27 January 2016
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Stacie Friend, Birbeck
The Real Foundation of Fictional Worlds
I argue that judgements of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is (really) true is also fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule or ‘principle of generation’ for inferring implied content from what is explicit in a text. Instead it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in making such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to understand stories, drawing on a range of empirical evidence. However, the Reality Assumption has several unintuitive consequences, not least that what is fictionally the case includes countless facts that neither authors nor readers could (or should) ever consider. I argue that such consequences provide no reason to reject the Reality Assumption.
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3 February 2016
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Katharine Jenkins, Cambridge/Nottingham
Ontic Injustice
In this talk, I argue that there is a distinctive type of injustice, ontic injustice, which occurs when someone is wronged by the social construction of categories, such as race categories or gender categories. A victim of ontic injustice suffers a wrong in virtue of being made into a member of the social category in question; that is to say, it is the very fact of category membership that constitutes the wrong, not any particular negative experiences that may follow. This wrong consists of a failure of recognition respect: the victim of ontic injustice instantiates morally relevant properties that warrant certain sorts of responses from others, but her category membership serves to license contrary sorts of responses. Although the notion of ontic injustice can be combined with different accounts of the ontology of social categories, here I draw on John Searle’s account of institutional reality to offer a more detailed explanation of ontic injustice. Finally, I apply the notion of ontic injustice to the Black Lives Matter movement, showing that interpreting the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ with reference to ontic injustice helps to fend off some confused and obstructive responses.
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10 February 2016
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Fiona Macpherson, Glasgow
Cognitive Penetration and Predictive Coding
If beliefs and desires affect perception—at least in certain specified ways—then cognitive penetration occurs. Whether it occurs is a matter of controversy. Recently, some proponents of the predictive coding account of perception have claimed that the account entails that cognitive penetrations occurs. I argue that the relationship between the predictive coding account and cognitive penetration is dependent on both the specific form of the predictive coding account and the specific form of cognitive penetration. In so doing, I spell out different forms of each and the relationship that holds between them. Thus, mere acceptance of the predictive coding approach to perception does not determine whether one should think that cognitive penetration exists. Moreover, given that there are such different conceptions of both predictive coding and cognitive penetration, researchers should cease talking of either without making clear which form they refer to, if they aspire to make true generalisations.
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17 February 2016
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Natalja Deng, Cambridge
Does Time Seem to Pass?
One of the current philosophical debates about the nature of temporal experience concerns whether or not we (perceptually) experience time as passing in a certain sense. That sense is as follows. According to (some) A-theoretic views of time, the most fundamental description of the world is tensed; it includes such claims as that it’s Wednesday today. On such views, time passes in a ‘robust’ sense. For example, only the present exists and which time exists constantly changes, or the past and the present exist and which time is the latest time constantly changes, or times constantly move into the present and then into the more and more distant past. I defend veridicalism, which denies that we (perceptually) experience time as passing in this sense. The talk has two parts. In the first part, I take the debate at face-value. I show that veridicalism gains indirect support from a close inspection of rival proposals. Moreover, I point out that veridicalists can offer good explanations for why we are nevertheless sometimes inclined towards A-theoretic views. In the second part, I suggest that a deflationary view of the debate can provide further support for veridicalism. Finally, I offer some McTaggart-style reasons to adopt this deflationary view and respond to a recent objection.
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24 February 2016
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Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vji, Kent
Epistemic Heroes and Duties to Inform
We owe duties to others, and those duties include a duty to help. Our duty to address other people’s need for information is a special case of this more general duty of beneficence. Taking Goldberg’s recent proposal regarding the nature of our duty to inform as my starting point, I will argue that the principle Goldberg is defending is demanding, since it (a) makes for an upward shift of the bar between duty and epistemic charity, and (b) is consistent with our in some cases having a duty to change our fundamental commitments if that would make us more useful to others. But it’s not too demanding—so long as it’s properly reformulated to handle cases of epistemic heroism.
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2 March 2016
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James Ladyman, Bristol
An Apology for Every Thing Must Go
In this paper I enumerate the main positive and negative theses of Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised. I will explain and defend some of them in more detail and clarify the version of Ontic Structural Realism the book advances replying to some objections.
