In der Bildungsforschung ist ein Verständnis von Kompetenzen prominent, das Kompetenzen als Kombination aus erlernbaren kognitiven Fähigkeiten und motivationalen Fähigkeiten und Bereitschaften auffasst, diese kognitiven Fähigkeiten zur Anwendung zu bringen (Klieme 2003; im Anschluss an Weinert 2001). Im Vortrag wird diese Auffassung mithilfe einer aktuellen Theorie von Fähigkeiten genauer ausbuchstabiert und auf epistemische Fähigkeiten angewandt. Dabei wird deutlich, dass den Bereitschaften eine nicht zu unterschätzende Rolle zukommt.

Angesichts der digitalen Transformation der Öffentlichkeit gewinnen epistemische Kompetenzen an Wichtigkeit. Dabei ist jedoch nicht klar, was diese sind, wie sie didaktisch konzeptualisiert werden können und wie man sie dann schulisch und außerschulisch vermitteln könnte. Die Ausgangsfrage ist: Welche Fähigkeiten hat eine epistemisch kompetente Person? Um diese Frage zu beantworten, greifen Anna Breitwieser und ich auf zwei bestehende Ansätze zurück, die erste Schritte zur Konzeptualisierung epistemischer Kompetenz unternommen haben. Nennen wir sie wissensbasierte Konzeption (in Anlehnung an Peterson et al., 2017) und reflexionsbasierte Konzeption (in Anlehnung an Bussmann & Kötter, 2019). Aufbauend auf ihren jeweiligen Stärken schlagen wir ein Kompetenzmodell epistemischer Kompetenz vor, das sowohl die Anwendung epistemischer Methoden als auch die Fähigkeit zu deren Reflexion integriert.

Empirisch informiertes Philosophieren ist nicht der Standard im deutschsprachigen Philosophieunterricht und in der universitären (Lerhkräfte)Ausbildung. Falls doch, dann gibt es bis jetzt keine Debatte darüber, welche Herausforderungen sich dadurch stellen und welche Kompetenzen auf Lehrenden-und Studierendenseite gefördert werden müssen. Ich stelle anhand eines exemplarischen Beispiels das Problem vor und präsentiere empirische Daten aus einer repräsentativen Analyse von Unterrichtskonzeptionen aus den Jahren 2003-2024 der Zeitschrift für die Didaktik der Philosophie und Ethik.

Die zunehmende mediale Präsenz von Pseudowissenschaft und Wissenschaftsleugnung (Christian and Gawel, 2024) sowie die Verbreitung von spezifischen Fehlinformationen, die das Vertrauen in Expertise beeinträchtigen (Hund, 2023; Nichols, 2024) plausibilisieren die Forderung nach einer Stärkung epistemischer Kompetenzen bei Laien. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird untersucht, ob epistemische Kompetenzen primär als kognitive Lernziele konzipiert werden sollten, was intuitiv richtig erscheinen mag. Es wird argumentiert, dass dieses Vorgehen bereits bei der Bearbeitung komplexer, normativ aufgeladener gesellschaftlicher Themen in der universitären Lehre an seine Grenzen stößt. Dies wird illustriert anhand von Debatten um genderkritischen Feminismus (Lawford-Smith, 2022, 2023; Lawford-Smith and Pepper, 2024), Transfeminismus (Jenkins, 2023; Chappell, 2024; Bettcher, 2025) und heterodoxer Sozialkritik (McWhorter, 2021; Neiman, 2023; al-Gharbi, 2024). Es wird These vertreten, dass epistemische Kompetenzen in hohem Maße von Fähigkeiten abhängen, die eher dem affektiven Lernbereich zugeordnet werden sollten, wie intellektuelle Demut, Offenheit für Dissens und die Fähigkeit zur Affektregulierung.

Does reflective equilibrium (RE) provide an appropriate and illuminating account of moral understanding? The answer depends on what we wish to capture with an explication of moral understanding and how we interpret RE. In this talk, I argue that a straightforward and unambiguous account of RE can be used to explicate moral understanding. It is true that merely holding a RE does not suffice for understanding, and articulating an RE-account of moral understanding requires some caution. Still, these challenges can be met. The problem, though, is that the resulting notion of moral understanding is fairly narrow, focusing on normative explanations of why certain moral judgments hold. There are arguably additional abilities or achievements we might want to cover with a notion of moral understanding, e.g., sensitivity to a broad range of moral concerns, understanding of alternative ethical viewpoints, or the ability to transform moral insight into action. I discuss how we may integrate these things into a richer RE-based account of moral understanding without moving too far away from RE or diluting its core idea. In any case, I suggest, going through the process of RE makes a central contribution to deepening our moral understanding.

While moral epistemologists have traditionally been concerned with moral knowledge and what makes such knowledge possible, there has been a growing interest in the notion of moral understanding. One reason for this shift in focus is that moral understanding appears to involve more than merely knowing why some moral proposition is true. It involves, according to several philosophers, “grasping” the relation between a moral proposition and the reasons why it is true. Here, my aim is to clarify in what sense, precisely, moral understanding involves having a grasp of the relation between a moral proposition and the reasons why it is true. To this end, I will argue that moral grasp – the grasp involved in moral understanding – is best conceived of as a type of knowledge that is grounded in a subject’s moral appreciation, and show how and why the relevant notion of moral appreciation is connected to moral virtues.

There is skepticism about how helpful the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) is in relation to the epistemic aims of knowledge and justified belief. An argument that is often offered for such skepticism is that there is little reason to expect that competent users of RE will converge in their moral views. What I shall discuss in my presentation is how this non-convergence objection relates to the viability of RE if we assume that the relevant aim is that of moral understanding rather than knowledge or justified belief.

Imagination, in its most typical form involves imagery, be it visual, auditory, proprioceptive or associated with some other sensory modality. Further, such imagery can be crucial to the development of novel theories and by that means of scientific discoveries. This raises the questions whether an investigator who lacks phenomenal consciousness (perhaps due to being an aphantasiac, or being an AI), can make a scientific discovery by means of imagination, as well as whether scientific discovery can benefit from unconscious imaginative ideation in a neurotypical human. In this talk, I will offer affirmative answers to both questions. In so doing I shall spell out the idea of unconscious imaginative ideation, and on that basis defend the possibility of imagination driving scientific discovery beyond the scope of phenomenal consciousness.

Recent efforts toward theorising the role of serendipity (that is, accidental or chance-based findings) in scientific discovery encounter an inevitable problem with the data available: most of it is in narrative form, and anecdotal, and thus presents not only case-by-case variability but great potential for rhetorical bias. At least, a positive bias exists, given that instances of missed or failed serendipity are (one assumes) drastically under-represented in the literature, having not led to discovery despite their potential. Accumulating more instances (anecdotes), and nearer to the point of occurrence, in favour of continuing to use apocrypha like the story of Archimedes in the bath, is one way to improve on the theory we can derive from the experience and practice of scientists; to this end, a new series in the Journal of Trial and Error began last year. For this talk, I look to how (or whether) the theory presented by myself and colleagues in this series so far, derived from analysis of empirical cases, takes into account issues of rhetorical justice relevant to the utilization of anecdotes to theorize the structure of scientific discovery.

