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The 90th Joint Session of

the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association

Cardiff University

7th-8th July 2016

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Contents

1. Programme……………………………………………. 2

2. Symposia……………………………………………… 5

3. Postgraduate sessions…………………………………. 10

4. Sunday Panels………………………………………… 13

5. Saturday Open Session with SWIP…………………… 18

6. Sunday Open Sessions………………………………... 20

7. Rules for the Open Sessions and the Chairing Thereof 23

8. Open Sessions Abstracts………………………………. 24

9. List of Delegates………………………………………. 49

10. Room maps………………………………....inside back cover

11. Cardiff maps………………………………..……...back cover

Dear Delegate

Welcome to the Ninetieth Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the MindAssociation. The first Joint Session took place in the summer of 1910 off AlbermarleStreet in the Mayfair area of London. Wales has hosted six Joint Sessions since then andthe last one hosted by Cardiff, then University College of South Wales andMonmouthshire, was exactly 60 years ago in 1956. It is our great pleasure to be hostingthe Joint Session once again and we hope you enjoy the conference.

We have great support from publishers again, including sponsorship of the winereception by Oxford University Press. You will find the publishers in their own large roomnext to registration. The British Philosophical Association has taken a table in there andthey will also be having their AGM during the conference. The Society for Women inPhilosophy is running an information session and are presenting a strand in the OpenSessions. The Open Sessions are as packed as always and I regret that there were moreacceptable papers offered than slots available. Inevitably fitting everyone in meant someof the categorisation got a bit messy, so apologies to anyone who feels I put their talkunder the wrong label. A new feature this year are the Sunday Panels in which the hostdepartment is asked to put on themed panels in their areas of interest.

I must thank the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, and their staff, for theirhelp during the last two years of preparation. I must also thank Professor Damian WalfordDavies, the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, the staff of theconference office and especially my colleagues in Philosophy, for all their help, and alsotheir forbearance, during this year.

Finally, if you have any questions please ask the staff on the registration desk or myself.

Nicholas ShackelReader in PhilosophyCardiff University

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Cardiff Business School Postgraduate Teaching Centre and

Julian Hodge Building

Programme

Room numbers refer to rooms in the Graduate Centre, see map on inside back cover. Maps forthe campus are on the back of this booklet.

Friday 8th July

13:00 14:00 Lunch Graduate Centre Concourse

13:00 14:30 Aristotelian Society council Graduate Centre 0.23

13:00 14:30 Mind Association council Graduate Centre 0.24

14:30 14:45 Aristotelian Society AGM Graduate Centre 0.23

14:45 15:00 Mind Association AGM Graduate Centre 0.24

15:00 16:30 Aristotelian Society & Mind jointcouncil I

Graduate Centre 0.24

12:00 17:00 Registration Graduate Centre Concourse

16:30 17:00 Tea and Coffee Graduate Centre Concourse

17:15 19:00 Julian Hodge Lecture TheatreThe Inaugural Address

The Unity of Virtue:Plato’s Models of Philosophy

MM McCabe

19:30 20:30 Wine Reception sponsored by OUP Marble Hall, Cardiff City Hall

20:30 22:00 Conference dinner Marble Hall, Cardiff City Hall

22:00 01:00 Bar open extension Marble Hall, Cardiff City Hall

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Saturday 9th July

08:00 09:00 Breakfast

09:00 10:45 Julian Hodge Lecture TheatreSymposium I

Social Relationships and Social Justice

Kimberley Brownlee & Laura Valentini


British Philosophical Association AGM Graduate Centre 0.25

11:15 13:00 Julian Hodge Lecture TheatreSymposium II

Intellectual Arrogance

Alessandra Tanesini & Sanford Goldberg

13:00 14:00 Lunch Julian Hodge Dining Hall

13:00 14:00 Aristotelian Society & Mind Associationjoint council II


14:00 16:00 Postgraduate Sessions I: Theoretical Julian Hodge Lecture Theatre

Postgraduate Sessions II: Normative Graduate Centre0.16 Lecture Theatre


Society for Women in PhilosophyInformation session.


16:30 18:30 Open Sessions including Society for Womenin Philosophy strand.

Graduate Centre

18:45 19:45 Dinner Aberdare Hall

20:00 21:45 Julian Hodge Lecture TheatreSymposium III

The Subject of Experience

Barry Dainton & Paul Snowdon

19:00 00:30 Bar open extension Aberdare Hall

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Sunday 10th July

08:00 09:00 Breakfast

09:00 10:45 Julian Hodge Lecture TheatreSymposium IV

Ethical Constructivism and Objectivity

Sharon Street & Yonatan Shemmer

Graduate Centre0.16 Lecture Theatre

Symposium V

Virtue, Health and Excellence

Edward Harcourt & Havi Carel


11:15 13:15 Open Sessions Graduate Centre

13:15 14:15 Lunch Julian Hodge Dining Hall

14:30 16:30 Panels Graduate Centre0.16, 1.19, 2.01, 2.02

Open Sessions Graduate Centre


17:00 18:45 Julian Hodge Lecture TheatreSymposium VI

Vagueness

John MacFarlane & Robert Williams

19:00 20:00 Dinner Aberdare Hall

19:00 23:00 Bar open Aberdare Hall

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Symposia

The Inaugural Address

Friday 8th July 17.15-19.00 chaired by Susan James (Birkbeck)

MM McCabe (KCL)

The Unity of Virtue: Plato’s Models of Philosophy

Plato gives us (at least) two model philosophical figures, apparently in contrast witheach other – one is the otherworldly philosopher who sees truth and reality outside theCave and has the knowledge to rule authoritatively within it; the other is the demoticfigure of Socrates, who insists that he does not know but only asks questions. I considerPlato’s contrasting idioms of seeing and asking or talking, and argue that the rich accountof perception that is represented in the Republic requires both idioms, and both models, toexplain the development of epistemic virtue. Furthermore, the conditions he places on thegiving and taking of reasons show how Plato takes intellectual virtue to be inseparablefrom moral virtue (in ways that Aristotle rejects). That integrated picture of virtue may –however disposed we may be towards the role of virtue in either ethics or epistemology –have something to say to us about how philosophy might best be carried on.

Symposium I: Social Relationships and Social Justice

Saturday 9th July 9.00-10.45 chaired by Charlotte Newey (Cardiff)

Kimberley Brownlee (Warwick)

The Lonely Heart Breaks: On The Right To Be a Social Contributor

This paper uncovers a distinctively social type of injustice that lies in the kinds ofwrongs we can do to each other specifically as social beings. In this paper, social injusticeis not principally about unfair distributions of socio-economic goods among citizens.Instead, it is about the ways we can violate each other’s fundamental rights to leadsocially integrated lives in close proximity and relationship with other people. This paperhomes in on a particular type of social injustice, which we can call social contributioninjustice. The paper identifies two distinct forms of social contribution injustice. The firstform involves compromising a person’s social resources so as to deny her adequate scopeto contribute socially. The second form involves unjustly misvaluing a person as a socialcontributor, usually by not taking her seriously as a social contributor.

Laura Valentini (LSE)

What’s Wrong with Being Lonely? Justice, Beneficence, and Meaningful Relationships

A life without liberty and material resources is not a good life. Equally, a life devoid ofmeaningful social relationships—such as friendships, family attachments, andromances—is not a good life. From this it is tempting to conclude that just as individualshave rights to liberty and material resources, they also have rights to access meaningfulsocial relationships. I argue that this conclusion can be defended only in a narrow set ofcases. “Pure” social-relationship deprivation—i.e., deprivation that is not caused, or

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accompanied, by deficits in liberties and material resources— mostly generates demandsof private beneficence. I suggest that social-relationship deprivation is unjust, hence arights-violation, only when it is due to factors—e.g., one’s race—that are irrelevant toone’s being a good participant in social relationships. I thus conclude that access tomeaningful social relationships is not a fundamental concern for theories of (personal orpolitical) justice.

Symposium II: Intellectual Arrogance

Saturday 9th July 11.15-13.00 chaired by Lizzie Fricker (Oxford)

Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff)

"Calm Down Dear": Intellectual Arrogance, Silencing and Ignorance

In this paper I provide an account of two forms of intellectual arrogance which causethe epistemic practices of conversational turn-taking and assertion to malfunction. I detailsome of the ethical and epistemic harms generated by intellectual arrogance, and explainits role in fostering the intellectual vices of timidity and servility in other agents. Finally, I

show that arrogance produces ignorance by silencing others (both preventing them fromspeaking and causing their assertions to misfire) and by fostering self-delusion in thearrogant themselves.

Sanford Goldberg (Northwestern)

“Arrogance, Silence and Silencing"

Alessandra Tanesini’s insightful paper (2016) explores the moral and epistemic harmsof arrogance, particularly in conversation. Of special interest to her is the phenomenon ofarrogance-induced silencing, whereby one speaker’s arrogance either prevents anotherfrom speaking altogether or else undermines her capacity to produce certain speech actssuch as assertions (Langton 1993, 2009). I am broadly sympathetic to many of Tanesini’s

claims about the harms associated with this sort of silencing. In this paper I propose toaddress what I see as a lacuna in her account. I believe (and will argue) that the arrogantspeaker can put those he silences in the morally outrageous position in which their ownsilence contributes to their oppression. While nothing in Tanesini’s account would predictor explain this, the wrinkle I propose will aim to do so in a way that is in the spirit of heraccount. To do so, I will need to expand the focus of discussion: instead of concentratingon (arrogance-induced) silencing, I will consider the phenomenon of (arrogance-induced)silence. When one is silent in the face of a mutually observed assertion (whatever thecause of this silence), one’s silence will be interpreted by others. I argue that (1) undercertain widespread conditions, a hearer’s silence in the face of the arrogant speaker’sassertions is likely to be falsely interpreted as indicating her assent to the assertion, and(2) such an interpretation of the hearer’s silence will bring new harms in its wake—inparticular, harms to the hearer who was silenced, and also harms to the community atlarge. When we combine these new harms with the ones Tanesini identified in her paper,we reach the further conclusion that (3) the harms of silencing (whether arrogance-induced or otherwise) are potentially far worse than many have imagined.

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Symposium III: The Subject of Experience

Saturday 9th July 20.00-21.45 chaired by Richard Gray (Cardiff)

Barry Dainton (Liverpool)

The Sense of Self

Different conceptions of the nature of subjects of experience have very differentimplications for the sort of relationship which exists between subjects and theirexperiences. On my preferred view, since subjects consist of nothing but capacities forexperience, the ‘having’ of an experience amounts to a subject’s producing it. Thisrelationship may look to be problematic, but I argue that here at least appearances aredeceptive. I then move on to consider some of the ways in which experiences can seem tohave subjects or owners, and argue that those who take a ‘sense of self’ to be an essentialfeature of all forms of consciousness may well be mistaken.

Paul Snowdon (UCL)

Dainton on Subjects of Experience

The paper discusses some of the themes in Professor Dainton's article 'The Sense ofSelf'. In the first part it is proposed that some of the arguments in favour of his theory thatDainton proposes are questionable, and that in its more extreme version there are featureswhich look doubtful. A simpler account of subjects is then proposed. In the second partsome aspects of Dainton's discussion of the sense of self are analysed. it is argued thatalthough Dainton's own account of our sense of self is not obviously correct, the views heis opposed to are not well supported, nor is the debate very clear.

Symposium IV: Ethical Constructivism and Objectivity

Sunday 10th July 9.00-10.45 chaired by Hallvard Lillehammer (Birkbeck)

Sharon Street (NYU)

Constructivism in Ethics and the Problem of Attachment and Loss

This paper explores two questions in moral philosophy that might at first seemunrelated. The first question is practical. While it’s not a truth we like to contemplate,each of us faces the eventual loss of everyone and everything we love. Is there a way tolive in full awareness of that fact without falling into anxiety or depression, or resorting toone form or another of forgetfulness, denial, or numbing out? The second question ismetaethical. Is it possible to vindicate a strong form of ethical objectivity without positinganything metaphysically or epistemologically mysterious? In this paper, I sketch apartially Buddhist-inspired metaethical view that would, if it could be made to work, givea positive answer to both questions. The overall view is too much to defend in one paper,so I focus on developing one limited part of it. I begin by characterizing the generalconstructivist strategy for vindicating the objectivity of ethics. After briefly discussingChristine Korsgaard’s Kantian implementation of the strategy, I suggest an alternativeimplementation. I explore the idea that every agent necessarily faces what I call theproblem of attachment and loss. I close with some speculative remarks about why, even

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though the problem of attachment and loss presents itself in a different substantive guiseto each individual agent, it is still possible that the best solution to the problem isuniversal, and involves taking up an ethical perspective on the world.

Yonatan Shemmer (Sheffield)

Objectivity and Idolatry

The attempt to vindicate the objectivity of morality tops the list of philosophicalobsessions. In this paper I consider the rationality of searching for such a vindication. Iargue that the only justification of our efforts lies in our belief in moral objectivity; thatthis belief can be as well, if not better, explained by wishful thinking and other cognitivebiases; that as a research community we have failed to take precautions against suchbiases; and that as a result we have been making disproportionate and therefore irrationalefforts to establish moral objectivity.

Symposium V : Virtue, Health and Excellence

Sunday 10th July 9.00-10.45 chaired by Jonathan Webber (Cardiff)

Edward Harcourt (Oxford)

‘Mental Health’And Human Excellence

The paper concerns two familiar lines of inquiry. One, stemming from a neo-Aristotelian naturalism associated with Foot and others, asks whether we can derivehuman excellences from what humans need in order to be some way. The second askswhether (as Plato said) virtue is a kind of health, and vice a kind of illness. The first isoften seen as a failure to the extent that the list of characteristics derived by this approachdoes not include familiar moral virtues. However, it is argued that the concept of humanexcellence is many-layered, so the fact that the approach may not succeed for moralvirtues does not show that it is no good for anything. Moreover, the kinds of

psychological characteristic derived by a liberalized version of Foot’s approach may alsohelp to give non-trivial answers to the second, Platonic, line of inquiry.

