“Skepticism and the Acquisition of ‘knowledge’ ” by Shaun Nichols (17 Jan)

Do you know you’re not being massively deceived by an evil demon?  That’s a familiar skeptical challenge.  Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Why do people – before training – respond so quickly to outlandish skeptical scenarios involving sorcerers and mad scientists?  We explore this question by taking a learning-theoretic approach.  We argue that, given the evidence available to the learner, it would be rational for the learner to infer an infallibilist conception of knowledge.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Friday, 17 Jan 2014
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Shaun Nichols, University of Arizona
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

nicholspictureShaun Nichols is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he directs a research group on experimental philosophy. He has published widely at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, including a book on moral judgment, Sentimental Rules, as well as several articles in experimental philosophy on free will, responsibility, and cultural diversity.

“Intellectual Autonomy” by Allan Hazlett (18 Apr)

Is it good to be intellectually autonomous?  If it is, in what way is it good?  In this talk I defend the value of intellectual autonomy by appeal to the value of non-testimonial knowledge.  I criticize some accounts of the value of non-testimonial belief (namely, those that reject the possibility of reliable belief, knowledge, certainty, and understanding on the basis of testimony), and defend the value of non-testimonial knowledge by appeal to the value of acquaintance (and the propositional knowledge that comes with it), individual achievement, collective risk-mitigation, and democratic legitimacy.  Non-testimonial knowledge entails acquaintance (which typically comes with a wealth of propositional knowledge), is always an individual achievement, and has social value in virtue of its connection with mitigating the collective risk of error  and with democratic legitimacy.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 18 April 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Allan Hazlett, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Allan Hazlett (PhD, Brown University, 2006) is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, having worked previously at Texas Tech and Fordham Universities.  He is the author of Luxury of the Understanding: On the Value of True Belief (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and was the winner of the 2007 Rutgers Epistemology Conference Young Epistemologist Prize.  Since 2012 he has served as the Secretary of the Scots Philosophical Association.  He is currently working on the nature and value of the (so-called) intellectual virtues.

“Seeing, Visualizing, and Believing” by John Zeimbekis (11 Apr)

I begin with an account of how visual processes construct the nonconceptual contents caused by picture perceptions, and then ask how those contents survive into doxastic, personal-level awareness. The account suggests that subjects have a degree of personal-level control over some of the visual processes that yield visual experiences, phenomenal characters, and nonconceptual contents as outputs. The cognitive penetrability of relatively early visual processes potentially conflicts with the use of perception to justify beliefs. I argue that this form of penetrability should be admitted, but that it does not have the pernicious epistemological consequences usually expected of cognitive penetrability because picture-perceptions do not cause beliefs. The account put forward secures a key point for understanding pictures as a form of representation. It shows that the mental states caused by pictures do not form the contents of attitudes or psychological modes (eg illusion, belief or perceptual belief with those contents), but are representations toward which we can subsequently adopt a number of different attitudes depending on the use of the picture. If there is time, I shall place this conclusion in the context of my (2010) proposal that pictures are always used to perform type (as opposed to token) demonstrations.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 11 April 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: John Zeimbekis, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Patras
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

John Zeimbekis is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Patras and maître de conférences on leave from the University of Grenoble. He has held fellowships at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and the University of Pennsylvania. He works on vagueness and appearance properties, pictorial representation, fiction and mind reading, aesthetic value, indexical thought, the contents of perception, and cognitive penetrability. Publications include articles in the BJA, JAAC, Noûs and Philosophical Studies, several articles and book chapters on aesthetics in French and in Greek, and a book on aesthetic judgment (Qu’est-ce qu’un jugement esthétique, Paris: Vrin, 2006). He recently completed a monograph, Pictures, Perception and Meaning, which is under review, and is co-editing (with A. Raftopoulos) a volume entitled Cognitive Penetrability. He is currently treasurer of the European Society for Aesthetics.

“Just Knowers: Towards a Virtue Epistemology in the Mahãbhãrata” by Vrinda Dalmiya (28 Mar)

Adopting the framework of Anglo Analytic Virtue Epistemology, I ask of the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, the question: What sort of character or intellectual virtues must a good knower have? Then, motivated by broadly feminist sensibilities, I raise the concern whether motivations for knowing the world can be associated with motivations to rectify injustices in that world – whether, in other words, a good knower is also a ‘just knower.’ I go on to explore the structure of humility and shame as “virtues of truth” in the epic to see whether they can establish a connection between knowing and justice.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 28 March 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Vrinda Dalmiya, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Professor Dalmiya is a feminist epistemologist who did her doctoral studies at Brown University. She has taught at Montana State University, Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, and is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research has expanded into the area of Ethics and she has published on a wide range of topics, ranging from truth and interpretation, Feminism and naturalized epistemology, epistemic humility, to wisdom and love, and care ethics. The Royal Institute of London recently invited her to give a lecture, “From Good Knowers to Just Knowers in the Mahābhārata: Towards a Comparative Virtue Epistemology.”

