participants
EuroUnderstanding workshop and OFA8 speakers and commentators:
Peter Pagin
Daniel Cohnitz Robert van Rooij Teresa Marques Luís Duarte d’Almeida Beate Priewasser Johannes Rössler Franck Esken Francisco Santos James Hampton Fiora Salis Sara Bizarro Eva Hoogland |
Lars Dänzer
José Mestre Gemma Celestino Bruno Jacinto Robin McKenna José Gusmão Stefan Reining Diogo Fernandes Dan Zeman Andreas Stokke Mireia López Klaus Gärtner |
programme and agenda of the events
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, Anfiteatro IV
10 September
9:30 - 10:45 OFA8:
Lars Dänzer, University of Cologne
Semantics, pragmatics and the explanation of utterance understanding
Comments: José Mestre, LanCog, University of Lisbon
coffee break
11:15 - 12:30 OFA8:
Gemma Celestino, LOGOS & University to Barcelona, & University of British Columbia
It is not the case that the alleged golden mountain exists
Comments: Bruno Jacinto, University of St. Andrews and LanCog, University of Lisbon
lunch
14:00 - 15:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Peter Pagin, University of Stockholm
Communicative success and similarity of content
15:30 - 16:45 EuroUnderstanding:
Robert van Rooij, University of Amsterdam
Deriving meaning from language use: From equilibria to (fuzzy?) meanings
coffee break
17:00 - 18:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Franck Esken, University of Salzburg
Ontogenetic early forms of rule-following and the implicit-explicit distinction
18:15 - 18: 30
Eva Hoogland, ESF Senior Science Officer for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Introduction to the European Science Foundation and the EuroUnderstanding Programme
11 September
9:30 - 10:45 OFA8:
Dan Zeman, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, & Filippo Ferrari, Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen
Radical relativism and retraction
Comments: Andreas Stokke, LanCog, University of Lisbon
coffee break
11:15 - 12:30 OFA8:
Mireia López, LOGOS and University of Girona
Cognitive penetration and the justificational power of experience
Comments: Klaus Gärtner, IFL, New University of Lisbon
lunch
14:00 - 15:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Steffen Borge, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
Communication, cooperation and conflict
15:30 - 16:45 EuroUnderstanding:
Beate Priewasser, Josef Perner, University of Salzburg, & Johannes Roessler, University of Warwick
Children understanding of competition as intentional action
coffee break
17:00 - 18:15 EuroUnderstanding:
James Hampton, City University London
Adopting stereotypical points of view about gender-based social categories
social dinner
12 September
9:30 - 10:45 OFA8:
Robin McKenna, University of Edinburgh
Shifting targets and disagreement
Comments: José Gusmão, University of Lisbon
coffee break
11:15 - 12:30 OFA8: Stefan Reining, University of Barcelona and LOGOS
Much more trouble for the Conciliatory View than Elga expects
Comments: Diogo Fernandes, Lancog, University of Lisbon
lunch
14:00 – 15:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Daniel Cohnitz, University of Tartu
Disagreements across scientific perspectives
15:30 – 16:45 EuroUnderstanding:
Teresa Marques, LanCog, University of Lisbon
Disagreement in context and coordination
coffee break
17:00 – 18:15 EuroUnderstanding: Francisco Santos, DEI & INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico (UTL) & ATP-group, Instituto para a Investigação Interdisciplinar, University of Lisbon
Behavioral dynamics under climate change dilemmas
end
9:30 - 10:45 OFA8:
Lars Dänzer, University of Cologne
Semantics, pragmatics and the explanation of utterance understanding
Comments: José Mestre, LanCog, University of Lisbon
coffee break
11:15 - 12:30 OFA8:
Gemma Celestino, LOGOS & University to Barcelona, & University of British Columbia
It is not the case that the alleged golden mountain exists
Comments: Bruno Jacinto, University of St. Andrews and LanCog, University of Lisbon
lunch
14:00 - 15:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Peter Pagin, University of Stockholm
Communicative success and similarity of content
15:30 - 16:45 EuroUnderstanding:
Robert van Rooij, University of Amsterdam
Deriving meaning from language use: From equilibria to (fuzzy?) meanings
