Our Next Event

Friday, February 10, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Ironic Wrongdoing and the Arc of the Universe"
Randall Auxier, Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University

Is there a pragmatic middle ground between the Rortyan retreat into private final vocabularies on one side, and the absolutist claims of religious and moral dogmatists on the other? Is there an objective moral order to the universe that is at least pragmatically knowable? I will defend a version of moral objectivity, some would call it "moral realism", that reconstructs the crucial concept of irony, along historical and moral lines, using Peirce's pragmatic maxim.

SPRING 2012
[Students in PHIL 482: Living Philosophers Colloquium, first meeting 1/27/12. Contact Prof. Woodbridge at ]

1. Friday, January 27, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Good to Know"
Earl Conee, Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester

When we wonder, we want to know. Knowledge is a satisfactory conclusion to inquiries born of amazement, curiosity, and the like. Accepting a correct reasonable conjecture, or otherwise having a true belief that falls short of knowledge, appears to be a less satisfactory outcome. Why? Similarly, why does knowledge appear to be a more attractive intellectual relation to a true proposition than belief that is not knowledge? A traditional conception of factual knowledge yields answers to these questions that support the genuineness of these apparent assets of knowledge. The traditional view is that knowledge is justified true belief with a fourth condition to block Gettier cases. From this conception we can develop better accounts of our interest in knowledge and its value than we can derive from alternative views, such as those focused on safety or virtue. The traditional conception best explains why knowledge is worth having.



2. Friday, February 3, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Properties and Powers, Subsets and Similarities"
Paul Audi, Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska-Omaha

According to the causal theory of properties (CTP), properties are individuated by the causal powers that they, as a matter of necessity, confer on the things that have them. CTP is a very powerful theory of properties, and appears to provide tidy accounts of property realization and associated phenomena such as multiple realizability and the causal efficacy of multiply realizable properties. But is CTP ultimately the correct view of properties? After distinguishing various versions of CTP and distilling the core principles to which all versions are committed, I will argue that CTP is substantially less plausible than it initially appears, as is its treatment of multiply realized properties. My objections concern the nature of causal powers and of the relation between powers and properties.



3. Friday, February 10, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Ironic Wrongdoing and the Arc of the Universe"
Randall Auxier, Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University

Is there a pragmatic middle ground between the Rortyan retreat into private final vocabularies on one side, and the absolutist claims of religious and moral dogmatists on the other? Is there an objective moral order to the universe that is at least pragmatically knowable? I will defend a version of moral objectivity, some would call it "moral realism", that reconstructs the crucial concept of irony, along historical and moral lines, using Peirce's pragmatic maxim.



4. Friday, February 17, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"System Dynamics of Scientific Controversy"
Albert DiCanzio, School of Business and Technology, Webster University

Models of scientific revolution have entailed controversy about how a new scientific paradigm gains acceptance. A perspective on controversy seemingly under-represented by the quantity of literature about it is that of system dynamics, modeling the flow of feedback from events of a controversy to decision-making agents. Do the data of the Galileo controversy exhibit looping behavior that can be studied to gain insight into the 17th century shift in terrestrial dynamics and a consequent shift, from that time ongoing to the present time, in the view of the scholarly community as to how innovation is best managed? Data from the original Galileo affair and from a four-century long controversy, in which that affair has been subjected to repeated scrutiny, are available to address such an issue. The aim of this colloquium is to review a sample of earlier work on the modeling of a scientific revolution using system-dynamics methodology, and to identify dynamic attractors influencing feedback loops in scientific controversy.



5. Friday, March 2, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Religious Credence =/= Factual Belief"
Neil Van Leeuwen, Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University

I argue that psychology and epistemology should classify religious credence and factual belief as distinct cognitive attitudes, despite the fact that common parlance uses the same word ("belief") for both of them. This is a thesis about attitudes, not contents. Just as fictional imagining and assumption for the sake of argument are different cognitive attitudes from factual belief, so too is religious credence. I argue for this thesis by identifying properties of factual belief that are needed to characterize factual belief and distinguish it from other attitudes. Then I note that religious credence generally lacks these properties. Furthermore, religious credence has characteristic properties of its own that factual belief generally lacks. To summarize: factual belief (1) is practical setting independent, (2) has cognitive governance over other attitudes, and (3) is evidentially vulnerable; by way of contrast, religious credence (a) has perceived moral orientation, (b) is susceptible to free elaboration, and (c) is vulnerable to moral authority. Toward the end of the paper, I propose the normative epistemic principles of Balance and Immunity to enable us better to judge which cognitive attitudes are or are not characteristic of well-functioning cognitive systems.



6. Thursday, March 8, 2012 - 4:00pm, BEH 122
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"Sexual Objectification"
Nancy Bauer, Department of Philosophy, Tufts University

In the past 20 years there has been much theorizing among feminists and other philosophers about the phenomenon of sexual objectification. For the most part, philosophers who write on this subject have had two goals: (1) to specify criteria for what counts as sexual objectification; (2) to say whether sexual objectification is necessarily a bad thing or not. My goal is to suggest that this theorizing is no longer about the actual phenomenon of sexual objectification, if it ever was. I speculate about why we may have drifted away from the real-world problem. I argue that the theoretical lens through which almost all philosophers study sexual objectification--namely, Kant's moral philosophy--distorts the problem, and I suggest that in Simone de Beauvoir's metaphysics we find a better lens through which to keep the actual phenomenon in view and to inspire people in the real world to strive to change things.



7. Friday, March 9, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Reference and Vagueness"
Mark Richard, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University

There seems to be a quick argument for the conclusion that it's indeterminate what we refer to with practically all of our names and nouns. The major premise is that names like 'Peter Rabbit' and predicates like 'rabbit' are vague. There are a host of different collections of molecules --surely thousands, perhaps millions or even billions--such that it is utterly indeterminate which of those collections collects all and only the molecules that are part of Peter Rabbit. Thus, there are a host of different objects--surely thousands, perhaps millions or even billions--such that it is indeterminate which of them the name 'Peter Rabbit' refers to. Likewise for the noun 'rabbit'--there are countless disjoint candidates for its extension. Likewise for pretty much every name and noun.
There are, so far as I can see, three responses one might make. One might say heroically, with Williamson, that vagueness is epistemic and so reference to rabbits is determinate. One might, with McGee, say that vagueness is not merely epistemic and that reference is indeed inscrutable. Or one might say, with McGee, that vagueness is not merely epistemic--that it is indeed indeterminate what molecules make up Peter--but still our names and nouns and have (for the most part) a determinate reference. After critically exploring Williamson's and McGee's views, this paper develops a version of the last response to the argument.



8. Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"Are All Rights Human Rights? "
Susan Meld Shell, Department of Political Science, Boston College

If we grant the same rights to animals (on the political left) or corporations (on the right) as are recognized in individual humans, are we benignly extending the idea of universal rights to non-humans? Or are we making it more difficult for the concept of "rights" to bear the moral weight that we have come to place on it? This talk will consider changes in the meaning of human rights.
Sponsored by the University Forum Lecture Series and the UNLV Political Science Dept.



9. Friday, March 16, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Mereology and Modality"
Gabriel Uzquiano, Department of Philosophy, University of Southern California

Can mereological wholes change their parts? While classical mereology does not directly speak to this question, its proponents often answer the question negatively. The paper offers a reason why they should, and, more generally, sets out to clarify what is at stake in the debate over the modal profile of wholes.



10. Friday, March 23, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Metaphysical Safety: From Platonism to Noneism via Hume's Principle"
Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson, Department of Philosophy, University of Groningen

If Hume's Principle is analytic, then so too are the truths of arithmetic, and a type of logicism is correct. A major obstacle for a proponent of the analyticity of Hume's Principle to overcome is that Hume's Principle is said to fail to satisfy a condition that any statement must satisfy if it is to be analytic--that it be ontologically neutral. I will argue that no matter where we situate ourselves on the spectrum of ontological commitment, Hume's Principle does not violate ontological neutrality.



11. Friday, April 13, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"We Have Met The State and She are Us: Understanding, Power, and Anarchist Transformation"
Mark Lance, Department of Philosophy and Program on Justice and Peace, Georgetown University

Anarchism is a theory both of social transformation and of social organization that rejects institutions based on domination, coercion, and hierarchy, while embracing cooperative modes of interaction: mutual aid, solidarity, horizontalism, and free association. "No Gods, No masters, only comrades!" is a familiar rallying cry, but for all the consistency of emphasis, it remains far from clear just what any of this--starting with the very distinction between hierarchy and free association--amounts to. In this paper, I pull together themes from philosophers such as Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Bob Brandom, and John Haugeland, anarchist theorists Gustav Landauer, Murray Bookchin, and Colin Ward, and the theorist of nonviolent action Gene Sharp to sketch an understanding of the nature of social hierarchy that highlights a crucial and under-appreciated challenge to liberatory revolution. My goal is not so much to solve theoretical puzzles, or to respond to other political philosophers, as it is to shed light on the strategic path we should take in building a movement. In the end, I argue, radical change requires a systematic constructive project that recognizes at the outset that we ourselves--whatever our political positions or allegiances--are deeply implicated in structures of hierarchy.



12. Friday, April 20, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"TBD"
TBD, Department of Philosophy, University of XX



13. Friday, April 27, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"TBD"
TBD, Department of Philosophy, University of XX



14. Friday, May 4, 2012 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"TBD"
TBD, Department of Philosophy, University of XX

FALL 2011

0. Friday, September 2, 2011 - 3:00pm, The Whiskey Attic (Note the place!)
"What I Did over Summer Break"
The Faculty, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas



1. Friday, September 9, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Information Manipulation and Moral Responsibility"
Todd Long, Department of Philosophy, California Polytechnic State University

I am concerned with the following question: Can we be morally responsible for our actions when they are the result of deliberation based on manipulated information? Using examples and some more-or-less theory neutral ideas, I argue that the answer is 'yes': information manipulation does not preclude morally responsible action, even when the manipulation is so radical that the agent would not have performed that action if the manipulation had not occurred. This result has important consequences for the debate over whether compatibilist theories of moral responsibility (i.e., those which entail that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism) can provide a plausible, principled distinction between compatibilist-friendly processes that result in morally responsible action and externally manipulated action for which the agent is clearly not morally responsible. Critics (such as Derk Pereboom) say that no such principled distinction can be provided. But, I argue that the most highly regarded compatibilist theory--Fischer and Ravizza's mechanism-based 'guidance control' theory--has the resources to provide such a distinction. This is because their theory distinguishes between the psychological mechanism that produces responsible actions and the inputs to that mechanism. My argument depends on my claim that Fischer and Ravizza's theory allows for morally responsible actions to flow from psychological mechanisms whose inputs have been so radically manipulated that the agent would not have performed those actions had the manipulation not occurred. I respond to some recent objections from Fischer himself, and I finish by showing how this result provides the basis for a principled response to Derk Pereboom's four-case argument objection to compatibilism.



2. Friday, September 23, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Destroying Artworks"
Marcus Rossberg, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut

This paper investigates feasible ways of destroying artworks, assuming they are abstract objects, or works of a particular artform, where the works of at least this artform are assumed to be abstracta. To this end, three "case studies" are investigated: conceptual art, music, and computer art, to try and determine whether for any of these an abstract ontology is plausible. If artworks are eternal, mind-independent abstracta and hence discovered, rather than created, then they cannot be destroyed, but merely forgotten or become inaccessible. Alternative conceptions of artworks as abstract objects, however, hold that there might be logical space for artwork destruction. Artworks as abstracta have been likened to impure sets (i.e., sets of concrete things, as opposed to pure sets, i.e., sets of nothing but other sets) that have a beginning in time, namely when their members come into being, and an end in time, namely when their members cease to exist. Alternatively, artworks as abstracta have been thought of as Aristotelian universals which have no being over and above their instances, or types that are created with their first token. Artwork destruction is harder on the latter account: merely destroying every token might not yet destroy the type. To what extent such similes can be spelled out and made plausible as an ontology of artworks, and what options there are on the different accounts for artwork destruction, is explored in this paper.



3. Thursday, September 29, 2011 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog, or a Chicken: Why You Shouldn't Eat Meat"
Alastair Norcross, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado

If someone were to torture dogs just for human pleasure, we would be outraged (remember Michael Vick?), and rightly so. But every year in the US alone, billions of animals suffer horribly while being intensively reared for human consumption. Given the easy availability of cheap vegetarian foods, eating meat is no more essential to human well-being than is attendance at dog-fighting events. Why think it's acceptable to do to chickens, pigs, and veal calves what would be unconscionable to do to dogs? This talk will present arguments against eating meat from a utilitarian position, through consideration of the net pain involved beyond whatever pleasure or contribution to human well-being an action, practice or institution might produce.
Co-sponsored by The University Forum Lecture Series.



4. Friday, September 30, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Deontology, Using, and Causal Fetishism"
Alastair Norcross, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado

This is part of an attempt to distinguish between consequentialism and deontology, and to understand the nonconsequentialist mindset. First, identify three theses accepted by all versions of consequentialism, two of which are also widely accepted by nonconsequentialists. I then focus on the third thesis, the rejection of which is characteristic of many nonconsequentialist appproaches. I then identify two contrasting methodologies of constructing ethical theories, one (roughly) characteristic of most consequentialist approaches, and the other of most deontological approaches. I identify a shared characteristic of many deontological approaches, that reject the third thesis. Such approaches, in constructing nonconsequentialist constraints against producing harm, fetishize the causal routes from actions to effects. I consider an alternative justification for rejecting the third thesis, involving attaching deontic moral significance to certain subjective attitudes, and argue that this justification is also unsatisfactory.



5. Friday, October 7, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Metalinguistic Descriptivism for Millians"
Alexis Burgess, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Metalinguistic descriptivism (MLD) is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to definite descriptions featuring metalinguistic expressions. According to Kent Bach's version of MLD, when 'Virginia Woolf' crops up in a sentence like 'Nobody's afraid of my neighbor Virginia Woolf', the name expresses the property of bearing 'Virginia Woolf'. For present purposes, I take it as read that MLD fares better than other forms of descriptivism when it comes to Kripke's epistemic and semantic arguments, and that his circularity objection rests on the dispensable assumption that MLD purports to provide a theory of reference for proper names. There is much less consensus, however, about how the proponent of MLD might best reply to (i) Kripke's modal argument against descriptivism in general, and (ii) various charges to the effect that the view is simply ad hoc. Drawing on resources from conceptual-role semantics, the present paper develops and defends a novel yet natural version of the claim that proper names are semantically equivalent to "nominal descriptions" against these two recalcitrant lines of objection. But metalinguistic descriptivists beware: the result is actually compatible with Millianism.



