Certain Doubts

KAZIMIERZ NATURALISED EPISTEMOLOGY WORKSHOP 2006
1st-5th September 2006
Kazimierz Dolny, Poland
http://bacon.umcs.lublin.pl/~ktalmont/KNEW

The prospective key speakers are:
Mark Bickhard (Lehigh University)
Michael Bishop (Northern Illinois University)
Werner Callebaut (Konrad Lorenz Institute)
Huw Price (University of Sydney)
Bjorn Ramberg (University of Oslo)

The second half of the 20th Century has witnessed the rapid growth of an approach to epistemology that gives up on the idea of a first philosophy and argues for a close partnership with sciences such as biology, psychology, cognitive science, information theory and computing. As a result of the cross-pollination of ideas, naturalised epistemology has come to include a great richness of methodologies and approaches. The workshop will bring together a number of leading experts with post-graduates and researchers. Over the five days, the speakers will lead workshop groups that will focus on issues dealing with naturalised epistemology and arising out of their work. KNEW’06 is being organised by Marcin Milkowski (PAN, CPR) and Konrad Talmont-Kaminski (UMCS, CPR).

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite submissions (by abstract) of papers in the area of naturalised epistemology by all summer school participants. Papers dealing with work related to the work presented by the invited speakers will be given preference. Contributed papers will have a total of half an hour presentation plus discussion time. Submission (in PDF, DOC or RTF) dead-line: June 1st, 2006. Notification of acceptance: June 10th, 2006

APPLICATION

The workshop is mostly aimed at postgraduate students and junior researchers. Applications should include an application form (DOC | PDF) and should either be sent by e-mail (entitled ‘KNEW Application’) to or posted to: KNEW’05; Konrad Talmont-Kaminski; Philosophy and Sociology Faculty; Marie Curie-Sklodowska University; Plac MCS 4; 20-031 Lublin, POLAND.
Application dead-line: June 20th, 2006; Notification of acceptance: June 25th, 2006. Registration fee: 100 EURO (payable upon acceptance).

John Doris sent me a version of their paper and I thought it might interest some here. It’s on responsibility rather than epistemology, but the connections are interesting enough that some here will want to take a look. It is a defense of what they term variantism, and involves lots of the stuff of which experimental philosophy is made. You can download the paper here.

Registration is now open for the Arche conference on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Modality, taking place at the University of St Andrews on 7-9 June 2006. The registration form can be downloaded from the conference webpage.

Suppose one is attracted to the idea that the primary concern of epistemologists ought to be those aspects of successful cognition that are valuable from a purely theoretical perspective. That is, suppose one is interested in value-driven epistemology. Suppose one is also impressed with evolutionary theory. One might then begin to think about epistemology from both an evolutionary and value-driven perspective. The question is what would result from such a perspective.
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This is ostensibly a review of Peg Tittle’s What If…, Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy (Pearson Longman, 2005) with a narrow focus: post-Gettier epistemology. (In these days of “post-” anything, I had better clarify: For me, “post-Gettier epistemology” means the same as “epistemological inquiry informed by Gettier’s seminal paper”.) But this frisky little post is trying to be all of the following: (a) a lightning-fast commentary on the tools of the epistemology-teaching trade, (b) a lightning-fast commentary on philosophical genres, (c) a very brief catalog of very offensive errors in the study of epistemology, (d) a very brief catalog of very insidious errors in the study of epistemology, (e) the antidote to all those errors, offensive or insidious, and (f) a bit of stern advice for instructors and teaching assistants who wouldn’t call themselves “card-carrying epistemologists” but are occasionally assigned an introductory course in the field.
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Several philosophers I spoke with at the Pacific meeting are working on the issue of the confirmational relevance of de se information. I’m working on it as part of a defense of what I’ve called propositionalism (which turns out now to be ill-named), Dave Chalmers has a new piece on it (I think he’s using it for the online philosophy conference), and Mike Titelbaum, one of Branden Fitelson’s students at Berkeley, is writing a dissertation on how to model the relevance of such information. (Dave’s paper is here and Mike’s is here.)

To begin addressing the issue, one needs a clean characterization of the difference between de se and de dicto information. David Lewis says that all beliefs are de se and the de dicto ones limit the class of worlds to which their subjects belong, whereas irreducibly de se beliefs indicate a subject’s identity or location in space or time. The distinction is thus a distinction between beliefs about logical space and those about “location” within a world. I find this characterization to be unhelpful, but perhaps I don’t understand it. Suppose I believe that tomorrow I will win the lottery. There are worlds in which I will win the lottery tomorrow and worlds where I don’t; so this belief appears to limit the class of worlds to which their subjects belong, and is thus de dicto. But it clearly is a de se belief, as opposed to the belief that JK will win the lottery on April 14, 2006 (the indexical character of calendar claims ignored for present purposes).

Perhaps the problem is that of trying to extend the concept of de se attitudes to encompass more than beliefs involving self-awareness. (more…)

Learned via Epistemic Value, there’s a conference commemorating Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” on its 50th anniversary at the Institute of Philosophy in London, June 28-30, 2006. More information can be found here.

As readers of this blog well know, there is a growing amount of interest in epistemic value. In my view, understanding epistemic value requires understanding its meta-normative status. A good place to start getting a hold on this status is a question which Jon raised on this blog over a year ago: Can we be expressivists about epistemic value?

Clearly, a chief – probably the chief – epistemic value is truth. So we might just as well ask: can we be expressivists about the value of truth? In order to answer that question, we need to get clear on at least two things: what it means to talk about “the value of truth” and what it would mean to be an expressivist about that value. My answers to both questions can be found in “Expressivism and the Value of Truth” a rough draft of which can be found over on Epistemic Value (Comments obviously welcome).

Here’s the really short version:

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Suppose you think David Chalmers is wrong about some well-known thesis regarding phenomenal consciousness. Or, you think David Lewis got something fundamental wrong about the metaphysics of modality. Or, maybe you think Tim Williamson has got vagueness seriously wrong.

Are you just an arrogant dolt? Do you really think that you have bested *those* philosophers on *those* topics? Let’s suppose that you say P and they say not-P on those topics. If you have any self-knowledge at all, and you are a typical philosopher, then you should be disposed to admit all of the following regarding those philosophers on those topics and claim P:
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The 10th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA 2006) will be held in Liverpool, September 13-15, 2006.

Submission deadline is May 1, 2006.

Although this call is making the rounds, note that the organizers have announced student grants of 100 British Pounds Sterling to students who co-author an accepted and registered paper. Proceedings will be published in the Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series by Springer-Verlag.

For details, see the conference webpage: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~jelia