“Truth and Recognition of Truth: Frege and Nyaya” by Arindam Chakrabarti (21 Mar)

Although a staunch realist in many senses, Gottlob Frege rejected the correspondence theory of truth because it leads to a vicious regress. Donald Davidson has more recently argued that truth (in natural language) is indefinable and any attempt to define truth would be sheer folly. I trace back basic reason why truth could not be defined to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Yet, we find in Gangeśa, a 14th century New Nyaya epistemologist, a technically fortified definition of true cognition which seems to escape Frege’s, Davidson’s and Kant’s objections. While truth is not considered a natural universal, Gangeśa definition of truth does not postulate any Fregean thoughts or abstract propositions as bearer of truth. Truth remains an artificial relational property of awareness-episodes. While there is no truth without true acts of believing, it is possible for truth of a piece of knowledge to remain unknown even by the knower. Can Nyaya maintain its realism, without postulating Fregean thoughts or any realm of sense?

This paper is an exercise in comparative philosophical logic of truth and recognition of truth, as it were, through a debate between Nyaya and Frege.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 21 March 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Professor Arindam Chakrabarti, having done his M.A. in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic, from Presidency College Kolkata University, earned his D.Phil from Oxford University in 1982, working under Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett. He taught at Calcutta University and at University College London, Seattle and Delhi University, and for the last 15 years, at the University of Hawaii Manoa. After being trained as an analytic philosopher of language at Oxford, Professor Chakrabarti has spent several years receiving traditional training in Indian logic (Navya Nyaya). Prof Chakrabarti has edited or authored six books, in English, Sanskrit, and Bengali, including Denying Existence, Knowing from Words (with B.K. Matilal) Universals, Concepts and Qualities (with Peter Strawson) and has published more than eighty papers and reviews. He is currently working on a book on moral psychology of the emotions and another monograph on the Isha Upanishad.

Hume Workshop (21 Feb)

The Philosophy Department will be organising a one-day workshop on David Hume:

[Talk 1. 2.00 – 3.10pm]

Ideas and Impressions Revisited by Tamás Demeter (Hungarian Academy of the Sciences), Isaac Manasseh Meyer Fellow, 11-25 Feb 2013

It is probably the first textbook wisdom on Hume’s philosophy that impressions and ideas are not different qualitatively but only in degree, i.e. in their force, liveliness and vivacity. Based on textual evidence, I am going to argue that there is a crucial qualitative distinction to be drawn between the two groups of perceptions: ideas, but not impressions, are distinct and atomistic. In my talk I will illustrate the significance of this difference in relation to the example of the ‘missing shade of blue’, arguing that the example itself presupposes this qualitative distinction. Then I will generalize the consequences of this insight and argue that it has implications fundamental to our understanding of Hume’s psychology as it drives toward a reading of Hume as a faculty psychologist rather than the arch-associationist he is frequently taken to be.

About the speaker: Tamás Demeter is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Previously, he taught at the Universities of Miskolc, Budapest (Eötvös University), Cambridge, and Pécs, and has held research fellowships at the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh (as a Mellon Visiting Fellow), Helsinki, and Wassenaar. In 2008-2010 he was the Lorenz Krüger Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He has written extensively on early modern philosophy and science, the philosophy of psychology, and Central European intellectual history.

[Talk 2. 3.15 – 4.20pm]

Hume’s Doxastic Involuntarism by Hsueh Qu (New York University)

In this talk, I examine three mutually inconsistent claims that are commonly attributed to Hume: (a) that all beliefs are involuntary; (b) that some beliefs are subject to normative appraisal; and (c) that ‘ought implies can’. I examine the textual support for such ascription, and the options for dealing with the puzzle posed by their inconsistency. First, I will put forward some evidence that Hume maintains each of the three positions outlined above. I then examine what I call the ‘prior voluntary action’ solution (henceforth PVA) endorsed by Passmore (1980), Norton (1982, 1994, 2002), Falkenstein (1997), Owen (1999), Williams (2004), and McCormick (2005), among others. I argue that PVA in any form fails to account for synchronic rationality. I then raise more specific objections depending on how we disambiguate PVA. PVA can be read as either granting beliefs derivative voluntariness, or as denying their normative significance; the former version fails to satisfactorily accommodate even diachronic evaluations of beliefs, while the latter falls to a regress given Hume’s thesis regarding the inability of actions and passions to possess epistemic normativity. I then briefly propose to reject (c) instead for three reasons: first, the weakness of textual support for such an ascription; secondly, the implications of Hume’s is/ought distinction; and thirdly, Hume’s explicit recognition of the irrelevance of involuntariness to normative evaluation in the moral case.

