Title: "Individualism and Externalism"

Abstract: Externalism is the doctrine that cognitive "content" properties of agents are individuated by factors outside of the agents brain. Such properties are believing that Sam is a fool, or wanting to drink a glass of water. The idea is that such properties are individuated by who and what they are about, and that depends on which the agent is related by causal and informational relations, which themselves are often mediated by social factors. So two individuals could be in the same brain-states and yet one could believe that Sam was a fool, while the other believed that Elwood was a fool, because Sam had played the role in the life of one of them, that Elwood played in the life of the other. Or Sam could believe that water was good to drink, while Elwood believes that "twater" is good to drink, twater being the liquid that plays the role of water on twin-earth, where Elwood lives. Or Elwood could have the false belief that he has arthritis in his calf, while if other people in his community used the word "arthritis" differently, being in the state he is in would constitute having a true belief about a somewhat different condition.

Some philosophers believe that if we are externalists about cognitive content properties, we should give up individualism, the idea that an agent's mental states are in the head, or are brain-states, or supervene on brain states. Giving up externalism seems a bit of a disaster for cognitive science, and, for that matter, for common sense explanations of what humans think and do.

I'll argue that if we (i) pay attention to the state/property distinction and (ii) consider the basic structure of systems that "harness information" we can be externalists without giving up individualism.

October 4, 2007
Joshua Knobe (UNC)

Title: "Cause and Norm"

Abstract: It has often been suggested that causation can be understood in terms of certain patterns of counterfactual dependence, but if this suggestion is on the right track, we seem to be faced with a question about why causation itself has any real philosophical significance. Thus, suppose that philosophers arrive at a perfectly adequate understanding of the patterns of counterfactual dependence in a given system but that they nonetheless continue to disagree about whether one event in that system counts as the 'cause' of the other. Given that we already know all of the relevant facts about counterfactual dependence, why should it even matter who is right about this question of causation? I argue that it is possible to give an answer to this question, i.e., that it is possible to explain how causation itself might have a significance that goes beyond anything involved in counterfactual dependence.

October 11, 2007
Andy Egan (Michigan)

Title: "Why Ethics is All About Me"

Abstract: It's hard to find an appropriate subject matter for moral belief to be about, such that (a) our moral beliefs are largely true, (b) they have the right kind of intimate connection to motivation, and (c) everybody's moral beliefs share a common subject matter. In the face of this, it's tempting to either give up on moral belief altogether, and explain moral thought and talk in terms of some other sort of attitude(s), or to give up on the idea that everybody's moral beliefs share a common subject matter. I argue that we can retain all of (a)-(c), so long as we say that the contents of moral beliefs are self-locating.

November 1, 2007
Tim Schroeder (OSU)

Title: "Reasons from Atoms"

Abstract: If a creature can act, its actions will be more or less rational, more or less reasonable. Few naturalistic philosophers of mind have concerned themselves with this particular intrusion of the evaluative into the factual realm, but these evaluative properties of creatures with minds demand naturalistic explanation just as much as intentional and qualitative properties do. Naturalists have generally looked to either social convention or natural selection to explain evaluative properties, but neither seems to be the right way to explain why any creature ought to do what seems most likely to maximize desire satisfaction. In this talk another explanation is sketched: actions are not merely caused but regulated by desires, and this regulation explains the existence of the evaluative standard known as 'practical rationality'.

November 15, 2007
Richard Heck (Brown)

Title: "Solving Frege's Puzzle"

Abstract: I develop what I take to be the strongest form of Frege's puzzle, one in which it constitutes a challenge to show how beliefs might figure in psychological explanation if their contents are individuated a la Russell. I then argue that the puzzle can be solved if we pay appropriate attention to the inferential relations between beliefs and allow ourselves to appeal to such relations in psychological explanations.

November 29, 2007
Dan Stoljar (ANU - Visiting Harvard)

Title: "What is a Physical Property?"

