Format: Talk followed by Q&A.
Abstract. "Ordinary thought recognizes many ways of knowing a fact: one can see, remember, intuit, deduce, or read online that some fact obtains, for example. But fundamentally speaking, how many ways of knowing are there? Most epistemologists are pluralists: they think several ways are equally fundamental. But I prefer a form of monism I call presentationalism. According to presentationalism, all ways of knowing a fact involve presentations of that fact, and the converse of the factive presentation relation is the sole fundamental way of knowing. I defend presentationalism on the basis of its simplicity and explanatory power in three stages. I begin by noting that it is already compelling about three central ways of knowing—viz., perceiving, episodically remembering, and intuiting. I then argue that it is consistent with common sense to extend presentationalism to knowledge by inference, testimony, and semantic memory. I admit this extension has surprising implications given common assumptions about presentations and the structure of justification. But in the final key stage, I show that resistance to these implications rests on questionable further assumptions about the relationship between the structure of knowledge and the structure of justification. I conclude by previewing how my defense of presentationalism doubles as a defense of an account of knowledge according to which it is that factive mental state which, when occurrent, presents one with a fact." |
Format: Talk followed by Q&A.
Abstract. "Much of our testimony comes in the form of narrative: when we tell each other things, we tell each other stories. I argue that narrative testimony is a far richer phenomenon than the 'simple' testimony traditionally studied by social epistemologists." |
Format: Two thematically related sessions, each featuring a talk followed by seminar discussion with both Tom and Guy.
Details. Over these sessions, Tom Crowther and Guy Longworth will look to some ancient discussions as they bear on questions about the nature of knowledge and related epistemic notions. In his session (23rd Jan), Tom will give a talk about the epistemological affordances of Aristotle's distinction between capacities and their actualisation. This distinction has been mobilised in different ways in some of the 20th century and contemporary work on knowledge. Tom will tentatively suggest that there are reasons to be sceptical about some of the ways this distinction has been mobilised, and hopes to go on to say something more positive about a) the role that this distinction might play in helping us to understand the epistemic role of the perspective that one occupies in being wakefully conscious, and b) (more speculatively) about why reflection on this role might be of more general epistemological significance. In the following week (30th Jan), Guy will give a talk about the epistemology of testimony in the Thaetetus. His focus will be the so-called 'Jury Passage', at 201a-c. |
Format: Talk followed by Q&A. If you want to read Daniele's paper before the session, it is available here ... but prior familiarity with the paper will not be assumed.
Abstract. "In this paper, I argue that a serious philosophical investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary is both possible and desirable, and I show that it possesses a distinctively moral dimension that has so far been overlooked. I start, in Section II, by offering an original characterisation of the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary derived from the degree of predictability and stability that differentiates their respective effects. In Section III, I argue that, in order to grasp the specificity of the perlocutionary, we must focus on the total speech situation, which I define as conversation. Then, in Section IV, I show that an investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary requires us to draw a conceptual distinction between recognition and acknowledgment. This distinction proves to be crucial, because the success of perlocutions normally depends on something more than what Austin calls the ‘securing of uptake’: the reciprocity condition for illocutions needs to be supplemented, in the case of perlocutions, with an analysis of what I call the ‘grammar of acknowledgment.’ Lastly, in Section V, I elaborate the notion of ‘perlocutionary responsibility,’ a specific form of moral responsibility for the consequences of utterances that are not (entirely) predictable." |
Format: Talk followed by Q&A. If you want to read Peter's paper before the session, it is available here ... but prior familiarity with the paper will not be assumed.
Abstract. Alongside his much-discussed theory that humans are permanently, if only tacitly, self-aware, Avicenna proposed that in actively conscious self-knowers the subject and object of thought are identical. He applies to both humans and God the slogan that the self-knower is “intellect, intellecting, and object of intellection (‘aql, ‘āqil, ma‘qūl)”. This paper examines reactions to this idea in the Islamic East from the 12th-13th centuries. A wide range of philosophers such as Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Šahrastānī, Šaraf al-Dīn al-Mas‘ūdī, al-Abharī, al-Āmidī, and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī raised and countered objections to Avicenna's position. One central problem was that on widely accepted definitions of knowledge – according to which knowledge is representational or consists in a relation – it seems impossible for the subject and object of knowledge to be the same. Responses to this difficulty included the idea that a self-knower is “present” to itself, or that here subject and object are different only in “aspect (i‘tibār)”. |
Format: Talk followed by Q&A.
