Julien Dutant, King’s College London, “Safety for Credences” (10:15am-11:35am)

The distinctions between belief, true belief, justified belief and knowledge are well-established in the epistemology of full beliefs. It is still an open question, however, whether there are analogue categories for credences. In this paper I spell out an account according to which there are. The starting point is Tang’s (2016) and Pettigrew’s (ms) theory of reliable and justified credence. Put roughly, they hold that one’s credence in a proposition is reliable or justified iff it matches the objective probability of that proposition given one’s evidence. I argue that the account faces an analogue of the missed cues problem for Lewis’s account of knowledge for full belief (Schaffer 2001): it allows credences that accidentally match the relevant objective probability to count as reliable or justified. In the full belief case, a good solution to Lewis’ is to replace his evidentialist condition with a safety one. I spell out an analogue strategy for the case of credences. The key idea is to use Tang’s (2016) and Pettigrew’s (ms) as an analogue of truth for credences. The resulting account guarantees that knowledgeable credences are probabilistically consistent and allows one’s probabilistic knowledge to be imprecise. Finally, I sketch one way to extend the account to justification for credences, extending ideas from Smith (2016).

Abelard Podgorski, NUS, “Skepticism about Propositional and Doxastic Justification” (2:00pm-3:00pm)

One common story about epistemic rationality goes something like this: for each agent, at each time, there is some doxastic attitude towards P that is propositionally justified for them. In order to be rational, the agent must hold the attitudes that are propositionally justified for them, and in addition, they have to be doxastically justified in holding those attitudes, which is a matter of them actually holding the attitude on the basis of the epistemic reasons that support it. In this talk, I want to distinguish the basic commitments of this picture, and raise doubts about one in particular that has not received much attention: that we can identify, in a principled way a reasons base for each agent which determines what is propositionally justified for them. I will try to argue that there is no way to identify such a base without appealing to the things that propositional justification is supposed to explain or else severing the connection between doxastic justification and rationality. One potential response to the problem would be to try and reverse the direction of explanation between propositional and doxastic justification; I will propose something a little more radical – that neither propositional nor doxastic justification has any significant role to play in explaining the rationality of agents.

Bob Beddor, NUS, “Reliabilism, Reasons, and Defeat” (3.10pm to 4.10pm)

Reliabilism purports to explain justification in entirely naturalistic terms. One challenge to this reductive goal comes from cases of defeat. In order to avoid counterexamples, reliabilists need to invoke a “No Defeaters” clause. However, it proves difficult to formulate a satisfactory No Defeaters clause without smuggling in unreduced epistemic notions. After criticizing extant reliabilist strategies for handling defeat, I propose a solution. My solution is to integrate reliabilism with Pollock’s influential reasons-based approach to justification and defeat. The resulting view is a sort of “Reasons First Reliabilism”. Justification and defeat are explained in terms of reasons to believe, and reasons to believe are then analyzed along reliabilist lines.

Weng Hong Tang, NUS, “Evidentialism and Fit” (4.20pm to 5.20pm)

According to evidentialists, we have justification for a belief—whether binary or partial—if and only if our evidence fits the belief. But surprisingly little has been said about the notion of fit. In this talk, I’ll consider some attempts to cash out the notion. The first attempt involves an appeal to epistemic probability. The second attempt, favoured by Feldman and Conee, as well as McCain, involves an appeal to inference to the best explanation. The third attempt involves an appeal to a match between belief content and the content of one’s evidence. I’ll argue that all three attempts fail to satisfy certain desiderata that an account of fit should satisfy. In particular, either (i) they are unilluminating, or (ii) they fail to account for inferential justification, or (iii) they fail to account for ultima facie justification, or (iv) they fail to account for the justification of partial belief.

All are welcome

2.00pm to 2.45pm
1st Presentation by Mr Joshua Thong Zheng Jie
Title
The Bayesian and the Dogmatist.

Abstract:
The Dogmatist potentially faces two sources of conflict when trying to combine with Bayesianism: the Bayesian Objection (White, 2006) and the Weisberg Paradox (Weisberg, 2009). Miller (2016, 2017) has proposed two different ways on how to solve these conflicts. In my paper, I argue against Miller that none of his proposals work. The first proposal has no hope of resolving conflict with the Weisberg Paradox while the second violates Bayesianism itself, or more specifically, it violates Richard Jeffrey’s motivations for Jeffrey Conditionalization. I will also propose a new solution which has the potential to resolve these two sources of conflict, while addressing some objections it might face.

2.45pm to 3.30pm
2nd Presentation by Ms Puah Xin Yi
Title
Zhuangzi and the Skillful Killer

Abstract
In the Zhuangzi, one finds a collection of passages that depict skillful exemplars excelling at what they do. It is generally thought that these stories give an account, at least in part, of Zhuangzi’s positive ethical vision. In contemporary literature, a criticism, which I will call the skillful killer critique, has been raised against Zhuangzi’s account. This thesis aims to clarify the nature of the critique such that it can be better understood as a legitimate problem for Zhuangzi, and the possible replies available to address it. In particular, I explore in more detail the type of response that draws on sceptical resources in the Zhuangzi, assessing the viability of this sceptical response to the critique.