What marks the moment of scientific discovery? This paper examines how this moment is determined, and the extent to which it involves conventional elements. Although scientific practice often treats discovery as a discrete event, philosophical accounts reveal its conceptual and temporal complexity. I begin with Kuhn’s distinction between that- and what-discoveries, as well as Schindler’s refinements. In order to address the question of when a discovery occurs, I draw on the recent Change-Driver account of scientific discovery by Dürr and Mills, integrating a more nuanced theory of scientific problems. Building on Nickles’ constraint-inclusion model of scientific problems, I argue that the moment of discovery is shaped by the evolving structure of problems and the conventions that guide their resolution. This approach highlights the pragmatic and often negotiated nature of claims to discovery, offering a more adequate account of how discoveries are recognised and situated in time within scientific practice. The account is illustrated through the case of the Higgs boson, where theoretical expectations, empirical data, and institutional decisions jointly shaped when the discovery was declared.

This paper examines how “incumbency bias” in housing policy—reflected in measures like restrictive zoning, certain rent regulations, and property tax incentives—can limit opportunities for newcomers. Drawing on Rawls’s veil of ignorance, the analysis develops four principles for housing justice: universal access to adequate housing, protection against arbitrary displacement, enabling mobility for those seeking better prospects, and ensuring long-term economic and environmental sustainability. I show that when these principles clash—for instance, if efforts to protect current residents restrict others’ housing choices—policy outcomes tend to favor incumbents at the expense of newcomers. To address this tension, the paper proposes a Principle of Fair Housing Opportunity, calling for reforms that balance the legitimate interests of existing residents with the needs of those who wish to relocate. The aim is to show that recognizing the significance of both stability and mobility offers an important corrective to the existing literature on housing justice, which tends to focus on the harms of displacement and gentrification. I discuss policy reforms that would reduce incumbency bias and promote equitable housing access without dismissing the concerns of existing communities.

Short Abstract

The aim of my talk is to go against the negative trend that currently prevails in the philosophical literature concerning the value of sharing personal information on social media. Both Anita Allen (2012) and Carissa Véliz (2023) argue against sharing personal information for prudential and moral reasons. Allen goes so far as to defend the claim that we have a duty not to share or a duty to protect our privacy, because we thereby protect our well-being as well as the well-being of the people around us. While this negative trend is certainly justified and understandable to some extent, it is, I believe, too one-sided and should be completed with the neglected positive aspects of sharing. The question that I want to answer is Why share personal information? Do we have any strong reasons for sharing? My main claim is that we have strong prudential, moral and epistemic reasons to share personal information on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The idea is that we can help ourselves as well as others by sharing and we can distribute knowledge or raise awareness for morally significant phenomena.

This paper investigates how human interactions with AI-powered chatbots may offend human dignity. Current chatbots, driven by large language models (LLMs), mimic human linguistic behaviour but lack the moral and rational capacities essential for genuine interpersonal respect. Human beings are prone to anthropomorphise chatbots—indeed, chatbots appear to be deliberately designed to elicit that response. As a result, human beings’ behaviour toward chatbots often resembles behaviours typical of interaction between moral agents. Drawing on a second-personal, relational account of dignity, we argue that interacting with chatbots in this way is incompatible with the dignity of users. We show that, since second-personal respect is premised on reciprocal recognition of second-personal moral authority, behaving towards chatbots in ways that convey second-personal respect is bound to misfire in morally problematic ways, given the lack of reciprocity. Consequently, such chatbot interactions amount to subtle but significant violations of self-respect—the respect we are dutybound to show for our own dignity. We illustrate this by discussing four actual chatbot use cases (information retrieval, customer service, advising, and companionship), and propound that the increasing societal pressure to engage in such interactions with chatbots poses a hitherto underappreciated threat to human dignity.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is an important climate policy tool aimed at removing and storing atmospheric CO₂. While the German government has begun investing in CDR research, it has yet to establish a concrete policy pathway. This paper argues that the state must take a proactive role in shaping CDR policy rather than leaving it to private companies. If private companies dominate CDR implementation, this could undermine public trust, weaken state authority, and threaten democratic decision-making. While state control is no guarantee for an equitable implementation of CDR policies, there are good reasons to think that CDR management should be led by the state. I highlight how CDR can be conceptualized as waste management, how waste management is typically tied to state oversight, and how the state is best equipped to provide it in an equitable way. Building on this, I argue that if private companies gain too much control over future CDR pathways, they may challenge the authority of the state as the primary entity responsible for managing the atmospheric clean-up. This could lead to a decline in state power, a (further) increase in corporate influence, and weaken democratic decision-making on critical societal issues such as climate policy. 

Aggregative moral theories, it is said, do not respect the separateness of persons because they allow severe burdens on one person to be outweighed by mild benefits to each member of a large group of people. There are many alternatives to aggregative moral theories that respect the separateness of persons, among them various MiniMax Complaints (MC). MC holds that we ought to choose the action that minimizes the maximal complaint among all those affected.

MC theories, however, struggle with risk imposition. When each of a large number of people is exposed to a small risk, it may be exceedingly likely that at least one of them will be harmed. However, each person presumably only has a weak complaint, because their individual risk to be harmed is low. MC may thus direct us to rather impose risks of harm than to harm identified individuals, even though we can expect more people to be harmed as a result. This paper presents an approach, Principle MC, that preserves the non-aggregative nature of MC while yielding plausible verdicts in cases involving identified and statistical lives by focusing on principles of risk imposition instead of focusing on individual acts that impose risks.

Consider the following two plausible claims grounded in common-sense morality:

1) Make Better: We have moral reasons to make the world better and to not make it worse.

2) Avoid Complaints: We have moral reasons to avoid personal complaints against our actions.

In this paper, I argue that these two claims, if true and properly specified, require us to reject the so-called Procreation Asymmetry (or just Asymmetry) in population ethics, but at the same time require us to hold onto a weaker version of it. This might bring us closer to a normative theory of population ethics that is both intuitively plausible and theoretically coherent.

According to a person-affecting theory of beneficence, our welfare-based reasons depend entirely on what is good or bad for individuals. This view can explain the Procreation Asymmetry, the claim that we do not have reasons to create individuals whose life would be good for them, but that we do have reasons to refrain from creating an individual whose life would be bad for them. But it struggles with the Non-Identity Problem: Why ought we create a better-off rather than a worse-off individual in a choice between two good lives? Recently, several authors have argued that we can provide a person-affecting answer to this question by appealing to asymmetries between the good and the bad: while we do not have reasons to promote the good, we do have reasons to avoid, prevent or reduce the bad. In the talk, I discuss and reject several versions of this proposal.

This talk discusses whether moral contractualists can solve the non-identity problem by appealing to the risk of a life not worth living. In a paradigmatic non-identity case, we can choose between creating a person with a good life and creating another person with a much worse but still positive life. It’s hard for contractualists to explain why we should, other things being equal, create the better-off person. Tim Henning (2022) has suggested a novel solution. He claims that if we deteriorate future living conditions or create a person with a serious medical condition, we usually also impose on these persons an increased risk to have overall bad lives. And this risk explains our obligations in non-identity cases. Henning’s proposal is insightful but, as I will argue, ultimately unsuccessful. I show that his view (i) relies on a dubious asymmetry between certain benefits and chances of benefit, thereby undermining a plausible ex ante understanding of risk, (ii) has implausible implications, and (iii) gives the intuitively wrong explanation of our obligations. On this basis, I suggest a revised understanding of the relevant risk-based objection. This results in a less ambitious solution to the non-identity problem but an overall more plausible view.