6. Friday, October 14, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Repeatable Artworks and Genericity"
Shieva Kleinschmidt and Jacob Ross, Department of Philosophy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

We seem to talk about repeatable artworks, like symphonies, plays, films, and novels, all the time. We say things like, "The Moonlight Sonata has three movements" and "The Wind in The Willows makes me laugh". But how are these sentences to be understood? We argue against the simple subject/predicate view of these sentences on which the subjects of the sentences refer to individuals, and the sentences are true iff the referents of the subjects have the properties picked out by the predicates. We then consider two alternative responses that involve reading these sentences as generics, the first of which takes the sentences to be about kinds, and the second which takes the relevant noun-phrases to act as predicates. We reject these alternative accounts, but offer a third alternative that is informed by both.



7. Friday, October 21, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Non-Rational Action in the Face of Disagreement"
Nikolaj Pedersen, Underwood International College, Yonsei University

Recently there has been a surge of interest in the intersection between epistemology and action theory, especially in principles linking justification (or rationality) in thought and justification (or rationality) in action. Recently there has also been a surge of interest in the epistemic significance of perceived peer disagreement: what, epistemically speaking, is the rational response in light of disagreement with someone whom one regards as an epistemic peer? First, I will turn to the idea that the normative standing of our actions depends on the normative standing of our beliefs. This is an idea that I endorse. More precisely, I will endorse a principle according to which adequate epistemic justification for beliefs pertaining to success conditions for a given goal-directed action is a necessary condition on rational execution of that action. Second, against the background of this principle, I offer a criticism of non-conformism, one of the main views on disagreement's epistemic significance.



8. Friday, November 4, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Relativism Without Relative Truth"
Lionel Shapiro, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut

In much-discussed recent work, John MacFarlane defends a "relativist" account of the contents expressed using, e.g., predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals. My aim in this talk is to show how the central thrust of MacFarlane's account can be appreciated independently of his own framework of relative truth. My starting point will be Robert Brandom's analysis of the normative structure of assertoric practice. By generalizing that structure, I will make room for propositions whose use in assertion resembles the use of those propositions MacFarlane describes as having different truth-values relative to different contexts of assessment. (In place of MacFarlane's truth relativism, we obtain an assertoric force relativism.) I will argue that my proposal has the advantage of supplying a clearer underlying rationale for an essential feature of MacFarlane's account of assertion--the form taken by a norm governing retraction of assertions. Viewed from the perspective I will present, the space of theoretical options takes on a new shape. The sort of theory typically classified as "moderate" relativism, in contrast to MacFarlane's own "radical" relativism, turns out to require the more radical modification to Brandom's pragmatics.



9. Friday, November 11, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Speaking and Thinking"
Rebecca Kukla, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University

This paper is based on collaborative work with Mark Lance. It is common for philosophers to understand thinking and speaking as fundamentally analogous activities, where the primary difference between them is that thought episodes are 'inner' whereas utterances are 'outer'. We argue that the inner/outer distinction is an unhelpful one for understanding the thought/language distinction. While there is an important sense in which thought is essentially 'private' and language is essentially 'public', we should not understand the relevant senses of privacy and publicity as tracking a distinction between 'inner' and 'outer'. In particular, pragmatists such as Sellars should be especially loath to understand thoughts as cases of 'inner speech'. We offer an account within which thought is importantly dependent upon language but not analogous to it, from a pragmatic point of view.



10. Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - 5:30pm, Greenspun Hall Auditorium
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires"
Carol Graham, Senior Fellow and Charles Robinson Chair in Foreign Policy Studies, Foreign Policy, Global Economy and Development Unit, The Brookings Institute

For centuries the pursuit of happiness was the preserve of philosophers. More recently there is a burgeoning interest in the study of happiness in the social sciences. Can we really answer the question what makes people happy? Is it grounded in credible methods and data? Is there consistency in the determinants of happiness across countries and cultures? Are happiness levels innate to individuals or can policy and the environment make a difference? How is happiness affected by poverty and by progress? This presentation introduces a line of research which is both an attempt to understand the determinants of happiness and a tool for understanding the effects of a host of phenomena on human well being, ranging from macroeconomic and political trends to inequality, disease, and crime. The author will discuss the potential of happiness surveys to contribute to better public policy, as well as the potential pitfalls.
Presented by The Brookings Institute



11. Friday, November 18, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Immorality, Self-Respect, and Happiness"
Paul Bloomfield, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Since "the dawn of moral philosophy", we have been vexed by the question of whether or not morality is capable of justifying itself when compared with immorality which may be practiced with impunity. Why be moral, which may require sacrifices to self-interest, if one can immorally pursue self-interest and "get away with it"? Two arguments for the harm of immorality will be given, both based on the assumption that self-respect is necessary for happiness. One argument is based on ontological considerations, the other is epistemic. Both conclude that immorality interferes with its perpetrators' self-respect and thereby with their happiness, turning the dialectical table on the defenders of immorality.



12. Friday, December 2, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 213
"Existence Monism Trumps Priority Monism"
Terry Horgan, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona

Jonathan Schaffer has recently been defending a version of ontological monism concerning concrete objects that he calls "priority monism"--the view that the whole cosmos is the only ontologically fundamental concrete object, and that although there are numerous concrete objects in the correct ontology that are proper parts of the whole, nevertheless the whole is ontologically prior to all these part-objects. He contrasts this view with what he calls "pluralism"--the view that the right ontology contains numerous concrete objects that are proper parts of the whole cosmos, and that these parts are ontologically prior to the whole. He also contrasts priority monism with what he calls "existence monism"--the view that the whole cosmos is itself the only concrete object, and that the right ontology does not contain any concrete objects that are proper parts of the whole. Matjaz Potrc and I have recently been defending a form of existence monism. In the present paper our principal goal is to argue that existence monism is theoretically preferable to priority monism. For present purposes, we will assume for argument's sake that Schaffer's arguments in favor of priority monism over pluralism are sound. We will harness those arguments, together with an argument of our own to the effect that ontological vagueness is impossible, to mount a case in favor of existence monism over priority monism.

SPRING 2011

1. Friday, January 21, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Saying More with Less"
Stephen Yablo, Department of Philosophy, MIT

Sentences don't always say what their standing meanings would seem to suggest, or even allow. Kendall Walton offers one strategy for explaining this: "piggybacking on a pretense." Robert Stalnaker hints at another strategy: "pivoting on a presupposition." I develop the second strategy and argue that a lot of what has been done with pretense can be replayed in the key of presupposition.



2. Friday, January 28, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Reading Kierkegaard"
Erik Lindland, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Were Kierkegaard's most famous texts: Fear and Trembling, Either-Or, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments or Sickness Unto Death written by Soren Kierkegaard? Not according to Kierkegaard. Instead they were penned by pseudonyms.
This talk will attempt to make sense of Kierkegaard's assertion without consigning him to the mundane, insane or post-modern.



3. Friday, February 11, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"On the Ethics and Varieties of Deception"
Bryan Benham, Department of Philosophy, University of Utah

Deception is a perplexing moral concept. On the one hand, it is nearly universally condemned by moral philosophers because either it undermines the autonomy of the individual deceived or it threatens social stability in some way. After all, if everyone were dishonest we would not be able to trust others, and trust is the basis of social cooperation. Therefore, deception is a categorical wrong. On the other hand, in everyday life, deception is commonplace and Ð except in few cases - is done with untormented conscience: to protect ones' privacy, maintain a sense of control over uncertainty, enhance our own well-being, protect the feelings of others, and as a "social lubricant". Indeed, imagine a society in which deception was not ubiquitous. In the current paper, I will attempt to explore why there appears to be such a dichotomy with regard to the moral assessment of deception. Briefly, the paradigm case of deception used by moral philosophers is the lie. Lying, however, does not capture the full range of types of deception. Thus, I suggest that if we were to consider more broadly the variety of deception in human interaction, the moral assessment of deception should be appropriately altered. For instance, instead of focusing only on how deception may violate principles of respect, autonomy, or leads to certain undesirable consequences, a look at the variety of deception will reveal that an important element is missing in these traditional accounts. Namely, the nature of the relationship between the deceiver and the deceived. I argue this provides a more complete account of the moral dimensions of deception and eliminates the need to think of deception as a categorical wrong.



4. Friday, February 18, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Incompatibility and the Logic of Proscribed Contents"
Dave Beisecker, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

In this paper I introduce a new kind of propositional content, symbolized by striking through a candidate atomic formula, which is meant to capture, at least in part, the rejection of the actual application of some portion of the subsentential conceptual content of that formula. After showing how such contents can easily be domesticated in terms of Brandom's incompatibility semantics and a Tableau system of logic, I sketch how such contents might be put to good philosophical use in providing a novel kind of response to the conceivability argument against materialism.



5. Friday, February 25, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Thoughts after Anscombe: Intention, Confidence, Likelihood and Intentional Action"
Neil Delaney, Jr., Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

There has been a marked resurgence of interest in logical and practical relations between intention, belief and intentional action both as history of recent analytic philosophy and as a topic of contemporary concern. This talk will examine the viability of a thesis ascribed to Anscombe in the light of a serious objection emerging from Michael Bratman's longstanding work on the Planning Theory of Intention.



6. Friday, March 4, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Logical Theory, Argumentation Theory, and Meta-Argumentation"
Maurice Finocchiaro, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

This is an examination of various conceptions of, and approaches to, the study of argumentation, especially three that may be labeled logical theory, argumentation theory, and meta-argumentation. I plan to examine their similarities and differences, their relative merits, and their comparative prospects. In line with a current book in progress, I would like to be able to show that the meta-argumentation approach is a highly promising approach.



7. Friday, March 25, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"The Relation Between Logic and Ontology in (and After) Kant"
Clinton Tolley, Department of Philosophy, UC San Diego

For a long while, logic was taken to have thought as its subject-matter, while ontology was understood to be the science of being (the science of objects or things 'in general'). One of Kant's central theses in his Critique of Pure Reason is that the basic elements of ontology -- what Kant, following Aristotle, calls 'categories' of things -- can, in fact, be shown to coincide, in some deep sense, with the basic elements of logic -- what Kant calls the 'forms' of thought. Many after Kant have been dissatisfied with this analysis of the relation between logic and ontology, often largely because of the decidedly subjective and idealist tenor that this seems to give to the foundations of what is supposed to be the science of objects. In my presentation, I will try to put a new, softer, less 'subjectivist' light on Kant's views of ontology, first, by taking a closer look at Kant's texts themselves, and in particular at what Kant describes as the 'Metaphysical Deduction' of the categories of ontology from the forms of logic. Secondly, I will try to draw out important, though under-appreciated, parallels between what Kant seems to have in mind and what is claimed by two of his most decidedly anti-subjectivist successors -- Gottlob Frege and the young Edmund Husserl.



8. Friday, April 1, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Is Belief a Propositional Attitude?"
Ray Buchanan, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin

According to proponents of the face-value account, a belief report of the form 'S believes that p' is true if, and only if, the agent believes a proposition referred to by the that-clause in the context of utterance. As against this familiar view, I argue that there are perfectly pedestrian cases of true belief reports of the form 'S believes that p' in which there is no particular proposition that the that-clause, or the speaker using the that-clause, can (in the context of utterance) plausibly be taken as referring to. I show that once appreciate the distinctive way in which the face-value account fails, there is pressure to give up the thesis that belief is a propositional attitude. I suggest that we allow non-propositional entities to be amongst the relata of the belief-relation, and make some brief remarks concerning what such entities might be like. (Access a previously published related paper here.)



9. Friday, April 8, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Religious Belief and Bigotry"
Bill Ramsey, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

It is becoming increasingly common to hear attacks on various religious belief systems characterized as a form of bigotry. The main question I want to address in this talk is this: does it actually make sense to characterize strong criticism and even ridicule of a given belief system as a form of bigotry? Contrary to popular views, I'm going to argue that it does not. I will suggest that while criticism of various religions may be factually mistaken, or intellectually unfair, they are not unethical in the way we normally think that bigotry is unethical. Thus, the growing charge of bigotry in connection to criticisms of religious doctrines and creeds is deeply confused, and detrimental to legitimate public debate. However, despite all this, I will suggest that it is nevertheless possible to be bigoted against people because of their religious beliefs.
To show this, I will first spend some time trying to get a little clearer on just what bigotry is. I'll argue that conventional definitions of bigotry are unacceptable, and I'll try to provide a sketch of what a better conception of bigotry might look like. Then I'll show why I think it is wrong to characterize attacks on religious systems as a form of bigotry. Even though it is possible to display bigotry against individuals who are stereotyped on the basis of their religious beliefs, it is not possible to do so by attacking the nature of what they believe.



10. Thursday, April 14, 2011 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"Representation and Perspective in Science"
Bas van Fraassen, Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University

Science represents the phenomena through theories and models. A particular science, like physics, represents the phenomena in its domain, and, in its own specific way, implicitly represents nature as a whole. Criteria of scientific success pertain first to accuracy and truth, but that is not the whole story. Representation is always selective and may require distortion even in the selected aspects. Observation and measurement are perspectival, and the appearances to be saved are precisely their perspectival outcomes. Thus, the question of what is required for science to "save the phenomena" can provide a new focus for the debate over scientific realism.
Co-sponsored by the Forum Lecture Series and the Dept. of Philosophy



11. Friday, April 15, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"The Self, From a Logical Point of View"
Bas van Fraassen, Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University

Our sense of self is readily extrapolated to engender illusions of reason, as Kant pointed out. But that sense is not easily dismissed even when the logical aporiai are exposed. In this connection, self-reference has been explored a good deal, but that has arguably made the subject only more mysterious. Can we avoid the logical difficulties by trying instead to "naturalize", and understand ourselves in the same way as we understand natural systems or artifacts? There too, logical paradoxes may return.



