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The draft paper with accompanying audio of the talk will be posted here approximately one week after its scheduled delivery.
Chaired by Marie McGinn (UEA)
President of the Aristotelian Society - 2011/12
Admission Free & Open to All
Abstract
Much of the discussion of Naive Realism about veridical experience has focused on a consequence of adopting it—namely, disjunctivism about perceptual experience. However, the motivations for being a Naive Realist in the first place have received relatively little attention in the literature. In the first part of the paper, I will criticise arguments for Naïve Realism offered by M.G.F. Martin, John Campbell, and (some exegetes of) John McDowell. In the second part, I will elaborate and defend the claim that Naïve Realism provides the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience.
Heather Logue is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, and particularly on issues concerning perceptual experience. She has published and forthcoming papers on Naïve Realism, disjunctivism, perceptual content, and skepticism about the external world, and she co-edited (with Alex Byrne) Disjunctivism: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press, 2009). She is currently working on a manuscript defending a Naïve Realist theory of perceptual experience that incorporates aspects of Intentionalism. Before coming to Leeds, Heather completed her PhD at MIT in 2009 and her bachelor's degree at the University of Pittsburgh in 2003.
About the Speaker
Heather Logue is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds
Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make-believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non-fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of non-essential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I claim that this proposal captures the intuitions motivating alternative theories of fiction.
Stacie Friend is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, where she has been teaching since 2007. Her research is at the intersection of aesthetics and philosophy of language and mind, focusing primarily on issues relating to fiction. She has published papers on the nature of fiction, discourse and thought about the non-existent, the metaphysics of fictional characters, emotional responses to fiction and tragedy and the cognitive values of literature. She is currently working on a monograph, Matters of Fiction.
Before coming to Heythrop, Dr Friend taught at Birkbeck College (2005-7) and at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania (2003-05). She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2002-03. She received her BA in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Miami, Florida (1995) and her PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University (2002).
Dr Friend is the Secretary of the British Society of Aesthetics, as well as an organiser of the London Aesthetics Forum series of talks at the Institute of Philosophy in London.
About the Speaker
Stacie Friend is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London
In this paper I review and provide a qualified defence of Samaritanism—Christopher Heath Wellman’s novel approach to the old fashioned problem of political obligation. I outline Wellman’s theory, clarifying the details and defend an amended version against a variety of objections concerning, successively, an alleged conflation of duties of care and beneficence, a difficulty concerning the distinction of perfect and imperfect duties, a problem deriving from the ‘particularity requirement’, and related issues deriving from the international applications of Samaritan values.
Dudley Knowles retired in July 2011 as Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He studied for his first degree at Bedford College, University of London, graduating in 1970. After a spell managing a hotel in Glencoe, he studied for a two-year thesis (MLitt) at the University of Glasgow, where he was appointed lecturer in 1973. He remained in Glasgow throughout his academic career. Although he has published on a variety of topics, his main interests have been in political philosophy and its history. He has published three books – Political Philosophy(2001), Hegel and The Philosophy of Right (2002) and Political Obligation (2010) – and edited several more. In retirement, he has continued to work on problems associated with political obligation and is preparing a second edition of Political Philosophy. He anticipates working on the nature and value of political freedom in his dotage.
About the Speaker
Dudley Knowles is an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow
There is a tension between the broadly decision-theoretic view of agents and the received picture of linguistic communication. The received view takes the transmission of nongraded, ‘binary’ belief as the paradigm. What one generally ‘puts into play’, in making an assertion, is a potential object of (nongraded, binary) belief: a proposition. What the compositional semantics of the language is charged with doing, fundamentally, is determining propositions relative to context. From a decision-theoretic perspective, this picture of communication is fixated on the objects of credence and preference, and lacks explicit room for the structure of credence and preference per se. That ultimately makes for a very peculiar bottleneck: to communicate with language, the Bayesian agent must squeeze her decision-theoretically structured state of mind into a binary, ungraded propositional medium for transmission. To remove the bottleneck, we must upgrade the received picture of communication. I describe a way of doing so, by equipping our semantics and pragmatics with decision-theoretic distinctions. The basic intuition behind the technical apparatus developed is expressivist in spirit: just as we can express those aspects of our states of mind which consist in their bearing some representational content, so too can we express `structural' aspects of our states of mind, such as the ways that they apportion probability and utility.
