & Philosophy Research Group, Pompeu Fabra University

Legal systems shape and regulate many aspects of our lives, by ensuring that a variety of

legal facts obtain: that negligent actions of certain types trigger civil liability, that pluralities

who meet certain requirements are married, and many others. Yet in legal theory and

philosophy of law, the nature and status of such facts has long been disputed. While it is

plausible that legal facts are not basic in the way that (say) facts about fundamental physics

are, it remains unclear just how they derive from more basic facts, and which other facts

determine them.

Legal positivism (LP) and anti-positivism (AP) are the two main families of views trying to

answer the question of what determines the legal facts. Though answers to this question

may in principle focus on the relevance of facts (or other entities) of various kinds, the

dividing line that has traditionally been regarded as of special philosophical interest, and that

sets LP and AP apart, concerns the role of social and moral facts in determining the legal

facts.

To a first approximation, the core idea that drives positivist thinking about law is that law is

a social construction. This claim, in turn, is usually cashed out by reference to the social

sources thesis, according to which the existence and content of the law is a function of its

social sources. In contemporary settings that conceive law as a plurality of legal facts, the

view naturally translates into the claim that every legal fact is determined by social facts.

Anti-positivists, by contrast, regard law not as a human creation that is in some sense ‘up

to us’, but rather as necessarily determined partly by morality. While granting some role to

social facts in law determination, they reject the social sources thesis, and hold that

necessarily, legal facts depend not only on social facts, but on moral facts as well.

Within the positivist camp, it is customary to single out two types of positivist positions:

inclusive and exclusive positivism (ILP and ELP respectively). The traditional way of drawing

the distinction between them is modal: while both subscribe to positivism’s core tenet,

inclusive positivists allow, whereas exclusive positivists disallow, that legal facts may

sometimes depend on morality. In addition, inclusive positivists typically maintain that

whenever a moral fact is responsible for determining a legal fact, there have to be some

social facts that make moral facts so responsible. In other words, ILP allows moral facts to

be legal determinants, but only in so far as it is social facts which grant them such a role.

The positivism/anti-positivism debate has both theoretical and practical significance. On

the one hand, by inquiring into law’s necessary building blocks – into the kinds of facts

responsible for determining it – an attempt is made to elucidate what constitutes a certain

phenomenon. And if a successful account of law were to be found, it would yield an

explanation of legal reality in more fundamental terms, providing us with understanding of an

important aspect of our shared reality.

On the other hand, answers to this question have also a crucial practical import. For

different views on what makes law carry different commitments concerning how the content

of particular laws is determined. And since the resolution of judicial disputes partly turns on

figuring out what the applicable law is (what the legal facts that are relevant to the case at

hand are), different views on the legal determinants will at times support different

conclusions on how judicial disputes should be solved (according to the law), a matter that is

clearly of great practical significance.

Despite the centrality and significance of this debate, two issues that have a considerable

bearing on it have remained largely unexplored: what is the nature of the determination

relation relied on by positivism and its rivals, and how are these views best formulated in

terms of it?

This paper will tackle the latter question. In doing so, it will make crucial, though not

exclusive, use of the notion of ground, recently at the center of intense discussion and

theorizing within metaphysics. In legal philosophy as elsewhere, grounding can play a

philosophically significant role by limning the space of available theories and the issues they

investigate, enabling us to shed light on the core of positivist thinking about law, and to

evaluate its strengths and weaknesses.

A number of considerations militate in favor of interpreting LP and AP as offering

competing grounding claims. I won’t rehearse them here. What is crucial for current

purposes is that while the view that legal positivism is best understood as a thesis about

grounding has been widely accepted in recent years, it remains far from obvious how

positivism may be defined ground-theoretically.

The goal of this paper is to fill this gap, and provide precise and theoretically illuminating

formulations of positivism as such, as well as of its inclusive and exclusive variants. Perhaps

surprisingly, it will turn out that simple candidate definitions suffer from serious shortcomings.

This, I shall argue, will warrant an appeal to the notion of a social enabler.

The paper will be structured as follows. Following some preliminary remarks to introduce

the relevant ground-theoretic notions and concepts, I set out and discuss some simple

grounding-based formulations of positivism, based on the notions of full and partial

grounding. I then raise a number of objections against them, and present a more adequate

definition capable of solving their problems, which crucially relies on a robust notion of social

enabler. Finally, I model inclusive positivism and exclusive positivism on the resulting

template, and outline the advantages of the ground-enablers proposal.

(I CAN’T GET NO) ANTISATISFACTION

Pablo Cobreros, University of Navarra; Elio La Rosa, Ludwig Maximilian University;

Luca Tranchini, University of Tübingen

Substructural approaches to paradoxes have attracted much attention from the philosophical

community in the last decade. In this talk we focus on two substructural logics, named ST

and TS, the first of which is non-transitive, the second non-reflexive. The target of this talk is

making explicit the correspondence of duality between these logics.

SIMPLICITY FOR (LINGUISTIC) UNDERSTANDING

María Inés Corbalán, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina; Giulia Terzian,

University of Bristol

The Minimalist Program (MP) in generative linguistics is predicated on the idea that

simplicity (here used as an umbrella term to encompass also elegance, parsimony, etc.) is a

property of its object of study — the human language faculty (FL) — on the one hand; and of

linguistic theory, on the other.

Thus MP is guided by two types of simplicity considerations, respectively known as

principles of substantive and methodological economy. Minimalists construe the latter as

instances of Ockham’s razor, thus explicitly aligning themselves with a long-standing

tradition in both science and philosophy of favouring theories that are simple, elegant,

parsimonious, and so on. In turn, s-economy principles stem from the minimalist thesis that

the language faculty is itself simple, elegant, and computationally efficient, or optimal.

Importantly, minimalists often say or imply that we should expect the two kinds of simplicity

to somehow converge, though they rarely offer arguments to this effect. Even more

worryingly, justifications for either simplicity claim are hard to come by in the literature.

In this talk we sketch a proposal that would allow minimalists to address each of these

concerns. We begin by unpacking the minimalist expectation that object-and theory-

simplicity will or should converge, which we argue is parasitic on a long-standing habit, in

generative linguistics, of conflating the two notions.

More specifically, we suggest that the convergence assumption is in turn the result of the

conjunction of — and failure to clearly distinguish between — the generative community’s

commitment to the following: (1) a strong form of (semantic scientific) realism, (2) a

metaphysical thesis according to which the world is simple (known in generative circles as

the Galilean stance, or style), (3) a ‘naturalist’ stance according to which ‘language should

be studied in the same way as any other aspects of the natural world’ (Al-Mutairi 2014, 34),

(4) the ‘Occamist urge to explain with only the lowest number of assumptions’.

Crucially, this conflationary habit threatens to seriously undermine the very core of MP,

and specifically its key thesis (known as the Strong Minimalist Thesis) according to which the

human language faculty is essentially simple — insofar as it is perfectly designed and

maximally efficient. Moreover, it casts serious doubt on the widespread minimalist

assumption that the human language faculty can only be accurately described by simple

theories.

In the second part of our talk, we offer minimalists a way out. Building on the foregoing,

the first part of our mitigating strategy is to direct the minimalist towards a more transparent

conceptual framework, within which it becomes possible — indeed, straightforward — to

clearly distinguish and firmly separate the two notions of simplicity.

Finally, we turn our attention to theory-simplicity. We begin with a brief sketch of the

orthodox accounts of simplicity — along with other aesthetic values — in the philosophy of

science, which construe these notions as either purely epistemic, truth-conducive criteria of

theory construction and theory choice; or as purely pragmatic and even subjective values,

with connotations of ‘easy-to-use’ and the like.

We will then outline and defend an alternative, compatibilist proposal and suggest that it

is particularly well suited to minimalist purposes. The proposed account draws on recent

discussions in the philosophy of science concerning the role of theoretical values — and

even more specifically, of aesthetic values — in shaping scientific explanation and scientific

practice (Breitenbach 2013; de Regt 2017; Ivanova 2017). On the proposed account,

simplicity is cast as a cognitive-pragmatic value that serves a distinctively epistemic function:

specifically, it is conducive to scientific understanding, where the latter is one of the central

aims of science.

A first and important part of our proposal, then, is that minimalists weaken their

commitment to (1) above, and that truth be replaced by understanding as the aim of

linguistic inquiry. Following a brief overview of the current debate on understanding, we

present an illustration of our general methodological suggestion, featuring a model — the

paradigm theoretical vehicle in science — that (a) instantiates simplicity and (b) is a vehicle

of understanding also in virtue of (a). Taking our cue from this illustration, we will then make

a case for re-interpreting minimalist hypotheses — ascribing ever-increasing simplicity to FL

— as simplified and idealized models of FL.

Finally, we will argue that the proposed compatibilist account not only sits better with

actual scientific practice, but moreover it helps illuminate the relation between ascriptions of

simplicity to phenomena on the one hand, and to scientific representations on the other.

Crucially, it allows us to entertain and justify both sorts of claims while at the same time

resisting the minimalist expectation that the two should converge.

References

Al-Mutairi, Fahad Rashed. 2014. The minimalist program: The nature and plausibility of

Chomsky’s biolinguistics, Volume 143. CUP.

Breitenbach, Angela. 2013. Aesthetics in science: A Kantian proposal. In Proceedings of the

Aristotelian Society, Volume 113, pp. 83–100. Wiley Online Library.

de Regt, Henk W. 2017. Understanding scientific understanding. Oxford Studies in

Philosophy of Science. OUP.

Ivanova, Milena. 2017. Aesthetic values in science. Philosophy Compass 12 (10), e12433.

EXPERIENTIALISM AND TWO CASES OF HEARING

Maria Giovanna Corrado, University of Warwick

While we commonly report that we hear ordinary objects and the events in which they

participate, according to some, we only indirectly hear them in virtue of being directly

presented with sounds. The aim of this paper is to assess in what sense – if auditory

perceptual experience only directly presents us with sounds – what is present in experience

may ground hearing ordinary objects and events other than sounds.

This paper is divided in three parts. In order to distinguish the view at issue from other

views in the vicinity that may deserve separate treatments, in the first part, I will identify a

particular version of the indirect view by illustrating the theses that it endorses and by

drawing examples from Broad (1951) and Berkeley (1713). Given the view’s endorsements,

in the second part, I will investigate what role experience of sounds can be taken to play in

grounding hearing ordinary objects and events. I will argue that the indirect view at issue is

committed to the claim that indirectly hearing ordinary objects and events in virtue of the

sounds that they make, depends on deploying the relevant concepts in experience.

However, in the third part, I will argue that this commitment is undesirable, for it fails to

accommodate a difference between two cases of hearing.

PRAGMATISMO, CIENCIA Y DEMOCRACIA EN LA ERA DE LA POSVERDAD

Ana Cuevas Badallo, Universidad de Salamanca; Daniel Labrador Montero,

Universidad de Salamanca

Posverdad y ciencia deberían ser nociones autoexcluyentes en un mundo donde la ciencia

tiene cada vez un papel más decisivo en la actividad política y cotidiana de los ciudadanos.

Aun así, cómo establecer si una proposición, una afirmación o una teoría son verdaderas se

ha convertido en un problema de relevancia pública y política. Cada vez son más lo que

defienden que el conocimiento científico no es una forma privilegiada de entender la

realidad y, por lo tanto, que no hay buenas razones para usar la ciencia como base para

tomar algunas decisiones. En esta comunicación, en cambio, se pretende articular un

alegato en favor de la actividad científica, la noción de verdad y la democratización del

conocimiento evitando caer en absolutismos y posturas ingenuas.

Algunos autores no se conforman solo con afirmar la llegada e instauración de la “era de

la posverdad”, sino que incluso defienden la inevitabilidad y la pertinencia de dicho

acontecimiento. Este es el caso de Steve Fuller cuando señala que: “a post-truth world is

the inevitable outcome of greater epistemic democracy. […] once the instruments of

knowledge production are made generally available —and they have been shown to work—

they will end up working for anyone with access to them. This in turn will remove the

relatively esoteric and hierarchical basis on which knowledge has traditionally acted as a

force for stability and often domination” (Fuller, 2016, pp. 2-3). Sin embargo, la

democratización epistémica no conduce necesariamente a la aceptación de esa posición.

Como el editor de Social Studies of Science ha apuntado: “Embracing epistemic

democratization does not mean a wholesale cheapening of technoscientific knowledge in the

process. [...] the construction of knowledge [...] requires infrastructure, effort, ingenuity and

validation structures” (Sismondo, 2016, p. 3). La posverdad, que establece que “lo que uno

quiere que sea verdad es verdad” (Wilber, 2017, p. 25), defiende una noción voluntarista de

la verdad, donde el valor de verdad no es algo relevante para mantener una afirmación y

sustentar una creencia Sin embargo, cuando se intenta establecer la veracidad de una

creencia no hay lugar para decisiones individualistas y caprichosas.

Para el relativismo radical, el consenso científico se alcanza por el mismo tipo de

mecanismos que en otras instituciones sociales, es decir, por redes que fabrican los

“hechos” mediante la negociación política, o por otras formas de dominación. Sin embargo,

la noción de verdad que los relativistas están atacando incurre en la falacia del hombre de

paja: la verdad como el “punto de vista de Dios”, que muy pocos filósofos o científicos

defienden ya. Sugerimos que una alternativa a las tesis de los defensores de la posverdad

es la noción de verdad desde el pragmatismo, que, a su vez, sugiere mecanismos para

desarrollar una verdadera democracia epistémica que no implica caer en el relativismo,

como Fuller sostiene. Esto podría parecer controvertido si erróneamente se piensa en la

versión caricaturizada, malentendida y popularizada del pragmatismo, esto es, aquella que

simplemente tiene en cuenta la unión entre la utilidad (en un sentido muy llano) y la verdad.

Sin embargo, ya sea entre los pragmatistas clásicos como John Dewey o los

neopragmatistas (por ejemplo, Philip Kitcher y Susan Haack), la construcción del

conocimiento científico, con todas sus limitaciones, es la mejor manera de alcanzar

verdades fiables y contrastadas, aunque de forma parcial o rectificable.

El pensamiento de Haack a este respecto, sobre todo en lo relativo al concepto de

verdad, sirve a la perfección para mostrar cómo las tesis de relativistas y defensores de la

posverdad hacen referencia a una actividad que se puede denominar como

“pseudoinvestigación”, pero que, sin embargo, no tiene cabida en la “investigación

científica”. Toda investigación —sea esta del tipo que sea— debe tener en el horizonte un

concepto de verdad que actúe de criterio comunitario decisivo para la consecución de

verdades falibles y parciales, y al mismo tiempo lo suficientemente sólidas como para

ajustarse a unos estándares epistémicos en los que la comunidad científica y la humanidad

en su conjunto ha puesto su confianza y ha comprobado su validez.

Otro de los aspectos que se han discutido desde el pragmatismo, tanto clásico como

contemporáneo (Dewey, 1927; Kitcher, 2001), es la necesidad de incorporar en la

deliberación política los mecanismos de discusión y acuerdo que se han desarrollado en la

práctica científica. Para Dewey los ciudadanos deberían apropiarse de los conocimientos

científicos no solo para saber más y mejor, sino también para adquirir ciertos hábitos

mentales, porque el futuro de la democracia está conectado con la difusión de la actitud

científica (Dewey, 1927, p. 176).

References

Dewey, John. 1927. The public and its problems. New York: H. Holt.

Fuller, Steve. 2016. Embrace the inner fox: Post-truth as the STS symmetry principle

universalized. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.

Haack, Susan. 2005. “The Unity of Truth and the Plurality of Truths”. Principia 9 no. 1–2: 87–

109.

Kitcher, Phillip. 2001. Science, democracy and truth. Oxford U.P.

Sismondo, Sergio. 2016. “Post-truth?”. Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1: 3–6.

Wilber, Ken. 2017. Trump and a Post-Truth World. Shamballah.

HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE MEINONGIANISM

Andreas de Jong, University of Manchester

Fictional realism (henceforth FR)—the position that fictional characters are existent abstract

objects—is a prominent position in the philosophy of fiction. FR is motivated by being able to

take data about practices of fiction at face value. Those data consists partly of forms of

prima facie true discourse about fictional characters, for example:

(1) Arya Stark is a well-developed character

(2) According to Harry Potter, Hermione Granger is a wizard

According to FR, statements like (1) and statements like (2) are about abstract fictional

characters. Parafictional statement (2) captures what is true about the fictional statement

“Hermione Granger is a wizard”. Whereas the fictional statement is not literally true, (2) is.

The challenge is that FR also needs to account for true negative existentials employing

names that are also used to refer to fictional characters.

In this discussion, I assume Thomasson’s conception of negative existentials for FR:

If N is a proper name that has been used in predicative statements with the intention to

refer to some entity of ontological kind K, then ‘N does not exist’ is true if and only if the

history of those uses does not meet the condition for referring to an entity of kind K.

(Thomasson 2003, p. 217).

Thomasson explains that whenever we say that Arya Stark does not exist or that Hermione

Granger does not exist, the value for K is person, not abstract object. This forces a

conceptual distinction between what the fictional character is pretended to be (henceforth

“the pretended object”) and the abstract existent fictional character. As said, external

discourse is about the latter according to FR, but negative existentials employ the use of the

name intended to refer to the former: Hermoine the person does not exist, but external

discourse is about an existent abstract fictional character. I argue that taking external

discourse and negative existentials at face value entails Meinongianism rather than FR:

fictional characters do not exist, yet external discourse is about those nonexistent objects.

There are two problems for Thomasson’s account. The first problem is that this account is

at odds with taking parafictional sentences at face value. Following prominent fictional

realists in construing parafictional sentences as de re about abstract objects, the question

arises what justifies interpreting them as not being about the pretended object. First, (2)

does not express that the story alleges that an abstract object has the property of being a

wizard. Rather, it seems that parafictional sentences are about the pretended object.

Second, if parafictional sentences are about abstract objects, it becomes hard to see why

negative existentials would not be. It seems more reasonable to suggest that parafictional

sentences and negative existentials have the same referential intention, namely to refer to

the pretended object.

The second problem is generated by fragments where multiple forms of external

discourse are tied together by employing anaphoric pronouns. If we assume that anaphoric

pronouns are co-referential, all the occurrences of the anaphoric pronoun have to refer to

the same object, which forces the conclusion that negative existentials and external

discourse are about the same object. For example:

(3) Hermione Granger is a well-developed character. According to Harry Potter, she is a

wizard. However, she does not exist because she is a fictional character.

On the assumption mentioned, (3) is about a single object that does not exist. The fictional

realist can avoid this conclusion by claiming that anaphors can work as pronouns of laziness

for the referring expression in question. Thomasson uses “The Rite of Spring is in the top left

drawer; you know I heard it in Boston last week, it went on for 45 minutes” (Thomasson

2010, p. 129) as an example, where “it” replaces 2 “The Rite of Spring”, which refers to the

copy of the score, the musical work, and the performance in turn. However, in order for this

solution to work, “she” in (3) refers to a complex of the pretended nonexistent object and the

abstract existent, which entails that there is a pretended nonexistent object. FR should

desperately avoid such a result, because even if FR does not commit to complex objects, it

still follows that some of the occurrences of the pronoun refer to the pretended nonexistent

object.

Another aspect of the problem is that (3) employs the personal pronoun “she”

consistently. This pronoun suggests that external discourse is about an object which is

intended to satisfy being a person. However, because fictional statements are false, the

object referred to does not satisfy being a person. So, the pronoun refers to an object

satisfies being is a person in a pretenceful way only. If it would be an abstract yet existent

object that would be referred to, we should be able refer to it by means of a neuter pronoun

“it”. However, such a use is not felicitous:

(4) Hermione Granger is a well-developed character. According to Harry Potter, # it is a

wizard. However, # it does not exist because # it is a fictional character.

The infelicity of (3) suggests that external discourse is about the pretended nonexistent

object, rather than about the abstract fictional character. If there is an existent fictional

character, it can only be referred to by means of the pretenceful use of the personal

pronoun. The absence of being able to directly refer to such an object puts into question

whether such an object exists at all. Rather, it would seem more natural that to interpret such

discourse as referring to a nonexistent person, if it is about an object at all.

References

Thomasson, Amie Lynn. (2010). In Fiction and Models, edited by John Woods, 109–148.

Munich: Philosophia.

Thomasson, Amie Lynn. (2003) Speaking of Fictional Characters. Dialectica 57, no. 2: 205–

223.

A DEFLATIONARY VIEW OF ONTOLOGY FOR SCIENTIFIC THEORIES:

A NEO-CARNAPIAN APPROACH

Xavier de Donato-Rodríguez, University of Santiago de Compostela; José L. Falguera,

University of Santiago de Compostela

May our best scientific theories serve to establish the ontology of the world? One traditional

answer has been that of the realists: our best scientific theories are aiming at establishing

which are the (kinds of) entities that really exists. Provided that our best scientific theories

can be said to be approximately true and that we rely on a standard semantics, this entails

that their theoretical terms must refer to mind-independent spatio-temporal objects.

That view is to be contrasted with different forms of instrumentalism; from those that say that

scientific theories are merely tools for systematizing and predicting observational

phenomena lacking a truth-value to those that maintain that scientific theories literally have

truth-value, even may be true, but consider that to accept a theory just involves to believe in

the observational part of the theory.

We want to focus on the view held by Carnap (1950/56 and subsequent work), i.e. a form

of agnosticism in relation to the issue of the real existence of theoretical entities: scientific

theories don’t serve to establish what really exists in the world (in the usual realist

interpretation). On the other hand, Carnap (1958, 1961, 1963, 1966, and Psillos 2000a)

opted for a genuinely new stance (sometimes presented as ‘neutral’ regarding the

realist/instrumentalist debate. Besides, proposed another form of understanding ontological

commitment for theoretical terms. Given his distinction between external and internal

questions, it is possible maintain that an external consideration of the ontological claims is

meaningless. Ontological commitments are always to be understood as internal to a given

linguistic framework. The problem of the reference of theoretical entities is addressed by the

last Carnap in relation with his renewed attempt to explicate the analytic/synthetic distinction

for any axiomatized scientific theory by using its Ramsey sentence (RS). In a RS higher-

order variables of the appropriate type (bound by existential quantifiers) replace the

theoretical terms of the original theory and, according to Carnap, designate purely logico-

mathematical entities (see Carnap 1963, 963).

Recently, Carnap’s point of views have been criticized in various ways. Lavers (2016)

has

pointed out that, in fact, Carnap wouldn’t have overcome his instrumentalist scruples. Psillos

(1999, 2000b) points out that Carnap’s alleged neutrality and attempt of reconciliation

between realism and instrumentalism would be severely compromised given that his RS

strategy faces the ‘Newman objection’. This objection establishes that RS provides just a

purely mathematical relational structure without restrictions regarding its components, except

for the fact that the cardinality of its domain allows for containing all the entities that are

needed for classical mathematics. Such cardinality is, nevertheless, trivially ensured given

the potentiality of the logical-mathematical language of RS. The existence of such relational

structure is, thus, guaranteed a priori given that we assume the consistency and empirical

adequacy of TC, a finite axiomatic system of theoretical postulates T plus correspondence

rules C. It follows that existential assertion about theoretical entities, that is supposedly

nontrivial at all, become trivial and a priori.

The Newman inspired objection as applied to Carnap’s strategy can receive two

alternative readings; respectively, the ontological and the epistemic (see Uebel 2011). On

the first reading, supported by Psillos (1999, 2000b), the envisaged solution is to introduce

realist constraints regarding the referents of theoretical terms in order to avoid the

trivialization result. Two remarks must be made in relation to this kind of solution: (i) pace

Psillos, it would suffice with some sort of restriction enough to stop the trivialization, but not

necessarily committed to realism (it could in turn appeal to artificial kinds) (see Demopoulos

2007); and (ii) if we take into account that the deflationary character of ontology is also

applicable to the observational vocabulary, the objection is forceless against Carnap (cf.

Uebel 2010, 2011; Friedman 2011).

The epistemic reading, supported by Friedman (2011) and Demopoulos (2007, 2008), is

however not so easily disarmed. According to it, the theoretical assertions of a theory whose

observational content is taken to be true become almost analytic truths with no empirical

surplus over and above its observational consequences (given the identity between TC and

RS). Uebel’s (2011) proposal consists in pointing out that Carnap’s appeal to RS is made

from an idealized, a-historical perspective in order to provide an explication of the

analytic/synthetic distinction. Given the idealization in question, the correspondence rules

are held fixed and all possible observational data are included. But then, clearly, what serves

for idealizational purposes cannot be applied to a historically situated theory. A situated

theory could perfectly enjoy an empirical surplus over and above the observational content

already tested. This consideration would undermine the epistemic reading. If Uebel’s

proposal is correct –as we think–, then Carnap’s appeal to RS and his neutral stance

regarding the realism/instrumentalism debate can be said to be orthogonal. If the Newman

objection in its epistemic version remains, then we should opt to maintain Carnap’s

agnosticism without the Ramseyfication project. Two new remarks are crucial at this point:

(a) the mathematical entities are just extensionally equivalent to the entities designated by

the theoretical terms of a theory, but the intensional content of a mathematical expression is

not the same as the intensional content of a theoretical term (cf. Psillos 1999, 53 ff.); (b) the

role of the numerical values is just to represent the putative referents of the theoretical terms

as intensionally determined. Given this, the intensional content of a theoretical term

constraints the corresponding postulated referent of the term (without any realist

assumption). In the final part of our contribution we will defend to abandon the idea of

identifying theoretical entities with purely logico-mathematical entities, though still accepting

that theoretical entities cannot be alleged spatio-temporal objects. We would remain faithful

to Carnap’s agnosticism if we took theoretical entities to be abstract artifacts (in a similar

sense as Thomasson 1999) characterized by theoretical descriptions made in the

corresponding theory. This can be made without abandoning the deflationary approach to

ontology.

STOP REPLICATING, START CLASSIFYING. ACT-BASED PROPOSITIONS FOR

INDEXICAL COMMUNICATION

Ainhoa Fernández, University of the Basque Country

In the philosophical discussion on communication there is a perspective which enjoys

considerable, if not majority, acceptance. Let's call it the Transmission model of

communication. According to this model, communication consists in the transmission or

replication of propositions, so when a speaker makes an utterance the hearer reconstructs

the proposition that the speaker wants to communicate. The strongest version of this thesis

is the Naïve conception of communication (Heck 2002)-sometimes called the belief transfer

model (Egan 2007) or the FedEx model (Weber 2013). According to the transmission model

there are three elements which intervene in a communicative process: (a) the propositional

content of the speaker's thought, (b) the proposition grasped by the hearer and (c) the

proposition literally expressed by the sentence. In the Naïve conception the three elements

are actually the same because the underlying idea is that the content, the information which

is transmitted, undergoes no change.