12. Monday, April 25, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 103
(Note the day and place!)
"Demystifying Dilation" (Download the paper here.)
Gregory Wheeler, CENTRIA (Center for Artificial Intelligence), Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Dilation occurs when upper and lower probability estimates of some event E are properly included in the upper and lower probability estimates of the probability of E conditional on another event F, resulting in a change from a more precise estimate of E to a less precise estimate of E upon learning F. Strict dilation occurs when E is dilated by every event in a partition, which means that sometimes E becomes less precise no matter how an experiment turns out. Many think that strict dilation is a pathological feature of imprecise probability models, while others have thought the problem is with Bayesian updating. However, a point often overlooked in critical discussions of dilation is that knowing that E is stochastically independent of F (for all F in a partition) is sufficient to avoid strict dilation. Since the most sensational alleged dilation examples are those which play up independence between dilator and dilatee, the sensationalism traces to mishandling imprecise probabilities rather than revealing a genuine puzzle about imprecise probabilities.



13. Friday, April 29, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Visual Arguments and Analogies"
Ian Dove, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

In visual argumentation, an image, picture, graph or other visual medium conveys an argument. In this talk, I contrast the use of analogies in non-visual arguments with the apparent use of visual analogies in some visual arguments. In standard analogical argumentation, one draws a conclusion about some target by comparing it to some base. The strength of the inference depends upon elements of the comparison. As is often the case with purported visual argumentation, the visual is more subtle than its non-visual counterpart. The difficulty occurs at the level of analysis. One needs to identify, for example, the visual target and the visual base, which can be exceedingly difficult. Moreover, the comparison need not be visual, even when the analogy is. For example, a print advertisement may suggest a comparison between two brands of motorcycle by visually placing the two brands on separate sides of a balancing scale; yet, the comparison may operate on non-visual elements, such as price. Still, the standard approaches to non-visual analogies can be applied to visual cases. To demonstrate this claim, I analyze a visual analogical argument from a print advertisement and a series of possible visual analogies from scientific and mathematical sources. Insofar as the analyses are successful, the results suggest a close connection between the analysis of visual and standard, non-visual arguments.



14. Friday, May 6, 2011 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"The Wisest of Men but the Worst of Friends: The Problem of Philia for the Stoic Sage"
Julie Piering, Department of Philosophy, Northern Arizona University

Friendship is a part of the Stoic Sage's typical, and even preferable, relationships; it is a rational affiliation which supports philosophical activity as well as a natural relationship stemming from feelings of warmth and sociability. In one sense, a Stoic's philosophical friendship is akin to Aristotle's friendship of the good. However, whereas Aristotle sees the friend as contributing to one's happiness, the Stoics do not. The friend or beloved cannot render the world more beautiful or enjoyable, because it already is perfectly ordered. Similarly his or her absence is merely a part of the best possible universe; to feel more than the initial prick of loss is irrational, futile, and borderline blasphemous. Both the friend and the friendship are properly understood as wholly superfluous. I suggest that this view on friendship is evidence of a failure within the Stoic system in two ways: it fails to adequately make sense of the phenomenon of friendship and therefore suffers a failure of description, but it also is an ethical failure. Friendship matters ethically, and an individual who participates in a relationship that only weakly resembles friendship is, in fact, a bad friend.

FALL 2010

1. Friday, August 27, 2010 - 3:00pm, The Whiskey Attic (Note the place!)
"What I Did over Summer Break"
The Faculty, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas



2. Friday, September 3, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Resituating Description and Direct Reference Theories for Singular Terms"
Darin Dockstader, Department of Philosophy, College of Southern Nevada

I examine the relationship between Description theories of singular reference and Direct Reference theories of singular reference. According to the Description picture, meaning is something that resides in-the-heads of language users. In the Direct Reference picture, meaning is something that resides in-the-marketplace of linguistic social practice. Direct Reference is currently the dominant view. In my view, the received debate between Descriptive and Direct Reference theories is marked by a mistaken tendency to see the choice between these as a dilemma to be resolved by choosing one theory over the other. I begin by identifying the source of the tendency to see the Description / Direct Reference debate as a dilemma and show why the dilemma is unnecessary and unwanted. I then examine aspects of Howard Wettstein's arguments for Direct Reference as a product of the false dilemma. In response to Wettstein, I offer several arguments against reducing reference to social practice. I argue that an account of linguistic competence conditions for singular terms given in a Description framework is complementary to the Direct Reference insight about linguistic social practice. We should separate the issues of what a competent speaker does in an instance of name use and what a competent hearer does in an instance of name use. This demystifies the relationship between Description and Direct Reference theories. The core insights of each strategy are complementary - not incommensurate.



3. Friday, September 10, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Sound and Valid, Signifying Nothing?"
Robert Barnard, Department of Philosophy, University Of Mississippi

I will argue that the apparent ontological commitments of discourse about logic make it very similar to discourse in metaethics and philosophy of mathematics. This is a prima facie challenge to metaphysical naturalism. However, I will note a simple argument for the view that there is reason to think that logical discourse cannot appeal to various eliminative strategies that are used to backstop naturalism in those other areas. Thus, logic is a bigger metaphysical problem for naturalists than might be supposed.



4. Friday, September 17, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Social Construction, Self-Knowledge, and Agency: A Naturalist Model"
Ron Mallon, Department of Philosophy, University of Utah

Social constructionist accounts of human categories (race, gender, emotions, mental illness) are widespread in the humanities and social sciences thought they get little play in philosophy and cognitive science. At the same time, these issues are often connected with important ethical issues. In this talk, I offer a causal model of one of the most radical sorts of claims: the claim that our behavior is a sort of intentional performance, focusing especially upon the failures of self-knowledge such a model would require. Once we understand such failures, however, we see that the constructionists are right: the way we represent ourselves as natural objects can undermine our self-knowledge, and thereby, our individual agency.



CANCELED: 5. Friday, September 24, 2010 - 3:00pm, Philosophy Dept. Conference Room (CDC 425)
"Why Scientists Get Confused about Theory Competition"
Todd Jones, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

We often face a bewildering array of different explanations for the same facts--often from accounts in different disciplines. Incest taboos, for example, might be given biological, psychological, economic, or historical explanations. But we have few guidelines for whether and when we should think of different accounts as competing or compatible. In this talk, I try to offer some clear criteria of when accounts compete and when they are compatible. I also provide a systematic taxonomy of some of the main factors that cause people to make mistakes about explanatory competition: what tends to lead scholars to think that that two or more accounts compete when they really don't, and what tends to lead scholars to think that two accounts don't compete, when they actually do. Such a taxonomy should be useful in helping scholars avoid wasting time discovering who is right when both can be, but to also avoid over-tolerant complacency when two accounts truly preclude each other.



6. Friday, October 1, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Demonstrative Thoughts"
David Pitt, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Los Angeles

Theories on which the intentional contents of conscious thoughts are constituted by a distinctive sort of cognitive phenomenology (by what it's like to have them) are prima facie committed to intrinsicalism about intentional content, according to which the content of a thought is determined by it's intrinsic properties. Such theories are in conflict with an account of the content of demonstrative thoughts (thoughts whose expression involves the use of demonstratives or indexicals) that is a natural extension of the standard account of the semantics of sentences containing demonstratives or indexicals.
If Sam and Dave both say "I'm hungry," the contents of their utterances what they have said are different. And they are different because the referents of their uses of 'I' are different. Hence, the contents of token demonstratives (and of the expressions they appear in) appear to be referent-involving. Likewise if Sam and Dave both think "I'm hungry." The contents of their thoughts will be different, because the referents of their I-concepts are different.
However, since the referents of demonstratives concepts are (typically) not intrinsic features of thoughts, on this construal the content of a thought will be determined by factors extrinsic to it. Hence, on the supposition that phenomenal character is intrinsically determined, demonstrative thought constitutes a counterexample to the thesis that intentional content is phenomenally constituted.
In this paper I argue that the intuitions supporting the standard semantics of demonstratives, and their extension to the contents of demonstrative concepts, are not inevitable, and that there is a workable and intuitively satisfying alternative consistent with intrinsicalism about phenomenally constituted intentional content. On this alternative, Sam and Dave think the same thought albeit about different individuals when each thinks "I'm hungry."



7. Friday, October 8, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Against Explanatory Fundamentalism" (Download an earlier version here.)
Brad Weslake, Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester

According to explanatory fundamentalism, non-fundamental scientific explanations are never superior to corresponding fundamental physical explanations. In this paper I evaluate the prospects for developing a principled rejection of fundamentalism. First, I argue that our theories of explanation should be non-fundamentalist. Second, I argue for an account of explanatory depth that I claim best explains why non-fundamentalism is true. Finally, I consider a difficult problem for the account, reject some recent solutions that have been offered, and defend the solution I prefer.



8. Friday, October 15, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Functionalism about Truth and the Modified Ramsey-Lewis Sentence"
Cory Wright, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach

Dialectically, functionalists about truth make space for their view by muscling out that of a close cousin: pluralism about truth. The rejection is based, inter alia, on arguments for the claim that pluralism is incoherent or otherwise unstable. Functionalists have usually employed Ramsification to produce an implicit definition of the theoretical term true in order to show that their view is appropriately monistic and unequivocal, but can nevertheless accommodate the pluralists' intuitions. In this talk, I show why the instability arguments fail, and then show that employment of Ramsification itself instigates a kind of epistemic circularity; for using it requires determining that the theory which introduces that term is itself true. Without a dissolution, this problem is sufficient to render functionalism about truth inadequate. Lastly, I consider a variety of putative dissolutions to the problem of epistemic circularity---each of which is shown to be unsatisfactory---and then offer a solution on functionalists' behalf. The upshot, however, is that they must tread on their anti-pluralist commitments.



9. Thursday, November 4, 2010 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"Portraits and the Fear of Death" (University Forum Lecture)
Cynthia Freeland, Department of Philosophy, University of Houston

Human cultures create and value portraiture in part because it preserves the memory of the deceased. Tonight our speaker explains how portraits sustain emotional links to the beloved or respected person, and how even photographs may sometimes be treated as religious icons in order to provide continued contact with the dead. She argues against focusing on the causal aspects of photography to explain the phenomenon, in favor of looking at broader cultural practices of commemoration. Co-sponsored by the UNLV Department of Art.



10. Friday, November 5, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Icon and Index Revisited: Photographic Realism and Medical Imaging Technologies"
Cynthia Freeland, Department of Philosophy, University of Houston

This paper explores a range of medical imaging technologies that challenge the icon/index distinction articulated by C.S. Peirce, ranging from electrocardiograms to X-rays, ultrasounds, and fMRI images of the brain. I question the nature of realism in such images, challenging some commonly held views about the "transparency" of photographic images. To highlight the role of interpretation and aesthetic choice in the new imaging technologies, I discuss work by various artists who have used "automatic" imaging technologies for creative purposes, including Robert Rauschenberg, Gary Schneider, Gabriele Leidloff, Gabriel de la Mora, and Wim Delvoye.



11. Friday, November 12, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Ontological Reduction and the Wave Function Ontology"
Alyssa Ney, Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester

The central point of this paper is to state clearly the challenges one faces if one tries to produce a reduction of the objects of our ordinary experience to a wave function ontology. This case puts serious strain on standard theories of reduction one finds in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science literature. I spell out the complications and make a tentative proposal towards a new conception of reduction that will better serve this case.



12. Friday, November 19, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Regress, Unity, Facts, and Propositions" (Download here)
Matti Eklund, Department of Philosophy, Cornell University

I distinguish between different regress arguments used against the idea of facts and relations - arguments in the vicinity of what's often called "Bradley's regress". (But I'll stay away from questions about what Bradley's regress really was.) Then I defend a solution to the regress problem that seems the most interesting. In slogan form: we must distinguish between "whatness" and "howness". Bradley's regress is often brought up in connection with the problem of the unity of the proposition; later in the talk I turn to that issue. I distinguish between different problems brought up under the heading of unity, and urge their independence, primarily by arguing that prominent purported solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition help with some but not all of them. Along the way I discuss Frege's concept/object distinction, Russell's multiple relation theory of judgment, the idea that instantiation isn't a genuine relation, and King's recent work on the unity of the proposition.



13. Friday, December 3, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 224
"Three Questions for Truth Pluralism"
Michael Lynch, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Metaphysical theories of truth are concerned with that in virtue of which propositions are true, when they are lucky enough to be true. Broadly and very roughly speaking, they can be divided into three kinds. Monists hold that there is only one property of propositions in virtue of which they are true. Deflationists can be understood as denying that there is any such property, or at least any metaphysically interesting property. And pluralists hold there is more than one. Despite their obvious differences, any kind of theory must answer some of the same questions. Three of the most important and obvious are these:

How do we identify the property or properties in virtue of which propositions are true?

How is this property (or properties) related to truth itself?

What determines whether a given proposition has the property (or one of the properties) that it must have in order to be true?

So listed, the questions appear, to put it mildly, rather abstract. But as I will try to make clear, they arise naturally in any context where the metaphysics of truth are being taken seriously. In this paper, I want to take on all three, addressing them from the perspective, naturally, of the kind of view I find most promising: pluralism.

SPRING 2010

1. Friday, January 15, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"Social Analysis and the Capabilities Approach: a Limit to Martha Nussbaum's Universalist Ethics" (Download here)
S. Charusheela, Women's Studies Department, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Postcolonial theorists critique modernist universalisms for legitimating structural power. Responding to those critiques, Martha Nussbaum argues that abandoning universalism leads to ethical relativism. Adapting Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, she has proposed a modified universalism that draws on cross-cultural conversations as a non-ethnocentric basis for universal judgment and intervention. This paper takes as its point of departure Nussbaum's (mis)reading of a critique by Nkiru Nzegwu. Working from that conversational failure the paper identifies the social anaysis Nussbaum deploys as a point of ethnocentric breakdown in universalist approach.

Dr. Charusheela is an economist in the Department of Women's Studies. This talk will be an excellent preparation for Martha Nussbaum's talk, during her visit to UNLV two weeks later.