Seth Yalcin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works mostly in the philosophy of language, on descriptive and foundational issues in natural language semantics. Lately his work has borrowed ideas from formal epistemology and from metaethical expressivism to develop accounts of the meaning of epistemic and deontic modals, probability operators, conditionals, attitude verbs, and the language of spatial orientation. He also has research interests in metaphysics, on questions about the nature of modality, information, and randomness.
About the Speaker
Seth Yalcin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
After presenting a simple expressivist account of reports of probabilistic judgments, I explore a
classic problem for it, namely the Frege-Geach problem. I argue that is a problem not just for
expressivism, but for any reasonable account of ascriptions of graded judgments. I suggest
that the problem can be resolved by appropriately modeling imprecise credences.
Daniel Rothschild is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in
Philosophy from Princeton University. His research focuses on natural language semantics
and pragmatics. He has written on specific constructions such as conditionals, descriptions,
questions, and modals, as well as foundational topics such as presupposition, expressivism,
game-theoretic pragmatics, and dynamic semantics.
About the Speaker
Daniel Rothschild is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Counterfactual Entailment is the view that a counterfactual conditional is true just in case its antecedent entails its consequent. I present an argument for Counterfactual Entailment, and I develop a strategy for explaining away apparent counterexamples to the view. The strategy appeals to the suppositional view of counterfactuals, on which a counterfactual is essentially a statement, made relative to the supposition of its antecedent, of its consequent.
David Barnett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to arriving at CU in 2005, he held positions at the University Vermont and Davidson College. In 2008, he was a visiting professor at NYU, where he obtained his PhD in in 2003. Barnett works mainly in philosophy of language and metaphysics, but also has interests in philosophy of mind. He has written on the nature of indeterminacy and vagueness, the necessity of origins thesis, the theory of stuffs, scientific essentialism, the nature of conscious beings, personal identity, and the semantics of conditional statements. He is currently developing a novel theory of content. Outside philosophy, Barnett’s interests include mountain biking, trail running, telemark skiing, and backpacking.
About the Speaker
David Barnett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Frege suggests that criteria of identity should play a central role in an account of reference, which will be capable of explaining reference to abstract objects. Inspired by Frege’s suggestion, this paper develops a simplified but precise model of how we may come to refer to abstract letter types. We start with an interpreted language concerned with letter tokens. We then add vocabulary suitable for talking about letter types and adopt precise rules which ensure that the extended language is used precisely as if it was concerned with letter types. Since the rules are logically impeccable and invoke only unproblematic concrete objects, this extension is legitimate. There are nevertheless reasons to interpret the extended language as not only apparently but genuinely referring to letter types. But the reductionist character of the rules is used to argue that the abstract referents are metaphysically “lightweight”.
Øystein Linnebo is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he arrived in January 2010, having held positions at the Universities of Bristol, Oxford, and Oslo. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2002 and an MA in Mathematics from the University of Oslo in 1995.
Linnebo’s research interests lie in philosophical logic (especially plural and higher-order logic, logical paradoxes, absolute generality); philosophy of mathematics (especially structuralism and Fregean approaches); metaphysics (especially abstract objects, criteria of identity, modality); early analytic philosophy (especially Frege); as well as parts of philosophy of language and philosophy of science. He is currently writing a book developing and defending a broadly Fregean approach to ontology and philosophy of mathematics
In 2010-2013 Linnebo is leading a European Research Council-funded project entitled “Plurals, Predicates, and Paradox: Towards a Type-Free Account”.
About the Speaker
Øystein Linnebo is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.