There is a well-known problem presented by the Naïve conception: to explain cases in

which we try to communicate indexicals thoughts. Indexical thoughts are restricted by the

context and essentially linked to it. The truth conditions and the content of an utterance are

relative to a particular context. The reason for this phenomenon is that there is a part of the

content which can only be entertained by the speaker and not by the hearer, so that it cannot

be transmitted or replicated. Perry (1979) called this phenomenon limited accessibility. All

the different versions of the transmission model aim to offer a solution to the problem that

indexical utterances pose for the naïve theory. On the one hand, we have solutions in which

a transformation- recentering process is carried out and in which no content is required to be

shared by the speaker and the hearer (Gibbard 2012, Weber 2013). On the other hand,

there are those of a Fregean substitutive spirit, according to which what is communicated is

a substitutive (ersatz) thought or proposition in such a way that this new thought is shared

between the speaker and the hearer (Kölbel 2013, Torre 2010).

What I will provide in this paper is an alternative to the transmission model of

communication: the Classificatory model of communication. This model is grounded on the

act-based view of propositional content (Hanks 2011, 2015). I shall argue that in this new

conception cases of indexical communication are not a problem and that, therefore, the

model does not need any adjustment or modification (substitutive, transforming or

recentering process) to explain how successful communication is achieved in such cases,

which simply fit smoothly into the model.

In the first place, I will argue that the reason why all the variants of the transmission

model of communication are forced to carry out a process of modification of the utterance

performed by the speaker is that they all maintain a Fregean conception of content. In that

view, there is only one concrete proposition that can be considered correct as the content of

an utterance, so that in cases of indexical communication we would need to postulate a

readjusted additional content, which is a disadvantage in order to explain how successful

communication is achieved.

According to act-based view propositions are types of actions which function as

classifying devices allowing us to individuate beliefs. They are also the bearers of truth

conditions, which are obtained through instantiated or possible tokens pertaining to each

type. Thus, when a speaker makes a token utterance the hearer classifies it under a certain

type. On the classificatory model, successful communication consists in a hearer classifying

the speaker's utterance under an appropriate type. Among the types we find that some of

them are more specific than others in the sense that some contain more information and

details than others, i.e. some are more coarsely-grained and others which are fine-grained.

When we classify an utterance there is not a single type which is the only correct one, but

there is a variety of types under which we can classify it. In the act-based view is defended

that there are semantic reference types which are certain types of reference acts, for

example, a type of reference act I perform when I use the name ‘Russell’. Accordingly, “two

acts of reference fall under the same semantic reference type just in case anyone who is

semantically competent with the terms used in those acts will know that those two acts

corefer” (Hanks 2015, 8). This feature combined with the variety of types is what will allow us

to accommodate the indexical cases without major trouble

As I will argue, indexical utterances do not pose a problem for the classificatory model.

Suppose a speaker says "I am extremely tired”. On the classificatory approach, the speaker

has performed a type of action that only she can perform. In that sense, the content of her

utterance is of limited accessibility. However, there is no barrier to a hearer classifying this

utterance under that type, even if the hearer is not capable herself of performing a token of

that type. In this way, indexical utterances can be easily integrated into the classificatory

model of communication.

ON READING THE TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS: WITTGENSTEIN AND

METAPHYSICS

Jordi Fiarhurst, Universitat de les Illes Balears

During the past decades there has been a growing interest in the debate regarding how we

must read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in order to account for its contents

and the paradoxical remark in 6.54 (i.e. that the propositions of the Tractatus appear to

provide theories/insights whilst being nonsensical). Traditionally there have been two main

alternative readings. First, the standard reading (see e.g. Anscombe 1971; Hacker 1986;

1996; 2017) that claims that Wittgenstein’s propositions provides philosophical theories and

doctrines, specifically a realist metaphysical ontology and a picture theory. Second, the

resolute reading (see e.g. Connant 1989; 2000; 2002; Diamond 1991; 1997; 2000; 2005)

that rejects the idea that Wittgenstein advances philosophical theories or doctrines in the

Tractatus.

One of the main objections against the standard reading consists in singling out the

illegitimate attribution of metaphysical realism to Wittgenstein (Ishiguro 1969; McGuinness

1981; 1985; Winch 1987; McGinn 1999; Moyal-Sharrock 2007; Goldfarb 2011; MacNeil

2017). Namely, claiming that Wittgenstein advances metaphysical truths that characterize a

thought-independent and language-independent reality. This attribution of realism to

Wittgenstein is illegitimate insofar it assumes a gap between world and language that is non-

existent in the Tractatus (Black 1964; Ishiguro 1969; McGinn 1999; Williams 2004).

Moreover, it takes ontological claims as the basis for an account of language, thus putting

the cart before the horse (MacNeil 2017, 357).

My aim in this paper is to offer a viable solution to this objection and advance an

alternative metaphysical reading of the Tractatus which takes him as advancing

philosophical theories without entailing a commitment to metaphysical realism. Specifically I

am going to argue that Wittgenstein advances a picture theory of reality where pictures (and

their logical structure) taint all ontological issues.

Pictures (i.e. propositions and thoughts) are what we employ to model and represent

reality. For Wittgenstein the sense/meaning of pictures is dependent upon two different

elements: (i) they must be logical pictures (i.e. they must have a logical form that they share

with reality) and (ii) they must represent the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.

Pictures are constituted by a connection of elements that have a certain structure. Elements

are representative of objects and the structure of elements in a picture will represent the

structure of objects in states of affairs (TLP 2.14, 2.15). This correlation between elements

and objects is what Wittgenstein calls ‘pictorial relationship’ (TLP 2.1514). Additionally, these

pictures are bipolar, true or false (TLP 2.21). The truth and falsity of pictures is determined

by the agreement or disagreement between their meaning (i.e. what they represent) and

reality. Hence, the totality of true pictures will provide a full description of all the facts that

constitute the world. Reality cannot outrun our picturing.

Defendants of the standard reading generally argue that Wittgenstein offers this picture

theory on the basis of a realist metaphysical ontology introduced in the 1’s and 2’s. However,

I believe there is an alternative understanding of these ontological propositions that does not

encompass attributing realism to Wittgenstein. The opening remarks of the Tractatus focus

on the structure that pertains necessarily to any possible world. Wittgenstein claims that the

world is all that is the case, the totality of facts (TLP 1, 1.1). Facts are the existence of states

of affairs that, in turn, are a combination of objects (TLP 2, 2.01). Objects are simples that

make up the substance of the world (TLP 2.02, 2.021, 2.024). Whilst objects do not alter,

their configuration changes and produces states of affairs: objects are connected to each

other in a state of affairs and this specific combination is the structure of the state of affairs

(TLP 2.0271, 2.0272, 2.03, 2.032, 2.034).

These ontological claims are not characterizing a language-independent and thought-

independent reality in order to later provide a picture theory. Conversely, Wittgenstein is

characterizing reality as we picture it. The isomorphic relation between pictures and world is

not coincidental: it is intentional. The categories and distinctions introduced in order to

provide a picture theory are extended and applied to what they represent: the ontology

characterized in the Tractatus. The only possible reality available is that which is presented

in our picturing. Reality is constructed and altered by every true picture (TLP 3.01, 4.0311,

4.0312, 4.1, 4.11, 5.5262, 6.53). Picturing structures reality as such. Hence why the structure

of states of affairs (a connection of objects) coincides with the structure of pictures (a

connection of elements). ‘Picture’ and ‘World’ refer here to the formal totalities of pictures

and the world (Sullivan 1996: 207). Consequently, the relation between world and pictures

outlined must be understood as two interdependent formal totalities that share the same

structural features.

Moreover this alternative reading coincides with Wittgenstein’s remarks regarding the

logical form shared by pictures and the world. This logical form is the form of reality, the

scaffolding of the world. However, it does not pertain inherently to the world (as the standard

reading seems to assume), conversely logical form only pertains to the world insofar as the

only possible world available to us is constructed by pictures with the help of logical

scaffolding (TLP 4.023). The facts that constitute the world must be given in logical space

(TLP 1.13) and the points and spaces in this logical space are uniquely determined by

pictures (TLP 3.4, 3.42). Ontological claims are tainted both by pictures and the logical form

of pictures.

In sum, Wittgenstein is advancing a picture theory of reality where picturing and its logical

structure determine ontology and its structure, thus avoiding any commitment to

metaphysical realism. But what kind of metaphysics is being developed in the Tractatus? It

might be suggested that the characterization offered above suggest some sort of

phenomenalism or transcendental idealism. Nevertheless, I believe that this approach is just

as problematic as associating Wittgenstein with realism. Wittgenstein is presenting the

structure of pictures and reality that must exist. This structure stands regardless of the

metaphysical premises one defends (Williams 2004, 22). Professing a certain metaphysical

view (e.g. realism, idealism, transcendental idealism) is completely empty.

SOCIAL STRUCTURES, IDEOLOGY, AND BAD SEX

Dr Jade Fletcher, University of Edinburgh

This paper is concerned with providing an explanatory framework for thinking about a

particular type of morally bad sex. I argue that much of the current literature on bad sex,

which takes consent to be the lens through which bad sex should be viewed, is unable to

adequately capture a myriad of instances of bad sex. These instances are interesting as it

appears that something bad has happened, but it isn’t obvious that those parties who play a

direct causal role in the event have done anything wrong. I argue that we should make

sense of what has gone wrong in these cases in terms of unjust social structures creating

the conditions for bad events. Whilst my primary aim is to provide a framework for thinking

about these cases in particular, I suggest that thinking about bad sex in terms of ideology

and social structures provides a richer and more fruitful framework for thinking about morally

bad sex at large.

IMPLICIT BIAS AND QUALIEFS

Martina Fürst, University of Graz

Recently the phenomenon of implicit bias has gained increased interest among philosophers

(see e.g. Brownstein and Saul 2016, Holroyd, Scaiffe & Stafford 2017). So, what is implicit

bias? As a first approximation, we can say that the notion of “implicit bias” aims to capture

implicit mental states that influence our behavior and attitudes when social categories (such

as gender or race) are in play. This often leads to discriminatory behavior and to unfair

judgments, for example about the qualification of a job applicant. The high relevance of

these experimental findings concerning the consequences of implicit bias is obvious, and

motivates a deeper analysis of the phenomenon.

In analyzing implicit bias, one key issue is to clarify its metaphysical nature. There is

significant controversy about how best to characterize implicit bias. We can roughly discern

two competing views on the issue: on the associative view, implicit bias is best characterized

in terms of associations. Gendler´s (2008) model of “aliefs” can be subsumed under the

associative view as well, insofar as it invokes a single, sui generis mental state, consisting of

a tightly, associatively, connected triad of representational, associative and emotional

aspects. In contrast, the alternative propositional view has it that implicit bias is best

analyzed as beliefs or belief-like attitudes (e.g. Mandelbaum 2016). To clarify whether

implicit bias has an associative or a propositional structure is important, since the competing

views have different consequences for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. For

example, depending on which view we endorse, different methods for changing implicit bias

appear promising. Accordingly, the goal of this talk is to clarify the metaphysical nature of

implicit bias.

I will develop a novel account of implicit bias that accommodates both its phenomenal

aspect and its propositional aspect. In the literature so far, these two aspects have been

accounted for only separately—either by the propositional or by the associative models. The

proposed model reconciles these aspects by pointing towards a propositional content,

though represented in a special, phenomenal, way. In particular, I develop a model of implicit

bias as belief-like states that involve a special usage of phenomenal concepts. I call mental

states that draw upon a phenomenal experience of what an object or person seems like to

attribute a property to this very object or person “qualiefs” (since these mental states

constitutively involve qualitative properties and share some of the characteristics of proper

beliefs). That means, a qualief has a propositional content that an object is F, but this

content is presented in a very particular, phenomenal, way. Accordingly, qualiefs are hybrid

mental states that fuse phenomenal and representational features.

Next, I argue that implicit bias is best analyzed as a specific instance of qualiefs—an

instance of generic qualiefs. According to Leslie (2012), generic generalization is a basic and

default cognitive mechanism, that picks up on striking properties and links them to a kind. I

argue that this default cognitive mechanism can be easily triggered by experiences of

members of a target group resulting in generic qualiefs. Generic qualiefs use an experience

of an individual to attribute a property to the class this individual belongs. As a result, the

phenomenal mode of presentation of a qualief—the experience of the individual seeming F

—is introspectively accessible. However, its generic content— that members of the target

group are F—is hard to access introspectively. Moreover, generic qualiefs underlying implicit

bias are problematic since they have a particular etiology: the experience used in the qualief

turns out to be shaped by the stereotype representations that we encounter in our culture.

Finally, I demonstrate that the qualief model of implicit bias is explanatorily powerful. First,

qualiefs are partly constituted by phenomenal experiences—this feature explains why

implicit bias is automatic, not under our control, and hard to regulate via cognitive means.

Second, as a result of generic generalization, there is a shift via a between the phenomenal

mode of presentation of a generic qualief and its content—this accounts for the implicitness

of bias as well as the ignorance of a possible tension to explicit anti-discriminatory beliefs.

Third, the qualief model does justice to the asymmetric inferential profile of implicit bias by

showing how it can be insensitive to reasoning, but at the same time it can serve as

propositional input to further mental states

References

Brownstein, Michael & Saul, Jennifer (eds.). 2016. Implicit Bias & Philosophy. Two Volumes.

Oxford University Press.

Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2008a. “Alief and Belief.” Journal of Philosophy 105: 634–63.

Holryod, Jules, Scaiffe, Robin Stafford, Tom. 2017. “What Is Implicit Bias?” Philosophy

Compass

Leslie, Sarah-Jane. 2012. “Generics Articulate Default Generalizations.”Recherches

linguistiques de Vincennes 41 : 25-44.

Mandelbaum, Eric. 2016. “Attitude, Inference, Association: on the Propositional Structure of

Implicit Bias.” Noûs 50 (3): 629-658.

MUSICAL MEANING OF PURELY INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: EXPRESSION AND

REPRESENTATION

Nemesio García-Carril Puy, University of Granada; Juan José Acero Fernández,

University of Granada.

The question about the meaning of purely instrumental music has generated prolific

discussions in the philosophy of music. In contemporary debate, three neatly differentiated

views stand out. Firstly, formalist accounts deny that instrumental music has meaning.

According to Peter Kivy (1990, 2007), instrumental music is pure form that does not refer to

anything extra-musical, i.e., pure musical syntax without content. Kivy acknowledges that

instrumental music, in virtue of its musical form, can express certain basic emotions or

feelings that listeners can grasp following the musical flow in a non-conceptual or

linguistically describable way. Nonetheless, he rejects that we can properly speak of musical

meaning. At best, when we sometimes vaguely ask about the meaning of a chord or a

melody, we are really asking about the function that this chord or melody fulfils in the overall

work’s form.

A second view in this debate can be labelled as moderate formalism. According to

Constantijn Koopman and Stephen Davies (2001), instrumental music has meaning, but of a

merely formal nature. It consists in the coherence of the work’s structure, obtained from the

relationships of implication that hold between the different sonic elements of a work.

Consequently, unlike linguistic meaning, musical meaning is not referential. Rather, it is to be

understood in terms of implication between the elements constituting the musical form.

Musical meaning is grasped in the aural experience of the dynamics and progressions of the

work’s form. It is a non-intellectual, non-conceptual, but experiential grasping, in which we

empathise with the dynamic flow of the musical form similarly to the way in which we

empathise with persons. This empathy with the work’s form enables music to express certain

feelings.

In the third place, anti-formalist accounts stand on the opposite pole. According to James

Young (2014), instrumental music can provide a profound insight about human emotions.

Young’s main thesis is that instrumental music can be a source of this sort of knowledge

because it represents –is about– emotions by means of expressing and arousing them.

Young distinguishes between two kinds of representation: semantic representation, in which

the assignation of the referents depends on semantic conventions; and illustrative

representation, in which the illustration’s experience conveys knowledge in virtue of being

similar to the experience of the represented object. Illustrations do not provide statements,

but experiences in which knowledge can be obtained. Music adjusts to this second model of

representation insofar it is illustrative of emotion. A work represents sadness because, by

means of expressing and arousing sadness when heard, its aural experience is similar to the

experience of sadness.

It will be shown that the abovementioned views oversimplify the phenomenon of musical

meaning. The thesis we defend is twofold: first, that both expression and representational

meaning can take jointly place in instrumental music, and secondly, that the distinction

between both phenomena provides us with a good analytical tool to approach the complexity

of musical meaning. Inspired by Wittgenstein (1953), we argue that there can be cases of

expression without figuration, as well as cases of simultaneous expression and figuration –

i.e., we can find musical extracts whose function is purely expressive, while other passages

have a mixed function: expressive and figurative.

In support of this thesis, different examples of musical quotations in purely instrumental

works will be provided. For instance, Valentí Miserachs’ Pucciniana is an orchestral piece in

a post-impressionist aesthetics aiming to express sadness, drama and passion.

Nonetheless, this work starts with the initial cell of the instrumental intermezzo of Puccini’s

opera Manon Lescaut, in an attempt of making reference to Puccini’s style and praising his

skills as a symphonist. Pucciniana, apart from expressing certain feelings and emotions,

aims to offer an exalted view of Puccini’s style from a merely instrumental point of view. This

sense of representation is analogous to the one taking place, for instance, in the Portrait of

Louis XIV. Rigaud, locating the king in a particular perspective, in a certain surround and

with a proper game of lights, aims to exalt and make reference to the monarch’s absolute

power. Other sort of musical quotations are those carried out by nationalistic composers.

They introduce folk music and musical colours characteristic of a particular region to make

reference to its culture and artistic richness. This is the case of Charles Ives’ Symphony No.

2, in which the quotation of “Turkey in the Straw”, the song of a rural dance, makes

reference to the American countryside, moving the listener to this scenario. Other kind of

quotations is achieved by means of the instrumentation and formal structure of the work.

Ligeti’s Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano, which makes reference to Brahms’ trio for the same

ensemble, illustrates this phenomenon.

On the basis of these examples, the thesis defended here presents explanatory

advantages regarding pure formalism, which only acknowledges musical expression,

denying any sort of figurative meaning. In turn, it has advantages regarding moderate

formalism, noting that the relationships between musical elements do not occur only in terms

of implication. Finally, it also appears superior with respect to Young’s anti-formalist position.

The idea that music represents emotions requires assuming a realist thesis about a work’s

expressive properties. This assumption is too strong insofar the judgments about the

emotions represented by a work would be factual ones, and disagreements involving them

would imply that at least one of the parties is mistaken. Nonetheless, faultless

disagreements between critics and professional musicians about the emotion expressed by

a work are plausible. This aspect contrasts sharply with disagreements about the referential

nature of music. A person is said to be wrong if she denies that Charles Ives’ Symphony No.

2 does not refer to the American countryside, and we have ways to show why the speaker is

wrong. The proposal defended here about the musical meaning reflects in a better way than

the previous accounts the difference between these two phenomena.

References

Kivy, Peter. 1990. Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience.

Cornell: Cornell University Press.

Kivy, Peter. 2007. Music, Language and Cognition, And Other Essays in the Aesthetics of

Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Koopman, Constantijn, and Davies, Stephen. 2001. “Musical Meaning in a Broader

Perspective”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (3): 261–273.

Young, James. O. 2014. Critique of Pure Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

FUNDAMENTAL YET GROUNDED

Joaquim Giannotti, University of Glasgow

The notion of fundamentality conveys the idea that there is something basic, or primitive in

the reality that we inhabit. Metaphorically speaking, the fundamental entities are those that

God would have to create in order to bring into being everything else that exists.

Fundamentality plays a crucial role in metaphysical inquiry as well as scientific investigation.

For example, Jonathan Schaffer argues that metaphysics “is about what is fundamental, and

what derives from it” (2009: 379). Moreover, it is widely held that physicists aspire to give us

an account of the fundamental constituents of reality. Despite its claimed importance,

however, there is no consensus on how to characterise the fundamental. The legitimacy of

this notion in our theorising hangs on the possibility of formulating a metaphysically as well

as empirically adequate conception.

A number of metaphysicians have attempted to elucidate fundamentality and regiment its

use in terms of grounding. This is a form of non-causal and explanatory dependence that

captures the idea that certain entities, typically facts, obtain because/in virtue of others. More

precisely, we can say that for some entities A and B, if A grounds B, then B obtains

because/in virtue of A. Albeit contentious, it is standardly held that grounding claims have an

explanatory import: if A grounds B, then A explains or account for B. For instance, if the fact

that an electron e has elementary charge grounds that the fact that e produces an

electromagnetic field, then the latter obtains because/in virtue of the former. The fact that e

has elementary charges explains the fact that e produces an electromagnetic field.

The orthodoxy’s view about grounding holds that the fundamental entities are those that

are ungrounded. Namely, they are those that do not obtain in virtue of anything else.

Accordingly, they are unexplained. To use the previous example, if the fact that e has

elementary charge were ungrounded, then it would be fundamental. This view captures the

intuitive idea that to be fundamental is to be independent, in some metaphysically relevant

sense. However, it has been recently argued that grounding orthodoxy evangelises a false

doctrine: it is possible that there are fundamental and yet mutually grounded entities

1(Wilson 2014, 2016, forthcoming; Tahko 2018; cf. Barnes 2018). Call Heresy the possibility

of fundamental and yet mutually grounded entities. Proponents of the previous objection

contend that the Heresy forces us to adopt two doctrines, which can be formulated as

follows: Primitivism and Separation.

Primitivism. Fundamentality cannot be characterised adequately in terms of grounding or

other notions of metaphysical dependence (Cf. Wilson 2014: 560).

Separation. The link between fundamentality and grounding should be excised (Cf. Barnes

2018: 69).

My aim is to show that the Heresy entails neither Primitivism nor Separation. Thus we are

not compelled to renounce the project of characterising fundamentality in terms of

grounding. To accomplish this aim, I will defend a non-symmetric conception of grounding.

On this view, it is possible that some entities A and B are such that A grounds B and B

grounds A. Drawing on Karen Bennett’s account of building (2017), I will propose to

reformulate the definition of fundamentality as follows:

Reformed Ungroundedness. An entity X is fundamental if and only if for every entity Y, if X

is grounded in Y, then Y is grounded in X.

As I will explain, Reformed Ungroundedness accommodates the Heresy for it permits the

possibility that an entity is fundamental and yet grounded in some other ones. Therefore, we

can deny Separation and, consequently, Primitivism. A toy example will illustrate. Consider

a possible world in which only A and B obtain. Suppose also that A and B ground each other,

namely A grounds B and B grounds A. In such a world, A is fundamental for the conditional in

Reformed Ungroundedness is true. By parity of reasoning, also B is fundamental.

The proposed approach has three important advantages over grounding orthodoxy. First,

it is ideologically more parsimonious. In order to account for the Heresy, the grounding

orthodox must invoke a distinct notion of fundamentality in addition to that of

ungroundedness. By contrast, Reformed Ungroundedness serves this purpose well while

preserving the link between grounding and fundamentality. Second, Reformed

Ungroundedness permits cases of symmetric grounding and yet mantains the original

sense of ungroundedness. If there is no Y, then it is vacuously true that X is fundamental.

The proposed non-symmetric conception of grounding does not rule out that some

fundamental entities can be ungrounded.

Lastly, Reformed Ungroundedness evades brute fundamentalism, the view that the

fundamental entities are unexplained (McKenzie 2017). Arguably, grounding orthodoxy

entails brute fundamentalism. If the fundamental entities are ungrounded, they do not obtain

in virtue of anything else. Thus they are unexplained. It is fair to say that brute

fundamentalism is the received view in metaphysics. However, it clashes with the ambitions

of physicists who do not aim just to offer an inventory of what the fundamentalia are but also

to explain why they are fundamental. By adopting Reformed Ungroundedness, some

fundamental entities can be grounded and therefore amenable to explanation.

Unfortunately, Reformed Ungroundedness is not immune to objections. Jessica Wilson

(2019) argues that formulations in its ballpark raise two objections: first, they fail to

accommodate fundamental and yet strongly emergent entities second, they fail to

discriminate between mutually dependent entities that are fundamental and non-fundamental

ones. While they have some teeth, I will argue for a strategy to resist these objections.

My plan is as follows. First, I will stress the relevance of fundamentality in both

metaphysics and science. After presenting grounding orthodoxy, I will discuss the Heresy

and its claimed consequences: Primitivism and Separation. To accommodate the Heresy, I

will argue for a non-symmetric conception of grounding. By defending the adoption of

Reformed Ungroundedness, I will show that we are forced to endorse neither Primitivism

nor Separation. I will conclude by illustrating the merits that Reformed Ungroundedness

brings us and showing that Wilson’s objections do not represent a serious threat to the

proposed account.

COMPLEX SYNTAX, SIMPLE SEMANTICS: A TRADITIONAL ACCOUNT OF COMPLEX

DEMONSTRATIVES

Joan Gimeno-Simó, University of València

Complex demonstratives are often seen as a source of trouble for the idea that

demonstratives are directly referential. For instance, King (2001 and much subsequent work)

and Nowak (2014) provide an array of cases in which complex demonstratives just can’t be

treated as devices of direct reference, since they could hardly be considered rigid

designators. They argue for an alternative account in which they are treated as quantifiers.

In this paper I argue that classical theories (i.e., inspired by Kaplan 1977 and subsequent

work) do indeed predict those non-referential uses of complex demonstratives, as that these

are not essentially different from demonstratives of other types, contrary to King’s claims.

The first kind of counterevidence comes from ‘quantification in’ uses (‘QI’ for short), which

occur when the complex demonstrative contains some pronoun bound by an external

quantifier:

(1) Every queen cherishes that cleric who crowned her

A second kind of counterevidence comes from what King calls ‘narrow scope readings’ (from

now on ‘NS’). In these uses, the complex demonstratives contains a quantifier, and if this

quantifier takes wide scope over the demonstrative, then the latter becomes non-directly

referential:

(2) That professor who brought in the biggest grant in each division will be honored

The third kind of counterevidence are cases in which the speaker demonstrates nothing and

intends to refer to no particular object, which is why Kings calls them ‘no demonstration no

speaker reference readings (NDNS)’. Here, the complex demonstrative does not designate

rigidly the same individual across possible worlds; i.e., it does not express a singular

proposition:

(3) That student who scored one hundred on the exam is a genius

(4) If Simone had won the election, she would definitely have embraced that elector

who cast the deciding vote

Another kind of counterevidence comes from variants of Bach-Peters sentences:

(5) Every friend of yours who studied for it passed that exam she was dreading

Finally, King also cites evidence from anaphoric uses of complex demonstratives:

(6) A student

was sitting in the library. Another student

who had an iPod was sitting

across from her

. That student

had a logic book.

I shall argue that none of these alleged counterexamples shows that complex

demonstratives should be treated as quantifiers. Any theory treating them as singular terms

can accommodate all of them.

