On 21 September, the Department of Philosophy is hosting a one-day workshop to discuss the Philosophy of mind. Registration is free and all are welcome - refreshments will be provided, but attendees will need to make their own arrangements for lunch. To book your place, please visit the Eventbrite page.
Sponsored by the Mind Association
Thursday 21 September 2017
A11, Highfield House, University Park
University of Nottingham
Programme
10.30 - 11.00: Coffee and Registration
11.00 - 12.30: Ali Boyle (Trinity Hall, Cambridge)
Two Logical Problems for Animal Mind Reading
12.30 - 13.00: Exchange Session
13.00 - 14.00: Lunch (Own Arrangements)
14.00 - 15.30: Will Davies (Birmingham)
Relational Colour Constancy
15.30 - 16.00: Coffee Break
16.00 - 17.30: Joulia Smortchkova (Oxford)
Identifying Representational Kinds
17.30-onwards: Drinks at The Hemsley
Speakers/Titles
Ali Boyle
Two Logical Problems for Animal Mindreading
Mindreading is the ability to ascribe mental states to others. It's widely held that attempts to detect mindreading in animals face a vicious problem known as the 'logical problem' - according to which empirical methods currently used to detect mindreading cannot, in principle, detect it. I argue that the situation is, in a way, worse than this. There are two, non-equivalent conceptions of mindreading at work in mindreading research. As a result, mindreading research faces not one logical problem, but two. Fortunately, this doubling of logical problems is not doubly problematic. Only one of the logical problems should trouble us and this one, I argue, can be solved.
Will Davies
Relational Colour Constancy
Perceptual constancies, such as we encounter in our visual experience of shape, size, and colour, are among the most significant yet perplexing aspects of perception. Colour constancy is widely taken to involve some invariance in our perception of objects’ monadic colour properties – properties such as red23 and green17 – under changes in illumination. In contrast, an important yet neglected cluster of empirical theories focuses on perceived constancies in the colour relations borne between objects in the scene (Craven & Foster 1992). Such relational theories neatly explain some recalcitrant data, but present philosophical puzzles concerning the supposed phenomenology and content of relational constancy phenomena. I take a closer look at these puzzles and propose a resolution. The ensuing account has wider implications. For one, it undermines the standard monadic determination view of relational colour perception, on which the colour relations that we perceive as holding between two objects are determined by the monadic colours that we perceive those objects as having. In addition, the account implies a revisionary view of the role of colour vision in our perception of objectual form.
Joulia Smortchkova
Identifying Representational Kinds
Many debates in philosophy of mind focus on whether folk or scientific psychological notions pick out cognitive natural kinds. Examples include memory and emotions. A potentially interesting kind of kind is: kinds of mental representations (as opposed, for example, to kinds of psychological faculties). My talk will focus on how kinds of representations are identified. In psychology kind identification is often based on the presence of signature effects. Signature effects are causal-functional roles that reveal both the properties of the underlying representational vehicles and what they refer to. I oppose this way of discovering representational kinds to other existing strategies: via the semantic content of representations, via their evolutionary history, via their implementation (in the brain).