Havi Carel (Bristol)

Virtue Without Excellence, Excellence Without Health

In this paper I respond to Edward Harcourt’s suggestion that human excellences arestructured in a way that allows us to see the multiplicity of life-forms that can beinstantiated by different groups of excellences. I accept this layered (as he calls it) model,but suggest that Harcourt’s proposal is not pluralistic enough and offer three criticalpoints. First, true pluralism would need to take a life-cycle view, thus taking into accountplurality within, as well as between, lives. Second, Harcourt’s pluralism still positsphysical health as a requirement for excellence, whereas I claim that the challenges ofillness give more, not less, opportunity for excellence. Third, I make a more general claimthat in certain salient cases (illness being one of them) it is precisely the absence ofexcellence that can facilitate virtue.

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Symposium VI: Vagueness

Sunday 10th July 17.00-18.45 chaired by Patrick Greenough (St Andrews)

John MacFarlane (Berkeley)

Vagueness As Indecision

This paper motivates and explores an expressivist theory of vagueness, modeled onAllan Gibbard’s (2003) normative expressivism. It shows how Chris Kennedy’s (2007)semantics for gradable adjectives can be adjusted to fit into a theory on Gibbardian lines,where assertions constrain not just possible worlds but plans for action. Vagueness, on thisaccount, is literally indecision about where to draw lines. It is argued that the distinctivephenomena of vagueness, such as the intuition of tolerance, can be explained in terms ofpractical constraints on plans, and that the expressivist view captures what is right aboutseveral contending theories of vagueness.

Robert Williams (Leeds)

Vagueness As Indecision

Paint being red is one thing; it is another for a person to treat paint as red for somepractical purpose. The first is a matter of the paint and its properties; the second involvesactivity: placing the pot on a particular shelf, fetching it in response to verbal instructions,etc.

This essay explores the thesis that for vague predicates uncertainty over whether aborderline instance x of red/large/tall/good is to be understood as practical uncertaintyover whether to treat x as red/large/tall/good. Expressivist/quasi-realist treatments ofvague predicates due to John MacFarlane and Daniel Elstein provide the stalking horse.Section 1 introduces a question about our attitudes to borderline cases of vague predicatesF. Section 2 explores the actions of treating and/or counting a thing as F. Section 3reviews how we might share our practical plans to count-as-F and evaluate those plans.

Section 4 looks at the shapes that the best plans to count-as-F may take. Section 5 linksthese practical evaluations to the cognitive evaluations of doxastic attitudes to vaguepredications. Sections 6 and 7 concern puzzles for the approach suggested here. Section 6explores its treatment of normatively defective or contested terms, and section 7 raises apuzzle about the mechanics of MacFarlane’s detailed implementation of the approach inconnection to gradable adjectives.

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Postgraduate Sessions

Theoretical

Saturday 9th July, chaired by Guy Longworth (Warwick)

14.00. Alison Fernandes (Columbia)

Freedom, Self-Prediction and the Psychology of Time Travel

Clear-thinking metaphysicians have argued that agents retain their normal freedom andabilities when they travel back in time (Lewis, Horwich, Sider). Time-travelling-Tim canshoot and kill his young grandfather, his younger self, or whomever he pleases—and so, itseems, can reasonably deliberate about whether to do these things. He might notsucceed—but he is still just as free as his non-time-travelling counterpart. But what agentscan reasonably deliberate on is sensitive to their beliefs. According to a plausibleignorance condition, agents must be uncertain of what they will do if they are toreasonably deliberate. This creates a rational constraint on the time-traveller’s freedom.Tim can’t reasonably deliberate on killing his grandfather, certain he’ll fail. With thisconstraint, time-travellers’ abilities to deliberate and decide are significantly curtailed.This constraint help makes sense of our competing intuitions about how to evaluatecounterfactuals in such cases. And it shows how the evidential structure of the ordinaryworld sustains our freedom to deliberate.

14.30. Joshua Habgood-Coote (St Andrews)

Knowledge-how, Abilities, and Questions

"Knowing-how seems to be a distinctively practical kind of knowledge. Yet accordingto the standard semantics for knowledge-how ascriptions, to know how to do something isto stand is some relation to a set of propositions about how to do it. How can these pointsbe reconciled? Intellectualists about knowledge-how take their lead from semantic theory,suggesting that knowledge-how is a species of propositional knowledge. As aconsequence they have trouble explaining the practical properties of knowledge-how,usually appealing to the somewhat obscure notion of a practical way of thinking. Bycontrast Anti-Intellectualists take the practical properties of knowledge-how seriously,claiming that knowledge-how is a kind of ability. Since abilities are generally relations toactivities rather than propositions, they have the parallel problem in making their viewcompatible with linguistic theory. In this paper, I explore a novel compromise betweenthese two views, which I will call the Interrogative Capacity view. According to this view,knowing how to do something is a certain kind of ability to generate answers to thequestion of how to do it. This view combines the Intellectualist thesis that knowledge-howis a relation to a question, with the Anti-Intellectualist thesis that knowledge-how is a kindof capacity. I argue that this view is uniquely well placed to defuse tension betweensemantic theory and the practicality of knowledge-how, and that it elucidates therelationship between knowledge-how, propositional knowledge and the ability to do.

15.00. Lukas Skiba (Cambridge)

Frege's Unthinkable Thoughts

In a famous passage from The Thought Frege endorses the existence of both privatesenses and private thoughts. There are two common reactions to this. Intersubjectivists

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reject both private senses and thoughts as incompatible with Frege’s conception of sensesas the vehicles of communication. Privatists accept both private senses and thoughts asthe natural upshot of a Fregean account of personal pronouns. What is striking about thedispute is that both sides agree on a pair of tacit assumptions: (1) Private sensesautomatically give rise to private thoughts. (2) Private thoughts are the most problematicentities to which private senses give rise. The aim of this paper is to show that bothassumptions are mistaken. As for (2), I argue that in so far as private senses give rise toprivate thoughts they also give rise to entities which Frege definitely couldn’t haveaccepted, namely unthinkable thoughts, i.e. thoughts which cannot be grasped by anyone.As for (1), I argue that a conception of Fregean thoughts as intrinsically unstructuredentities can coherently accept private senses without having to accept private thoughts.This motivates a so far neglected, reconciliatory position between intersubjectivism andprivatism according to which all thoughts are public while some senses are private.

15.30. Matthew McKeever (St Andrews)

Stage Theory about Objects and Predicativism about Names: A Match Made In Heaven

In this paper, I’ll argue that combining predicativism about names with stage theoryabout objects leads us to a neat package, which can overcome some of the problems forthe two views to be found in the literature. I’ll also suggest doing so sheds light on thevexed question of whether there is an acquaintance constraint for singular thought andreference. My strategy will be to introduce the two views, present a problem for each ofthem, and then show how combining them can resolve these problems, before showingthe interesting consequences this has for acquaintance.

Normative

Saturday 9th July 14.00-16.00 chaired by Rory Madden (UCL)

14.00. Michael Lyons (Trinity College Dublin)

Can There Be Moral Progress Without Moral Realism?

"Moral realists have been treated as having the upper hand over moral anti-realists inexplaining moral progress. In spite of this treatment, Catherine Wilson (2010) not onlyclaims that moral anti-realists can adequately explain moral truth and moral progress, butalso that their account could be preferable to those available to the moral realist. In doingso she argues that in fact it is the moral anti-realist who has the upper hand over realistshere. First of all, she defends the treatment of moral claims as theoretical conjectures,analogising between moral beliefs and scientific beliefs, in order to explain moral truth asa postulated endpoint of the theoretical development of collective morals. Wilson then inturn explains moral progress in terms of the generating and dissipating of collectivenarratives that can ratify a change in collective moral beliefs as being a progression ordeterioration. So moral truths are simply moral claims that will survive scrutiny. Wilsonthen argues that the anti-realist realist account is preferable because it avoids commitmentto the following: that moral truths are independent of perspectives, that there are somethat cannot be known, and that in every moral dispute, someone must hold a false moralbelief. In this paper, I will: 1) argue that Wilson’s account of moral progress can beaccommodated within a moral realist framework, 2) defend the realist account against her

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claim that anti-realism is preferable, and 3) subsequently point out inherent issues withinher own account.

14.30. Chong-Ming Lim (UCL)

Re-Examining Resistances to Reconceptualising Disability

Central to the reconceptualisation of disability is the idea that disability is notintrinsically bad; rather, it is merely part of the spectrum of natural human diversity orvariation. However, not only do philosophers regard the reconceptualisation asimplausible, it has also not gained much traction beyond the small circles of disabilityrights activists and theorists. This paper critically re-examines two resistances toreconceptualising disabilities, in the form of two convictions concerning disability(Kahane and Savulescu 2009). I argue that these convictions are not basic. Instead, theydepend on our considerations about the costs and extent of change required toaccommodate citizens with a particular disability trait. There are two main payoffs ofclarifying the bases of these convictions. First, it identifies the limitations to both theproject of reconceptualisation, and its rejection. Second, it reveals as overly-quick thedismissals of those in favour of reconceptualisation by those against it, and vice versa. Inthe final section, I consider and assuage two worries about the analysis – that itconfusedly introduces a practical dimension into a normative discussion, and that it leavestoo much room for conservatives to reject reconceptualisation.

15.00. Alison Toop (Leeds)

Is Marriage Compatible with Political Liberalism?

This paper examines four arguments that claim marriage, as a political institution, isincompatible with political liberalism. These arguments are drawn from Elizabeth Brake(2012), Clare Chambers (2013) and Tamara Metz (2010). My responses suggest that noneconclusively shows the political institution of marriage to be incompatible with politicalliberalism. Argument 1 claims that the political institution of marriage violates theprinciples of neutrality and public reason. I question whether a violation really occurs.Argument 2 alleges that marriage involves the state in unjustified discrimination. Iconsider whether there are grounds for the differential treatment. Argument 3 argues thatmarriage is ineffective for its maintained purpose of protecting caregiving relationships.My reply suggests marriage could be particularly good at this task. Argument 4 isconcerned that marriage involves regulating belief (not solely action). My responseconsiders whether such a distinction can be made, and suggests that the intention of thestate is paramount. Whilst unsuccessful, these arguments do highlight necessary featuresof a political liberal defence of marriage, which I draw out in the conclusion.

15.30. Laura Frances Callahan (Rutgers)

Explaining Moral Testimony: A Different Appeal to Understanding

Why is there a felt asymmetry between cases in which agents defer to testifiers forcertain moral beliefs, and cases in which agents defer on other matters? Here, I attempt tomotivate an answer that appeals to the distinctive importance of affectively,motivationally involved understanding in the moral domain. When it comes to certainmoral matters, we want to grasp them, in a way that involves our affections as well as ourcognitive capacities to perceive reasons and draw connections. But achieving such a graspis somewhat in tension with deferring to testimony – hence the felt ‘fishiness’ of manycases of moral testimony. This explanation incorporates and builds on going explanationsappealing to the importance of understanding in a thinner sense of the word.

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Joint Session Panels: Sunday Afternoon 14:30 to 16:30

The Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association have decided to introduce Panels to theJoint Session. The rationale is to encourage a greater integration between the Joint Sessionand the Host Department, to introduce an additional element of themed sessions within theestablished generalist format of the Joint Session and to encourage attendance fromestablished mid-career philosophers in the UK and continental Europe at the Joint Session.Cardiff is proud to inaugurate this initiative.

Panel 1: From Personality to Virtue

Room 0.16, introduced and chaired by Jonathan Webber (Cardiff)

From Personality To Virtue is a new volume of essays on the philosophy of character,edited by Jonathan Webber (Cardiff) and Alberto Masala (Paris-Sorbonne) and publishedby Oxford University Press. The volume presents theoretical analyses of character andmotivation alongside arguments concerning practical implications of the nature ofcharacter for individual ethics and public policy. In this panel, four contributors to thebook develop themes from their chapters.

Katharina Bauer (Bochum)

“Here I Stand…” – An ‘Added Weight’ of Practical Necessity?

When we quote Luther’s dictum, “Here I stand. I can do no other,” we express anincapacity of alternative action, which is not regarded as a restriction or deficit. It ratherseems to “lend some added weight” to the decision. What kind of value is attributed toexperiences of practical necessities or incapacities? It can be related to the ideal ofsteadfastness or to the benefit of immediately knowing, what to do. But why should wevalue personal necessities, which derive from an individual’s psychological “structure”and the limits of someone’s personality? Those limits determine how far a person cancontinue to value her life as her own life—according to her self-understanding andthrough integration into social relationships with others. An ‘added weight’ of personalnecessities corresponds to a value that is attributed to the unfolding of individualpersonalities in different meaningful and valuable ways of life.

Roman Altshuler (Kutztown)

The Mutual Constitution of Will and Character

Some philosophers speak as if action stems from volitional acts, others as if action islargely the product of character. These views appear to be in tension with each other, asboth character and the will have a claim to being the sole determinant of agency. Mychapter in From Personality to Virtue argues that character and will should be seen as twodescriptions of the same underlying phenomenon. Here I attempt to fill out that view withan existential account that allows characterological and volitional descriptions to capturedifferent, yet ontologically inseparable aspects of agency. I argue that agency is impossiblewithout the mutual constitution of facticity and projection. Descriptions in terms ofcharacter rely on the former aspect. Descriptions in terms of the will on the latter. Neitheris by itself able to account for agency, however; in providing an action explanation interms of one or the other, we give only incomplete explanations, though ones usuallysufficient for situational purposes.

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Jonathan Jacobs (CUNY)

Character, Incarceration, and Just Deserts

Currently prevailing forms of incarceration in the U.S. and some other liberaldemocracies have features and effects that are antithetical to some of the values andprinciples of liberal democracy. While a liberal polity should not require persons to bevirtuous, it is also not justified in damaging or worsening persons in known and regularways, even though it is justified in imposing criminal sanction. Contemporaryincarceration erodes and undermines the agential capacities of many offenders through itsimpact on their characters. Because the damage is often lasting, ex-prisoners struggle toreintegrate into civil society successfully. Thus, some forms of incarceration exceed theproportionality of just desert through the ways they are harming and because thepersistence of their effects continues punishment beyond completion of sentence. Myargument focuses on the ethical and explanatory significance of states of character inregard to this issue.

