LUNCHTIME SEMINAR ABSTRACTS (alphabetical by author)

Kent Bach - Perspectives on Possibilities: Contextualism, Relativism, or what?
Abstract
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Emma Borg - Referential Intentions, Semantic Minimalism and Epistemic Behaviourism
Full Paper
This paper examines the role of speaker intentions in issues of reference determination for context-sensitive expressions, focusing on demonstratives. Intuitively, the referent of a token utterance of ‘that’ is determined (at least in part) by the speaker’s intentions. However, if this is right it seems to cause a problem for so-called formal theories of meaning. I begin by setting out the precise nature of this problem and proceed to explore three putative solutions. First, the assumption that speaker intentions determine reference in these cases may be rejected; second, it may be held that current speaker intentions are relevant but that they can be accommodated within a formal semantic theory; third, reference determination and semantic content may be held strictly apart. I argue that the first two of these moves, respectively termed ‘conventionalism’ and ‘epistemic behaviourism’, are flawed but that the third move provides an appealing way for the formal semanticist to accommodate the content of context-sensitive terms.
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Annalisa Coliva - Moore's Proof, Liberals and Conservatives: Is there a third way?
In the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in Moore’s Proof of an external world. The contemporary debate has been mostly triggered by Crispin Wright’s influential - “conservative” - “Facts and certainty” and further fostered by Jim Pryor’s recent - “liberal” - “What’s wrong with Moore’s argument?”. In the paper, I briefly survey their debate in order to show that it makes room for a possible alternative position - the “third way” - that so far hasn’t been explicitly considered. I then characterise such a third way in some detail, showing how it differs from externalism, Humean naturalism and Wright’s notion of entitlement. I then enlarge on its consequences with respect to both scepticism about the external world and the assessment of Moore’s Proof. Contrary to Pryor’s view, on the third way, Moore’s Proof turns out to be circular, but the kind of circularity it exemplifies is different and in fact deeper than the one originally diagnosed by Wright.
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Wayne Davis - Knowledge Claims and Context: Loose Use
Full Paper
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Philip Gerrans - Affective Neuroscience, Moral Cognition and Motivational Inertia
Full Paper
Impaired decision making following acquired ventromedial (VMF) damage is an important source of evidence about the role of affective processes in moral cognition. Typically VMF patients can apply a moral or practical rule correctly but are not motivated to act. They also remain unmoved by the, often catastrophic, consequences of their failure to act. More drastic deficiencies in moral judgement are shown by psychopaths who apparently understand, intellectually, the scope of moral rules but are entirely unmotivated by them .
Following Antonio Damasio many theorists explain these types of motivational inertia as a result of inability to associate appropriate emotions such as distress, empathy, disgust, fear, or anger with conclusions reached by abstract reasoning. To use his term, these patients lack “somatic markers” for reasoning processes. Unsurprisingly versions of this idea are recruited to support sentimentalism in ethics: the idea that moral judgement essentially depends on affective responses. Similar conclusions have been reached by cognitive neuroscientists using imaging techniques to probe the cognitive structure of moral judgement.
However sentimentalists and cognitive neuroscientists alike mischaracterize the  cognitive deficits in these cases. Phylogenetically, ontogenetically and in mature cognition, affective states are associated with abstract reasoning via processes of episodic memory and imagination which allow a subject to project herself into recalled or imagined situations.
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Gary Hatfield- Perceptual Constancy and Visual Space
Philosophers and psychologists often adopt a certain conception of the goal or aim of visual perception: that it aims to achieve "constancy" with respect of environmental properties, which means that perception aims to present properties as they are, as opposed to how they might appear if perception simply was determined by the contents of our retinal images. This conception of the task of perception is friendly to the recently popular "transparency" view of perceptual content, according to which the content of perception is the representation of object properties and contains no qualia or subject-dependent aspects.
I present an analysis of the task of perception in which full constancy is not the aim.  Using color perception as an initial example, I argue that on a plausible conception of what color perception is good for, full constancy is not needed.  I then examine the structure of visual space, and argue that here again full constancy is not achieved and that this need not be seen as a failure of perception to fulfill its task.  I offer a description of visual space that differs from full constancy (flat isotropic Euclidean space) and from the projective structure of the retinal image (an image in 2-d perspective), and suggest that visual space with this structure (a 3-D contracted projection of physical space) would serve well the functional desiderata of spatial perception (including navigation and object-identification).