There is moral luck, but its impact varies depending on the agent’s mindset. While a would-be killer who aims and shoots is equally blameworthy regardless of whether she hits her target, a driver who texts behind the wheel deserves different degrees of blame depending on whether she actually harms someone. By choosing to text behind the wheel, a driver exposes herself to the risk of ending up more blameworthy if she happens to harm someone. If this risk does not materialize, the driver, who neither intended nor caused any harm, is morally lucky, i.e. deserving of less blame than she would be had she hit a pedestrian. This, however, doesn’t apply to the would-be killer who misses her target. She is unlucky in the everyday sense (because she misses her victim contrary to her intention). Fate interfering with one’s own plans cannot benefit one’s moral responsibility in the same way as when fate goes along with one’s own plans. My argument suggests that moral luck’s impact operates along a continuum, with its influence diminishing as the quality of will worsens. This new perspective on moral luck better aligns with both our considered judgments and legal practice.

In epistemology, the project of Vice Epistemology promises to reveal crucial information about our concept of knowledge, and more generally about the ethics of belief, by attending to the characteristic ways in which negative aretaic character traits impede successful inquiry. These character traits are the titular epistemic vices. This paper proposes and partially develops a parallel project for the concept of moral responsibility.

According to this project, certain character traits may impede successful resolution of conflict within our responsibility-practices in characterstic ways. And we can learn important information about the functioning of these practices, as well as the concept of moral responsibility, by attending to such `hypological vices'. I focus, in particular, on the undertheorised practice of taking responsibility. Within this practice, resolution of conflict is systematically impeded by the following bundle of dispositions (vices), which together comprise an inability to take responsibility for one's actions:

(i) a disposition to misrepresent legitimate moral address as abuse, (ii) a disposition to represent the putative transgression as an outcome of external circumstances, (iii) a disposition to trivialise the normative fallout of the transgression, and (iv) a lack of proper motivation concerning ones compensatory duties and a merely instrumental motivation to offer apologies.

While T. M. Scanlon’s moral contractualism is widely regarded as a plausible moral theory, it is threatened by the so-called ‘ideal world objection.’ What this objection draws attention to is that contractualism’s appeal to principles that are generally accepted causes the view to overlook whenever acting in the relevant way would be very bad under more realistic circumstances with lower acceptance levels. In response to this worry, it has been suggested in the more recent literature that contractualists should give up on the notion of principles and shift their evaluative focal point to actions or maxims instead. As I will argue in this talk, however, adopting this maneuver would bring serious problems of a different kind for contractualist theory. Instead of shifting their evaluative focal point, I therefore suggest that contractualists should respond to the ideal world objection by showing responsiveness to the different degrees to which it is likely for the relevant principles to be accepted in the world we live in.

Kantian constructivism in moral theory has the difficulty, especially salient in Korsgaard (1996), that the move from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, or from individual rationality to morality, is not properly justified. Even if one grants that rational action is action according to universal principles or laws, it is not clear why the universality of the laws guiding a person’s actions should take the specific form of the person conceiving of themselves as a legislator for all rational beings, rather than limiting the universality to the internal coherence of their own actions. Korsgaard’s attempts at solving this problem are unconvincing as they stand. Their appropriate foundation is provided by a transition to Fichtean or Hegelian constructivism (Darwall 2006, Samuel 2022), following the idea that reflective self-consciousness, and therefore reasons for action, essentially depend on the subject’s recognition as reasonable, reflective, and self-conscious by others. Reasons for action are by their very nature implicitly oriented toward others as potential justifications. In this orientation, one acknowledges the authority of others. This has substantial consequences for morality, but is still compatible with different moral codes.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed our understanding of language, meaning, and communication, with systems like ChatGPT demonstrating remarkable capabilities in simulating human-like dialogue. However, this paper argues that AI’s ability to process language remains fundamentally distinct from human understanding. While AI excels at formal syntax and linguistic representation, it lacks the intentional grounding and contextual awareness that characterize human semantics. Human meaning is inherently tied to intentional acts – mental states directed toward external objects or concepts – and is deeply rooted in lived experiences and social contexts. AI systems, operating within pre-defined computational frameworks, cannot replicate this intentionality or engage with the interpretive practices that give human language its depth. Drawing on key philosophical concepts, this paper highlights the limitations of AI, emphasizing that genuine semantic understanding arises from intentional and contextual dimensions inaccessible to machines. These insights have significant implications for the philosophical, practical, and ethical considerations of AI, urging caution against conflating probabilistic outputs with true understanding. Ultimately, the paper concludes that while AI systems excel in formal language processing, they remain incapable of replicating the intentional and contextual nature of human meaning, underscoring the unique qualities of human cognition.

The massive and rapid leaps forward in the development in large language models (LLMs) have been matched by an equally massive and rapid increase in their commercial deployment. The current architecture of such LLM-type AIs suffers from a principled inability to distinguish between things that are merely accidentally not said (perhaps because they are not pertinent to the topic) and things that interlocutors are or should be intentionally silent about. We diagnose this failure to be the source of a variety of (severe) harms caused by AI in the past and present, and anticipated for the future. The LLM industry reacts to any of these problems with a "more data" strategy, resulting in some superficial success. This is veneer over a rotten core. The real problem is that the logic the LLMs are built on is too coarse-grained. We draw together recent research in a variety of different areas in logic and semantics (three-valued free logics and their proof-theory, bounds semantics, discourse representation, question-under-discussion framework, semantics for monstrous contents) to show how to build a better logical foundation that can handle deliberate silences in a contextually sensitive manner.

In 2018, a video of Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a “dipshit” went viral. Such “deepfakes,” AI-generated audiovisual media, are becoming increasingly accessible, even to those with only basic computer skills. The potential spread of deepfakes raises various epistemological and ethical concerns: they might distribute misinformation, gaslight individuals, infringe on personal rights, and undermine the credibility of genuine media. Consequently, some actors, like political parties, have pledged to avoid using deepfakes. However, deepfakes could also have positive uses: law enforcement might use them to infiltrate criminal organizations without risking undercover agents, and the media could illustrate stories when no genuine recordings are available. This raises the question: Is it morally acceptable for well-meaning actors to use deepfakes for positive purposes?

To answer this question, I argue three points. First, some dangers of deepfakes will diminish as they become more common. Second, other dangers depend more on their accessibility than their prevalence. Third, once deepfakes are ubiquitous, we should compare the knowledge from audiovisual media to knowledge from testimony rather than perception. Based on these points, I will present two criteria for whether well-meaning actors should use deepfakes.

Computanionalism about cognition is widely accepted. Illusionists “eliminate” consciousness by reducing it to cognition. The illusionist framework is thereby often taken to be very permissive with respect to machine consciousness. However, the analogy between brains and machines depends on the underlying account of physical computation, i.e. what one takes it to mean for a physical system to compute and thereby realize cognition. According to David Chalmers’ account (2012) or the more recent robust mapping account (Anderson & Piccinini, 2024) physical computation in both brains and machines is entirely constituted by the system’s physical structure in order to avoid pancomputationalism in the form of observer-relativity. In this contribution, I will critically review the robust mapping account and argue that it cannot fully account for biological cognition. Instead, an account of biological computation – unlike digital computation – must involve a trade-off between observers’ explanatory interests and physical structure. This then corresponds to Dennett’s framework according to which mental states, i.e. computational states of the brain, are real patterns identified by an observer taking the intentional stance. It follows that illusionism is much less permissive with respect to machine consciousness than commonly conceived.

Queer, Marxist, Black and Indigenous feminists call for the abolition of the family (Gumbs 2016; TallBaer 2019; Redecker 2020; Nash 2021; Lewis 2019; 2022; Weeks 2023; O’Brien 2023). But what exactly do they want to abolish, and why?