coffee break
17:00 - 18:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Franck Esken, University of Salzburg
Ontogenetic early forms of rule-following and the implicit-explicit distinction
18:15 - 18: 30
Eva Hoogland, ESF Senior Science Officer for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Introduction to the European Science Foundation and the EuroUnderstanding Programme
11 September
9:30 - 10:45 OFA8:
Dan Zeman, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, & Filippo Ferrari, Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen
Radical relativism and retraction
Comments: Andreas Stokke, LanCog, University of Lisbon
coffee break
11:15 - 12:30 OFA8:
Mireia López, LOGOS and University of Girona
Cognitive penetration and the justificational power of experience
Comments: Klaus Gärtner, IFL, New University of Lisbon
lunch
14:00 - 15:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Steffen Borge, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
Communication, cooperation and conflict
15:30 - 16:45 EuroUnderstanding:
Beate Priewasser, Josef Perner, University of Salzburg, & Johannes Roessler, University of Warwick
Children understanding of competition as intentional action
coffee break
17:00 - 18:15 EuroUnderstanding:
James Hampton, City University London
Adopting stereotypical points of view about gender-based social categories
social dinner
12 September
9:30 - 10:45 OFA8:
Robin McKenna, University of Edinburgh
Shifting targets and disagreement
Comments: José Gusmão, University of Lisbon
coffee break
11:15 - 12:30 OFA8: Stefan Reining, University of Barcelona and LOGOS
Much more trouble for the Conciliatory View than Elga expects
Comments: Diogo Fernandes, Lancog, University of Lisbon
lunch
14:00 – 15:15 EuroUnderstanding:
Daniel Cohnitz, University of Tartu
Disagreements across scientific perspectives
15:30 – 16:45 EuroUnderstanding:
Teresa Marques, LanCog, University of Lisbon
Disagreement in context and coordination
coffee break
17:00 – 18:15 EuroUnderstanding: Francisco Santos, DEI & INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico (UTL) & ATP-group, Instituto para a Investigação Interdisciplinar, University of Lisbon
Behavioral dynamics under climate change dilemmas
end
Abstracts
Lars Dänzer, University of Cologne
Semantics, Pragmatics and the Explanation of Utterance Understanding
What exactly is the role, if any, that semantic and pragmatic theories ought to play in an account of how we are able to successfully interpret linguistic utterances? The goal of this paper is to sketch an answer to this question that shows how one can avoid an uncomfortable dilemma that seems to confront the theorist in this area: Either his theories are supposed to contribute to an account of utterance interpretation, in which case they need to tell us something about the on-line computational or inferential processes involved in interpretation and thus ought to be highly sensitive to experimental and computational questions in a way that they typically are not; or they merely contribute to ‘rational reconstructions’ of utterance interpretation, in which case they do not tell us anything about how we in fact understand utterances but merely something about how some subjects could do it. In contrast, I propose that semantics and pragmatics should be construed as contributing to rational-intentional explanations of interpretation. I explain what this idea amounts to, why it is attractive and how it blocks a certain line of argument that has had some prominence in recent debates in the area.
Gemma Celestino, LOGOS & University to Barcelona, & University of British Columbia
It is not the case that the alleged golden mountain exists
In this paper I will discuss a recent proposal by Frederick Kroon (2004, 2009). It belongs to a broad family of views, according to which sentences containing empty names do not even semantically express any proposition, but we use them, and pretend them to be true, in participating in games of make-believe. This is in a nutshell the proposal of Gareth Evans (1982) and Kendall Walton (1990). I will first discuss Kroon’s positive view and then I will turn to his criticism to what he calls ‘the Ellipsis Strategy’ to argue that his arguments are not successful.