2. Friday, January 22, 2010 - 3:00pm, GUA 2202 (Note the place!)
"Persisting Acts and the Moral Valence of Consequences"
Joseph Ulatowski, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

When does an action occur? Suppose that Audrey pulls the gun's trigger and shoots Cooper at noon on Tuesday. As a result, Cooper dies on Friday. Did Audrey's killing Cooper take place on Tuesday or Friday? At least three different views exist, and each view has its problems. On the minimizing view of act individuation, "Audrey's killing Cooper" and "Audrey's pulling the gun's trigger" refer to the same act. But, if we take up the minimizing view, then we have to accept that Audrey kills Cooper before he is dead. On the maximizing view, "Audrey's killing Cooper" and "Audrey's pulling the gun's trigger" refer to distinct acts. Of course that means Audrey acts even when she is not moving. The problem becomes more complicated if Audrey dies before Cooper does. The third view - call it the componential account - has attacked both the minimizing and the maximizing view by claiming that no one would agree with either side of the debate. Both the minimizing and maximizing view are counterintuitive. In this paper, I test the componentialists' empirical claim. I will show that the data indicate that even if people are prompted in the right way, people tend to individuate action based upon the moral valence of the consequences.



3. Friday, February 5, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"The Monotonicity of 'No' and the 'No-Proposition' View"
Brad Armour-Garb, Department of Philosophy, University at Albany/SUNY

This paper reveals a tension between a fairly standard (possibly pre-theoretic) response to 'liar sentences', of which

(L) Sentence (L) is not true

is an instance, and some features of our natural language determiners (e.g., 'every', 'some', 'no', etc.), the latter having been established by formal linguists. The fairly standard response, which has been voiced by a number of philosophers who work directly on the Liar Paradox, but can also be heard by philosophers who do not work directly on that paradox, is that liar sentences do not express propositions. Call this the "No-Proposition View". Evidently, that liar sentences do not express propositions is a deeply held intuition. As the previously mentioned tension will reveal, there is reason to worry about whether this deeply held intuition can be sustained.



4. Friday, February 12, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"Disentangling Two Questions About Mental Representation"
William Ramsey, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Philosophical theories about mental representation are often unclear on exactly what they are theories of. Sometimes they are presented as naturalistic theories of representation, sometimes they are presented as naturalistic theories of content, and oftentimes they read as a lot of both. In this talk, I'll argue that it pays to pull apart these matters and to keep distinct the following two questions: 1) how does some brain state function as a representation, and 2) how does a brain state that functions as a representation acquire the specific content it has? I'll argue that one advantage of distinguishing these questions is that it allows us to see how theories traditionally viewed as competitors are perhaps better viewed as complementary theories of different dimensions of representational phenomena.



5. Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - 3:00pm, The Whiskey Attic (upstairs at The Freakin' Frog) (Note the day and place!)
"Is X-Phi Philosophy?" (Some useful background reading is available here.)
T. Jones and J. Ulatowski, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

This week's event is a joint colloquium/Philosophy Club meeting on the topic of the emerging field of "Experimental Philosophy" or "X-Phi". Profs. Jones and Ultatowski will introduce us to the controversy surrounding this field. The meeting will serve as a useful introduction and background discussion to ready us for Stephen Stich's talk on March 5th.



6. Friday, March 5, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"Experimental Philosophy and the Bankruptcy of the Great Tradition"
Stephen Stich, Department of Philosophy and the Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University

The "Great Tradition" in Philosophy, stretching from Plato to Kant and continuing to the present, portrays Philosophy as an autonomous discipline that can be pursued from the armchair. I will argue that recent work in experimental philosophy shows that, in many areas of philosophy, including ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of language, this view of philosophy is untenable. Philosophers who ignore these findings and continue to pursue philosophy as an armchair discipline are, I maintain, deeply intellectually irresponsible.



7. Friday, March 12, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"The Ethical Implications of Skepticism"
Dustin Locke, Department of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College

Skepticism comes in many varieties: 'We do not know there is an external world', 'We are not justified in believing that the future will resemble the past', 'We do not know what it is like to be a bat'. With respect to each of these skepticisms, we may ask is it true? But we may also ask does it matter? Recent work on skepticism tends to focus on the former question; this paper is squarely concerned with the latter. I begin by making two cross-cutting distinctions between types of skepticism. The first distinction is between those skepticisms that deny knowledge of a certain domain and those that deny justified belief about that domain. The second distinction is between those skepticisms that concern a domain of graspable facts and those that concern a domain of ungraspable facts. I then argue that skepticisms of exactly one of the four resulting types have drastic ethical implications--that is, drastic implications for how we ought to live our lives.



8. Friday, March 19, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"Induction and Modal Commitment"
Franz-Peter Greismaier, Department of Philosophy, University of Wyoming

In one formulation, Hume's problem of induction is the problem of how one can justify choosing to accept the inductive conclusion of an inductive argument over its anti-inductive counterpart: Even if I have seen only eucalyptophile koalas, Hume argues, I am no more justified in believing that all koalas are eucalyptophile than I am in believing that some are eucalyptophobic. One reason Hume provides for this verdict is the modal claim that the anti-inductive conclusion is possibly true: eucalypto-phobic koalas are (logically) possible. Of course, we also strongly believe that eucalyptophile koalas are possible; after all, we have already observed a bunch of them. Their possibility is implied by their actuality.
In my talk, I will argue that (i) we are better justified in believing that eucalyptophile koalas are possible than we are in believing that eucalyptophobic ones are and that consequently (ii) we are better justified in believing the inductive conclusion, which implies the possibility of eucalyptophile koalas, than we are in believing the anti-inductive conclusion, which implies the possibility of eucalypto-phobic koalas. The latter claim turns on the general principle that if
p --> r, and p* --> r*, and we are better justified in believing r than we are in believing r*, we are thereby better justified in believing p than we are in believing p*. I will defend this principle in detail.
My main thesis, viz., that belief in inductive conclusions is better justified than belief in anti-inductive conclusions, rests on a number of further assumptions, which I will explore in the rest of my talk. Prominent among them is the claim that sense perception is generally more reliable than modal intuition, a claim that has recently come under heavy attack. From the perspective of my approach, the problem of induction was generated by affording both sense perception and modal intuition the same evidential weight. If indeed sense perception (of an actual eucalyptophile koala) were to provide no more justification for the modal belief that eucalyptophile koalas are possible than is provided by modal intuition for the belief that eucalyptophobic koalas are possible, there would be no difference in an agent's justification for believing the inductive and the anti-inductive conclusion. However, if sense perception carries more weight than modal intuition, then there is an epistemic difference between the two conclusions. It is somewhat ironic that an empiricist of Hume's stature should have treated sense perception and modal intuition as evidentially equal.



9. Friday, March 26, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"Two Conceptions of Aristotelian Matter"
Keith McPartland, Department of Philosophy, Williams College

Contemporary commentators on Aristotle have rightly emphasized the ways in which Aristotle's conception of matter differs from that dominant in modern science. Contemporary scientists often aim for bottom-up explanations of various phenomena. Psychological processes, for example, are implemented by neurophysiological, chemical, and ultimately, physical processes. According to this view of the unity of science, all processes will be grounded in the basic interactions between the entities of our most basic and comprehensive science of matter. In contrast, Aristotle seems to have a top down conception of matter, according to which both the identity of nature of a thing's matter are relative to its form. Matter, in itself, is thought to be pure potentiality, devoid of the sort of determinate nature capable of grounding any sort of explanation. However, proponents of the top-down view have often overlooked a side of Aristotle's thought friendlier to the bottom-up conception of matter. In discussing hypothetical necessitation, for example, Aristotle tells us that the function of a thing dictates its matter. At first glance, this appears to be an example, par excellance of the top-down conception of matter. However, attention to the details of Aristotle's examples suggests that matters are not so simple. When Aristotle says that a saw needs to be made of iron (or of some similar stuff) in order to do its job, he seems to be involved in bottom-up reasoning. The argument that a saw needs to be made of iron (or something similar) relies on facts about how the characteristic function of a saw must be implemented in lower-level causal processes. We can extend this sort of reasoning to biological and physiological cases. A bottom-up conception of matter seems to play a role in Aristotle's biological thought. Aristotle's conception of matter thus seems more nuanced and complex than the traditional interpretations would lead us to believe.



10. Friday, April 9, 2010 - 2:00pm, TBE A-107 (Note the time and place!)
"Contradictory Information: Too Much of a Good Thing"
J. Michael Dunn, School of Informatics and Computing, and Department of Philosophy, Indiana University - Bloomington

In the middle 1970's both Belnap and I motivated the "Belnap-Dunn 4-valued Logic" by talk of being simply "told true" (T), and simply "told false" (F), which leaves the options of being neither "told true" nor "told false" (N), and being both "told true" and "told false" (B). Belnap motivated these epistemic notions by thinking of unstructured databases that allow for negative information as well as positive information (even when they conflict). We now experience this on a daily basis with the Web. But the 4-valued logic is deductive in nature, and its matrix is discrete: there are just four values. In this paper I investigate embedding the 4-valued logic into a context of probability. A. Josang's (1997) Subjective Logic introduced uncertainty to allow for degrees of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. We extend this so as to allow for two kinds of uncertainty -- that in which the reasoner has too little information (ignorance) and that in which the reasoner has too much information (inconsistency). Josang's "Opinion Triangle" becomes an "Opinion Tetrahedron" and the 4-values can be seen as its apexes. We make various observations concerning this.



11. Friday, April 16, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"Kant on Divine and Human Freedom as Intelligent Spontaneity"
David Forman, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Kant rejects the kind of compatibilist view of freedom according to which an agent counts as free just because she does what she prefers to do or what she takes to be good. Kant even mocks Leibniz's version of such a view as offering only the freedom of a rotisserie spit that runs on its own once it is wound up. But Kant refuses to define freedom in terms of an ability to act contrary to one's preferences. Nor does he define freedom in terms of contingency or in terms of an ability to do have done otherwise. This is most clear in his account of the freedom of the divine will. God could not have done otherwise since He cannot possibly act contrary to His rational preference (representation of the good). God is free instead because He is absolutely causally independent (absolutely spontaneous) and acts on reasons rather than blindly or on sensible desires. This definition of freedom is consistent with Leibniz's view. And Kant defines human freedom along the same general lines. However, Kant's account of human action introduces some complications that require important deviations from the Leibnizian account of freedom.



12. Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 107 (Note the day and place!)
"Constitution and the Subset Account of Realization"
Greg Janssen, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas



13. Friday, April 23, 2010 - 3:00pm, BEH 222
"Perception and the Language of Nature: Berkeley and Reid on Acquired Perception"
Rebecca Copenhaver, Department of Philosophy, Lewis & Clark College

A common view in psychology and philosophy holds that strictly speaking we see very little - strictly speaking, we see only facing surface features like color, boundaries and illumination. Everything else is filled in by the mind. For example, we don't have visual experiences of three-dimensional tomatoes. Rather we have visual experiences of a two-dimensional field colored and illuminated a certain way. I think that this view is wrong, but surprisingly persistent. I will dragoon two historical figures, George Berkeley and Thomas Reid, to do my arguing for me, and to illustrate how this putatively common sense view is a piece of theory and a product of history.
On the familiar picture, features presented in individual sense modalities (vision, touch, etc.) are the only features, strictly speaking, given in perception. On this view, features not presented in original perception, features such as "being a tomato," or "being a Pinot Noir," are not, strictly speaking, the products of experience and should not be included in the given. By contrast, George Berkeley and Thomas Reid present a picture of perception on which original perception is a productive precondition for acquired perception. It provides traction for acquiring perceptual experiences that are ever more sensitive to a variety of features in our environment. Such sensitivity comes with the normal development of the human cognitive system: early associations between properties provided in original perception and properties made available by an expanded conceptual repertoire develop into abilities for the perceptual recognition of features as common as the smell of an apple and as uncommon as the tonnage of a ship. On this view acquired perception is genuine perception. Normal adults do not have two kinds of perceptual experience: acquired perception, and another original, given perception - as it were behind it. Perception is a unified phenomenon, grounded in a productive and developing relationship between the mind and world.

FALL 2009

1. Friday, September 4, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"The Fiction of What's Known in Understanding"
James Woodbridge, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Linguistic understanding is naturally expressed as a kind of knowledge. For example, an understanding of the expression 'blau' might be explained as knowing that it applies to all and only the blue things. Similarly, understanding 'Rauchen ist verboten' can be said to be a matter of knowing that it means that smoking is forbidden. Generalizing on these claims, we get such platitudes as that understanding an expression is knowing what it means, and to understand a language is to know the meanings of its expressions (or: what its expressions mean). Talk of linguistic understanding seems, therefore, to traffic in an ontology of things to which we bear some kind of knowledge relation. These putative entities appear to be the referents of 'that'-clauses and either to capture semantic rules for particular expressions, or to be explicit specifications of the meanings of the expressions. Either way, on its surface, this talk suggests that linguistic understanding is a kind of propositional knowledge, some sort of intellectual/theoretical "knowing-that", relating us to things. I maintain that the putative entities to which understanding supposedly relates us are fictions, and the way we talk about understanding is a pretense-involving discourse. Understanding is not a kind of knowledge relation we bear to meaning entities or rules. Our "knowing-that" talk of understanding is an as if discourse that provides a means for talking indirectly about particular complex use-features, the employment or recognition of which constitutes a speaker's understanding of an expression. The standard "propositional" talk of understanding accomplishes this by yielding something like a collapse of the use/mention distinction, allowing speakers to pick out complex use-features of expressions by displaying them at work in uses of (other) expressions. The result allows for the attribution of these use-features via a kind of deferred ostension. This account forges a link between the "propositional knowledge" surface appearances of our talk of linguistic understanding and the view of understanding as a kind of "knowing-how" regarding the uses of expressions.



2. Friday, Sept. 18, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Cheap Contextualism, Meaning Underdetermination, and Truth"
Peter Ludlow, Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University

To hear philosophers tell it, we hardly ever say anything true. Someone says that Michael Jordan is 6 feet 6 inches tall. Philosophers point out that he isn't really that height. In fact, no one is exactly 6 foot 6. Philosophers tell us we have the same problem when we say that something is flat. I might say that Kansas is flat, or that a pool table is flat, but of course they aren't completely flat - nothing in the real world is really flat. Here three ways out of this problem that are in the literature: i) we might say that all of these claims about flatness, etc. are literally false, but that they are assertable because they do some work for us even if literally false; ii) we might say that for cases like 'flat' there are varying standards of flatness, and that context tells us whether we are talking about flat by the standards of pool tables or flat by the standards of North American Geography, iii) we might say that when we say that Kansas is flat, we are usually appending a "roughly-speaking" operator, as in 'Roughly-speaking[Kansas is flat]'. I'm going to advocate a fourth option, which I call the "Truth on the Cheap" option. The basic idea is this. Word meanings are vastly underdetermined. When we do the semantics of natural language, we want to lift that meaning underdetermination into the metalanguage. If we do that, then the truth predicate as used by the semanticist is tolerant of a broad range of claims to the effect that Kansas is flat. Why? Because "absolutely flat" is just one precisification of 'flat', and it is not a privileged precisification. This kind of underdetermination holds for every predicate that we use (even mathematical ones). Nothing is ever completely precise. Word meanings can be made more or less precise, but we don't measure this precision against the degree to which they approximate some Platonic ideal of the exact meaning. Rather they are more or less precise depending on the way we make the meanings more or less restrictive. Finally, I'm going to argue that it is a mistake to think that the semantics of natural language requires a precise metalanguage. Thus, as tensers might lift tense into the metalanguage, we will want to lift this imprecision into the metalanguage. If we do that, then we can dispense with roughly-speaking operators, etc.