This paper offers a critique of the privatization of reproductive labour in nuclear households from the perspective of children. In short, I argue that the private household limits the visibility of forms of life which differ from the parent’s form of life. What is more, it limits the child’s capacity to identify with deviant forms of life as role models. This is especially problematic insofar as it undermines the development of autonomy with regard their own choice of a future form of life.

Note that I focus on the privatization of reproductive labour as opposed to, e.g., its gendered division. Thus, my argument holds even if the labour is, within households, divided equally and in a non-gender-specific fashion. In other words, the wrong of the privatization of reproductive labour exceeds the gendered division of labour, i.e. both the wrong of its unequal division as well as the wrong of the division being gendered.

Glaubwürdigkeit ist ein Schlüsselkonzept der Sozialphilosophie und sozialen Erkenntnistheorie, dessen begriffliche Konturen jedoch oft unscharf bleiben. Unser Vortrag zielt darauf ab, den Begriff durch eine systematische Abgrenzung von zwei gut erforschten Formen zwischenmenschlicher Abhängigkeit zu schärfen: dem Sich-Verlassen ("reliance") und dem Vertrauen.

Beim Sich-Verlassen handelt es sich um eine primär deskriptive Erwartungshaltung: Wir antizipieren das Verhalten anderer und beziehen es in unsere Planung ein, ohne dass eine reziproke Beziehung vorausgesetzt wird. Vertrauen hingegen etabliert eine normative Dimension: Wir motivieren andere, unsere Interessen in ihrem Handeln zu berücksichtigen, wobei deren aktive Anerkennung dieses Vertrauensverhältnisses konstitutiv ist.

Glaubwürdigkeit teilt mit beiden Phänomenen das Element der Abhängigkeit von anderen, unterscheidet sich jedoch fundamental in ihrem Gegenstandsbereich: Im Fokus steht weder die Verlässlichkeit von Handlungen noch die Berücksichtigung persönlicher Interessen, sondern die Wahrhaftigkeit von Aussagen. Diese epistemische Dimension macht Glaubwürdigkeit zu einem eigenständigen Phänomen, das weder eine interpersonale Beziehung noch die Berücksichtigung der Interessen des Vertrauenden voraussetzt.

Aus dieser Differenzierung lässt sich eine funktionale Bestimmung von Glaubwürdigkeitszuschreibungen gewinnen: Sie dienen der Identifikation verlässlicher Informationsquellen in sozialen Kontexten. Diese funktionale Analyse ermöglicht es uns, die definitorischen Merkmale von Glaubwürdigkeit präzise zu bestimmen und ihre besondere Rolle in der sozialen Erkenntnistheorie zu klären.

Ist romantische Liebe Gründen zugänglich? In der Literatur stehen sich diesbezüglich zwei Positionen gegenüber: Der „reasons view“ zufolge ist Liebe eine Einstellung, die, ähnlich wie Überzeugungen und Absichten, prinzipiell Gründen zugänglich ist. Dementsprechend kann man solchen Gründen gerecht werden und damit vernünftigerweise (nicht) lieben oder nicht gerecht werden und damit unvernünftigerweise (nicht) lieben. Der „no-reasons view“ zufolge geht das nicht: Liebe ist Gründen prinzipiell nicht zugänglich und gleicht damit mentalen Zuständen wie Wahrnehmungen oder Schmerzen, bei denen es keinen Sinn hat, nach Gründen zu fragen, und die nicht als rational oder irrational bezeichnet werden können. In diesem Vortrag verteidige ich eine Variante der „reasons view“. Ich vertrete dabei die These, dass die (generellen) liebenswerten Eigenschaften einer Person Gründe für Liebe zu ihr konstituieren (und die gegenteiligen Eigenschaften Gründe dagegen). Zur Verteidigung dieser These setze ich mich mit der Kritik an einer solchen „general quality view“ auseinander, die Hichem Naar in seinem Buch "The Rationality of Love" formuliert. Ich erkläre dabei, wodurch Gründe für Liebe eingeschränkt werden und wie die prinzipielle Unersetzbarkeit geliebter Menschen mit einer solchen Auffassung von „vernünftiger Liebe“ vereinbar ist.

In this talk, I describe a challenge for accounts of the structure of joint duties that originates in indeterminacies regarding the ascription and allocation of duties within a group. I discuss possible answers to this challenge and argue that the intuitively least welcome answer is ultimately the most adequate.

There is a kind of situation in which only some members of a group ought to perform a certain joint action, but it is indeterminate who is to discharge this duty. What if, for example, three people are each able and ready to perform a rescue maneuver, but it can only be performed by two of them jointly?

This suggests that the three together bear a joint duty to coordinate and that only a duplet bears a joint duty to perform the rescue. Crucially, it is indeterminate which of the three possible duplets bear the latter duty. And whereas each individual is party to the joint duty to coordinate, it is indeterminate whether they are to contribute to or refrain from contributing to the rescue.

Given these indeterminacies, who has a duty to rescue? I shall argue that all the individuals have joint duty until it’s settled who’s released from it.

Criminal entrapment occurs whenever one party, the “Agent”, intentionally brings it about that another, the “Target”, commits a criminal offence, intending to have the Target prosecuted and punished for committing the offence.The Agent could either be a state official (“state entrapment”) or a private party (“private entrapment”).

Several jurisdictions and parts of the literature allow blocking the prosecution or conviction only for Targets of state entrapment.

The article defends the position that we need to discern the distinctive wrongness of entrapment to ascertain whether the identity of the Agent should matter for whether, and if so, by whom, the Target ought to be held accountable for the criminal offence into which they were entrapped.

It argues that entrapment amounts to an objectionable subversion of practices of accountability. Some instances of entrapment are permissible. There is reason to block the prosecution of Targets of impermissible instances to prevent the Agent’s scheme from coming to fruition, regardless of the (state or private) identity of the Agent. This reason is, however, typically weak and therefore often defeated. Contrary to current legal practice, Agents involved in impermissible instances of entrapment ought to be prosecuted if their behaviour amounts, in itself, to a criminal offence.

The aim of this paper is to ask what goes wrong, normatively speaking, when particular kinds of justified hope are structurally unavailable for members of some social groups. In response, I introduce the notion of speratic injustice (from spes = lat. “hope”), a particular kind of hope-related wrong. I argue that the structural unavailability of justified hope can constitute or entrench a particular kind of powerlessness in relation to the future, both of a broader social and of a more specifically political kind. The implication is that if we are concerned about the injustice of structurally unequal power relations, we should also be concerned about the structural unavailability of justified hope. The notion of diachronic democracy emerges from this analysis as the only way to prevent or overcome speratic injustice. Diachronic democracy provides citizens with a focal point for negotiating, contesting and revising different and often conflicting visions of their common future. In so doing, it empowers citizens by putting them collectively in charge of their shared future.

Republican political philosophers have long debated whether majoritarian democratic institutions are compatible with the republican ideal of non-domination. While neo-republicans like Pettit look to counter-majoritarian mechanisms and institutions in order to avoid domination by the majority, others have argued that basic political equality (understood as one person one vote) together with some form of social equality (understood as near equal influence and control) will safeguard against domination. What is striking about both sides of this debate, however, is the fact that the basic premise that all democratic decisions should always be based on the equal votes of all members of a community (whether that is a firm, a political party, or a parliament) is never questioned.

In this paper, I will look at the often-neglected idea that at least for some democratic decisions the degree of affectedness should determine the weight (or the amount) of a person’s vote(s) and show that it actually fits very well with the worry of arbitrary interference that republicans have. This raises the question of whether republican non-domination requires an affectedness-sensitive democratic system.