About the speaker: Hsueh Qu is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at New York University. He previously completed the BPhil and PPE degrees at the University of Oxford. He is currently working on a PhD dissertation on normativity in Hume’s philosophy.

[Talk 3. 4.30 – 5.30pm]

‘No species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life…’: Recent Work on Hume’s Epistemology of Testimony by Axel Gelfert (National University of Singapore)

Recent years have witnessed a thorough reassessment of Hume’s views concerning one of the most pervasive sources of knowledge: the testimony of others. Traditionally, Hume had been cast in the role of ‘global reductionist’, who demands that each of us must have first-hand, non-testimonial evidence of the reliability of (relevant reference classes of) testimony, before accepting any new instance of it. Indeed, most contemporary epistemologists of testimony –reductionists and anti-reductionists alike – still take it for granted that this is Hume’s position. However, a number of scholars have recently disputed the accuracy of this interpretation of Hume on testimony. The upshot of these new interpretations is that Hume is not nearly as ‘individualistic’ about what constitutes good grounds for empirical knowledge as has traditionally been thought; rather, he is willing to regard testimonial acceptance as a natural (default) response to testimony – given certain general constraints (e.g., exclusion of ‘miraculous’ testimony, prevalence of favourable social conditions, etc.). Support for this reassessment comes from textual evidence (especially if one looks beyond Hume’s Enquiry), Hume’s account of the role of sympathy in belief formation, his take on curiosity as the love of knowledge, and recent attempts to interpret Hume as a virtue epistemologist.

About the speaker: Axel Gelfert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at NUS. He received his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge in 2006, and has held visiting research fellowships at Collegium Budapest (Institute of Advanced Study) and the University of Edinburgh (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities). His main areas of research are historical and social epistemology and the philosophy of science and technology.

“The Essence of Truthmaking (and a Quandary for Quasi-Realism)” by Jamin Asay (7 Feb)

Conventional wisdom in truthmaker theory is that which propositions an object makes true is a function, in part, of its essential properties. For instance, Socrates himself is a truthmaker for <Socrates is human> but not <Socrates is a philosopher> because while Socrates is essentially human, he is not essentially a philosopher. I’ve argued previously that we can make sense of a different kind of truthmaking that relies not on essential properties, but on the kinds of projectivist practices at work in quasi-realist accounts of metaethics. Such a distinction enables quasi-realists to distinguish themselves from realists (in particular, naturalistic “Cornell” realists). But what if modality itself is best understood quasi-realistically? What would this mean for truthmaker theory? In this talk I’ll explore what the ramifications of anti-realism about modality are for truthmaker theory. In particular, I’ll argue that this perspective offers an argument for a nominalist-friendly approach to truthmaker theory, but that comes at the expense of clouding the distinction between realism and anti-realism. A further consequence of this shows that quasi-realists may be on shaky ground if they pursue their quasi-realism about both morals and modals.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 7 Feb 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Jamin Asay, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker: 

Jamin Asay is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He has also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he recently earned his Ph.D. He has published in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of science, metaethics, and philosophy of language. His monograph entitled The Primitivist Theory of Truth will be released by Cambridge University Press in summer 2013.

“Knowing-how and knowing-that in the Zhuangzi: discipline, habits, and spontaneity” by Karyn Lai (8 Nov)

A number of scholars have characterised the Zhuangzi’s epistemology as anti-rationalist, anti-intellectual, or sceptical of conceptual knowledge (knowledge-that). I suggest that this characterisation of its epistemology is unhelpful and wrongheaded for two primary reasons. First, it glosses over a key similarity between the Zhuangzi’s approach to the acquisition of skills, and that of Confucian self-cultivation. Both traditions share the view that discipline, which may include knowledge-that, is crucial to cultivation. Secondly, to characterise the Zhuangzi’s epistemology as ‘intuitive know-how’ is a reductionist move that overlooks the multi-faceted nature of the cultivation of skills in the text.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 8 Nov 2012
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Karyn Lai, Associate Professor of Philosophy,
 University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia
Moderator: Dr. Neil Sinhababu