Abstract: How is one to clarify what it is for a property to be a physical property? My approach will be to assume that 'physical property' is a cluster concept, and then use the method of cases to adjudicate various proposals about which elements in the cluster are to be included and how they are to be weighted and understood. I will argue (better: suggest) that an application of this method leads naturally to a sceptical view about physicalism.

January 24, 2008
Meir Buzaglo (Israel, Visitng Rutgers Jewish Studies)

Title: "Paradoxes and Concept Expansions"

Abstract: Although expansions of concepts are widespread in mathematics and the physical sciences, Frege thought that logic could not allow concepts with "fluid" boundaries. In a previous work I criticized this view by developing a logic of expansions that is richer than first order logic. This prepares the way to deal with paradoxes, which themselves have been subject to a long and respected tradition that analyses them as the result of illegitimate expansions of concepts. Keeping within Fregean terms, I believe that this approach allows me to avoid the frustration that is most likely to arise in the face of the paradoxes of set theory. I believe that the path to a possible solution is not to be found by providing a new logic or by suggesting modifications in the Fregean system where the paradox does not arise, but by changing our understanding of the logic that we have.

February 14, 2008
Lara Buchak (Princeton)

Title: "Risk without Regret"

Abstract: Decision theory is supposed to represent any preferences that a rational decision maker might have. And yet, there are some preferences that violate standard decision theory that seem intuitively reasonable: on the face of it, counterexamples to the claim that standard decision theory (expected utility theory) can represent all rational agents. I discuss one way a decision theorist might respond to purported counterexamples: re-describing the choice problems decision makers face by individuating/ /outcomes in these examples more finely, so that standard decision theory can accommodate the stated preferences after all. I argue that while this response succeeds against many of the purported counterexamples, it does not succeed against them all: in particular, it does not succeed against counterexamples that stem from how decision makers take risk into account.

February 28, 2008
Ursula Coope (Oxford)

Title: "Why isn't continence enough for practical wisdom?"

Abstract: In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between the virtuous person and the merely continent person. The difference is that continent person has an appetitive desire for the wrong thing, whereas the virtuous person's desires are all in line with his choices. This suggests that, as far as their reasoning is concerned, the two are alike: they differ only in their appetitive desires. However, Aristotle also says that it is only possible to have practical wisdom if one has the ethical virtues. This implies that the merely continent person cannot have practical wisdom. As practical wisdom is a virtue of the rational part of the soul, this implies that the continent person must have some defect in respect of his rationality. In my paper, I discuss why Aristotle thinks this. I argue against McDowell's view that, according to Aristotle, the continent person must have some kind of cognitive failure, and I suggest an alternative reason for thinking that the continent person is deficient in respect of his rationality.

March 6, 2008
Delia Graff Fara (Princeton)

Title: "Possibility Relative to a Sortal"

Many philosophers, including me, agree that a person is necessarily female just in case that very person is female in every possible world; and that for the person to be possibly a mother is for there to be some possible world in which that very person is a mother. I disagree with most such philosophers, however, in thinking that necessity and possibility do not thereby require that in the relevant possible worlds there be something that's female, or a mother, that's *identical* to the person in question.

I develop the hypothesis that cross-world (and cross-time) sameness, relativized to a sortal, does not require cross-world (or cross-time) identity. I explain how the hypothesis helps to preserve the sensible view that material objects are identical to the matter that constitutes them. I also show that the view fairs better than more extreme versions of counterpart theory.

