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

Speaker: Simon Wimmer (TU Dortmund)

Title: 'What if Knowledge and Belief Took Different Objects?'

Abstract​: Suppose one knows and believes that it is raining. What relation do one’s knowledge state and one’s belief state bear to each other? The aim of this paper is to explore what constraints on answering this question follow if knowledge is an attitude to a fact, whilst belief is not.

This is to announce that the seminar with Katalin Farkas (CEU) which was originally scheduled for April 16th has been **rescheduled** as a Zoom meeting.

Title: 'The Unity of Knowledge'

Speaker: Professor Katalin Farkas (CEU)

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

Speaker: Christoph Hoerl (Warwick)

Title: 'Episodic Memory and Knowledge'

Abstract​: According to Locke, memory is the power of the mind "to revive perceptions which it once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before". I will refer to theories that fit Locke's general description as 'two-factor theories' of memory, and I will assume that they are meant specifically to provide an account of episodic memory. Such two-factories have been very popular historically, and they have seen a resurgence in recent years, because they are seen to be in line with certain empirical findings about the neural structures underpinning episodic memory. I will sketch a number of problems facing two-factor theories of episodic memory, and suggest that they have a common root, which is that the concept of knowledge is absent from the account two factor theories give of episodic memory. An account that instead puts centre stage the idea that episodic memory involves the retention of a certain type of knowledge can avoid the problems that two-factor theories of episodic memory face.

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

Speaker: Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa)

Speaker: Richard Gipps (Oxford)

Title: 'On the Importance of Not Understanding the Patient'

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

Speaker: Johannes Roessler (Warwick)

Title: 'Self-Understanding'

Abstract​: "Intentional agents seem to have a distinctive ‘first-personal’ way of knowing what they are doing (Anscombe’s ‘practical knowledge’) as well as, connectedly, a distinctive ‘first-personal’ way of understanding why they are doing it, in terms of their practical reasons. In this talk I consider a puzzle generated by two further plausible suggestions: traits of character play an essential (if perhaps implicit) role in reason-giving explanations of intentional actions; but we have no first-person knowledge of our character. I won’t try to solve the puzzle, merely to get a better understanding of it (drawing on work by Hursthouse, Kant, and Montaigne)."​

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

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj (Warwick)

Title: "Democratic Mandates and the Ethics of Representation."

Democratic Mandates and the Ethics of Representation

A day after the Tories achieved a decisive victory in the December 2019 British general election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that he had received a “huge great stonking mandate” to get Brexit done and implement his domestic policy agenda. Whether or not what Johnson received is appropriately described as huge, great, or stonking, his statement reflects a more general idea that has wide currency in conventional democratic thought—namely, that larger electoral victories give representatives greater mandates to govern. Despite its important role in the practice of democratic politics, democratic theorists have paid little attention to the questions of whether larger electoral victories actually give representatives greater mandates to govern and, if so, what the moral implications of having a greater or lesser mandate are. My aim in this essay is to answer these questions and, in doing so, lay the groundwork for a normative theory of democratic mandates. I suggest that the key to answering the questions lies in understanding the relationship between two functions of democratic votes. Votes have a metaphysical function: they authorise representatives to govern. And votes have an expressive function: they express attitudes about the representatives they authorise. I defend what I call the dependence thesis: the content, size, and moral implications of a representative’s mandate depend on the attitudes expressed by the votes that generate the mandate. I then argue that, given certain ineliminable features of large-scale democratic politics, real-world democratic representatives are rarely in a position to justifiably claim greater mandates based on the size of their electoral victories.

Speaker: Maria Corrado (Warwick)

Title: 'Action, Force, and Auditory Perception'

Abstract​: "In chapter 2 of Individuals, Strawson (1959) explores the case of a purely auditory world, which he considers to be exempt of material things, to test whether there could be a conceptual scheme that accommodates the existence of objective particulars which does not rely on material things. Strawson’s assessment of a purely auditory world raises a question as to whether purely auditory perceptual experience does enable direct cognitive contact with an objective, material world. I pursue the thesis that the purely auditory delivers materiality through the notion of force. My leading reasoning is that (1) insofar as exertion of force is a mark of materiality, and (2) insofar as force is apparent in purely auditory perceptual experience, (3) there is a mark of materiality that is apparent in auditory perceptual experience. On this occasion, I focus on providing motivation for the claim that (2) force is apparent in auditory perceptual experience by defending the thesis that it is possible to directly observe force in things interacting at a distance from one. My strategy is to argue that a cogent explanation of our ability to successfully act or bring about the desired changes in the world requires that we are capable to perceptually observe the force that objects exert at a distance from us. Accepting that force is observable at a distance from one brings us a step closer to the view that force is apparent in auditory perceptual experience of collisions. The plan is to then use this insight as a starting point to defend, at a later stage, the thesis that purely auditory perceptual experience provides us with the material to justify the objectivity of our sensory experience."​​

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

Speaker: Ellisif Wasmuth (Essex)

Title: "What the many know and teach: Plato on the knowledge of language users"

Abstract. "Plato is known for his low opinion of the epistemic achievements of the many. He usually grants knowledge (epistēmē or technē) only to the expert or master dialectician, but in the First Alcibiades Socrates seems to agree with Alcibiades that even the many have some knowledge – they know Greek (111c3). In this paper I ask what, if anything, the many actually know in knowing Greek. What kind of grasp of reality must they have, according to Plato, in order to be competent users of language, and can knowledge of language be had independently of knowledge of the world? 
I argue that Plato structures the First Alcibiades so as to draw a parallel between playing games and using language, suggesting a continuum between basic language mastery and philosophical inquiry or dialectic. According to this view, gaining knowledge of a language, and learning or inquiring about the things talked about are – at least within virtuous linguistic communities – two sides of the same coin. I argue that this role of language is illustrated in the famous questioning of the slave in the Meno, before looking at the puzzling discussion of names, and the understanding embedded in them, in the Cratylus."

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

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

Guest Speaker: David Jenkins (Tel Aviv)

Title: 'Reasoning and Its Limits'

Reasoning and its limits

It is often argued that the extent to which it is not up to us how our reasoning unfolds undermines the natural idea that reasoning is a kind of action. I argue that the extent to which it is not up to us how our reasoning unfolds in fact fails to cast doubt on the idea that reasoning is a kind of action and instead reflects the kind of agential exercise which reasoning is. The limits to the extent to which it is up to us how our reasoning unfolds can in fact be explained via appeal to reasoning’s status as a kind of aim-directed action. This in turn paves the way for an explanation of how reasoning is a way for us to be active with respect to our attitudes.

Guest Speaker: Nishi Shah (Amherst College)

Title: 'John Stuart Mill's Neglected Argument for Free Speech'

Guest Speaker: David Horst (Porto Alegre)

Title: Virtue, Skill and Epistemic Competence'

Abstract: Many virtue epistemologists conceive of epistemic competence on the model of skill—such as archery, playing baseball or chess­. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic competences and skills are crucially and relevantly different kinds of capacities. This, I suggest, undermines the popular attempt to understand epistemic normativity as a mere special case of the sort of normativity familiar from skillful action. In fact, as I argue further, epistemic competences resemble virtues, rather than skills—a claim that is based on an important, but largely overlooked, distinction between virtue and skill, one that Aristotle highlights in the Nicomachean Ethics. The upshot is that virtue epistemology should indeed be based on virtue, not on skill.