Spring 2007

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

January 26, 2007 (Friday)
Speaker: Erin Eaker, Department of Philosophy, Western Ontario
Title: "How not to be puzzled about belief"

Abstract: In this talk I will outline a new approach to the semantics of believes that sentences, i.e., sentences such as “Stella believes that Joe Tobacco won the hand.” I will argue that semantic theories for believes that sentences have been unduly influenced by metaphysical theories about the nature of belief. The semantic theories have been shaped to fit these metaphysical theories, rather than to reflect our ordinary practices of psychological description. Our actual belief description practices do not support the common assumption that the primary function of believes that sentences is to provide fine-grained psychological descriptions of their subjects. This assumption has led to a distorted understanding of believes that sentences and to the mistaken conclusion that a semantic theory for believes that sentences must provide solutions to some well-known, but illusory, puzzles about belief. With a new approach to the semantics of believes that sentences these puzzles disappear and the semantic theory for believes that sentences becomes much less complicated.

January 31, 2007
Speaker: Rachel Singpurwalla, Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Illinois
Title: "Reason and the Divided Soul in Plato’s Republic"

Abstract: In Republic IV, Socrates argues that the experience of motivational conflict demonstrates that the soul has three parts or sources of motivation, which he calls reason, spirit and the appetites. Socrates’ clearest characterization of these parts of the soul occurs in Republic IX, where he suggests that they should be understood in terms of the various goals or ends that motivate our actions. In Republic X, however, Socrates uses the phenomenon of cognitive conflict about matters of fact to show that the soul has only two parts, the rational and the irrational. Moreover, he characterizes these parts in terms of cognitive tendencies, such as forming beliefs on the basis of reason versus forming beliefs on the basis of perceptual appearances. In this paper, I explain how these divergent accounts are legitimate alternative characterizations of the parts of the soul. A consequence of my argument is that we should not think of the divided soul as primarily a division of desires, but rather as a division of cognitive attitudes towards the world, each of which yields different sorts of desires.

February 2, 2007 (Friday)
Speaker: Ray Buchanan, Department of Philosophy, New York University
Title: "On Saying What You Believe"

Abstract: According to the standard view of communication, what a speaker means by her utterance must be some one or more propositions; successful communication (minimally) consisting in the speaker’s audience entertaining what she meant. I argue that this standard view fails. Moreover, once we see how the standard view fails we will see there is pressure to rethink some of our most basic assumptons regarding attributions of meaning and belief.

February 7, 2007
Speaker: Elizabeth Tropman, Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University
Title: "Renewing Moral Intuitionism"

Abstract: Moral intuitionism, in its classic formulations, was the favored view of a number of significant British moral theorists in the first part of the twentieth century. Intuitionism fell out of favor by the 1950’s, in large part because it then became unpopular to hold, as intuitionists did, that there are objective moral facts of which we can have genuine moral knowledge. Enthusiasm for objectivistic moral theories rebounded two decades later and remains strong today, while interest in intuitionism has not followed suit. In many quarters, intuitionism is still viewed as a non-starter. This dismissal is unfortunate, as it rests, I claim, on misunderstandings. The aim of this paper is to examine some common misrepresentations of intuitionism, to clarify the view, and, in light of this reformulation, to argue that intuitionism is worthy of closer attention. I shall also begin to sketch a novel and updated version of intuitionism that I believe offers a promising metaethical account of moral thought.

February 9, 2007 (Friday)
Speaker: Jason Brennan, Department of Philosophy, Brown University
Title: "Philosophical Dissensus"

Abstract: Philosophers disagree. Indeed, we expect philosophers to disagree when engaged in honest inquiry. Some--especially non-philosophers-- might claim this proves philosophy is an irrational field. Philosophical methods lead everywhere; thus, philosophy is an ineffective instrument of truth. Can we defend the rationality of philosophy as a field, or should we be skeptics about philosophy? There are lots of reasons why philosophy is worth doing. Yet, it would be disturbing if we can't show that philosophy gets us the right type of value—true answers to philosophical questions. This paper explores why dissensus occurs, why many common defenses don't seem to be enough, and what it would take to show that philosophers can be justified in accepting their views despite overwhelming disagreement from their epistemic peers.

February 15, 2007 (Thursday)
Speaker: Dan Moller, Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
Title: "Abortion and Moral Risk"

Abstract: It is natural for those of us with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if we have examined all of the arguments we know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, our moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, risk-based considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making.

February 16, 2007 (Friday)
Speaker: Elizabeth Jelinek, Department of Philosophy, Duke University
Title: "Why We Are Not Too Thick-Headed: Explanations in Plato’s Timaeus"

Abstract: Does Plato have anything to offer in the way of scientific explanations, or is he trapped by the theoretical constraints of the Forms? Aristotle criticizes Plato’s Forms based on his claim that Forms cannot explain natural events. Based on Aristotle’s critique, we are left with the impression that Plato’s philosophical commitment to the Forms renders him incapable of offering adequate scientific explanations. The Timaeus is the dialogue in which Plato accounts for the creation of the universe, and thus Plato’s theory of explanation comes into focus. However, the standard interpretation holds that all explanations in the Timaeus are teleological and/or Formal explanations in disguise. If this is the case, then Aristotle is correct: Plato’s teleological and Formal explanations cannot explain natural events, and so he has, in fact, failed to offer the kind of adequate scientific explanations Aristotle sought. I suggest that such an impression is ill-conceived: I shall demonstrate that Plato offers a sophisticated type of scientific explanation that has been previously overlooked.