Counterevidence coming from QI can be easily accommodated if we assume that natural

language contains operators on character – what Kaplan (1977) called ‘monsters’. In (1), the

character of ‘that cleric who crowned her’ is supposed to be given by the descriptive material

appended to the demonstrative (‘cleric who crowned her’), and this material is being

quantified on by an external operator (the binder of ‘her’). This means that this external

quantifier is an operator on character. Monsters pose a threat to the idea that indexicals are

directly referential, but this threat is no greater when it comes to complex demonstratives

than it was for the simple ones: after all, variable binders are monsters (Rabern 2013), and

they prevent simple demonstratives from being directly referential. The situation is not

different when it comes to sentences like (1):

[Every queen] λ1. t

cherishes dthat (cleric who crowned her

)

The character of the complex demonstrative is supposed to be given by the descriptive

content appended to it, and this descriptive content is being quantified on by a variable

binder. On the standard Kaplanian theory this is yet not enough, because the complex

demonstrative is anchored to the actual world instead of being dependent on other worlds,

but this problem vanishes if we adopt an extensional system with full object-language

quantification over worlds and times, as it is also standard (although usually omitted for

simplicity’s sake).

NS uses can be handled similarly, the only difference being that in QI cases what is bound is

a pronoun whereas in NS uses it is a trace:

NS reading: [Each division] λ1. [the biggest grant in g

] λ2. dthat (professor who

brought in g

) will be honored

The case is not different with sentences like (4), only that what we need in this case is

quantification over possible worlds, as in a standard Lewis-Stalnaker semantics for

subjunctive conditionals. This is made clear if we adopt an extensional system in which

tense and mood are treated as indexicals:

(6) [ w: w is among the closest-to-cⱯ

-worlds in which Simone wins the election)] (w

she

embraces dthat (w elector who

[the deciding vote] λ3. g

casts g

)

As for Bach-Peters sentences and anaphoric uses, they are easily accommodated once we

admit the existence of E-type pronouns (Evans 1977), i.e., pronouns anaphoric on a

quantifier that does not c-command them, and whose semantic value is retrieved by means

of a definite description obtained from that very quantifier:

(6a) A student was sitting in the library. Another student who had an iPod was sitting

across from the student who was sitting in the library. The student who had an I-

pod and was sitting across from the student who was sitting in the library had a

logic book.

(7a) [Every friend of yours who

studied for the exam she

was dreading] λ2. g

passed that exam she

was dreading.

The existence of E-type anaphora could be seen as a threat to direct reference, but, again,

this threat is no greater when it comes to complex demonstratives than it was for simple

ones.

Finally, cases like (3), in which the speaker employs a complex demonstrative without having

any particular individual in mind, can be reproduced for simple demonstratives too. I shall

argue that they are just variants of Frege’s problem.

References

Evans, Gareth. 1977. Pronouns, quantifiers and relative clauses. Canadian Journal of

Philosophy 7 (3): 467-536.

Kaplan, David. 1977. Demonstratives. Reprinted in Almog, Joseph; Perry, John, and

Wettstein, Howard, eds. Themes from Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1989, 481-563.

King, Jeffrey. 2001. Complex demonstratives. A quantificational account. Cambridge: MIT

Press.

Nowak, Ethan. 2014. Demonstratives without rigidity or ambiguity. Linguistics and

Philosophy 37 (5): 409-36

Rabern, Brian. 2013. Monsters in Kaplan's LD. Philosophical Studies 164: 393-404.

IS THERE A GOOD MORAL ARGUMENT AGAINST MORAL REALISM?

Camil Golub, Rutgers University - Newark/University of Leeds

Moral realism is often defended with moral arguments. Only realism, it is argued, can make

good on commitments that we hold most dear, e.g. that genocide is wrong no matter what

anyone thinks about it. However, some philosophers (Blackburn 1993, Erdur 2016, Hayward

2019, Bedke 2019) have argued that there is something morally objectionable about realism

itself: for instance, according to realism, we are justified in believing that genocide is wrong

only if a certain moral fact obtains. But it is objectionable to hold our moral commitments

hostage to metaphysical inquiry in this way. Or so the argument goes.

In this paper, I argue that no version of this moral argument against realism is likely to

succeed. More precisely, minimal realism (the kind of realism defended by Kramer 2009,

Dworkin 2011, and Scanlon 2014, on which realist theses are understood as internal to

moral discourse) is immune to this challenge, while robust non-naturalist realists might have

good answers to all versions of the argument as well.

First, the moral argument against realism might be stated in counterfactual terms:

according to realism, if the normative facts were different or inexistent, then, e.g., genocide

would not be wrong, and this is an objectionable belief to hold.

This argument poses no problem for minimal realists. Given their deflationary approach to

metaphysics, a claim such as “If there were no objective fact that genocide is wrong, then

genocide would not be wrong” is equivalent to “If genocide was not wrong, it would not be

wrong”, which is trivially true, rather than a substantive claim to which moral objections can

be raised.

Robust realists can also reject this argument by appealing to the metaphysical necessity

of normative facts, which makes the relevant counterfactuals trivially true as well.

Another version of the argument (Erdur 2016) focuses on moral explanations: e.g., for

realists, genocide is wrong ultimately because there is an objective reality that makes it

wrong. However, genocide is wrong primarily because of the pain and suffering and loss that

it involves, and not due to the existence of an objective moral reality.

Minimal realists face no challenge here either: they need not claim that moral

explanations bottom out in claims about objective facts. They do embrace moral objectivity,

but typically as the result of substantive moral theorizing, rather than its starting point.

As for robust realists, they could try to explain away the intuitions driving Erdur's

argument by distinguishing between moral and metaphysical explanations. For instance,

perhaps the existence of an objective moral reality is the wrong kind of explanans in a first-

order moral explanation of why genocide is wrong, but once we go beyond moral theorizing

and look for a deeper explanation of morality, such realists might argue, it is appropriate to

appeal to moral facts and properties in a fundamental explanatory role.

The moral argument can also be stated in terms of epistemic possibility (Hayward 2019,

Bedke 2019): realism objectionably entails that we should abandon our moral commitments

if it turns out that the moral facts are different or inexistent.

Minimal realists again have an easy response: on their view, to discover, say, that there is

no fact that makes it the case that genocide is wrong is simply to discover that genocide is

not wrong. Such a discovery should indeed make one abandon the belief that genocide is

wrong, as a matter of basic epistemic rationality.

Robust realists might be tempted to point out that accepting realism does not entail being

disposed to abandon one's moral beliefs in light of certain metaphysical discoveries: if they

came to believe that the moral facts were different, they could still hold on to their moral

commitments, and reject instead the idea that such commitments need a metaphysical

foundation. However, the fact that one could preserve one's moral probity by abandoning

realism in certain circumstances does not sound like a vindication of realism itself.

A more promising option for robust realists is to adopt a certain methodological stance on

the right way to form metaphysical beliefs about moral facts. The metaphysical discovery

that there is no fact that makes it the case that genocide is wrong, they might argue, could

only be supported by the same kind of evidence that would support believing that genocide

is not wrong, namely first-order moral evidence together with other evidence that is relevant

in forming and revising moral beliefs, e.g. higher-order evidence about one's beliefs, or the

simplicity and explanatory power of one's views. So, if our beliefs are formed through the

right kind of process, it is not epistemically possible for the moral facts to substantially

diverge from our moral commitments.

Robust realists can also offer this response when facing the methodological version of the

moral argument (Bedke 2019). According to this argument, robust realism entails that there

is some purely non-moral way of reasoning that would support believing in different

metaphysical facts, and thus undermine our moral commitments, but this would be an

objectionable way of forming moral beliefs.

Once again, robust realists can deny that their view has such consequences: the only

evidence relevant for settling metaphysical disputes about moral facts might be the same

type of evidence that we legitimately use in forming moral beliefs.

In conclusion, both minimal and robust realists can address all versions of the moral

argument, at least if robust realists adopt a certain stance on how we should form

metaphysical beliefs in the moral domain. This discussion also reveals something important

about the dispute between minimal and robust realism: this divide becomes even more

elusive and intractable than it already was, if minimal and robust realists agree not only on

the existence of objective moral facts and our reliable access to such facts, but also on what

kind of evidence can support or undermine realist theses, and only disagree about the

metaphysical weight of their shared commitments.

MULTI-TRACK EPISTEMIC VIRTUES AND DISPOSITIONAL REALISM

Modesto Gómez-Alonso, Universidad de La Laguna

In Judgment and Agency, Sosa (2015) develops his account of knowledge as cognitive

success due to competence into an analysis of how competences, understood as

dispositions to succeed, are constituted. As Sosa sees it, cognitive competences have —

when complete— a triple-S structure that includes the innermost (seat) competence of the

agent, her overall intrinsic state (shape), and the external circumstances for the

manifestation of cognitive success to occur (situation). It is also important to notice that a

range of normal circumstances set a threshold below which S would not count as relevantly

competent. Thus, Sosa’s analysis is able to capture finer structures of potentiality. Those

structures are context-sensitive. As thus, they take into account both temporal dispositions

that would mask the agent’s more stable innermost ability, and external factors relevant to

provide the right opportunity to exercise it.

Context-sensitivity is instrumental in making sense of how the attribution of competence

to the same agent in the same situation (one that is unpropitious) may with equal right be

held true or false. If we are focusing on the innermost competence, the attribution may be

true independently of how things stand in the vicinity of the agent. If, however, we also take

into consideration her overall shape and the availability of external conditions suitable for the

successful exercise of the competence, the agent might count as having the innermost

competence while lacking the relevant, fine-grained, complete competence.

Context-sensitivity, however, needs to be managed with care. Firstly, it may well suggest

an ontological distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic dispositions so that complete

competences would be classified as being part of the latter variety —properties that the

subject acquires and loses without undergoing any intrinsic change. This claim would be at

odds with one of the paradigm marks of dispositionality: intrinsicality.Second, context-

sensitivity could easily be associated with the success thesis, namely with the claim that,

since S exercises an ability to F only if the action to which the ability is directed is

successfully performed, S would lack an ability to F if the situation or shape were not

suitable for cognitive success due to the agent’s relevant competence. One problem with the

success thesis is that it flies in the face of common sense intuitions that seem to conceive

abilities as portable properties. A second source of trouble comes from the single

manifestation-type conception of abilities to which this view seems committed. This

conception and the ‘hub-and-spokes’ model that many power theorists propose do not go

together well.

Finally, if we shift from competences to successful events such as knowledge, the

context-sensitivity of knowledge could be developed into an account that conceives the

modality inherent to knowledge as the modality of subjunctive conditionals and easy

possibilities, and that, thus sees knowledge as not being fully anchored in the cognitive

powers of the subject. Supporters of anti-luck virtue epistemology (ALVE, for short) take this

route. There are, then, two problems. One is a question about the nature of competences,

which revolves around whether and to what extent they are dependent on external factors.

Also, there is the question about the context-sensitivity of successful events, which ties in

with the issue of whether those events are manifestations of powers of the actual world or

whether they are a matter of what happens in modally close possible worlds. On the latter

view, the property of being safe as instantiated by a belief does not supervene on cognitive

features of the believer, and knowledge is only partially grounded in actuality.

The first objective of this paper is thus to meet the challenge of ALVE while sharing with

its advocates the view that competences are modally robust across contexts.

As a second objective, this paper aims at providing an ontological background for the

context-sensitivity of epistemic competences such that context-sensitivity would be

compatible with the following three theses: (i) cognitive competences are intrinsic properties,

(ii) competences (generally) are multi-track dispositions whose powerful nature is not

exhausted by a single-track manifestation-type, and (iii) the modal nature of epistemic

virtues is that of potentiality.

As I see it, the question is about how to provide a thicker ontological base than meagre

potentiality for pragmatic mechanisms to pick out dispositions. It is thus an issue of how to

be realistic about the truth-makers of fine-tuned dispositional terms without mapping

dispositions according to the context-sensitivity that permeates our language about powers.

Context-dependence is an artefact of language. There are, however, ontological features of

dispositions that make it possible to bridge the gap between bare potentiality and pragmatic

regimentation. The scope of a dispositional term may well be pragmatically selected.

However, even so, the proportional nature and the conditions built into the competence for

its proper manifestation are objective features.

In section 1, I will present the epistemic Twin Earth argument against Sosa’s robust virtue

epistemology which was recently proposed by Jesper Kallestrup and Duncan Pritchard

(2016). In section 2, it is explained how ALVE is unable to avoid the problem of finks and

provide the appropriate ordering source to capture the modal force of knowledge. This failure

of anti-luck virtue epistemology to accommodate cognitive competences and thus, to offer a

satisfactory account of knowledge, serves as a foil to flesh out my proposal. On this

alternative account, gradability and reciprocity being the intrinsic features that lay bare the

right ordering source for abilities and their manifestations, they offer a non-contextual

ontological base for context-sensitivity. Finally, in section 3, I will deal with the problem of the

individuation of cognitive powers. My aim here is to defend a model according to which multi-

track powers are invariant across possible cases and scenarios, as well as to offer a

diagnosis of why intuitions on this topic are often fluctuating and conflicting. This paper thus

aims at making explicit the ontological underpinnings of knowledge in a way that it is

consistent with Sosa’s fully dispositional virtue epistemology.

NO NORM FOR (NON-ASSERTED) IMPLICATURES

Javier González de Prado, UNED

Several authors argue that there is a constitutive norm of assertion, for instance a

knowledge norm (e.g. Williamson 2000). An interesting question is whether there is also a

constitutive norm for the act of communicating contents indirectly, in particular as Gricean

implicatures. Green (2017) has recently proposed that there is such a norm for impliciatures,

although it sets a weaker epistemic standard than the norm of assertion. In this paper, I

argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that there are no constitutive norms

governing the communication of contents in indirect ways, when such contents are not

asserted. I will grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, these indirect

communicative acts may be subject to normative assessment on different levels (for

instance, regarding their moral or prudential appropriateness, or their politeness). However,

the norms underlying such assessments are not distinctive and constitutive of this type of

indirect, non-assertoric communicative act.

I start by distinguishing indirect assertions from non-assertoric acts in which some content

is intended to be communicated indirectly to an audience. Following García- Carpintero

(forthcoming), I say that an assertion of p is indirect when it is not made by uttering the type

of declarative sentence that by default, in standard contexts, expresses such a proposition. I

will allow that Gricean conversational implicatures can sometimes count as indirectly

asserted. However, not all propositional contents communicated indirectly should be seen as

asserted. I will argue that a communicative act counts as assertoric only if it gets recorded in

the conversational scoreboard as a proposal to add some proposition to the common ground

of the conversation. There can be contents that are successfully communicated, in the sense

that the members of the audience adopt the relevant attitudes by virtue of recognizing the

communicative intentions of the speaker, but do not get registered in the conversational

scoreboard.

Following Camp (2006), I propose that whether a content communicated indirectly gets to

be recorded in the public conversational scoreboard, and thereby may count as asserted,

depends on the cooperativeness of the participants in the conversation. In cooperative

contexts, participants may be disposed to register as asserted contents far beyond the literal

meaning of the sentence used (for instance metaphors or Gricean implicatures). By contrast,

in more adversarial scenarios, it may happen that the audience or the speaker are only

willing to acknowledge contents directly asserted (that is, contents closely related to the

conventional meaning of the sentence uttered).

On the view I will defend, assertion is constitutively subject to a social norm, that is a

norm sustained by the sanctioning behavior of the participants in the practice (Fricker 2017).

As a result of this norm, asserters become committed to their audience to the truth of what is

asserted. Thus, if a speaker makes a false assertion, the audience becomes entitled to

complain, feel wronged and even demand that the speaker retracts her assertion. This

commitment is not directly dependent on moral or prudential considerations, and is

undertaken even when there is no expectation that the speaker’s audience will believe what

she says (e.g. in bald-faced lies).

I will argue that the norm of assertion governs public assertoric updates to the

conversational scoreboard, in which contents are proposed to be added to the

conversational common ground. Therefore, assertoric commitments are acquired only when

the speaker’s communicative act is recorded in the scoreboard of the conversation.

Speakers, however, may manage to get across some content indirectly while avoiding its

being registered in the public score of the conversation and its being recognized as

asserted. When speakers do so, they do not undertake the commitments associated with

asserting, thereby escaping the jurisdiction of the norm of assertion. If a speaker is attributed

a commitment to the truth of a content that has not been recorded in the conversational

scoreboard, she can disavow such an attribution by claiming to be committed only to those

contents she counts as endorsing according to the public score of the conversation.

Typically, it will be difficult for speakers to disavow a commitment to contents close to the

literal, conventional meaning of the sentence uttered, without retracting their original speech

act (Camp 2006). However, if the commitment attributed is to a content expressed indirectly,

the speaker will often be in a position to complain successfully against having such a content

on the record as asserted by her.

To be sure, speakers who communicate contents indirectly without asserting them can

still be subject to normative evaluation and criticism, for instance on moral grounds.

Nevertheless, these evaluations will not derive from the constitutive norm of assertion, and

the audience will not be in a position to criticize the speaker’s communicative act as

defective qua assertion. It is useful here to compare assertions with legal contracts (or

promises). If an agent signs a contract to the effect that she will bring about some outcome,

she undertakes a legal commitment to do so. The other signatories will be entitled to

complain legally in case she does not honor the contract. This does not need to happen if an

agent generates intentionally certain expectations in her addressee without becoming

contractually bound to fulfill them. In these cases, the addressee is not entitled to the same

type of complaint and redress as when her expectations are backed by a contract

(regardless of whether the agent is morally blameworthy for having created misleading

expectations).

My contention is that the norm of assertion works like a contract in that it makes the

asserter publicly bound by a commitment to her targeted audience. Indirect, non-assertoric

communication provides a way for speakers to get across contents to their audience without

undertaking the public commitments generated by assertions. Of course, such non-asserted

contents will not be added to the common ground of the conversation, but it may be that the

speaker’s main goal is only to get the audience to adopt certain attitudes, even if they are

not reflected in the conversational common ground.

References

Camp, Elizabeth. 2006. “Contextualism, metaphor, and what is said.” Mind & Language 21

(3): 280-309.

Fricker, Elizabeth. 2017. “Norms, Constitutive and Social, and Assertion.” American

Philosophical Quarterly 54 (4): 397-418.

García-Carpintero, Mamuel. Forthcoming. “Sneaky assertions.” Philosophical Perspectives.

https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12116

Green, Adam. 2017. “An Epistemic Norm for Implicature. “The Journal of Philosophy 114

(7): 381- 391.

Williamson, Timothy. 2002. Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

COMMON SENSE EPISTEMOLOGY AS A GENERATIVIST META-PHILOSOPHY

Jean-Baptiste Guillon, Universidad de Navarra

In recent decades, many epistemologists have found some inspiration in Thomas Reid and

the “common sense tradition” of epistemology, and many philosophers have held the view

that a correct meta-philosophy should have a certain degree of “respect” for common sense

(see e.g. Lewis 1986, sect. 2.8). But the common sense tradition contains a variety of

arguments, in which the notion of “common sense” plays very different roles. Common

Sense beliefs are sometimes conceived as highly intuitive beliefs, sometimes as universal,

or natural, or epistemically basic, or chronologically prior, or known to be known, etc.

The line of argument I want to develop here is the conception of Common Sense as the

system of beliefs which constitutes, chronologically speaking, the starting point of all

philosophical enquiry. According to Reid, this chronological antecedence gives common

sense beliefs a “jus quaesitum, or a right of ancient possession, which ought to stand good

till it be overturned” (Reid 1788 IV, 6). This chronological strategy hasn’t been defended by

recent epistemologists. My intention is to develop a modernized version of this line of

argument, using the resources of contemporary dynamic epistemology.

The revised argument offers an original and modest meta-philosophy of common sense

according to which every philosophical system must be conceived as ultimately derivable

from the common sense (i.e. the original) system through a finite series of justified belief

revisions.

In the first part of the presentation, I will set in place the basic concepts of dynamic

epistemology that are needed for the argument. Here, I draw on Isaac Levi’s work (Levi

1980), which draws attention to revisions of beliefs. A belief revision is a process by which

the agent moves from one system of beliefs Sn (what Levi calls a “corpus”) to another

system Sn+1. And, as Levi notes, a belief revision can be justified or unjustified in a sense

which has nothing to do with the traditional synchronic (or foundationalist) notion of

justification. To distinguish clearly between synchronic justification and diachronic

justification, I call the former support and the latter motivation:

– a belief state can be supported by another belief (by inference) and maybe also

basically by some experiences (like perceptual experiences)

– a revision of one’s system of belief Sn can be motivated by an inconsistency or an

incoherence within Sn.

In dynamic epistemology, the central question is not whether a given belief is supported

or not, within the agent’s system of beliefs Sn. The central question is whether the move

from Sn-1 to Sn was (or was not) motivated. This approach is also very close to what

Harman develops under the label: “the coherence theory of belief revision” (Harman 1986,

32).

An important difference with Isaac Levi’s (and other dynamic epistemic logicians’)

approach is that I don’t take systems of beliefs to be closed under deduction, because I want

to leave open the possibility that the agent possesses (unbeknownst to her) sets of

inconsistent beliefs: this is important in order to account for philosophical arguments which

have the form of trilemmas for instance (where the argument shows to the agent that she

has three inconsistent beliefs, and the inconsistency in itself constitutes a motivation – in our

technical sense – to adopt a revised system of belief).

One important feature that I keep from Levi’s work is the demand that a revision of

system Sn to Sn+1 must be motivated by a principle which is present in Sn itself. (I call this

the “principle of internal motivation”).

In the second part, I will apply this framework to the idea of Common Sense as a first or

original system of beliefs S0.

Suppose an agent starts with the belief system S0, then any system S1 (successor of S0)

can only be motivated by principles within S0 (and some internal tension – inconsistency or

incoherence – within S0). And more generally any later belief system Sn can be ultimately

well motivated only if it is derivable, through a finite series of motivated revisions, from the

principles of the original system S0.

It is important to note here that this strategy is not strongly “conservative”: Sn may differ a

lot from S0, and indeed may have abandoned all of S0’s beliefs. The requisite is only that it

should be derivable from S0 through a series of motivated revisions.

What I call “Common Sense” is the prephilosophical system of belief Scs that everyone

starts from. (Of course, it would probably require a high degree of idealisation to suppose

that everyone starts with the same set of beliefs. So, in a less idealized version, Scs is

definfed as the subset that is the intersection of all S0s.) I introduce the idea that generally a

philosopher who proposes an argument tries (or should try) to make it in principle relevant to

everyone: this means, in our framework, that generally, philosophers propose arguments

which “appeal to common sense”, or in other words, arguments which should be derivable

through a finite series of motivated steps from the subset Scs of everyone’s S0.

This set up gives the basics of a conception of philosophical method (a common sense

meta-philosophy): every philosophical argument should be presented as derived, through a

finite series of motivated revisions, from a set of beliefs that are part of common sense. In

reference to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar hypothesis, I call this meta-philosophy a

generativist meta-philosophy.

This meta-philosophy is different from Richard Double’s (1996) highly conservative

definition of a common sense meta-philosophy (according to which the only purpose of

philosophical activity would be to preserve common sense beliefs, come what may, and

provide underpinnings for them). In my common sense meta-philosophy, common sense

beliefs can be revised; the constraint is only that any revision of common sense must be

ultimately “generated from” (or “traced back to”) principles of common sense itself, through a

series of motivated revisions.

References

Double, Richard. 1996. Metaphilosophy and free will. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harman, Gilbert. 1986. Change in View: Principles of Reasoning. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press.

Levi, Isaac. 1980. The Enterprise of Knowledge: An Essay on Knowledge, Credal

Probability, and Chance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Lewis, David. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: Blackwell.

Reid, Thomas. 1788. Essays on the active powers of man By Thomas Reid. Edinburgh:

Printed for John Bell and G.G.J. & J. Robinson London.

PRAGMATICS, LEVELS OF MEANING, AND SPEAKER COMMITMENT

Alison Hall, De Montfort University; Diana Mazzarella, Université de Neuchâtel

What a speaker directly communicates or ‘says’, as opposed to implicates, is widely held to

go beyond Grice’s notion of ‘what is said’, which was equated with the linguistically encoded

meaning of the utterance after reference assignment and disambiguation. This has led many

theorists (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1995, Carston 2002, Recanati 2004), referred to here as

‘contextualists’, to posit that this level of utterance meaning is a hybrid of linguistically

encoded meaning and both linguistically- and pragmatically-mandated pragmatically

recovered meaning.

The main arguments for the contextualist view that what is said is the result of extensive

enrichment of linguistic meaning are (a) that truth-value judgments depend on this enriched

meaning (henceforth ‘explicature’) rather than any more minimal meaning, and (b) that more

minimal meanings (the Gricean what is said, or the minimal propositions posited by

Minimalists such as Borg 2004 and Cappelen & Lepore 2005) are explanatorily redundant,

whereas explicature has a role to play in the explanation of how we derive the overall

speaker’s meaning, in that it provides the inferential warrant for implicatures.

The use of truth-value judgments as a method of individuating explicatures has been

criticised recently by Borg (2016). She argues that the truth-value judgment does not

uncover the explicature; instead, it is the process of making the truth-value judgment that

creates the putative explicature. That is, the literal meaning is enriched not as part of the

process of utterance comprehension, but only subsequently, in order to judge whether the

utterance is true or false.

Borg (2017), Michaelson (2016), Weissman and Terkourafi (2019), and others, argue that

the lying-misleading distinction tracks the saying-implicating distinction better than truth-

value judgment tasks do. The idea is that saying something false with the intention to

deceive is lying, whereas implicating it is misleading. Borg (2016, 2017) claims that people’s

intuitions about whether a speaker has lied or merely mislead generally favour the more

minimal proposition over explicature as the correct notion of what is said. If this is correct,

these judgments are evidence of an explanatory role for minimal content.

We argue that the lying-misleading test shares essentially the same flaw as truth-value

judgments: the process of judging whether the speaker lied does not uncover communicated

content, but instead encourages the judge to extract the minimal content recoverable by

linguistic decoding (plus the linguistically-mandated processes of reference assignment and

disambiguation), because this minimal content, being largely free of pragmatic inference, is

what the judge is in a position to indisputably hold the speaker responsible for. In fact, the

problem may be more likely to arise in judgments of lying vs. misleading, as opposed to

mere truth vs. falsity, because, as Weissman and Terkourafi (2019: 223) point out: “precisely

because accusations of lying are consequential and not to be made lightly, people may be

driven to sharpen their intuitions regarding whether some material is part of an utterance’s

truth-conditional content when asked whether a speaker who asserted this material has lied.”