This article develops a novel concern about competitive social institutions: their impact on our “radius of care”, i.e., the range of persons to whom we can reasonably adopt an attitude of care. Care, here, is understood as epistemic, emotional and practical responsiveness to the needs and interests of others (for their own sake). The article proceeds in four steps. It argues, first, that competitive institutions can create strong practical reasons to favour the interests of ourselves and those we are close to or have special obligations towards. Second, it argues that this is normatively relevant: from an individual agent’s perspective, there is value to adopting an attitude of care towards others; from a social perspective, attitudes of care create positive externalities. Third, it argues that this concern about competition differs from those discussed in the literature: competition’s potential inefficiency (Heath 2014); the harm of resulting status inequalities (Sandel 2020); ensuing estrangement (Hussain 2020). Fourth, the article explores how it complements existing feminist criticisms of market relationships, like the thesis that markets have come to colonize areas where care is the appropriate attitude to take (Tronto 1993) and the claim that markets inherently disadvantage altruistic caregivers (Kittay 2020).

In this paper, I provide a general argument for the so-called X-First programme in the debate about normativity and defend X-First accounts against recent criticism. According to X-First accounts, there is a single normative primitive that is normatively fundamental and involved in explaining all other normative phenomena. Recently, Daniel Wodak (2020) has argued against X-First accounts by questioning the assumption that there is a single normative primitive. Wodak defends an alternative view, according to which normativity is the disjunction of multiple normative features. I argue that disjunctive accounts either force us to abandon large parts of our ambitions to understand normativity, or are themselves committed to the X-First methodology. It is argued that in the absence of local X-First accounts, disjunctive accounts fail to explain those parts of the structure of normativity which call for explanation, while their attempt to account for the unity of normativity is a postulate of what they set out to explain. These considerations, I argue, provide a positive argument for the X-First programme: We need to investigate X-First accounts in order to learn more about normativity.

In this talk, we offer a semantic diagnosis of “relativized ‘oughts’”, i.e. statements concerning what we, legally, morally, prudentially, etc., ought to do. According to this diagnosis, these are effectively equivalent to attitude ascriptions (“According to Creon, Antigone ought to…”). We propose to treat these ascriptions in the semantic framework of Gibbardian expressivism. In doing so, we offer a defense of the view that there is an “ought simpliciter” in addition to relativized “oughts” of legality, prudence, etc., against challenges from Baker (2018) and Coop (2007). Moreover, Wodak (2016) has argued that expressivists are particularly ill-placed to account for the relativization of “ought” to different standards. Our argument shows that this is not so.

Ranking theory is a well-established account of rational belief (= taking to be true) and its dynamics. It is, however, theoretically mandatory that a formal representation of epistemic states be extendable to a decision theory. Ultimately, epistemic states manifest themselves in rational action; each such representation should be able to say how. Alas, the decision-theoretic extension of ranking theory is still wanting. Giang & Shenoy (2000) is the only, but not well received proposal so far, for reasons to be explained. This talk will present a modification of this proposal. In analogy to standard decision theory, the upshot will be a theorem proving a unique representation of a preference relation over ranking-theoretic prospects (instead of lotteries) by an ‘expected utility’ function for those prospects (where expectation works in the ranking-theoretic, not in the familiar probabilistic way, whence the underlying utility function works like a ranking function too). What is this good for? One perhaps surprising, but instructive application is that this ranking-theoretic decision theory allows advancing the field of (conditional) deontic logic by providing the first substantial account of how (subjective) norms and beliefs interact. This is to show that this theory is a fruitful one deserving further development.

The view that one ought to do what one has most reason to do has served as a blueprint for a variety of more specific accounts of how reasons determine the deontic status of actions. I suggest a new such account with remarkable explanatory power. Over and above returning the intuitively correct results in a wide range of cases, the suggested account entails important deontic principles, including ones that axiomatise Standard Deontic Logic. These results can be turned into the core of an explanation of deontic principles in terms of facts about how reasons interact in determining oughts.

Chronic pain is a prevalent condition commonly associated with significant distress, disability, and distortion. However, not all individuals with chronic pain experience these negative effects, suggesting that pain-related suffering plays a crucial role in their emergence. This paper analyzes ‘pain-related suffering,’ distinguishing it from chronic pain and clarifying their relationship. It begins by identifying four key attributes of pain-related suffering that serve as desiderata for further analysis. Subsequently, the paper addresses the challenge of conceptualizing pain-related suffering in a way that aligns with these attributes and clarifies the conditions under which pain leads to suffering. It explores the dissociation between pain and suffering, arguing that suffering does not arise directly from pain’s intensity, persistence, unpleasantness, or functional impact but from the meaning ascribed to pain by the individual. Further, it critically examines existing theories of the ‘meaning’ that pain might hold, including the traditional view that suffering results from a perceived threat to personal integrity (Cassell, 1982) – a notion criticized for its conceptual ambiguity and misalignment with key attributes. Instead, the paper proposes that pain-related suffering arises when pain is perceived as a harmful disruption to one’s sense of self, related to embodied, interpersonal, and existential dimensions.

This paper introduces and defends the Blueprint View, a novel approach to understanding health and mental health in terms of abilities and design. It begins by addressing two key challenges for ability-based theories of health: the inclusion challenge (which abilities are relevant to health?) and the threshold challenge (to what extent do these abilities need to be present?). After rejecting influential existing approaches (Fulford 1989; Nordenfelt 2012), the paper develops its answer: the abilities relevant to health are those that the organism would have if all parts of the organism were fully functional. Inspired by Neander (1983), Wakefield (1992), and Griffiths and Matthewson (2018), selection processes determine full functionality.

In the second part, the paper extends this framework to mental health, addressing what distinguishes mental health from physical health. After critically reviewing alternative accounts (Wren-Lewis and Alexandrova 2021; Leder and Zawidzki 2023), it adopts the central tenet of Sanja Dembić's (2023) Rehability View, according to which mental health depends on the ability to respond to reasons.

This synthesis offers an account of mental health as a designed rational ability. It unifies physical and mental health under a single theoretical framework while distinguishing between them.

Traditional suicide risk assessments focus on statistical correlations between risk factors like mental illness and suicide (attempts). However, such suicide risk factors fail to identify high-risk individuals, with frequent false positives and negatives. This talk introduces the Normic account of suicide risk, a new theoretical framework that shifts from probability-based to norm-based risk assessments. Drawing on the idea of possible worlds instead of probability theory, this account evaluates risk by assessing the "normalcy" of suicidal action in terms of practical rationality. Risk increases when suicidal action is easy to rationalize based on an individual’s reasons for living and dying, while actions requiring greater explanatory effort signal lower risk. Drawing from clinical practices like Motivational Interviewing, the Normic account of suicide risk highlights the importance of exploring the agent’s motivational reasons to better assess and address suicide risk. By reframing suicide risk in terms of normative intelligibility rather than statistical likelihood, this approach offers a more person-centered and ethically sensitive framework for understanding and mitigating suicide risk, while circumventing the problem of low predictive powers of all known suicide risk factors.

