Author: cful

Knowledge, Luck and Individualised Evidence
Dario Mortini (Cogito, University of Glasgow)

4 December 2020, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: It is intuitively impermissible to convict someone on the basis of mere statistical evidence, but it is intuitively permissible to convict someone on the basis of eye-witness testimony – evidence which is individualised to the incriminating facts. Why? What’s so special about individualised evidence? These are the main questions raised by the puzzle of statistical evidence, and while the notion of individualised evidence may hold the key to solve it, there’s still no agreement on how exactly to define it. To make progress on the problem, epistemologists have proposed accounts of individualised evidence in terms of single causal and modal anti-luck conditions on knowledge like causation (Thomson 1986), sensitivity (Enoch et al. 2012) and safety (Pritchard 2018). In this talk, I show that each of these fails as satisfactory anti-luck condition, and that such failure lends abductive support to the following conclusion: once the familiar anti-luck intuition on knowledge is extended to individualised evidence, an adequate account of individualised evidence will have to invoke knowledge directly rather than separate (and defective) anti-luck conditions on knowledge.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/lancog/registration/

On the Optimality of Vagueness
Paul Egré (joint work with Benjamin Spector, Adèle Mortier, Steven Verheyen)
Institute Jean Nicod and École Normale Supériore

27 November 2020, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: What is the function of vagueness in language? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal trade-off between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and informativeness (Gricean Quantity). Focusing on expressions of approximation such as “around”’, which are semantically vague, we show that they allow the speaker to convey indirect probabilistic information, in a way that can give the listener a more accurate representation of the information available to the speaker than any more precise expression would (intervals of the form “between”). We give a probabilistic treatment of the interpretation of “around”, and offer a model for the interpretation and use of “around”-statements within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. Broader lessons are drawn concerning the semantic flexibility of vague expressions.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/lancog/registration/

Jeffrey Andrew Barash

University of Picardie – Jules Verne

Collective Memory, Social Imaginaries, and the Transformation of Political Mythology in the Age of the Mass Media

24 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

Whatever structural similarities anthropologists might posit to typify and systematize the myths that have been narrated since time immemorial, I will insist in this talk on the appearance over the past decades of a novel kind of political myth adapted to a specifically modern significance and function.  How might we account for this novel function of political myth in the contemporary world?  According to my interpretation, the contemporary singularity of its meaning and function depends on mutations on a global scale in the modes of collective experience; in the ways in which experience communicated among vast groups is collectively remembered and imaginatively deployed.  This talk will investigate these mutations in collective modes of experience and remembrance, which may be traced to the remarkable influence of the mass media that, over the past century and a half, have relentlessly accelerated their communicative capacity and extended their global reach.

Natural Kinds, Mind-Independence, and Unification Principles
Tuomas Tahko (University of Bristol)

20 November 2020, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: A group of entities may share a number of properties without being a natural kind (say, all green and round things). It’s often enough for our scientific goals of explanation and prediction that there are one or more shared properties among a given sample set. Yet, there is more to being a member of a natural kind than sharing properties with other members of the kind. There have been many attempts to determine what makes a natural kind real, chief among them is the criterion according to which natural kinds must be mind-independent. But it is difficult to specify this criterion: many seemingly natural kinds have an element of mind-dependence. I will argue that the mind-independence criterion is nevertheless a good one, if correctly understood: the mind-independence criterion concerns the unification principles for natural kinds. Unification principles explain how natural kinds unify their properties.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/lancog/registration/

The Fundamentality of Fundamental Powers
Joaquim Giannotti (University of Birmingham)

13 November 2020, 16:00 | The talk will be given in a mixed presence regime

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: Dispositional essentialism is the view that all or many fundamental properties are essentially dispositional, or powers. The literature on the dispositional essence of powers is abundant. In contrast, the question of how to understand the fundamentality of fundamental powers has received scarce interest. Therefore, the fundamentality of powers stands in need of clarification. There are three main conceptions of the fundamental, namely as that which is: (i) metaphysically independent; or (ii) belonging to a minimally complete basis; or (iii) perfectly natural. Here I present and discuss each of these approaches from the viewpoint of dispositional essentialism. I show that (i) is incompatible with the metaphysics of powers and (ii) – (iii) have more drawbacks than merits. Therefore, the dispositional essentialist should favour a different approach. To this end, I defend a primitivist conception of the absolute fundamentality of powers, which has the virtues of (i) – (iii) but none of the vices.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/lancog/registration/

Gianfranco Casuso

Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

Socio-Epistemic Pathologies. The Double Dimension of Social Criticism and the Problem of Asymptomaticity

10 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

It is common to affirm – and that is what Honneth believes that Critical Theory has done since its origins – that the indicator that can give us the clue that a social situation hides pathological features is suffering – not just that of members of social groups easily identifiable as vulnerable or disadvantaged, but potentially all people to varying degrees. Be that as it may, suffering should be a kind of “symptom” of social pathology. However, and here is where the difficulties begin, immediately appealing to the individual experience of suffering does not necessarily allow us to get out of the trap, because the problem lies in that the dual pathological condition of society is so powerful that under a veil of normality it even blocks the emergence of every possible symptom. In my talk, I will try to delve into this problematic link between suffering and social pathology as developed by Honneth, both from his own Hegelian reading of a deficit of rationality, and from Adorno’s idea of a sick normality. This will be done against the background of the less worked phenomenon of social asymptomaticity.

