Programme abstracts

 

Friday 10th July 5.00 p.m.

Inaugural Address David Papineau (King's College London)

The poverty of analysis

ABSTRACT: I argue that philosophy is like science in three interesting and non-obvious ways. First, the claims made by philosophy are synthetic, not analytic: philosophical claims, just like scientific claims, are not guaranteed by the structure of the concepts they involve. Second, philosophical knowledge is a posteriori, not a priori: the claims established by philosophers depend on the same kind of empirical support as scientific theories. And finally, to complete the traditional trio, the central questions of philosophy concern actuality rather than necessity: philosophy is primarily aimed at under¬standing the actual world studied by science, not some further realm of metaphysical modality.

 

Saturday 11th July 9.00 a.m.

Must a semantic minimalist be a semantic internalist?

Emma Borg (Reading)

ABSTRACT: I aim to show that a semantic minimalist need not also be a semantic internalist. §1 introduces minimalism and internalism and argues that there is a prima facie case for a minimalist being an internalist. §2 sketches some positive arguments for internalism which, if successful, show that a minimalist must be an internalist. §3 goes on to reject these arguments and contends that the prima facie case for uniting minimalism and internalism is also not compelling. §4 returns to an objection from §1 and argues for a way to meet it which does not depend on giving up semantic externalism.

 

John Collins (University of East Anglia)

ABSTRACT: Borg surveys and rejects a number of arguments in favour of semantic internalism. This paper, in turn, surveys and rejects all of Borg’s anti-internalist arguments. My chief moral is that, properly conceived, semantic internalism is a methodological doctrine that takes its lead from current practise in linguistics. The unifying theme of internalist arguments, therefore, is that the linguistics neither targets nor presupposes externalia. To the extent that this claim is correct, we should be internalists about linguistic phenomena, including semantics.

 

Saturday 12th July 11.00 a.m.

Incommensurability and vagueness

Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund)

ABSTRACT: This paper casts doubts on John Broome’s view that vagueness in value comparisons crowds out incommensurability in value. It shows how vagueness can be imposed on a formal model of value relations that has room for different types of incommensurability. The model implements some basic insights of the ‘fitting attitudes’-analysis of value.

 

Robert Sugden (University of East Anglia)

ABSTRACT: This paper defines and analyses the concept of a ‘ranking problem’. In a ranking problem, a set of objects, each of which possesses some common property P to some degree, are ranked by P-ness. I argue that every eligible answer to a ranking problem can be expressed as a complete and transi¬tive ‘is at least as P as’ relation. Vagueness is expressed as a multiplicity of eligible rankings. Incommensurability, properly understood, is the ab¬sence of a common property P. Trying to analyse incommensurability in the same framework as ranking problems causes unnecessary confusion.

 

Saturday 12th July 8.00 p.m.

Conflict

Robert Adams (Oxford)

ABSTRACT: The following theses are defended. Conflict has importantly valuable func­tions, but we obviously need to limit its destructiveness. The efficacy of reasoning together in resolving or restraining conflict is limited; it needs to be supplemented by procedures such as negotiation, compromise, and vot­ing. Despite the urgency of justice, when the resolution or limitation of a conflict needs to be negotiated, the best attainable outcome will often not seem completely just to all parties, and some claims of justice, as seen by the parties, may need to be subordinated to other moral considerations.

 

Ruth Chang (Rutgers)

ABSTRACT: This paper moots an approach to social conflict that provides an alternative to approaches suggested by Rawls, perfectionists, deliberative democrats, and social choice theorists. It explores what might be a rational, rather than a reasonable, response to practical conflicts based on the ‘structure’ of a conflict. A rough analogy is proposed between conflict within an individual and conflict within a society. It is suggested that a rational response to conflicts with a certain structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases is self-governance. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society’s deliberation over the question, ‘What kind of society should we be?’ In liberal democracies, it is suggested, this rational response is also a reasonable one.

 

Sunday 13th July 9.00 a.m.

Liberty’s chains          

Véronique Munoz-Dardé (UCL)

ABSTRACT: Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau’s ‘liberty condition’: that, after the social contract, each ‘nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’. She argues that Rousseau’s social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory’s preoccupation with authority and obedience and focus instead on what she calls the ‘legitimacy’ of social arrangements. I ask questions about each of these claims.

 

Niko Kolodny (Berkeley)

ABSTRACT: Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau’s ‘liberty condition’: that, after the social contract, each ‘never¬theless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’. She argues that Rousseau’s social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that po¬litical philosophy should turn away from social contract theory’s preoccu¬pation with authority and obedience and focus instead on what she calls the ‘legitimacy’ of social arrangements. I ask questions about each of these claims.

 

Sunday 13th July 11.00 a.m.

Climate modelling

Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana)

ABSTRACT: Today’s climate models are supported in a couple of ways that receive little attention from philosophers or climate scientists. In addition to standard “model fit,” wherein a model’s simulation is compared to observational data, there is an additional type of confirmation available through the variety of instances of model fit. When a model performs well at fitting first one variable and then another, the probability of the model under some standard confirmation function, say, likelihood, goes up more than under each individual case of fit alone. Thus, two instances of fit of distinct variables of a Global Climate Model using distinct data sets considered collectively will provide stronger evidence for a model than either one of the instances considered individually. This has consequences for model robustness. Sets of models that produce robust results will, if their assumptions vary enough and they each are observationally sound, provide reasons to endorse common structures found in those models. Finally, independent empirical support for aspects and assumptions of the model provides an additional confirmational virtue for climate models, contrary to what is implied by some current philosophical writing on this topic.

Wendy Parker (Ohio)

ABSTRACT: Lloyd (this volume) contends that climate models are confirmed by various instances of fit between their output and observational data. The present paper argues that what these instances of fit might confirm are not climate models themselves, but rather hypotheses about the adequacy of climate models for particular purposes. This required shift in thinking – from confirming climate models to confirming their adequacy-for-purpose – may sound trivial, but it is shown to complicate the evaluation of climate models considerably, both in principle and in practice.

 

Sunday 13th July 8.00 p.m.

The normative role of logic

Hartry Field (New York)

ABSTRACT: The paper tries to spell out a connection between deductive logic and rationality, against Harman’s arguments that there is no such connection, and also against the thought that any such connection would preclude rational change in logic. One might not need to connect logic to rationality if one could view logic as the science of what preserves truth by a certain kind of necessity (or, by necessity plus logical form); but the paper points out a serious obstacle to any such view.

Peter Milne (Stirling)

ABSTRACT: In making assertions one takes on commitments to the consistency of what one asserts and to the logical consequences of what one asserts. Although there is no quick link between belief and assertion, the dialectical requirements on assertion feed back into normative constraints on those beliefs that constitute one’s evidence. But if we are not certain of many of our beliefs and that uncertainty is modelled in terms of probabilities, then there is at least prima facie incoherence between the normative constraints on belief and the probability-like structure of degrees of belief. I suggest that the norm-governed practice relating to degrees of belief is the evaluation of betting odds.