Expression and Self-knowledge

Warwick University, Friday 4^th October 2019

Humanities H0.03

Programme

11.00 – 12.30
Lucy Campbell (Warwick)
‘Self-knowledge: expression without expressivism’

12.30 – 2.00

Dorit Bar-On (University of Connecticut)
‘No ‘How’ Privileged Self-Knowledge’

3.00 – 4.30

Cristina Borgoni (Bayreuth University)

‘Primitive forms of first-person authority and expressive capacities’

Reading: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [pdf]

Readings:

Week 2: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [ pdf]

Week 3: Eilan, N. 'On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to Kohler'. [ pdf]

Week 5: Roessler, J. 'The Silence of Self-Knowledge'. [pdf]

Week 7: Campbell, J. 'Sense, Reference and Selective Attention' [pdf]

Readings:

Week 2: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [ pdf]

Week 3: Eilan, N. 'On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to Kohler'. [ pdf]

Week 5: Roessler, J. 'The Silence of Self-Knowledge'. [pdf]

Week 7: Campbell, J. 'Sense, Reference and Selective Attention' [pdf]

Readings:

Week 2: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [ pdf]

Week 3: Eilan, N. 'On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to Kohler'. [ pdf]

Week 5: Roessler, J. 'The Silence of Self-Knowledge'. [pdf]

Week 7: Campbell, J. 'Sense, Reference and Selective Attention' [pdf]

The forum will take place at LSE, London. The event is free and does not require registration.

CFA details and updates about the event will be published here: https://lwmindforum.wordpress.com/.

For further info, email: m.corrado@warwick.ac.uk

MINDGRAD 2019: OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Warwick Graduate Conference in the Philosophy of Mind

7th-8th December 2019, University of Warwick (UK)

Invited speakers:
Dr Stina Bäckström - Södertörn University
Professor Matthew Boyle - University of Chicago
Professor Jane Heal - University of Cambridge
Dr Joel Smith - University of Manchester

Details TBC

Speaker: M.M. McCabe (KCL)

Title: 'Knowing, Saying and the Value of Understanding: Plato's Account of Epistemic Virtue'

First saying, then believing: the pragmatic roots of folk psychology

Workshop with David Hunter on his forthcoming book On being a believer.

Further info TBA

Contact: Johannes Roessler

Philosophy and Empirical Perspectives

Interdisciplinary conference

Speakers:
Rachel Dudley, Kati Farkas, John Hyman (tbc), Guy Longworth, Eva Rafetseder, Paul Silva, and Simon Wimmer.

Katalin Farkas, CEU

Speaker: Michael Hannon (Nottingham)

Title: 'Empathetic Understanding in Politics'

The Cultural Origins of Human Mind-Reading

Speaker: Naomi Eilan (Warwick)

Title: 'Knowing and Understanding Other People'

Speaker: David Bather Woods (Warwick)

Title: 'The World as One: Learning from Solitude with Schopenhauer'

Abstract

Schopenhauer praises solitude and derides sociability. An active mind requires solitude, and tolerance of solitude requires an active mind, thus a capacity for solitude is an intellectual virtue, he reasons. The need for sociability, a sign of an inactive mind, is solitude’s opposite vice. Time has not been kind to this view. It is now widely accepted, and has scarcely been more apparent, that human beings are ineluctably social creatures, and better off that way. Worse still, Schopenhauer’s praise of solitude jars with his praise of worldliness as another intellectual virtue. Thinkers should learn from experience of the world, he believes; but can thinkers be both worldly and solitary? How can they know more about the world by getting out in it less? I propose a reading of Schopenhauer’s praise of the intellectual virtue of solitude which is neither insensitive to the patent human need for sociability, nor inconsistent with the intellectual virtue of worldliness.

Text: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002)

Speaker: Richard Moore

The Communicative Foundations of Propositional Attitude Psychology

Abstract:

According to a widely held dogma, a developed propositional attitude psychology is a prerequisite of attributing communicative intent, and so a developmental prerequisite of natural language acquisition. This view is difficult to reconcile with developmental evidence, which shows not only that children do not develop propositional attitudes until they are four years old (e.g. Rakoczy 2017), but also that this development is parasitic upon natural language acquisition (de Villiers & de Villers 2000; Lohmann & Tomasello 2003; Low 2010), and that it recruits brain regions that do not exist in infancy (Grosse-Wiesmann et al. 2017). Against the received view, and building on my work on minimally Gricean communication (Moore 2017a), I sketch a developmental trajectory to show how propositional attitude psychology could be both invented and learned through communicative interaction. I finish by considering the conditions in which cultural tools for mental state representation might first have been developed in human history; and the extent to which our early human ancestors might have lacked propositional attitudes. The goal of the paper will not be to show that strong nativism about human mindreading must be false, but that there is no reason to take it for granted in considering the origins of the modern human mind.

Speaker: Eileen John (Warwick)

Title: 'Learning from Artistic Disagreement'

Abstract​: "When we disagree about the meaning and value of works of art, we do not always bother to argue about it, but sometimes we do. Arguments about art can be pursued seriously, and such disagreements can mark somehow important faultlines between people. What are these disagreements about, why are they difficult to resolve, and what can be learned from them? Stanley Cavell says that ‘the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs’ (MWMWWS, 86). Responding to Cavell and to some work by Fabian Dorsch, both of whom defend the unusual rationality of aesthetic judgement and argument, I will resist some of the ‘particularising’ accounts of the difficulty of these practices. I will also make some not-well-defended claims about the role of reasons in the context of artistic evaluation."