February 21, 2007
Speaker: Damon Horowitz, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
Title: "What Metaphors Tell Us About Truth"

Abstract: Do metaphors have truth-conditions? I argue that they do, and that the dominant Gricean tradition has been mistaken in seeking a categorical distinction between the mechanisms of meaning involved in literal and metaphorical utterances. A Contextualist view of metaphor allows that pragmatic factors play a dominant role in the determination of truth-conditional content for literal and metaphorical utterances alike. The main objections to this view charge that it cannot account for various normative constraints which govern our determinate linguistic communications. But these objections overestimate the determinacy our utterances in fact achieve, while underestimating the constraints which pragmatics may provide. By clarifying the proper place for normative considerations in a theory of meaning, I show how a refined version of Contextualism may survive the objections, while giving us further insight into what it is for an utterance to have truth-conditions in any case.

March 2, 2007 (Friday)
Speaker: Sahar Akhtar, Department of Philosophy, Duke University
Title: "Respect for Persons and *their* Identities"

Abstract: Many critics of liberal political theory argue that liberalism, contrary to what it claims, is not neutral with respect to comprehensive conceptions of the good. Such critics argue that liberalism does not pay equal respect to every person because it does not recognize what is essential to some persons, namely, their social identities, such as their cultural, ethnic, or racial group. I argue, first, that the claim that something is part of one’s conception of the good is not equivalent to the claim that it is part of one’s identity, and second, that even if liberalism is committed to respecting one's identity from the perspective of the principle of equal respect for persons, it is not committed to respecting groups.

March 9, 2007 (Friday)
Speaker: Nathanael Stein, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University
Title: "Aristotle and the Homonymy of Cause"

Abstract: Aristotle is a causal pluralist. Famously, he thinks there are four kinds of causal relation: formal, material, efficient, and final causation. These causal relations are, besides their metaphysical roles, also the objects of knowledge: to know is to grasp causal relations, according to Aristotle—this is his consistent claim throughout the logical, metaphysical, and scientific treatises. This leads to an interpretive and philosophical problem: if knowledge is the grasping of causes, but there are four kinds of cause, then knowledge is ambiguous, unless the kinds of cause can be appropriately and non-trivially unified. As such, it is natural for Aristotle and his commentators to look for some unifying principle for the causes that reveals the basis of their metaphysical importance and justifies their place in his system. While several such attempts have been made, and each has merits, they share a defect: none of them is sensitive to the relation of causes to Aristotle's apparatus of homonymy, which presents both special problems and unique possibilities for unification. The problem can only be solved by appreciating that causation is one of the concepts Aristotle recognizes as homonymous: concepts which are not univocal but nonetheless organized around a core concept, or focal meaning. We must then determine how the kinds or cause are organized, since Aristotle is not explicit on the matter. The core concept for causation is, in fact, the concept of predication, and the four causes may be understood as constituting the metaphysical basis for the possibility of true predications. This result ought to be of interest both for scholars of Aristotle and for those wishing to defend causal pluralism.

April 25, 2007
Speaker: Susan Schneider, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Title: "The Nature of Symbols in the Language of Thought"

Abstract: This paper provides a theory of the nature of symbols in the language of thought (LOT). My discussion consists in three parts. In part one, I provide three arguments for the individuation of primitive symbols in terms of total computational role. The first of these arguments claims that Classicism requires that primitive symbols be typed in this manner; no other theory of typing will suffice. The second argument contends that without this manner of symbol individuation, there will be computational processes that fail to supervene on syntax, together with the rules of composition and the computational algorithms. The third argument says that cognitive science needs a natural kind that is typed by total computational role. Otherwise, either cognitive science will be incomplete, or its laws will have counterexamples. Part two defends this view from a criticism, offered by both Jerry Fodor and Jesse Prinz, who respond to my view with the charge that because the types themselves are individuated “holistically”, different individuals will not be subsumed under the same psychological generalizations. Finally, part three briefly explores the notion of computational role that is involved in the three arguments and suggests an individuation condition that meets the demands of the arguments.

May 9, 2007
Speaker: Michael Smith, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University
Title: "The Explanatory Role of Being Rational"

Abstract: This paper revisits a much neglected debate within the Humean camp about the basic elements involved in the explanation of action. Hempel and Davidson famously disagreed about whether, in addition to desire and belief, we should suppose that an agent's being rational also has a role to play in the explanation of action. I argue that Hempel was right and that Davidson was wrong: an agent's being rational plays a significant role in the explanation of action. At the end I briefly discuss some of the implications of this conclusion.