Epistemic trespassing and epistemic free-riding
Luís Estevinha Rodrigues (Federal University of Ceará)

20 May 2022, 11:00 (Lisbon Time – WET) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Experts and non-experts become epistemic trespassers by making judgments about issues belonging to scientific fields where they lack competence, evidence, or both (Ballantyne 2019; DiPaolo 2021). These invasions are usually documented as epistemically illegitimate and create malignant theoretical and social consequences. I argue in this talk that this kind of epistemic transgression is closely related to another: doxastic free-riding, a subset of epistemic free-ridding. After reviewing some examples of these transgressions enacted by experts and non-experts, I generate an explanatory pattern of their association. In the end, I use this pattern to distinguish epistemic trespassing from interdisciplinary cooperation.

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event.

On Wednesday, 18 May, Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva) will give a talk titled “Composing and Causing Spacetime in Quantum Gravity” (abstract below).

The series of online seminars is organized in the context of the activities of the LanCog Research Group at the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, and will focus on the foundations of quantum and spacetime physics.

The meeting will be online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CEST). If you have not registered yet, you can do so here.

You can address any question to Andrea Oldofredi (aoldofredi@letras.ulisboa.pt).

ABSTRACT:
According to a number of approaches in quantum gravity spacetime does not exist fundamentally. Rather, spacetime exists by depending on another, more fundamental, non-spatiotemporal structure. A prevalent opinion in the literature is that this dependence should not be analysed in terms of composition. We should not say, that is, that spacetime depends on an ontology of non-spatiotemporal entities in virtue of having them as parts. But is that really right? On the contrary, I will argue that a mereological approach to dependent spacetime is not only viable, but promises to enhance our understanding of the physical situation. I will then discuss some of the roles that causality might play in these scenarios. Based on a collaboration with Sam Baron.

On Wednesday, 11 May, Antonio Vassallo (Warsaw University of Technology) and Pedro Naranjo (Warsaw University of Technology) will give a talk titled “A Proposal for a Metaphysics of Self-Subsisting Structures” (abstract below).

The series of online seminars is organized in the context of the activities of the LanCog Research Group at the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, and will focus on the foundations of quantum and spacetime physics.

The meeting will be online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CEST). If you have not registered yet, you can do so here.

You can address any question to Andrea Oldofredi (aoldofredi@letras.ulisboa.pt).

ABSTRACT:
We present a new metaphysical framework for physics that is conceptually clear, ontologically parsimonious, and empirically adequate. This framework relies on the notion of self-subsisting structure, a set of fundamental physical elements whose individuation and behavior are described in purely relational terms, without any need for a background spacetime. Although the specification of the fundamental aspects of the ontology depends on the particular physical domain considered–and is thus susceptible to scientific progress–the structural features of the framework are preserved through theory change. The kinematics and dynamics of these self-subsisting structures are technically implemented using the theoretical framework of Pure Shape Dynamics, which provides an entirely relational physical description of a system in terms of the intrinsic geometry of a suitably defined Riemannian space, called shape space.

Justified belief for Gnostics
Julien Dutant (King’s College London)

13 May 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: According the Lockean view, it is justified to believe P iff it’s rational to have a high credence in P. A theory of degrees of justification fits this view well: the degree to which one is justified in believing P is one’s rational credence in P. On that theory degrees of justification obey the probability axioms. I give reasons to prefer an alternative, the “probable knowledge” view, according to which it is justified to believe P iff it’s rational to have a high credence that one knows P (or is in a position to know P). A theory of degrees of justification fits that view well: the degree of which one is justified in believing P is one’s rational credence that one knows (or is in a position to know) P. On that theory, degrees of justification typically violate the probability axioms. I explore their shape; in particular, I show that under the assumption that knowledge obeys the normal logic KT, degrees of justification turn out to be Belief functions (aka Dempster-Shafer belief functions).

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event.

Modern Arguments for Fatalism
Ricardo Santos (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

06 May 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Fatalism is one of the traditional metaphysical problems in philosophy. Among other things, a fatalist believes that whatever happens could not have failed to happen, hence could not have been avoided. While some people have scorned the view as prescientific and primitive, and the known arguments for it as pure sophisms, many analytic philosophers have thought that there are arguments for fatalism that are quite challenging and worth careful examination. Some of them have even tried to come up with new and stronger fatalistic arguments. In this talk, I will distinguish several forms that arguments for fatalism can take and I will review them, trying to make clear what are the main available options for responding and their more general consequences.

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event.

Conversational Internalism
João Miranda (University of Lisbon, LanCog)

29 April 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Access internalism is the view that only items that one is aware of are available to justify beliefs. Conversational internalism, the view to be defended in this paper, is the kind of access internalism that argues that the reason why access is required, is not because it is in itself epistemologically relevant, but because it is necessary for conversations. Internal access gets its epistemological relevance from conversations because the ability to adequately intervene in conversations is what is required to make a belief justified, and you can’t adequately intervene in a conversation without being aware of what you’re conversing. I start by distinguishing internalistic from externalistic approaches to epistemology, setting the stage for the discussion. I then present my theory, and an argument for it. Characterizing conversations – the relevant kind of conversations – as things that can be represented as sequences of ordered pairs Question→Answer, allows for contrastivism (Snedegar, 2017) to provide an explanation of how a belief can get justified through conversation and contextualism about justification (inspired by Lewis, 1996) to provide a more refined view of how the theory can account for shifts in the strength of justificatory demands from one conversation to another. I conclude by showing how the theory handles some main objections to internalism (such as those that concern an agent’s capacity to store enough reasons and the strength of the epistemological demands for justification), in particular by arguing that it fares better against those objections than traditional internalistic alternatives.