Given the doubts expressed above about whether truth-value or lying/misleading

judgments are singling out any level of content that is entertained by the hearer as part of

the utterance comprehension process (as opposed to being recovered upon subsequent

reflection on whether the speaker was being truthful), we argue instead for a more indirect

method of gauging what hearers entertain as having been ‘said’. Using uncontroversial

examples of saying (that is, cases that do not involve pragmatic enrichment), presupposing,

and implicating, Mazzarella et al (2018) measured the reputational costs incurred by

speakers who deliberately conveyed something false, finding that, all else being equal,

people are “significantly more likely to selectively trust the speaker who implicated p than the

speaker who asserted [=’said’] or presupposed p”.

We present the results of a study comparing explicature to the Gricean what is said and

to implicatures, using examples such as (1):

1. a. You have time.

1. b. You have time to organise a focus group.

1. c. A focus group is a good idea.

(1c) implicates that the recipient has time to organise a focus group; in (a) this is part of

explicature; in (b), it is said in the Gricean sense. Participants read a story that established a

high-stakes context, then saw two testimonies – e.g. (1a) and (1c) – then answered a

question to gauge their trust in each speaker. In line with contextualism, we predicted that

pragmatically inferred but explicated material, as in (a), would be treated by participants as

being committed to by the sender to a similar degree as is characteristic of content that is

linguistically encoded, or involves only reference assignment and disambiguation, as in (b).

We also predicted that the sender will be treated as significantly less committed to

implicatures, as in (c). Both predictions were borne out. We discuss the implications for the

debate between contextualists and minimalists about what levels of meaning feature in the

comprehension process.

References

Borg, Emma. 2017. “Explanatory roles for minimal content”. Nous, Early View.

Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit

Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mazzarella, Diana, Robert Reinecke, Ira Noveck, and Hugo Mercier. 2018. “Saying,

presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment”. Journal of

Pragmatics 133: 15-27.

Recanati, Francois. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weissman, Benjamin, and Marina Terkourafi. 2019. “Are false implicatures lies? An empirical

investigation”. Mind & Language 34: 221-246.

THE CONTINGENT VALUE OF RATIONALITY

Julen Ibarrondo Murguialday, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

There is an ongoing debate on the normativity of rationality that has been significantly

enriched in the last years. Many authors both in epistemology as well as in ethics assume

that rationality ought to be necessarily normative. That is, that we have to be rational

regardless of the effects rational behavior may have on us and our relation to our

environment. This seems to conflict with the intuition that any vindicative explanation of the

normativity of rationality should rely on claims about what is promoted by rationality and the

ways in which it does so. I will call this the ”practical value’ of rationality.

As Cowie (2014) has pointed out, there is an initial presumption in favor of explaining the

normativity of rationality in purely practical terms. After all, most authors acknowledge that

rationality has practical value. On the one hand, claims about the valuable properties in

rationality that are detached from practical value seem to overdetermine its normative

nature. The appeal to practical value seems enough to explain why rationality is normative.

Adding other considerations seems unjustified. On the other hand, postulating normative

properties fully detached from practical value leads to an odd overlap: since the advocate of

the intrinsic value detached from any practical value acknowledges that rationality has

practical value, he is forced to admit that practical and intrinsic value overlap on rational

conduct in a mysterious way as both run parallel to one another but we cannot explain the

appearance of one in terms of the other.

In order to defend that rationality is normative regardless of its practical value, some

authors have stacked to the intuition that there is something valuable in behaving rationally

even in those hypothetical contexts of radical skepticism in which, ex hypothesis, rationality

has no practical value at all. Recently Sylvan (forthcoming) has presented an interesting

view that takes this path. Following Hurka’s (2003) value theory, he claims that manifesting

respect for truth is valuable because it is the appropriate way of relating to truth.

Manifestations of respect for truth come in degrees, where the highest would involve forming

true beliefs by procedures that manifest respect for truth. However, even if the subject fails to

manifest respect for truth in this way, there are degraded forms of respect such as believing

rationally. Thus, according to Sylvan, we have to be rational regardless of its practical value

(and therefore also in contexts of radical skepticism) because irrationality involves a form of

disrespect to truth.

My goal is that of showing that the claim that rationality retains its worth in skeptic

contexts is way less plausible than what it seems at first view. Instead, I will argue that its

plausibility relays on not distinguishing between cases in which the agent fails to obtain the

goods that are usually provided by rationality (epistemic and practical success) because one

is facing an anomalous situation that provides him with an excuse, from a very different type

of cases in which reason (understood as a set of psychological dispositions) is so

disconnected from the environment that it is systematically unfitted to bring about epistemic

or practical success.

In order to illustrate this I will consider the following example: Let us suppose that, as

some theist philosophers and theologians (Plantinga and Calvin among them) have argued,

human

beings enjoy a faculty called `sensus divinitatis ” which involves a set of powers that allow

us to communicate with God. If God exists and we can relate to him in this way then we

obviously have very strong reasons in favor of cultivating and protecting our employment of

sensus divinitatis. This can explain why we still see something valuable in our commitment

to the appropriate use of sensus divinitatis in cases in which we fail to make good use of it

because of factors that we cannot control.

However, does manifesting respect for God by cultivating sensus divinitatis have any real

value in a godless world? It does not seem so. We can excuse the reasonable theist who

believes to be manifesting respect for God by cultivating sensus divinitatis, but there is a

sense in which it is obvious that there is nothing good, even less mandatory, in the believer’s

behavior. To claim that sensus divinitatis retains worth in such world implies a form of

fetishism, by which value is placed on an object in such a way that it is not beneficial for

anyone.

My claim is that rationality operates in an analogous way in worlds of radical skepticism. If

the connection between rationality and epistemic and practical success is merely apparent,

then there cannot be anything genuinely valuable in being rational in that world. The set of

dispositions that play valuable functions for the agent in his environment are unable to

perform such a role in skeptic worlds. In those worlds behaving rationally is not a good way

to interact with the environment and thus to consider it normative is fetishistic.

If this is so then the normativity of rationality is a contingent fact: the psychological

dispositions we characterize as rational are valuable only in those worlds in which they retain

practical value. Why are they valuable in our world even if they sometimes lead us to error?

Because, according to Graham’s etiological account of functions, it is in virtue of the

proliferation of normal circumstances in non-skeptic worlds, and therefore the tendency of

rationality to produce valuable outcomes, what explains the perseverance of rational

dispositions of rational dispositions, both at psycho-biological and at socio-cultural levels. An

explanation that would not be available for skeptic worlds but nevertheless helps us

elaborate a vindicative history of rationality.

I will conclude then that the intrinsic value of rationality cannot be vindicated without

appealing to its practical value. We ought to search for a teleological theory of rationality that

explains why it is normative in terms of how, given our constitution and environment, it

contributes to the goods of human life.

References

LaSalle, Peter. 2017. “Conundrum: A Story about Reading.” New England Review 38 (1):

95–109. Project MUSE.

Cowie, Cristopher. 2014. “In defence of instrumentalism about epistemic normativity”,

Synthese N.191, pp. 4003-4017.

Graham, Peter. 2014. “Warrant, Function, History”, Fairweather, Abrol y Flanagan, Owen

(eds.), Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue. Cambridge University Press, pp. 15-35.

Hurka, Thomas. 2001. Virtue, Vice, and Value. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Sylvan, Kurt. Pendiente de publicación. “An Epistemic Non-Consequentialism”, The

Philosophical Review.

ON COGNITIVE AFFORDANCES

Marta Jorba, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

Affordances are opportunities for action presented to an organism in a certain environment

and they are always relative to the organism’ abilities (Gibson 1979)—a tree is climbable to

an organism capable of climbing, a teapot is graspable to someone capable of grasping it,

etc. It is a theoretical concept that can be cashed out linguistically by the structure [verb]—

able: a stone is perceived as throw—able, or an apple as eat—able. The notion of

affordance has received a great deal of interest and has functioned as a key concept in

ecological psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, as well as in music and

industrial design.

Research on affordances has been strictly developed in the domain of perceptual

experiences and bodily actions, thus somehow assuming that there are no affordances in

other domains. It is the aim of this paper to attempt to make the case that this assumption

need not be maintained and so there is room for arguing that this notion can be extended to

thinking or cognition in useful ways. First, I make the case for cognitive affordances and,

second, I argue that they function as motivating reasons for action, thus playing a relevant

rational role in our cognitive life. The fact that they present this role also gives an argument

for thinking that cognitive affordances are experienced.

Let’s consider these two examples:

CALCULATION: a subject entertains the thought that she should arrive at 8am at the

train station and she is inclined to calculate the time at which she should leave home

in order to achieve that aim.

MIND-WANDERING: a subject is engaged in mind-wandering and at a certain moment a

pattern of thoughts produces a new idea that “calls” for being reflected upon.

The common structure underlying these two cases is the following: x affords φ-ing, where x

is a cognitive element and φ is a certain mental action. In CALCULATION, x is the thought I

should arrive at 8am at the station and φ is the mental action of calculating the time at which

I should leave home in order to get to the station. In MIND-WANDERING, x is an idea and φ the

mental action of reflecting on it. The x can involve different elements of the mind insofar they

afford a certain kind of action, and these elements can be characterised as cognitive

affordances. Cognitive affordances, thus described, involve mental elements being

opportunities for mental action.

In contrast with the perceptual domain, mental actions are not constrained in the same

way by the environment of the subject and so the question arises as to what can provide

constraints in the affordance-structure of cognition. I explore the question of why certain

affordances are salient and not others for a certain subject, and argue that there are cases in

which the previous intention of the subject explains this salience, whereas there are other

cases (as in creative thinking), where the affordance “spontaneously” demands a certain

course of action.

In contrast with other similar attempts to extend the notion of affordances (Scarantino

2003, Matthen 2005, McClelland 2014, 2019), my approach doesn’t restrict affordances to

perceived affordances but rather claims that cognitive affordances are experienced

elements, that is, something the subject experiences but not necessarily of a perceptual

nature. I provide an argument to the conclusion that cognitive affordances are experienced

based on a rational role they play in our minds. Roughly, the argument goes as follows.

When rationalizing an action, the afforded preceding episode can function as a reason the

subject adduces for which she acted as she did. In the case of CALCULATION: why did the

subject calculate the time? Because (she thinks) she should arrive at the station at 8. In the

case of MIND-WANDERING: why did the subject reflect on an idea? Because an idea called her

attention. The reasons contained in these answers are usually called motivating reasons,

that is, reasons that the agent takes to favor her action, and in light of which she acts.

Motivating reasons are distinct from normative reasons and explanatory reasons (Alvarez

2010). Normative reasons justify someone’s φ-ing, while explanatory reasons explain why

someone φ–ed. Cognitive affordances can play the role of motivating reasons precisely

because they are part of what is offered as a response to the question why the subject did

the action she did. In the two cases presented, there is a reason for the subject to act in this

way (motivating reason) given the fact that this action was presented to her as possible

within her abilities (cognitive affordance). For one to be motivated to act in certain way, “the

reason must be something the agent is at some level aware of.” (Alvarez 2010: 129). I

further clarify the kind of awareness involved here, discuss possible general objections and

conclude with some implications of the cognitive affordance hypothesis.

References

Alvarez, Maria. 2010. Kinds of Reasons. An Essay in the Philosophy of Action. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Gibson, James J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). New Jersey:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Matthen, Mohan. (2005). Seeing, Doing and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense

Perception. Oxford: OUP.

McClelland, Tom. 2019. “The Mental Affordance Hypothesis”, Mind.

Scarantino, Andrea. 2003. “Affordances Explained”, Philosophy of Science, 70(5), 949-961.

THE MIRROR THESIS OF CONSENT

Maximilian Kiener, University of Oxford

When we consent to something (e.g. a medical procedure, sex, a tattoo), we permit people

to act in ways that would otherwise be legally or morally impermissible. However, in order for

consent to be valid, certain conditions must be met. In this presentation, I discuss the

condition that consent needs to be voluntary, i.e. that a person give his consent free of

pressure, coercion, or any other seriously controlling influence. More specifically, I will

address the question as to which influences on a potential consenter’s decision-making

coerce or control him in a way so as to vitiate his consent. I will answer that influences vitiate

consent only if exerting the influence shares three features with the wrong committed when,

for instance, a physician performs surgery on a competent patient without that patient’s

consent. I will call this claim the Mirror Thesis because it states that the features of the

wrong required to vitiate consent, e.g. blackmail, mirror certain features of the wrong of

performing a certain act without consent, e.g. assault.

TOO QUEER? ASEXUALITY MEETS SEX POSITIVITY

Abigail Klassen, University of Winnipeg

Broadly, the term ‘asexual’ refers to persons who do not experience sexual arousal or who,

despite sexual arousal, choose not to engage in sexual activity. These people may or may

not experience romantic feelings for others. Asexuality remains a relatively unknown, and

perhaps worse, a largely misunderstood phenomenon. Some typical misconceptions include

the notion that an asexual is someone who is a “closeted” homosexual or a person who “has

yet to find the right person.” More radically, asexual persons can be wrongly associated with

the recent uprising of “incels” or “involuntary celibates” (persons desiring, but unable to

secure sexual or romantic partners). “Inceldom” is often characterized by misogyny,

resentment, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against people

who are sexually active. Recent media coverage of violent incel cases includes the 2014 US

shooting massacre undertaken by Elliot Rodger, for example. Scholarship pertaining to

asexuality is therefore not only of importance to the natural or social sciences, but is also of

moral importance; constraints and enablements are placed on individuals who are, or who

are taken to be, asexual. When asexual persons are misunderstood, constraints placed

upon them can be not only epistemically unwarranted, but unethical and oppressive.

Perhaps best described in the works of Foucault, Western society emphasizes

“compulsory sexuality” – the idea that human beings are “naturally sexual.” Certainly,

“normal” bodies are not just “for sex,” but sex is part of what a “normal” body desires or

engages in. In turn, an asexual person may wonder, “What is my body for? What am I for?”

Others too may wonder of a declared or taken to be asexual person, “What is their body

for?” or more radically, “What is an asexual “for”? What do they do? What do I do with them?

How am I to behave around them?” Compulsory sexuality coupled with the current trend of

“sex positivity” (at least in the West) and its accompanying proliferation of ways to

understand or identify one’s sexuality (i.e., as “pansexual,” “demisexual,” etc.), while

considered emancipatory by some, can serve to reinforce the notion that there is something

wrong with asexual people. Further scholarship pertaining to asexuality is therefore not only

of importance to the natural or social sciences, but is also of moral importance since, to use

Ásta’s language from Categories We Live By (2018), constraints and enablements are

placed on individuals who are, or who are taken to be, asexual. When asexual persons are

misunderstood, constraints placed upon them can be not only be epistemically unwarranted,

but unethical and oppressive.

Empirical and psychological investigations are but one dimension of capturing the

meaning and the constraints and enablements that follow from “being asexual” or “being

asexually embodied.” In Ian Hacking’s terms, asexual people are also subject to the looping

effect. Being characterized as asexual by oneself or by others, an individual has some

capacity to negotiate the meaning of that characterization - to accept, reject, or alter it. Using

Beauvoir’s analysis of “frigidity” in The Second Sex (1949) is useful in providing a lens

through which to reconceptualize asexuality by means of ideology critique. Beauvoir

reconstructs frigidity as an active resistance to one’s embodied social situation rather than

an intrinsic passive pathology, though asexuality may characterize both cases. I hope to

further underscore Beauvoir’s important rearticulation of frigidity by applying her analysis to

asexuality. I also buttress Beauvoir’s reading with Catherine MacKinnon’s work on

pornography and Sally Haslanger’s work in Resisting Reality (2012) on ameliorative social

constructionist programs (programs that ask what do “we” want the concept of, in this case,

“asexual” to represent or do?).

THINKING THE IMPERCEIVABLE: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PHILOSOPHY OF

AUDITORY PERCEPTION

Giulia Lorenzi, University of Warwick

The thought experiment, as a device for thinking about counterfactual scenarios that are not

necessarily testable, has been employed in philosophy since the antiquity. In De Rerum

Natura (1.951–987) Lucretius provides one of the most intriguing example of the ancient age

deploying it to support his vision about the infiniteness of space. In the history of philosophy

and certain sciences (like physics), thought experiments have played a central role. These

little stories have become well-known independently of the main arguments that they are

meant to support. For example, Schrödinger's cat or Maxwell's demon are now popular also

among people who are not specialists in quantum physic or in thermodynamics.

The widespread use of thought experiments in the philosophical and scientific literatures

during the centuries has lead many researchers to think about their roles, functions and their

argumentative and scientific value. In the last years, a vast debate has bloomed about them

and their various aspects. The one of the goals of these disquisitions is to understand if they

can tell us something about the real world and, if they can, how they achieve this.

Presenting the main positions displayed in the literature about thought experiments,

Brown and Fehige (2014) observe that that debate on this topic is closely related to the one

on the role of intuitions. Indeed, usually authors employ counterfactual scenarios with the

conviction that univocal reactions to them can constitute an argument against or in favour a

certain position. Some philosophers, like Wilkes (1988), have suggested that disciplines like

psychology can furnish a great variety of real cases that are suitable to test our intuitions,

without the need of creating nonassessable stories. However, real situations often are too

peculiar and complex to allow philosophers to work only on one specific aspect at a time and

to develop a general theory. Thought experiments are valuable instrument to create an

occasion to reflect on particular questions and to generalise the conclusions. This seems

particularly true if we focus in particular on the study of perception, a kind of experience that

involves first-hand impressions. In cases in which we are working on the phenomenology of

something, even the impossibility to have a clear image of the scenario expressed in the

thought experiment can lead us to a very promising conclusions.

The aim of my talk is to outline the specific role that thought experiments have in the

study of auditory perception. I will employ a bottom-up approach, on the basis of the study of

two peculiar thought experiments. I will argue that these cases offer a challenging but

promising starting point for discussions in the philosophy of perception and metaphilosophy.

The first case that I want to analyse is the case of a world without any spatial dimensions

presented by Strawson in the second chapter of Individuals (1959). This thought experiment

was created to clarify metaphysical issues, and in particular, to bring on considerations

related to the identification of individual entities. Instead, it marked the beginning of the

contemporary interest in the world of sounds. Against Hacking (1993) suggestion that

thought experiments have only one purpose, Strawson’s TE had a peculiar historical role

raising a debate about perception that did not exist before and that was not the target of his

original creator. While Strawson’s view on individual sounds went on to involve Swanson

(1967) and Evans (1980), who took the thought experiment as a given, I want to argue that

Strawson’s non-spatial world suggests us to consider an imperceivable situation that cannot

be imagined. I want to a) explore the notion of the impossible imagination relevant in this

context and b) suggest that it was the consideration of this impossibility that lead to the

flourishing of spatial theories in the debate on sounds as Casati and Dokic (2014)

reconstructed. Mutatis mutandis Strawson’s non-spatial world seems to have the same

problems as Chalmers’ (1996) zombie TE. What matters here is the relation between the

notion of “being conceivable” and “being imaginable”. On the one side, I want to point out

that even in cases in which the thoughts experiments highlight problems related to some

type of impossibility they are still conducing us to promising results. On the other side, I want

to suggest that in the peculiar context of the philosophy of perception a good criterion for

identifing good scenarios where it is possible to test our perceptual intuition should be

grounded in the notion of perceptual imaginability.

The second case that I want to present is the TE of sounds in a vacuum. It was

introduced for the first time in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in

opposition to Sceptics and Atheists (1713), but it was re-elaborated and introduced in the

contemporary debate on the metaphysics of sounds by Casati and Dokic in their La

philosophie du son (1994, 2014). Also in that case, the thought experiment was created to

find an answer to a metaphysical issue but shifted to become the main point of the

discussion between Casati and Dokic and O’Callaghan (2007). These authors wanted to

know if the presence of a medium is a necessary condition for the existence of a sound, or in

other words, if a sound is a relational event that included some sort of vibrating substance.

They soon realised that the thought experiment cannot provide a certain answer to this

question, but it can test properly our intuition on the way in which our perception works

(Bregman 1990). This idea is confirmed by the associations that Casati and Dokic drew

between the auditory case presented and the real cases of visual tunnel effects. The

unexpected reactions to this scenario led these philosophers to suggest other reasons to

support their theories, abandoning one of the historically most used argument in the debate

on sounds. However, I will argue that the thought experiment leads us to explore more

deeply the relation between metaphysics and perception in the case of audition.

RADICAL ENACTIVISM, PRIMITIVE INTENTIONALITY AND BIOLOGICAL

NORMATIVITY

Carlos Mario Márquez Sosa, São Paulo University

Two main pillars of radical enactivism (RE hereinafter) are (1) to be radical, i.e., to dissociate

intentionality, mentality and cognition from representation. (2) To be enactivist, i.e., to

endorse the view according to which motion, action, agency, activity or dynamics is

constitutive of intentionality, mentality and cognition. It is not difficult to discover a close

linkage between the two tenets. After all, one crucial way to argue against representational

theories of mind is to state that cognitive agents are dynamic -not symbolic- systems (see

van Gelder and Port, 1995 and Chemero, 2013). There is also an important divergence that

worth pursuing. On the one hand, in attempting to reject the equivalence between

intentionality and representation, RE theorists assume that there is a kind of primitive

intentionality or directionality that does not require the attribution of contents or correctness

conditions. On the other, the attempt to explain cognitive agents as dynamic systems let to

the following impasse: even assuming that being representational is not the mark of

cognition, mentality and intentionality, there still should be a characteristic feature that

distinguish it from other dynamical systems, even if the difference is a matter of grades and

not of levels. After all, although maybe all cognitive systems are dynamic, for sure not all

(physical, biological or computational) dynamic systems are cognitive. One way to state that

characteristic feature -without using directly the notion of representation- is to point out that

cognition is intrinsically a normative phenomenon. If that story is approximately true, RE

theorists would confront the following issue: they urge us to admit that there is a kind of

directionality that does not entail the attribution of correctness conditions and to admit that to

be in a cognitive state requires to be in a state that is normative, i.e, to be in a state that can

be corrected by how the world is.

Fortunately, there are some routes out of the previous dilemma. A way out will be to stay

very radical. That is, to maintain that neither cognition nor intentionality nor mentality are

intrinsically normative phenomena. That denial either implies to endorse a strict equivalence

between dynamic and cognitive systems and to eliminate the notion of intentionality from the

vocabulary of cognitive science, or demands to point to other features in order to demark the

limits. Since RE theorists do not stay as radical as to deny a role for the notion of normativity,

I wont pursue this nihilist path either.

Another way out will be to argue that there is a kind of normativity whose structure is not

characterized in terms of correctness conditions. So for example, Hutto and Myin (2017)

relay on Millikan’s naturalistic approach to distinguish between semantic and biological

normativity. They avoid Millikan’s target -that is, to provide an account of mental

representation- but endorse her theoretical apparatus and use it to explain a putative

primitive contentless directionality. Millikan’s account focuses on consumer devices as

interpreters that -under normal conditions- perform proper functions determined by its

phylogenetic record. Proper functions are not specified by determining what the consumer

devices actually or dispositionally do, but to what they are supposed to do accordingly to

biological norms given some normal conditions of covariance. Even if those devices don't

actually or dispositionally perform its function- they still have a proper function that should or

are supposed to perform. A “should” with a normative force, but a natural “should”.

Another example is Schlicht (2018), according to him: Varela, Thompson and Rosch

(1991) autopoietic enactivism entails the notion of biological purposes. Briefly, an organism

is directed towards features in its environment in virtue of self-sustaining processes (self-

organization, self-production, self-repairmen) that sustain the satisfaction of its biological

needs. Those needs acquire a biological meaning or value for the organism survival.

In order to maintain the dissociation between intentionality and representation without

denying its normative distinctive aspect, Schlicht, Hutto and Myin seems to claim then, that it

is plausible to assume that some mechanisms have evolved for some purposes in the

service of survival, so that the states of those mechanisms exhibit intentionality in the sense

of biological directedness. A kind of pointing not in the sense of representing nor in the sense

of detecting, but in the sense of having the function to satisfy a natural target valuable for

adaptation and evolution.

Now, it is worth remembering that the leading motivation to endorse the main pillars

outlined above is to provide an account of how mental ascriptions fit within a natural

description of the world. That is, to naturalize intentionality. It is worth remembering also that,

as Fodor (1987) would say, the naturalistic project requires providing an account “in non-

intentional, non-semantical, non-teleological, and in general, non-question- begging

vocabulary”.

The objective of my presentation is to evaluate if the assumption of biological normativity

is question begging. I will proceed developing the following argument: (1) one of the

advantages of evolution theory is to avoid accounts in terms of putative purposes reducing

them to accounts in terms of causes historically exhibited in the phylogenetic record. What

an organism is supposed to do is explained in terms of what it historically did when

functioned appropriately, not the other way, so that it is unnecessary to introduce attributions

of values, meanings and purposes in the descriptions of natural history. (2) Biological norms,

conceived as nomological clauses stated from a biological theory, are fully propositional

statements subject to counterfactual evaluation. As Putnam (1992) has pointed out,

counterfactual evaluations involve criteria of relevance based on intensional adscriptions of

content. So then, using evolutionary theory to explain primitive intentionality either entails to

excise attributions of values and meanings or presuppose attributions of content.

References

Chemero, Anthony. 2013. "Radical embodied cognitive science." Review of General

Psychology 17, no. 2: 145-150.

Fodor, Jerry and Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo. 2011. What Darwin got wrong. Profile books.

Haugeland, John. Having Thougth: Essays in the Metaphysics of mind. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Hutto, Daniel and Myin, Erik. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: basic minds met content. MIT

Press.

Putnam, Hilary. 1992. Renewing philosophy. Harvard University Press.

Schlicht, Tobias. 2018 “Does Separating Intentionality From Mental Representation Imply

Radical Enactivism?” Front. Psychol. 9:1497.

VARIETIES OF DEEP DISAGREEMENT

Guido Melchior, University of Graz

The notion of deep disagreement was introduced by Fogelin (1985) in his seminal paper and

gained increasing attention in epistemology in the last years. Intuitively, deep disagreement

arises if two parties fail to reach agreement about certain target propositions due to

disagreement about fundamental “hinge” propositions and/or framework propositions about

rules or conditions of rational argumentation.

Concerning deep disagreement, two questions are central. (1) What is deep

disagreement, i.e. how can deep disagreement be characterized? (2) Is deep disagreement

really unresolvable? There are different views on the market about the nature of deep

disagreement. Fogelin (1985, 8f) argues that deep disagreement “proceeds from a clash in

underlying principles” and that it is disagreement about “a whole system of mutually

supporting propositions (and paradigms, models, styles of acting and thinking) that constitute

[…] a form of life.” Ranalli (forthcoming) distinguishes between a Wittgensteinian theory or

hinge theory of disagreement, which Fogelin endorses, and a fundamental epistemic

principle theory. Lynch (2010) defends a version of deep disagreement that arises from

epistemic circularity. Aikin (forthcoming) stresses the analogy between deep disagreement

and regress problems and the problem of the criterion.