3.30pm tp 4.15pm
3rd Presentation by Ms Mah Wan Ying Sara
Title
The Public in Hume’s theory of Justice

Abstract
Hume’s theory of Justice was mainly discussed in the Treatise of Human Nature and in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. While his arguments focus on the nature of justice as being a virtue based on social conventions and being directed towards public interest, less words were spent on who constituted this society or public.

The main chapters of this thesis aim to answer the question “To whom are we supposed to be just?” Given his criteria for justice to be applied to free, civilised, equal people, Hume’s theory of justice presents many questions on what these criteria mean.

Hume briefly discusses some cases in Enquiry 3.18-19, namely those of the pseudo-human, the barbarian, and women. Using his arguments, I also extend these cases to animals, children, handicapped people, and immigrants since they in some way do not necessarily meet these criteria, as well as to some variations to the cases he does discuss. In doing so, I attempt to provide a way for Hume to give a satisfactory explanation for whether we need to treat these people justly and vice versa.

4.15pm to 5.00pm
4th Presentation by Mr Nicholas Khaw Hong Song
Title
A contextualist reading of Hume on miracles

Abstract
Hume’s work in part I if on miracles has traditionally been read as an objective attack against belief in miracles. This essay suggests that Hume’s piece might be much more subjective and contextualist in nature. A testimony concerning an act M might be a miracle to some people in a particular context and not to other people in a different context. I suggest that Hume’s arguments are only binding to people(s) who currently deem M as a miracle. Objections and how it ties in with part II are further discussed.

The Evil Demon Inside

Abstract:
In the “new evil demon” scenario, it seems that we could still have justified beliefs about the external world, even if we failed to be reliable about the external world. My own goal is to examine how new evil demon problems arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. In the first part of the talk, I argue that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. In the second part of the paper, I argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use the scenarios to defend a properly formulated internalist view about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of self-knowledge need to talk—each has much to learn from each other.

Date: 1 March 2018
Time: 2pm to 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3-05-23)

About the Speaker:
Professor Silins is Associate Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. He did his graduate work in Philosophy at Oxford University, where he received his PhD in 2004 and his BPhil in 2001. Professor Silins developed his interest in philosophy by studying literature and philosophy at Princeton University, where he received his BA, magna cum laude, in Comparative Literature in 1999. He works in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He has special interests in the epistemology of perception, self-knowledge, and the interplay between views in epistemology and views about mental content and mental causation. He joined the Sage School in Fall 2006, after completing a Bersoff Fellowship at New York University. He has also held a fellowship at the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University.

All are welcome

Understanding the phenomenology of perceptual experience by Frank Jackson

Abstract:
Seeing something as green is different from seeing something as red. Seeing something as round is different from seeing something as square. These commonplaces remind us (not that we need reminding) that perceptual experiences have a phenomenology. What’s the best way to account for this?

Date: 11 December 2017, Monday
Time: 6pm – 7.30pm
Venue: AS7 Seminar Room B

About the Speaker:
Frank Jackson is Lim Chong Yah visiting professor at The National University of Singapore, and an Emeritus Professor at The Australian National University. His books include From Metaphysics to Ethics, and Language, Names, and Information.

ALL ARE WELCOME

“The Verisimilitude Framework for Inductive Inference” by Olav Vassend

Abstract:
The “likelihood” of a hypothesis given a piece of evidence is the probability that the hypothesis assigns to the evidence. Both Bayesians and likelihoodists use likelihoods to quantify evidential impact, and likelihoods play an important role in frequentist inference as well. However, I show that the likelihood is not always an appropriate way of measuring evidential impact. I then argue in favor of a “verisimilitude framework” for inductive inference, and I give several examples of verisimilitude-based inference procedures that make use of evidential measures other than the likelihood, including inference procedures appropriate for parsimony evaluations of scientific theories and for phylogenetic inference. Finally, I contrast my proposal with a similar recent proposal grounded in decision theory.

Date: 9 November 2017
Time: 3pm to 5pm
Venue: Philosophy Meeting Room (AS3-05-23)

About the Speaker:
Olav Vassend is an assistant professor of philosophy at Nanyang Technological University. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in the spring of 2017. Most of his work is in philosophy of science and formal epistemology, and he is particularly interested in the foundations of statistical inference and inductive inference more generally.