Nafsika Athanassoulis (independent scholar)

The Psychology of Virtue Education

I argue that moral character education programmes are theoretically possible, givenempirical findings in psychology, and would benefit in their practical application fromthose findings. I argue that situationism does not pose a threat for moral education,properly conceived, and that, in fact, educators can and should make use of situationalfactors. It strikes me that much of the debate in this field is hampered by incomplete orpartly inaccurate understandings of the central concepts of virtue ethics, in addition toconflicting versions of what virtue education should be aiming for.

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Panel 2: Introspection

Room 1.19 chaired by Liz Irvine (Cardiff)

The popularity of introspection as a method of gaining (more or less) accurateinformation about the structure and contents of consciousness waxes and wanes. Recentlythe role of introspection in psychology has been both enthusiastically lauded and deeplycriticised by both psychologists and philosophers, who alternatively see it as a privilegedand unique way of accessing first person phenomena, or as a methodologically suspectprocess that alters or falsely represents these phenomena. The talks in this panel willevaluate a number of challenges to introspection and attempt to sketch ways out ofapparent methodological road-blocks.

Maja Spener (Birmingham)

First-person reflection

Auguste Comte raised a problem for introspective psychology: the effort ofintrospecting one's own experiences requires splitting one's attention, thus resulting in thedestruction or distortion of the original experience. I will look at different ways in whichintrospective psychologists and philosophers have responded to this problem and defend apluralist view of introspective access in light of that discussion. Finally, I will draw outsome consequences for the use of introspective methods in psychology.

Tom McClelland (Manchester)

Ensemble Perception and the Grand Illusion Confusion

Advocates of the Grand Illusion Hypothesis claim that our introspective judgementsabout visual phenomenology are deeply unreliable. Specifically, they claim that we wildlyoverestimate how rich visual experience is outside the focus of attention. Although thereis no doubt that attention constitutes a severe bottleneck in perceptual processing, recentwork on ‘ensemble perception’ has revealed one of the ways in which the perceptualsystem compensates for this bottleneck. Even when detailed information about theperiphery of a visual scene is unavailable to us, we accurately encode ‘summary statistics’

that capture the average properties of an array of objects, such as the average size of a setof circles or the average mood of a set of faces. Many in the ensemble perception literaturehave taken these findings to be of great significance for the evaluation of the GrandIllusion Hypothesis. However, the literature demonstrates a certain amount of confusionabout what exactly its significance is meant to be. This paper aims to address theseconfusions and identify the real consequences of ensemble perception for the assessmentof the Grand Illusion Hypothesis.

Liz Irvine (Cardiff)

On the possibility of bootstrapping introspective methods

The methodological problems associated with introspection often seem unique but havemany structural similarities with problems of measurement more generally. Otherphenomena are regularly affected by processes of measurement, methods of measurementare often deeply tied to both theory and experimental protocols, and other measuresroutinely face problems of reliability, accuracy, and scope. Drawing on Chang'scoherentist approach to the development of measurement methods, I will illustrate andevaluate possible ways of moving forward in debates about how to gather and useintrospective reports, though (currently) point to a pessimistic conclusion.

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Panel 3: Nietzsche and the Good Life

Room 2.01 chaired by Simon Robertson (Cardiff)

This panel critically examines Nietzsche’s views about a theme central to ethicalenquiry: what is involved in living a good – or excellent – life. Issues considered willinclude the nature and value of human flourishing, health, creative excellence, and life-affirmation, and how these might connect; whether they represent ideals achievable bypeople quite generally; what constraints there might be upon their pursuit; whether theyallow for a codifiable ethics; and metaethical issues concerning the objectivity ofNietzsche’s positive evaluative claims.

Andrew Huddleston (Birkbeck)

The Uses and Disadvantages of Bildung for Life

In this paper, I chart Nietzsche’s complex relationship to the ‘Bildung’ tradition in 18thand 19th- century German thought. Talk of ‘Bildung' (education/ culture/ formation)loomed large in the era preceding Nietzsche, and it served as an ideal of the well-livedhuman life. While this is, in broad outlines, a conception of the good life that Nietzscheshares, he sees it as in danger of being perverted and watered-down. I discuss Nietzsche’sthoughts on this topic with reference to two early texts— On the Future of ourEducational Institutions [Bildungsanstalten] and his “David Strauss” essay from theUntimely Meditations. I go on to mention some echoes of these ideas that we see inNietzsche’s later work.

Christoph Suringa (New College of the Humanities, London)

Foot Contra Nietzsche

Simon Robertson (Cardiff)

Nietzsche

Central to Nietzsche’s perfectionism are two ideals: flourishing and excellence. This talk

sets out an account of what they each involve, including how they differ and connect, plusan axiological picture that makes sense of that. It also suggests that the underlying modelof value which emerges––in effect, a model of a good life––is interesting and attractive inits own right, and that it may therefore have wider philosophical appeal.

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Panel 4: Normativity of Rationality

Room 2.02 chaired by Nicholas Shackel (Cardiff)

Rationality appears to have some intimate relation with normativity: exactly whatrelation is in dispute. There is a view on which the normativity of rationality is a trivialmatter since rationality just is part or all of normativity. By contrast, whether we ought toconform to rational requirements has recently been subject to skeptical challenges, tochallenges of mere apparent normativity and to challenges of vacuity. I think there are fourbroad kinds of positions here: Dogmatic Rationalist, Aristotelian, Humean and Kantian.The contributors to this panel each offer a variety of a non-dogmatic view.

Lubomira Radoilska (Kent)

Toward an Aristotelian Account of the Normativity of Rationality

In this paper, I will explore the thought that an Aristotelian conception of rationalitydoes not necessarily commit us to consider the issue of the normativity of rationality astrivial. More specifically, I will argue that although questions, such as whether and whysomething being a rational requirement is also a reason, might seem at odds with, ifintelligible at all from an Aristotelian perspective, a promising line of inquiry emergesfrom the articulation of the initial unease. Following on this line of inquiry, I will suggestthat the underlying concerns about the normativity of rationality can be effectivelyaddressed by, firstly, reframing the central question as one of unity between different typesof rational requirements and, secondly, acknowledging the unifying capacity of the normsof success for action.

Nicholas Shackel (Cardiff)

Servanthood for the Normativity of Rationality

This paper takes the final step in my instrumentalist account of the normativity ofrationality. Four prior steps have taken us to two propositions: that what is rational for youis validly first personally predicable as rationally required and that when you are as youought to be then what is rational for you to do will be what you ought to do. From here I

argue for an obligation to be rational and subsequently to what I call servanthood for thenormativity of rationality. I then address some challenges that have been thought to ruleout this kind of view.

Christine Tiefensee (Frankfurt)

Rationality, Reasons and Inferentialism

This talk seeks to develop a fresh approach to the normativity of rationality byconsidering which novel perspectives inferentialism about meaning can offer on questionssuch as whether or not we ought to be rational and have reasons to be rational. It does soin two parts. In the first, I will present an inferentialist explanation of three, admittedlycontroversial intuitions about the normativity of rationality. In the second, I will examine aserious challenge to this inferentialist explanation and make a tentative suggestion as tohow it

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Open Sessions: Saturday Afternoon

Topic and Chair Room 16:30 17:00 17:30 18:00

Society for Womenin Philosophy

0.25 Geraldine Ng Elselijn Kingma and FionaWoollard

Catherine Hundleby Matthew Cull

Alessandra Tanesini What does climate ethicshave to do with two men in aboat?

Can you harm your foetus?Pregnancy, physicalindistinctness, and difficultdeontological distinctions.

Beyond the AdversaryParadigm: Argument Repair

Ontological Injustice

Epistemology 0.16 Caroline Torpe Touborg Finnur Dellsen Stephen Wright Aidan McGlynn

Sanford Goldberg A way of thinking aboutknowledge

Acceptance, Belief, andDeductive Cogency

Transmission and Subject-Sensitive Invariantism

Wh-MisidentificationIs Not Spurious

Metaphysics 1.19 Jan Westerhoff Martin Grajner Jules Salomone Jonathan Payton

Penelope Mackie Anti-foundationalism all theway down?

Grounding as Entailment andExplanation

Is Existence Univocal? AnAristotelian Critique ofQuinean Meta-Ontology

'Many-One Identity inPlural Logic'

Metaphysics 0.22 Daniel von Wachter Philip Goff Harry Cleeveley Nathan Wildman

Sacha Golob The Laws of Nature do notEntail Regularities ofSuccession.

Priority monism, grounding andthe mind-body problem

Two-Dimensional Semanticsand the Kripkean A PosterioriNecessities

'A brief argument forcontingent necessity-makers'

Mind andCognitive Science

0.23 Léa Salje Henry Shevlin Daniel Burnston Andrei Marasoiu

Roger Clarke Talking our way tosystematicity

On feeling bad: Thepsychological basis of theexperience of suffering

There is no diachroniccognitive penetration

Common sensiblesand Molyneux’sproblem

Mind 0.24 Alexandria Boyle Christiana Werner Mihailis E. Diamantis Denis Buehler

Hemdat Lerman Mapping the Minds of Others Real fear of fictional monsters 'Action' Without Action? Warrant fromTranssaccadic Vision

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Moral Psychology 2.01 Glen Pettigrove Charles Starkey Robin Zheng Thomas Schramme

Edward Harcourt Characters and Roles The (Non-)Psychology ofVirtues: Radical VirtueExternalism

Expanding the MoralRepertoire: Oughts, Ideals, andAppraisals

The role of empathy inan agential account ofmorality

Normative Ethics 2.02 Robbie Kubala Paul Knights Julia Mosquera Cristina Roadevin

Roger Crisp Two-Level Consequentialism,Regret, and the ReactiveAttitudes

De Re Valuing and Human Well-being

Should egalitarians--quaegalitarians- aim at reducing theincidence of deprivations?

Blame as anAffirmation ofRespect afterDisrespect

Philosophy ofLanguage

1.26 Sergi Oms Carsten Held Benjamin Martin Douglas Edwards

Thomas Hodgson Horwich’s Fixed PointTheory of Truth

Indicative conditionals andlogical consequence

Rejection-less Negations: AChallenge for Rejectivism

Alethic Pluralism andthe Problem of MixedAtomics

Politics/Epistemology/Metaphysics

1.29 Charlotte Newey Rachelle Bascara Christos Kyriacou Robert Edward Pezet

Brian Berkey Changing the subject(s)TheEthics of Global PovertyAlleviation

Responsibility for Oppression Bifurcated skepticalinvariantism

A Boundary toMovement

Rationality 1.27 Joe Cunningham Adam Rieger Max Hayward Richard Rowland

Christine Tiefensee Williams' Dictum Is Arrow’s theorem more famousthan it deserves to be?

Practical Reason, Sympathyand Reactive Attitudes

Reasons First

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Open Sessions: Sunday Morning

Topic and Chair 11:15 11:45 12:15 12:45

Aesthetics/Vagueness

0.25 Kathrine Cuccuru Dan O'Brien Stephen Bolton Hrafn Asgeirsson

Nathan Wildman Aesthetic Attention Art, Empathy And The Divine Is Bobzien's Theory ofHigher-order VaguenessInconsistent?

A Puzzle About Vagueness,Knowability, and JudicialDiscretion

Epistemology 0.16 Roger Clarke Peter Dennis Jumbly Grindrod F. Oliver C. H. Pearson

Christiana Werner Context-Sensitive Pyrrhonism Interpersonal EpistemicJustification: a Non-Reductionist Account

Against EpistemicComparativism

Luck and the Need for TensedBeliefs

Feminism/Epistemology

1.19 Amanda Cawston Eleanor Gordon-Smith Ema Sullivan-Bissett Natalia Waights Hickman

Susan James Looking the Other Way:Locating the Wrongs ofPornography

Refusal, uptake, and themeaning of 'no'

Implicit Biases asUnconscious Imaginings

Knowledge, Reasons andSemantic Understanding

Metaethics 0.22 Kirk Surgener Andres Luco Wouter Floris Kalf Herman Philipse

Daniel Whiting Thick ConceptsCommunicate TheirEvaluative ContentsPragmatically

A Moral Realism Deserving ofthe Name: Naturalistic MoralRealism and CategoricalReasons

Integrative MoralRationalism

Truth in Ethics and Elsewhere:The Criterial Conception

Metaphysics 0.23 Tim Button David M. Lindeman Darragh Byrne, NaomiThompson

Verena Wagner

Helen Beebee Propositions as sets ofpossible worlds –or– Possibleworlds as sets of propositions

The Case against AnalyticMetaphysics

Is HyperintensionalityMetaphysical?

Indeterminism Matters forCompatibilism

Methodology 0.24 Jonathan Berg Miguel Egler Eugen Fischer Stephanie Rennick

Nick Unwin What are the Data ofPhilosophical Thought

'Philosophical Expertise(s) Stereotypes, intuitions andhallucinations

Metaphysical Dystropia: ANew Philosophical

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Experiments? Methodology

Mind 2.01 Andrew Kirton Demian Whiting Simon Brown Henry Taylor

Daniel Burnston Trust and distrust: attitudesand activity

The myth of the dispositionalemotions

Time for Scrub Jays The Ontology of PhenomenalProperties

Normative Ethics 2.02 Brian Berkey Finlay Malcolm Benjamin Matheson Nathan Hauthaler

Emma Bullock Intuitions, Distinctions, andPermissibility Verdicts

Complimenting by Believing Tracing and PersonalIdentity

Private intentional action? Onprivacy vs. relativity vs.publicity of intentional action

Perception 1.26 Hemdat Lerman Nicholas Young Abigail Connor Sebastián Sanhueza Rodríguez

Léa Salje On Brewer’s notion of thicklooks

Hearing Events Measuring PhenomenalDuration

The Assertive Character OfExperience

Philosophy ofScience/Maths

1.27 Antonios Basoukos Kazutaka Inamura Graham White Demetra Christopoulou

Finnur Dellsén Epistemic normativity in IanHacking’s entity realism

A genus-differentia definitionand natural kinds

The Centre of Mathematics Aristotle on number as aproperty

Late registrantpapers

1.29 Sophie Grace Chappell Benjamin Smart Daniel Morgan TBA

Robert Pezet Because Two new objections tobiostatistical conceptions ofdisease

Explaining Addiction

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Open Sessions: Sunday Afternoon

Topic and Chair Room 14:30 15:00 15:30 16:00

Philosophy ofLanguage

1.26 Fiona Teresa Doherty Owen Griffiths Siu-Fan Lee Thomas Hodgson

Richard Gray The Structure of Frege'sThoughts

Permutations and modality The Semantics of EmptyNames

The alleged transparency ofpropositional structure

Epistemology 1.27 Barnaby Walker Emma Bullock Robin McKenna Milena Ivanova

Alessandra Tanesini Enquiry and the Value ofKnowledge

The Limits of EpistemicPaternalism

Is Knowledge a Social Kind? Aesthetic Values in Science

Metaphysics 1.29 Daniel Kodaj Natalja Deng Casey D McCoy Pascal Massie

Stephanie Rennick The sad truth about power-based counterfactuals

Does time seem to pass Classical Motion andInstantaneous Velocity

Diodorus Cronus’Motionless Time

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Rules for Open Sessions and the Chairing thereof

1. Each half-hour slot in the open sessions starts at its allotted time whether or not

anyone has started speaking and lasts for precisely 29 minutes

2. Experience shows that the 29 minutes is exhausted entirely by 20 minutes

speaking and 5 minutes questions.