Moreover, there is disagreement about whether deep disagreement is unresolvable or

not. Fogelin (1985) was pessimistic and claims that “deep disagreements cannot be resolved

through the use of argument, for they undercut the conditions essential to arguing.” Lynch

(2010, 273) argues similarly: “Where there is deep epistemic disagreement over some

fundamental principle, the disagreement has hit bedrock, the spade has turned.” Feldman

(2005) in contrast argues that deep disagreement can be resolved in that both disagreeing

parties suspend judgment about the target propositions.

This paper will clarify these two central questions concerning deep disagreement. First, it

will elucidate the nature of deep disagreement by providing a taxonomy of various versions

of deep disagreement, including deep disagreement relying on disagreement about the

reliability of sources, on disagreement about premises of arguments, and on disagreement

about the rationality (or cogency) of arguments. Second, it provides arguments for why these

versions of deep disagreement cannot be resolved via argumentation, which are based on

reinterpretations of skeptical arguments.

Typically, epistemologists identify two desiderata concerning skeptical arguments, first, to

explain how the skeptical intuition arises, and second to argue why the skeptical argument is

unsound (or why it is sound). Most epistemologists do not regard skeptical arguments as

convincing and reject them as arguments about the limits of knowledge. Approaches to

skeptical problems usually stop at this point due to the strong focus on knowledge in

epistemology. This knowledge-centered approach ignores a further desideratum. Even if the

skeptical conclusion can be reasonably rejected, skeptical arguments need not be entirely

abandoned. As I will show, they can teach us a philosophically significant lesson, not about

the limits of knowledge, but about the limits of persuasive argumentation and resolving

disagreement. Here is the core idea of this paper:

The core idea

Problems and limitations of reasoning stressed by skeptical arguments do not affect

our capacities to know but our capacities to persuasively argue and to resolve

disagreement. Properly understood, these arguments do not teach a lesson

concerning the limits of knowledge but concerning the limits of persuasive

argumentation and of resolving disagreement.

Hence central skeptical arguments are unsound as arguments about the extent of

knowledge but properly reinterpreted they are sound arguments about the limits of

persuasive argumentation. Here are the versions of skeptical arguments reformulated as

arguments about argumentation and disagreement and the crucial conclusions that can be

drawn for deep disagreement:

Argument 1:

A speaker cannot convince a hearer via argumentation that is infinite, or circular, or

stops at an arbitrary point.

Consequence: Persuasive argumentation requires that speaker and hearer agree

about some premises or that the hearer trusts the speaker concerning some

premises prior to engaging in argumentation.

Argument 2:

We cannot persuade via argumentation that involves infinite meta-regresses.

Consequence: Agreement about the rationality of arguments cannot be established

via argumentation. Persuasion via argumentation requires agreement about

rationality of arguments prior to engaging in argumentation.

Argument 3:

Bootstrapping is not a way of persuasively arguing that a source is reliable.

Consequence: Persuasion via argumentation requires agreement about the reliability

of some sources prior to engaging in argumentation.

Summary: In this paper, I show that we have to distinguish at least three forms of deep

disagreement. For each of these versions there is a reinterpretation of a skeptical argument

that shows why this version of deep disagreement cannot be resolved via argumentation.

References

Aikin, Stephen. forthcoming. “Deep Disagreement and the Problem of the Criterion.” Topoi,

1-8.

Feldman, Richard. 2005. “Deep Disagreement, Rational Resolutions, and Critical Thinking.”

Informal Logic 25, 12–23.

Fogelin Robert. 1985. “The Logic of Deep Disagreements.” Informal Logic 7, 1-8.

Lynch Michael. 2010. “Epistemic Circularity and Epistemic Disagreement.” In: Haddock A.,

Millar A., Pritchard D. (eds.) Social Epistemology. Oxford University Press, 262-277.

Ranalli Christopher. forthcoming. “What is Deep Disagreement?” Topoi, 1-16.

THE POLITICAL ASPECT OF A RELATIONAL APPROACH TO AUTONOMY

María Méndez, University of Glasgow

Personal autonomy can be defined in a number of ways, such as, leading a life that is

authentic to our values and commitments, as an ideal of self-authorship concerning our lives,

or as exercising self-government over our desires and goals. Nonetheless, the varied

approaches to personal autonomy seem to share a tendency to separate their concerns

about oppressive circumstances in the political sphere, from the conditions required for

personal autonomy. Most accounts consider the political aspect of autonomy as part of a

separate concept, namely, political autonomy. Similarly, academic discussions about

democracy, do not usually explore the connection between every citizen’s involvement in the

political sphere, and their enjoyment of personal autonomy. Instead, they increasingly focus

on the analysis of, the electorate’s capacities and interest to be involved in political decision-

making, and the experts’ role in those processes. Such debates address ideas like

technocracy, epistocracy, and deliberative democracy.

This little attention to the connection between personal autonomy and the political has

two problematic consequences. First, it obscures the effect over our lives of the limited

involvement we experience in current democracies, especially for minorities. Secondly, it

reduces the political sphere’s capacity to foster our personal autonomy, given that it is where

some of the most important collective decisions are made. Hence, I suggest we shift the

focus of our debates in both areas to analyse the value and impact of the relations we hold

in the political sphere over our personal autonomy.

The thesis I want to put forward is that personal autonomy has a political aspect. I argue

that the relations we hold in the political sphere are partially constitutive of our personal

autonomy. Therefore, the political sphere is a domain in which we should enjoy autonomy

enhancing relations. I identify these as relations of mutual recognition, constituted by our

enjoyment of non-domination and control.

In order to advance this view, I will show that if we acknowledge that social relations are

important to our autonomy; our interactions within the political sphere can be no exception.

Relational theories of autonomy are the most capable to stress this point because they

recognise both the impact of our political standing for autonomy, and the relevance of the

relations we engage in. Catriona Mackenzie’s relational account is especially well suited to

address the political aspect of autonomy.

Mackenzie argues that enjoying structural conditions that recognise our equal standing as

authoritative agents is central to our development of autonomy. Still, relational views in

general, and Mackenzie in particular, does not focus on the relations we want to promote in

the political sphere. Even though she points out specific conditions to guarantee rights and

liberties, her view seems unable to identify political conditions directed at improving the kind

of political relations we experience. My proposal seeks to address this shortcoming.

The paper structure is as follows; I introduce the relational character of my view, locate

Mackenzie’s approach amongst other relational theories, and track the centrality of our

political relations for her view. I move on to analyse her account’s strengths and

shortcomings to envisage political conditions for personal autonomy. I conclude by

describing what I understand as relations of mutual recognition and their constitutive

character.

Accordingly, I begin by presenting an overview of different relational theories of autonomy.

Exploring their central features allows me to both, characterise this perspective, and to

situate Mackenzie’s account within the broader group. However, I will not compare the

virtues of each account, either against each other, or when faced with other non-relational

views. Instead, I want to show that relational approaches, Mackenzie’s in particular, are

capable of addressing the importance of our political standing for our autonomy. The latter,

added to their understanding of autonomy’s connection to the relations we hold in every

domain, makes them able to unravel problems associated to oppressive political contexts,

even if they do not focus on developing specific political conditions for autonomy.

My analysis of Mackenzie’s view suggests that by distinguishing separate dimensions,

she draws attention to gender-based structural inequalities and other forms of oppression.

She shows how they impair our abilities to be self-determining by restricting our freedom and

opportunities, and how they are internalised, constraining the agent’s psychological freedom

and agency. However, her view seems to characterise the political sphere as a domain that

can either harm or contribute to the development of our autonomy, but not as an area where

we actually experience relations. I will discuss the features of Mackenzie’s account that

contribute to an analysis of those relations and ways of improving the political structure.

More specifically, I will explore her political conditions for autonomy, whilst at the same time,

pointing out the limitations of her view in that respect. The idea is to identify the areas where

my approach to our political relations can elucidate political conditions for our autonomy.

This, allows us to focus, not only on the political background of our social interactions, but

precisely on developing the sort of political relations that can qualify as appropriate for our

personal autonomy.

The final section of this paper will address the manner in which I take Mackenzie’s

understanding of recognition as key to characterise the kind of political relations required for

our development and enjoyment of personal autonomy. I explain the importance of

recognition for our political relations, and what amounts to mutual recognition. Finally, I

introduce what I identify as the two conditions for establishing relations of mutual recognition,

namely, non-domination and control.

Including the political aspect, offers a novel approach to autonomy that shows the

importance of enjoying autonomy enhancing political relations. Likewise, having a clearer

notion of the kind of political relations required for our autonomy can illuminate many of the

issues regarding the justification of political authority, and the relevance of a democratic

division of labour in the political sphere, which are part of my broader project.

INFALLIBILISM AND INQUIRY

Joe Milburn, The University of Navarra

In this paper I show that, given that knowledge is the end of inquiry, infallibilism is true. My

argument, in brief, is as follows. Suppose that knowledge is the end of inquiry. In this case,

one successfully completes inquiry if and only if one comes to have knowledge.

Furthermore, once one has knowledge, one acts incoherently if they continue to inquire (one

can compare this to looking for what one has already found). But if one only has non-

conclusive grounds for their beliefs, one can always continue to inquire without acting

incoherently. Thus, to have knowledge one must have conclusive grounds for believing what

they believe.

HOW TO TELL IF ANIMALS CAN UNDERSTAND DEATH

Susana Monsó, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna;

University of Vienna; Medical University of Vienna

It is generally assumed that humans are the only animals who can possess a concept of

death. The prevalence of this idea is exemplified by the debate on the ethics of killing

nonhuman animals (hereafter ‘animals’). Within this debate, much of the discussion revolves

100

around whether the fact that animals cannot understand death affects the extent to which

death harms them (see e.g. Meijboom & Stassen [Eds.], 2015; Višak & Garner [Eds.], 2015).

However, neither side of the debate questions the very idea that animals lack a concept of

death. This premise is usually offered without any empirical justification by one side, and has

remained largely unquestioned by the other. This is surprising, given that there are at least

two prima facie reasons for thinking that some animals may understand death (Allen &

Hauser, 1991): the ubiquity of death in nature and the evolutionary advantages that would

come from understanding death, especially for animals living in fission-fusion groups, which

require a constant renegotiation of relationships and keeping track of competitors and allies

(Piel & Stewart, 2015). In this paper, however, I do not want to settle this issue from the

armchair. My intention is to examine how we could go about empirically determining whether

animals can have a concept of death.

In order to empirically determine whether animals can possess a concept of death, the

first thing that needs to be clarified is what it means to possess a concept. Taking as my

starting point the discussion on concept possession among philosophers of animal minds, I

argue that the possession of a concept of death will require more than the mere capacity to

discriminate dead individuals. What is necessary is an ability to classify individuals as dead

with relative independence of perceptual cues and a grasp of the intensional features of the

property of being dead. With this in mind, and taking into account that the concept of death

will be neither binary nor universal, I defend the following account of the minimal concept of

death:

A creature can be credited with a minimal concept of death once she classifies some

dead individuals as dead with some reliability, where ‘dead’ is understood as a

property that pertains to beings who:

(a) are expected to have the cluster of functions characteristic of living beings, but

(b) lack the cluster of functions characteristic of living beings, and

This definition has several important features. First, it presupposes a concept of life, which

allows one to distinguish dead individuals from inanimate entities. Further, possession of a

minimal concept of death entails classification, rather than mere discriminatory capacities, so

the emphasis is not placed on the animal’s capacity to recognise dead beings, but on her

capacity to recognise them as dead. Thus, full reliability in the discrimination of dead

individuals is not required. An animal can sometimes mistake beings that are asleep or in a

coma for dead beings and still possess a concept of death. And lastly, this definition leaves

room for variation across species, across individuals, and across time, so it allows for the

existence of different concepts of death. With this definition in mind, I turn to specifying how

to empirically determine whether animals can understand death. I argue that observational

studies should be on the lookout for the following behaviours, all of which are potential

indications of a capacity to understand death:

1. Varied behaviour towards corpses

2. Unhygienic/maladaptive behaviour towards corpses

3. Different treatment of corpses vs asleep individuals

4. Investigative behaviour towards corpses

5. Aggressive behaviour towards corpses

6. Caring behaviour towards beings with limited functionality

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7. Mourning behaviour towards corpses

8. Eventual ignoring or abandoning of a corpse

9. Age- or experience-relative difference in behaviour towards corpses

If all or most of these behaviours are observed in a single species, this amounts to quite

good evidence of their capacity to understand death. However, one must concede that

observational evidence is especially difficult to interpret. Therefore, as a final step in my

argument, I offer some recommendations on how to experimentally test for a concept of

death. Given that it is important to maintain ethical standards in our dealings with animals,

my proposal is for the test not to contain actual dead individuals, but to test animals with the

use of artefacts. The idea would be to develop a mechanism of some sort that the animal

has to utilise in a certain way in order to obtain a reward. In the test condition, the

mechanism would break or shut down; it would lose its functionality. Moreover, it would do

so in a way that would be irreversible, and this irreversibility would be clearly visible to

anyone who understood the functions of the mechanism. At this point, if the animal wants to

access the reward, she has to realise that she cannot do so any longer with this particular

artefact, and must either make use of another one or find some other alternative. This

doesn’t give us direct evidence of an understanding of death. However, if an animal passes

the test, it shows us that she has the necessary cognitive requirements to understand death.

It shows us that she can process the crucial sub-components of a minimal concept of death.

Thus, it gives indirect evidence of her capacity to understand death. Coupled with

observational reports of the behaviours detailed above in the same species, this would

amount to enough evidence to question the common assumption that animals cannot

acquire a concept of death.

References

Allen, Colin, and Marc D. Hauser. 1991. “Concept Attribution in Nonhuman Animals:

Theoretical and Methodological Problems in Ascribing Complex Mental Processes.”

Philosophy of Science 58 (2): 221–40. https://doi.org/10.1086/289613.

Meijboom, Franck L.B., and Elsbeth N. Stassen, eds. 2015. The End of Animal Life: A Start

for Ethical Debate. Wageningen Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.3920/978-

90-8686-808-7.

Piel, Alexander Kenneth, and Fiona Anne Stewart. 2015. “Non-Human Animal Responses

towards the Dead and Death: A Comparative Approach to Understanding the

Evolution of Human Mortuary Practices.” In Death Rituals, Social Order and the

Archaeology of Immortality in the Ancient World, edited by Colin Renfrew and

Michael J. Boyd, 15–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Višak, Tatjana, and Robert Garner, eds. 2015. The Ethics of Killing Animals. New York:

Oxford University Press.

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BEYOND THE CONVERSATION: A NON-PROPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT OF SLURS

Alba Moreno Zurita, Universidad de Granada; Eduardo Pérez Navarro, Universidad de

Granada

The aim of this paper is to offer an account of slurs that accommodates certain phenomena

that we think should be accommodated. The first one is the pervasiveness of their pejorative

character, i.e. the fact that the ability of slurs to derogate is manifested in all contexts in

which these terms are uttered. The second one is their special behaviour with respect to

retraction-like phenomena, which makes them more akin to expressions of pain, for

instance, than to ordinary descriptive discourse.

Our approach consists of three parts. The first one concerns the normalizing potential of a

slur. Any utterance of a slur, i.e., the mere occurrence of the word, makes it more natural for

the word to appear again in successive contexts. We can just mention a slur, or dispose the

context in such a way that, for instance, it is common ground among the participants in the

conversation that a particular use of a slur is ironic and not intended to carry derogatory

content. In these situations, the slur has no derogatory content. Let us call these kinds of

contexts “controlled contexts”. Still, no matter how carefully we dispose the present context

to make sure that the utterance of a slur does not have the kind of semantic effect that we

want to avoid, it will facilitate ulterior occurrences of the term. In particular, it will make the

slur more likely to appear in what we may call “uncontrolled contexts”, that is, contexts in

which the utterance of the slur does have derogatory content.

The second step in our proposal concerns their derogatory content, the postulation of

which has in many cases been used to explain the pejorative character of slurs. We can then

discuss the level of meaning to which such content belongs; however, whether asserted,

implicated or presupposed, derogatory content is always taken to be propositional, since

only propositions can be asserted, implicated or presupposed. One point of connection

between content-based theories and our proposal is that we all assume that there is such a

thing as derogatory content. A further one between our approach and proposals such as

Hom’s (2008) is that we believe that this content is part of what is said. However, what

distances us from these positions is our view that derogatory content is not propositional. In

the spirit of dynamic semantics, we identify the content of an utterance with its impact on the

common ground. Propositional content is that of an utterance that serves to eliminate

possible worlds from the common ground; however, since utterances can have a variety of

different kinds of impacts on the common ground, not all content is propositional. In

particular, the pejorative character of slurs is due to the fact that they at least partially serve

to order the possible worlds of the common ground. One way to implement the idea that the

contribution of slurs isn’t propositional can be found in Stanley’s (2015) account of

derogatory speech in general. According to Stanley, some derogatory speech might be seen

as ordering those worlds in which one socializes with members of the derogated group as

less preferable than those in which one doesn’t (Stanley 2015: 144). Inasmuch as

derogatory speech understood in this way doesn’t eliminate possible worlds from the

common ground, its contribution isn’t propositional (Stanley 2015: 145). Our point is that

slurs, as a specific form of derogatory speech, behave in this way too.

Finally, we claim that when slurs have derogatory content they have effects that go

beyond the context of the conversation, which is the third part of our explanation. In

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uncontrolled contexts, the world-ordering modifies the socionormative space. Here, we

understand the socionormative space as a structure that situates each agent in a node

characterized by the range of actions that agent can perform in relation to other agents. In

particular, we choose to focus on one way in which agents can see the range of actions that

are available to them diminished: what Ayala (2016: 883) calls “speech capacity”. Ayala

defines speech capacity in terms of speech affordances, which she in turn defines as

relations between speaker and environment that account for the range of things the former

can do with words (Ayala 2016: 881). Once speech affordances have been defined, we can

define speech capacity as the range of speech affordances that are available to a speaker

(Ayala 2016: 882). Thus, the social position of the person who has been derogated by a slur

changes in such a way that the derogated group can no longer perform certain speech acts,

that is, it limits their speech capacity. Once the derogated group has seen their range of

available actions diminished, it is not available for the speaker to give them the power they

have lost back. This is why slurs behave as they do with respect to retraction.

The normalizing potential of slurs does not depend on their being used—they always

facilitate ulterior occurrences of such terms, even if at the present context they are only

mentioned. Once the slur reaches an uncontrolled context, that is, a context in which it in

fact orders the possible worlds in the common ground in a certain way, this leads to changes

in the socionormative space that restrain the range of things the derogated group can do

and that can’t be taken back. Together, these three steps explain both the pervasiveness of

the pejorative character of slurs and their particular behavior with respect to retraction. Our

proposal has consequences for philosophical practice as we know it too. Our point is that

uttering a slur always comes at a moral cost, and it is the responsibility of the philosopher

who writes a paper on slurs to assess such cost and decide whether it is worth it to give one

more example of a slur in a paper addressed to an audience that is assumed to know what

slurs are.

References

Ayala, Saray. 2016. “Speech Affordances: A Structural Take on How Much We Can Do with

Our Words.” European Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 4 (Winter): 879–891.

https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12186.

Hom, Christopher. 2008. “The Semantics of Racial Epithets.” The Journal of Philosophy 105,

no. 8 (August): 416–440. https://doi.org/10.2307/20620116.

Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

DOXASTIC OWNERSHIP AND EPISTEMIC AUTONOMY

Jesús Navarro, Universidad de Sevilla

There are many things that we do, which are attributable to us in a minimal sense, and could

even be explained by our desires and intentions, but that we do not fully recognise as our

own deeds. We did those things—and in that sense they are our activity, not just mere

occurrences—but we failed to play the role in them that would have made them fully ours.

Such practical ownership seems to be required for fully autonomous action.

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By the same token, there are many beliefs that we have, but we fail to recognise as fully

ours. Some of those beliefs may perfectly be true, and even come from sources that are

reliable. That is not the worry, but that, although we do believe those things, and they are

ours in that minimal sense, those beliefs merely happened in us. We lack what may be

called doxastic ownership of them. And it seems that such ownership is an essential part of

epistemic autonomy in the sense that, in so far as one does not fully own one’s beliefs, one

may not be an epistemically self-governed agent.

In this paper I motivate the claim that doxastic ownership is earned by engaging in

doxastic deliberation, which is constituted by the goal of full knowledge. Doxastic

deliberation is the process by which rational agents make up their minds regarding what to

believe—a process to be distinguished from other forms of belief-formation, such as

indoctrination, self-deception or arbitrary endorsement. The central claim of this paper is that

doxastic deliberation consists in aiming at knowledge. When one struggles to figure out what

to believe, if one is actually engaged in doxastic deliberation at all, then one must aim at

knowing the proposition in question, being thus sensible to any feature of one’s cognitive

performance that could imperil a proper attribution of knowledge.

The thesis of this paper may be contrasted with two weaker alternatives. First: one may

hold that the constitutive goal of doxastic deliberation is something less demanding than

knowledge like, for instance, true belief, justified belief, well-grounded opinion or reliable

belief. Each of these weaker theses is implied by the one that we will here endorse.

Second: one may hold that doxastic deliberation is merely regulated by the goal of

knowledge, but not constituted by it. A constitutive goal defines what the activity in question

is, whereas a regulative claim points to a better way in which the activity may be performed

according to some standard of quality. A weaker regulative claim would hold that agents who

deliberate doxastically may contingently aspire at the ideal of knowledge. In the paper, such

regulative view will be exemplified by higher-order epistemic theories, where a higher-order

stance may allow the agent regulate according to a more demanding goal (knowledge)

something that, in the lower order, is constituted by a less demanding goal (apt belief). In

contrast, our view is that doxastic deliberation is constituted—and not merely regulated—by

the goal of knowledge: in so far as one does not aim at knowing while making up one’s mind

about what to believe, one is not even engaged in doxastic deliberation.

But more than by contrast with its weaker alternatives, our thesis may be better exposed

against an overt antithesis, namely that we own our beliefs when we form them by

ourselves, independently of the influences of others, as an authentic manifestation of our

own identity and the kind of person that we are. We hold that a proper understanding of the

link between epistemic autonomy and doxastic ownership will show that epistemic autonomy

is not to be identified with epistemic independence, as the capacity to believe by oneself. In

fact, a proper understanding of ownership and its relation to autonomy shows that epistemic

autonomy may be in conflict with the demands of absolute epistemic independence.

Regarding the argument, it draws an analogy between two debates that originated

independently in action theory and epistemology. In a nutshell, the idea is that what

Velleman told Frankfurt (in action theory) may be told to Sosa (in epistemology).

References

105

Chrisman, Matthew. 2016. “The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on

Rosenberg”. In Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals, ed. By Martin Grajner and

Pedro Schmechtig. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Frankfurt, Harry G. 1988. The importance of what we care about: philosophical essays.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shah, Nishi, and J. David Velleman. 2005. “Doxastic Deliberation”. Philosophical Review

114:4: 497-534.

Sosa, E. 2015. Judgment and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Velleman, J. David. 2000. The Possibility of Practical Reason. Oxford: Clarendon.

WHAT’S BETTER FOR YOU: FUTURE-BIAS OR TEMPORAL NEUTRALITY?

Quan Nguyen, St Andrews & Stirling

Time-biases are preference patterns that govern our attitudes towards events based on their

temporal location. If you are time-biased, you care not only how good or bad an event as

such is, but also about when it happens. There are two forms of time-biases: Near-bias and

future-bias.

Near-Bias: If you are biased towards the near, you prefer good events to be closer to

the present rather than being further away, or bad events to be in the far rather than

the near future.

Future-Bias: If you are biased towards the future, you’d prefer good events to be

future rather than past, and bad events to be past rather than future.

Some authors (Brink 2010, Sullivan 2017, Greene/Sullivan 2015, Dougherty 2010)

have argued that time-biases are irrational on the basis of them being bad for you – if

you are time-biased, you will make decisions leaving yourself worse off. You should

instead be temporally neutral:

Temporal Neutrality: You should not prefer an event over another solely based on

its temporal location.

The proponents of temporal neutrality rule out both near-bias and future-bias as irrational on

the basis that temporally neutral behaviour avoids the bad decisions time-biases would lead

you to. Especially Greene/Sullivan and Dougherty have used creative and wonderful

arguments to show that future-bias leads to bad decisions if you’re both future-biased and

risk-averse (Dougherty) or future-biased and regret-averse (Greene/Sullivan). Dougherty’s

and Greene/Sullivan’s argument goes like this:

x. Risk-Aversion/Regret-Aversion is rationally permissible.

xi. A rational agent prefers her life to go forward as well as possible.

xii. If you are risk-averse and future-biased, you will choose lesser future goods

over greater past goods just because they are in the past.

xiii. Your life would go better if you chose the greater good over the lesser good.

xiv. Therefore, a rational agent would not be future-biased.

This paper will defend the rationality of future-bias against Dougherty and Greene/Sullivan. I

will not question the soundness of their arguments, as others have done before (see Dorsey

2016 for an attack of (1), as well as Scheffler forthcoming), but rather explore why their

106

arguments, even if successful, do not change my credence in believing future-bias to be

rational.

I first outline how both their arguments are structurally diachronic versions of classic

Dutch book arguments. Dutch book arguments aim to show that holding inconsistent beliefs

can be exploited and lead to pragmatic costs – however, the diachronic Dutch books by

Dougherty and Greene/Sullivan only show pragmatic costs of two attitudes held together

(Future-bias and risk- or regret-aversion), not an inconsistency as such between them. This

leads to the Diachronic Dutch book losing its argumentative force (see Christensen 1991)

and leaves the arguments at risk of overgeneralising to the combination of all sorts of

attitudes leading to pragmatic costs. Hence, even if Dougherty’s and Greene/ Sullivan’s

arguments are valid, they still fail to establish the rational impermissibility of future-bias.

I secondly argue that a challenge similar to diachronic dutch books can be mounted

against temporal neutrality – if you’re temporally neutral, you will accept a preference pattern

that can lead to bad choices leaving you worse off. The examples I provide resemble basic

sunk cost fallacies, and I show that a proponent of temporal neutrality is committed to them,

while a future-biased person can avoid them.

Sunk Cost Argument against Temporal Neutrality:

(5) In absence of independent reasons against it, changing preferences is rationally

permissible.

(6) A rational agent wants her life to go forward as best as possible.

(7) Your life will be worse off overall if you give equal concern to your past as to your

present and future and at the same time change your preferences

(8) Giving equal concern to your past as to your present and future leaves your life

worse off overall.

(9) Hence, a rational agent would not give equal concern to her past as to her present

and future.

I do not take this to be a knock-down argument against temporal neutrality, for the same

reasons that I think that Dougherty’s and Sullivan’s arguments aren’t: This does not show an

actual inconsistency between preference-change and temporal neutrality, merely that both

can be exploited and lead to pragmatic loss – but that does not show the general

impermissibility of temporal neutrality. However, while Dougherty’s and Greene/Sullivan’s

cases border on the absurd and will therefore almost certainly never happen, sunk-cost

fallacies happen all the time and are well-evidenced in psychology and economic research.