Peter Pagin, University of Stockholm
Communicative success and similarity of content
An utterance of a speaker has a content and a force. In order for communication to succeed, the hearer needs to get the force right. Here I shall set the nature of the force recognition aside, and focus on content. I shall argue that in order for communication to succeed, it is not required that the content of the hearer's thought is not identical to the content of the speaker's thought, but that a less strict relation of similarity suffices. A main task is to characterize the relevant similarity relation. It must be an equivalence relation, and it should be possible to characterize it at least partly in terms of truth and falsity across varying possibilities. The question is how to achieve this, and how to achieve it uniformly for indexical and non-indexical sentences.
Robert van Rooij, University of Amsterdam
Deriving meaning from language use: From equilibria to (fuzzy?) meanings
More-valued logics are used a lot in philosophy to account for paradoxes related to vagueness, self-refential truth, etc. Though these analyses are appealing from a formal point of vie, they typically give rise to conceptual problems: where do the values/meanings come from? Some proposals to solve this problem have been made, but none of them have been very convincing. Proponents of fuzzy logic, for instance, have proposed that the ordering between truth-values of sentences of the form `x is tall' are in direct correspondance with people's lengths. But there are well-known problems with this approach. Others (e.g. Williamson) simply claims that use gives rise to fixed two-valued meanings, but how the meanings are supposed to be dependent on this use is left completely in the dark. In this talk I will propose to correlate meaning with use, or better, with use in equilibrium. First, I will use game theory, coupled with some ways of implementing bounded rationality, to determine equilbrium play. Second, I will propose varous definitions of meaning that can be derived from the strategies used in the equilibrium. Finally, I will relate these different meanings with different theories of vagueness, and discuss the pro's and con's of the various theories in the light of these relations: from super/subvaluationism, via many-valued logics, to the epistemic analysis of vagueness.
Franck Esken, University of Salzburg
Ontogenetic Early Forms of Rule-Following and the Implicit-Explicit Distinction
Questions concerning my talk:
1. How can early forms of rule following be distinguished from mere dispositional behaviour like infants circular reactions (Piaget)?
2. What is constitutive for rule following? To distinguish:
- a response that conforms to a given standard (“You should not do A”)
- a response that is actually guided by a given rule (“If there is A, then I should do B”)
Both responses include norms, but of a very different kind. The distinction between conformity to norms and rule following will be spelled out in some detail and brought in connection with the implicit-explicit distinction in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science.
Dan Zeman, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris
Filippo Ferrari, Northern Institute of Philosophy, Aberdeen
Radical relativism, retraction and “being at fault”
This paper has two connected aims. One is to investigate the phenomenon of retraction as it has surfaced in the contemporary debate between relativism about various areas of discourse and its rivals. While “faultless disagreement” and disagreement in general has benefited from extensive discussion in recent literature, retraction hasn’t been in the spotlight that much. Given its dialectical significance in the debate mentioned, a thorough understanding of the phenomenon is highly desirable. We will thus be interested in laying out what we take to be the main characteristics of retraction and in clarifying the role retraction plays in, the explanation given by and, ultimately, the challenges it raises to one specific version of relativism (radical relativism).
Radical relativists such as John MacFarlane have contended that retractors need not attribute fault to their previous selves while retracting. The other, broader aim of the paper is to study the possible senses of “being at fault” in which such a claim could be understood. Since retraction essentially involves evaluation of previous assertions, we present what seems to be an uncontroversial model of assertion-evaluation that comprises three relevant dimensions of evaluation: truth, aptness and correctness. Then we try to make the case that there is another dimension of evaluation that we call “circumstance-accuracy”. We investigate the features of such a new dimension; the result we arrive at is that circumstance-accuracy is double-faced: in certain cases (best illustrated by the moral domain), it is context-of-assessment-oriented; in others (best illustrated by taste discourse) it is context-of-utterance-oriented. We take our result to tentatively support two conclusions: i) that the tripartite model of assertion-evaluation needs to be supplemented with this new dimension; ii) radical relativism has a prima facie problem in integrating the double-faced character of circumstance-accuracy. However, we don’t want to claim that the problem is fatal to radical relativism; our main task has been to draw attention to this new dimension and to urge relativists and non-relativists alike to take it into consideration.