Direct realism with respect to perceptual experiences has two facets, an epistemological one and a metaphysical one. From the epistemological point of view it involves the claim that perceptual experiences provide immediate justification. From the metaphysical point of view it involves the claim that in perceptual experience we enter in direct contact to items in the external world. In a more radical formulation, often associated with naïve realism, the metaphysical conception of direct realism involves the idea that perceptual experiences depend on the items in the external world they are related to. This paper describes a simple account that makes room for immediate justification provided by perceptual experience. The simple account establishes an explanatory relation between the justificational role of a perceptual experience and the fact that such an experience provides a reason for a belief. The account is evaluated in the light of some objections. Different ways to react to those objections are discussed. It will appear that in order to preserve the explanatory relation established by the simple account, one has to accept naïve realism. By breaking the connection between reason and justification, on the other side, one jeopardises the possibility for perceptual experience to deliver immediate justification.
Gianfranco Soldati works on phenomenology, mind and knowledge. Among other things he is interested in problems related to self-knowledge and in the philosophical analysis of experience. His publications (in English, German, French and Italian) contain a book in German on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and articles on self-knowledge and introspection, on the phenomenology of thought, and on demonstrative thought. Before obtaining the chair for modern and contemporary philosophy at Fribourg University (Switzerland), Soldati has lectured at the University of Tübingen (Germany).
About the Speaker
Gianfranco Soldati is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg.
In investigating non-inferential knowledge, I’m concerned with statements which, in appropriate circumstances, for example, in response to some relevant enquiry, I am in a position to make ‘straight off’, ‘immediately’, not only in the sense that I do not have to engage in reasoning, but in the sense that there is no prior belief from which what I state could be presented as an inference. The kinds of things we can state in this way include observational judgements, perceptual statements, memory statements, statements about my current bodily posture, statements about my intentions for the future, and so on. All these kinds of statement are distinctive, not only because I am often in a position to make them straight off, or immediately, but also because, made in response to a relevant enquiry, the question, ‘How do you know?’, would not normally arise for them. Not only that, but the question, ‘How do you know?’, would, in normal circumstances, be odd, in the sense that it is very unclear what I should, or could, say in reply to it. The problem that my apparent capacity to state all these kinds of thing straight off, immediately, without any prima facie justification, poses is this: what is the nature of my entitlement to make them? How can a judgement that I make straight off be one to which I am entitled? The statements I’m concerned with are distinctive in not being grounded in other things which I judge to be the case, so how can they meet the requirement—which it seems they must meet in order to count as manifestations of knowledge, and thus in order for me to be entitled to make them—that they are ones for which I possess a warrant. In this paper, I focus on straight-off observational judgments and on two contrasting approaches to understanding the nature of my entitlement to make them. Both of the approaches are instances of what might be called a non-reductive form of naturalism and they both assume that it belongs to the nature of an entitlement to judge that the subject who judges is aware of his entitlement. However, while the first approach, which I argue against, sets out to provide an account of the nature of the warrant that I have for straight-off observational judgements, the second approach, which I defend, sets out to disconnect the source of my entitlement to make these judgements from the question of possession of a justification, or warrant, for making them. In a final brief section, I consider what light the kind of account of our entitlement to straight-off observational judgements which I develop sheds on the other kinds of judgement I am in a position to make straight off.
Marie McGinn is Professor Emerita in Philosophy at the University of York, and part-time Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Her main areas of research are the philosophy of Wittgenstein, epistemology and the philosophy of mind. Her publications include Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, (London: Routledge), 1997, of which a second edition is currently being prepared, and Elucidating the Tractattus: Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy of Logic and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2007; she has also published articles on Wittgenstein, scepticism, naturalism, Merleau-Ponty and John McDowell; she is editor, with Oskari Kuusela, of The Oxford Handbook to Wittgenstein. Recent articles include: "Wittgenstein and Naturalism," in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. M.De Caro and D. McArthur, (New York: Columbia University Press), 2010; "McDowell’s Minimal Empiricism," Philosophical Topics, 2010; "Wittgenstein and Williamson on Knowing and Believing’’, in The Conceptions of Knowledge, ed. Stefan Tolkdorf, (Berlin/New York: deGruyter), forthcoming 2011.
Quassim Cassam is Head of the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University. He was previously Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, Professor of Philosophy at UCL and Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford University. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University. He works on Kant, epistemology and philosophy of mind. He has published two books, Self and World (1997) and The Possibility of Knowledge (2007).
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