Hence, future-bias is better for us than temporal neutrality - our focus should be to avoid

sunk cost fallacies, and future-bias may be a good insurance against them.

References

Brink, David (2010) “Prospects for Temporal Neutrality”. In Callender, Craig: The Oxford

Handbook of Philosophy of Time. Oxford University Press.

Dorsey, Dale (2016): “Future-Bias – A Qualified Defence”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Dougherty, Tom (2011): “On Whether to Prefer Pain to Pass.” Ethics.

Greene, Preston & Sullivan, Meghan (2015):“Against Time-Bias”. Ethics.

Sullivan, Meghan (2018): Time-Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal

Persistence, Oxford University Press.

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INCLOSURE AND INTOLERANCE

Sergi Oms, Universitat de Barcelona, Logos; Elia Zardini, University of Lisbon,

National Research University Higher School of Economics

Graham Priest has influentially claimed that the Sorites paradox is an Inclosure paradox,

concluding that his favoured dialetheic solution to the Inclosure paradoxes should be

extended to the Sorites paradox. We argue that, given Priest’s dialetheic solution to the

Sorites paradox, the argument for the conclusion that that paradox is an inclosure is invalid.

COMMUNICATION AS COORDINATION

Andrea Onofri, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí

What is it to communicate successfully? More specifically, under what conditions does a

hearer understand a simple declarative utterance of the form a is F? Here is a

straightforward answer:

Reference Identity (RI): A hearer H who accepts an utterance u produced by speaker S

understands u iff the belief that S expresses through u and the belief that H forms as a

result of u ascribe the same property to the same object.

In simpler terms: assuming that hearer H accepts the utterance and understands its

predicate, communication succeeds as long as H identifies the object to which the speaker is

referring.

It follows from RI that, if speaker and hearer ascribe the same property to the same

object, then the hearer has understood, no matter how she thinks of the object. However, in

‘The Semantics of Singular Terms’ (1976), Brian Loar famously proposed a case which

shows this consequence to be unacceptable (I will refer to the case as ‘Stockbroker’):

Stockbroker: Suppose that Smith and Jones are unaware that the man being

interviewed on television is someone they see on the train every morning and about

whom, in that latter role, they have just been talking. Smith says ‘He is a stockbroker’,

intending to refer to the man on television; Jones takes Smith to be referring to the man

on the train. Now Jones, as it happens, has correctly identified Smith's referent, since the

man on television is the man on the train; but he has failed to understand Smith's

utterance. (Loar 1976, p. 357)

Loar draws the following conclusion from his case:

It would seem that, as Frege held, some ‘manner of presentation’ of the referent is …

essential to what is being communicated. (Loar 1976, p. 357)

Building on this idea, various authors (Loar, Bezuidenhout, Recanati) have proposed

accounts where communication requires thinking about the same object in similar ways:

Similar Ways of Thinking (SW): A hearer H who accepts an utterance u produced by

speaker S understands u iff:

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1. The belief that S expresses through u and the belief that H forms as a result of u

ascribe the same property to the same object.

2. H's way of thinking about the object is sufficiently similar to S's way of thinking about

the object.

Ways of thinking have been characterized in various ways – for instance, on some accounts

they can be identified with definite descriptions. Regardless of how we construe ways of

thinking, however, SW remains an extremely influential model of communication, both within

the discussion of Loar cases and within other philosophical contexts. Indeed, SW seems to

provide a straightforward explanation of Stockbroker. Smith intends to refer to the man on

television, so he thinks of the referent as the man on television. On the contrary, Jones

thinks Smith intends to refer to the man on the train, so he thinks of the referent as the man

on the train. Since speaker and hearer think of the referent in radically different ways, SW’s

second condition for successful communication is not satisfied. It thus follows from SW that

Jones does not understand, which is the correct prediction.

In the first part of my talk, I will argue that this popular model is mistaken – SW does not

provide an adequate account of Loar cases, for it yields incorrect predictions. Consider for

instance:

Writer: Rudolf Lingens writes novels under the pseudonym ‘Leo Peter.’ Not realizing that

Lingens is Peter, Gustav Lauben asks Lingens if he can deliver a message to Peter.

Desiring to keep his other identity secret, Lingens accepts and waits for Lauben to write

the message. While waiting, he suffers from a bout of amnesia, forgetting that he is Peter,

the writer, and that Lauben will give him a message for Peter. So, when Lauben gives him

the message ‘You are a great writer,’ Lingens thinks ‘This message is for me. I am a great

writer.’

Just as in Stockbroker, the hearer (Lingens/Peter) does not seem to have understood. This

time, however, we cannot explain his misunderstanding by appealing to ways of thinking. Of

course, speaker and hearer do think of the referent (Lingens/Peter) in different ways –

Lauben thinks of him as the person I am addressing, while Lingens thinks of the referent in a

first-person way. However, the same happens in any case of successful indexical

communication: if Paula says to Charlotte ‘You are tall’, Charlotte will (correctly) think of the

referent in a first-person way, while Paula will not. So SW's explanation of Writer predicts

communication failure in any ordinary exchange involving indexicals. Obviously, this is not

what we want.

In the second part of the talk, I will propose an alternative account of Loar cases and

communication. I will explain Loar cases as cases of ‘luck’ analogous to Gettier cases.

Analogous suggestions have been briefly made in the literature, but we still lack a developed

account of such cases, one that explains what ‘communicative luck’ exactly amounts to and

why it is instantiated in Loar cases. I will analyze communicative luck as involving two

mistakes that cancel each other out, thus resulting in a correct (but lucky) identification of the

referent. I will then conclude by showing what is at stake in the debate. Underlying SW is a

picture of communication as simulation: to achieve understanding, the hearer must enter a

mental state that is identical or similar to the one expressed by the speaker. Building on

Lewis’s classic work Convention (1969), I propose an alternative picture. Successful

communication requires achieving a state of coordination, which does not generally require

‘doing the same thing’. As the case of indexical communication clearly shows, what we seek

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is not identity or similarity in how we think of the referent, but non-lucky convergence on the

right object. The ultimate goal of my talk, then, is to show how the debate on Loar cases can

lead us to rethink the very nature of communication.

DENOTATION AND QUANTIFICATION IN COPREDICATIVE SENTENCES

Marina Ortega-Andrés, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

Copredicative sentences -see examples in (1)- have been used to attack the notion of

reference that traditional truth-theoretical semantics works with (Chomsky 2000).

(1) a. The school was in the party when it caught fire.

b. The book is interesting but too thick.

c. The city has 500,000 inhabitants and outlawed smoking in bars last year (Asher

2011).

The main point of the argument is that there is nothing in the world that can be the referent

of the word school when someone asserts (1a). A plausible response is that copredicative

terms like school, book and city in (1) refer to mereological objects formed by the sum of

aspects/parts. My claim is that copredicative nouns do not denote mereological sums, but

simple entities.

According to mereological proposals, in (1) the word school denotes something that is

partly a building and partly a group of people; the word book denotes the sum

content+physical object and the word city denotes the sum population+council. The first

issue is that intuitively we should not get an acceptable whole just by summing any two parts

without any relevant reason. Arapinis and Vieu (2015) give some conditions that the parts

have to fulfill in order to be constitutive parts of a whole: they have to be linked by some

constant existential dependency relation that explains that the parts are in agential

coincidential relations.

A second objection is that the persistence conditions of the constitutive sums of parts are

unclear (see Ortega-Andrés and Vicente 2019). Consider (2):

(2) London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100

miles away(Chomsky 2000).

Intuitively, the whole should not exist when only one of its constitutive parts persist. For

example, the statue David is constituted by a marble stone and the art-piece. If we destroy

the marble stone, David would not persist; and, if we destroy the art piece (imagine a non-

art-world where people do not have any beliefs, feelings or thoughts about art), then David

would not persist either. However, it is not so clear that this conclusion follows in the case of

London. Moreover, if all Londoners and the London institutions decide not to move to the

new location, we could say that London is wherever the Londoners and the institutions are.

So, even if accept that London can persist with the persistence of any of its parts, and parts

can persist independently from each other, then we would have too many Londons.

A third issue is the counting puzzle (see Asher 2011): imagine that I have three copies of

the same volume that contains two different novels. In that case, we could count the books

either informationally or physically. Depending on that, the following sentences would be true

or false:

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(3) a. There are three heavy books on the shelf.

b. There are three interesting books.

c. There are three interesting and heavy books.

If we count books physically, (3a) would be true. If we count books informationally, (3b)

would be false. In (3c), depending on which criterion we use for counting books, it will be

true or false: if we count the books physically, then it would be true, but if we count books

informationally, it would be false. According to traditional mereological theories of the

denotation of copredicative words, we have to count books as sums of parts. So, there

would be six books (physical+info). However, this conclusion does not seem very intuitive.

We do not normally think that I have six books when I have three volumes with two contents

each.

Ortega-Andrés and Vicente (2019) propose that the word London -remember (2)- is a

compilatory term that binds, in the psychological sense, various different aspects of the

concept associated with the term. Each aspect/sense of the copredicative word has its own

denotation. The truth conditions of the original sentence derive from a process of de-

compilation and the assignment of each predicate to its respective denotation. Copredicative

sentences hide more complex sentences. For example, sentences in (1) could be

paraphrased as (4):

(4) a. The school (group of people) was in the party when it (the building) caught fire.

b. The book (info) is interesting but its physical realization is too thick.

c. The city (population) has 500,000 inhabitants and the council outlawed smoking in

bars last year

The counting puzzle is solved because in (3) we count different sets of entities. The

predicate there are three books is ambiguous. In (3a) we count physical books, because the

adjective heavy selects the sense “physical object”. In (3b) we count informational books,

because the adjective interesting selects the aspect “informational content”, so it has to be

false. In (3c) we count either physical books that contain informational books, either

informational books that are realized by physical books. The denotation of the word book in

(3c) is double: it refers to a set of informational contents and a set of physical objects.

Depending on the context, (3c) would be understood as (3c

) or (3c

). (3c

) would be false

and (3c

) would be true:

(3c

) There are three interesting books (info) and their physical realizations are

heavy.

(3c

) There are three heavy books (physical objects) and their informational content

are interesting.

In conclusion, there are reasons for denying that the denotation of copredicative nouns are

mereological compounds. The proposal given by Ortega-Andrés and Vicente (2019) about

copredicative nouns understood as compilatory terms solves the ontological puzzles that

mereological compounds generate.

References

Arapinis, Alexandra, and Laure Vieu. 2015. “A plea for complex categories in ontologies.”

Applied Ontology 10, 285–296

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Asher, Nicholas. 2011. Lexical meaning in context: A web of words. Cambridge University

Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Ortega-Andrés, Marina, and Agustín Vicente. 2019. “Polysemy and co-predication. Glossa:

A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1) 1. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.564

A NON SUBJECTIVIST ACCOUNT OF THE “NECESSITIES OF LOVE” AND

EUDAIMONIA

Eduardo Ortiz, Universidad Católica de Valencia

Although our loves come in personal and non personal varieties, the possibility of

symmetrical reciprocity speaks, prima facie, in favor of the greater significance of personal

loves in our lives. The effects of such loves in people are anything short of shallow. When

immersed in romantic love or friendship or in another type of interpersonal love, persons

undergo a process of mutual drawing guided by the devices of direction (through the

interests and concerns of the lovers and the beloved ones) and interpretation (through their

not being impervious to revise their self-conceptions as a result of the suggestions of the

lovers and the beloved ones).

Personal loves prompt delight and enjoyment in us, but they use to bring about the

involvement of hard work as well. The delicacies of being attached to our beloved ones go

hand in hand with the troubles we find, at least from time to time, not only in promoting their

thriving but in trying to further our loving relationship.

Let me illustrate that demanding side of love with an example. Last night, in the intimacy

of a dinner in their favourite restaurant, Harry declared to Mary, “You’re the only one for me”.

She corresponded taking his hands and kissing his lips after saying, “Oh, Harry! You took

these words out of my mouth”. Notwithstanding the sincerity and the strength of what Harry

and Mary wanted to communicate to each other, can it be actually assured that their words

and gestures do mirror all the truth of the matter?

Harry loves Mary, sure, but he also loves his friends, his parents, his work as a

paediatrician, not to talk of his non personal loves. And what about Mary? Besides loving her

charming Harry, she loves her sister as well and her parents and her two intimate friends

since Primary School and of course, her profession as a classic piano player.

It can be presumed that each one of these loves demands from Harry and Mary attention

and dedication, and likewise that each one of them does not incline Harry and Mary in the

same direction. A way to explain that situation relies on the fact that the already mentioned

drawing process experienced by Harry and Mary because of each one of those loves of

them, does not accord.

On pain of suffering the consequences of intractable conflicts in their lives, Harry and

Mary will sooner or later engage themselves in the task of harmonizing all their personal

loves. They will prioritize some of them with respect to others. As a result, the characters of

my example will display a particular hierarchy of loves (ordo amoris).

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Due to the non negligible meaning of our personal loves, such a hierarchy, though not

fixed once and for ever, supplies the core of our “stable motivational structures”. To order

(the from time to time conflicting requirements of) our loves is actually a work which is never

definitively done. Nevertheless, we cannot but be occupied in evaluating and revisiting our

hierarchies of loves or our “necessities of love”, in Harry Frankfurt’s apt phrase, since our

happiness (eudaimonia) heavily relies on its fulfilment.

Is it possible to identify the traits of an adequate or appropriate hierarchy of loves, which

should form part of the objective conditions of eudaimonia? An answer to this demand

comes from an incremental perspective about love. Indeed, our loving experiences disclose

that some of our loves bring about our progressive improvement and that another ones give

rise to our decline. Furthermore, this proposal constitutes a non subjectivist way to

understand that the necessities of love are more than liberating.

References

Frankfurt, Harry.1999. Necessity, Volition and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Kroeker, Esther and Schaubroeck, Katrien (eds). 2017. Love, Reason and Morality, London:

Routledge.

Rorty, Amélie. 2016. “The Burdens of Love”. Journal of Ethics 20, n.4 (December): 341-354.

Taylor, Gabriele. 1975. “Love”. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76:147 – 164.

Zangwill, Nick. 2013. “Love: gloriously amoral and arational”, Philosophical Explorations 16,

n.3, (September): 298-314.

HIGHER-ORDER COUNTER EVIDENCE: THE AGENCY-FIRST VIEW

Michele Palmira, University of Barcelona, LOGOS/BIAP

Introduction. One acquires higher-order misleading counterevidence (henceforth MHOE)

when one receives misleading about that makes one uncertain about one’s first-order

evidence bearing on a proposition p. This phenomenon plays a starring role on current

epistemological debates about epistemic rationality.

Most authors frame and understand debates about the alleged epistemic significance of

MHOE in terms of its power to provide one with higher-order defeating evidence (HODE) for

the rationality of one’s belief. That is, most parties to these debates subscribe to:

Defeating Account: MHOE is epistemically significant because it is HODE.

Accounts of the defeating mechanisms of HODE (e.g. González de Prado forthcoming,

Rosenkranz and Schulz 2015 result in the view that since the rationality of one’s belief is

defeated, one is rationally permitted to suspend judgement only. I argue that this is too

austere a result, especially if we think of cases of systematic peer disagreement (e.g. about

philosophy, morality, and the like). This provides the motivation for exploring an alternative

agency-first account.

The Agency-First Account. The view I defend is the following:

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Agency-First Account: MHOE is epistemically significant because it requires of one to

re-open the question whether a given proposition p is true.

To re-open the question whether p amounts to going over the shared body of evidence by

re-evaluating its extension, re-assess its probative force, double-check the reasoning from

evidence to belief, ascertain that one’s general epistemic and cognitive conditions were

normal.

Importantly, re-opening the question of the truth of p is an epistemic-cognitive way of

addressing the rational doubt raised by the acquisition of MHOE. I argue for this point by

addressing some possible misgivings about the epistemic nature of this cognitive activity, its

practical feasibility, and its compliance with the ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ principle.

Agency-First Account: Doxastic Implications. The Agency-First Account of MHOE prompts

the following question: If higher-order counterevidence does not defeat the rationality of

one’s original belief that p, does it follow that one is rationally permitted to retain one’s

original beliefs while re-opening the question whether p? If this question were to be

answered in the affirmative, we would then have redeemed the possibility of rational

disagreement by fine-tuning traditional steadfast approaches by stripping their dogmatic

flavor off.

Unfortunately for the supporter of traditional steadfast approaches, though, I believe that

the foregoing question has to be answered in the negative. To see why, I shall first introduce

the notion of taking the question whether p to be settled. I shall then bring out the normative

connections among re-opening the question whether p, retaining one’s belief that p, and

taking the question whether p to be settled. From these connections, it follows that the

requirement to re-open the question whether p and the permission to retain one’s belief that

p lead to an inconsistency.

The notion of taking the question whether p to be settled can be understood in relation to

the notion of re-opening the question whether p. Plausibly, one way to fall short of re-

opening the question whether p is to take the question whether p to be settled. (Another way

is to simply stop considering the question of p’s truth-value and focus on something else.)

Thus, just like one re-opens the question whether p relative to one’s own epistemic position

vis-à-vis p, one takes the question whether p to be settled relative to one’s own position at.

That is to say, one takes the question whether p to be settled in the affirmative or in the

negative given the evidence, epistemic facts and reasoning powers available to one. To

illustrate this further, suppose that one’s body of evidence at t is such that it rationalises p.

Surely, it seems that one can, in a psychological sense, close the inquiry into the question

whether p by believing that p. This means that taking the question whether p to be settled

neither entails that one knows the answer to the question, nor does it entail that the question

is indeed settled. Obviously, should one later acquire new counterevidence, one would (if

rational) re-open the question, or perhaps taking the question to be settled in a different way.

Having clarified this, I lay out the normative connections among re-opening the question

whether p, taking the question whether p to be settled, and belief retention. Here they are:

PR1: If one ought to re-open the question whether p, then one ought not take the

question whether p to be settled.

PR2: If one is permitted to retain one’s belief that p, then one is permitted to take the

question whether p to be settled.

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I argue for PR1 and PR2 and I show that these two principles generate an inconsistency with

the requirement to re-open the question and the permission to retain one’s belief while re-

opening.

So, the first doxastic consequence of the Agency-First Account is that rational belief is not

allowed as a response to MHOE.

However, on closer inspection, the Agency-First Account does not issue the prediction

that whenever we receive MHOE the only rational response to it is to suspend judgement.

So, the Agency-First Account crucially differs from subscribers to the Defeating Account

insofar one is rationally permitted to hold different types of doxastic attitudes, such as

“acceptance”, “hypothesis”, and the like, while being under the requirement to re-open the

question.

References

González de Prado, Javier (forthcoming) “Dispossessing Defeat”, Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research doi: 10.1111/phpr.12593

Rosenkranz, Sven and Schulz, Moritz (2015) “Peer Disagreement: A Call for the Revvision of

Prior Probabilities”, dialectica 69(4): 551-586.

CONCEPCIONES FILOSÓFICAS SOBRE LA DELIMITACIÓN DE LO CÓMICO

Manuel Pérez Otero, Universidad de Barcelona / LOGOS

Esta comunicación contiene algunas reflexiones sobre la comicidad. Su ámbito temático

específico es, por tanto, la filosofía del humor (uso los conceptos de cómico y humorístico –

y sus derivados– conforme a los sentidos en que son equivalentes). Pero mencionaré

primero ciertas conexiones entre ese ámbito y otras dos áreas cercanas: la filosofía de los

valores y la filosofía de la mente. Después, destacaré los inconvenientes de aquellas teorías

filosóficas que se proponen definir la comicidad. Finalmente, esbozaré muy brevemente una

propuesta alternativa: la teoría del perjuicio (desarrollada con mayor detalle, y defendida

ante aparentes contraejemplos, en Pérez Otero 2018).

La comicidad tiene una faceta evaluable o “normativa” (por usar el término más

frecuente) desde una perspectiva doble:

(i) Intrínsecamente, evaluamos como mejor o peor un determinado efecto cómico.

(ii) También sería plausible sostener (aunque dista de ser obvio) que la comicidad de las

situaciones en una obra de ficción –literaria, teatral o cinematográfica– contribuye a la

calidad artística o estética de dicha obra, contribuyendo por consiguiente al valor de la

misma. No es algo obvio, pues aunque sí parece evidente que los elementos cómicos en

una obra suelen dotarla de mayor atractivo, no se sigue que dicha atracción sea

estrictamente de carácter artístico y/o estético. También otros factores (la excitación sexual

que pueda provocarnos ver una película, por ejemplo) nos atraen, sin que eso implique que

tales factores son siempre artística y/o estéticamente relevantes. De todos modos, no

resulta muy arriesgado suponer que –en efecto– los elementos cómicos en un relato de

Kafka, o en una película de Charlot o de Tati poseen ese tipo de relevancia. Si es así, la

115

teorización del humor (o una parte de la misma) se incluye en la teorización sobre el arte; el

humor (o algunos aspectos del humor) es objeto de estudio no sólo de la filosofía de los

valores en general, sino también de la estética y/o la teoría de las artes.

Con frecuencia, la literatura filosófica contemporánea aborda lo humorístico rastreando

sus conexiones con la respuesta característica que tiende a provocar: el estado mental de

divertimento o regocijo cómico [comic amusement]. (Se lo considera un estado mental; pero

hay controversia, por ejemplo, sobre si es o no una emoción.) Por ello, el estudio del humor

es también relevante en otro campo: la filosofía de la mente. Me referiré a la persona que

experimenta ese divertimento como el apreciador; es quien aprecia o siente como cómico

algo.

Es común clasificar las principales concepciones filosóficas sobre el humor propuestas a

lo largo de la historia dividiéndolas en tres categorías: teorías de la superioridad, teorías de

la incongruencia y teorías del alivio [relief]. Conforme a las teorías de la superioridad (cuyo

principal exponente es Hobbes), el apreciador encuentra cómicas situaciones que

involucran personas que sufren algún infortunio y ante las cuales experimenta un

sentimiento de superioridad. Las teorías de la incongruencia (con precursores como Kant,

Schopenhauer y Bergson) proponen que el apreciador encuentra cómicas situaciones en las

cuales reconoce falta de congruencia entre dos elementos. Para los defensores de las

teorías del alivio [relief] (Freud, paradigmáticamente), el divertimento cómico desempeña en

nuestro sistema nervioso una función similar a la de una válvula de éscape.

Todas esas concepciones son problemáticas, incluyendo las versiones contemporáneas

más sofisticadas de las teorías de la incongruencia, desarrolladas por Raskin (1984),

Morreall (2009), Carroll (2014) y los textos de Clark (1970) y Martin (1983) reimpresos en

Morreall (1987). Así, respecto a las teorías del alivio, no están bien descritas las conexiones

entre alivio y comicidad; y, además, identificar esa supuesta función del divertimento cómico

no clarifica qué situaciones nos parecen cómicas. Por otra parte, las teorías de la

superioridad y las teorías de la incongruencia afrontan inconvenientes derivados de su

pretensión de ofrecer una definición de lo cómico; es decir, su pretensión de ofrecer

condiciones necesarias y conjuntamente suficientes de la comicidad. Hay sentimientos de

superioridad sin divertimento cómico; y viceversa. En relación con la falta de congruencia,

ésta no siempre resulta cómica. Y cuando la incongruencia no es cómica, no

necesariamente (contra la posición de Carroll) provoca algún efecto negativo (dolor, ira,

miedo, tristeza, etc.); hay casos de incongruencia “neutra” (ni cómicos ni negativos).

Un enfoque menos ambicioso postularía condiciones necesarias (no triviales) para la

comicidad, sin aspirar a que sean también conjuntamente suficientes. La teoría del perjuicio

ejemplifica ese enfoque. Su versión débil establece que el apreciador reconoce o detecta un

perjuicio en sujetos intencionales. Habría también una versión fuerte: la tesis débil es el

caso y además la comicidad que provoca el divertimento deriva –al menos en parte– de

dicho perjuicio; es ese perjuicio aquello que, cuando se combina con otros factores, el

apreciador encuentra cómico.

Dicha teoría se vincula con las teorías de la incongruencia, pues todo perjuicio es un

caso de incongruencia (aunque no a la inversa). Se relaciona –asimismo– con las teorías

de la superioridad: una consecuencia de estas teorías (que al experimentar divertimento

cómico el apreciador manifiesta cierto grado de malicia) es implicada por la teoría del

perjuicio. Así, la teoría del perjuicio explicaría el atractivo de las teorías de la superioridad en

lo que respecta a esa consecuencia (pero sin compartir los inconveniente de tales teorías).

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References

Carroll, Noël. 2014. Humour: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morreall, John, ed. 1987. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State Univvesity

of New York Press.

Morreall, John. 2009. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. Malden MA:

Wiley-Blackwell.

Pérez Otero, Manuel. 2018. “La comicidad como perjuicio de sujetos intencionales”. Crítica.

Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 50, n. 150: 43-63.

Raskin, Victor. 1984. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Acknowledgment

Proyectos “Objetividad-subjetividad en el conocimiento y en la representación singular”

(FFI2015-63892-P; Gobierno de España, MINECO, AEI/FEDER, UE) y “Perspectival

Thoughts and Facts: New Questions” (FFI2016-81858-REDC; Red CONSOLIDER 2016,

Acción de Dinamización, Red de Excelencia) / Grupo de investigación consolidado LOGOS

(2017SGR63), AGAUR.

WHAT DOES DECISION THEORY HAVE TO DO WITH WANTING?

Milo Phillips-Brown, MIT Linguistics and Philosophy

Decision theory and folk psychology both purport to represent the same phenomena: our

belief-like states and desire- and preference-like states. They also purport to do the same

work with these representations: explain and predict our actions. You might expect, then,

that the concepts of decision theory and those of folk psychology could be accounted for in

terms of the other. Can they be?

There is much at stake in this question. If its answer were no, we’d have a dubious

dualism: two competing representations and systems of prediction and explanation. This

dualism would tempt many to reject one of the two pictures. Yet neither can be let go lightly.

Folk psychology structures daily life: we understand each other in large part on the basis of

folk-psychological notions such as believing and wanting. These notions have also proven

fruitful for studying the mind (e.g. Davidson (1963)) and ethics (e.g. Smith (1994)). Decision

theory is similarly significant. It’s pervasive in the social sciences, especially economics, and

widely used in other disciplines, too, like neuroscience and philosophy.

My interest is giving a decision-theoretic account of believing and wanting, two key

concepts that decision theory omits. Many have studied whether there are necessary and

sufficient conditions, stated in terms of credence, for belief (e.g. Buchak (2014)). (The

Lockean Thesis says there are such conditions.) The parallel question for wanting has

received less attention. In this paper, I give decision-theoretic necessary and sufficient

conditions for wanting.