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), defined as experiences of hearing voices in the absence of an appropriate external stimulus, raise important clinical but also philosophical questions about the nature of hallucinations, mental agency, and delusional beliefs. A central and under-researched aspect of this experience is control (or lack thereof), i.e the extent to which, the specific manner in which, and aspects over which voice-hearers can exert control when experiencing AVH episodes. Philosophers take the lack of control to either indicate that AVHs are non-veridical perceptual experiences as opposed to other inner experiences, or to explain the feeling of alienness that voice-hearers report. I argue that the currently used and poorly understood notion of control cannot answer any such questions. In response, I suggest that, to properly understand control, we need to distinguish actual control from sense of control, and the actual agent (i.e the voice-hearer) from the imaginary one (i.e the voices heard). Specifically, I argue that the actual agent exerts different types of actual control. A sense of control correlates with the control that the actual agent attributes to the imaginary agent. This will help us better understand the notion of mental agency more generally.

According to a widely shared belief, an explanation of phenomenal experience in terms of neural mechanisms is impossible in principle. The reason for this “Explanatory Gap” or “Hard Problem” is supposed to be that phenomenal experience cannot be captured in objective, functional terms.

Here, we will take three steps to avert this conclusion and show what an explanation of the qualitative character of phenomenal experience might look like.

Step I demonstrates that pivotal assumptions underlying the “Explanatory Gap” argument are unfounded. This means that it is possible to capture phenomenal states in functional terms and to solve the problem with the familiar methods of hypothesis development and -testing.

Step II presents a hypothesis how affective pain, a paradigmatic sort of phenomenal experience, can be captured in functional terms.

Step III presents empirical evidence corroborating this claim and indicates how this functional description can help to identify the neural mechanisms that explain affective pain experience.

We take this as proof of principle showing how the qualitative character of phenomenal experience can be explained. We conclude with some remarks on how this approach might contribute to future progress in the understanding of consciousness in general.

Most philosophical discussions of self-knowedge acknowledge that questions as to what we believe are often transparent to questions ‘about the world’. This means that in order to answer the question whether I believe that Madrid is smaller than Berlin, for example, I need to think about the respective sizes of Madrid and Berlin rather than about myself. However, consideration of the sizes of Madrid and Berlin will not help me answer the question what belief, if any, I already had when I was asked the question. This limit of transparency has been pointed out before. So, how do we go about answering questions about our pre-existing beliefs? I will argue that in typical cases our answers to such questions express our current attitude to our past reflections and judgements as we remember them. I will show how this account can augment earlier discussions of the matter and what implications it has for the epistemic status of self-knowledge (authority, immediacy etc.).

In this paper I defend the view that pretence plays an important role for the development of imagination and should be seen as primary to imagination. In particular, I argue against the view that pretence should be seen as identical to imagination, or that pretence is just a subtype of imagination (i.e. imagination plus behaviour) such that imagination is a prerequisite for pretence. Instead, I will argue that pretence should be seen as primary to imagination and provides an important foundation for the development of imaginative abilities. I draw three main distinctions between pretence and imagination: being a social ability, being behaviour based vs. purely mental and its connection with reality. I argue that while in pretence one pretends something which one knows not to be the case, pretence maintains a close connection with the current situation. I sketch a developmental trajectory from early pretence without imagination, to imagination in the context of pretence and finally, to full blown imagination outside of the context of pretence. In doing so, I aim to clarify the relationship of pretence and imagination, as well as highlight the developmental significance of pretence for thinking beyond the here and now.

Imaginative resistance—i.e., the difficulty of engaging with certain fictional scenarios—is a phenomenon that has been explained in many different ways. A paradigmatic case is Walton's (1994) morally repugnant story: “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.” This paper develops a skill-based account of imaginative resistance. It argues that the phenomenon stems from the cognitive effort required to engage with scenarios that are distant from our experiences or habitual patterns of imagination. The greater this distance, the more likely resistance is to arise, even for competent imaginers. Beyond knowledge-that a given fictional world is such and such, I highlight the importance of knowledge-how to engage with said world. I then explain how this distinction constitutes a novel version of contextualism with respect to the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (compare Stock 2005, Todd 2009). A key strength of this account is its ability to explain how imaginative resistance can be shaped over time, allowing individuals to train their imagination to either embrace or resist various scenarios.

Grounding is often regarded as a kind of metaphysical causation (Wilson 2018). Some even consider causation as a particular grounding (or building) relation (Bennett 2017). However, although there are strong similarities in content, structure, and form, the analogy is not uncontroversial given some notable differences (Bernstein 2016). In this talk, I argue for a restricted analogy that does justice to both the striking similarities and the key differences. Specifically, I argue that the analogy holds only between causation and particular grounding relations, namely those that connect events on different levels of nature (or facts about such events). I show that this refined analogy overcomes in particular the problems of missing grounding analogs for productive, negative, and probabilistic causation.

Craver (2007) has argued that constitutive relevance can be discovered by mutual manipulability, based on interventions. However, the requirements on interventions make mutual manipulability of mechanisms and their constituents impossible.

Craver, Glennan, and Povich’s (2021) thesis that constitutive relevance can be reduced to “causal betweenness”, between the input and the output condition of a mechanism, is not adequate for multi-level mechanisms. Their account of the construction of models for mechanisms leads to the paradoxical result that there are no levels and no multi-level mechanisms, but only causal chains of fundamental level activities.

Models of multi-level mechanisms can be constructed on the basis of empirical information although the relevant experiments directly provide only information about causal relations, because this causal information can bear on variables at different levels. A multi-level model is built in two steps. 1) first, partial purely causal models are built for each hypothetical constituent variable i, on the basis of top-down and bottom-up experiments that modify or measure i in a level-specific way, 2) second, those partial models are merged in a comprehensive model containing both causal and constitution relations between variables, on the basis of information about the level of each variable and spatio-temporal constraints.

In a number of papers, Marc Lange and others have argued that statistical theorems non-causally explain empirical matters of fact. A typical (toy-)example would be an explanation of the average outcome of throwing dice in terms of the law of large numbers. Lange calls those explanations Really Statistical Explanations (RS Explanations). In my talk, I will argue that viewing RS explanations as non-causal is mistaken and misrepresents their function. I will show that in spite of the fact that information about the explanandum’s causal history is not explicitly mentioned when stating RS explanations, such information is pragmatically conveyed due to features of the conversational context. Next, I will argue that the thus conveyed information is essential to account for why statistical theorems explain empirical matters of fact in the first place. In the final part of the talk, I sketch a novel interpretation of RS explanations as a particular kind of coarse-graining explanations.

Some scientific knowledge involves knowing how to make something. In this paper we build on Currie’s recent examination of this kind of “maker’s knowledge” in experimental archaeology (Currie 2022). This examination leads to two important extensions of Currie’s proposal. First, we show how Currie’s proposal helps to make sense of another debate in experimental archaeology. This debate involves figuring out how the moai (statues) of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) were moved to their intended places on the island. Second, unlike Currie, we explore how maker’s knowledge is best connected with competing accounts of knowing how. We argue that knowing how to make something is its own kind of cognitive achievement that should not be treated as a species of knowing how to do something and that it is intimately related to an objectual understanding of the thing to be made.

This paper develops an eliminativist critique of dual character concept theories, which posit that some concepts exhibit a "double dissociation" between descriptive and normative categorization. By examining different categorization judgments, I demonstrate that double dissociation is partly better explained by context-dependent applications of broadened category standards, rather than the hybrid lexical structures posited by extant theories. Eliminativism offers a more parsimonious treatment of double dissociation, one that cautions against overreliance on ambiguous linguistic tests and emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between literal and loose categorizations. This position challenges dual character concept theories and provides methodological inputs for future experimental work in categorization.

