Colloquia Abstracts

Printable Version


Fall Term 2007

Speaker: Hanoch Sheinman (Rice University)
Title: "The Practice Reason Account of Promises"
Date: October 12th
Abstract:

An account of what promises are must explain the difference between A's prediction that A will do X (or statement of intention to do X), on the one hand, and A's promise to do X, on the other. According to the influential Obligation Account of Promises, this key distinction cannot be explained unless we characterize a promise to do X in terms oAnalytic Methods for Linguisticsf a moral obligation to do X. I counter this by presenting the Practice Reason Account of Promises, which characterizes promises in terms of a practice reason to do X. Practice reasons are neither obligatory nor moral; they are self-regarding reasons consisting of social pressure to conform to practice-based expectations. By explaining how promises can give practice reasons, I seek to explain the key distinction between promises and predictions (or statements of intention). The Practice Reason Account does not deny that we often have, and act for, all sorts of other reasons to do what's promised. It claims that the distinctly promissory reason to keep a promise-the one reason every promise gives or at least purports to give-is practice-based and self-regarding. I close by arguing that it is the Obligation Account that, in the last analysis, lacks the resources to explain the key distinction.


Speaker: Michael Martin (University College London)
Title: "What's in a look?"
Date: October 26th
Abstract:

This paper starts out with a(n easy) puzzle: Suppose Dean and Pearl look exactly alike then the following three statements can all be true together:

(A) Every way that Pearl looks, Dean does too; and every way that Dean looks, Pearl does too;

(B) Pearl looks ill

(C) Dean doesn't look ill

The puzzle is to explain how these three statements can be jointly consistent. This leads us to consider both the nature of looks-statements (and the familiar claim that such statements admit of phenomenal, comparative and epistemic uses) and the nature of looks themselves.

Useful background reading: Frank Jackson, /Perception: A Representative Theory/, Ch. 2; Michael Tye, /Consicousness, Color & Content/, pp.53ff.)


Speaker: Doug Hutchinson (University of Toronto)
Title: "Socrates in Prison Again: a second 'Second Apology' in P.Köln205"
Date: November 2nd
Abstract:

When Socrates lost his famous trial, his friends were appalled not only by his fate but also by his apparently suicidally inept defense speech. According to Plato's *Phaedo*, Socrates felt the need, on his last day of life, to defend himself against this second accusation, that his conduct invited his own death to an irresponsible degree. In this 'Second Apology', his main line of argument was that a philosopher will not shrink from death, au contraire. In a little-known papyrus fragment from the 3rd c. BC, now held in Köln, we find a separate treatment of these themes. In this talk, I'll study the lines of argument in this unfamiliar text, show the connections with more familiar texts, and hazard some guesses as to who is the author of this unfamiliar Socratic dialogue.


Speaker: Kent Johnson (UC Irvine)
Title: Analytic Methods for Linguistics
Date: November 9th
Abstract:

It is well-known from the philosophy of science that much of scientific methodology involves bridging the gap between theory and evidence. Strikingly, mainstream contemporary linguistics frequently mediates these two by informal, largely verbal, reasoning. In particular, linguistics commonly forgoes the use of quantitative methods for aggregating, analyzing, and assessing the relationship between its theories and evidence. In this talk, I explore this phenomenon. I begin by showing why this practice is a concern. I then identify three aspects of linguistic theorizing that make it unamenable to the standard statistical methods employed in psychology, the social sciences, and elsewhere. Next, I describe a procedure for overcoming these aspects and arriving at an assessment of a few central features concerning the collective body of data and the theory (or theories) under consideration. The explicitness of this procedure helps expose several problems and prospects for linguistic theorizing. I conclude by discussing these and other aspects of the structure of linguistic theorizing that provide room for future work.


Speaker: David Owen (University of Arizona)
Title: Seeing is Believing
Date: November 16th
Abstract:

It is with the empiricists, especially Locke and Hume, that the modern concept of empirical knowledge begins to be formed. As transitional figures, each diverged, both from the scholastic doctrine of scientia (still found in Descartes) and from the modern doctrine.
Broadly speaking, Locke characterized knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement between any two ideas. He classified as knowledge our immediate awareness of real existents, even though it is hard, perhaps impossible, to understand such an awareness as the perception of the relation of ideas. Sensitive knowledge, or immediate sensory knowledge, seems especially problematic. Nevertheless, Locke insisted that such knowledge was limited to actual, particular sensory experience, plus memories of such experience. All attempts to generalize such knowledge, or project it beyond what is a currently observable, result in belief, not knowledge.
Hume's picture is tidier. While agreeing with Locke that all projections of experience into the unobserved result in belief based on probable reasoning, he denied that the immediate awareness we get in sense perception is knowledge. Instead, he classified it as belief. This is part of his overall theory of impression, ideas, beliefs and probable reasoning. Hume realized that to say that the sun will rise tomorrow (or indeed that we observed it to rise today) is only probable, or "merely" a matter of belief, would make the speaker appear ridiculous. To counter this, he used the term "proofs" to characterize those beliefs that "are entirely free from doubt and uncertainty." Reclassifying such beliefs as empirical, as opposed to a priori, knowledge is but a short step.