Mireia López, University of Girona and LOGOS
Cognitive Penetration and the Justificational Power of Experience
My aim in this paper is to provide reasons to believe that some cases of cognitive penetration of experiences, where the content of experience is causally influenced by our cognitive states, are problematic for Pryor's (2000) dogmatist anti-sceptical proposal. Although the existence of these cases does not constitute a conclusive argument against the dogmatist, they seem to compel him to carry out important and difficult amendments on his view. Dogmatism is committed to the thesis that whenever we have an experience we have justification to believe its content. However, I present some cases of cognitive penetration that intuitively threaten this assumption. Besides, Siegel (forthcoming) intends to ground the underlying intuitions for the Downgrade Thesis (DT). According to (DT), certain experiences lose all of their epistemic credentials to justify our beliefs in their contents, as a consequence of being cognitively penetrated. Finally, I criticize Siegel's argument in favour of (DT) but I offer further reasons to think that (DT) holds, thus concluding that dogmatist should be concerned about the existence of cognitive penetration.
Steffen Borge, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
Communication, Cooperation and Conflict
According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being in conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative.
Beate Priewasser, Josef Perner, University of Salzburg, & Johannes Roessler, University of Warwick
Children Understanding of Competition as Intentional Action
Our research focuses on competition as rational action in 3 to 5 year old children and addresses the issue whether perspective taking is crucial for understanding competition as rational action. For engaging in competitive situations it is essential that the competitors are aware of the subjectivity of desires (a different perspective on what is desirable or good). Similarly understanding how a mistaken agent (with a false belief) will act requires understanding of the subjectivity of instrumental actions (a different perspective on what action to take to be successful). Therefore competitive game playing and understanding mistaken actions should develop at the same time if understanding of perspective is a developmentally identifiable step. The results of our study show a clear correlation between the amount of competitive behaviour in a game and to understand mistaken actions in the false belief task.
James Hampton, City University London
Adopting Stereotypical Points of View About Gender-based Social Categories
People not only have their own views of the social world, but can also be asked to take on stereotypical points of view of other groups in society. This ability was discovered by Barsalou and Sewell, but has been little researched since. In the study to be reported, we looked at how taking on the point of view of a gender-biased social category (e.g. rugby players) affects the way in which people perceive social misfits - members of two groups that are socially antagonistic.
Robert McKenna, University of Edinburgh
Shifting Targets and Disagreement
A common objection to contextualism about ‘might’, ‘knows’ and a host of other expressions is that these expressions behave differently to paradigm context-sensitive expressions (such as indexicals) in certain situations. A version of this objection that has received a lot of attention in the recent literature focuses on how expressions such as ‘might’ and ‘knows’ are used in certain cases in which speakers, intuitively, disagree with each other about the correct application of these expressions. On the one hand, the objection has been taken to motivate adopting a revisionary relativist semantics for the relevant expression (cf. MacFarlane, ‘The Assessment-Sensitivity of Knowledge Ascriptions’) and, on the other, the objection has been taken to motivate a more traditional context-insensitive semantics for the relevant expression (cf. Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries). (Of course, which option is more attractive will depend upon the expression in question). In this paper I argue that epistemic contextualists (that is, the contextualist about ‘knows’) can deal with the problem of disagreement. In doing so contextualists undercut a potential argument for relativism, and also an argument for an invariantist semantics for ‘knows’.
Stefan Reining, LOGOS and University of Barcelona,
Much More Trouble for the Conciliatory View than Elga Expects
Elga 2010 argues that the Conciliatory View (CV) on peer disagreement is self-undermining, because it offers incoherent advice in those cases in which the disagreement is about the truth or falsity of CV itself. As a consequence, Elga endorses a modified version of the view, which is restricted to those cases of apparent peer disagreement that do not concern the view itself. I argue that Elga’s attack on CV fails, but that this attack can be modified so as to reveal that CV faces a much more general problem than Elga expects -- one that cannot be solved by the kind of restriction to CV that he proposes.
