Dan López de Sa

University of Barcelona

Significant Verbal Disputes and So-Called “Metalinguistic Negotiations”

06 October 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Some disputes are verbal—in metaphysics (and philosophy) as well as elsewhere. That the disputes are verbal is often taken to express a certain form of skepticism about metaphysics (or perhaps about philosophy more generally): the domains in question are defective, one hears, in that the disputes are “merely” verbal, as opposed to involving substantial questions. This is misguided. Some philosophers, including notably David Chalmers (2011), David Plunket (2015), and Amie Thomasson (2017), have recently emphasized how many disputes are, although verbal, not “merely verbal” but actually quite significant. Both Plunket and Thomasson contend that some, perhaps many, disputes in metaphysics (and philosophy) are to be seen as so-called “metalinguistic negotiations”. Whether there exist cases of metalinguistic negotiation—in general, let alone in metaphysics (and philosophy)—is, however, interesting in itself but controversial. A controversy one can avoid when the purpose is vindicating the significance of (some) verbal disputes.

Diogo Santos

LANCOG Universidade de Lisboa

Evaluating metalinguistic negotiation

29 September 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: The phenomenon of persistent disagreement has been at the forefront of the debate between philosophers of language on the semantics of evaluative predicates. Metalinguistic negotiation largely limits the scope of the objection from lost disagreement against contextualist views. Sundell (2016) argues that aesthetic adjectives are not semantically evaluative and that their meaning is in some way relative to a standard. Data in Liao, McNally, and Meskin (2016) apparently undermine Sundell’s view, by showing that aesthetic adjectives behave as absolute gradable adjectives – specifically, with respect to the comparison class not being contextually determined. This signals that the standard of comparison is semantically encoded and not contextually triggered. If so, then there is reason to think that aesthetic adjectives’ meaning is in some way relative to a standard. This paper rehearses what Sundell can say to account for the linguistic data. Nonetheless, it concludes – following Marques (2017) – that metalinguistic negotiation does not accommodate the puzzle from persistent disagreement and, thus, that Sundell (2016) has not shown that there is no independent motivation to endorse the thesis that aesthetic adjectives are semantically evaluative and relative to a standard.

Tommaso Piazza

Università di Pavia

How to Defeat a Seeming

25 July 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: In this talk I draw a distinction between the direct and indirect contribution of a mental state to the epistemic justification of a subject’s beliefs. In terms of this distinction, I describe a puzzle surrounding the conditions on which S’s direct justification for believing P originating from S’s seeming that P is undercut. On the one hand the direct justification from the seeming seems to be undercut exactly when the indirect justification from the seeming is. On the other hand, however, the general characterization of the distinction between the direct and indirect contribution of a mental state to the justification of a belief motivates the expectation that what undercuts the indirect justification originating from it should not have the power to also undercut the direct justification. This leaves unexplained why, when S acquires an undercutting defeater of the indirect justification, S is apparently left with no justification for believing P. I explore three solutions to this puzzle. The first solution eliminates the puzzle by simply conjecturing that S’s seeming that P only supplies indirect justification for believing P. The second solution eliminates the puzzle by conjecturing that S’s indirect justification replaces S’s direct justification from the seeming. The third one, which I defend, rest on a principle distilled by N. Silins, and conjectures that an undercutting defeater of S’s indirect justification from the seeming affects S’s direct justification from the seeming by rebutting one presupposition of it.

Agnaldo Cuoco Portugal

Universidade de Brasília

Disagreement on Belief in God

and Bayesian Conditions for Convergence

25 July 2017, 11:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: The Existence of God (1979, 2004) by Richard Swinburne is one of the most influential books in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Among its many virtues, it proposes to frame the traditional arguments of natural theology (teleological, cosmological, the problem of evil, etc.) in an inductive probabilistic form. This way, each argument does not aim to lead to a necessary deductive conclusion about the existence of God, but only to increase or decrease its probability, following an epistemic interpretation of Bayes’s theorem as a formal reasoning tool. The proposal of the seminar is to discuss an alternative way to use the theorem as a structure for interpreting the disagreement involved in the discussion about the justification of theism. In this proposal, I will suggest both a theory of probability and an assessment of the priors assigned to theism by the main parties involved, which are different from the ones employed by Swinburne. As a result, another manner of conceiving the rationality of the belief in God will be put forward in this disagreement scenario.

Free Attendance

Disputatio has been classified Q2 in Scimago Journal Rank for the third consecutive year. It has also been promoted to A2 in Qualis.