Speaker: Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
Title: "Laws and Natural Properties"
Date: November 30th
Abstract:

My topic is the connection between laws and natural properties. I am particularly interested in David Lewis' Best System Account of laws and chances (the BSA aka the MRL account) and its connections with his metaphysically realist and Humean view of perfectly natural properties. Lewis' account of natural properties/relations involves a metaphysically fundamental distinction that identifies a special class of properties he calls "the perfectly natural properties." I argue that the way Lewis employs natural properties in the BSA account of laws is problematic. It undermines the connection between the BSA and scientific practice and it overburdens the notion of natural property with work it cannot perform. I sketch a version of the BSA that doesn't depend on Lewis' account of natural properties. The significant difference between my account and Lewis' is that where he invokes naturalness as a metaphysical primitive and explains laws partly in terms of it, my account involves a genuine "package deal" that characterizes laws and scientifically fundamental properties together. I call it the "Package Deal Account"; the PDA.


Speaker: Manuel Vargas (University of San Fransisco)
Title: Building a Better Beast
Date: December 7th
Abstract:

Some agents seem to be appropriate targets of a distinctive form of evaluation, an evaluation largely given in terms of moral praise and blame. Other agents seem to be inapt targets of such evaluations- for example, children and non-human animals. Determining which agents are appropriate targets of this form of evaluation is the task of a theory of responsible agency. In this paper, I offer an account of (1) the distinctive normative structure governing justified responsibility practices, attitudes, and judgments, and (2) an account of the nature of responsible agency. I go on to discuss how responsible agency is partly context-dependent, and what implications this might have for addressing a range of limit cases for responsibility attribution.


Winter Term 2008

Speaker: Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt University Berlin and UC Berkeley)
Title: "Hegel's Metaphysical Conception of Self-Consciousness"
Date: February 22nd
Abstract:

One of the rather perplexing peculiarities of classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, also known as German Idealism, is that its main representatives insisted on the necessity to distinguish between two kinds of self-consciousness. The one was called empirical self-consciousness and was taken roughly to be identical with a subject's consciousness of its inner states. The other was considered to be non-empirical and went by different but equally opaque names like transcendental unity of apperception (Kant), the I as a deed-act (Fichte), the absolute I (Schelling) or the I as concept (Hegel). And whereas most of them had surprisingly little to say about what was called empirical self-consciousness they put an enormous amount of energy into conceptualizing the other kind of self-consciousness which I will refer to in what follows under the cover-name of philosophical self- consciousness. Why did they do this? What was it what they found so attractive in the idea of a philosophical self-consciousness? What did they intend to characterize by means of this idea and where did they want to arrive at by relying on it?

Speaker: Jenann Ismael (University of Arizona, University of Sydney)
Title: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reflexivity
Date: February 29th
Abstract:

Reflexive thoughts have been a source of contention. Some have held that the ability to think reflexive thoughts is uniquely and even definitively human. Nozick, for example, writes; "To be an I, a self, is to have the capacity for reflexive self-reference." It is increasingly common in the psychological literature (following the lead of D'Amasio, Bandura, Hofstaedter, Dennett, and many others) to see reflexive thought as central to human cognition. Others, however, have denied the existence of reflexive thoughts. William James, for example, asserted categorically that "No subjective state, whilst present, is its own object; its object is always something else." Ryle ridiculed the very idea as involving" the hallowed paraoptical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides." If one looks a the literature, however, it's surprisingly hard to find a clear account of what a reflexive thought is supposed to be. Being about itself is not enough to make a thought reflexive. If Alice is thinking about what Tom is thinking and Tom is thinking about what Alice is thinking, for example, Alice hasn't yet had a reflexive thought. There is little talk about what more is required. I'll propose a simple, demystifying model for reflexive thoughts, and say a little about how it might help with some other puzzles that arise in understanding our own minds.

Speaker: Monte Johnson (UC San Diego)
Title:Aristotle the materialist, mechanist, and reductionist
Date:March 14th
Abstract:

In this presentation I will argue that Aristotle's method of scientific explanation is thoroughly empiricist and depends heavily on quantitative, materialist, reductionist, and mechanistic explanatory schemes.

