Fall 2008

(All talks are on Wednesdays in 1115 Skinner Hall at 4:00 unless noted otherwise, followed by a reception in the philosophy department lounge)

October 1, 2008
Speaker: Keith De Rose (Yale University)
Title: "Knowledge and Some Evaluations of Actions"

Abstract:
Judgment aggregation studies the aggregation of yes-no judgments of the members of a jury on logically interconnected propositions into a consistent collective judgment set. As the discursive dilemma shows, proposition-wise majority voting will not in general lead to a consistent collective judgment set. To arrive at a consistent collective judgment set, three procedures have been discussed in the literature: the premise-based procedure (PBP), the conclusion-based procedure (CBP) and the distance-based procedure (DBP). According to these procedures, the jury can accept a judgment set that only a few (or even none) of the members of the jury voted for. This raises the question whether such a decision is really acceptable. Clearly, a decision based on PBP, CBP or DBP amounts to a compromise, and not everybody will be happy with the decision. The jury members agree to go along with the will of the others. The preferred solution, however, is to arrive at a consensus, whereby every jury member is in agreement with the final decision. The goal of this paper is to develop a model for the emergence of consensus in a judgment aggregation setting and to asks how this new aggregation method compares with suitably generalized versions of PBP, CBP and DBP. The paper is based on joint work with Jan Sprenger (Tilburg).

October 22, 2008
Speaker: Huw Price (University of Sydney)
Title: "Monism, minimalism and modal metaphysics"

Abstract:
This year is the centenary of Quine's birth. It is also the sixtieth birthday of a subject he is widely believed to have fathered, or at least rendered legitimate, namely, analytic Ontology. As Putnam (2004) puts it:

Ontology became a respectable subject for an analytic philosopher to pursue ... in 1948 when Quine published a famous paper titled "On What There Is." It was Quine who single handedly made Ontology a respectable subject.

As several writers have noted, however, the subsequent career of Ontology has called into question not only its claim to the Quinean bloodline, but also its legitimacy, by Quine's own lights. For my part, I think it is high time that Ontology was pensioned o?, and that an argument for redundancy can be made in Quinean terms. Moreover, I want to argue that contrary, certainly, to Quine's own intentions, it is Genealogy, not Ontology, that really prospers in the ground that he himself prepared.

November 5, 2008
Speaker: Sally Haslanger (MIT)
Title: "What's a Girl to Do?"

Abstract:
In the social realm, knowledge, or what purports to be knowledge, is entangled with the reality it represents. The social world is constituted, at least in part, by sets of shared beliefs, practices, and conventions. When social knowledge goes wrong, it may be because it has constituted a reality-and perhaps accurately represents that reality-that nevertheless falls short in some way. As a result, it has been suggested that an epistemology of the social realm must not simply be concerned with whether a belief is justified and true. I explore the issue of how we should evaluate social knowledge using the example, yes, of the preteen fashion trend of wearing crop-tops that expose the midriff. This style is constituted as "cute" within a particular milieu, but it is also, I argue, a proper target of ideology critique. The paper provides an account of social structure which makes explicit the role of schemas in constituting social reality and the role of critique in challenging the schemas.

November 19, 2008
Speaker: Stephen Darwall (Yale University)
Title: "But It Would Be Wrong"
TBA

December 3, 2008
Speaker: Michal Devitt (CNUY)
Title: "On Determining What Is"

Abstract:
In "Deconstructing the Mind," Stich rightly points out that typical arguments for eliminativism about the mind - including his own earlier ones - presuppose a description theory of reference. But, he notes, other theories of reference are possible; e.g. a causal-historical theory. So the issue of eliminativism seems to come down to that of the theory of reference. Stich argues for a gloomy conclusion about this theory, whether taken as concerned with folk semantics or as proto-science. This yields a gloomy conclusion about the importance and interest of the eliminativism issue and, indeed, of realism issues in general. What has gone wrong? Stich thinks that the mistake came in the "semantic ascent" at the beginning, in looking to the theory of reference to settle metaphysical/ontological questions.

I argue that Stich is absolutely right about that, but for the wrong reasons. The folk-semantic view of the theory of reference is a nonstarter, despite its popularity. The theory of reference should be taken as proto-science and divided into two tasks: characterizing reference and showing that reference has a scientific role. Then we should not share Stich's gloom about it. Still, an appropriately modest view of the accomplishments of this proto-science goes decisively against the semantic ascent approach to ontological issues. How then are we to settle ontological issues? I think that Stich's answer is very much along the right lines. We do not have any principles adequate to help us with the difficult cases and it may be that some of these are indeterminate. But this is no excuse for constructivism.

December 10, 2008
Speaker: Jennifer Runnels (University of Maryland)
Title: "Meta-Political Activity and the Consent Theory Tradition"

Abstract:
Although the idea of government "by the consent of the governed" is theoretically alluring, real consent is not and cannot be a part of actual citizen/government interaction. However, there is a way to capture some of consent theory's appeal while avoiding many of its practical, epistemological, and ontological pitfalls. Jean Hampton called this solution "convention consent," but I will use the phrase "meta-political activity," as the latter emphasizes the individual citizen's indirect contribution to or impact on the laws he is expected to obey. While the individual's state-legitimating power is much weaker on the meta-political activity view than it is on the classical consent view, the fact that real people can interact with their governments in this real, meaningful way makes the view worthy of consideration.