3. Friday, September 25, 2009 - 3:00pm, Dept. Conference Room
"Are Customs and Conditioning Competitors?"
Todd Jones, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

The situations that social scientists explain using concepts like custom and norm often tend to be situations where many other kinds of explanations seem plausible as well (e.g. biological, psychological, economic, historical). Do these other explanations compete with the custom/norm explanations or do they complement them? We need to carefully consider this question, and not just assume that various accounts are all permissible at "different levels of analysis." In this paper I describe two families of non-competing accounts: 1) explanations of different (but similarly described) facts, and 2) accounts which seem to differ but are really different parts or versions of the same underlying explanation. I argue that, while many types of apparent competitor don't really compete with customs, there will usually be some that do.



4. Friday, October 2, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Natural Beauty and Eco-Phenomenology"
Ron Wilburn, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

It is natural to suppose that Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative implies that his moral theory is irremediably hostile to the ends of current environmentalism. For certainly, with his speciesist injunction against the treatment of ourselves and other people merely as means to ends, Kant appears to insist that human welfare, and human welfare alone, should delimit the range of permissible action. Now, even though it is clear that the above-described tension exists, it is worth asking whether or not it is a genuinely irremediable tension? Herein, I consider four possible strategies for defending a negative answer to this question (at least one of which is suggested by Kant himself). I then go on to consider a forth, more promising, argument. On this account, our obligations to nature emerge from an indirect obligation to humanity itself, and stem from the value that the aesthetic appreciation of nature offers as a proving ground, of sorts, for moral judgment. Treating this thesis as a broadly empirical claim about human phenomenology, I then seek out (in typical phenomenological style) literary confirmation of it in the essays of 20th century naturalist, Loren Eiseley. I also aim, in brief conclusion, to sketch an effective response to a line of criticism of scientific culture that perennially echoes through the fundamentalist churches and school boards of these United States.



5. Friday, October 9, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Truth, Paradox and Vicious Reference"
Phil Kremer, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto

Kripke's "fixed-point semantics" is by now the standard approach to the liar's and related paradoxes. But as this semantics is commonly understood, truth behaves nonclassically even in the absence of vicious reference. Gupta and Belnap argue that a distinct advantage of their own "revision theory" of truth is that truth behaves classically in the absence of vicious reference. In my presentation, I will outline the fixed-point and revision-theoretic semantics, and cite some original technical results to argue that Gupta and Belnap's anti-fixed-point argument just doesn't work, at least not as well as they want it to. One thing I hope to do in this presentation is show how technical results can have a bearing on philosophical/methodological issues. That said, I will try to make the presentation as accessible as possible to those not versed in logic's technicalities. (I certainly won't prove any theorems!)



6. Friday, October 16, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Medieval Logicians' use of Natural Language as Logical Notation"
Terence Parsons, Department of Philosophy, UCLA

Today, Aristotelian logic is well-known, as the theory of conversions (immediate inferences) and syllogisms. Less well-know are the techniques that Aristotle himself used to establish the conversion principles and (some of) the syllogisms. These techniques involve a logically sophisticated set of principles. These principles persisted through the Medieval era, when logicians vastly expanded the scope of logic. The result is a system of notation and techniques that are essentially equivalent to modern symbolic logic. My goal is to explain some of that development, and to justify the positive assessment.



7. Friday, October 23, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"On 'Following the Argument Where it Leads'"
Thomas Kelly, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University

Throughout the history of western philosophy, the Socratic injunction to "follow the argument where it leads" has exerted a powerful attraction. But what is it, exactly, to follow the argument where it leads? I explore this intellectual ideal and offer some reflections. Among the topics taken up is the relationship between the ideal and 'common sense' or 'Moorean' responses to revisionary philosophical theorizing.
[Disclaimer: for better or for worse, this talk will not include any Plato-exegesis]



8. Thursday, November 5, 2009 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"Science and Religion: Where the Conflict Really Lies"
Alvin Plantinga, Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

Contrary to the claims of Richard Dawkins, there is no conflict between theistic belief (belief in God) and the current scientific theory of evolution. Indeed, Dawkins' argument for the conflict is deeply flawed. There is, however, a conflict between naturalism, a view adopted by many proponents of evolution, and evolutionary theory.

(Sponsored by the Departments of Philosophy and Geoscience and by the Thomas Aquinas Catholic Newman Center)



9. Friday, November 6, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Content and Natural Selection"
Alvin Plantinga, Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

This talk looks into the question of what, in addition to naturalism and evolutionary theory, a naturalist can sensibly conditionalize on when considering the reliability of her cognitive mechanisms. The candidates considered are all from current philosophy of mind.



10. Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
(Note the day, time, and place!)
"Galileo's Telescopic Discoveries, 1609-2009: Repercussions and Lessons"
Maurice Finocchiaro, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

(University Forum Lecture Series)



11. Friday, November 13, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Biology and the Unconscious"
Stephen Downes, Department of Philosophy, University of Utah

There is a widespread tendency to assume that a biological mechanism invoked in explaining human behavior is an unconscious mechanism. Sometimes the view is pushed further by the assumption that calling a process "unconscious" contributes to the relevant explanation. I examine the connection between the biological and the unconscious. Along the way, I introduce folk-psychological explanations and some contrasting styles of biological explanation of our behavior. I argue that characterizing biological explanations as appeals to the unconscious does no useful explanatory work. Also, I propose and briefly defend an alternate way of construing the relation between some folk-psychological explanations and biological explanations of human behavior that requires no reference to the unconscious.



12. Friday, November 20, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"Organizational Dynamics of Controversy: Science and Business"
Albert DiCanzio, Webster University School of Business and Technology

In a single-case study of interorganizational controversy, the researcher investigated ways to strengthen scientific business management by applying concepts from physical dynamics to organizational behavior exhibited in a time series. Data of the controversy included critical events identified in the 400 year old Galileo controversy 1610-2009 from various sources -- notably including UNLV Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus Finocchiaro's Retrying Galileo (2005), the Notre Dame conference on Galileo and the Church (2002), and DiCanzio's Galileo: His Science and His Significance for the Future of Man (1996). The goals of the research have been to offer empirically supported guidance for the management of an organization that is in a relationship of negotiation, disharmony, dysfunction, or dynamic tension with its environment, that is, with its suppliers, distributors, customers or stakeholders; to explore long term consequences, in terms of the dynamic state of closure of a controversy, for an organization in which systems of reward for its innovators are crippled or disabled; to derive results from data mining and analysis useful in future studies to formulate normative criteria for the constitutional ruleset insuring rational and moral behavior of cybernetic systems (robots of the future); and to offer guidance for future studies that would place organizational dynamics on a firmer footing of physical dynamics. Theoretical foundations of the study resided in organizational and information theories, combining time series evaluation and data mining. To this end, an event matrix was built from the source data and subjected to clustering analysis using a Hamming distance function. Dynamic attractors, unresolved enigmas, myths, resolving observations and other explanatory hypotheses were extracted from the event matrix. Its four dimensional array structure facilitated correlation of causal influences (attractors) with consequences longitudinally over a domain of events. A principal immediate outcome of the study was an empirical base of guidelines for practitioners of organizational dynamics and the identification of organizational-dynamic attractors that correlate well with successful outcome of a controversy. Organizational-dynamic interpretations were analyzed for potential of experimental confirmation in future multiple case studies outlined by this researcher, and guidance for future studies targeted requirements for a rewarding treatment of a particular class of organizational contributors -- constructively creative thinkers and achievers. More generally, the study identified factors that correlate well with the improvement of any state of dynamic tension between a business or scientific organization and its environment.



13. Friday, December 4, 2009 - 3:00pm, BEH 212
"The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors"
Eric Schwitzgebel, Department of Philosophy, UC Riverside

Aristotle, Kant, and Mill suggest that careful theoretical reflection about morality can be morally improving. If so, one might wonder if ethics professors, on average, behave morally better than non-ethicists of similar social background. I will explore a variety of empirical evidence about the moral behavior of ethicists including: (1.) philosophers' general opinions about the moral behavior of ethicists and their opinions about the moral behavior of individual, arbitrarily selected ethicists, (2.) the rates at which ethics books are missing from academic libraries compared to other philosophy books, (3.) the voting rates of ethics professors (including professors of political philosophy) compared to other philosophers, to political scientists, and to professors in other departments, (4.) the rates at which ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and other professors respond to undergraduate emails, and (5.) self-reported vegetarianism and donation to charity. (Much of this work is collaborative with Joshua Rust of Stetson University.)

SPRING 2009

1. Friday, January 16, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Trust, Power and Betrayal"
Karen Frost-Arnold, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas



2. Friday, January 23, 2009 - 3:00pm, SRWC 1010
"Kierkegaard and Experimental Psychology: The Relation Between Self-Deception and Cognitive Dissonance"
Erik Lindland, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas



3. Friday, February 6, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Logical Pluralism for the Rest of Us"
Gregory Frost-Arnold, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

This presentation will not be a 'normal' paper; rather, it's an information session on the topic of logical pluralism, which has received a lot of attention in logic & language circles since about 2000.

There will be about 30 minutes' worth of motivation for and exposition of logical pluralism, which can/should be interspersed with your questions and comments as it proceeds. At this point, some tentative remarks will be made concerning the view, on which feedback would be deeply appreciated.

If you want to be especially well-prepared for this information session, click here to see the handout that will be used on Friday. And if you want to be really prepared, you can take a look at the article that started the recent resurgence of interest in logical pluralism: J.C. Beall and Greg Restall, "Logical Pluralism," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2000, which you can find at https://eprints.kfupm.edu.sa/49246/.



4. Friday, February 13, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Theory Concept Pluralism: What SPECIES can teach us about THEORY"
P. D. Magnus, Department of Philosophy, University at Albany/SUNY

Philosophers of science typically presume that theories are some specific kind of thing. I argue against this presumption, and for theory concept pluralism: There are multiple distinct theory concepts which we legitimately use in different domains and for different purposes, and we should not expect this to change. Many wholesale arguments about science rely on one theory concept or another and so are threatened by pluralism.



5. Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205 (Note the day!)
"Abstract Valuation and Our Thinking about Death"
Stephen Rosenbaum, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Since Nagel's article, "Death," in 1970, numerous philosophers have argued powerfully for and against the Epicurean idea death is not bad for people. They have considered this idea partly in light of various attitudes and beliefs we commonly have about death. Many reject the Epicurean view on the grounds that it does not accord with the "intuition" that death is bad for us and that it is incompatible with many of our other, more settled, views about death and the value of life. In this paper, I continue to explore ways in which different concepts of value affect the implicit dialogue about whether death is bad for those who die. More specifically, I review the different notions of value involved, and show that the "intuition" that death is bad for people is unreliable and also that the Epicurean view is compatible with received, important ideas about death and the value of life. The argument should serve to place the question of death's value and also moral debates about death in a fresh context, and promises greater understanding of human views and attitudes toward death.



6. Friday, February 27, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Galileo's Archimedean Approximation and Friedman's Dynamics of Reason"
David Miller, Department of Philosophy, Duke University



7. Friday, March 6, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"How Not to Build a Hybrid"
William Ramsey, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

In accounting for the way we explain and predict the behavior of others, two major positions are the theory-theory and the simulation theory. Recently, some authors have advocated a hybrid position, where elements of both theory and simulation are claimed to be at work. In most of these, cognitive sub-systems are described as "simulation-like" if they are used to replicate some cognitive operation assumed to take place in the target of explanation and prediction. For example, if I use my own inference mechanism to assign an inferential belief to the target, then (on these accounts) my inference system would be employed in simulating the reasoning of that other person. In this paper, I argue that this strategy for developing a hybrid theory is seriously confused. The confusion stems from a failure to appreciate how the application of any internal theory will require the employment of various other cognitive sub-systems and mechanisms while applying theoretical principles. The employment of our folk psychological theory is no different. When using our folk psychology to assign perceptual beliefs, we often need to use our visual system to see what another person. Similarly, we sometimes need to use our own inference system to know what content to assign to another person's inferential beliefs. In these sorts of cases, our cognitive mechanisms are used as "fact-finders", not as simulators. After arguing that these alleged hybrid theories actually aren't, I offer two ways to demarcate cognitive processes that are truly a form of simulation from those that are simply used in the application of a theory.



8. Friday, March 13, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Image, Evidence, Argument"
Ian Dove, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Abstract: The bourgeoning study of visual rhetoric and visual literacy has raised questions in the field(s) of argumentation studies and informal logic: Are there visual arguments? And, if so, what is the logic of visual arguments? Proponents of visual arguments such as Leo Groarke and David Birdsong have proposed a new category of propositions--visual propositions--to account for both visual arguments and their logic. Opponents of this view either have refused to accept the possibility of visual propositions, e.g., David Fleming, or have written off the apparently visual arguments as something altogether different, e.g., separately Ralph Johnson and Tony Blair. There are unresolved difficulties on both sides of this debate. The proponents need to explain the necessity for new entities. Opponents need to account for the actual use of visual elements in what appears to be reasoning. In this talk, I'm an opponent of visual argument if that means that there are arguments such that the constituent parts are irreducible to propositional content of the usual kind. Hence, I don't appeal to visual propositions. Moreover, I argue that the apparent use of visual elements in argumentation is best explained in terms of evidence and encoded reasoning. The visual elements should be treated as evidence for claims in associated, though perhaps tacit, arguments. In support of this view, I cite examples from such diverse sources as instant replay in the NFL and cloud chamber studies in particle physics. As a test case, then, I apply the hypothesis that visual arguments are really just encoded regular arguments to an ongoing debate in philosophy of mathematics--the use of diagrams for justification. The result furnishes an insight into the use of diagrams that makes no appeal to occult faculties and platonic realms (cf. James Brown) or visually enhanced logics (cf. Nathaniel Miller).