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event.

Relativism and Retraction
Dan Zeman (University of Warsaw)

08 April 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: The argument from retraction (the speech act of “taking back” a previous speech act) has been one of the favorite arguments used by relativists about a variety of natural language expressions (predicates of taste, epistemic modals, moral and aesthetic claims etc.) in support of their view. The main consideration offered is that relativism can, while rival views cannot, account for this phenomenon. For some of the relativists leading the charge, retraction is, in fact, mandatory: a norm of retraction makes it obligatory for an agent to retract a previously unretracted assertion whenever what has been asserted is shown to be currently false. This norm, it is contended, is part and parcel of our behavior as rational agents and distinguishes relativism from other views on the market.
Recently, several considerations – both from the armchair and based on empirical studies – have been offered to undercut the support retraction has been taken to provide relativism. In this paper, I engage with both types of considerations. In relation to the former, I urge relativists to give up the claim that retraction is mandatory, but show that even if they do so there is still a phenomenon to be explained and that the view remains better situated in accounting for it that its rivals. I also show how what seem like problematic cases of retraction can be handled if one embraces a (principled) flexible form of relativism. In relation to the latter, I survey some of the current experimental literature supporting the idea that the folk don’t retract claims involving the target expressions (or that they don’t do in the way envisaged by the relativist) and argue that the experimenters have not paid attention to all the possible perspectives the participants in the experiments could take when responding to the queries. This leads to a way to interpret these results that makes them compatible with flexible relativism, and hence inconclusive when it comes to a more sophisticated version of the view.

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event. Note that this is an in-person event and everyone should wear a mask.

The cognitive life of maps
Roberto Casati (Institut Jean Nicod)

01 April 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: The cognitive life of maps is distinct from the life of cognitive maps. But then, there are two senses of ‘the cognitive life of maps’; in the wake of theories of extended cognition, one may claim that maps have a cognitive life of their own. Here we follow a different path, the study of the cognitive engagement with maps. In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw and use them. How can they? What kind of life is it?
I first introduce the main claims about what maps are and how they work – their specific syntax, their peculiar semantics, and their pragmatics. Then I delve into the mechanics of maps as they are used for navigation, the differences and similarities between maps and pictures, and between maps and models. Then, I test the skeletal theory of maps on an enlargement: can we find maplike structures in other cognitive artifacts, and how are these structures specifically maplike? I’ll make the case that clock faces, music notation, writing, organizers (such as calendars), and numeral series are or contain essentially map structures. This enlargement strategy makes a case for the centrality of maps. Missing an understanding of maps, we cannot understand how a number of other crucial cognitive artifacts work.

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event. Note that this is an in-person event and everyone should wear a mask.

Modals and Copulas in Aristotle
Simona Aimar (UCL)

25 March 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: The following sentences

(1) The Queen is necessarily British.

(2) The Queen is possibly Italian.

are modal claims. They contain modals, words that make a sentence express modalities like possibilities and necessities. Claim (1) contains the modal adverb ‘necessarily’ – a necessity modal. Claim (2) contains the modal ‘possibly’ – a possibility modal. This talk asks: How does Aristotle account for modals?
So far, scholars assume that my question is a non-starter. In their view, Aristotle does not account for modals: no such account is present within his reconstruction of modal logic (in the Prior Analytics), or in his account of language (in De Interpretatione). Even the claim that Aristotle has a systematic semantics for natural language is regarded as suspicious.
My talk debunks the suspicion that Aristotle was no semanticist. I reconstruct his theory of modals and show that it stems from a systematic account of language. Just like many contemporary linguists, Aristotle assumes that language is compositional and assertive claims have truth-conditions. Unlike contemporary authors, however, he analyses predications of the form ‘a is F’ as have a tripartite structure: a copula (‘is’) takes scope over two terms (‘a’ and ‘F’). Given this picture, he argues that modals are copula-modifiers, where his modifiers can be modelled as expressing a function that takes an item of a given linguistic type and issues a different item of the same linguistic type. Specifically, modals take a (non-modal) copula as an input and yield a modal copula as their output. I reconstruct his argument for the claim that modals are non-copula modifiers and how it relies on semantic intuitions about negations (a technique also used in contemporary linguistics). Finally, I show how Aristotle’s account guarantees the insight that modals and quantifiers work in a parallel way and accounts for differences in scope. I conclude by raising the question of why (for all we know) Aristotle did not think about higher-order modal claims. Is there room for these in his semantics at all?.

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event. Note that this is an in-person event and everyone should wear a mask.

Barcan Formulas and the Limits of Contingency
Adam Russell Murray (University of Manitoba)

18 March 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Our simplest and best understood theory of first-order metaphysical modality represents individual existence and non-existence as strictly non-contingent. However, these necessitist implications of the simple theory appear to be undermined by robust intuition to the effect that existence and non-existence are largely contingent matters. In this talk, I show how resources familiar from two-dimensional semantics support a novel interpretation of the necessitist’s theoretical commitments. In contrast with existing positions in these debates, the necessitist theory I develop preserves both the simple theory and a non-revisionist metaphysics of individuals, while also explaining much of the intuitive allure of the alternative, contingentist picture.

The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at <info@lancog.com> until a day before the event. Note that this is an in-person event and everyone should wear a mask.