Theorists note a distinction within the category of generics between descriptive generics that merely describe generalizations, and normative generics, that have a distinctly normative flavor. Previous proposals have analyzed the latter as speech acts that give instructions, provide advice, or prescribe appropriate behavior. We concur that these are important and central uses of normative generics, but argue that the analysis should broaden its focus to some of the wider ways that normative generics figure in discourse. Uses that give voice to derogations or to threats, are also quite central, yet the accounts alluded to above wouldn’t adequately explain why. After making the case for these uses of normative generics, our talk focuses on bringing together resources that allow us to explain them. We argue that the metalinguistic account of definitional generics best allows us to see normative generic discourse as a means of negotiating and policing normative expectations about the relevant kinds, and in turn, to analyze the relevant uses described above as derogations and/or threats.

Are the outputs generated by LLM-based chatbots---e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek---meaningful in the same way in which human-generated speech is meaningful? In response to this question, I explore and partially defend a position which I call Meaning Minimalism about LLMs. In the course of this, I place special emphasis on the question in how far LLM-based AI-systems can perform speech acts.

In recent years, several empirical studies have been conducted to investigate whether people think it is possible to lie with deceptive implicatures. While the findings are not clear cut, there is quite strong evidence that at least some cases of deceptive implicatures are considered to be lies. Moreover, it has been found that some literally true utterances that convey a false implicature are judged to be false.

In the present paper, we investigate whether the aforementioned phenomena can be generalized to different languages and cultures. Moreover, we test the degree to which human judgments are aligned with judgments elicit by artificial intelligences (in the form of LLMs such as ChatGPT). To these aims, we conducted a cross-cultural study in which participants were presented with ten cases of deceptive implicatures and asked to judge whether the speaker lied and (in a different condition) whether what she said was true or false. 3660 participants (183 per condition; 366 per country) were recruited in ten countries (USA, UK, South Africa, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Israel, Germany, China, and Japan). Surprisingly, highly similar result patterns were found between countries, with correlations between different countries being higher than correlations between humans and AI.

Holton (2017) argues from the observation that no natural language has a contrafactive to the claim that the object of knowledge is a fact. His argument relies on the idea that if the truth inference of 'know' arises because its declarative complement denotes a fact, then the falsity inference of contrafactives would be due to their declarative complements denoting contrafacts. But, Holton thinks, there are no contrafacts. Thus, given Holton's claim about knowledge, there are no contrafactives. In reply, Hyman (2017) and Roberts and Özyildiz (2023) insist there are contrafacts. My aim is to argue that their reply is ineffective. Even if there are contrafacts, they do not get you contrafactives. On Holton's picture, natural languages only get contrafactives if they let some of their declarative complements denote contrafacts. But, I argue, there are good reasons why natural languages do not do this. I show that if a natural language lets some of its declarative complements denote contrafacts, it invites a systematic and particularly problematic form of ambiguity in factive attitude ascriptions. For instance, a knowledge ascription 'S knows p' could now attribute either knowledge of p or knowledge of not-p, and in many contexts that ambiguity would be irresolvable.

In their seminal paper, Geis and Zwicky (1971) drew attention to "a tendency of the human mind ... to 'perfect conditionals to biconditionals'". They used the material conditional -> for their analysis and suggested the following principle: "A sentence of the form A -> C invites an inference of the form ~A -> ~C.'' It has been pointed out in the literature that there are several non-equivalent ways of understanding conditional perfection. In my talk I follow suit and examine four possible ways of implementing conditional perfection. Proceeding on the assumptions that (i) the perfecting of conditionals should be based on suppositional conditionals (of the kind studied in the tradition of Ramsey, Adams, Stalnaker and Lewis) rather than material conditionals, and that (ii) this perfecting occurs at the primary level of meaning, I will study the logics of these interpretations. The four logics turn out to be significantly different, but they are unified in invalidating the inference scheme of Weakening the Consequent.

According to the Logicality of Language hypothesis, the language system contains a logical device to exclude analytic constructions as ungrammatical. The hypothesis has been defended along two lines, namely as based on a natural logic built on logical skeletons (Gajewski 2002, 2009) or as based on standard logic and logical forms (Del Pinal 2019, 2021; Pistoia-Reda and Sauerland 2021). In an original contribution, Pistoia-Reda and San Mauro (2021) opposed the former line by showing that a propositional variant exists of the ungrammatical analytic construction “Some students but John smoke” which is: (i) based on standard logical forms; (ii) analytic, for the same logical principle; (iii) grammatical. I show that a similar variant exists for the ungrammatical analytic construction “There are any cookies left”, which has been used to illustrate how the behavior of “Any” is key to understanding the “spontaneous logicality of language” (Chierchia 2013). My analysis makes use of De Morgan’s laws and of a suitable correspondence between logical and set operators, which can well provide for further applications to other cases. I argue that accounting for such variants represents a requirement for any Logicality proposal, one that can be hardly satisfied by a natural logic of some kind.

Truth minimalism is the idea that truth doesn't play a substantial explanatory role and the concept of truth is exhausted by platitudes about it. Truth minimalism is taken to have the tendency to creep to other semantic and more generally representational notions, leading to the problem of creeping minimalism: realism/representationalism and expressivism about a discourse become indistinguishable. The creeping tendency for minimalism has been largely taken for granted in the literature. This talk challenges this assumption and argues that, while it is certainly possible for minimalism to creep, there is no pressure for an expressivist who embraces truth minimalism to go further and take up minimalism about other semantic and/or representational notions.

This talk focuses on two reasons for creeping minimalism that has been raised in the literature.

1) Expressivists are motivated to truth minimalism because it helps them accommodate ordinary uses of moral language, and this inevitably leads them to go minimalist about other notions like beliefs.

2) Notions like truth, proposition, belief and representation are taken to have constitutive connections to one another, so minimalism inevitably creeps along these links.

This talk resists creeping minimalism by offering arguments against these two reasons.

This paper defends the Fregean view that logical forms don't contain variables (No Variables!). That is, the logical form of a statement like "Everybody needs somebody", which we'd normally formalize as ∀x∃yR(x,y), contains only the quantifiers ∀ and ∃ and the predicate R, but no variables x and y.

This view is motivated by the so-called Antinomy of the Variable, which Fine (2003) attributes to Russell (1903).

We defend No Variables! by developing a 100% variable-free predicate calculus, which has a fully compositional Fregean semantics, where terms denote objects, predicates denote value-ranges, and sentences denote truth-values. This calculus is formulated using de Bruijn indices, which are common in automated theorem proving, but rather uncommon in philosophy.

We argue that the calculus provides a better guide to logical form than standard Tarskian or Fregean predicate calculi.

I will examine from a logical point of view several conditions, formulated by Dummett, for a contextual definition to be considered legitimate as a “permissible means of introducing an expression” into a Fregean formal language. To this purpose, I will introduce an abstract framework in which all relevant notions are expressed in terms of a primitive relation of logical consequence, along a tradition started by Tarski in the thirties of the last century.

I will examine the mutual relationship between the different Frege-Dummett conditions and, in particular, I will prove a mathematical result about a weakening of the “uniqueness of solution” requirement parenthetically suggested by Dummett in the following passage taken from "Frege: Philosophy of Language" (1981, 2nd ed., p. 653):

"(We might, however, relax the requirement of a unique solution in cases in which different solutions would still yield the same truth-value for each sentence in which the expression was going to occur.)"

I will next use the interpretation of the first-order fragment of Frege’s classical logic into the standard Tarskian semantics to contrast Dummett’s suggestion with the standard theory of definitions centred around Beth’s definability theorem.