Grounding the Future (and the Future of Grounding)
Roberto Loss (University of Hamburg)

6 November 2020, 16:00 | The talk will be given in a mixed presence regime

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) & live-streamed

Abstract: According to what may be labelled ‘serious Ockhamism’, (i) the future is open, (ii) the openness of the future consists in the fact that what exists is insufficient to determine the truth-value of (at least some) future-directed statements, and yet (iii) future-directed statements all possess a determinate truth-value. Serious Ockhamism appears to be in tension with the idea that truth is grounded in reality. Some serious Ockhamists bite the bullet and accept some truths to be indeed ungrounded. Others prefer, instead, a more sophisticated approach and claim that even if future-contingent statements are not grounded in the way reality is, they are nevertheless not ungrounded, as they are ‘cross-temporally’ grounded in the way reality will be. In this talk I will construe the grounding challenge faced by serious Ockhamists as involving the notion of metaphysical grounding and I will argue that, although the kind of ‘cross-temporal grounding’ serious Ockhamists appeal to is in tension with a set of rather ‘orthodox’ grounding principles, serious Ockhamists appear to have independent reasons to embrace at least a certain kind of grounding ‘heresy’.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/lancog/registration/

Oliver Marchart

University of Vienna

Always Ontologize! The Political Thinking of Antagonism

3 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

Presuppositions about the nature of social being are implied by any kind of social research – sometimes openly, but most often silently. Any political interpretation, as William Connolly once argued, invokes a set of ontological assumptions about the very nature of the social bond. Social analysis, therefore, warrants interpretations, not only of particular social phenomena, but of the nature of social being in general: of being-qua-being. Every inquiry into the social world can thus be referred back, in the last instance, to a very simple question: ‘what’s going on with Being?’ (Gianni Vattimo). The wager of my presentation will be that something political is going on with Being. More than that: Being is political, and the name of the political is antagonism. It is the ineradicably antagonistic nature of social being that accounts for the disturbances and asymmetries of the social: the conflicts, the power discrepancies, the relations of subordination and oppression. A case will be made that thinking, as a collective and conflictual practice, needs to take account of antagonism at the ground of being.

Against the Pretense View of Fiction
Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona / LOGOS / LanCog)

30 October 2020, 16:00 | Online, via Zoom

Abstract: In his classic paper “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse” (1974/5), John Searle argued that fictions don’t result from dedicated, sui generis acts (or, in to me equivalent terms, are not dedicated, sui generis artefacts) in the way assertions, questions or directives are; they are just pretenses of acts like those – the view had been defended earlier by Margaret MacDonald (1954) and Richard Gale (1971). Searle’s arguments were seriously challenged by Currie and Walton, proponents of different versions of the dedicated artefact view in their respective very influential 1990 books. In recent work, Peter Alward and Stefano Predelli have argued for a more sophisticated version of a Searlian view. In this paper I’ll confront their arguments, in defense of (my own version of) the dedicated artefact view. I’ll elaborate in my own terms on two decisive objections, not adequately acknowledged by either Currie or Walton: first, that the Searlian view is implausibly committed to there being fictional narrators in all fictions; second, that the view has implausible commitments on how referential expressions work in fictional discourse, implying that (as van Inwagen and Kripke put it in work in the 1970s) fictional utterances including them “don’t express propositions”.

Free Attendance, but preregistration required: https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/lancog/registration/

Tamara Caraus

Praxis-CFUL / University of Lisbon

Marx’s Radical Cosmopolitics

27 October 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+0)

Due to the current health restrictions, this session will take place entirely via Zoom Follow this link

Meeting ID: 884 7169 1230

Password: 746274

Abstract

“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” says the Communist Manifesto, the same text which states that “The working men have no country” and ends with the famous call “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”. The ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’ was the object of critique in different texts authored by Marx (and Engels). Thus, Marx underlined that “political economy displays a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond, but comes out in its complete cynicism” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) and that “free competition and world trade gave birth to hypocritical cosmopolitanism and the notion of man”(German Ideology). However, Marx’s critique of ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’ was not formulated from a local or national perspective, but from the perspective of a  radical cosmopolitics whose main elements, as this presentation argues, could be detected in (i) the immanent critique of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” or of globalised capitalism, (ii) in the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’ or in the emancipatory and transformational role of Marx’s radical  critique, (iii) in the proletariat as a cosmopolitical agency from below, (iv) in the missing theory of state in Marx’s oeuvre, (v) in the stake on the transformation of consciousness and self-emancipation, and (vi) in Marx’s unavoidable  humanism. In this radical cosmopolitics, cosmopolitan and communist horizons tend to become one, and the radical cosmo-communist politics appears as the real stake of struggle against global injustice, both in Marx’s time and now.