19-20 June, 2017
Faculty of Philosophy
Radcliffe Humanities
Radcliffe Observatory Quarter
Woodstock Road
Oxford, OX2 6GG
Speakers:
Dorit Bar-On | Naomi Eilan | Nico Silins | Matthew Soteriou | Lea Salje | Jennifer Hornsby
Faculty of Philosophy
Radcliffe Humanities
Radcliffe Observatory Quarter
Woodstock Road
Oxford, OX2 6GG
Speakers:
Dorit Bar-On | Naomi Eilan | Nico Silins | Matthew Soteriou | Lea Salje | Jennifer Hornsby
Talk Titles and Abstracts:
'The Evil Demon Inside' (Nico Silins)
How reliable are we about our minds? Could we have justified beliefs through introspection even if we weren't reliable about our minds? I begin by examining whether we are actually unreliable about what mental states we are in. Here I evaluate psychological as well as philosophical literature, and defend the view that we are reliable about our current mental states. I then argue that there still are possible situations in which we are not reliable about what mental states we are in, and I argue that we could still have justified beliefs through introspection in such possible situations. An upshot of my discussion is a new way of looking at debates between internalists and externalists in epistemology. 'Other Minds vs Other People' (Naomi Eilan)
|
'Neo-Expressivism, Self-Knowledge, and the Nature of Mind' (Dorit Bar-On)
I begin with a pair of dilemmas – one epistemological, the other more metaphysical – to do with self-knowledge and the nature of mind. After expounding the two dilemmas (Section 1) and two major approaches to addressing them, I turn to my own preferred way of avoiding the dilemma. This way involves rejecting certain root presuppositions that drive the dilemmas and providing a neo-expressivist account of the phenomenon of so-called first-person authority. The account portrays first-person authority as grounded in certain natural capacities we have as minded and linguistic creatures, most notably, our capacity to speak our minds (Section 2). In Section 3, I offer reflections on some of the potential implications of my account for our understanding of the nature of mental states. I suggest that the neo-expressivist approach offers an understanding of basic self-knowledge that is consistent with adopting a broadly naturalist, non-Cartesian perspective on mentality. 'Ryle vs Materialists' (Jennifer Hornsby)
I take Ryle’s Concept of Mind to be engaged in epistemology-led philosophy of action (and thus of mind). Jason Stanley's arguments for the claim that knowing how is propositional knowledge, are embedded in a misunderstanding of Ryle’s arguments against what Ryle called the Intellectualist legend. When correctly understood, Ryle’s arguments come close to providing satisfactory accounts both of an agent’s own knowledge of what she is doing, and of another’s knowledge of what an agent is doing. I suggest that Stanley’s misunderstandings derive from a sort of materialism which Ryle set himself against in opposing Cartesianism and whose underlying assumptions remain pervasive in philosophy of mind. |
'The Occupation of Conscious Attention' (Matthew Soteriou)
A diverse range of phenomena seem to be associated with the engagement of attention in one form or another – not just perception, but intentional action, various forms of conscious thinking, and the occurrence of affective phenomena such as pain. It is not clear that any one theory of attention can to do justice to them all. Given such diversity, one might suspect that there is no single mechanism of attention, no single psychological operation or process, perhaps no single faculty, or capacity or function, so the fractionation of accounts of attention seems to be the sensible way to proceed. Still, at the level of what we might call the manifest image of mind, one might wonder what unifies this diverse range of phenomena that are associated with the engagement of attention? What do they all have in common? I shall be suggesting that if there is unity here, we shouldn’t be looking to the metaphysics of mind, or psychology, to uncover it. We should, rather, be guided by epistemic considerations. I’ll be suggesting that the notion of attention that can provide unity is signalled by our talk of the respect in which one’s attention can be occupied. That is the broadest notion of attention that can encompass and thereby provide unity to other notions of attention, and epistemic considerations are fundamental in explaining that notion. After outlining an epistemic understanding of the occupation of conscious attention, I shall end the talk with some brief speculative remarks on why I think our capacity to exercise agency over the occupation of conscious attention may turn out to be of central importance to an account of the metaphysics of consciousness. |
'Lit From Within' (Lea Salje)
In Being Known, Chris Peacocke raises a highly general challenge with application across different areas of philosophy: how to reconcile the epistemology of a given domain with its metaphysics. This is the integration challenge. One way to press this challenge in the philosophy of mind is to ask, how should we reconcile a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of first person thoughts on the one hand, and a credible account of how we can know these truths on the other. The central claim of this paper is that there is a distinctive feature of the epistemology of the semantics of I-thoughts that threatens to skew our progress with this integration challenge: on the one hand, we have a kind of Godly omniscience about the reference of our I-thoughts, and yet, on the other, we know as little a priori about the nature of the referent of our I-thoughts as we do about the nature of the referent of our water-thoughts. Taken overly seriously, this threatens to lead to illusions of transcendence about the self. |