I dispel the orthodox accounts—what I call What’s-best Accounts—that connect wanting

to decision theory, and to preference more generally (e.g. Stalnaker (1984), Lewis (1986)).

They say that you want what’s best (in your eyes), given certain alternatives. Below is such

an account, stated decision-theoretically:

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What’s-best Account. S wants p iff S assigns a higher expected value to p than to any of

certain alternatives.

Being best, though, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being wanted.

It’s not sufficient because sometimes we want none of the options we’re faced with, even

the best one. Imagine that you have been kidnapped and must make an awful choice: either

shoot one of the two people in front of you, or do nothing and both will be shot. You neither

want to shoot, nor do you want to refrain from shooting and have the two be shot!

Nonetheless, you prefer shooting the one to not shooting the one and having both be shot.

Shooting is best, but you don’t want it.

Being best isn’t necessary for being wanted because sometimes we want many things,

even ones that aren’t best. Imagine that you’re going out to dinner. The options are the

pizzeria, the ramen shop, and the hot dog stand, and while hot dogs sound bad tonight, the

other two options sound good. The pizzeria would be best. You say, ‘I want to go to the

ramen shop, and I want to go to the pizzeria even more.’ You want to go to the ramen shop,

but you disprefer it to one of the other alternatives. You want to go to the ramen shop, but it’s

not best.

An alternative to What’s-best Accounts are what I call What’s-good-enough Accounts.

What’s-good-enough Accounts claim that you want what’s good enough (in your eyes). This

corrects the mistakes of What’s-best Accounts. You want neither to shoot the one nor refrain

from shooting with the other two end- ing up shot. Why is it that you can want neither of the

two things (even though one of them is best)? Intuitively, because neither is good enough.

Either would result in some- thing truly awful. You want to go to the ramen shop and want to

go to the pizzeria more. Why is it that you can want two things (even though one of them

isn’t best)? Intuitively, because both are good enough. You’d be happy going to the pizzeria

and happy going to the ramen shop.

I propose the following. What’s good enough is represented by a threshold, a real

number.

What’s-good-enough Account. S wants p iff the expected value S assigns to p meets a

certain threshold.

(Compare to a version of the Lockean Thesis: S believes p iff the credence S assigns to p

meets a certain threshold.)

You neither want to shoot the one nor refrain from shooting. The account can make sense

of both facts by saying that neither the expected value that you assign to shooting nor the

expected value you assign to not shooting meets the threshold. You want to go to the ramen

shop and you want to go to the pizzeria, and the account can accommodate both of these

facts, too, this time by saying that each option meets the threshold.

What’s-good-enough Accounts also make simple sense of the commonplace but

theoretically puzzling (e.g. Jackson (1985)) phenomena of conflicting desires—wanting p

and wanting not-p. Do you want to donate this month’s pay check to charity? You do (lives

could be saved) and you don’t (there are bills to pay). How is that? Both donating and not

are good enough; both are wanted. More generally, both p and not-p can be good enough;

both can be wanted.

References

118

Lara Buchak. Belief, credence, and norms. Philosophical Studies, 169(2):1–27, 2014.

Donald Davidson. Actions, reasons, and causes. Journal of Philosophy, 60(23):685–700,

1963.

David Lewis. On the Plurality of Worlds. Blackwell, 1986.

Michael Smith. The Moral Problem. Blackwell, 1994.

Robert Stalnaker.

Inquiry

. Cambridge University Press, 1984.

ON WHY WE CAN BE GLAD TO BE ALIVE

Christian Piller, University of York

If our existing in the way we do is better for us than our never having existed at all, then we

have good reason to be glad to exist in the way we do. If the same evaluative comparison

holds not only for our actual life but also for a wide variety of other lives we can imagine to

live or to have lived, then we have good reason to be glad to be alive. But can we compare

our existing (in some way or other) to our never having existed at all?

Bernard Williams said that we cannot think egotistically about our own non-existence. In a

sense, he is right. If I did not exist, nothing would be good or bad (or neutral) for me. John

Broome argues against the possibility of existence/non-existence comparisons in the

following way. If our existence would be better for us than our non-existence, then, by the

logic of such comparisons, our non-existence would be worse for us. But this can’t be true:

our non-existence could not be worse for us as there would be no us for whom it could be

worse. I call Broome’s argument the no-nonsense challenge to existence/non-existence

comparisons.

This paper has two aims. First, it tries to answer this challenge. If successful, this shows

that the relevant comparisons are possible, i.e. they do not violate principles which are

obviously correct, like the principle that my never having existed at all would be neither good

nor bad nor neutral for me. Secondly, I try to show how, despite accepting the idea that one’s

non-existence fails to register on a scale of personal value, we can nevertheless make

positive comparisons. The guiding idea is that what is good for us is better for us than

something that fails to be good for us. Parfit, I will argue, has been attracted by the same

idea (although his official doctrine of non-comparative existential harms and benefits points

in a different direction). I show that those of us who are glad to be alive have good reason to

be so.

References

Broome, John. 1993. Goodness is reducible to betterness: the evil of death is the value of

life. Reprinted in J. Broome Ethics out of Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. 1999: 162-173.

Parfit, D. 2017. Future people, the non‐identity problem, and person‐affecting

principles. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 45(2): 118-157.

119

Williams, Bernard. 1973.>The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.

Problems of the Self

. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 82-100.

SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATION, METROLOGY, AND THE EXPLANATORY GAP

ARGUMENT: A RESPONSE TO SCHEELE

Yunus Prasetya, Baylor University

According to Levine's (1983) explanatory gap argument, there is an important difference

between normal scientific identity statements and psycho-physical identity statements.

Normal scientific identity statements, such as, “heat is the motion of molecules,” are fully

explanatory. Identifying heat with molecular motion allows us to exhaustively explain the

concept of heat. In contrast, psycho-physical identity statements, such as, “pain is the firing

of C-fibers,” have explanatory gaps. That pain is identical to the firing of C-fibers cannot

explain the phenomenal character of pain. We cannot understand why C-fibers firing feel

painful rather than itchy. This leads to the intuition that possibly, pain is not the firing of C-

fibers. However, as we learned from Kripke (1980), this intuition implies that “pain is the firing

of C-fibers” is necessarily false and, ipso facto, actually false. If psycho-physical identity

statements are false, then physicalism is probably false. Therefore, the explanatory gaps in

psycho-physical identity statements are problematic for physicalism.

Physicalists (for example, Nagel 1998) sometimes grant that psycho-physical identity

statements have explanatory gaps. They further claim, however, that science can close this

gap in the future. If these physicalists are right, then the explanatory gaps in psycho-physical

identity statements are not problematic in principle. However, merely hoping that future

science can solve current problems for physicalism does not seem satisfactory.

Marcel Scheele (2002) provides a stronger response to the explanatory gap argument.

Scheele claims, contra Levine, that we should not take explanatory gaps in psycho-physical

identity statements as evidence against physicalism. He argues that normal scientific identity

statements have explanatory gaps that are analogous to the purported

k T

gaps in

psycho-physical identity statements. Scheele uses, as a case study, the statement, where

denotes the mean kinetic energy of the molecules in Joules; T is the temperature in

Kelvin; and k is the Boltzmann constant, 1.38 x 10

-23

J/K. I refer to this as the “Joules-Kelvin

equation.” Scheele claims that we should use this (kind of) statement when evaluating

whether normal scientific identity statements have explanatory gaps. The explanatory gap in

the Joules-Kelvin equation arises from our inability to understand why temperature must be

multiplied by the Boltzmann constant (instead of some other number) in order to get kinetic

energy. Scheele then argues that since purported explanatory gaps are not problematic for

the Joules-Kelvin equation, so they are not problematic for psycho-physical identity

statements. As far as I know, Scheele is the only one to have given this kind of response to

the explanatory gap argument.

This paper defends Levine’s explanatory gap argument from Scheele’s objection. It is

argued that there is a crucial difference between “pain is the firing of C-fibers” and the

120

Joules-Kelvin equation

The former is a statement about the bare phenomena of pain and

the firing of C-fibers. The latter is a statement about the representations we use to measure

temperature and kinetic energy. It is not just about the relationship between heat and kinetic

energy, but the relationship between heat as measured in Kelvin and kinetic energy as

measured in Joules. If we take seriously the fact that heat is identical to molecular motion,

then the Joules-Kelvin equation is just a statement that we use to convert between two

different methods of measuring the same thing. For this reason, it is argued, we can close

the purported explanatory gap in the Joules-Kelvin equation by understanding the natures of

the representations, and how they are used in science.

It is argued that the explanatory gap in the Joules-Kelvin equation can be closed by

understanding two kinds of facts. First, facts about the decisions made by scientists to 1) use

the expansion properties of ideal gases to represent temperature, 2) define temperature as

being directly proportional to the product of pressure and volume of ideal gases, and 3)

define the temperature of the triple-point of water as 273.16 K. Second, facts about the

natural invariances used as a point of reference in the Kelvin scale and the Joule, e.g. the

triple-point of water. It is argued that once we understand the decisions made by scientists in

defining thermometry, and the natural invariances used, we can fully understand the Joules-

Kelvin equation. That is, we understand why temperature (in Kelvin) has to be multiplied by

the Boltzmann constant, instead of some other number, in order to get kinetic energy (in

Joules).

Finally, it is argued that “pain is the firing of C-fibers” is a statement that concerns certain

phenomena, apart from our representations of them. Therefore, the methods employed in

closing the purported explanatory gap in

k T

does not apply to “pain is the firing of C-

fibers,” and this dispels Scheele’s objection against the explanatory gap argument.

Scheele’s response is more promising than the response of hoping in future science to

vindicate physicalism. If it can be shown that normal scientific identity statements have

explanatory gaps just like the purported gaps in psycho-physical identity statements, that

would significantly weaken the explanatory gap argument. However, the particular case

study that Scheele uses fails to demonstrate that the two types of statements are analogous.

To build the kind of argument Scheele envisions, he needs an identity statement about

scientific phenomena that has explanatory gaps similar to the gaps in psycho-physical

identity statements. The gaps in such a statement cannot be closed by reflecting on the

nature of scientific representation, as the statement is not about scientific representation. If

Scheele can find such a statement, he may have a successful response to the explanatory

gap argument.

References

Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Levine, Joseph. 1983. “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.” Pacific Philosophical

Quarterly 64 (4): 354–61.

Nagel, Thomas. 1998. “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem.” Philosophy

73 (3): 337–52.

Scheele, Marcel. 2002. “Never Mind the Gap: The Explanatory Gap as an Artefact of Naive

Philosophical Argument.” Philosophical Psychology 15 (3): 333–42.

121

ON MEANING ASCRIPTIONS

Andrea Raimondi, University of Nottingham

In ordinary communication, we specify the meanings of linguistic expressions by employing

the predicate ‘means’ followed by expressions of our own language: for instance, we say

that ‘neige’ (in French) means snow, and that ‘little by little’ means gradually. My aim is to

discuss and reject two prima facie plausible theories of the logical form of these meaning

ascriptions.

In the first section, I illustrate the theories. Consider (1):

(1) ‘Neige’ (in French) means snow.

Harman writes: “’means’ abbreviates a relational predicate ‘S’ together with a pair of

quotation marks surrounding what follows […] ‘S’ is such that for every expression ‘e’, ⌜‘e’ S

‘e’⌝ is true” (1999: 265). He then suggests that ‘S’ might be interpreted as ‘is synonymous

with’. Similarly, Field (2017) contends that ‘means’ expresses the relation of sameness of

meaning holding between ‘neige’ and ‘snow’. They support the Quotational Theory: two

expressions figure in the logical form of an ascription, and they are said to mean the same.

One can interpret ‘meaning the same’ in accordance with their conception of meaning; I

opt for the Kaplanian interpretation, according to which sameness of meaning is cashed out

as sameness of Kaplanian content (nothing in my arguments depend on this choice). This

version of the theory analyzes (1) as:

) There is a content C such that (a) ‘neige’ has C in French, and (b) ‘snow’ has C in

English.

According to another theory (embraced by Horwich 1998 and Abbott 2003), ‘means’ triggers

a linguistic context in which expressions refer to their customary contents: ‘snow’ in (1)

functions simply as a tag for a content – hence the name Tag Theory. I employ this notation:

the result of appending square brackets to an expression ‘e’ is the tag ‘[e]’, a singular term

whose character is the rule that, given a context c, ‘[e]’ (directly) refers to the content of ‘e’ in

c. Hence, the Tag Theory analyzes (1) as:

)There is a content C such that (a) ‘neige’ has C in French, and (b) C = [snow].

The two theories differ in the way they conceive of how we can refer to meanings. The

Quotational Theory implies that we can refer to them via definite descriptions mentioning

particular expressions. The Tag Theory maintains that we can use ordinary expressions as

genuine names for their meanings.

In the second section, I provide an argument against the Quotational Theory. If the

Quotational Theory is correct, (1) is analyzed as (1

); if so, then (1) and (1

) convey the

same piece of information. The Italian translations of (1) and (1

) are (2) and (2

respectively:

(2) ‘Neige’ (in francese) significa neve.

) C’è un contenuto C tale che (a) ‘neige’ ha C in francese, e (b) ‘snow’ ha C in

inglese.

If (1) is analyzed as (1

), then (2) conveys the same piece of information as (2

). The

consequent of this conditional is false. By two applications of modus tollens, we conclude

that (2) is not analyzed as (2

), and that the Quotational Theory is incorrect.

122

I discuss two objections. The first one stresses that analysans and analysandum need not

convey the same piece of information: hence, there is no reason to maintain that the

translation of the analysans of (1) must convey the same piece of information as the

translation of the analysandum. I reply that this objection assumes a misleading notion of

analysis that has problematic consequences as regards the explanatory role of analysis

itself.

According to the second objection, actual translators do not rely on the notion of

translation employed in the argument. However, actual translations attempt to preserve

pragmatic features of sentences; therefore, they are irrelevant with respect to an argument

that aims at showing something about the semantics of (1).

In the third section, I formulate an argument against the Tag Theory. This argument

concerns homophonic ascriptions, like (3):

(3) ‘Snow’ (in English) means snow.

Homophonic ascriptions are empirically indefeasible: we cannot discover that they are false

(Harrison 1998, Field 2017). Firstly, I discuss why they have this epistemic status, and I

distinguish it from the status of necessarily true sentences. Afterwards, I argue that the

supporter of the Tag Theory does not have the resources to account for the empirical

indefeasibility of (3). This suggests that the theory is strongly defective.

The advocate of the Quotational Theory can draw on her analysis of (3) to show that the

ascription expresses a conceptual truth. This might explain its empirical indefeasibility –

assuming that conceptual truths are empirically indefeasible. I show why the latter strategy is

not available for the supporter of the Tag Theory.

In the fourth section, I discuss a problem that affects both theories. Firstly, developing

Recanati’s (2000) remarks, I provide an argument to the effect that a meaning ascription is

iconic with respect to its complement expression. That is, the proposition expressed by an

ascription depends (in part) on the content of its complement expression. This Principle of

Iconicity represents a semantic explanation of this fact: it is impossible to understand (1)

without understanding its complement expression.

Then, I contend that both theories do not satisfy this principle. As regards the Quotational

Theory, the content of ‘snow’ does not figure in the proposition expressed by (1): ‘snow’

occurs as the quoted material of a pure quotation (see (1

)), and this material is

semantically inert.

As far as the Tag Theory, the content referred to by ‘[snow]’ figures as an object in the

proposition expressed by (1) (see (1

)); but what this proposition must contain in order for

the Principle of Iconicity to be satisfied is not the content of ‘snow’ considered as an object

(i.e., the semantic value of a tag), but rather the content of ‘snow’ considered as the

semantic value (i.e., the content) of ‘snow’.

In the conclusive remarks, I argue that reference to meaning turns out to be a more

complex phenomenon than we might have expected. I also show some connections with

problems discussed by Frege, Russell, and Mates.

References

Abbott, Barbara. 2003. “Some Notes on Quotation”. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 17: 13-

26.

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Harman, Gilbert. 1999. “Immanent and Transcendent Approaches to Meaning and Mind”. In

Harman, Gilbert (ed.) Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Horwich, Paul. 1998. Meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Field, Hartry. 2017. “Egocentric Content”. Nôus, 0(0): 1-26.

Recanati, F. 2000. Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta: An Essay on Metarepresentation. Cam-

bridge: The MIT Press.

SEEING OPAQUE OBJECTS AND SEEING SURFACES

Carlo Raineri, The University of Manchester

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of perception is dominated by the distinction

between “direct” and “indirect” realism: traditionally, naïve realists and intentionalists are

taken as examples of the former group, sense-data theorists of the latter. While direct

realists believe that perception relates us with (or makes us aware of) “external” objects

(spatiotemporal, three-dimensional objects), indirect realists believe that any contact with

such objects is mediated by different entities (whether they are “mental” or “physical”

objects), which are, in turn, perceived “directly”.

In relationship with this debate, I will raise a question about the significance of the

(alleged) fact that, at a time, one can only see part of the surface of opaque objects

(ordinary, non-transparent objects). According to some philosophers, this entails that opaque

objects are only seen “indirectly”: there is a process starting with the visual perception of a

part of the surface of the object and ending with the perception of the object. This claim

challenges the naïve realist’s contention that perception relates us with opaque objects,

since we would be (at best) related to some parts of them.

During my presentation, I will present and criticise a different view, which I will call the

“easy answer”: that to see a part of the surface of an opaque object is what seeing an

opaque object amounts to (and, thus, that being perceptually related with a part of an

opaque object is to be related with the opaque object).

In the first part of my presentation, I will develop this view by relying on Jackson’s

distinction between “mediate” and “immediate” objects of perception (Jackson, 1977).

First, Jackson defines what he calls “in virtue of” relation as capturing those situations in

which the fact that something has a certain property can be analysed in terms of something

else having the same property (i.e. living in Spain in virtue of living in Valencia).

Second, he defines what a “mediate” object of perception is: “X is a mediate object of

(visual) perception (for S at t) iff S sees x at t, and there is an y such that (x ≠ y and) S sees

x in virtue of seeing y” (1977: 19-20). An “immediate” object of perception is an object which

is not mediate. According to this definition, an opaque object is a mediate object of

perception, as it is perceived in virtue of perceiving a part of it.

Finally, he argues (with Bermudez, 2000) that the mediate/immediate distinction should

be distinguished from the direct/indirect one. He claims that his view is not a “two-meanings”

(according to which “seeing” means something different when applied to opaque objects or

part of their surface), but an “analytical expansion” one: as there is nothing indirect in the fact

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that I live in Spain if I live in Spain in virtue of living in Valencia, there is nothing indirect in

the fact that I see an object if I see it in virtue of seeing a part of its surface.

The easy answer can thus be reformulated as follows: to see an opaque object is to see it

in virtue of seeing a part of it.

In the second part, I will criticise this account by considering how we apply “seeing” to

opaque objects in ordinary language. By following Clarke (1964), I will analyse a puzzle

composed of three situations (S1, S2 and S3 below) showing that there is a difference

between our use of “seeing” in S1 (before noting the “fact” that we can only see a part of an

opaque object) and in S2 (after noting the fact).

I will then illustrate Clarke’s contextual solution to the puzzle: “to see” is a unit concept,

which only applies to objects regarded as units (and in this case, there is no amount of the

object to which “seeing” applies). If the object is a compound of units, “seeing” does not

apply to it, but it applies to an amount of it. Therefore, it is true that the subject sees the

object in S1, but false in S2, when the object is a compound of units. Hence, as opposed to

the easy answer, noting the “alleged fact” above changes the context, producing a new

situation in which it is true that the subject sees only part of the opaque object, but which is

different from the context in which we normally use “to see”. It is then false that when we say

that we see an opaque object (S1) we mean that we see it in virtue of seeing a part of its

surface.

In the last part, I will defend Clarke’s solution from an objection raised by Bermudez.

According to Bermudez (2000), Clarke’s account conflates the concepts of “seeing” and

“attention”, since one could only claim to “see” a part of an opaque object when one

selectively attends to it. But since there is empirical evidence that the content of perception

is wider than the content of attention, we must conclude that we see more than what we pay

attention to.

I will show that this is not an issue for Clarke’s account by considering some insights from

Husserl’s early phenomenology of perception. Trying to make sense of the fact that we can

experience constant properties even if our experience changes (for instance, when we

perceive an object as uniformly coloured even if some parts of it are shaded differently),

Husserl distinguishes between the concepts of “perceiving” and “apprehending”. This

difference allows arguing that we have a visual experience of (we “apprehend”) more than

what we perceive, and that part of the difference is played precisely by attention: by

switching the attentive focus, one can perceive different things without any change in the

field of apprehension. By applying this phenomenological distinction to Clarke’s account, I

will show that there is no problem in arguing that one only sees what one pays attention too,

although being visually aware of more than that. Moreover, I will argue that Husserl’s

approach can provide an account of the different roles played by the front and the rear side

of a perceived object, which is something missing from Clarke’s one.

S1 S2 S3

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References

Bermudez, Josè L. 2000. ‘Naturalised Sense Data’. Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research 61 (2): 353-374.

Clarke, Thompson. 1964. ‘Seeing Surfaces and Physical Objects’, in Black, M. (ed., 2013),

Philosophy in America. New York: Routledge, 98-114.

Husserl, Edmund. 2010, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, translated by R. Rojcewicz,

Dordrecht: Kluwer. Original title: Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, Husserliana,

XVI, edited by Claesges, U., Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag, 1973.

Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Madary, Michael. 2012. ‘Husserl and Perceptual Constancy’. European Journal of Philo-

sophy 20 (1): 145-165.

REALISM AND THE A PRIORI: REASONS FOR PLURALISM

Mariano Sanjuán, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

A thriving proposal in scientific theories’ conceptual analysis (physics particularly) has been

introduced by Michael Friedman (2001). According to him, scientific theories possess

elements that play a constitutive role resembling Kant’s synthetic a priori; but unlike the

latter, Friedman’s constitutive principles are theory-specific and substitute in times of

scientific revolutions. Constitutive elements such as the mathematical structure for calculus

or some especially fundamental principles within a theory are necessary presuppositions of

all further empirical meaning. This view was anticipated in Reichenbach’s early work (1920)

and has been coined as “the relative a priori”.

Defenders of the relative a priori have focused on scientific theories’ conceptual structure,

and sometimes on scientific rationality across subsequent theories. But this characterization

should be complemented by an account of the nature of scientific knowledge and its relation

to reality. For admitting that theories’ constitutive elements set semantic and epistemic (and

ontological?) limits and that such limits are modified when the theory is abandoned in such a

way that incompatibilities show up very often is irreconcilable with standard or orthodox

realism. I take it to be surprising that these considerations have not been carefully

addressed thus far. To this respect, my goal is to defend three tenets.

In the first place, I aim to show that every account of the relative a priori implies scientific

pluralism. Although I will stay on Friedan’s static account (thus rejecting his dynamic), I will

defend that alternative proposals such as Chang’s or Stump’s also imply pluralism. I will

illustrate what I understand by pluralism on the basis of Ruphy’s (2017) recent work, trying to

defend that the relative a priori meets epistemological and even metaphysical pluralism.

Secondly, I will attempt to show that a pluralist account of science does not conflict with

scientific realism. As a matter of fact, this is not quite innovative tenet. I will delve on two

particularly traditional versions of realism that fit nicely a pluralist framework: Worrall’s and

Ladyman’s structural realism and Kitcher’s real realism. The novelty of my argument stems

from the fact that weather structural and real realism are considered indeed consistent with

pluralism, I will defend that they are not consistent with an aprioristic account of scientific

theories.

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And thirdly, to overcome this situation, I will stress that in spite of both versions of

realism’s strengths, scientific theories understood as sets of constitutive elements are better

connected to Giere’s perspectival realism (2006). Perspectival realism aims at reconciling

realists and antirealists by claiming, for the former, that scientific theories aim at successfully

representing a mind-independent world and that scientific knowledge is genuine knowledge;

and for the latter, that objectivism and traditional conceptions of truth have to be substantially

modified to properly define science. I will also argue that Giere’s philosophical work grounds

the possibility of a unified read of the relative a priori and perspectival realism. But I will show

as well that this pursuit of harmony is not an enterprise out of controversy.

As I see it, there are three prospective sources of dissent. The first is that Giere endorses

philosophical naturalism, and so is appropriate for other perspectivists. This might be

challenging for traditionally naturalism is opposed to apriorism. I will nonetheless claim that

Giere’s naturalism only implies empiricism and rejects analyticity, not apriorism in its relative

sense. The second objection highlights a difficulty in coordinating a statement-based

account of scientific theories such as Friedman’s and a model-based-account. Here I will

subscribe to the complexity of scientific theories, defending that there is a place for both

models and statements in the conceptual structure of theories, since models and statements

play different roles, constitutive and non-constitutive. As for the third objection, it can be

described as follows: how can an empirical statement be dependent upon a perspective and

be simultaneously assertive regarding a mind-independent world? This issue is directed to

perspectival realism’s heart. As a defense, I will lay on Massimi’s (2018) new conception of

truth. I will conclude by proposing that truth, as understood by Massimi, composes a realist

approach to truth and that Massimi’s account of truth constitutes a very promising notion of

truth that allows looking at the constitutive elements of scientific theories from a perspectival

point of view.

References

Friedman, Michael. 2001. Dynamics of reason. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Giere, Ronald. 2006. Scientific perspectivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Massimi, Michela. 2016. “Four Kinds of Perspectival Truth”, en Philosophy and

phenomenological Research, XCVI 2, pp. 342-359.

Reichenbach, Hans. 1920. The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge. Berkeley y Los

Angeles: Cambridge University Press.

Ruphy, Stéphany. 2017. Scientific pluralism reconsidered. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg

Press.

A DEFENCE OF EXPERIENTIALISM ABOUT THE SENSE OF BODILY OWNERSHIP

Carlota Serrahima, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS/CNRS/EHESS

Somatosensory experiences typically are mental states suitable to be reported in judgments

that are de se, in that subjects endowed with a conceptual system or language would

express them by qualifying the felt body with a first-person indexical. For instance, the

following is a report of my current experience as of my bodily position: “I can feel that my

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legs are crossed”. Authors in the literature express this by saying that subjects have a sense

of bodily ownership (SBO). In this paper, an account of the SBO is presented. The account

proposed is an Experientialist Account: it assumes that there is something it is like to

experience a body as one’s own, and hence that the SBO does not solely consist in

judgments of bodily self-attribution.

Let us call judgments in which somatosensory experiences are reported judgments of

somatosensation. And let us grant that, when one sincerely asserts judgments of

somatosensation that involve a first-person pronoun qualifying the felt body, one expresses

awareness of the body one feels as being one’s own. The notion of SBO captures this:

[SBO]: For one to have a sense of bodily ownership is for one to be aware of the body

one feels in somatosensory experience as being one’s own.