9. Friday, March 20, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Philosophy in America in the 20th Century"
Neil Delaney, Sr., Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame



10. Friday, March 27, 2009 - 3:00pm, SRWC Meeting Rm 1010
"Demarcating Presentism"
Christian Wüthrich, Dept. of Philosophy, University of California at San Diego

Recent essays, such as those presented in Callender (2000) and Savitt (2006), contend that the debate between presentism, the view in philosophy of time that only present entities exist, and eternalism , the view that past, present, and future entities are ontologically on a par, lacks any metaphysical substance. This paper argues that they ultimately fail, although important lessons can be gleaned from them in how to formulate a non-vacuous version of presentism. It suggests that presentism can best be characterized in the context of spacetime theories. The resulting position is an ersatzist version of presentism that admits merely non-present entities as fictional characters deprived of physical existence. Ersatzist presentism both escapes the charges of triviality and promises to offer a route to solving the grounding problem, which befalls its more traditional cousins. Furthermore, Savitt's ecumenical position of offering both presentism and eternalism their rightful place as equal partners is rejected. It is argued that in ontological matters, the eternalist view takes precedence, while the presentist view may well be valuable for the purpose of explaining the phenomenology of temporality.



11. Friday, April 17, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Untying the Knot from the Inside Out: Reflections on the Paradox of Supererogation"
Mark Timmons, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona

In his 1958 seminal paper, "Saints and Heroes", J. O. Urmson argued that the then dominant tri-partite deontic scheme of classifying actions as being exclusively either obligatory, or optional, or wrong, ought to be expanded to include the category of the supererogatory. Colloquially, this category includes actions that are "beyond the call of duty" (beyond what is obligatory) and hence actions that one has no duty or obligation to perform. The title of Urmson's paper indicates some of the main types of action that are supposed to belong in this category. But it is a controversial category. Anti-supererogationists either deny the coherence of the concept, or, granting its coherence, argue that the corresponding category is empty. Pro-supererogationists argue that the category is not empty, and that therefore the corresponding concept is coherent, though the Pros often disagree about the conceptual contours of the category. The apparent conceptual tension regarding supererogation, sometimes referred to as the "paradox of supererogation", has been a main focus of philosophical discussions of the topic. The source of the paradox has been dubbed the "good-ought tie-up". In what follows, we plan to address this alleged paradox by first making a phenomenological case for the reality of instances of genuine supererogatory actions, and then, by reflecting on the relevant phenomenology, we explain why there is no genuine paradox. We set for ourselves three tasks. Because the issues regarding supererogation are complicated, our first task is to set up the rest of the paper by: (i) clarifying various elements that figure in the concept of supererogation, clarifying the paradox just mentioned, and (ii) motivating our phenomenological approach to the putative paradox—approaching it 'from the inside' as it were. Our second task is to examine some of the details of moral experience—its phenomenology—contrasting experiences of moral obligation with experiences of supererogation. Our third task is to address the paradox of supererogation. We argue that one can make sense of supererogation by recognizing what we call a 'merit-conferring' role that moral reasons can play. We describe this sort of role partly by contrasting it with two other roles practical reasons can play: what Joshua Gert calls a 'requiring' role and a 'justifying' role. By recognizing multiple roles a moral reason can play (inspired by reflection on the phenomenology of supererogation), one has the conceptual recourses to untie the good-ought knot and thereby make sense of supererogation—to untie a philosophical knot 'from the inside'.



12. Friday, April 24, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"TBA"
Neil Delaney, Jr., Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas



13. Friday, May 1, 2009 - 3:00pm, SU Room 205
"Experimental Semantics, or What Would Kripke Have Said If He Were Asian"
Edouard Machery, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. Early worked explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. After a brief review of, this early work, I will examine the recent objections to this work and describe some additional work done in response to these objections.



14. Friday, May 8, 2009 - 3:00pm, Location TBD
"TBA"
John Symons, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, El Paso

FALL 2008

1. Friday, September 5, 2008 - 3:00pm, Location, SU 213.
"Slamming Wamming: DeRose's Dismissal of Warranted Assertibility Maneuvers" (Download here.)
Ron Wilburn, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

In a number of papers, Keith DeRose articulates his reasons for thinking that we cannot plausibly explain the mechanics of knowledge attribution in terms of varying conditions of warranted assertibility. His reasoning is largely comparative: "know," he argues, proves a poor candidate for such a diagnosis when compared to other terms to which such warranted assertibilility maneuvers (i.e., WAMs) clearly apply. More specifically, DeRose aims, by way of such comparative case studies, to identify several general principles through which we might determine when WAMs are called for. In what follows, I take issue with one of these principles and argue that DeRose's efforts to deploy the others to pro-contextualist (i.e., anti-invariantist) ends are misguided. I conclude by examining DeRose’s specific objection to Unger’s skeptical invariantism, and identify a problematic feature of his recurrent appeals to linguistic intuition. The payoff of this is an enhanced appreciation of the factors on which the contextualist/invariantist dispute should be seen to turn.



2. Friday, September 12, 2008 - 3:00pm, CBC C110.
"Emotions, Norms and the Moralization of Fairness"
Shaun Nichols, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona

Recent work in moral psychology has emphasized the importance of emotions for moral judgment. I'll argue that the available research provides no reason to think that emotional activation alone can account for moral judgment. Nonetheless, the fact that we are naturally repelled by suffering still provides a fairly direct explanation for the cultural success of norms prohibiting harming innocent people. Norms of fairness pose a more complicated problem, since it's harder to connect such norms directly to our emotional repertoire. In contrast to recent work in rational-choice theory, I argue that norms of fairness get their cultural heft because they are moralized, which provides an indirect connection to the emotions.



3. Friday, September 19, 2008 - 3:00pm, CBC C110.
"Interventions, Mechanisms, and the Modularity of Mind" (Download here.)
Matthew Haug, Department of Philosophy, College of William and Mary

This paper takes as its starting point John Campbell’s recent attempt to extend the interventionist approach to cover causation in psychology. I point out that Campbell’s radical suggestion that causation between psychological variables may not be grounded in biochemical mechanisms conflicts with the completeness of physics. I then use a case study involving the effects of a nurturing environment on memory ability to argue that accepting the existence of underlying biochemical mechanisms does not commit one to the equally radical reductive view according to which mental causation is reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, biochemical causation. I show how the biochemical variables in any mechanism underlying nurturance’s effect on memory are likely not as accurate or precise as psychological variables, nor are they as effective as a means of intervening on memory ability. I then explore the relationships between modular systems, robust variables, and reduction, arguing inter alia, that even non-robust cognitive variables in modular systems cannot be replaced by biochemical variables. These results support a straightforward general argument that psychological variables will play an ineliminable role in the etiology and treatment of many mental phenomena.



4. Friday, October 10, 2008 - 3:00pm, CBC C110.
"Linguistic Puzzles and Semantic Pretense"
James Woodbridge, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Philosophical/linguistic dilemmas were the launching pad of modern philosophy of language and remain the life-blood of its aims and methods. From Frege and Russell to the present day, philosophers of language have, for the most part, attempted to resolve such dilemmas by appeal to logical or semantic innovation. While we have learned much from these ingenious advances, it is fair to say that few of the original dilemmas have been resolved in a satisfactory way. We think, for example, of a range of familiar problems, e.g., the informativeness of identity claims, the semantic paradoxes, the sorites, negative existential claims, etc. In this paper, I will set out what I see as a novel, and very promising, approach to resolving a number of the familiar dilemmas that provide philosophy of language with much of its subject matter. This approach postulates semantic pretense at work where these puzzles arise. I will begin by briefly cataloging the relevant dilemmas. Then, after introducing the pretense approach, I will indicate how it promises to handle these putatively intractable problems. I will then consider a number of objections to pretense views, taking this as an opportunity to provide more detailed explanation of what a pretense account amounts to, what the pretense approach commits us to, and why it is a promising approach in philosophy of language.



5. Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
"Reason, Relativism, and the Human Normative Predicament"
Kenneth Taylor, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Many people would say that if we would just heed the voice of reason, all moral, ethical, and political disputes would eventually end in what Nietzsche calls "the hallowed place of peace." Our speaker argues tonight that, sadly enough, there is no such place. We should regard our predicament not as a counsel of despair, however, but rather as an urgent call to arms. The work of overcoming the human normative condition, and of building life-affirming moral and political orders is invigorating, even heroic labor that calls upon the best in us all.
Co-sponsored by the UNLV Department of Philosophy.



6. Friday, October 17, 2008 - 3:00pm, TBD
TBD
Kenneth Taylor, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University



7. Friday, November 7, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU 207
TBD
Marion Ledwig, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada Las Vegas



8. Friday, November 21, 2008 - 3:00pm, TBD
TBD
Nicholas Rescher, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh



9. Friday, December 5, 2008 - 3:00pm, TBD
TBD
Jeremy Heis, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine

SPRING 2008

1. Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 211
"Bolzano on Logical Consequence and Mathematical Proof"
Sandra Lapointe, Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University

It is relatively well known that Bolzano contributed to the birth of modern mathematics and, in particular, that he had interesting views on mathematical proofs. Few, however, are familiar with the details of these views, and fewer still acknowledge Bolzano's distinction between what are in fact three different notions: grounding (Abfolge), objective justification (objective Erkenntnisgrund) and what we may call objective demonstrations or proofs (Begründungen). This tripartite distinction in itself testifies to Bolzano's acute sense of the differences between logical, epistemological and pragmatic concerns: grounding is a relation between propositions (not propositions and facts or states of affairs), objective justification is a relation between beliefs (i.e. certain types of mental states) and Begründungen are linguistic objects that generate objectively justified knowledge of the type we find in mathematics. In this paper, I present these three notions, and explain how they are related in order to stress the specificity of Bolzano's views on demonstrations in mathematics.



2. Friday, February 1, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 211
"Truth-Definitions and Definitional Truth" (Download here.)
Douglas Patterson, Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University

Putnam, Etchemendy, Heck and others have criticized Tarski's definitions of truth on the grounds that they turn what ought to be contingent truths about the truth conditions of sentences into logical, mathematical or necessary truths. I argue that this criticism rests on the misguided assumption that substitution in accord with a good definition preserves logical, mathematical or necessary truth. I give a number of examples intended to show that substitution in accord with good definitions need preserve none of these. The paper should be of interest not only to students of Tarski, but to anyone interested in definition and analyticity, and it includes some discussion of the contingent a priori, logicism, the nature of applied mathematics, and early Wittgensteinian doctrines about showing and saying.



3. Friday, February 8, 2008 - 3:00pm, CBC C117
"From a Genetic Predisposition to an Interactive Predisposition: Rethinking the Ethical Implications of Screening for Gene-Environment Interactions"
Jim Tabery, Department of Philosophy, University of Utah

The concept of gene-environment interaction, or G×E, refers to cases where different genetic groups respond differently to the same array of environments. In a widely acclaimed study from 2002, researchers found a case of G×E for a gene controlling neuroenzymatic activity (low vs. high), exposure to childhood maltreatment, and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Cases of G×E are generally characterized as evincing a genetic predisposition; for example, individuals with low neuroenzymatic activity are generally characterized as having a genetic predisposition to ASPD. I first argue that the concept of a genetic predisposition fundamentally misconstrues these cases of G×E. This misconstrual will be diagnosed, and then a new concept—interactive predisposition—will be introduced. I then show how this conceptual shift reconfigures old questions and raises new questions for genetic screening. Attempts to screen embryos or fetuses for the gene associated with low neuroenzymatic activity with an eye towards selecting against the low-activity variant fall prey to the myth of pre-environmental prediction; attempts to screen newborns for the gene associated with low neuroenzymatic activity with an eye towards early intervention will have to face the interventionist's dilemma.



4. Friday, February 15, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 211
"The First-Person Concept and a Puzzle about Intersubjectivity"
Gurpreet Rattan, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto

This talk aims to answer two questions at once: (1) the question of how to incorporate the first-person concept in a general theory of concepts; and (2) the question of how to understand the rational force of the sheer fact of disagreement with one's epistemic peers. The first part of the paper explains exactly what problem the first-person concept poses for a theory of concepts. It is argued that the problem is that first-person thoughts resist incorporation into a view of thoughts organized around an idea of objective knowledge. The second part of the paper argues that the first-person concept plays a role in understanding the rational force of disagreement with peers, explaining how it can be rational to persist in one's attitudes in the face of disagreement with one's peers. This gives the first-person concept a role in objective knowledge that allows its incorporation into a general theory of concepts in a natural way.



5. Friday, February 22, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 205
"Mathematical Fallacies and Informal Logic"
Andrew Aberdein, Department of Philosophy, Florida Institute of Technology

It might be supposed that mathematical fallacies could be defined very simply. If all mathematical reasoning is formal and deductive, then surely mathematical fallacies are merely invalid arguments? This definition has several shortcomings. Firstly, there are many invalid mathematical arguments that would not normally be described as mathematical fallacies. Secondly, much reasoning in mathematics is conducted informally. So a satisfactory account of mathematical fallacies must explain what is distinctive about formal fallacies, beyond their invalidity, and also address informal fallacies. This paper considers the application to mathematical fallacies of techniques drawn from informal logic, specifically the use of 'argument schemes'. (You can download related background papers here and here.)



6. Friday, February 29, 2008 - 3:00pm, CBC C117
"Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Galileo Affairs"
Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Although recent works on Galileo’s trial (1613-1633) have reached new heights of erudition, documentation, and sophistication, they typically exhibit over-inflated complexities; neglect 400 years of historiography; and make little effort to learn from Galileo. I am working on a book aiming to avoid these lacunae. I argue that the Copernican Revolution required that the earth’s motion be supported not only with new arguments but also with new evidence, and that it be not only supported constructively but also critically defended from numerous objections. This defense in turn required not only the destructive refutation but also the appreciative understanding of those objections in all their strength. A major Galilean accomplishment was to elaborate such a “reasoned” and “critical” defense of Copernicanism. Galileo’s trial can be interpreted as a series of ecclesiastic attempts to stop him from defending Copernicus. And an essential thread of the controversy (1633-1992) about Galileo’s trial is the emergence of numerous arguments for and against the claim that his condemnation was right. My thesis is that the defense of Galileo can and should have the reasoned and critical character which his own defense of Copernicus had.