Daniel Cohnitz, University of Tartu
Disagreements across scientific perspectives
In my talk I will discuss the role of theories of reference in accounting for disagreements and agreements of various sorts in the history of science. I will focus on theories of partial reference (as developed by Hartry Field and Christina McLeish), and discuss their potential as general theories of reference.
Teresa Marques, LanCog, University of Lisbon
Disagreement in context and coordination
The possibility of faultless disagreement has been the focus of a lively debate. The two main positions in this debate, contextualists and relativists, have offered semantic theories where the faultlessness of disagreeing parties is guaranteed. It is not clear whether either side preserves disagreement. Contextualists have a problem in accounting for doxastic disagreements. But, it has been argued, relativists have the same problem. Recently, several authors (see Huvenes (2012), Sundell (2011), MacFarlane (forthcoming), Egan (2010), etc.) have drawn attention to another aspect of disagreements, the conflict of non-doxastic attitudes. But there is a simple puzzle about conflicting attitudes that has gone unnoticed. This paper presents the puzzle and suggests a possible solution.
Francisco Santos, DEI & INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico (UTL) & ATP-group, Instituto para a Investigação Interdisciplinar, University of Lisbon
Behavioral dynamics under climate change dilemmas
The welfare of our planet stands as a perfect example of what scientists commonly refer to as public goods — a global good from which everyone profits, whether or not they contribute to maintain it. Indeed, reducing the effects of global warming has been described as one of the greatest public goods problems — or “games” — humans have faced, and the one we cannot afford to lose. Unfortunately, individuals, regions or nations may opt to be “free riders”, hoping to benefit from the efforts of others while choosing not to make any effort themselves. Cooperation problems faced by humans often share this setting, in which the immediate advantage of free riding drives the population into the “tragedy of the commons”, the ultimate limit of widespread defection. Moreover, nations and their leaders seek a collective goal that is shadowed by the uncertainty of its achievement. Such types of uncertainties have repeatedly happened throughout human history from group hunting to voluntary adoption of public health measures and prospective choices.
In this talk, I will first address several evolutionary mechanisms that are able to efficiently promote cooperation at different levels of complexity. Next, by taking global warming as an example, I will discuss an evolutionary and social learning dynamics approach to a broad class of cooperation problems in which attempting to minimize future losses turns the risk of failure into a central issue in individual decisions. Resorting to the tools of game theory, we find that decisions within small groups under high risk and stringent requirements to success significantly raise the chances of coordinating actions and escaping the tragedy of the commons. We also offer insights on the scale at which public goods problems of cooperation are best solved. Instead of large-scale endeavors involving most of the population, which as we argue, may be counterproductive to achieve cooperation, the joint combination of local agreements within groups that are smaller than the population at risk is prone to significantly raise the probability of success. In addition, our model predicts that, if one takes into consideration that groups of different sizes are interwoven in complex networks of contacts, the chances for global coordination in an overall cooperating state are further enhanced.
Sponsor:
This event, as part of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES Programme EuroUnderstanding, is supported by funds from FWF, FWO, DCIR, ETF, CNR, NWO, RCN, MNiSW, FCT, VR.
OFA8 Graduate workshop sponsors:
LanCog Group/ Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia
Under the auspices of:
Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia Analítica
Semantics, Pragmatics and the Explanation of Utterance Understanding
What exactly is the role, if any, that semantic and pragmatic theories ought to play in an account of how we are able to successfully interpret linguistic utterances? The goal of this paper is to sketch an answer to this question that shows how one can avoid an uncomfortable dilemma that seems to confront the theorist in this area: Either his theories are supposed to contribute to an account of utterance interpretation, in which case they need to tell us something about the on-line computational or inferential processes involved in interpretation and thus ought to be highly sensitive to experimental and computational questions in a way that they typically are not; or they merely contribute to ‘rational reconstructions’ of utterance interpretation, in which case they do not tell us anything about how we in fact understand utterances but merely something about how some subjects could do it. In contrast, I propose that semantics and pragmatics should be construed as contributing to rational-intentional explanations of interpretation. I explain what this idea amounts to, why it is attractive and how it blocks a certain line of argument that has had some prominence in recent debates in the area.