Ned Markosian

University of Massachusetts – Amherst

First Lecture

The Dynamic Theory of Time and Time Travel to the Past

24 July 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Second Lecture

The Open Future

26 July 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Free Attendance

Ricardo Santos

Universidade de Lisboa

The Fitch-Church Argument, the Knower Paradox and Paraconsistency

21 July 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: We surely do not know everything, but some philosophers have thought that every truth can be known – by following the right method (be it the Cartesian method, or ‘the’ scientific method). An interesting argument first published by Frederic Fitch, but most likely due to Alonzo Church, purports to show that those philosophers are wrong, and that there are necessary limits to what can be known by non-omniscient beings like us. For many people of a more realist persuasion, that there are unknowable truths is good news, so they tend to look favorably to the Fitch-Church argument. But the argument looks suspicious, because it performs a kind of modal collapse, allegedly showing that if every truth is knowable, then every truth is known – so it invites looking for ways to resist it. In this talk, I will examine one way in which the Fitch-Church argument may be blocked, namely by adopting a paraconsistent logic and a dialetheic view of knowledge, independently motivated by another important problem, the Knower Paradox (due to Richard Montague). The dialetheic approach to both problems faces some objections, which I will discuss. I will argue that dialetheism proves better as a solution to the Knower than as a solution to the more general knowability problem.

Free Attendance

For further information, please contact CFUL at c.filosofia@letras.ulisboa.pt

Alyssa Ney

UC Davis

Physics and Fundamentality

14 July 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: What justifies the allocation of funding to research in physics when many would argue research in the life and social sciences may have more immediate impact in transforming our world for the better? Many of the justifications for such spending depend on the claim that physics enjoys a kind of special status vis-a-vis the other sciences, that physics or at least some branches of physics exhibit a form of fundamentality. The goal of this paper is to articulate a conception of fundamentality that can support such justifications. I argue that traditional conceptions of fundamentality in terms of dynamical or ontic completeness rest on mistaken assumptions about the nature and scope of physical explanations.

Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa

LanCog Group (Language, Mind and Cognition Research Group)

http://www.lancog.com

Centro de Filosofia das Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa

http://cfcul.fc.ul.pt

Alexander Carruth

Durham University

Being Physical

7 July 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: In order for certain debates in the philosophy of mind to proceed in good order—especially those concerning the relationship between mind and body—there are certain desiderata that any characterisation of the notion of ‘physical’ ought to meet. Our understanding of what it is for something to be physical ought not, for instance, to render the doctrine of physicalism either obviously false or trivially true—and much has been said about these desiderata in discussions concerning Hempel’s dilemma. It is also sometimes, although not always, suggested that there ought to be an empirical component to the truth of physicalism—our notion of what it is for something to be physical should render it conceivable that empirical evidence could come to light which falsifies physicalism. In this talk it will be argued that another, less discussed, desideratum for a satisfying characterisation of the physical is that it ought to be able to distinguish physicalism not just from dualism, but from alternative, non-physicalist monisms such as idealism, phenomenalism, panpsychism and neutral monism. To set the scene, the problem that Hempel’s dilemma raises for simple science-based accounts of the physical will be outlined. Two recently popular accounts of the physical, the via negativa account and object-physicalism, however, can avoid such problems. But these two accounts, it will be shown, fail to meet the fourth desideratum—they cannot distinguish phsyicalism from other forms of monism.

Ofra Magidor

University of Oxford

Co-predication and Property Inheritance

(co-authored with David Liebesman)

30 June 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: It is tempting to think that words like ‘book’ are ambiguous between a ‘physical book’ sense and an ‘informational book’ sense: on the physical sense, three copies of War and Peace count as three books, and on the informational sense, as only one book. However, this ambiguity hypothesis seems to face problems with cases of co-predication, namely sentences such as ‘Three red books are informative’. The problem arises from the claims that: (i) ‘red’ only applies to physical books; (ii) ‘informative’ only applies to informational books; and (iii) we have only one occurrence of the word ‘book’ in the sentence.

Co-predication has been taken in the literature to be a deep problem that forces us into radical conclusions, most notably, the abandonment of referential semantics altogether. In this paper we argue that no such radical conclusions are warranted. We offer a novel account of co-predication which denies both that ‘book’ is ambiguous, and that there are strong categorical restrictions preventing physical books from being informative, or informational books from being red. We show how our account can address a wide variety of cases of co-predication and deal with some objections.