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James Higginbotham- Perfective Aspect and the Metaphysics of Events
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Thomas Hurka - Asymmetries in Value
Abstract
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Anders Nes - Is perceptual representing conceptual?
It’s a plausible thought that beliefs somehow require the possession of concepts. At a first pass, we might formulate this as the constraint that in order to believe that …F… one needs to possess the concept F. In the first section of the talk, I consider some objections to the constraint, in particular objections from a naïve-Russellian view of belief ascription and from tacit knowledge. I argue that these objections call at most for minor revision of the conceptualisation constraint in its application to belief. I then, in the middle section, turn to the controversial question of whether the conceptualisation constraint extends to perceptual experience: is it the case that in order to have perceptual experience as of …F… one needs to possess the concept F? A familiar alleged counterexample to this claim trades on the fine-ness of grain of visual experience. The idea is that someone can have an experience of something as being red-345, say, without having the concept red-345. A familiar reply to this objection turns to demonstrative concepts: whilst the perceiver typically won’t have the concept red-345, she will have some demonstrative concept of the shade in question, expressible as ‘that shade’ or ‘shaded thus’. I reject this defence of the conceptualisation constraint, my (I hope less familiar) reason being that grasp of demonstrative concepts requires attention to the demonstratum, whereas there is only a contingent connection between perceptual experience of something and attention to it. However, in the third section of the talk I consider an alternative defence of the conceptualisation constraint, proceeding by what I will call an argument from assimilation: it is a truism that S’s perceiving something as so-and-so involves S’s activating a capacity to represent something as so-and-so; in the absence of true, substantive constraints on conceptual capacities that exclude the noted perceptual-representational capacity activated in S’s experience, the presumption must be that this perceptual-representational capacity is conceptual – distinctions shouldn’t be multiplied beyond necessity.
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Nathan Salmon - What is existence?
Abstract
 Handout
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Michael Schmitz - A (Dis)solution to the Problem of Mental Causation
The problem of mental causation is commonly posed against the background of a metaphysical picture in which the manifest macrophysical world has been implicitly or explicitly eliminated in favour of the causal effects of a purely microphysical world on human and other minds. The causal closure of the physical domain then apparently forces us to choose between options such as epiphenomenalism, overdetermination and the identity theory. After a brief critique of these options, I argue that the problem can be overcome by abandoning the received metaphysical picture in favour of a pluralistic (polyistic) ontology based on the notion of composition (Searle 1992). The key is to clearly distinguish causal relations as relations within a given micro or macro level from the compositional relations between levels. Mental causation can then be thought of as one kind of macro level causation among others. It is not inconsistent with the principle of causal closure, since this principle is only valid on the microphysical level (Sturgeon 1998). Microlevel causation does not compete with, or preempt macrolevel causation, it rather explains it. I conclude with some reflections on the extent to which the proposal constitues a dissolution instead of a solution to the problem.
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Alberto Voltolini - To think is to have something in one’s thought
In this paper, I will claim that intentionality is not only an internal relation, in the sense of being a modal relation of existential dependence of something (typically, a thought) on its object (or content), but also a constitutive relation, a relation of individuative dependence of something (typically, a mental act, a thought) on its object (or content), a relation that something has in virtue of its nature. This claim will lead to the following theses: first, a thought has both intrinsic and original intentionality; second, in order for a thought to have original intentionality, it must be an object in a cogitative modality. To my mind, in its nonnaturalist flavour all this is what taking externalism seriously really means.
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Graham White - Davidson on the equality of actions
Davidson ontends, on the basis of certain patterns of commonsense reasoning, that equalities between actions are meaningful: he then uses this claim to argue that actions are first-class objects. Recent work in formal logic has made it possible to examine both steps of this argument in considerable detail, and to establish results which, while interesting for the analysis of action, leave Davidson's argumentative strategy in considerable disarray.
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