Gemma Celestino, LOGOS & University to Barcelona, & University of British Columbia
It is not the case that the alleged golden mountain exists
In this paper I will discuss a recent proposal by Frederick Kroon (2004, 2009). It belongs to a broad family of views, according to which sentences containing empty names do not even semantically express any proposition, but we use them, and pretend them to be true, in participating in games of make-believe. This is in a nutshell the proposal of Gareth Evans (1982) and Kendall Walton (1990). I will first discuss Kroon’s positive view and then I will turn to his criticism to what he calls ‘the Ellipsis Strategy’ to argue that his arguments are not successful.
Peter Pagin, University of Stockholm
Communicative success and similarity of content
An utterance of a speaker has a content and a force. In order for communication to succeed, the hearer needs to get the force right. Here I shall set the nature of the force recognition aside, and focus on content. I shall argue that in order for communication to succeed, it is not required that the content of the hearer's thought is not identical to the content of the speaker's thought, but that a less strict relation of similarity suffices. A main task is to characterize the relevant similarity relation. It must be an equivalence relation, and it should be possible to characterize it at least partly in terms of truth and falsity across varying possibilities. The question is how to achieve this, and how to achieve it uniformly for indexical and non-indexical sentences.
Robert van Rooij, University of Amsterdam
Deriving meaning from language use: From equilibria to (fuzzy?) meanings
More-valued logics are used a lot in philosophy to account for paradoxes related to vagueness, self-refential truth, etc. Though these analyses are appealing from a formal point of vie, they typically give rise to conceptual problems: where do the values/meanings come from? Some proposals to solve this problem have been made, but none of them have been very convincing. Proponents of fuzzy logic, for instance, have proposed that the ordering between truth-values of sentences of the form `x is tall' are in direct correspondance with people's lengths. But there are well-known problems with this approach. Others (e.g. Williamson) simply claims that use gives rise to fixed two-valued meanings, but how the meanings are supposed to be dependent on this use is left completely in the dark. In this talk I will propose to correlate meaning with use, or better, with use in equilibrium. First, I will use game theory, coupled with some ways of implementing bounded rationality, to determine equilbrium play. Second, I will propose varous definitions of meaning that can be derived from the strategies used in the equilibrium. Finally, I will relate these different meanings with different theories of vagueness, and discuss the pro's and con's of the various theories in the light of these relations: from super/subvaluationism, via many-valued logics, to the epistemic analysis of vagueness.
Franck Esken, University of Salzburg
Ontogenetic Early Forms of Rule-Following and the Implicit-Explicit Distinction
Questions concerning my talk:
1. How can early forms of rule following be distinguished from mere dispositional behaviour like infants circular reactions (Piaget)?
2. What is constitutive for rule following? To distinguish:
- a response that conforms to a given standard (“You should not do A”)
- a response that is actually guided by a given rule (“If there is A, then I should do B”)
Both responses include norms, but of a very different kind. The distinction between conformity to norms and rule following will be spelled out in some detail and brought in connection with the implicit-explicit distinction in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science.
Dan Zeman, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris
Filippo Ferrari, Northern Institute of Philosophy, Aberdeen
Radical relativism, retraction and “being at fault”
This paper has two connected aims. One is to investigate the phenomenon of retraction as it has surfaced in the contemporary debate between relativism about various areas of discourse and its rivals. While “faultless disagreement” and disagreement in general has benefited from extensive discussion in recent literature, retraction hasn’t been in the spotlight that much. Given its dialectical significance in the debate mentioned, a thorough understanding of the phenomenon is highly desirable. We will thus be interested in laying out what we take to be the main characteristics of retraction and in clarifying the role retraction plays in, the explanation given by and, ultimately, the challenges it raises to one specific version of relativism (radical relativism).