3. Previous chairs have observed that it doesn’t matter if speakers start speaking

late, if they want any questions they stop by the 22nd second of the 23rd minute.

4. There are no finger questions.

5. There is never time for just one more question.

6. On the basis of our currents best estimates of philosophical inertia, chairs are

instructed to interrupt eminent philosophers at the 27th minute and everyone else

at the 28th.

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Open Sessions Abstracts: Saturday

Society for Women in Philosophy

16:30 Geraldine Ng

What does climate ethics have to do with two men in a boat?

Climate ethics concerns our obligations or duties of justice towards future others. InEmile, Rousseau argues that the sense of justice is the natural outcome of our affections.Yet, our failure to reach a binding global agreement on curbing carbon emissions might beevidence to the contrary. The question we have to ask is: Do we naturally lack theevaluative resources to deal with the unique demands of climate ethics? To address thisproblem, I return to the broader question of the ground of justice. In this paper, I explorehow Hume’s science of human nature can expand our thinking about climate ethics.

17:00 Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard

Can you harm your foetus? Pregnancy, physical indistinctness, and difficult deontologicaldistinctions.

Contemporary discussion of maternal behaviour often treats mothers who fail to act inthe best interests of their children as if they violated the strongest deontologicalconstraint: the constraint against doing harm to others. This paper argues that most suchbehaviour should not be treated in the same way as standard cases of doing harm toothers. The analysis has relevance beyond the doing and allowing distinction: it seemslikely that similar difficulties to the ones we identify for doing and allowing may apply toother key moral concepts in the context of pregnancy, for example, bodily autonomy, self-ownership and self defence. Care may have to be taken when applying these conceptswithin the context of pregnancy.

17:30 Catherine Hundleby

Beyond the Adversary Paradigm: Argument Repair

The Adversary Method that Janice Moulton (1983) argued dominates philosophy as aKuhnian paradigm creates both epistemological problems and social injustices. Criticalthinking textbooks by philosophers often reflect the Adversary Paradigm but can alsoserve as sites for resisting the Method’s operation as a default mode of reasoning.Narrowing of argumentative discourse facilitates complete defeat of one position byanother and allows for the operation of the Adversary Method. The consideration ofargument repair, described most fully by Richard L. Epstein, broadens discourse and sohedges against the narrowing pressures of the Adversary Method. It constitutes a basicway to allow room for other approaches to argumentation, to resist default assumption ofthe Adversary Method, and to keep in mind the greater collaborative purposes thatMethod serves epistemologically.

18:00 Matthew Cull

Ontological Injustice

In this paper I outline a form of injustice I have called ‘ontological injustice’, injusticein virtue of the social construction of reality by the powerful. I begin by giving themotivation for the account, drawn from Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injusticeand by spelling out three kinds of distinctively ontological injustice, drawing on women’s

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cricket, my own experience coming to terms with my nonbinary gender identity, andpolice violence against African Americans. I then briefly spell out some methods ofcounteracting ontological injustice. Finally, I discuss the possibility of two different formsof ontological injustice derived from the existence of wrongful identities, but concludethat only one of those forms seems to exist.

Epistemology

16:30 Caroline Torpe Touborg

A way of thinking about knowledge

In this paper I propose a way of thinking about knowledge, which can handle theoriginal Gettier cases, is immune to Zagzebski-style revenge cases, and is compatible withthe intuition that one can be justified in holding a false belief. My proposal is based on thediagnosis that the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief does not ensurea sufficiently strong link between justification and truth. The cure is then obviously tostrengthen this link. To do so, I first suggest a particular account of justification. I thensuggest a weakened condition to replace the truth-condition in the traditional analysis ofknowledge. The crucial feature of this weakened condition is that its satisfaction does noton its own guarantee truth; however, it does guarantee truth when it is satisfied togetherwith the condition requiring justification.

17:00 Finnur Dellsen

Acceptance, Belief, and Deductive Cogency

For a given propositional attitude, the requirement of Deductive Cogency holds that theset of propositions towards which one has, or is willing to have, this attitude should beconsistent and closed under logical consequence. While this requirement seems, primafacie, to apply to (full) belief, a number of philosophers have recently argued that it doesnot. In this paper I argue that Deductive Cogency is still an important epistemicrequirement, albeit not as a requirement on belief. Instead, building on a distinctionbetween belief and acceptance proposed by Jonathan Cohen, I argue that DeductiveCogency applies to the attitude of treating propositions as given in certain intellectual

contexts.

17:30 Stephen Wright

Transmission and Subject-Sensitive Invariantism

It has recently been argued that transmission theories in the epistemology of testimonyare incompatible with Subject-Sensitive Invariantism about knowledge ascriptions. In thispaper, I show that the appearance of incompatibility is an illusion.

18:00 Aidan McGlynn

Wh-Misidentification Is Not Spurious

This paper responds to an attempt due to Annalisa Coliva that try to demonstrate thatJames Pryor's notion of wh-misidentification is ‘spurious’. In particular, I show that herproposal about the kind of justificatory architecture that underlies cases of wh-misidentification can’t even be applied to Pryor’s principal example of wh-misidentification.

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Metaphysics

16:30 Jan Westerhoff

Anti-foundationalism all the way down?

In the contemporary ontological literature we find various arguments against theexistence of an ontologically fundamental level, and arguments for a non-well-foundedontology. Such ontologies would either incorporate an infinite downward descent ofontological dependence, or they would close up on themselves, forming a cycle ofdependence. When foundationalism is abandoned, the options are either dependence allthe way down, or all the way round. There are various contemporary philosophers (suchas Jonathan Schaffer, James Ladyman, and Graham Priest, to name just a few) whoendorse such non-well-founded ontologies.

17:00 Martin Grajner

Grounding as Entailment and Explanation

Most proponents of grounding claim that the predicate ‘grounds’ expresses a notion thatresists analysis in more primitive terms. Audi (2012), Rosen (2010), and Schaffer (2009)subscribe to this view. They motivate the primitivist view by pointing out that groundingdoes not appear to be analyzable in counterfactual or modal terms. In this paper, I proposean analysis of ‘grounds’ that maintains that grounding might be understood by referenceto the notions of entailment and explanation. I will try to show that this account is able toaccommodate the features that we pre-theoretically associate with the notion ofgrounding.

17:30 Jules Salomone

Is Existence Univocal? An Aristotelian Critique of Quinean Meta-Ontology

"According to Quine, the task of ontology is to draw up the list of the kinds of entitiesthat exist. This meta- ontological view compels any Quinean ontologist to argue forunivocalism, i.e. the claim that existence means the same thing regardless of the entitieswhich are said to exist. Drawing on Aristotle’s refutation of univocalism, I argue that the

Quinean ontologist is led to an indefensible position. On the one hand, she must reject theParmenidian view that there exists one and only one kind of individuals, for otherwisethere would be no task for the Quinean ontologist to undertake. On the other hand, shecannot argue against it: for she cannot say what differentiates the ontologicallycommitting entities from one another, the claim that there are entities instantiatingessentially distinct kinds, and not just one, lacks substance.Regarding van Inwagen'smeta-ontology as faithful to Quine's own, I first present and criticizes van Inwagen’sarguments for univocalism. I then set them against Aristotle’s (at first, obscure) defense ofmultivocalism. I conclude by showing why the Quinean ontologist is vulnerable toAristotle’s arguments."

18:00 Jonathan Payton

'Many-One Identity in Plural Logic'

According to ‘composition as identity’, a whole is identical to its parts – not identical toeach part, but identical to them all together. This idea seems paradoxical: how can theparts be identical to the whole, when they are many while it is one? I argue that these twoclaims are consistent. Unlike other recent defenses of many-one identity, mine does notrequire that number predicates like ‘one’ and ‘many’ be relativized to sorts or kinds. It

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does, however, require us to understand the claim that x is one differently than opponentsof composition as identity have understood it.

Metaphysics

16:30 Daniel von Wachter

The Laws of Nature do not Entail Regularities of Succession.

According to the most popular theories of laws, laws of nature entail regularities ofsuccession of the form `All events of type x are followed by events of type y'. In this talk Ishall argue against this assumption. Perhaps there even are no regularities of succession.

17:00 Philip Goff

Priority monism, grounding and the mind-body problem

Most philosophers think that facts about wholes are grounded in facts about their parts.Priority monists, in contrast, think that facts about parts are grounded in facts aboutwholes; all facts being ultimately grounded in facts about the whole universe. I givereasons to doubt that facts about a conscious mind could be grounded in facts about itsparts. Therefore, if facts about consciousness are not fundamental, we are led to thepriority monist’s conception of how they are grounded.

17:30 Harry Cleeveley

Two-Dimensional Semantics and the Kripkean A Posteriori Necessities

It would once have been philosophical orthodoxy that the conceivability of a scenarioentails its metaphysical possibility. But in recent decades, especially since the work ofKripke (1971, 1980), it has become commonly accepted that there are a posteriorinecessities: that there are some statements that are true in all possible worlds, but whosenegation is conceivable, and which can therefore only be known a posteriori. I argue thatthe Kripke cases are not really all that they seem, and that the application of two-dimensional semantic analysis shows that they do not present any unambiguous examplesof a posteriori necessities.

18:00 Nathan Wildman

'A brief argument for contingent necessity-makers'

There has been some recent discussion about whether contingencies can serve asnecessity-makers – that is, whether any contingent fact q is able to fully ground thenecessity of some fact p – with received opinion being that contingencies lack the modalchutzpah to be necessity-makers. This paper offers a simple, novel argument to theopposite effect. Specifically, I here detail a case where a contingent fact fully grounds the(metaphysical) necessity of another, related fact. And while this result doesn’t show thatall necessities are grounded in contingencies, it does show that, contra popular opinion,some necessities are fully grounded in contingent matters.

Mind and Cognitive Science

16:30 Léa Salje

Talking our way to systematicity

The generality constraint is a widely accepted condition on conceptual thought. It isalso widely accepted that humans meet it to a far greater extent than other animals (if,

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indeed, there are others that meet it at all). Many writers in this area locate the relevantdifferent in our unique capacity for language. This paper explores three ways of teasingout the idea that it’s our capacity for language that sponsors our comparative success withthe generality constraint, and finds that it’s harder than it looks to make that ideasatisfactory.

17:00 Henry Shevlin

On feeling bad: The psychological basis of the experience of suffering

In this short paper, I present a new account of the experience of suffering, focusing oncases like pain, nausea, and negative emotion. I briefly review the major existing theories,then present my own theory, which claims that an experience of suffering occurs when aconscious sensation or emotion acquires an appropriate motivational role for an organism.I go on to spell out this account of motivation in terms of ‘motivational tradeoff’paradigms common in contemporary animal research.

17:30 Daniel Burnston

There is no diachronic cognitive penetration

Several theorists have recently argued that perception is diachronically cognitivelypenetrated. That is, the kinds that we can come to perceive over time, over the course ofperceptual learning, depend in a systematic way on the content of the beliefs that wehave. I argue that once we think seriously about how perceptual category learning works,and about the content of the beliefs we are likely to have in the course of that learning, thecognitive penetration comes out as a poor description of the process.

18:00 Andrei Marasoiu

Common sensibles and Molyneux’s problem

Molyneux's problem (Essay II.IX.VIII) has customarily been thought (Degenaar 1996)to concern either how sensations of sight and touch relate, or how concepts of shape applyin experience. I propose an alternative: Molyneux's problem is about non-conceptualperceptual representations. Perceptual representations originate in the sense modalities,and are usually (Martin 1992) thought to be modally-specific and coordinated by thinking.I challenge this Berkeleyan assumption. I propose a common-sensible approach toMolyneux's problem, and argue Locke could have endorsed it. Common sensible ideas areconscious, crossmodal, perceptual representations. This approach is more theoreticallyparsimonious than Berkeley's, and should be preferred.

Mind

16:30 Alexandria Boyle

Mapping the Minds of Others

Mindreading is the capacity to ascribe mental states to others. The idea that all creaturesare either mindreaders or mere ‘behaviour readers’ is under increasing pressure. It seemssome creatures are ‘minimal mindreaders’ – they can read minds very efficiently, but onlyin a limited range of situations. How should minimal mindreading be explained? I arguethat minimal mindreading is the result of using a map-like, rather than linguistic,representational format to represent the mental states of others.

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17:00 Christiana Werner

Real fear of fictional monsters

Some philosophers deny that emotions towards fiction are genuine emotions because ofthe role of imagination and a general lack of action tendencies. I will argue thatimagination is also involved in emotions towards non-fiction and that fictional emotionsdon’t generally lack action tendencies but only tendencies to specific actions. This is alsoa feature of emotions towards representations in general. Therefore there is no basis fordistinguishing between fictional emotions and emotions towards representations. It is onlyif we claim that emotions towards representations are no proper emotions that fictionalemotions can be anything other than genuine.

17:30 Mihailis E. Diamantis

'Action' Without Action?