It is important to notice that somatosensory experiences typically are mental states suitable

to be reported in judgments that are de se in yet another sense: subjects endowed with a

conceptual system or language would express them by using a first-person indexical in the

subject position. This feature is not exclusive of somatosensation. It is a fact about

phenomenally conscious experiences in general that, may the subject that undergoes them

have the capacity to make judgments in which she reports them, she will typically use the

pronoun “I” in the subject position. I will call this phenomenon sense of experience

ownership (SEO):

[SEO]: For one to have a sense of experience ownership is for one to be aware of the

phenomenally conscious experience one undergoes as being one’s own.

Succinctly, the view on the SBO defended here is the following: for a subject to have a SBO

is for her to be aware of (A) the experience-dependency of the properties involved in the

content of somatosensory experiences; and (B) the relevant experiences (namely

somatosensory experiences) as being her own. Assuming that there is a SEO amounts to

assuming (B). Hence, on my view, having a SBO for the body we feel in somatosensory

experiences partly depends on having a SEO for the somatosensory experiences by which

we feel it. The first goal of the paper is to articulate this proposal by spelling out (A). The

second goal of the paper is to underpin the view by showing its explanatory potential.

In order to explicate (A), consider the following examples of what somatosensory

experiences convey to their subjects: the Painfulness of an ankle, the Position of a hand, a

finger being Depressed against an obstacle. Somatosensory experiences generally involve

as part of their content a given property felt as instantiated in the body. I will henceforth use

Properties

as a placeholder for properties as they are involved in somatosensory

experiences.

The central claims to be motivated in the defence of (A) are, on the one hand, that

Properties

are experience-dependent: they cannot be instantiated unless the token

experience they are a content of is occurring (Dokic, 2003). Besides, on the other hand, that

Properties

are experienced as experience-dependent. I motivate these claims via the

following reasoning: in sensory states, experience-dependent properties can be cashed out

as properties of a sensory field. For a property of this sort to be experienced as experience-

dependent means for it to be experienced as a property of a sensory field. Being aware of

the experience-dependency of perceived properties thus means being aware of a sensory

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field as such. My claim is that, in normal cases, somatosensory experiences are experiences

in which a sensory field is apparent as such. I call this sensory field bodily field.

In order to specify this reasoning in support of the notion of bodily field, I borrow and

adapt, on the one hand, some of Peacocke (2008)’s ideas about the visual field in his

account of colour perception; and on the other hand, the observations about the

phenomenology of bodily space to be found mainly in Martin (1995) and Bermúdez (2017). I

close this first part of the paper by explaining how the notion of a bodily field, together with

(B), makes for an account of the SBO.

There are some pathological cases relevant for the discussion on the SBO which, I

contend, my proposal can accommodate. The first case worth mentioning is

somatoparaphrenia. Somatoparaphrenic patients have somatosensory experiences involving

a SEO, but not a SBO. This is compatible with the relation of dependence (of the SBO on

the SEO) established by my view. I account for these cases as cases in which subjects are

not aware of the experience-dependency of the properties involved in their somatosensory

states. The second case is depersonalisation. Depersonalised patients also suffer from a

lack of SBO. On my view, this can be explained as a function of their loss of a SEO.

References

Bermúdez, José Luis. 2017. “Ownership and the Space of the Body”. In The Subject’s

Matter: Self-Consciousness and the Body, edited by Frédérique de Vignemont and

Adrian Alsmith, 117-144. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dokic, Jérôme. 2003. “The Sense of Ownership: An Analogy between Sensation and

Action”. In Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, edited

by Johannes Roessler and Naomi Eilan, 320-344. New York: Oxford University

Press.

Martin, Michael. 1995. “Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership”. In The Body and the Self

, edited by José Luis Bermúdez, Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan, 268-289.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Peacocke, Christopher. 2008. “Sensational Properties: Theses to Accept and Theses to Re-

ject”. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 1, 243: 7-24.

MENTAL CAUSATION AND QUALITATIVE PERSISTENCE

Radivoj Stupar, The University of Sheffield

In my talk, I intend to address a novel argument for the existence of enduring tropes that was

put forward by Douglas Ehring. Ehring argues that previous deployment of tropes in solving

various problems in metaphysics is dispensable in favour of exemplification of universals. In

that sense, none of the previous arguments could be taken to favour the existence of tropes

over universals. However, he offers a new argument that is supposed to do just that. Ehring

argues that enduring tropes are needed to account for the phenomenon he calls ‘qualitative

persistence’. He invites us to imagine two machines, one of which destroys a particular

quality of an object, while the other creates an exactly similar quality. When the two

machines operate at the same time, even though the object they operate on does not

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change with respect to the type of property it has, it does not exhibit qualitative continuity

with respect to the property in question. When the machines do not operate, the object

exhibits qualitative continuity. According to Ehring, only enduring tropes can account for the

difference between the situation in which the machines are operating and the situation in

which they are not, and so only enduring tropes can account for the phenomenon of

qualitative persistence. The same is not true of the theory of universals, because the two

situations have the same description in terms of the exemplification of universals.

In response to this, I will argue that being characterized by an enduring trope F is neither

necessary nor sufficient for an object to exhibit qualitative persistence with respect to F. My

argument for the claim that enduring tropes are not necessary for qualitative persistence is

based on the assumption that there are no less than maximally specific or determinate

tropes. This assumption is crucial in deploying tropes in order to solve the problem of mental

causation, and is accepted by probably all authors working on the topic. I will give a rough

sketch of why this assumption is important in order to give a trope theoretic solution to

problems of mental causation. After that, I will argue that enduring tropes are not necessary

for qualitative persistence by imagining a machine similar to Ehring’s which can destroy a

trope F, without disrupting qualitative persistence with respect to F. The upshot of the first

part of my presentation is that we cannot give a trope theoretic account of qualitative

persistence, while at the same time relying on tropes in order to solve problems of mental

causation.

In the second part of my presentation, I will argue that enduring tropes are not sufficient

for an object to exhibit qualitative persistence. My argument here will not rely on the

assumption that there are no less than maximally determinate tropes. In that sense, it can

appeal even to those authors who have a solution to problems of mental causation that is

independent of accepting the ontology of tropes.

References

Ehring, Douglas. 2011. Tropes: Properties, Objects, and Mental Causation. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Ehring, Douglas. 1997. Causation & Persistence: A Theory of Causation. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

THE HUMEAN PROPENSITY INTERPRETATION OF ‘PROBABILITY’

Nicos Stylianou, University of Bristol

In this talk I propose an interpretation of ‘single-case probability’ or ‘chance’ in terms of

Humean propensities. This interpretation is nothing more than a complementary reading of

Lewis’ Best System Analysis of ‘chance’, and Szabó’s ‘No chance’ interpretation. I call this

interpretation the ‘Humean Propensity’ because, as I claim, it captures the features of the

hard propensity interpretations while avoiding their problems, and without deviating from the

metaphysical doctrine of Humean Supervenience. Most importantly, it does not commit to

the deterministic (or not) nature of physical reality. I raise some concerns with the tenability

of the subjectivist guide to BSA chance assertions, and based on the operationalist

philosophy of Bridgman, I introduce ‘Bridgman’s guide’ to BSA chance assertions, which, as

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I conclude, reveals that the truth-makers of BSA chance assertions must be the ordinary

(non-modal), already known and well-defined physical quantities of Szabó.

FREGE ON PERCEPTION: A DILEMMA FROM DUMMETT AND TRAVIS?

Manuela Teles, Universidade do Porto (MLAG/IF)

Perception was not a theme of investigation for Gottlob Frege. However, there are several

places in his writings where he has something to say about perception or from which

something about perception can be said. This presentation will consider two of these

sayings: Michael Dummett's conceptualist approach to perception and the anti-

representationalist account of perception by Charles Travis. Dummett provides a

conceptualist approach as an alternative to Frege's remarks on color-words in the

Grundlagen. Travis builds an anti-representational account of perception grounded on

Frege's characterization of thought in ‘Der Gedanke’ and elsewhere. So, both Dummett's

conceptualism and Travis' anti-representationalism seem to be properly Fregean theories of

perception. This is called into question by the map of debates within contemporary

philosophy of perception. According to this map, conceptualism is a version of the so-called

Content View, which takes perception to be representational, and anti-representationalism is

a relationalist view of perception, which denies it any kind of representational content. Thus,

on the map of the contemporary debates, Dummett and Travis' Fregean theories of

perception appear as incompatible. This brings about an interpretative dilemma. If

conceptualism and anti-representationalism are incompatible, then Dummett and Travis

cannot both be right (although they can both be wrong) about Frege on perception. The aim

of this presentation is to show that Dummett and Travis can be both right, so conceptualism

and anti-representationalism are compatible. Using color-words as a case study, Dummett's

conceptualist alternative to Frege is put under what is taken to be Travis' test to detect

representations in perception. The result is that Dummett's conceptualism is not

representational according to Travis' test. This points to a new direction on the map of

contemporary philosophy of perception.

AN EXPRESSIVIST APPROACH FOR COVERT DOGWHISTLES

José Ramón Torices Vidal, Universidad de Granada; Manuel de Pinedo, Universidad

de Granada

Covert dogwhistles are not really about sending a “coded message.” Instead, they raise

attitudes to salience, so people will act by them without realizing they are being moved

towards them. Our key question in what follows is whether covert dogwhistles, either backing

or subordinating, constitute a special form of implicit communication, or whether they can be

reduced to already existing forms of implicit communication, such as presuppositions or

implicatures. To carry out this task, we compare the features of each of the mentioned

phenomena and analyse how they behave in the face of retraction. The thesis that we

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defend is that covert dogwhistles are first-order predicables, and as such, they convey

orientational, nonpropositional information. Their peculiarity, either because they are implicit

first-order predicables instead of explicit, or for another reason, is that they do not contribute,

unlike explicit first-order perspectival expressions, locational, propositional information. They

do not add information that allows those involved in a conversation to situate the actual

world in a particular region of the logical space, rather than another (Charlow 2014, Lewis

1979).

Republican Gingrich’s following speech hides a covert dogwhistle:

Over here you have a policy which, with Reagan and me as speaker, created millions

of jobs—it’s called paychecks. Over [t]here you have the most successful food stamp

president in American history, Barack Obama. (Newt Gingrich, quoted in Elliott 2012)

Let’s take this case as an example for our analysis. Covert dogwhistles convey a kind of not-

at-issue information (Tonhauser 2012, Stanley 2015), which is, as we have said,

orientational. Commonly, presuppositions and implicatures are conceptual tools used to

account for how different kinds of implicit communication or not-at-issue information work.

Let’s see then whether dogwhistles are reducible to some of them.

Gingrich’s speech apparently suggests something like “African Americans are lazy and

freeloader.” Even so he can explicitly reject that “African Americans are lazy and freeloader”

without obvious contradiction and without seemingly affecting the meaning of what he said.

However, both presuppositions and conventional implicatures cannot be rejected without

producing a certain oddity in the hearers. Besides, presuppositions and conventional

implicatures are semantically linked to the meanings of the words in such a way that it is

practically impossible for their contents to be aimed only by to selected part of the audience.

On the other hand, conversational implicatures are cancellable (although the price to be

paid is to show oneself to the audience as being non cooperative) and can be rejected

without affecting the main content asserted. It would perhaps because of this seem plausible

to argue that Gingrich exploits conversational rules and contextual factors to influence a

subset of his audience sending the conversationally implicated message that “African

Americans are lazy and freeloader.” Nevertheless, assuming by using the term “food stamp”

Gingrich is suggesting that “African Americans are lazy and freeloader” is troubling. A

notable feature of covert dogwhistles is their ability to affect a part of the audience without

their awareness––that is, without the latter being aware that they are being moved for racist

reasons, for instance. In the case of implicatures in general, speaker and hearer engage in a

game of mutual recognition of intentions, without which the implicated content cannot be

successfully captured by the hearer. In the case of covert dogwhistles, however, their

success rests precisely in the fact that the hearer does not recognize the speaker’s intention,

yet is still mobilised for specific political purposes. The type of contribution that the speaker

makes through a covert dogwhistle seems to produce a certain effect on the audience,

rather than to communicate propositionally articulated content. One way to confirm this is by

analysing the behaviour of an implicated content and an alleged “dogwhistled content”

concerning retraction. Consider the following dialogues, the first is a case of retraction of a

conversational implicature and the second is an alleged case of retraction of a covert

dogwhistle:

xv. A: Sam does not like to work.

B: Well, she is African American.

(Implicature: African Americans are lazy).

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B: Wait, wait! Sorry, I was wrong, not all African Americans are lazy. That was very

racist! (B’s retraction)

A: Exactly.

xvi. A: Over here you have a policy which, with Reagan and me as speaker, created

millions of jobs-it’s called paychecks. Over there you have the most successful food

stamp president in American history, Barack Obama. (Dogwhistle: African Americans

are lazy)

B: Well, food stamp recipients are a tiny minority.

A: # It is true, I was wrong, not all African American are lazy and a freeloader. (A’s

retraction)

B: Wait, I did not know that your comment in addition to being explicitly classist, was

also racist.

As we can see, in case (1) the retraction of B does not produce surprise to A, in case (2),

however, the retraction of A does produce surprise to B, because A’s retraction in (2) reveals

to B something that had previously remained hidden. In fact, as Mendelberg (2001) and Saul

(2019) show, when the covert dogwhistle becomes explicit the effect produced begins to

change. Therefore, covert dogwhistle cannot be propositional because they lose their

persuasive power when translated into a propositionally articulated statement. They cannot

be retracted, as other claims can, because they cannot be translated into full propositional

sentences. In this sense, they are ineffable. In A’s speech act of retraction, he’s not properly

targeting the content of the dogwhistle, which is, by definition, implicit.

The fact that covert dogwhistles do not contribute with locational, propositional

information. Covert dogwhistles, like the other of first-order predicables, have expressive

meaning, they make partitions in the logical space and rank the subsets of possible worlds

resulting according to a certain order. However, covert dogwhistles do not contribute

locational information.

References

Elliott, Debbie. 2012. “Food stamp president: Race code, or just politics”.

https://www.npr.org/2012/01/17/145312069/newts-food-stamp-president-racial-or-

just-politics

Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the

Norm of Equality. Princeton University Press.

Saul, Jennifer. 2019. “Dogwhistles, political manipulation and philosophy of language”. In

Daniel Fogal, Daniel Will-Harris, M. M., editor, New Works on Speech Acts, chapter

13, pages 360–383. Oxford University Press.

Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton University Press.

Tonhauser, Judith. 2012. “Diagnosing (not-)at-issue content”. In Proceedings of Semantics

of Under-represented Languages in the Americas (SULA), pages 239–254. UMass,

Amherst: GLSA.

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THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF INTELLECTUAL AUTONOMY

Jesús Vega Encabo, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Intellectual autonomy has been regarded as an ideal worth to pursued, as a virtue in a well-

grounded intellectual character, and an objective particularly valuable. To become an

intellectually autonomous being matters. But why does it matter? Does it epistemically

matter? In this paper, I will argue that the epistemic value of intellectual autonomy is at most

indirect, that is: a) there is no defense of the value of intellectual autonomy that can be

couched in purely epistemic terms; b) intellectual autonomy has no value in virtue of how

non-instrumentally contributes to achieve knowledge and/or understanding.

I will adopt a dual conception of intellectual autonomy. Being intellectually autonomous

requires, first, to exhibit independence of thought and be free of undue interferences, and

second, a certain capacity of self-governance and self-guidance in one’s own cognitive

conduct.

Leaving aside a possible instrumental value of being intellectually autonomous, I focus on

how intellectual autonomy can be constitutive of certain epistemic achievements. Several

authors have suggested that the epistemic value of intellectual autonomy is non-

instrumental. Consider some versions of knowledge as an achievement, such as the credit

view of knowledge. Knowledge is creditable true belief. Credit accrues to the agent from her

contribution to the acquisition of the true belief. A central aspect of what constitutes the

epistemic domain of evaluation is that true belief must be acquired through the exercise of

an ability or the manifestation of a competence: this is what we take as fundamentally

valuable insofar as we are concerned with the purely intellectual assessment of belief. We

do value beliefs not just by being successful or accurate; we do value the attainment of

success and we aim at it.

How well does intellectual autonomy fare in this conception? First, not as an ideal we

strive for, but more as a condition for the exhibition of sufficient agency to deserve the status

of knower. Second, not as a particular ability or competence whose exercise or manifestation

constitutes the status of knowledge. It is not a virtue whose exercise constitutes knowledge.

Nevertheless, it seems to be important in connection with the agential contribution of the

knower to the normative domain. How so? The notion of autonomy that is here at stake is

closer to some of the demands we put on personal autonomy, a sort of coherence and

integration of attitudes we identify ourselves with, in this case applied to the intellectual

domain. In order to exhibit the condition of an epistemic agent, one has to secure a certain

cognitive integration in the workings of one’s own abilities and competences. This

requirement is not necessarily met by adding new abilities or competences; rather it points to

the need that the epistemic agent be present, so to say, in the performance of the cognitive

task, engaged in it. Autonomy refers to the quality of the agential engagement in cognitive

tasks.

This line of reasoning in the defense of the value of intellectual autonomy faces the

following dilemma:

i) Either intellectual autonomy is just an aspect of the agential involvement in the

constitution of the achievement characteristic of knowledge,

ii) Or autonomy gives a distinctive value to a particular class of intellectual

achievements

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The first horn of the dilemma empties intellectual autonomy of much of its force as a trait that

distinguishes admirable performances. The second horn gives some plausibility to the idea

that many aspects of a good intellectual life do not depend on exhibiting intellectual

autonomy, that we could even benefit from practices that do not preserve autonomy, and that

we should sometimes rationally surrender our independence and self-reliance, even our self-

governance.

Someone could argue that there is nothing problematic in embracing the first horn of the

dilemma, besides the recognition that knowing entails autonomous belief, that is, belief that

does not derive from undue interference and is under our control. I do not think that it is an

easy task to establish when a belief is autonomous in this way; nonetheless, my worry is

that, in a sense, only a being that is intellectually autonomous could be a full knower.

In this paper I am more interested in the second horn. Which sort of intellectual

achievement can be constituted only by intellectually autonomous beings? Which epistemic

(and maybe also ethical value) is lost if we surrender our intellectual autonomy? E. Sosa has

given a version of this idea, in terms of reflective knowledge: “Why the pride of place for

reflective knowledge? One answer is to be found in the special bearing of reflective

knowledge on the understanding and coherence dear to intellectuals, and on the intellectual

agency that we honor . . . No matter how much we value consultation, we are unwilling to

yield our intellectual autonomy, which requires us to assess the place of consultation in the

light of all our other relevant information and recognized desiderata . . . In the end reflection

has a closer, more finally determinative influence on the beliefs we form, and the

deliverances of consultation bear properly only through reflection’s sifting and balancing”.

(Sosa, 2004: 291) And Pritchard has appealed to understanding, to an active intellectual

grasping of how truths are interconnected: “I think it is clear that the overarching intellectual

virtue at issue in seeing things for oneself, both perceptually and intellectually, is that of

intellectual autonomy, and thus that they both promote the good of being intellectually

autonomous” (Pritchard, 2013, 38).

I will argue in the paper that none of these conceptions can explain the value of

intellectual autonomy in terms that refer to the epistemic value of their respective

achievements. Both of them seem to emphasize a richer conception of intellectual autonomy

that is rooted in a thicker conception of rational self-governance, according to which one

should become the author of one’s own intellectual world. And this notion cannot be

accounted for in purely epistemic terms. Reflection, for instance, should contribute to create

and develop what one could call an epistemic identity that involves the endorsement of

certain values, the pursuit of certain goods, and the adoption of certain attitudes.

I will hold that intellectual autonomy is less a particular virtue than the condition that help

us shaping our personal intellectual ethics, that is, those virtues and dispositions that involve

a complex set of attitudes towards oneself and others, attitudes that reflect how we view

ourselves and others when engaged in epistemic tasks.

References

Sosa, E. 2004. “Reply to critics”, in Ernest Sosa and His Critics, ed. John Greco, Blackwell.

Pritchard, D. 2016. “Seeing it for oneself: perceptual knowledge, understanding, and

intellectual autonomy.” Episteme 13/1: 29-42.

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DYNAMIC CONCEPTS AND DISAGREEMENT

Víctor M. Verdejo; University of Valencia

Consider (1) and (2):

(1) There is a fire here.

(2) There is a fire there.

In central cases, coreferential utterances of (1) and (2) will involve the expression or grasp of

the same thought even if there is, in principle, an obvious difference in the way of expressing

or grasping it. Since David Kaplan’s succinct but inspirational remarks (Kaplan 1989, 537-

538 and fn. 64), this phenomenon goes by the name of ‘cognitive dynamics’ or ‘dynamic

thought’. Here I wish to approach dynamic thought from a thus far unexplored angle.

Retention of thought, I suggest, is not the only case in which dynamic thought is put to work.

Just as shift of the way in which we express or grasp a thought may be required in order to

retain that thought, so too it may be required in order to retain or enable disagreement with

respect to another thought. Consider (3):

(3) There is not a fire there.

In indefinitely many cases, utterances of (1) and (3) would involve the expression of genuine

disagreement. This is what I call ‘dynamic disagreement’. To a first approximation, dynamic

disagreement is the kind of disagreement that arises by means of dynamic thought.

Three features of dynamic disagreement stand out. First, it requires providing an

elucidation of the dynamics of thought for the interpersonal case and not merely the

intrapersonal case. Dynamic disagreement shows that dynamic thought is not a

phenomenon confined to or mainly concerned with subjects that think across contexts.

Dynamic thought may also bridge the thoughts of subjects that occupy differing contexts.

Second, and most obviously, dynamic disagreement brings out the need for an account of

dynamic thought that grounds genuine disagreement. More precisely, the requirement is that

subjects endorse conflicting attitudes or states. I will confine attention to those central cases

in which the conflict is derived from exclusionary or contradictory propositional contents or

thoughts. Finally, dynamic disagreement puts pressure on the account of dynamic thought to

capture a notion of rationality and coherence that survives the potential cognitive

mismatches originated by context shift. Since disagreement is a rational state or a state for

which subjects are held rationally accountable, one should not be counted as delivering the

right results if dynamic disagreement is reached via compromising the rationality of the

subjects that enter into it.

In this paper, I set myself two tasks: (i) to show how these three features are challenging

for mainstream accounts of dynamic thought; (ii) to set out, in reaction to this, approaches

that recognise the existence of dynamic concepts, namely, concepts that display a number

of ways of thinking in different contexts.

As regards (i), three main strands of research have been proposed. First, what we may

dub ‘Kaplanian’ theories offer a two-dimensional framework where only elements at the level

of reference or state of affairs count as the proper constituents of thought. On this account,

the thoughts in different contexts are the same in spite of involving different ways of thinking

(or characters) because ways of thinking are either not themselves parts of thought or only

part of thought insofar as united by the same referential source. A second class of theories

we may call ‘Fregean’. These theories individuate dynamic thought at the level of sense or

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cognitive value. Fregean theories in the sense I intend here do not however make room for a

split of the notion of way of thinking and thought. A third kind of approach starts with a fine-

grained notion of thought interpreted as constituted by files or indexical modes of

presentation individuated by contextually articulated informational relations—what Recanati

calls ‘epistemically rewarding’ relations. According to this view, while preservation of the

target informational relations guarantee instantiation of the same thought, dynamic thought is

achieved, beyond sameness of such relations, via operations on files (such as conversion or

fusion) or coordination of files (Recanati 2017).

As for (ii), I am ready to argue that none of these types of theory, in spite of their many

assets, can accommodate the three features of dynamic disagreement just highlighted. As

an alternative to these views, I suggest that different subjects enter into the dynamics of

disagreement just in case they employ distinct modes of presentation or ways of thinking

that belong to one and the same concept or sense. I call concepts that comprise several

ways of thinking in this sense, ‘dynamic concepts’. I call ways of thinking belonging to but not

individuating a thought ‘perspectives’. By relying on previous material (Verdejo 2018,

forthcoming), we may analyse the above case as involving one single dynamic concept—

constituting a single dynamic thought—that displays a number of ways of thinking

paradigmatically attached to ‘here’ and ‘there’.

We may flesh out the exact characterisation of dynamic concepts and its associated

perspectives in more than one way. On my preferred interpretation, a dynamic concept is

fully individuated by a fundamental reference rule (Peacocke 2014). The fundamental

reference rule at stake in the above case is the one for a location-based indexical concept

[place] such that for x to be the reference of [place] in an event e of thinking, x has to stand

in the spatial relation R to the place of e. When the thinker draws on the information that x is

the place of the event of thinking e, a ‘here’ perspective is active. A ‘there’ perspective is in

force otherwise. This account generalises to other indexicals and demonstrative terms in

ways that are promising to capture the fundamental features of thought that dynamically

intervenes in disagreement.

References

Kaplan, D. (1989) ‘Demonstratives’, in: J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, eds., Themes

from Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 481-563.

Peacocke, C. (2014) The Mirror of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Recanati, F. (2017) Mental Files in Flux, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Verdejo, V. M. (2018) ‘Thought Sharing, Communication and Perspectives about the Self’,

Dialectica 72, 487-507.

Verdejo, V. M. (forthcoming) ‘The Second Person Perspective’, Erkenntnis.

HOW I REALLY SAY WHAT YOU THINK

José Manuel Viejo, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

The apparently obviously true doctrine of opacity has been thought to be inconsistent with

the referentialist account of the semantics of proper names and indexicals. I discuss here

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one of the most popular strategies for resolving the apparent inconsistency, namely Mark

Richard’s translational theory of the semantics of belief-ascribing sentences, and raise three

problems for it. Finally, I propose an alternative theory of the semantics of belief ascriptions –

the indexical theory – that clearly avoids the three problems that trouble Richard’s theory,

and motivate it as the best possible strategy for resolving the apparent inconsistency

between the doctrine of opacity and referentialism.

TOWARDS A RIGHT TO MATERNAL TOUCH IN ANIMALS

Birte Wrage, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna; Judith Benz-Schwarzburg,

University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna

Insights from developmental psychology show that maternal touch is crucial for the normal

socio-emotional development of social mammals. Yet, humans routinely deprive animals of

maternal touch, e.g. in dairy farming or in the lab. We argue that these practices have ethical

implications beyond the obvious welfare concerns: the causal connection between maternal

touch and social development ultimately links the experience of being cared for to the

capacity to care, which in turn points to the animal’s integrity as a social being. This also

brings in the harm done to the maternal animal, who may be capable of caring but is not

allowed to. From an ethics of care perspective, care is not only a value in itself, but it is

necessarily a practice. Accordingly, maternal touch deprivation may in fact prevent both

infant and maternal animal from achieving a form of morality that would otherwise be

accessible to them.

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