7. Friday, March 7, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 211
"Constitution, Inescapability, and Necessity"
Nadeem Hussain, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Prof. Hussain will take up the claim that we can avoid mainstream metaethical theories once we see that certain mental states and mental processes, or human activities and practices, are constituted by principles or norms. He will look at various versions of such claims, including claims that certain practices presuppose normative commitments, and argue that they do not succeed.



8. Tuesday, March 11, 2008 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
"Is Compassion Good for Us? Nietzsche's Politically Incorrect Thoughts"
Clifford Orwin, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

Few people today doubt that it is good to be compassionate. But reading the nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche makes us doubt it. Pity or compassion was a major theme of Nietzsche's, and his treatment of it was not just idiosyncratic but sometimes frightful: it lent itself to horrific misinterpretation, and it received it. It also furnished a major ground of his rejection of democracy, science, and modern "progress" generally. But we cannot then simply ignore Nietzsche's treatment of compassion, because the problems with compassion are too obvious to ignore. Nietzsche's treatment proves more subtle and ambivalent than it at first appears, but precisely for this reason poses a formidable challenge to the current reverence for compassion. Indeed he makes us suspect that the most pitiable thing about us is our infatuation with pity.
(Sponsored and hosted by the Great Works Academic Certificate Program, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)



9. Wednesday, March 12, 2008 - 4:00pm, Dept. Conference Room
"Do Customs Compete with Conditioning? Turf Battles and Division of Labor in Social Explanation"
Todd Jones, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Situations that social scientists and others explain using concepts like custom and norm often tend to be situations where many other explanations seem plausible as well. Do these other explanations compete with the custom/norm explanations or do they compliment them? In this talk Prof. Jones will sort out what makes high and low level accounts competitors.



10. Friday, March 28, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 211
"Possible Worlds of Doubt"
Ron Wilburn, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

A prominent contemporary anti-skeptical strategy, most famously articulated by Keith DeRose, aims to cage the skeptic’s doubts by contextualizing subjunctive conditional accounts of knowledge through a conversational Rule of Sensitivity. This paper argues that this strategy courts charges of circularity by virtue of its selective invocation of heavy counterfactual machinery. Because of the danger that this invocation essentially employs a metric for modal comparison that is implicitly informed by judgments of epistemic sameness, this metric proves objectively indefensible. We have reason to fear that this metric is selectively cherry-picked in advance to support the very anti-skeptical conclusion for which the contextualist longs. (You can download the full paper here. On Friday, I will quickly summarize he first eleven pages and read the subsequent ten. So, if you have an opportunity to read any of it, your time would be best spent on "Section IV. The Argument from Modal Circularity," pp. 11-21.)



11. Thursday, April 3, 2008, 7:30pm - Barrick Museum Auditorium
"Seeing Movies and Watching the Stars"
Gregory Currie, Professor of Philosophy and Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham

If the movie star sometimes inhibits our ability to see through the celebrity into the character, cinema is usually more successful at overcoming the ‘tyranny of reality’ than still photography. Our speaker argues that the reason for this lies in the dynamic narrative structure of film. He explores a tension between the make-believe that promotes narrative, and the make-believe that suppresses the realism of its images. Illustrations include still photographs and scenes from Blackhawk Down and The Thin Red Line.
(Co-sponsored by the UNLV Department of Philosophy and UNLV Department of Film)



12. Friday, April 4, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 211
"Narrative and Scepticism about Character"
Gregory Currie, Professor of Philosophy and Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham

We say that people have distinctive Characters, and much literature reinforces this idea, developing narratives wherein people's Character is subject to development and test. But social psychological investigation has failed to find evidence for the existence of Character, from which some conclude that the notion of Character is a cognitive illusion. I ask whether narratives which depend on the notion of Character are significantly compromised by these findings. I offer a (limited) defence of the narrative of Character.



13. Friday, April 11, 2008 - 3:00pm, CBC C113
"What is a Truth Value and How Many Are There?"
Roy T. Cook, Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota

Typically within formal semantics the semantic status of a sentence is represented by a truth value. Thus, these semantics represent the situation as one where there is a special relationship between statements and a special class of objects - the truth values (typically, but not always, true and false). In actuality, however, truth values, as objects, are mere surrogates for the different sorts of relations that can hold between a statement and the world. Thus, a statement receives the truth value 'true' if and only if it is true - i.e. if and only if what it says is the case. If truth values are really objectual surrogates for the various semantic relations that can hold between a statement and the world, however, then the critical question "how many truth values are there?" becomes transformed into a question about the number of possible semantic relations that can hold between a statement and the world. If we take the Liar paradox, and the Revenge phenomenon arising from strengthened versions of the Liar statement, seriously, then it turns out that the answer to this question is "more than can be contained in any set". In other words, the class of relevant semantic relations is indefinitely extensible, and as a result there is a proper class of truth values.



14. Tuesday, April 15, 4:00pm, Sociology Dept. Conference Room, CDC-B-225B
"Pragmatist Theory of Action"
Dr. Erkii Kilpinnen, Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki



15. Friday, April 18, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 205
"Counterexamples to Modus Ponens and Theories of Conditionals"
Ian Dove, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Since 1985, when Vann McGee published a set of putative counterexamples to modus ponens, (at least) two other possible counterexamples have convinced some theorists that modus ponens isn't generally valid. McGee's and William Lycan's (1993 and 2001) separate counterexamples come with two fully developed theories of conditionals. Douglas Walton (2002) offers a series of putative counterexamples along with a suggestion of yet another theory of conditionals. If the counterexamples are anything more than mere theoretical possibilities, this suggests that natural language conditionals are ambiguous – there are conditionals that support modus ponens and (at least) three others that don't. This is not a happy situation. Of the possible responses, biting the bullet and accepting the ambiguity is the least welcome. Still, that may be our only solution, in the end. Before accepting this unhappy state of affairs, I suggest ways to avoid each of the counterexamples and hence salvage modus ponens.

That's the official abstract. Unofficially: Counterexamples to Modus Ponens are like Bigfoot sightings: they come with a presumption of falsity. Hence, any (adequate) mundane explanation will trump the extraordinary one. In this talk, I give competing commonplace explanations for the extraordinary phenomena.



16. Friday, April 25, 2008 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 205
"Two Emotional Issues in Descartes: Intentionality and Animals"
Abel Franco, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Northridge

The intentionality of emotions and emotions in animals are two of the issues related to Descartes' Theory of Passions still insufficiently treated in the secondary literature. Whereas the former (intentionality) is crucial to properly understand Descartes' theory of passions, the latter has the potential to help revise not only some of the common assumptions held on Descartes' view of animals--in particular that they are machines--but also his view of the mind. I will try to show that our "passions" are for Descartes our only natural guides to our natural perfection (or natural happiness). For Descartes, the "importance" of the objects which our emotions represent--the specific representational content which distinguishes passions from sensations--is their worthiness to be joined in order to constitute unities of greater perfection with them. In this sense, we can talk about, at least, three different levels of aboutness. If we take into account the so-called "emotions"--caused only by the soul, not the body--of which Descartes mentions "intellectual" and "internal" ones, we can add a fourth level: the state of the soul. That "internal emotions," the ones on which "our well-being depends principally" (Passions II, art, 147, AT XI 440 : CSM I 381) are about the third level, as I would suggest, is particularly significant to understand Descartes' ethical goals in his treatment of the passions.
As to animals, I will try to show that they are clocks, yes, but clocks with passions. Descartes' theory of (human) passions, and, specially, the view of the human mind which emerges from it, allows, first, to avoid the apparent conflict that many scholars have seen in Descartes' attribution to animals of sensations and passions at the same time that he denies them a rational soul; and, secondly, to show that Descartes' theory of (human) passions can account, with small adjustments, for passions in animals. None of this requires denying animals a mind, but rather providing them with a non-human one.



17. Friday, May 2 - 3:00 pm, CBC C113
"From the Pessimistic Induction to Semantic Anti-Realism"
Gregory Frost-Arnold, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The Pessimistic Induction (PI), roughly put, is the following inductive generalization: since most of our past scientific theories have been radically mistaken in their accounts of what the world is like, our current theories are likely similarly mistaken. But what kind of 'mistake' is at issue here? Most commentators on the PI suggest that we should take our past theories as false--and thus, if the PI is a good argument, our present ones as probably also false. I here argue instead that, given certain widespread (though not universal) views about the relation between language and the world, many of the theoretical claims of previous scientific theories are neither true nor false. This lack of truth-value can arise in at least two related ways: referential failure or semantic presupposition failure. If substantial chunks of our past theories are truth-valueless, then the upshot of the PI is semantic anti-realism, the view that much of our theoretical scientific discourse is neither true nor false. However, semantic anti-realism is anathema to most philosophers of science today, so I conclude by considering various routes to escape this conclusion.



18. Tuesday, May 6, 2008 12:00 - 1:30 pm (Brown Bag Lunch), BSL 112
"Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets and the Rescue Industry"
Laura Agustín, Visiting Scholar Department of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Laura Agustín explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work; that migrants who sell sex are passive victims; and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Agustín argues that the label "trafficked" does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the "rescue industry" disempowers them. Based on extensive research among migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis.

FALL 2007

1. Friday, September 21, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 222
Discussion of Social Construction and Social Kinds
Sally Haslanger, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and Acting Director of Women’s Studies, MIT

Prof. Haslanger will explain how she understands the notions of "social construction" and "social kind". Some relevant background readings (esp. #2, 3, and 5 under "Articles") are available on her Webpage.



2. Friday, September 21, 2007 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
"The Social Critique of Social Knowledge (or, 'But Mom, Crop-Tops are Cute')"
Sally Haslanger, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and Acting Director of Women’s Studies, MIT

What seems cute to a seventh-grade girl is unlikely to seem cute to her parents, whose standards of dress and deportment may differ widely from her own. Parents and children each possess social knowledge that the other lacks, knowledge based upon facts constituted within specific social milieus. Does the situation lead inevitably to relativism about social knowledge, or rather to the possibility of genuine social critique?
(Co-sponsored by the UNLV Departments of Philosophy and Women’s Studies)



3. Friday, September 28, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 222
Discussion of Jones-style Social Epistemology
Todd Jones, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Prof. Jones will discuss his recent work. Some relevant background readings include "Swarm Scholarship and the Fundamental Epistemology of the Collective Method" and "Numerous Ways to be an Open-Minded Organization: A Reply to Lahrroodi." Read the papers and show up ready to abuse one of our own.



4. Friday, October 12, 2007 - 3:00pm, Dept. Conference Room
Discussion of the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars
David Beisecker, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Prof. Beisecker will shed some light on the subtle and complex views of one of the 20th Century's most important philosophers, focusing on Sellars's papers "Meaning as Functional Classification" and "Being and Being Known".  A background reading is available here.



5. Friday, October 19, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 222
"Probabilistic Proofs and Transferability" (Download here.)
Kenny Easwaran, Department of Philosophy, UC Berkeley

Don Fallis, in "The Epistemic Status of Probabilistic Proof", points out that although mathematicians don't require proofs to be complete formal deductions of their results, there are a certain class of "probabilistic" proofs that they don't accept. He argues that there is no epistemic purpose that can be served by accepting proofs with omitted steps and computer-aided proofs, but rejecting probabilistic proofs. I argue that there is in fact such a purpose, namely that of achieving "transferability" of proofs. This notion of transferability relates to an old counterexample to Grice's 1957 account of speaker-meaning, and helps illuminate a certain distinction between the practice of mathematics and the natural sciences. In the end, I suggest that though transferability is a real epistemic phenomenon, it may not be the best criterion, in mathematics or philosophy.



6. Friday, November 2, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 222
Get-together to discuss Michael Tye's work prior to his visit on Nov. 30.

Background Readings: Drestke, F. (2004). “Change Blindness.” Philosophical Studies, 120, 1-18. (Download here.) Also, Cavanagh, P. & Intriligator, J. (1999). “Attentional resolution: The grain and locus of visual awareness.” In C. Taddei-Ferretti and C. Musio (Eds.), Neuronal basis and psychological aspects of consciousness, pp. 41-52. (Click here and run a search on this paper title.)



7. Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007 - 3:00pm, CBC C133      
"Comparative Choice without Comprehensive Factors" (Download here.)
Jim Okapal, Department of Philosophy,  Missouri Western State University

A comparativist says that if a comparison is possible, then the comparison must take place in terms of properties borne by the items in question. I will call these properties "factors". According to Ruth Chang, rational choice and conflict resolution in each situation is determined by a single, comprehensive factor. She defends this view by arguing that rival approaches fail to meet certain meta-level criteria. I offer a distinct version of a sophisticated orthodox approach that eschews comprehensive factors and meets her criteria, thus showing that her argument by elimination is unconvincing. The heart of this alternative view utilizes factors, normative-level criteria, and interaction principles.  Together, these elements supply content beyond the factors, provide determinate weightings of factors, and leave room for reasonable disagreement.  Finally, I address criticisms that my account will end up offering a fractured account of conflict resolution and choice, and that Chang and I are essentially offering the same view.



8. Thursday, November 8, 2007 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
"Time-Loops, Superstrings, and Other Weird Stuff: Are Physicists for Real (or Is This Just a Lot of Mathematics)?"
Jody Azzouni, Department of Philosophy, Tufts University

The so-called hard sciences, such as physics, characterize their more theoretical objects in entirely mathematical ways (for example, as ‘electron-fields’). Usually no non-mathematical characterization is possible. Our presenter will discuss ways of distinguishing the real objects recognized by science from what is only the language of mathematics used in hard sciences.
(Co-sponsored by the UNLV Departments of Philosophy and Physics)



9. Friday, November 9, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 222
"Being Wrong about our Talk"
Jody Azzouni, Department of Philosophy, Tufts University

One thing that all the recent insights coming out of contemporary linguistics seem to have revealed is how little ordinary speaker-hearers know about their own language(s). I discuss some rather dramatic examples of properties of natural languages that I claim speaker-hearers are unaware of (e.g., their inconsistency, the non-existence of sentence and word types, etc.), offer some speculations about the nature of the subpersonal processing of language that causes these "confusions" about natural languages, and conclude with some discussion of burden-shifting arguments by philosophers with respect to the methodological requirement that "error-theories" should be avoided.