Radical relativists such as John MacFarlane have contended that retractors need not attribute fault to their previous selves while retracting. The other, broader aim of the paper is to study the possible senses of “being at fault” in which such a claim could be understood. Since retraction essentially involves evaluation of previous assertions, we present what seems to be an uncontroversial model of assertion-evaluation that comprises three relevant dimensions of evaluation: truth, aptness and correctness. Then we try to make the case that there is another dimension of evaluation that we call “circumstance-accuracy”. We investigate the features of such a new dimension; the result we arrive at is that circumstance-accuracy is double-faced: in certain cases (best illustrated by the moral domain), it is context-of-assessment-oriented; in others (best illustrated by taste discourse) it is context-of-utterance-oriented. We take our result to tentatively support two conclusions: i) that the tripartite model of assertion-evaluation needs to be supplemented with this new dimension; ii) radical relativism has a prima facie problem in integrating the double-faced character of circumstance-accuracy. However, we don’t want to claim that the problem is fatal to radical relativism; our main task has been to draw attention to this new dimension and to urge relativists and non-relativists alike to take it into consideration.
Mireia López, University of Girona and LOGOS
Cognitive Penetration and the Justificational Power of Experience
My aim in this paper is to provide reasons to believe that some cases of cognitive penetration of experiences, where the content of experience is causally influenced by our cognitive states, are problematic for Pryor's (2000) dogmatist anti-sceptical proposal. Although the existence of these cases does not constitute a conclusive argument against the dogmatist, they seem to compel him to carry out important and difficult amendments on his view. Dogmatism is committed to the thesis that whenever we have an experience we have justification to believe its content. However, I present some cases of cognitive penetration that intuitively threaten this assumption. Besides, Siegel (forthcoming) intends to ground the underlying intuitions for the Downgrade Thesis (DT). According to (DT), certain experiences lose all of their epistemic credentials to justify our beliefs in their contents, as a consequence of being cognitively penetrated. Finally, I criticize Siegel's argument in favour of (DT) but I offer further reasons to think that (DT) holds, thus concluding that dogmatist should be concerned about the existence of cognitive penetration.
Steffen Borge, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
Communication, Cooperation and Conflict
According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being in conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative.
Beate Priewasser, Josef Perner, University of Salzburg, & Johannes Roessler, University of Warwick
Children Understanding of Competition as Intentional Action
Our research focuses on competition as rational action in 3 to 5 year old children and addresses the issue whether perspective taking is crucial for understanding competition as rational action. For engaging in competitive situations it is essential that the competitors are aware of the subjectivity of desires (a different perspective on what is desirable or good). Similarly understanding how a mistaken agent (with a false belief) will act requires understanding of the subjectivity of instrumental actions (a different perspective on what action to take to be successful). Therefore competitive game playing and understanding mistaken actions should develop at the same time if understanding of perspective is a developmentally identifiable step. The results of our study show a clear correlation between the amount of competitive behaviour in a game and to understand mistaken actions in the false belief task.
James Hampton, City University London
Adopting Stereotypical Points of View About Gender-based Social Categories
People not only have their own views of the social world, but can also be asked to take on stereotypical points of view of other groups in society. This ability was discovered by Barsalou and Sewell, but has been little researched since. In the study to be reported, we looked at how taking on the point of view of a gender-biased social category (e.g. rugby players) affects the way in which people perceive social misfits - members of two groups that are socially antagonistic.
Robert McKenna, University of Edinburgh
Shifting Targets and Disagreement
A common objection to contextualism about ‘might’, ‘knows’ and a host of other expressions is that these expressions behave differently to paradigm context-sensitive expressions (such as indexicals) in certain situations. A version of this objection that has received a lot of attention in the recent literature focuses on how expressions such as ‘might’ and ‘knows’ are used in certain cases in which speakers, intuitively, disagree with each other about the correct application of these expressions. On the one hand, the objection has been taken to motivate adopting a revisionary relativist semantics for the relevant expression (cf. MacFarlane, ‘The Assessment-Sensitivity of Knowledge Ascriptions’) and, on the other, the objection has been taken to motivate a more traditional context-insensitive semantics for the relevant expression (cf. Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries). (Of course, which option is more attractive will depend upon the expression in question). In this paper I argue that epistemic contextualists (that is, the contextualist about ‘knows’) can deal with the problem of disagreement. In doing so contextualists undercut a potential argument for relativism, and also an argument for an invariantist semantics for ‘knows’.
