In this paper I chart the history of the development of theories of psychological continuity in the modern period. In providing the logical geography of competing positions, I distinguish between two forms of strong psychological continuity and discontinuity, between theories of strong continuity and discontinuity between cognitive and associative processes and between theories of strong continuity and discontinuity between human and animal psychology and behavior. I note that both forms of strong continuity and discontinuity have tended to be affirmed or denied together, and have only rarely and recently been decoupled, opening up new theoretical positions in the debate. While the historical trend in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was to extend explanations in terms of association “all the way up” to the highest human cognitive processes, some contemporary theorists have tried to extend cognitive explanations “all the way down” to encompass associative processes. I draw some tentative conclusions about the theoretical options in contemporary research on psychological continuity.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 21 January 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

John D. Greenwood was educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, and teaches in the PhD Programs in Philosophy and Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His main interests are in the history and philosophy of social and psychological science. He is the author of Explanation and Experiment in Social Psychological Science (1989), Relations and Representations (1989), Realism, Identity and Emotion (1994), The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology (2004) and A Conceptual History of Psychology: Exploring the Tangled Web (2014, 2nd ed.)

According to a posteriori ethical intuitionism (AEI), perceptual experiences can provide non-inferential justification for at least some moral beliefs. Moral epistemology, for the defender of AEI, is less like the epistemology of math and more like the epistemology of tables and chairs. One serious threat to AEI comes from the phenomenon of cognitive penetration. The worry is that even if evaluative properties could figure in the contents of experience, they would only be able to do so if prior cognitive states influence perceptual experience. Such influences would undermine the non-inferential, foundationalist credentials of AEI. In this paper, I defend AEI against this objection. Rather than deny that cognitive penetration exists, I argue that some types of cognitive penetrability are actually compatible with AEI’s foundationalist structure. This involves teasing apart the question of whether some particular perceptual process has justification conferring features from the question of how it came to have those features in the first place. Once this distinction is made, it becomes clear that some kinds of cognitive penetration are compatible with the non-inferential status of moral perceptual experiences as the proponent of AEI claims.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Monday, 18 January 2016
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Preston J. Werner, Syracuse University
Moderator: A/P Neiladri Sinhababu

About the Speaker:

Preston J. Werner is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Syracuse University. His research interests are in metaethics (especially moral epistemology), philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.

In this talk, I propose a new semantic framework for reasoning about a notion of content that inherits two important features of the Fregean notion of sense. First, it inherits the hyperintensional structure of Fregean senses. Senses are hyperintensional because some necessarily equivalent sentences have distinct senses. Second, it inherits the non-trivial structure of Fregean senses. Senses are non-trivial because some necessarily equivalent sentences have the same sense. So, while cut very finely, sense it is not an “everything goes” view on content: there are non-trivial constraints on how finely individuated Fregean senses should be. By developing a semantics in which we can capture such Fregean-inspired distinctions among contents, I argue that we can develop a semantics for a non-trivial, hyperintensional notion of content. A core feature of the semantics is that it can represent a whole spectrum of notions of content: ranging from extremely fine-grained content—and potentially trivial content—to content that is individuated up to logical equivalence. The resulting semantic flexibility, I argue, is desirable when it comes to accounting for hyperintensional content.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 14 January 2016
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Jens Christian Bjerring, Aarhus University
Moderator: A/P Neiladri Sinhababu

About the Speaker:

Dr. Bjerring was awarded the PhD degree in philosophy from the Australian National University in November 2010. Currently, he is lecturing at Aarhus University (Denmark). He is particularly interested in issues in epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and mind.

Coercion has the power to undermine morally valid consent. We think that this is true in business, in medical research, and in sexual relations. However, the most popular account of what grounds consent in the moral realm – the waiving of rights – has a hard time explaining the relationship between coercion and consent. I examine a problem often referred to as “The Paradox of Blackmail” and suggest that there is a more difficult but related “Paradox of Rape.” The paradox emerges from the combination of two theses about sexual consent that are almost entirely uncontested, with a similarly uncontested but incompatible thesis about coercion.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 7 January 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Hallie Liberto, University of Connecticut
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Hallie Liberto is an assistant professor of philosophy at UConn. She joined the faculty in the fall of 2011 after completing her dissertation at the University of Wisconsin – Madison under the advisorship of Daniel Hausman. She works in moral and social philosophy. Lately she has been writing on these topics: promises, exploitation, sexual consent, and the nature and transfers of rights.

She is spending the 2014-2015 academic year at Princeton University as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow.

In this talk, I motivate understanding memory as a cognitive capacity with memory beliefs as the results of exercising this capacity. Memory beliefs have traditionally been understood as either stored and retrieved content with a certain causal history or content with a particular phenomenal character. First, I show that these conceptions are not extensionally equivalent and they disagree on cases of special interest to epistemologists. Then, I argue that the capacity conception can best accommodate the psychological discovery that memory is radically constructive, focusing on cases of false memory.

Finally, I claim that Michaelian’s attempt to capture constructive memory with a causal account does not go far enough to include central cases of interest.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Monday, 23 Nov 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Mary Salvaggio, Rutgers University
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Mary Salvaggio is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Rutgers University. Her dissertation is focused on updating epistemological views of memory in light of the contemporary psychological understanding of human memory as an active, constructive process. She is currently a graduate tutor at Nanyang Technological University.

Gilbert Harman argues that logic as a science of consequence relations (what he calls ‘implications’) is not the same thing as reasoning in the sense of a procedure for ‘rea- soned change in view’. Harman’s position is an orthodox position among contemporary philosophers and logicians. In fact, Harman takes himself to be explicating what every- one already believes rather than arguing for his position. In this paper, I will demonstrate two things. First, I will show that a paraconsistent logician (someone who rejects ex con- tradictione quodlibet (ECQ) (ϕ, ¬ϕ |= ψ for any ϕ, ψ) as invalid) should reject Harman’s position. Second, based on my analysis of paraconsistent logic, I will argue against Har- man’s position. If it is true that Harman’s position represents a modern orthodoxy, its rejection has a number of consequences. I will briefly discuss some of them in the end.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 12 Nov 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Koji Tanaka, Lecturer, School of Philosophy, Australian National University
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Koji Tanaka is Lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. He works on logic, the philosophy of logic, Buddhist philosophy and Chinese philosophy. His current project is to integrate Buddhist insights into the nature of logic with contemporary debates about logic and to challenge the foundations of the (Western) contemporary development of logic.