Guest Speaker: David Boonin (Colorado Boulder)

Guest Speaker: John Hyman (UCL)

Title: 'Knowledge and Belief'

Getting the Most out of Your Degree

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Jennifer Morton (UNC)

Guest Speaker: Eva Rafetseder (Stirling)

Title: TBC

Taking Effective Notes

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Tommie Shelby (Harvard)

Speaker: Robert C Miner (Baylor University)

Title: 'In the South: Nietzsche and the Homines Religiosi in The Gay Science V'

Guest Speaker: Simon Wimmer (TU Dortmund)

Title: 'Lessons from Ryle?'

Understanding the Marking Criteria

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Japa Pallikkathayil (Pittsburgh)

Guest Speaker: Eylem Õzaltun (Koç University)

Title: 'What is the Moral of Davidson's Carbon Copier? Towards an Anscombean Account of Practical Knowledge'

‘Pragmatics-First’ Approaches to Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language

Dorit Bar-On, University of Connecticut;

Director, Expression, Communication, and Origins of MeaningResearch Group (ECOM)

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach to the subject. Seyfarth & Cheney (2017), for example, propose that “animal communication constitutes a rich pragmatic system” and that “the ubiquity of pragmatics, … suggest[s] that, as language evolved, semantics and syntax were built upon a foundation of sophisticated pragmatic inference”. I begin by distinguishing two different notions of pragmatics advocates of the ‘pragmatics-first’ approach have implicitly relied on (cf. Bar-On and Moore, 2018). On the first, Carnapian notion, pragmatic phenomena are those that involve context-dependent determination of the content or significance of an utterance or signal. On the second, Gricean notion, pragmatic phenomena involve reliance on speakers’ communicative intentions and their decipherment by their hearers. I use the distinction, first, to evaluate a recent formal linguistic analysis of monkey calls, due to Schlenker et al. (e.g. 2014, 2016a,b), which explains the derivation of call meanings through a form of pragmatic enrichment. And, second, I use the distinction to motivate the need for an ‘intermediary pragmatics’ that, I argue, applies only to a subset of animal communicative behaviors, and would allow us to reconceive the significance of animal communication for our understanding of the evolution of language.

Please contact Richard Moore for further information.

Top Tips for Take-Home Exams

Led by David Bather Woods

Speaker: Thomas Nail (University of Denver)

Title: TBC

Guest Speaker: Paul Silva (University of Cologne)

Title: 'Knowledge, Belief, and the Possession of Reasons'

Abstract. Lottery cases, cases of naked statistical evidence, fine-tuning arguments, and profiling evidence can provide a thinker with evidence that ensures a high probability in some claim p. Yet it's widely believed that p's being very probable on one's evidence is insufficient for justified belief that p and therefore also insufficient for knowing that p. Accordingly, lottery cases (etc.) are cases where justified belief and knowledge are inaccessible. This lesson seems to naturally extend to fine-tuning arguments (for theism or a multiverse) as well as profiling cases.

In this paper I provide cases where one's evidence is "statistical" in a way that parallels lottery cases (etc.) but, shockingly, our intuitions are reversed: these parallel cases are cases where high probability justifies belief and holds the promise of knowledge. Existing accounts of what goes wrong in cases of "merely statistical evidence" cannot explain the justificatory asymmetry between the parallel cases of statistical evidence. I examine two explanations. One builds on insights from Timothy Williamson. Another builds on insights from David Lewis. Lessons are drawn about the flaws and limitations of fine-tuning arguments as well as a certain class of arguments for the existence of moral encroachment on justification.

Programme

10.00am - Welcome

10.10am-11.10am - Quassim Cassam (Warwick): 'Extremism: A Philosophical Analysis'

11.10-11.20 - Break

11.20-12.20 - Bill Brewer (KCL): 'The Metaphysics of Perception and the Place of Consciousness in the Natural World'

12.20-12.30 - Break

12.30-1.30 - Adrian Moore (Oxford) 'The Possibility of Absolute Representations'

1.30-2.30 - LUNCH

2.30-3.30 - Matthew Soteriou (KCL): 'The First Person Perspective'

3.30-3.40 - Break

3.40-4.40 - M.G.F Martin (Oxford/Berkeley): Title TBC

Please contact Maria Corrado for further information.