Spring Term 2008

Speaker: Maurice Finocchiaro (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Title: Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Galileo Affairs
Date: April 11th
Abstract:

Although recent works on Galileo's trial have reached new heights of erudition, documentation, and sophistication, they typically exhibit over-inflated complexities; neglect 400 years of historiography; and make little effort to learn from Galileo. Moreover, the general-cultural controversy over its interpretation and evaluation shows no signs of subsiding, as recent events demonstrate. I am working on a book aiming to avoid those scholarly lacunae and to shed light on the general-cultural controversy. I argue that the Copernican Revolution required that the earth's motion be supported not only with new arguments but also with new evidence, and that it be not only supported constructively but also critically defended from numerous objections. This defense in turn required not only the destructive refutation but also the appreciative understanding of those objections in all their strength. A major Galilean accomplishment was to elaborate such a "reasoned" and "critical" defense of Copernicanism. Galileo's trial (1613-1633) can be interpreted as a series of ecclesiastic attempts to stop him from defending Copernicus. And an essential thread of the controversy (from 1633 to our own day) about Galileo's trial is the emergence of numerous arguments for and against the claim that his condemnation was right. My thesis is that the defense of Galileo can and should have the reasoned and critical character which his own defense of Copernicus had.

Speaker: Paul Churchland (UC San Diego)
Title: "On the Genesis of Conceptual Frameworks: How We Learn Structures That Unfold in Time."
Date: April 18th
Abstract:

Standard accounts of how we, and creatures generally, learn to recognize Causal Processes -- accounts such as Induction, Hypothetico-Deduction, and Bayesian Updating -- all require an antecedent conceptual framework in which the relevant causal hypotheses or conclusions can be stated, experimental data can be expressed, and confirmation relations can be evaluated. How those conceptual frameworks are created in the first place is an issue that is typically finessed or badly fumbled by all of these accounts. We need a biologically-realistic, *sub*-conceptual story of how such concepts are generated. We also need an account that displaces the highly artificial procedures of the familiar 'back-propagation algorithm' typically employed in artificial neural-network models of concept learning. An alternative model of temporal-process learning will be proposed that deploys the more realistic *Hebbian* process of synaptic modification, a model that embodies some interesting predictions about the biological *architecture* of those special neuronal networks that are capable of learning and deploying causal knowledge. A series of illustrative diagrams will help convey the model being proposed.

Speaker: Sam Cumming (UC Los Angeles)
Title: "Discourse Content"
Date: April 25th
Abstract:

This talk is about content, discourse entities, and names. Standard accounts of content, on which it is determined or constituted by such external factors as truth conditions and reference, are beset by equally standard objections. Discourse entities (Karttunen 1969) seem to offer an attractive alternative to concrete referents in accounts of content. However, they must be understood as intersubjectively available (if content is to be interpersonal) and transcontextual (if content is not to be confined to a particular discourse).

In answering the first challenge, I draw on objective accounts of discourse context in philosophy (Lewis 1979) and AI practice (DeVault and Stone 2006). For the second, I argue, based on the discourse properties of names, that anaphora can occur between discourses, and thus there are discourse entities that span contexts.

If there is time, I will show how this account of content straightforwardly predicts the intuition of "intentional identity" in Hob-Nob sentences (Geach 1967).

Speaker: Carl Craver (Washington University, St. Louis)
Title: Experimentation, Instruments, and Activity Realism: Philosophical Reflections on Early 20th Century Electrophysiology
Date: May 23rd Abstract:

Neurophysiologists characterize the electrical activities of neurons by treating the neuronal membrane as a parallel circuit with voltage-dependent resistors. The development of this idea in the first half of the 20th Century required the invention of ever more subtle techniques for stimulating, detecting, amplifying, recording, and dissociating different aspects of the electrical activities of nerve cells. I follow Ian Hacking's lead in arguing that experimental practices provide a compelling reason to favor realism over varieties of antirealism. Hacking gives two arguments. The first, and most cited, is that the ability to use an entity to produce new phenomena establishes that the entity exists. This argument, as others have shown, is flimsy at best. Arguments for entity realism grounded in the fact that entities are "robustly detectable" are flimsy for similar reasons. Hacking's second and less familiar argument is that experimental practice is unintelligible if entity realism is false. While ultimately unconvincing as an argument for entity realism, this argument provides some warrant for realism about causal structures, or activities. I use this fundamental episode in the history of neurophysiology (particularly the development of the cathode ray oscilloscope and the voltage clamp) to show how experimental practice presupposes activity realism, and I show how this argument places the burden on antirealist about causation to provide an equally compelling account of such episodes in the history of science, episodes that any adequate philosophy of neuroscience must be able to explain.