Abstract. Sometime in 1793 or 1794, the German philosopher, physicist, and aphorist George Christoph Lichtenberg writes in his notebook: ‘One should say it is thinking, just as one says, it is lightning. To say cogito is already too much as soon as one translates it as I am thinking. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement’ (my translation). Lichtenberg’s claim was influential on a range of philosophers, including Ernst Mach, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. But – I’ll suggest – the problem which he is pressing has been misunderstood. I’ll try and set out the nature of the puzzle and explain why it has force. It will raise a set of questions about the kind of agency involved in conscious thought. |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. Epistemic democracy is standardly characterized in terms of “aiming at truth”. This presupposes a veritistic conception of epistemic value, according to which truth is the fundamental epistemic goal. I will raise two objections to the standard (veritistic) account of epistemic democracy, focusing specifically on deliberative democracy. I then propose a version of deliberative democracy that is grounded in non-veritistic epistemic goals. In particular, I argue that deliberation is valuable because it facilitates empathetic understanding. I claim that empathetic understanding is an epistemic good that doesn’t have truth as its primary goal. |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. What is to know someone? The question is rarely considered as a separate issue in epistemology, though it arises in many guises in everyday life. Grammatically, it is a form of objectual or relational knowledge. But is this grammar just skin deep? In the first part of the talk I lay out what I take to be fairly commonsense characterisations of our knowledge of people, all of which suggest that is has a sui generis form not shared with any other kinds of knowledge, including other kinds of objectual knowledge. In the second part I gesture very briefly at the potential implications of putting such knowledge centre stage when considering other issues, such as: the kind of understanding we employ when thinking about people; the relation between knowledge and the emotions, knowledge and ethics, and self-knowledge. |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. Schopenhauer praises solitude and derides sociability. An active mind requires solitude, and tolerance of solitude requires an active mind, thus a capacity for solitude is an intellectual virtue, he reasons. The need for sociability, a sign of an inactive mind, is solitude’s opposite vice. Time has not been kind to this view. It is now widely accepted, and has scarcely been more apparent, that human beings are ineluctably social creatures, and better off that way. Worse still, Schopenhauer’s praise of solitude jars with his praise of worldliness as another intellectual virtue. Thinkers should learn from experience of the world, he believes; but can thinkers be both worldly and solitary? How can they know more about the world by getting out in it less? I propose a reading of Schopenhauer’s praise of the intellectual virtue of solitude which is neither insensitive to the patent human need for sociability, nor inconsistent with the intellectual virtue of worldliness. |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
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Abstract. When we disagree about the meaning and value of works of art, we do not always bother to argue about it, but sometimes we do. Arguments about art can be pursued seriously, and such disagreements can mark somehow important faultlines between people. What are these disagreements about, why are they difficult to resolve, and what can be learned from them? Stanley Cavell says that ‘the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs’ (MWMWWS, 86). Responding to Cavell and to some work by Fabian Dorsch, both of whom defend the unusual rationality of aesthetic judgement and argument, I will resist some of the ‘particularising’ accounts of the difficulty of these practices. I will also make some not-well-defended claims about the role of reasons in the context of artistic evaluation. |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
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Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. According to Locke, memory is the power of the mind "to revive perceptions which it once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before". I will refer to theories that fit Locke's general description as 'two-factor theories' of memory, and I will assume that they are meant specifically to provide an account of episodic memory. Such two-factories have been very popular historically, and they have seen a resurgence in recent years, because they are seen to be in line with certain empirical findings about the neural structures underpinning episodic memory. I will sketch a number of problems facing two-factor theories of episodic memory, and suggest that they have a common root, which is that the concept of knowledge is absent from the account two factor theories give of episodic memory. An account that instead puts centre stage the idea that episodic memory involves the retention of a certain type of knowledge can avoid the problems that two-factor theories of episodic memory face. |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. One kind of everyday understanding that we seek has to do with making sense of what someone’s getting at or on about with her initially opaque words or actions. The retrieval of such meaning is a mainstay of everyday life and an ambition that psychology often brings with it to the clinical setting – even when the thought there under consideration is psychotic. It’s also presupposed by such efforts at understanding, causally, why