There is a commonsense connection between an event being an action of ours and ourbeing responsible for it. If this is right, we should probably be irrealists about action.Philosophers of action typically channel their own intuitions about responsibility todevelop their theories, implicitly assuming there is an underlying uniformity to whenpeople hold each other responsible. However, citing examples from law and psychology,I show that practices actually vary widely. In particular, the common philosophers’intuition about the connection between responsibility and intention is much lesswidespread than philosophers of action seem to think. I suggest this diversity pushes ustoward irrealism, or at a minimum, a much messier metaphysics of action.

18:00 Denis Buehler

Warrant from Transsaccadic Vision

In this paper I discuss the role of visual attention in transsaccadic vision. An importantsubset of our visual perceptions integrates information across saccades and shifts ofattention. Explaining our warrant for basic visual perceptual beliefs formed on the basis oftranssaccadic vision therefore requires appeals to visual attention. This role of visualattention in explaining our warrant for perceptual belief has been overlooked in recentwork on the epistemic role of attention.

Moral Psychology

16:30 Glen Pettigrove

Characters and Roles

The 18th century conception of character differed from the standard 21st centuryconception. This paper considers some of the attractions of the 18th century conceptionand responds to three objections that must be faced by any conception of character thatincludes social roles among its constituents.

17:00 Charles Starkey

The (Non-)Psychology of Virtues: Radical Virtue Externalism

Virtue externalism has gained widespread attention in recent years and holds thatvirtues are character traits that systematically produce good or some other desirable state.The most popular and powerful theory of this sort has been articulated and defended byJulia Driver. In this essay I will argue for a radical shift in our assumptions about the

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psychology of virtue by demonstrating that Driver’s view - what I call moderate virtueexternalism (MVE) - is untenable, but that recent work in virtue epistemology decisivelysupports radical virtue externalism (RVE) over virtue internalism or traditional mixedviews, so that no psychological feature is a necessary component of the virtues. Thearguments that substantiate this have a surprising but undeniable implication: virtues arenot character traits.

17:30 Robin Zheng

Expanding the Moral Repertoire: Oughts, Ideals, and Appraisals

Philosophers have overwhelmingly focused on blame, resentment (along with otherreactive attitudes), and punishment. However, I argue for the existence of other importantforms of moral criticism that have hitherto gone overlooked. I introduce a new category ofwhat I call “non-appraising responses” as opposed to “appraisal-based” responses likeblame and resentment, and provide both moral-theoretical and psychological argumentsfor this distinction. I argue that two distinct domains of morality (Ought vs. Ideal), alongwith two distinct psychological systems of motivation (Approach vs. Avoidance), call forthese different types of moral criticism. Non-appraising responses set aside the appraisalfunction of blame in favor of its communicative and exhortative functions. This makesthem appropriate responses to an agent's failing on a particular occasion to carry out someaction that would contribute to carrying out an imperfect duty, unlike blame, which is onlyappropriate for wholesale violations of imperfect and perfect duties.

18:00 Thomas Schramme

The role of empathy in an agential account of morality

I defend a constitutive role of empathy for morality. I will rely on a particular readingof the notion of morality that is often neglected. I call the approach agential. It focuses onmental and behavioural aspects of moral agents, not on moral codes. In conclusion, Ibelieve there is a constitutive role of the capacity for empathy in the development ofmoral agency. We are justified to draw this conclusion on the basis of our currentscientific knowledge about the psychopathology of autism and psychopathy and on thebasis of a philosophical account of human moral agency.

Normative Ethics

16:30 Robbie Kubala

Two-Level Consequentialism, Regret, and the Reactive Attitudes

In a recent article, Dale Miller (2014) has argued that by adopting a Strawsonian moralpsychology of reactive and objective attitudes, the consequentialist can avoid objectionsto the effect that an agent who follows a consequentialist moral theory necessarily has anunstable set of attitudes. Miller focuses on the version of the objection pressed by BernardWilliams against R. M. Hare’s two-level utilitarianism, but Miller takes his response toramify beyond that particular debate. After introducing the two-level view and Williams’objection in §1, I defend three claims. In §2, I argue that although supplementing Hare’smoral psychology with Strawson’s constitutes a genuine advance in our understanding ofconsequentialism, there is nonetheless an important disanalogy, namely that the two-levelconsequentialist, unlike the Strawsonian pessimist, has reason by her own lights to regrether contingent psychological makeup. In §3, I show that this implication is no objection totwo-level consequentialism, however, because non- consequentialist views also imply that

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we have fitting reasons to regret our psychology. And in §4, I explain how theconsequentialist can argue that we have telic reasons not to regret our psychology. If thosetelic reasons are weightier than the fitting reasons, then the two-level consequentialist isvindicated against Williams’ objection.

17:00 Paul Knights

De Re Valuing and Human Well-being

An influential criticism of objective list and other enumerative theories of well-being isthat they are rendered implausible by their insensitivity to welfare agents’ attitudes to thepurported welfare goods. One response to this criticism is to argue that the welfare goodsenumerated are objective-subjective hybrids, with pro-attitudes towards the good as anecessary component. This paper argues that there is an additional necessary subjectivecomponent for some welfare goods, namely, the de re mode of valuing. In making thisargument the application and usefulness of the de re/de dicto distinction is extended intonew territory.

17:30 Julia Mosquera

Should egalitarians--qua egalitarians- aim at reducing the incidence of deprivations?

"It is an intuitive and common sense belief that reducing deprivations such as povertyleads to more equality. Indeed, most people who advocate poverty reduction describethemselves as egalitarians. This is indisputably true for the elimination of deprivations.Equality favours the total elimination of deprivations. In fact, all else equal, eliminatingdeprivations is the ideal with respect to equality; if there were no deprived individuals,there would not be inequality stemming from poverty. Since eliminating deprivations isfavoured by equality, it is natural to think that where we cannot eliminate it, reducing itwould be a good second best, from the point of view of equality.

Nevertheless, a mere reduction in the incidence of poverty—as opposed to itselimination— could lead to non-egalitarian outcomes. This paper argues that there is anegalitarian reason against the mere reduction in the incidence of poverty."

18:00 Cristina Roadevin

Blame as an Affirmation of Respect after Disrespect

Recent literature on blame has tended to emphasize its interpersonal forms, whether interms of a rupture of relationship [T.M. Scanlon 2008; 2013], or the communication offault [Miranda Fricker 2014]. However, these accounts fail to successfully explain themoral significance of two central forms of blame: 1. Distant blame and 2. Third-partyblame. I propose instead an expressive view of blame, according to which blame is acorrective affirmation of respect for the wronged party. The expressive view I’mdefending is able to not only account for the interpersonal forms of blame, but also forthese two other forms.

Philosophy of Language

16:30 Sergi Oms

Horwich’s Fixed Point Theory of Truth

Horwich’s theory of truth, Minimalism, is inconsistent in classical logic due to the Liarparadox. Horwich has tried to overcome this difficulty by restricting the instances of theT-schema that constitute the minimalist theory of truth so that no paradox can be

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formulated. In this paper I will make precise Horwich’s attempt to give a fixed pointconstruction to specify which instances of the T-schema are to be included in the theoryand I will show that the fixed point exists and it is consistent.

17:00 Carsten Held

Indicative conditionals and logical consequence

Unlike the material conditional, the natural-language indicative conditional is notgenerally true when its antecedent is false or its consequent true. I propose to analyse thelatter conditional as strong, i.e. as containing a tacit quantification over a domain ofpossible situations, with the if-clause specifying that domain such that the conditional getsassigned the appropriate truth conditions. Now, one definition of logical consequenceproceeds in terms of a natural-language conditional. Interpreting it as strong leads to aparaconsistent consequence relation, though the motivation behind it is not to reasoncoherently about contradictions but to reason entirely without them.

17:30 Benjamin Martin

Rejection-less Negations: A Challenge for Rejectivism

This paper offers a challenge to rejectivism, the theory that negation should beexplained in terms of the act of denial, by proposing a logic, gD-V, containing a negationoperator which fails to express denial. The existence of such operators should beprecluded by rejectivism, yet reasons are advanced for concluding that the operator doesindeed express negation. Two possible rejectivist replies to the challenge are consideredand found to be inadequate, while a potentially more successful response based oninferential semantics is suggested.

18:00 Douglas Edwards

Alethic Pluralism and the Problem of Mixed Atomics

Alethic pluralism holds that the property that makes propositions true varies acrossdomains of discourse. Recently the view has faced the ‘problem of mixed atomics’, whichchallenges it to account for atomic propositions that seem to be, say, both physical andmoral claims. I divide the supposed examples of mixed atomics into different classes, andargue that they either do not pose a problem for alethic pluralism, or that they collapseinto problems of mixed compounds.

Politics/Epistemology/Metaphysics

16:30 Charlotte Newey

Changing the subject(s)The Ethics of Global Poverty Alleviation

The effectiveness of aid to alleviate global poverty is highly contentious, dividingexpert opinion. Even so, the extent and persistence of poverty and suffering lead manyphilosophers to ask what the affluent owe to the global poor. I highlight certain challengesto the success of global poverty alleviation through both official and private aid efforts,taking seriously the proposition that aid may make some people in other countries worse-off. What is our moral obligation in the light of such a possibility? I explore tworesponses. The epistemic response suggests that we should change the recipients of aid,focusing on those subjects for whom we have most confidence that aid will do more goodthan harm. The theoretical response suggests that we should change the question.

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17:00 Rachelle Bascara

Responsibility for Oppression

This paper adumbrates a framework for ascribing responsibility for oppression. I startby defining what oppression is, emphasizing its dual nature by situating acts of oppressionwithin an oppressive societal or structural arrangement. There are three main distinctionsimportant for ascribing responsibility for oppression: forward-looking and backward-looking perspectives of responsibility, the interactional and institutional domains of therealization of morality, and acts and omissions. Given these six concepts, I demonstratehow we can ascribe responsibility by considering a story about a single mother on thebrink of homelessness. Throughout, I engage with various oppression theorists claimsabout responsibility and show how my account can accommodate and even reconcile mostof their concerns better than their own frameworks.

17:30 Christos Kyriacou

Bifurcated skeptical invariantism

I present an argument for a sophisticated version of skeptical invariantism: BifurcatedSkeptical Invariantism (BSI). I argue that BSI can, on the one hand, (dis)solve the Gettierproblem and, on the other hand, show some due respect to the Moorean methodologicalincentive of ‘saving epistemic appearances’. BSI can achieve this much because itdistinguishes between two distinct but closely interrelated (sub)concepts of(propositional) knowledge, fallible-but-safe knowledge and infallible-and-sensitiveknowledge, and explains how the pragmatics and the semantics of knowledge discourseoperate at the interface of these two (sub)concepts of knowledge.

18:00 Robert Edward Pezet

A Boundary to Movement

It’s widely assumed that a certain geometric model of boundaries can beunproblematically extended from regions to material-objects. This model prescribes atripartite topological characterisation of the boundaries for material-objects: fully- open,fully-closed, and partially-open/closed. Drawing on a disanology between regions andmaterial-objects – that only the latter move – I draw out the incoherence of fully- orpartially-open material-objects through two related arguments. The first is a dilemmataking separately the alternatives that the fully- or partially-open material- object inmotion is mereologically simple or a composite composed by closed material-objects. Thesecond shows how the movement of such objects reignites a problem regarding themoment of change within a dense temporal topology.

Rationality

16:30 Joe Cunningham

Williams' Dictum

According to Hornsby (2008) and Roessler (2014) we should reject a highest commonfactor view of rationalising explanation ((HCF)) of the sort committed to by Davidson(1963) and Dancy (2000). This paper argues that once care is taken to formulate (HCF) ina way that takes into account the distinction between kinds of explanation and particularexplanations which exemplify the relevant kind, the arguments of Hornsby and Roessler

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against (HCF) can be shown to be unsound. It then offers a fresh argument against (HCF)which, I hope, is more successful.

17:00 Adam Rieger

Is Arrow’s theorem more famous than it deserves to be?

Arrow’s theorem has typically been interpreted as demonstrating that an adequatesystem of voting, or even democracy itself, is impossible. I question this interpretation. Ofthe conditions Arrow shows jointly unsatisfiable, one, the so-called independence ofirrelevant alternatives, lacks intuitive justification, and is easily seen to be undesirablegiven the existence of preference cycles. I conclude that Arrow’s theorem has lesssignificance than is generally thought.

17:30 Max Hayward

Practical Reason, Sympathy and Reactive Attitudes

This paper has three aims. First, I defend, in its most radical form, Hume’s scepticismabout the normative status of the rules of practical reason, as it applies to purely self-regarding matters. It is not always irrational to discount the future, to be inconstant inone’s preferences, to have incompatible desires, to not pursue the means to one’s ends, orto fail to maximise one’s own good. Second, I explain how our response to the agent whobreaks these rules should be understood as an expression of frustrated sympathy, ratherthan a genuine judgement about Reason. We judge these people because we cannotimaginatively identify with the desiderative and intentional patterns they instantiate, andthis is frustrating. Third, compared to the standard cognitive view, I argue thissentimentalist theory better explains the nature of our criticism of the “irrational,” and, byportraying imprudence as a cause of upset to other people, provides a better normativebasis for caring about the rules of practical reason.

18:00 Richard Rowland

Reasons First

Some have argued that we should hold that facts about fittingness are more basic thanfacts about normative reasons and we should analyse facts about reasons in terms of factsabout fittingness. I first show that the only arguments that have been made for the viewthat we should analyse reasons in terms of fittingness, and so put fittingness rather thanreasons first, fail to show that we should put fittingness first. I then argue that other thingsequal we should analyze fittingness in terms of reasons and so accept the reasons firstview rather than the fittingness first view.