Writing a Thesis Statement

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Erin Kelly (Tufts)

Speaker: Naomi Waltham-Smith (Warwick)

Title: 'The Rhythm of Democracy - The Pulse of Destruction'

Guest Speaker: Rachel Dudley (CEU)

Title; 'The Pragmatics of Knowing'

Abstract:

 "Children’s understanding of propositional attitude reports (and their understanding of others’ minds) has played a central role in the study of cognitive development for several decades. Over the years, an orthodox perspective emerged whereby children fail to understand attitude reports, with sources of difficulty being syntactic, semantic or even conceptual in nature. This orthodoxy has also been ported over into other fields such as epistemology and philosophy of mind. However, a wave of findings from new methods and analyses has cast this orthodoxy into doubt. These new findings suggest that even infants have a greater understanding of mental state concepts than we once suspected, and that the apparent difficulties in later childhood stem from pragmatic sources. Resolving the conflict between these new findings and the orthodox perspective is critical to understanding the development of children’s minds and their language faculties, but the debate is far from settled.

In this talk, I’ll discuss my research on children’s understanding of the attitude verbs "know" and "think" and how it relates to the broader conflict. While both verbs can be used to describe beliefs, there are subtle differences between them. As a factive verb, "know" only felicitously describes true beliefs about propositions which we take for granted. In contrast, the non-factive "think" can describe false beliefs or beliefs which we do not take for granted. Using a combination of behavioral methods and corpus analyses, I investigate how children come to master this subtle contrast. Results from this line of research highlight the importance of pragmatic cues to the language acquisition process, particularly from the different kinds of discourse moves that adults make in everyday conversation (e.g., I think it's time for bed, Do you know where my keys are?). Results also suggest that we are sensitive to related pragmatic factors even much later in development. Ultimately, this supports a broader picture where older children’s errors with attitude reports are pragmatic performance errors and not deeper conceptual or semantic errors, highlighting the need for more research on the interplay between semantic and pragmatic development in early development."

Editing and Drafting Your Work

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Andrew Williams (UPF)

Guest Speaker: Johannes Roessler (Warwick)

Title: 'Perceptual Self-Knowledge and Doxastic Self-Determination'

Abstract. According to a widely held view of the nature of belief (which I label the Activity thesis, AT), beliefs belong to the ‘active side’ of the human mind. In this paper I explore a challenge to AT. I argue that reflection on the distinctive immediacy of perceptual knowledge, as we ordinarily understand it, puts pressure on an assumption informing AT, viz. that reasons for belief can always coherently be treated as a basis for ‘making up one’s mind’. Our best reasons for perceptual beliefs, I suggest, manifestly entail that we hold the belief they support, and so imply that our minds are already made up. (For example, one's best reason for believing that p may be 'I can see that p'.) I do not mean to suggest that perceptual beliefs should therefore be classified as belonging to the 'passive side' of the human mind. Rather, I think we should question the exhaustiveness (and perhaps usefulness) of the active vs passive distinction, as it has been employed in the philosophy of mind.

Managing Your Workload and Getting "Stuff" Done over Christmas!

Guest Speaker: Renée Bolinger (Princeton)

Speaker: Wahida Khandar (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Title: 'Sketches of Lived Time'

Guest Speaker: Leda Berio (HHU, Düsseldorf)

Title: "Talking about Thinking: Language Acquisition and False Belief Reasoning"

Guest Speaker: Rahul Kumar (Queen's)

Guest Speaker: Guy Longworth (Warwick)

Title: 'Unsettling Questions'

Abstract: "Should we expect someone who knows by seeing to be in a position positively to settle the questions “How do you know?” “Why do you think so?” or “Are you sure?"? I begin to address that large question by defending the following claims. We should not expect someone who knows by seeing that p to be in a position to know how they know that p (§2). However, we should expect someone who knows by seeing that p to have sufficient reasons for thinking that p, but—in light of the first claim—we should not expect their seeing what they do to figure amongst their reasons. A further issue that will figure in the background to the discussion here concerns how, if at all, sensory awareness of things can furnish one with reasons for thinking things so (§3). Despite the fact that one who knows by seeing need not know how they know and need not have amongst their reasons that they see what they do, still their seeing what they do can play an important role in establishing surety (§4)."