the patient thinks as she does as invoke the notion of a mistake or illusion: we can’t understand why someone makes a particular mistake unless we already understand something of its content. (The understanding here is captured by suggestions like: ‘Were I in her cognitive/perceptual/somatosensory/existential/environmental predicament, I’d come to that conclusion too’). In this paper I suggest that certain theories of thought disorder, passivity experience and delusion – theories which hope to understand the patient by retrieving his speaker’s meaning – radically fail. They do so because they trade on an alienated conception of ordinary mental life which is itself only sustained by illusions of sense; they attempt to reduce delusion to illusion; and they fail the patient by evading the fact of, rather than meeting him in the midst of, his brokenness. Despite the impossibility of retrieving speaker’s meaning from truly psychotic discourse, this does not render unavailable other forms of understanding (symbolic/motivational, neurological, situational etc.) of the psychotic subject. Even so, if we’re to achieve, with the psychotic subject, that (moral) form of understanding which can be said to be shown someone, we must first learn to avoid the temptation of attributing speaker’s or agent’s meaning to his psychotic words and acts. To this end this paper outlines what I’ll call an ‘apophatic’ (as opposed to a ‘cataphatic’) psychopathology. This ‘apophatic’ approach aims at understanding the patient not through positively understanding her words’ meaning but instead through understanding just why some of the things we’re most tempted to say of her fail her. |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. Intentional agents seem to have a distinctive ‘first-personal’ way of knowing what they are doing (Anscombe’s ‘practical knowledge’) as well as, connectedly, a distinctive ‘first-personal’ way of understanding why they are doing it, in terms of their practical reasons. In this talk I consider a puzzle generated by two further plausible suggestions: traits of character play an essential (if perhaps implicit) role in reason-giving explanations of intentional actions; but we have no first-person knowledge of our character. I won’t try to solve the puzzle, merely to get a better understanding of it (drawing on work by Hursthouse, Kant, and Montaigne). |
Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. In chapter 2 of Individuals, Strawson (1959) explores the case of a purely auditory world, which he considers to be exempt of material things, to test whether there could be a conceptual scheme that accommodates the existence of objective particulars which does not rely on material things. Strawson’s assessment of a purely auditory world raises a question as to whether purely auditory perceptual experience does enable direct cognitive contact with an objective, material world. I pursue the thesis that the purely auditory delivers materiality through the notion of force. My leading reasoning is that (1) insofar as exertion of force is a mark of materiality, and (2) insofar as force is apparent in purely auditory perceptual experience, (3) there is a mark of materiality that is apparent in auditory perceptual experience. On this occasion, I focus on providing motivation for the claim that (2) force is apparent in auditory perceptual experience by defending the thesis that it is possible to directly observe force in things interacting at a distance from one. My strategy is to argue that a cogent explanation of our ability to successfully act or bring about the desired changes in the world requires that we are capable to perceptually observe the force that objects exert at a distance from us. Accepting that force is observable at a distance from one brings us a step closer to the view that force is apparent in auditory perceptual experience of collisions. The plan is to then use this insight as a starting point to defend, at a later stage, the thesis that purely auditory perceptual experience provides us with the material to justify the objectivity of our sensory experience. |
** Originally I had planned a mini-workshop on the epistemology of mind for this date with Ben Sorgiovanni, Giulia Luvisotto, and Maria Corrado. Due to moving things online, Maria will deliver this session, and we will have an in-person event with Ben and Giulia later in 2020.
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Format: Online talk followed by Q&A
Abstract. Plato is known for his low opinion of the epistemic achievements of the many. He usually grants knowledge (epistēmē or technē) only to the expert or master dialectician, but in the First Alcibiades Socrates seems to agree with Alcibiades that even the many have some knowledge – they know Greek (111c3). In this paper I ask what, if anything, the many actually know in knowing Greek. What kind of grasp of reality must they have, according to Plato, in order to be competent users of language, and can knowledge of language be had independently of knowledge of the world? I argue that Plato structures the First Alcibiades so as to draw a parallel between playing games and using language, suggesting a continuum between basic language mastery and philosophical inquiry or dialectic. According to this view, gaining knowledge of a language, and learning or inquiring about the things talked about are – at least within virtuous linguistic communities – two sides of the same coin. I argue that this role of language is illustrated in the famous questioning of the slave in the Meno, before looking at the puzzling discussion of names, and the understanding embedded in them, in the Cratylus. Ellisif adds: "This is very much a work in progress, and I am very grateful for this opportunity to discuss it. Any comments and suggestions, whether exegetical or not, will be very much appreciated. " |