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Open Sessions Abstracts: Sunday Morning

Aesthetics/Vagueness

11:15 Kathrine Cuccuru

Aesthetic Attention

Paying attention appears essential to experiencing art, music, and the aesthetic in natureand even the everyday. Although often assuming, even appealing to, its role, the actualnature of attention is little discussed in aesthetic theory, and where it is discussed itappears to be assumed, or reducible to, a basic, common understanding of attention. Butin broader philosophy, explanatory accounts of attention do not seem basic nor commonlyunderstood. I suggest that aestheticians should consider these philosophical accounts toestablish a full understanding of ‘aesthetic attention’. My purpose in this paper is todemonstrate the need and motivate the value of such a consideration. I shall examine onerecent account from the philosophy of attention in relation to aesthetic theory. Itcharacterises attention as ‘selection for a task’. I ask: if aesthetic attention is to beunderstood as ‘selection for a task’, what is the relevant task? I shall offer a tentativeassessment of this using existing candidates from aesthetic theory, showing that they donot sufficiently explain the role of attention in aesthetic experience. I conclude with thespeculative proposal that aesthetic attention is best characterised as ‘selecting for the sakeof selection’.

11:45 Dan O'Brien

Art, Empathy And The Divine

In §1 I survey various arguments for the claim that empathy must be involved in God’sunderstanding of man. §2 turns to artistic representations of divine understanding. §3considers various ways religious art may illuminate divine understanding. Paintings canplay a supporting role to an argument, with their iconography translatable into textualtheology. Pacht argues for an alternative: ‘[v]isual art, like music, can say things, in itsown medium that cannot be said in any other’ (1999, 84). I suggest a distinctinterpretation of this claim and a new interpretation of how religious art can help usunderstand God’s omniscience.

12:15 Stephen Bolton

Is Bobzien's Theory of Higher-order Vagueness Inconsistent?

Vague predicates are typically taken to exhibit borderline cases. But intuitively theyalso exhibit what we can call ‘higher-order’ vagueness, and in particular ‘radical’ higher-order vagueness. We can understand this as the claim that they exhibit borderline cases,borderline borderline cases, borderline borderline borderline cases, and so on (where aborderline borderline case of φ is a borderline case of ‘borderline case of φ’). Susanne Bobzien’s theory of higher-order vagueness tries to capture this phenomenon. But I willshow that two core features of this view are in tension: one of its characteristic axioms,(V), seems to be inconsistent with the ‘margin for error’ principles that Bobzien endorses,which she uses to motivate the theory’s other characteristic axiom, (4). More specifically,a consequence of (V), and therefore a theorem of Bobzien’s view, is that no predicatecould exhibit clear borderline cases, but an apparent consequence of Bobzien’s margin forerror principles is that there could be some clear borderline cases of some predicates. I

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will first briefly explain some salient features of Bobzien’s view, and then demonstratethe above inconsistency. I will then show why a potential reply from Bobzien would notbe successful.

12:45 Hrafn Asgeirsson

A Puzzle About Vagueness, Knowability, and Judicial Discretion

In this paper, I point out what I take to be a deep but unacknowledged tension betweentwo seemingly consistent theses, endorsed on one occasion or another by Joseph Raz,along with several other legal positivists: That in cases in which it is indeterminatewhether the relevant legal language applies to the relevant set of facts, officials havediscretion to decide either way; and that there are no unknowable reasons. If what I say iscorrect, legal positivists need to say much more about the way vagueness affects thereasons for action that (the enactment of) legal norms give rise to

Epistemology

11:15 Roger Clarke

Context-Sensitive Pyrrhonism

Several recent strands of work in epistemology treat belief as context-sensitive in onesense or another. I sketch one such account here, and apply it to suggest a newinterpretation of Sextus Empiricus's Pyrrhonian scepticism. The Pyrrhonists, famously,aim to avoid all belief, to suspend judgment on every question. Sextus distinguishes,though, between a “wide” and a “narrow” sense of belief (PH 1.13). What Sextus'sdistinction amounts to has been a topic of lively debate; this paper offers a new option.

11:45 Peter Dennis

Interpersonal Epistemic Justification: a Non-Reductionist Account

We seek not only to be justified in our beliefs, but also to justify our beliefs to oneanother. While epistemologists have tended to focus on the former kind of justification(viz. individual epistemic justification), it is thorough the second kind of justification (viz.

interpersonal epistemic justification) that our most successful forms of enquiry makeprogress. The aim of this paper is to present an account of interpersonal epistemicjustification (IPEJ) according to which IPEJ is a form of shared rational inquiry capable ofgenerating second-personal epistemic reasons. My paper is divided into four sections. Insection (i), I give a pre-theoretical description of IPEJ and distinguish it from relatedpractices. In section (ii), I outline five desiderata that any account of IPEJ can be expectedto meet. In section (iii), I canvass some reasons to be suspicious of ‘reductionist’accounts, on which the epistemic significance of IPEJ can be fully explained in terms ofnon-interpersonal epistemic concepts like (individual) epistemic justification, knowledge,or information (cf. Goldman 1994; 1997; 1999; 2003). In section (iv), I present myalternative, non-reductionist account.

12:15 Jumbly Grindrod

Against Epistemic Comparativism

A common objection to epistemic contextualism is that there is no semantic basis fortreating ‘know’ as a context-sensitive term. Schaffer & Szabó (2013) propose a solution tothis worry: they argue for a semantic treatment of ‘know’ that treats the expression assimilar to adverbial quantifiers and so captures the fact that both sets of expressions are

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question-sensitive. I argue that their proposed solution faces two important objections.First, their account does not allow for a true knowledge attribution when an inappropriatediscourse question is in play. Secondly, the motivation for their account is undermined bythe fact that there is a general phenomenon of question-sensitivity throughout naturallanguage.

12:45 F. Oliver C. H. Pearson

Luck and the Need for Tensed Beliefs

Whatever one’s metaphysics of time, we need tensed beliefs throughout life. I offer a newaccount of this phenomenon grounded in the clarification that tensed beliefs are onlyrequired for rational timely actions. With normativity to the fore, we can see that luck is ofimport: actions that succeed by luck fail standards of rationality. Actions from tenselessbeliefs succeed by luck in a way that those from tensed beliefs do not, thus the latter, notthe former are required for rational timely action. This account links to, but hasadvantages over the prominent tenseless account offered by Mellor.

Feminism/Epistemology

11:15 Amanda Cawston

Looking the Other Way: Locating the Wrongs of Pornography

The anti-pornography debate has been critically hampered by its attempt to understand thewrongs of pornography in terms of what pornography is, the harms it causes, or the rightsit violates. While each of these threads picks up on important points, they fail to identifythe core wrong of pornography. Moreover, these attempts have prompted responses thatillustrate the ability to modify, re-describe or reinterpret pornography, or the conceptualframework that permits and legitimises it, in ways that fail to represent genuine solutionsto the problem. In this paper, I propose an alternative understanding of pornography'swrongs, an understanding that directs our attention towards the attitudes of pornographyconsumers and away from features of pornographic objects. In this brief sketch, I aim tointroduce the attitudinal account of pornography, and discuss its preliminary advantages

over traditional accounts.

11:45 Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Refusal, uptake, and the meaning of 'no'

What sort of thing is a refusal? A popular view holds that it is a communicative act thatrequires ‘uptake’, that is, that an utterance only counts as a refusal if it is recognised asone by its addressee. If this view is correct, women’s ability to verbally refuse sex willdepend on their partners taking their ‘no’s as refusals. Rae Langton, among others,worries that pornography could render women unable to verbally refuse sex by teachingtheir partners that women who say ‘no’ in sexual settings are not really refusing. Thispaper argues that not all refusals require uptake.

12:15 Ema Sullivan-Bissett

Implicit Biases as Unconscious Imaginings

I argue that implicit biases are unconscious imaginings. Following Jules Holroyd(forthcoming) I outline four desiderata on a successful account of implicit bias, and arguethat my account is able to meet all of them. In light of its success here I conclude that thethesis that implicit biases are unconscious imaginings should be taken seriously.

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12:45 Natalia Waights Hickman

Knowledge, Reasons and Semantic Understanding

I exploit two recent proposals in epistemology in support of semantic cognitivism, theview that speakers (a) possess (implicit) semantic knowledge and (b) exploit thisknowledge in language use and comprehension. I will appeal to Hawthorne and Stanley’s(2008) ‘knowledge action-principle’ and the ‘knowledge view of reasons’ advanced byHornsby (2007) and Hyman (2015), and argue that: (1) Non-cognitivism has theconsequence that language use is systematically irrational. (2) Non-cognitivism isinconsistent with the rational sensitivity to semantic facts exhibited by speakers, inter alia,in resolving structurally ambiguous sentences.

Metaethics

11:15 Kirk Surgener

Thick Concepts Communicate Their Evaluative Contents Pragmatically1

This paper argues that our practice of applying thick concepts to animals favours apragmatic view of how a use of those concepts communicates their evaluativecomponents over a view that builds the evaluative components into the semantics of theterms in question. Insofar as we wish to avoid ascribing wide spread error to ordinaryusers of thick concepts we should then reject the semantic view.

11:45 Andres Luco

A Moral Realism Deserving of the Name: Naturalistic Moral Realism and CategoricalReasons

A categorical reason for action is a normative reason to perform an action that obtainsindependently of the agent’s desires, interests, and evaluative attitudes. It’s often said thatnaturalistic moral realism cannot explain why we have categorical reasons to fulfil ourmoral obligations. There is seemingly no naturalistic explanation for how it can be truethat, necessarily, if an agent morally ought to φ, then he or she has a categorical reason to

φ. This essay argues, however, that categorical reasons to comply with moral obligations are grounded in the fact that compliance with moral obligations promotes the collectivegood.

12:15 Wouter Floris Kalf

Integrative Moral Rationalism

I formulate and defend a new version of moral rationalism. I first explain what moralrationalism is and I explain that moral rationalists can formulate their theory in threedifferent ways. I then argue for three theses. (1) Moral rationalism understood exclusivelyas reasons-responsiveness is not plausible. (2) Moral rationalism understood exclusivelyas requirements-responsiveness is not plausible. (3) Integrative moral rationalism, whichhas not yet been formulated in the literature and which integrates rationality understood asreasons-responsiveness and rationality understood as requirements responsiveness, can bemore plausible. I conclude that this gives us some reason to develop integrative moralrationalism.

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12:45 Herman Philipse

Truth in Ethics and Elsewhere: The Criterial Conception

In this article, I endorse a version of monistic minimalism with regard to the meaning ofthe truth-predicate and the truth-operator, while I propose a pluralistic and substantialaccount of the criteria for truth in different domains of discourse, such as matters of fact,arithmetic, or prescriptive morality. I argue that this combination of monistic minimalismconcerning the concept of truth and substantial pluralism as regards truth-criteria resolvesa number of stubborn conundrums about the notion of truth.

Metaphysics

11:15 Tim Button

Propositions as sets of possible worlds –or– Possible worlds as sets of propositions

What is the relationship between possible worlds and propositions? Some philosophersadopt the Worldly Perspective: that propositions are sets of possible worlds (e.g. RobertStalnaker 1976). Other philosophers adopt the Propositional Perspective: that possibleworlds are sets of propositions (e.g. Robert Adams 1974). Both positions are tenable,given three assumptions: that logic is bivalent, that propositions are coarse-grained, andthat we can refer to ‘enough’ propositions. Moreover, given these assumptions, the twoPerspectives are dual. We can move harmlessly back and forth between them, without anygain or loss.

11:45 David M. Lindeman

The Case against Analytic Metaphysics

In their 2007 Every Thing Must Go (ETMG), Ladyman and Ross (L&R) provide whatis perhaps the most devastating critique of analytic metaphysics offered since the hey-dayof logical positivism – though unlike the logical positivists, L&R’s critique is importantlyconcerned not with the meaning of metaphysical claims but with the method employed inarriving at them. I set forward this critique and take a look at the defence of analytic

metaphysics offered in Dorr’s (2010) review of ETMG. I rebut this defence in turn.

12:15 Darragh Byrne, Naomi Thompson

Is Hyperintensionality Metaphysical?

Much of the recent discussion in metaphysics has focussed on notions which many taketo be hyperintensional. One prominent example is the notion of essence, which has beenthought to carve reality more finely than familiar modal notions. In this paper, we arguethat it a mistake to think of the hyperintensionality of essence and other such notions asanything metaphysical. We claim that hyperintensionality arises as a consequence of ourways of representing the world, a position we label conceptualism abouthyperintensionality. Our argument for this view is inspired by broadly Fregean accountsof intensionality.

12:45 Verena Wagner

Indeterminism Matters for Compatibilism

Compatibilists claim that determinism does not preclude freedom. Questionsconcerning indeterminism seem to be none of their business and the libertarian’s burdenalone. But this view is mistaken. I aim at showing that indeterminism matters for

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compatibilist theories: firstly, the prevalent compatibilist position is committed to thecompatibility of freedom and indeterminism. Secondly, I will illustrate that libertariansand compatibilists use the same arguments for their respective compatibility. Thirdly, Iwill show that the luck objection does not support the compatibilist position but ratherweakens it. I will conclude that the two compatibilities need to be rejected or affirmedtogether.

Methodology

11:15 Jonathan Berg

What are the Data of Philosophical Thought Experiments?"

I argue that the data collected by philosophical thought experiments--the “intuitions”we appeal to regarding hypothetical situations constructed to test philosophicalhypotheses--should be construed as metalinguistic, about what we are inclined to say. Forone thing, although concepts cannot be directly perceived, they are reflected in our use ofthe words associated with them; moreover, our beliefs about what we would say in agiven situation are typically less vulnerable to objection than our object-level beliefsabout the situation itself.

11:45 Miguel Egler

'Philosophical Expertise(s)

A great number of studies in experimental philosophy make use of experimentaltechniques and empirical findings in order to advance a forceful critique of the method ofcases in philosophical inquiry. Proponents of the ‘expertise defence’ argue that thiscritique is unfounded, for it rests on the illicit comparison between non-philosophers’ andprofessional philosophers’ judgments on philosophical cases. However, they proposephilosophers are experts at judging such cases. In this paper, I argue that debates about theexpertise defence have been hindered by an inadequate discussion on the nature of so-called philosophical expertise. .

12:15 Eugen Fischer

Stereotypes, intuitions and hallucinations

Experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychologicalexplanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess their evidentiaryvalue. This paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by briefphilosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying aclassic paradox about perception (‘argument from hallucination’). We trace them tostereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension. We employ aforced-choice plausibility-ranking task to show that contextually inappropriatestereotypical inferences are made from less salient uses of the verb “to see”. This yields adebunking explanation which helps resolve the philosophical paradox.

