Harmful habits: Responsibility for implicitly biased behaviour
Josefa Toribio (Logos, ICREA, University of Barcelona)

12 November 2021, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: This talk has a two-fold goal. First, I defend the view that the prejudicial behaviour that results from implicit biases is best understood as a type of habitual action — as a harmful, yet deeply entrenched, passively acquired, socially relevant type of habit. Second, I explore how characterizing such implicitly biased behaviour as a habit aids our understanding of the responsibility we bear for it. As habits are ultimately susceptible of being controlled, agents ought to be held responsible for their implicit biased actions. Yet, the blaming response should target agents only insofar as they have failed (while being able) to develop a particular kind of ability: the ability to spot the kind of situations that require the exercise of the relevant intellectual, moral, social, and prudential obligations. Being thus responsible, however, is consistent with the agent’s not being blameworthy. For the automaticity of the blamed agent’s implicitly biased behaviour makes it unintentional relative to intellectual, moral, social, and prudential values that she already cares about.

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

Linguistic Intentions
Indrek Reiland (University of Vienna)

05 November 2021, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: What is the proper role of intention in a theory of linguistic meaning? On individualist views (Davidson, Bilgrami), meaning intentions have a direct role in imbuing uses of words with particular meanings. In this talk, I will approach the question from the contrasting public language perspective (Austin, Dummett, Kaplan, Lewis etc.) with the aim of explaining why we still have to appeal to something like linguistic intentions. Intentions play a very different role on this view: they activate the meaning that words already have in a particular language and thereby make it the case that the speaker’s use is a use with a particular meaning in that language. These sorts of linguistic intentions also play a role in disambiguation. However, contrary to widespread recent opinion, I will argue that they do not play a role in determining the reference of context-sensitive expressions. That is not settled by intention at all.

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

29 October 2021, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: We ordinarily track whether something is real or imagined. To explain this, philosophers and cognitive scientists posit a subjective sense of reality which ‘tags’ certain representations as real or not. In this talk, I argue that this sense of reality is insufficient to account for what I call ‘extraordinary perceptions’, that is experiences occurring in virtual reality, derealisation, or under various forms of stimulants which can be confusing yet continue to tell us that we perceive something which is real and independent of us.

Implicit knowledge: expanding the bounds of agency
Arnon Cahen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

22 October 2021, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: In their classic (1977), ‘Telling more than we can Know’, Nisbett and Wilson purportedly show that we are often blind to factors influencing our actions. When explaining our actions, we are prone to confabulation. Underlying these confabulations is the fact that we attempt to ‘tell’ more than we ‘can know’. Their work has bred a vast empirical literature pointing in the same direction – a proper explanation of our actions commonly appeals to features of which we are completely unaware. One unsettling consequence of such research, which many have been quick to draw, is that our commonsensical conceptions of human agency, freedom, and (epistemic, moral, and legal) responsibility, must be abandoned or, at least, substantially modified. Our actions, the story goes, can no longer be seen as outcomes of our conscious, rational, assessment of our situation. Rather, they are controlled by situational factors of which we are unaware; factors that ‘bypass’ our conscious decision-making processes altogether. In this talk I aim to uncover, and call into question, some of the assumptions embodied in this literature. I cast doubt on the transition from our ‘failure to tell’ and ‘inability to know’. Indeed, I argue, a ‘failure to tell’ is characteristic of the kind of knowing underlying the bulk of our genuinely agential engagements with the world. Rather than presenting a threat to our notion of agency, such literature calls for a broadening of its proper scope of applicability.

Davide Romano recently published a new paper “The Metaphysics of Decoherence” in Erkenntnis with Antonio Vassallo. The paper is available in open access here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00469-8

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the journal Disputatio, Prof. Timothy Williamson (Oxford) gave a lecture on October 7 on “Degrees of Freedom: Is Good Philosophy Bad Science?”. The lecture was hosted by the LanCog group at the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon. The recording of the lecture can be found here: https://youtu.be/uT-8nvRgXLc

New Mechanism, Reduction and Emergence in Physics, Chemistry and Biology
14-15 October 2021 | online

First Steps in the Philosophy of Paradoxicality
Elia Zardini (LanCog and Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

08 October 2021, 11:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: According to the traditional definition of paradoxicality, in a paradox apparently true premises apparently entail an apparently false conclusion. I argue that the traditional definition is too narrow, in that prominent types of paradoxes also have versions that conclude to an obviously true conclusion but that are nonetheless paradoxical. After drawing out an interesting corollary of this fact, I criticise a couple of alternative proposals (that in a paradox apparently a priori premises apparently entail an apparently a posteriori conclusion; that in a paradox anything (in the relevant range of propositions) apparently entails everything (in the relevant range of propositions)) as both too narrow and too strict. I then propose my own characterisation, according to which in a paradox, apparently, even if the conclusion failed to hold, the premises would be true and the argument form would be valid. I explain in what sense this account is not a reductive definition; in which directions the account can be extended to cover various other paradoxical phenomena and how the account can be understood as the metaphysical ground for a plausible epistemological claim about paradoxicality.

A Priori and A Posteriori: The Case of Proof
Timothy Williamson (University of Oxford)

08 October 2021, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Knowledge by mathematical proof is normally considered a paradigm of the a priori. However, when the process of checking a written proof is analysed, it turns out to depend on sophisticated forms of perceptual pattern recognition—indeed this is closely related to the nature of formal proof. If one checks the proof in one’s head rather than on paper, the process is similar: checking it in one’s head is the offline version of the online process of checking it on paper. Little sense can be made of the injunction to separate the content of a proof from its form. The case of mathematical proof supports the conclusion that the a priori and the a posteriori are only superficially different. This is not a form of empiricism: it does not abolish the a priori but accounts for it in an evolutionarily plausible way.

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

Ontological Disputes, Reference and the Limits of Charity
Delia Belleri (LanCog, University of Lisbon)

01 October 2021, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Eli Hirsch argues that certain ontological disputes are merely verbal: the principle of charity should compel each party to interpret the other side as speaking truly in a different language. Hirsch adopts an “intensional” method of language interpretation, which maps sentences (in context) onto sets of possible worlds, but which assigns no role to reference. I argue that this method leads to an overly uncharitable portrayal of the disputes at issue – whereby ontologists can only argue about syntax. Lack of charity stems from the fact that this portrayal likely fails to uphold the self-conception of the disputants – and particularly what I will call “the weak self-conception”. As a result, Hirsch’s deflationism falls victim of the same principle of charity that informs it.

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