About the Speaker: 

Karyn Lai is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), in Sydney, Australia. She is the Chair of the Bachelor of Arts (BA) Program in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW. Her primary research area is in early (pre-Qin) Confucian and Daoist philosophies. She is the author of Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Learning from Chinese Philosophies (Ashgate Publishing, 2006); and of numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals. She is the Editor of the scholarly journal Philosophy Compass (Chinese Comparative Philosophy Section) and Assistant Editor of Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics. She is currently the President of the Australasian Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the Regional Advisor (Australasia) of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy.

Her current research focuses on epistemology in Chinese philosophy. The research begins by asking what it is to know in some of the pre-Qin texts. For a start, these texts are not fundamentally concerned with propositional knowledge, or what epistemologists call knowing-that. They are interested in ways of knowing that are action-guiding or that have practical outcomes. Here, epistemological concerns and their associated approaches to learning reflect the belief that contextual details are irreducible in our understanding of action, a person’s character, and his or her ultimate commitments. Lai proposes that the primary concern in pre-Qin Chinese philosophy is not primarily with knowledge-that, nor even with knowing-how (for instance, how to conduct oneself at a funeral), but with knowing-to, a capacity to act in the moment (e.g. to be tactful in a particular situation while blunt in another). The aim is to articulate an account of knowing that highlights epistemology in light of the agent in action that has to date not been explored either in western analytic epistemology or Chinese philosophy.

“Two Conceptions of Warrant” by Peter Graham (11 Sep)

Our understanding of epistemic warrant pulls in two directions. On the first, warrant is truth-conducive; warrant is a good route to the truth. On the second, warrant consists in following correct procedures of belief-formation. On most current conceptions of warrant, these two understandings pull apart, especially for empirical warrant. For it is possible for a belief-forming process to produce mostly true beliefs, where intuitively the process is not a good or correct procedure. And it is possible for an epistemically good or correct procedure to consistently fail to produce true beliefs.

The result of this is that many contemporary epistemologists take sides: there are two conceptions of warrant—outcome oriented or procedure oriented–and only one is right. I argue this is not so. It is possible to understand what makes a procedure good or correct in terms of reliably promoting true beliefs, understood in such a way that the two dimensions do not pull apart. The key idea is to understand belief-forming processes as psychological processes with the etiological function of forming true beliefs reliably, for then what makes the procedures epistemically correct consists in the normal functioning of the belief-forming process.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 11 Sep 2012
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Peter Graham, Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, University of California, Riverside
Moderator: Dr. Neil Sinhababu

About the Speaker: Peter Graham is Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, and Associate Dean for Student Academic Affairs, at the University of California, Riverside. He’s taught at Saint Louis University and has held visiting positions at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He studied Philosophy as an undergraduate at UCLA, started graduate school at the University of Arizona before finishing his PhD at Stanford University. He’s written extensively on the epistemology of testimony and the epistemology of perception. His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of language, and early modern philosophy.

“Hume on Curiosity” by Axel Gelfert (10 May)

Hume ends Book II of his Treatise of Human Nature with a section on the passion of curiosity, ‘that love of truth, which was the first source of all our enquiries’. At first sight, this characterisation of curiosity – as the motivating factor in that specifically human activity that is the pursuit of knowledge – may seem unoriginal. However, when Hume speaks of the ‘source of all our enquiries’, he is referring both to the universal human pursuit of knowledge and to his own philosophical project. Seen in this light, Hume’s discussion of curiosity takes on a new significance, as it weaves together elements of his systematic account of human nature – notably, his theory of cognition and motivation – with observations about the pursuit of philosophy as well as the progress of the arts and sciences. In the present paper, I offer a reconstruction of Hume’s view on curiosity and its role in cognition and inquiry.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 10 May 2012
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 Level 5)
Speaker: Axel Gelfert, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker: Axel Gelfert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore and Co-Chair of the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Research Cluster at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Since 2011, he has also been an Associate Fellow at Tembusu College. He completed his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge in 2005, after which he spent a year as a Junior Fellow at Collegium Budapest (Institute for Advanced Study), before arriving at NUS in 2006. His research and teaching revolve around issues in the philosophy of science and technology, social epistemology, and history of philosophy.

More information on the Philosophy Seminar Series can be found here. A list of past talks in the series can be found here.