12:45 Stephanie Rennick

Metaphysical Dystropia: A New Philosophical Methodology

Most of us ‘do’ philosophy on a daily basis: any time we ask, for instance, whethersomething is good, or true, or possible. As philosophers, if we want our conceptualanalyses to build on or engage with the kind of thoughts that result from this ubiquitousquestioning – our ‘folk intuitions’ – then we need a way of accessing that data. I propose a

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new methodology for accessing philosophical folk intuitions: identifying and appealing tocommon patterns (i.e. tropes – e.g. ‘you can’t fight fate’, ‘you can’t change the past’) inspeculative fiction across different media, including literature, film, and video games.While such patterns may not reveal what people believe, they do – I contend – revealwhat people are willing to suspend disbelief about. That is, they indicate which ideas,concepts, theories and notions people will entertain – at least for the length of theexperience – and thus provide real insight into what people consider to be the boundariesof the landscape of possibility (after all, if an idea is too unbelievable, it does not surviveto become a trope). In this paper I explore the usefulness of this method – whichcomplements, but is distinct from, both traditional armchair philosophising andconventional X-Phi – drawing on examples in time travel and foreknowledge.

Mind

11:15 Andrew Kirton

Trust and distrust: attitudes and activity

"Trust is commonly understood as reliance on another’s acting, plus additionalconditions, or as ‘reliance plus X’.1 I show that this view of trust is misguided. I claimthat you can trust another without relying on her. This is because your trust can simply bea mental attitude of assurance about another’s performance. I show this by focusing ondistrust: I show that distrust is just a mental attitude of anxiety about non- performance,rather than being a type of non-reliance. But, as distrust is the contrary of trust, we shouldinfer that there is an attitude of trust.

My conclusion then is that ‘trust’ can refer to (i) an attitude that disposes one to rely (F-trust), or (ii) the reliance itself (R-trust). But, the attitude and the reliance can come apart:you can distrust another and R-trust her without inconsistency. So, the prevailing ‘relianceplus X’ view of trust is incomplete. Those discussing trust must pay heed to theattitude/activity (or F-trust/R-trust) distinction, in order to not misconstrue the subject."

11:45 Demian Whiting

The myth of the dispositional emotions

I argue the idea there are dispositional emotions is a myth. There are only episodicemotions. But to say there are no dispositional emotions is not to say that those mentalstates commonly thought to be dispositional emotions – e.g. a fear of spiders – are notgenuine emotions. The mental states in question are emotions, but they are emotions onlybecause they turn out also to be episodic.

12:15 Simon Brown

Time for Scrub Jays

C an animals represent time? Recent experiments with the scrubjay, a kind of bird thatstores and retrieves food in the wild, have provided what many take to be the bestevidence yet of a nonhuman animal representing time. I briefly review some of the keyfindings in this literature, and argue that as the data currently stand, they suggest aphilosophically suggestive qualification on the temporal properties scrubjays are able torepresent. Scrubjays have only been shown to represent durations relative to now andwhat’s more these have always been durations from a p ast time to now. Althoughscrubjays’ temporal representations are in many ways remarkably sophisticated, andalthough scrubjays plan, or at least cache foods for future retrieval in ways that are

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responsive to a large number of surprisingly complex features such as their preferences attime of retrieval and which (if any) scrubjays observe them whilst caching, they do notseem to use their temporal representations in planning. This qualification on scrubjays’abilities suggests categorizing capacities for temporal representation along two interestingand relatively independent dimensions of sophistication, which I call detail andallocentricity.

12:45 Henry Taylor

The Ontology of Phenomenal Properties

This paper will assess the prospects of dispositional theories of properties in terms ofhow well they can give an account of the properties of conscious experiences. I start byintroducing dispositional essentialism (the view that at least some properties areessentially dispositional). I then examine the objection that this view cannot account forthe ‘occurrent’ nature of consciousness. I clarify this objection, and consider variousproposed solutions. I ultimately argue that by adopting the ‘powerful qualities’ view, theproblem can be solved.

Normative Ethics

11:15 Brian Berkey

Intuitions, Distinctions, and Permissibility Verdicts

I argue that there is an important gap in many arguments in defence of thepermissibility verdicts represented in the content of case-based intuitions. Recognizingthis gap highlights that revisionists about intuitive permissibility verdicts have a widerrange of argumentative strategies available to them than have been widely pursued, andthat we have reasons to take seriously combinations of views about, on the one hand, themoral significance of distinctions, and, on the other, permissibility verdicts, that tend to beneglected.

11:45 Finlay Malcolm

Complimenting by Believing

It is sometimes claimed that we insult a speaker when we don’t believe her testimony.Does it follow, then, that by believing a speaker, we compliment her in some way? I arguethat while both of these claims are defensible, their truth turns on a distinction betweenbelieving the speaker, and believing the speaker’s testimony. The insult or compliment isin believing or disbelieving a speaker, not just the speaker’s testimony. I describe the tacitcompliment paid to a speaker in terms of her acknowledged trustworthiness and authority,and the social engagement a hearer enters into with the speaker.

12:15 Benjamin Matheson

Tracing and Personal Identity

An appeal to tracing is widespread in contemporary accounts of the conditions on moralresponsibility. This paper first presents a counterexample to the ‘tracing view’ of moralresponsibility – namely, a case of temporally distant self-manipulation. Second, it showsthat the counterexample arises because tracing theorists implicitly take personal identityto be the temporal condition on derivative moral responsibility. It proposes that tracingtheorists instead use character connectedness as their temporal condition to avoid thiscounterexample

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12:45 Nathan Hauthaler

Private intentional action? On privacy vs. relativity vs. publicity of intentional action

Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’ has received its fair amount of philosophicalattention. It has also motivated various analogous arguments in domains of practicalphilosophy, such as Korsgaard’s argument against the privacy of reasons for action, orThompson’s against the privacy of life forms. Here I advance another related argument,against the privacy of intentional action, taking as my point of departure Anscombe’saccount of intentional action. I conclude by sketching how the argument against privateintentional action has (limiting, moderating) upshots for relativist accounts of intentionalaction such as Velleman’s.

Perception

11:15 Hemdat Lerman

On Brewer’s notion of thick looks

According to relational views of experience a visual experience of a mind-independentthing is an unanalysable relation between the perceiver and the seen thing, where thephenomenal character of the experience is constituted by seen things. Proponents of theview thus need to account for the ways in which the phenomenal character of visualexperience differ from the seen things. In this talk I focus on Bill Brewer’s attempt toaddress this challenge; specifically, his appeal to what he calls ‘thick looks’ – looks thatinvolve conceptual registration. I argue that conceptual registration isn’t required forexplaining the aspects of the phenomenology which Brewer’s thick looks are meant toexplain.

11:45 Nicholas Young

Hearing Events

Through hearing we learn about events involving material objects. We can, forexample, tell whether an object is struck, scraped or rolled. My aim here is to provide an

account of auditory perceptual content which explains how we might represent eventssuch as these. Firstly, I introduce two uncontroversial features of v isual event perception:the sequential attribution of properties to objects, and the idea of a temporally extendedspecious present. However, I argue that hearingevents cannot be modelled on seeingevents because it is implausible to think that audition involves the attribution of sequencesof properties to objects, and propose an alternative model: Auditory Parsing. On thisaccount, hearing events involves the representation of t wo types of individualsimultaneously: the material object itself and the temporally extended force applied to thatobject. Finally, I suggest that the visual perception of shapes as extending through spaceprovides a good model for the auditory perception of forces as extending through time.

12:15 Abigail Connor

Measuring Phenomenal Duration

Survivors of life threatening accidents report an experience of phenomenal time asslowed down. Such reports conflict with the naïve realist account of perception, whichclaims that physical events determine the phenomenal character of our experience.Phillips presents a relative account of phenomenal duration with the aim of defendingnaïve realism against these reports of slow time. Phillips’ defence relies on the claim that

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the increased phenomenal duration in slow time can be accounted for through a relativeincrease in non-perceptual mental activity. I argue that we must reject Phillips’ relativeaccount, as it is inconsistent with reports of slow time in meditation.

12:45 Sebastián Sanhueza Rodríguez

The Assertive Character Of Experience

Visual experiences are in general assertive. Tat is, the worldly items or states of afairs asubject experiences are presented to her as being the case. Or again, experiences areassertive insofar as their subjects do not passively entertain, but are actually commited tothe existence of the worldly items or states of afairs such experiences present them with.Although the notion of assertive character refers to an experiential feature widelyacknowledged by philosophers of mind, relatively litle work has been done on thequestion how that notion should be more precisely understood. Tis piece aims to stimulatesome discussion in this area. More specifcally, I aim to do two things here. First, I shallput the notion of assertive character into focus. Ten, I describe how this feature may beanalysed in functional terms and, relying on the aforementioned link between perceptionand belief, I argue that it is extremely plausible to think of it in terms of the functionalrole that perceptual experiences have within a larger psychological and epistemologicaleconomy.

Philosophy of Science/Maths

11:15 Antonios Basoukos

Epistemic normativity in Ian Hacking’s entity realism

A common explanation for the success of science is that science represents the worldaccurately most of the time. This philosophical stance is called scientific realism.Scientific realism combines two apparently incompatible positions: a) that there is a worldindependent of us, and 2) that we can have knowledge of this world. But, if the world isindependent of us, then how can we know that our scientific representations correspond toit? I show that Ian Hacking has provided an original answer to the previous question,

which is that beliefs arising from the scientific practice are self-evident

11:45 Kazutaka Inamura

'A genus-differentia definition and natural kinds'

This paper examines J. S. Mill's positive view of a genus-differentia definition in his ASystem of Logic. In particular, as opposed to the Lockean nominalist and Kripkeanessentialist criticism that it merely expresses the connotations of a general name that aregiven from humans' subjective perspectives, I argue that Mill offers useful insights intothe role of a genus-differentia definition as a basis for scientific classification. I also showhow the Millian view can understand the practices of contemporary biological taxonomyand its various concepts of a species supported by Darwinian evolutionary biology.

12:15 Graham White

The Centre of Mathematics

We argue that the tendency to view mathematical objects as being assembled from setshas two roots: the desire for intuitively secure foundations, and the idea the a reduction ofmathematics to sets says something about the constitution of mathematical objects ingeneral. We argue that, in practice, set theoretical reductions do not give certainty

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(because of the likelihood of mistakes), and that the constitution story depends on suchreductions being objective: in fact, they are often based on arbitrary and ineleminablechoices. We give an example of such arbitrariness, and we close with a plea for regulativeconsiderations in the philosophy of mathematics.

12:45 Demetra Christopoulou

Aristotle on number as a property

This paper attempts to present an interpretation of Aristotle’s account of natural numberas a dispositional property of a natural kind. In the first place, it elaborates Aristotle’sposition on mathematical objects according to which they are not substances and they areappropriately related to the sensible objects. Secondly, it defends an account of naturalnumbers as properties of natural kinds. Thirdly, it takes under consideration theAristotelian assertion that mathematical objects exist hylikos. In accordance with a rivalinterpretation of that expression, it highlights the aspect of the properties in question asdispositional.

Late registrant papers

11:15 Sophie Grace Chappell

Because

I develop the notion of a because-relation, and consider its applicability to emergenceand supervenience theses in philosophy of mind and metaethics.

11:45 Benjamin Smart

Two new objections to biostatistical conceptions of disease

Unquestionably the most frequently discussed analysis of pathological condition (thatof Boorse) takes the notion of disease to be value-free, wherein ‘normal (or supernormal)function' is the mark of health, and disease is the absence of health. In this paper I outlinewhat I take to be the most troublesome objection raised against Boorse’s biostatisticaltheory (BST); namely, the line-drawing problem (Schwartz 2007). Peter Schwartz

attempts to solve this problem by introducing an additional (supposedly value-free)component to BST, but even Schwartz's view cannot escape the two new objections I setout here – the no instances objection, and the universal diseases objection

12:15 Daniel Morgan

Explaining Addiction

Notoriously, addiction can cause people to behave in ways that go against their own,and any reasonable, sense of which options are good options for them to take. There is asimple but shallow explanation of this: addictive desires can be incredibly strong. Adeeper explanation will have to say what it is about addictive desires that accounts fortheir strength. Neuophysiological Monism says that there is a single explanatory factor:the impact of addictive substances on the dopamine system. Pluralism gives a role topersonal level factors in addition to this neurophysiological factor. This paper makes thecase for Pluralism, and in particular it looks at the personal level factor that is the motiveof self-escape.

12:45 TBA

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Open Sessions Abstracts: Sunday Afternoon

Philosophy of Language

14:30 Fiona Teresa Doherty

The Structure of Frege's Thoughts

In the discussion regarding Frege’s view of the structure of thoughts, a particularremark from his posthumous writing is often taken in support of the view that Frege heldthere to be no unique structure of a thought (Frege, 1979:17). By careful exposition of theremark and articulation of the opposing views regarding the structure of thoughts bySchlick and Dummett, this paper will argue that Frege’s remark does not, in fact, implyeither of the accounts since it is consistent with both.

15:00 Owen Griffiths

Permutations and modality

The permutation invariance demarcation of the logical constants has much torecommend it: it is philosophically motivated by the thought that logic is topic neutral,capable of precise formulation and respects the logical constants of rst-order logic withidentity. Recently, however, it has been accused of undergeneration by failing to deemcertain modal operators as logical. I argue that the modal operators we should want aslogical { those of S5 { are permutation invariant.

15:30 Siu-Fan Lee

The Semantics of Empty Names

Empty names present some persistent challenges to theories of reference. This paperargues for the limitations of the direct reference theory of names and the existing pretencetheories in giving a satisfactory semantic account of empty names. My main arguments

include: the hermeneutic circle implicit in using the story operator, the importance ofexplaining what it is to pretend and the inability of the present pretence theories to answerit, the problems of intentionality and collective intentionality, and the category mistake inexplaining empty names using socially constructed abstract entities. I then call for a thirdapproach I coin the Counterfactual Reference Theory. I explain its motivation though Imay not have the space to discuss it fully in this short paper.