All are welcome

Date: 16 November 2017
Time: 2pm to 5pm
Venue: Philosophy Meeting Room (AS3-05-23)

2pm to 3.30pm
“Holism in Action” by Robert Myers

Abstract:
Although Davidson always acknowledged that his causal theory of action faces a number of serious difficulties, he maintained throughout his career that they should be regarded as problems of detail, not as problems calling into question his basic idea that reasons for actions are causes of actions and that rationalizing explanations are causal explanations. I argue, first, that these difficulties are actually fatal to Davidson’s view as it is often interpreted and as he himself often presented it in his classic papers on philosophy of action, but, second, that, on a different interpretation, Davidson’s view fares better, and that this different interpretation is closer to his real meaning.

About the speaker:
Robert Myers is Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught for twelve years at Barnard College in New York City before joining the department of philosophy at York University in 2001. His research interests are in theoretical ethics, related issues in philosophy of action and epistemology, and political philosophy. He is the author of Self-Governance and Cooperation (Oxford 1999) and the co-author (with Claudine Verheggen) of Donald Davidson’s Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry (Routledge 2016).

3.30pm to 5pm
“Davidson’s Treatment of Wittgenstein’s Rule-Following Paradox” by Claudine Verheggen

Abstract:
The aim of this paper is first to show that Wittgenstein and Davidson argue for semantic non-reductionism, the rejection of any account of meaning that does not invoke semantic notions, in similar ways, and that consequently they conceive of the use they both take to be essential to meaning in a similar way. Both think that a full account of meaning requires us to consider this use within a semantic context, so that we cannot say what speakers mean by their words, and what words mean, without saying what speakers use their words to mean, and we cannot answer the question what makes it possible for someone to have a language without thinking of her as already having one. However, whereas Wittgenstein makes only very general remarks about the kind of use that is essential to meaning, Davidson has much more to say about the topic and, as a result, provides a significantly richer and more constructive way to address the paradox about meaning and rule-following developed by Wittgenstein.

About the speaker:
Claudine Verheggen is Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto. She received a diploma in cinema from the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle, Brussels, an MA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She taught for ten years at the City University of New York before joining the department of philosophy at York University in 2006.

Verheggen’s research interests are in the philosophy of language and related issues in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology (including normativity, objectivity, truth, and philosophical skepticism). She is the co-author (with Robert Myers) of Donald Davidson’s Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry (Routledge 2016), and the editor of Wittgenstein and Davidson on Language, Thought, and Action (Cambridge 2017). Her current research includes a book project, entitled Minding the World, in which she addresses critiques of what she takes to be Wittgenstein and Davidson’s conception of the relation between thought and reality, and develops and defends the conception of objectivity that can be based upon it.

All are welcome

The Mysticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and “the Meaning of Life” by Richard McDonough

Abstract:
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus defines the “mystical” as that which can be “shown” but cannot be “said.” It is argued that there are two distinct notions of “showing” in the Tractatus, that which is “shown [zeigt]” by propositional symbols, and that which “shows itself [zeigt sich]”. This distinction is essential to understanding the mysticism of the Tractatus. Although the former notion has received the most attention, it is argued that the latter is more fundamental. The paper argues that the various species of the mystical in the Tractatus can, in a sense, be “said” after all. A sketch of the sense in which one can say “mystical” things is provided and distinguished from the sense in which one can “say” “genuine” (factual) propositions. The former resembles a “warranted assertibility” theory of meaning while the latter resembles a more traditional “truth conditions” theory of meaning. It is argued that the neglected Tractatus’ view that life and the world are one [sind Eins]” anticipates Husserl’s notion of the “life-world” some 16 years before Husserl announced that notion. The Tractatus life-world is my life-world (for any me). It is argued that the “mystical” in the Tractatus refers primarily to those aspects of the life-world that cannot be expressed in genuine propositions. Thus, although the Tractatus is best known for defending a seminal version of “logical atomism,” it actually holds that the organic unity of the life-world is lost in the process of analysis. It is shown how the present interpretation differs both from the “traditional” and the “resolute” interpretations of the Tractatus. Finally, the paper provides a taxonomy of the various species of Tractatus mysticism that illustrates these points.

Date: 2 November 2017
Time: 2pm to 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Meeting Room (AS3-05-23)

About the Speaker:

Richard McDonough received his BA in philosophy, with minors in mathematics and chemistry, summa cum laude, from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, his MA in philosophy from Cornell University in 1974, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1975. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow 1971-71 and a National Science Foundation Fellow 1971-74. He is the author of two books, over 80 articles in internationally referred journals, 5 encyclopedia and dictionary entries, and 11 book reviews. He has acted as a guest editor of an issue of Idealistic Studies titled Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science. He has taught at Bates College, the National University of Singapore, the University of Tulsa, the University Putra Malaysia, the Overseas Family College, the PSB Academy, the University of Maryland, the Arium Academy, and James Cook University. In addition to philosophy, he has taught psychology, physics, general humanities and writing courses. He is currently working on a book on Plato and a book on the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy from the early Tractatus to his “later philosophy”

All are welcome