10. Friday, November 16, 2007 - 3:00pm, CBC C112 (Note the location)
"Nietzsche's Naturalism, Nietzsche's Skepticism"
Jessica Berry, Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University

Some of the most successful recent commentaries on Nietzsche are those that read him as a naturalist. Proponents of these readings have devoted no small effort to the task of explaining away Nietzsche's skeptical-sounding remarks about the value of truth, and the status of knowledge and scientific "objectivity", as they have worked to develop readings that are philosophically coherent, internally consistent, and (importantly) anti-skeptical. This, I shall argue, is the wrong approach to take, for two reasons: First, because Nietzsche's skeptical moments are more than "occasional prevarications". They appear in Nietzsche's earliest writings and then steadily throughout his career. To neglect these passages or to make them consistent with a rigorous anti-skepticism simply strains interpretive credibility too much. Secondly, this strategy also rests on a largely unfounded and, I shall argue, false presupposition that skepticism and naturalism are necessarily incompatible outlooks (since the naturalist must have commitments about the natural world and the methods of scientific investigation that the skeptic is not entitled to hold), so that we must choose between these two competing interpretive templates for Nietzsche's thought. We need not abandon the naturalist readings of Nietzsche in order to accommodate his skepticism, nor need we downplay his skepticism in order to do justice to the centrality of naturalism in his thought. It will be my task to explain how Nietzsche's skepticism in fact leads him to the position we recognize as "naturalistic".



11. Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 207
"Holistic Choice and Complex Intentions: A Sellarsian Approach to
Double Effect." (Download a related paper here.)
Neil Delaney, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University



12. Friday, November 30, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 222
"Lost Innocence: Change Blindness and Visual Consciousness"
Michael Tye, Department of Philosophy, The University of Texas at Austin

Prof. Tye will talk about his recent work in the philosophy of perception.
Background Readings: Drestke, F. (2004). “Change Blindness.” Philosophical Studies, 120, 1-18. (Download here.) Also, Cavanagh, P. & Intriligator, J. (1999). “Attentional resolution: The grain and locus of visual awareness.” In C. Taddei-Ferretti and C. Musio (Eds.), Neuronal basis and psychological aspects of consciousness, pp. 41-52. (Click here and run a search on this paper title.)
(Co-sponsored by the UNLV Department of Psychology)



13. Friday, December 7, 2007 - 3:00pm, SU Meeting Room 222
"Are Philosophers Experts?"
Jonathan Weinberg, Department of Philosophy and the Center for Cognitive Science, Indiana University at Bloomington

(Jonathan will deliver a powerpoint demonstration, of which we have no advance copy. However, a number of broadly relevant papers of Jonathan's are posted here.)



14. Friday, December 14, 2007 - 3:00pm, CBC C133 (Note the location)
"Ought: Between Objective and Subjective"
John MacFarlane, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley

Reflecting on the use of "ought" in deliberation has led many philosophers to assign it a "subjective" sense (ought, given the deliberator's evidence). Reflecting on its use in advice has led others to assign it an "objective" sense (ought, given the facts). We argue that both sides have part of the truth. Attempts to resolve the conflict by "taking sides" one way or the other, or by taking "ought" to be ambiguous or indexical, cannot succeed. Only by recognizing that "ought" is assessment-sensitive, we argue, can we account for its dual role in deliberation and advice. We apply our theory to some paradoxes involving oughts and conditionals, and to a puzzle Allan Gibbard raised about truth and correct belief.
A good background paper I would recommend, for those who have the time, is my paper in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, "Making Sense of Relative Truth."

SPRING 2007

1. Saturday, Jan. 27, 2007 - 9am, Imperial Palace Hotel, Jade Room
Part of The 19th Annual Meeting of the Far West Popular Culture & Far West American Culture Associations
"Rational Emotional Responses to Art"
Marion Ledwig, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

In order to evaluate whether it is rational to respond emotionally to art, it is first necessary to agree upon what art is. Originality is the central feature of art, with the different subject matters or materials used to determine which form in particular that work of art takes. The paradox of fiction is solved by claiming that people have beliefs in the existence and features of objects, even if known to be completely fictional, for seeing means believing. An emotional response to art is rational, if the agent has good reasons for his emotional response with regard to the particular piece of art. Hence, many different emotional responses to art become rational.



2. Saturday, Jan. 27, 2007 - 10:15am, Imperial Palace Hotel, Room TBA.
Part of The 19th Annual Meeting of the Far West Popular Culture & Far West American Culture Associations
"What Makes Some Political Issues 'Cultural'?"
Todd Jones, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

Many pundits, including Bill O'Reilly in his recent book, Culture Warrior, have discussed how voters make their political decisions based on "cultural issues". By 'cultural issues' they mean abortion, gay marriage, and gun control. What's unclear is why these issues count as "cultural" but issues like minimum wage, the Iraq war, and warrantless wiretapping do not. In this talk I examine what makes something a prototypical "cultural issue".



3. Friday, Feb. 2, 2007 - 5:30pm, CDC 425, Dept. Conference Room
"Analytic Truth: Then and Now"
Gregory Frost-Arnold, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

This talk deals with analytic truth, both historically and logically. First, I present a historical conjecture to explain how Quine's critique of analyticity was radicalized in the period between 1934's "Lectures on Carnap" and 1950's "Two Dogmas." Second, I contest certain of Paul Boghossian's recent claims concerning the notion of analyticity. In particular, I argue (contra Boghossian) that one can accept Quine's critique of analyticity without also accepting his indeterminacy of meaning thesis.



4. Friday, Feb. 9, 2007 - 5:30pm, MSU 222
"McDowell and Aristotle on 'Second Nature' "
David Forman, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

Detailed background material available here.



5. Friday, Feb. 9, 2007 - 7pm, CBC A106
"Compassion in Daily Living"
Lama Tenzin Dhonden, Personal Emissary of Peace to Gyalwa Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama 

Sponsored by Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada, Stillpoint Center for Spiritual Development, and the UNLV Department of Philosophy. Visit http://www.interfaithsn.org/calendar.html for more information.



6. Monday, Feb 12, 2007 - 7:30pm, MSU Theater (Room 111)
"The Origin of Species: Then and Now"
Michael Ruse, Department of Philosophy, Florida State University 

2009 is the 200th anniversary of the great English naturalist Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his great work The Origin of Species, in which he argued that all organisms (including humans) are the end results of a long, slow process of development - evolution - by a mechanism known as natural selection. Today, in America especially, Darwin and his ideas are under attack from scientists (like Stephen Jay Gould) and Christians, especially the Intelligent Design supporters. Is Darwinism truly an exhausted paradigm, or is there life yet in the old dog? I argue strongly that the theory of Origin is a great theory, that it works today as never before, and that the critics are hopelessly gloriously mistaken

Sponsored by the Great Works Academic Certificate Program Committee, CSUN, and the Honors College.



7. Friday, Feb. 23, 2007 - 5:30pm, CBC C122
"Actually" (Download here.)
Scott Soames, Department of Philosophy, USC, Los Angeles

My topic is the metaphysics and epistemology of actuality and possibility, plus the semantics and pragmatics of the language we use to talk about it. By 'actuality' I mean the actual world-state. By 'possibility' I mean all possible world-states, both the metaphysically and the epistemically possible. The actual world-state is the way the world is. Metaphysically possible states are ways the world could have been. Epistemically possible states are ways the world can coherently be conceived to be. In this talk I will sketch a conception of what these world-states are, and explore how we know about them.



8. Friday, Mar. 2, 2007 - 5:30pm, MSU 207 (Note the location)
"Free Will: New Directions for an Ancient Problem" (Download here.)
Robert Kane, University of Texas, Austin

In a number of writings over the past two decades, I have sought to answer four questions about free will: (1) Is it compatible (or incompatible) with determinism? (2) Why do we want it? (3) Can we make sense of a free will that is incompatible with determinism? (4) Can such a free will be reconciled with modern images of human beings in the natural and social sciences? On all four questions, I have tried to point current debates about free will in new directions. Is this essay, I discuss some of these new directions.



9. Friday, Mar. 2, 2007 - 7:30 pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
"Are All Values Relative? Seeking Common Ethical Ground in a Pluralist World"
Robert Kane, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin 

Are there objective values, and can we find common ethical ground in the welter of conflicting contemporary voices and beliefs? In this lecture it will be argued that pluralism need not lead to relativism, but that it may instead lead to a number of universal ethical principles.



10. Friday, Mar. 9, 2007 - 5:30pm, MSU 222
"Justificatory Independence and Revolutionary Maximalism"
Matthew Noah Smith, Department of Philosophy, Yale University 

Normally, we think that the moral status of an institution determines the moral status of those rules and relationships that are dependent upon the institution for their existence. In this paper, I challenge this view. In particular, I argue for the justificatory independence thesis: the rules and relationships that are dependent upon certain political and social institutions are authoritative even when those institutions are corrupt or illegitimate. I defend this thesis by appeal to three related arguments, an argument appealing to the value of the integrity of one's political commitments, a free-rider argument and an argument from respect for other's practical agency. I conclude the paper by arguing that what I call the revolutionary maximalism thesis follows from the justificatory independence thesis. The revolutionary maximalism thesis is the claim that the only morally appropriate response to an illegitimate or unjust institution whose rules display justificatory independence is either complete conformity or sincere revolutionary activity.



11. Friday, Mar. 23, 2007 - 5:30pm, CBC C114 (Note the location)
"Denial through Assertion: The Role of 'False'"
Brad Armour-Garb, Department of Philosophy, University at Albany/SUNY 

Suppose someone were to ask you (editing Groucho Marx), "Have you stopped beating your dog?" This seems like an ordinary "yes-no" question, but neither answer seems to get things right for someone who has never beaten her dog. Any such dog owner would (or: should) deny that she has stopped beating her dog--in fact, she would reject the thought that she has ever done such a thing. But saying, for example, that it is false that she has stopped beating her dog, or (what sounds even worse) that no, she has not stopped beating her dog don't seem to work as denials. Neither says what she means to convey, for if she says either, it seems right to conclude that she is still beating the poor animal! How, then, can she deny that she has stopped beating her dog, when the only obvious means for doing so wind up committing her to something that she also rejects? A number of philosophers (who I will call 'Cancellers') have postulated a separate 'speech act' of denial and have argued that we can (and do) sometimes deny a proposition whose negation we do not--because we cannot--assert. In this talk, I introduce and motivate the canceller view, after which I will provide reasons for rejecting it. My goal is not to provide an answer to the question raised above (although I will provide something of an answer). Rather, I aim to explain how the problem arises, to draw some conclusions about what it shows, and to shed light on certain (heretofore neglected) features of 'truth talk'.



12. Friday, Mar. 30, 2007 - 5:30pm, MSU 222
"Conceptions of Self-Deception"
Erik Lindland, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

Self-deception seems oxymoronic on its face. How can one deceive oneself? After all, in normal cases of deception one person knows the truth (the deceiver) while the other does not (the deceived). Does this imply that when we deceive ourselves we both know and don't know the truth? Furthermore, self-deception seems to pose paradoxical questions about intention. Can we intend to employ a strategy to hide some fact from ourselves? If the strategy works then this process is not present to consciousness. So, in what sense have we then intended anything? On the other hand, the results of self-deception are so precise it is hard to understand them as anything but intentional. In this paper I will explore various ways people have attempted to deal with these apparent paradoxes in recent analytic literature, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses. Finally, I will conclude with a proposal based on the work of Søren Kierkegaard.



13. Friday, Apr. 13, 2007 - 5:30pm, CBC C122 (Note the location)
"Virtue Ethics"
Paul Schollmeier, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

See the Handout.



14. Friday, Apr. 20, 2007 - 5:30pm, CBC C122 (Note the location)
"Indeterminism and Branching Time without Truth-Value Gaps"
Alan Rhoda, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

A natural way to model indeterministic causation is by means of a branching future depicting all of the causal possibilities as of a given point in time. Most authors who have taken this approach (e.g., Thomason, McCall, Belnap, etc.) have assumed that branching time requires denying bivalence, such that propositions about future contingents are neither true nor false. A few authors (e.g., Prior, Hartshorne), however, have thought that branching time and bivalence could be reconciled. In this talk I defend the second position. The denial of bivalence for future contingents is motivated by the assumption that corresponding pairs of "will" and "will not" propositions are contradictories. I will present three arguments that they are not contradictories, but contraries, and therefore are jointly false in the case of future contingents.



15. Friday, Apr. 27, 2007 - 5:30pm, MSU 207 (Note the location)
"The Story about Propositions"
James Woodbridge, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The notion of a proposition plays a central role in philosophical theorizing about language and the mind. Propositions--abstract entities supposedly denoted by expressions of the form that p--are held to be the things we believe and know, what your beliefs can share with mine or with other thought-states, what thought-states can share with assertions and other speech acts, and what utterances from different languages can all mean in common. With such a variety of functions associated with propositions, this notion simplifies, unifies, and systematizes theorizing about our thought and talk. Nevertheless, there are strong reasons for denying that propositions really exist, mainly due to their supposed abstract nature--considerations similar to those that generate doubts about the existence of numbers. In this talk I will explain these reasons for resisting ontological commitment to propositions, but I will then explain how we can retain our talk seemingly about propositions and the theoretical and expressive advantages it offers. The account of proposition-talk I propose explains the discourse as an "as if" talk grounded in a special kind of pretense.



16. Friday, April 27, 2007 - 7:30pm, Barrick Museum Auditorium
"Are Emotions Rational?"
Marion Ledwig, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

On the one hand we consider emotions as senseless, passive eruptions that interfere with reasoning. On the other hand we say that the heart has its reasons. I will discuss the ways in which emotions can be considered rational.



17. Friday, May 4, 2007 - 5:30pm, MSU 222
"'Refer' Madness"
Michael O'Rourke, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho

In this talk, I consider the concepts of reference and referring with a view to determining whether it makes sense to account for them together. After reviewing the literature a bit, I describe a model based on the notion of aiming that purports to explain both concepts in a systematic and unified fashion. While this appeals to me (at least), I'm not convinced it is adequate for reasons that I will adduce. I close by sketching an alternative approach that is in some ways akin to the recent work of Howard Wettstein.