16:00 Thomas Hodgson

The alleged transparency of propositional structure

Some problems of empty names would be solved by the thesis that the emptiness of thename triggers a difference in the structure of the proposition expressed (Variation).Variation is in tension with the thesis that the structure of what is expressed is detectableby the subject (Transparency). I argue that Transparency is unmotivated. Therefore,Variation is more plausible than it at first appears.

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Epistemology

14:30 Barnaby Walker

Enquiry and the Value of Knowledge

Philosophical writings about the value of knowledge, inspired by Plato’s seminaldiscussion in Meno, focus on the following ‘comparative state question’: why is itadvantageous for the subject to know that p rather than to merely truly believe that p? Bycontrast, there has been little discussion of a closely related question about enquiry: whydo we desire and seek knowledge of the answers to questions, and not just true beliefsabout the answers?1 Neither has there been much discussion of how this ‘enquiryquestion’ relates to the comparative state question. My aim in this paper is to address thisneglected issue. I will argue that the enquiry question identifies a more fundamentalproblem about the value of knowledge than the comparative state question, and thattackling the comparative state question is only one way of tackling the problem posed bythe enquiry question. I conclude with a sketch of an alternative proposal about how toanswer the enquiry question.

15:00 Emma Bullock

The Limits of Epistemic Paternalism

Epistemic paternalism is the thesis that a paternalistic interference with an individual’sinquiry is justified when it is likely to bring about an epistemic improvement in her. Iclaim that in order to motivate epistemic paternalism we must first account for the valueof epistemic improvements. I propose that the epistemic paternalist has two options: eitherepistemic improvements are valuable because they contribute to wellbeing, or they areepistemically valuable. I will argue that these options constitute the foundations of adilemma: either epistemic paternalism collapses into general paternalism, or a distinctiveproject of justified epistemic paternalism is implausible.

15:30 Robin McKenna

Is Knowledge a Social Kind?

Some groupings of things reflect the structure of the social world rather than the naturalworld. That is, some kinds are social rather than natural. For instance, money is a socialkind. But is knowledge a social kind? In this paper I argue for a conditional claim. Ifpragmatic encroachment in epistemology is true, then knowledge is a social kind. Whilemy claim is conditional, it has implications for mainstream analytic epistemology.Feminist epistemologists like Elizabeth Anderson, Helen Longino and Lynn Nelson arguethat epistemic facts hold partly in virtue of the contingent needs and interests of particularcommunities. If I am right, pragmatic encroachment in epistemology has reached thesame conclusion, albeit for different reasons.

16:00 Milena Ivanova

Aesthetic Values in Science

In this paper I explore the epistemic justification of aesthetic values in scientificpractise. It is well documented that scientists use aesthetic values in the evaluation andchoice of theories they employ. Aesthetic values are not only regarded as leading topractically more convenient theories, but are very often taken to stand in a specialepistemic relation to the truth of a theory. That is, the aesthetic properties of a theory are

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regarded as intrinsically linked to the theory’s truthlikeness, justifying our belief that abeautiful theory is a true one. I examine the empirical justification for this link and itschallenges. I explore an alternative link which could overcome the noted difficulties andcaptures better scientific practise.

Metaphysics

14:30 Daniel Kodaj

The sad truth about power-based counterfactuals

Powers have become quite fashionable in metaphysics in recent years, with a number oftheir proponents claiming or implying that powers are the truthmakers for modal facts ingeneral and of counterfactuals in particular. I argue that power-based counterfactualsemantics has no chance of getting off the ground unless it posits possible worlds. As aresult, the power ontologist’s ambition to ground modality in powers is doomed.

15:00 Natalja Deng

Does time seem to pass

This paper is about one of the current philosophical debates about temporal experience,

namely the one relating to the metaphysical question of whether time robustly passes. A-theorists think it does, B-theorists think it does not. I outline the A-theoretic argumentfrom experience, understood as an inference to the best explanation. I don’t question theinference, but focus on the premise that we perceptually experience time as robustlypassing. I provide some reasons to reject it, and thereby to adopt a view sometimes knownas veridicalism.

15:30 Casey D McCoy

Classical Motion and Instantaneous Velocity

The impetus theory of motion states that to be in motion is to have a non-zeroinstantaneous velocity. The at-at theory of motion states that to be in motion is nothingover and above being at di erent places at di erent times. I first argue that there should be a

preference for the at-at theory over the impetus theory. I note, however, that this pointrelies on the well-entrenched assumption that space is fundamental. This assumption isthe basis for what I call the spatial view. I raise the possibility of a fundamental velocitybased in “velocity space,” and then develop this velocital view in a way that is symmetricto the spatial view. I conclude therefore that there are no obvious grounds for choosingone over the other.

16:00 Pascal Massie

Diodorus Cronus’ Motionless Time

The master argument posits a metaphysical thesis: Diodorus rejects Aristotle’sconception of dunamis as a power simultaneously oriented toward being and non-beingand proclaims that possibilities that fail to actualize are simply nothing. To justify thisclaim, Diodorus proposes a conception of temporality that envisions the future sub speciepraeteriti: since the future is destined to become past, and since what will have been cannever be the accomplishment of a possibility that did not obtain, any possibility thatdoesn’t actualize is neither futural nor even possible. Yet, this solution is not moresuccessful than Aristotle’s at avoiding Parmenides’ injunction.

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List of DelegatesMr Ron Aboodi The Hebrew University of JerusalemDr Roman Altshuler Kutztown UniversityMr Hrafn Asgeirsson University of IcelandDr Nafsika Athanassoulis Independent researcherProfessor Robin Attfield Cardiff UniversityMs Rachelle Bascara BirkbeckDr Antonios Basoukos Independent ResearcherDr Katharina Bauer Ruhr-Universität BochumProfessor Helen Beebee University of ManchesterProfessor Jonathan Berg University of HaifaProfessor Brian Berkey University of PennsylvaniaDr Corine Besson University of SussexMr Stephen Bolton University of SheffieldDr Nicole Boyce IndependentDr Raymond Boyce IndependentMs Alexandria Boyle University of CambridgeMr Simon Brown Columbia UniversityDr Kimberley Brownlee University of WarwickMr Tony Bruce Routledge PublishersDr Denis Buehler UNAMDr Emma Bullock Central European UniversityDr Daniel Burnston Tulane UniversityDr Tim Button University of CambridgeMr Darragh Byrne University of BirminghamMrs Laura Callahan Rutgers University New BrunswickProfessor Havi Carel University of BristolMs Hannah Carnegy University College LondonDr Amanda Cawston University of StirlingProfessor Sophie Chappell Open UniversityMiss Valeriya Chasova UCLouvain (Belgium), ULeeds (UK)Dr Demetra Christopoulou University Of AthensDr Roger Clarke Queen's University BelfastMr Harry Cleeveley King's College LondonDr Ben Colburn University of GlasgowMiss Abigail Connor University of Manchester

Professor Tim Crane University of CambridgeProfessor Roger Crisp St Anne's College, OxfordMrs Kathrine Cuccuru University College, LondonMr Matthew Cull Queen's University CanadaDr Joe Cunningham University of WarwickProfessor Barry Dainton University of LiverpoolMr John Davies Cardiff UMr Tom Davy Oxford UniversityDr Finnur Dellsen University College DublinDr Natalja Deng University of CambridgeDr Peter Dennis LSEMr Mihailis Diamantis New York UniversityProfessor Julian Dodd University of ManchesterMiss Fiona Teresa Doherty University of Cambridge

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Dr Tom Dougherty University of CambridgeDr Douglas Edwards Hamilton CollegeMr Miguel Egler University of St Andrews/ArchéDr Daniel Elstein University of LeedsDr Matt Farr University of QueenslandMiss Jess Farrell WarwickDr Alison Fernandes Columbia UniversityDr Eugen Fischer University of East AngliaDr Carmel Forde Saint Mary'sProfessor Elizabeth Fricker Oxford UniversityDr Hilary Gaskin Cambridge University PressMr Alexander Geddes UCLDr Philip Goff Central European UniversityProfessor Sanford Goldberg Northwestern UniversityDr Sacha Golob KCLMiss Eleanor Gordon-Smith University of SydneyDr Martin Grajner Dresden University of TechnologyDr Richard Gray Cardiff UniversityDr Patrick Greenough University of St AndrewsDr Owen Griffiths University of CambridgeMr Jumbly Grindrod University of ReadingMr Joshua Habgood-Coote St AndrewsMr Paul Hampson Cardiff UniversityDr Edward Harcourt University of OxfordMr David Harris Aristotelian SocietyMr Nathan Hauthaler Stanford UniversityMr Max Hayward Columbia UniversityDr Carsten Held Universität ErfurtDr Ulrike Heuer University of LeedsDr Thomas Hodgson University College DublinDr Andrew Huddleston Birkbeck, University of LondonMiss Alicia Huertas University of LondonDr Catherine Hundleby University of WindsorDr Kazutaka Inamura Hirosaki UniversityDr Elizabeth Irvine Cardiff UniversityDr Milena Ivanova MCMP, LMU MunichProfessor Jonathan Jacobs John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNYProfessor Susan James Birkbeck CollegeDr Anneli Jefferson University of BirminghamMr Andrew Jones Cardiff UniversityDr Wouter Floris Kalf Utrecht UniversityMiss Libuse Kaucky N/A Independent ResearcherMs Jana Kaucky N/AMs Sophie Keeling Southampton and CardiffDr Elselijn Kingma SouthamptonMr Andrew Kirton University of ManchesterDr Paul Knights University of ManchesterDr Daniel Kodaj University of OxfordMr Robbie Kubala Columbia UniversityDr Christos Kyriacou University of CyprusDr Siu-Fan Lee Hong Kong Baptist University

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Dr Mary Leng University of YorkDr Hemdat Lerman University of WarwickMr Osian Luke Lewis Cardiff UniversityProfessor Hallvard Lillehammer Birkbeck, University of LondonMr Chong-Ming Lim University College LondonMr David Lindeman Johns Hopkins UniversityDr Guy Longworth University of WarwickDr Andres Luco Nanyang Technological UniversityMr Michael Lyons Trinity College DublinProfessor John MacFarlane University of California, BerkeleyDr Penelope Mackie University of NottinghamDr Rory Madden University College LondonMr Finlay Malcolm University of ManchesterMr Andrei Marasoiu University of VirginiaDr Ben Martin University College LondonDr Pascal Massie Miami UniversityDr Benjamin Matheson University of GothenburgProfessor M M McCabe King's College LondonDr Tom McClelland University of ManchesterDr Casey McCoy University of EdinburghDr Aidan McGlynn University of EdinburghMr Matthew McKeever University of St AndrewsDr Robin McKenna University of ViennaDr Phillip Meadows UAE UniversityProfessor Hugh Mellor Cambridge UniversityProfessor Adrian Moore St Hugh's College OxfordMr Daniel Morgan University of BarcelonaDr Joe Morrison Queen's University BelfastMiss Julia Mosquera University of ReadingDr Charlotte Newey Cardiff UniversityMrs Geraldine Ng University of ReadingProfessor Paul Noordhof University of YorkProfessor Lucy O'Brien UCLDr Dan O'brien Oxford BrookesMr Sergi Oms University of Barcelona, LogosMr Jonathan Payton University of TorontoDr Francis Pearson Durham UniversityDr Glen Pettigrove University of AucklandDr Robert Pezet University of LeedsProfessor Herman Philipse Utrecht University, The NetherlandsDr Alexandra Plakias Hamilton CollegeMr Jack Price Cardiff UniversityDr Lubomira Radoilska University of KentDr Clea F Rees Cardiff UniversityDr Lynette Reid Dalhousie UniversityMr Lloyd Robert Reinhardt Sydney Uni retiredDr Stephanie Rennick Cardiff UniversityDr Adam Rieger University of GlasgowMs Cristina Roadevin University of SheffieldDr Simon Robertson Cardiff UniversityDr Richard Rowland Australian Catholic University

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Dr Lea Salje Leeds UniversityMr Jules Salomone CUNY - The Graduate CenterMs Jospehine Salverda Aristotelian Society / UCLDr Sebastian Sanhueza Rodriguez Pontifical Catholic University of ChileDr John Saunders Cardiff UniversityDr Sarah Sawyer University of SussexProfessor Thomas Schramme Hamburg UniversityDr Christoph Schuringa NCHDr Nicholas Shackel Cardiff UniversityDr Yonatan Shemmer University of SheffieldMr Henry Shevlin CUNY Graduate CenterMr Lukas Skiba University of CambridgeMr Benjamin Smart ENCAP, Cardiff UniversityDr Benjamin Smart University of JohannesburgProfessor Paul Francis Snowdon UCLProfessor Matthew Soteriou University of WarwickDr Maja Spener University of BirminghamMr Charles Starkey Clemson UniversityProfessor Sharon Street New York UniversityDr Ema Sullivan-Bissett University of BirminghamDr Kirk Surgener University of WarwickProfessor Alessandra Tanesini Cardiff UniversityDr Henry Taylor University of CambridgeDr Christine Tiefensee Frankfurt School of Finance & ManagementMrs Alison Toop University of LeedsMiss Caroline Touborg University of St AndrewsDr Robert Trueman University of CambridgeMr Kei Udono University of ReadingDr Nick Unwin Lancaster UniversityDr Laura Valentini LSEDr Naomi van Steenbergen Utrecht UniversityMr Daniel Vanello WarwickDr Daniel von Wachter IAP LiechtensteinDr Verena Wagner University of KonstanzMiss Natalia Waights Hickman University of OxfordDr Barnaby Walker University of WarwickMr Martin Warner University of WarwickDr Jonathan Webber Cardiff UniversityDr Christiana Werner Goettingen UniversityDr Jan Westerhoff University of OxfordDr Graham White Queen Mary, University of LondonDr Daniel Whiting University of SouthamptonDr Demian Whiting University of HullDr Nathan Wildman University of HamburgProfessor J Robert Williams University of LeedsDr Stephen Wright Jesus College, University of OxfordMr Wesley Wrigley University of CambridgeMr Nick Young Universiteit AntwerpenMr Ruoyu Zhang Durham UniversityDr Robin Zheng University of Cambridge

Joint SessionConference DinnerMarble Hall,Cardiff City Hall

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