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9 March 2016
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Naomi Thompson, Southampton
Irrealism about Grounding
Grounding talk has become increasingly familiar in contemporary philosophical discussion. Most discussants of grounding think that grounding talk is useful, intelligible, and accurately describes metaphysical reality. Call them realists about grounding. Some dissenters reject grounding talk on the grounds that it is unintelligible, or unmotivated. They would prefer to eliminate grounding talk from philosophy, so we can call them eliminitivists about grounding. This paper outlines a new position in the debate about grounding, defending the view that grounding talk is (or at least can be) intelligible and useful. Grounding talk does not, however, provide a literal and veridical description of mind-independent metaphysical reality. This (non-eliminative)irrealism about grounding treads a path between realism and eliminativism.
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16 March 2016
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Nathan Wildman, Hamburg
For Contingent Necessity-makers
Are there true grounding claims of the form, 'P's necessity is grounded in Q', for some absolute necessity P and some contingent Q? Or, to rephrase, are there any contingent necessity-makers for absolute necessities? Here, I argue that there are. More specifically, I argue that, for every contingent Q that is a partial grounds of some absolute necessity P's truth, there is a contingent plurality G, consisting of Q plus some (possibly empty) D, that is P's necessity-maker. And while this result doesn't show that all necessities, let alone all absolute necessities, are grounded in contingencies, it does show that the necessity of some absolute necessities are fully grounded in contingent matters.
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13 April 2016
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Marcello Oreste Fiocco, University of California Irvine
Time as a Substance
In this paper (the third chapter of a book in draft), I lay out the framework for a metaphysics of time by deriving some ontological principles of a more general metaphysical theory whose crux is a certain account of what a thing is. A thing is a natured entity, something constrained in what it is by its very existence and, via this existence, constraining other things. This account is derived from a unique methodology, one that assumes nothing about the world, confronting it as merely the impetus to inquiry. Applying this methodology as the first step in a wholly critical metaphysics of time, I argue that time itself is a thing, more specifically, a substance. In so doing, I examine the most obvious phenomena associated with time, providing accounts of change and what a moment is, and considering the relations among these and time per se. The resulting account of time summarily resolves several much-discussed controversies in the metaphysics of time. This just shows, however, that the most contentious and interesting issues here are not about time itself, but about temporal reality—the world in time.
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20 April 2016
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Christopher Bennett, Sheffield
Why and How to Express One's Emotions
'My point of departure is an interest in actions that are expressive of emotion. Recently philosophy has concentrated on expressions of emotion that are automatic and involuntary, such as facial expressions. My focus is different. I would like to understand expressions of emotions that are deliberate and intentional (though not normally done with some further purpose in mind). In particular, I am interested in the idea that expressive actions ‘symbolise' the way in which the person experiencing the emotion sees the salient features (the ‘gravity’) of their situation. After providing some examples by way of illustration I will consider two potential objections: what is the point of expressing one’s emotions in this sense; and is the vehicle for expression merely conventional? In exploring the beginnings of an answer to this question, I turn to the history of ideas - in particular to the Romantic or post-Kantian tradition - for a range of understandings of 'expressive needs,' that is, our alleged need to express our emotions. I provide a taxonomy of five different answers to the question of why we have expressive needs. One of these understandings is the tradition of Symbolism, and I suggest that this tradition may help in understanding the claim that expressions of emotion symbolise the intentional content of the emotion. I suggest that the idea of symbolising the content of one’s emotions in external form has some advantages over the alternative answers as a way of explaining the value of expressing the emotions. I conclude by considering how this history can help us begin to answer the two objections to the idea of symbolic, expressive action with which we started.’
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27 April 2016
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Katherine Hawley, St Andrews
Are You Trying to Tell Me Something?
To learn from what others say, we need to understand the content of their utterances, and also to grasp the force with which they are expressed: who is joking around, who is asking rhetorical questions, who is trying to tell me something? In the first part of this talk, I investigate some obstacles to the communication of force, paying particular attention to obstacles which arise from power imbalances, social stereotypes, and clashes of localised conventions. In the second part, I explore why some of us sometimes need to use non-standard speech acts to achieve our perlocutionary goals, for example persuading by speculating rather than telling.
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4 May 2016
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Jeff McMahan, Oxford
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