Stefan Reining, LOGOS and University of Barcelona,
Much More Trouble for the Conciliatory View than Elga Expects
Elga 2010 argues that the Conciliatory View (CV) on peer disagreement is self-undermining, because it offers incoherent advice in those cases in which the disagreement is about the truth or falsity of CV itself. As a consequence, Elga endorses a modified version of the view, which is restricted to those cases of apparent peer disagreement that do not concern the view itself. I argue that Elga’s attack on CV fails, but that this attack can be modified so as to reveal that CV faces a much more general problem than Elga expects -- one that cannot be solved by the kind of restriction to CV that he proposes.
Daniel Cohnitz, University of Tartu
Disagreements across scientific perspectives
In my talk I will discuss the role of theories of reference in accounting for disagreements and agreements of various sorts in the history of science. I will focus on theories of partial reference (as developed by Hartry Field and Christina McLeish), and discuss their potential as general theories of reference.
Teresa Marques, LanCog, University of Lisbon
Disagreement in context and coordination
The possibility of faultless disagreement has been the focus of a lively debate. The two main positions in this debate, contextualists and relativists, have offered semantic theories where the faultlessness of disagreeing parties is guaranteed. It is not clear whether either side preserves disagreement. Contextualists have a problem in accounting for doxastic disagreements. But, it has been argued, relativists have the same problem. Recently, several authors (see Huvenes (2012), Sundell (2011), MacFarlane (forthcoming), Egan (2010), etc.) have drawn attention to another aspect of disagreements, the conflict of non-doxastic attitudes. But there is a simple puzzle about conflicting attitudes that has gone unnoticed. This paper presents the puzzle and suggests a possible solution.
Francisco Santos, DEI & INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico (UTL) & ATP-group, Instituto para a Investigação Interdisciplinar, University of Lisbon
Behavioral dynamics under climate change dilemmas
The welfare of our planet stands as a perfect example of what scientists commonly refer to as public goods — a global good from which everyone profits, whether or not they contribute to maintain it. Indeed, reducing the effects of global warming has been described as one of the greatest public goods problems — or “games” — humans have faced, and the one we cannot afford to lose. Unfortunately, individuals, regions or nations may opt to be “free riders”, hoping to benefit from the efforts of others while choosing not to make any effort themselves. Cooperation problems faced by humans often share this setting, in which the immediate advantage of free riding drives the population into the “tragedy of the commons”, the ultimate limit of widespread defection. Moreover, nations and their leaders seek a collective goal that is shadowed by the uncertainty of its achievement. Such types of uncertainties have repeatedly happened throughout human history from group hunting to voluntary adoption of public health measures and prospective choices.
In this talk, I will first address several evolutionary mechanisms that are able to efficiently promote cooperation at different levels of complexity. Next, by taking global warming as an example, I will discuss an evolutionary and social learning dynamics approach to a broad class of cooperation problems in which attempting to minimize future losses turns the risk of failure into a central issue in individual decisions. Resorting to the tools of game theory, we find that decisions within small groups under high risk and stringent requirements to success significantly raise the chances of coordinating actions and escaping the tragedy of the commons. We also offer insights on the scale at which public goods problems of cooperation are best solved. Instead of large-scale endeavors involving most of the population, which as we argue, may be counterproductive to achieve cooperation, the joint combination of local agreements within groups that are smaller than the population at risk is prone to significantly raise the probability of success. In addition, our model predicts that, if one takes into consideration that groups of different sizes are interwoven in complex networks of contacts, the chances for global coordination in an overall cooperating state are further enhanced.
Sponsor:
This event, as part of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES Programme EuroUnderstanding, is supported by funds from FWF, FWO, DCIR, ETF, CNR, NWO, RCN, MNiSW, FCT, VR.
OFA8 Graduate workshop sponsors:
LanCog Group/ Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia
Under the auspices of:
Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia Analítica