March 13, 2008
Alison Simmons (Harvard)

Title: "Marking the Mental: Arguments for the Unconscious from Leibniz to Freud"

Abstract: In this talk I will explore some reasons for a significant shift in the understanding of the nature of the mental that took place in the two centuries between the early modern period and the late 19th century. In the early modern period, consciousness was the reigning mark of the mental. What makes something count as a /mental/ phenomenon, a phenomenon of the mind, is its being conscious. There was also general agreement that consciousness is some sort of /epistemic /property of the mental; it is the means through which mental phenomena make themselves known to the mind that has them. Philosophers of the period disagreed in their /analysis/ of consciousness: is it an intrinsic property of each mental phenomenon or some sort of reflexive property or a higher-order property, i.e., the result of one mental phenomenon taking another as its object? Whatever the analysis, the lights are decidedly on in the early modern mind. Leibniz was a rare dissenter, arguing that mental phenomena come in both conscious and unconscious flavors. Just as there is more to body than meets the eye, so too there is more to the mind than meets consciousness. Despite Leibniz's efforts, the idea of an unconscious mental life did not take hold.

Some two hundred years later, in the middle of the 19th century, the idea that consciousness is a mark of the mental remained fairly entrenched. Even Brentano, whom we think of as giving us intentionality as the mark of the mental, staunchly defended the view that consciousness counts as a mark of it too: intentional phenomena are all present (indeed infallibly, immediately, and self-evidently present) to consciousness, and they are the only things present to consciousness. By this point, however, there were more dissenters. On varying grounds, James Mill, William Hamilton, Henry Maudsley, Gustav Fechner and others argued in favor of an unconscious mental life. William James, surveying the lay of the psychologist's land in his /Principles of Psychology/ at the end of the century wrote of this development: "it is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology and of turning what might become science into a tumbling ground of whimsies...and yet it has numerous champions." Whereas Locke in the 17th century could dismiss the idea of unconscious mental phenomena with a mere "tis near a contradiction," 19th century defenders of the conscious mark felt they had some arguing to do to preserve it. A genuine debate was underway. My questions are the following: What in the 19th century made possible (or inevitable) genuine debate about the existence of unconscious mental phenomena? What were the arguments for and against them (and were they really any different from Leibniz's arguments 200 years earlier)? What was at stake in defending one side or the other? And for those who admit unconscious mental phenomena, what marked out the mental such it could come in both conscious and unconscious varieties?

March 27, 2008
Martine Nida-Rümelin (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)

Title: "Identity Across Time and Subject Body Dualism"

Abstract: Considering a case of fission where a person A splits into B and C I will argue that we have a clear positive conception of the difference between a world where A is B and a world where A is C. Our cognitive access to that difference can be explained by reference to conceptual features of self-attribution of future properties. Given this datum one might take two positions: (a) one may argue that - in a case of perfect symmetry in psychological and bodily relations between A and the two successors - there really is no such difference between a world where A is B and a world where A is C. We only seem to be able to grasp the difference (illusion theory). (b) One may adopt a realist position with respect to identity accross time of conscious individuals and insist that therer is a real difference between these two possibilities at issue, a difference which we are able to grasp (realism with respect to identity across time for conscious individuals). - I will argue against the illusion theory and in favor of the realist position. Realism however implies a weak version of a view one might call subject-body dualism. According to subject-body dualism, whenever there is conscious experience, there is also an experiencing subject having those experiences which is an individual thing persisiting accross time and non-identical to any material entity.

April 24, 2008
Susanna Siegel (Harvard)

Title: "Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification"

Abstract: This paper discusses the epistemological impact of top-down influences on visual experience. I argue that some cases of cognitive penetration of visual experience pose difficulties for dogmatist theories of perceptual justification.

May 1, 2008
Austen Clark (University of Connecticut, Storrs)

Title: "Phenomenal Character and Consciousness"

Abstract: In this paper I analyze two distinct conceptions of phenomenal character, one of which is essentially tied to conscious mental states, and the other of which is not. The first derives from Thomas Nagel's notion of "what it is like" to have a sensory state; the other from an older tradition of thought about the similarities and differences manifest in veridical and nonveridical sensory experiences. These two notions are often conflated, and the first task is to give a precise analysis of their distinction. Once that is done the conflation is easy to demonstrate, and its costs can be assessed. More importantly, we can start to address the question of how these two distinct sets of properties might be related to one another.