Das platonistische Lager besteht in Opposition zum Konstruktivismus auf der absoluten Unabhängigkeit der Zahlen, Propositionen und überhaupt der objektiv-nichtwirklichen Entitäten vom Vollzug ihres Gedachtwerdens. Ich weise erstens nach, daß Freges Begriff der Logik sowohl den Platonismus in Bezug auf die GedankenF als Gegenstand der Logik als auch die Rechtfertigung der Prinzipien der Logik erforderlich macht. Zweitens weise ich nach, daß die von Frege erwogenen Rechtfertigungsstrategien mit Notwendigkeit scheitern, da er sich durch die strikte Trennung der Gegenstände der Logik von jedem Vollzug ihres Gedachtwerdens der Möglichkeit verschließt, Reflektionen auf Handlungspräsuppositionen als Rechtfertigungsmittel heranzuziehen. Dieser Vortrag ist insofern nicht nur eine Kritik des fregeschen Begriffs der Logik, sondern auch allgemein eine Kritik des platonistischen accounts von allein durch Handlungsreflektion erkennbaren Gegenständen.

Das von Gottlob Frege 1879 in der Begriffsschrift unter dem Titel ‚Tafel der Gegensätze‘ präsentierte logische Quadrat wirft eine Reihe von Fragen auf: Warum bezeichnete Frege sowohl das Verhältnis zwischen A- und E-Urteil aus auch das zwischen I- und O-Urteil als konträr? Weshalb kommt in Freges Darstellung 1879 die als ‚subaltern‘ bezeichnete Relation zwischen allgemeinem und partikulärem Urteil noch vor, aber nicht mehr in Carnaps Mitschriften von Freges Vorlesung über Begriffsschrift aus dem Wintersemester 1910/11? Ging der frühe Frege noch von einer intensionalen Auffassung der Begriffsverhältnisse aus, der spätere dagegen nicht? Lassen sich Freges Ansichten und Bezeichnungsweisen als an der Tradition orientiert bezeichnen und mit denen anderer Logiker seiner Zeit in Zusammenhang bringen? Ich möchte einige der Argumente zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen überdenken und eine mögliche Lesart der logischen Sanduhr präsentieren, die vielleicht zugleich als Antwort auf diese Fragen verstanden werden kann.

Carnap introduced his notion of explication to arrive at concepts that are precise enough to progress science. This means that one has to start from less precise concepts---an understanding of explication inapplicable to mathematics. We show that within mathematics explications are widespread. We discuss examples such as topological spaces, prime numbers, and Imre Lakatos's case-study of the polyhedron. We argue that such explications are needed for the modern mathematical endeavour which takes foundational work serious. E.g., automated theorem proving necessitates the expansion of functions and introduction of conventions which are kept. There also are foundational aspects that might make some type system desirable, also enforcing the distinction between addition on different numbers. Such cases appear to be basic, but they either render advanced topics false or enforce being explicit about several of the implicit assumptions.

We argue that these developments correlate with arguments of productive ambiguity within mathematics. Carnap sees potential explications as \emph{proposals} which are not themselves truth-apt. However, as Carnapian explication is not applicable to such cases, we argue that these mathematical case-studies also motivate a different notion of explication which covers the mathematical cases by allowing precise mathematical concepts to be explicated.

Logic is often considered theoretically neutral, imposing no significant constraints on the world. In this talk, we explore how this purported neutrality can be understood, focusing on a proposal Beall has done. He suggests that logic should be viewed as the universal closure relation of theories. Under this view, a logic that just closes truths gathered by extralogical theories is superior to a logic independently proving logical truths. The main thesis of the talk is that the absence of logical truths can be interpreted as a hallmark of logic's neutrality. We present this proposal, examine its complexities, and ultimately argue that this account of neutrality is tenable when approached through a meta-linguistic framework.

Some philosophers of mathematics have argued that mathematics “cannot be regarded as a priori” (Ferreirós 2016, 310). The argument points to mathematical practices, and in particular to cases in which mathematicians successfully justify the truth of a mathematical proposition. It is argued that these practices often fail to meet the rigorous standards of apriorism.

For example, Lakatos (1976ab) argues that mathematical justifications are tentative, fallible, and sometimes even plainly empirical. Putnam (1979, 64) claims that mathematicians often use “quasi-empirical” justifications that are not so different from those used in the sciences. More recently, such claims have been echoed in historical studies (Ferreirós 2016), in questions about the admissibility of probabilistic and computational proofs (Fallis 1997; McEvoy 2007), and in the distinction between proofs and simil-proofs (De Toffoli 2021).

In this talk I will argue that these attempts to establish aposteriorism are mistaken about the a priori/a posteriori distinction. Mathematical practices cannot give us the kind of evidence needed to settle whether mathematics is a priori or a posteriori. I will argue that doing so requires modal evidence, whereas practices can only give us factual evidence.

Enumerative induction in mathematics—the idea that sampling evidence can yield high credence or even knowledge of mathematical statements—was long dismissed, particularly by Frege. However, it has recently regained prominence. This paper aims to move the debate about its viability forward in several ways. First, it clarifies what exact epistemic good enumerative induction might secure. It then critically evaluates three recent arguments for enumerative induction’s viability. Based on this evaluation, the paper proposes a new criterion for explaining why enumerative induction can, in some settings, surmount inductive scepticism. Finally, a case study on Goldbach’s Conjecture illustrates when enumerative induction can meet this criterion.

More than half of Plato’s Euthydemus consists of the display of eristic, the name Socrates gives to the skill demonstrated by the two other main characters, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. The brothers’ way of arguing has often been dismissed as fallacious or trivial. However, scholars increasingly suggest that their practice of eristic reflects deeper commitments, linking them to Megaric, Eleatic, or Heraclitean thought.

This talk proposes a new approach to identifying the brothers’ philosophical commitments by focusing on the doctrine Socrates attributes to Euthydemus in the Cratylus: that “everything belongs equally to everything at the same time and always” (286d).

To support this, I first analyze historical testimonies, concluding that Euthydemus was a serious intellectual, though little is known about his doctrines. Next, I examine what the Euthydemus suggests about the brothers’ philosophical commitments and discuss the three existing main hypotheses in the research literature. Finally, I develop my own hypothesis, focusing on the ‘universal attribution doctrine,’ Euthydemus’ doctrine in the Cratylus. I argue that a commitment to this doctrine can account for the brothers’ ostensible disregard for contradiction, verbal precision, and statement qualifiers, and it also explains an otherwise obscure claim that Socrates makes in Euthydemus 303d5–e2.

In Seneca, the term veritas/verum usually appears in a context that resembles skepticism. He is nevertheless considered by the majority of scholars, especially in more recent studies, to follow Stoic sensualism on the grounds of his arguably evident Stoic materialism. Following Hachmann (2006), who pointed out that Seneca found sensory perception insufficient for moral progress, I argue that Seneca does not adopt sensualism from the stoics, even though he remains true to their materialism. Thus, I suggest that in his case, the question about his materialism should be investigated inde-pendently of the sensualism-question. My intention here is to isolate the latter, and investigate not only Seneca’s famous passages on veritas, but also the broader context. In this respect, I offer a statistical analysis and interpretation of further relevant terms and concepts. Seneca’s rare use of the term comprehensio, as well as the equivalence of the meaning between the terms opinio and scientia seem to reveal strong evidence - which haven’t yet received the attention they deserve in scholarship - for my claim.

Second-personal ethics, as developed by Stephen Darwall and others, seeks to ground morality not in abstract principles but in authoritative, intersubjective claims. Darwall draws significant influence from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Summons Argument in his 1798 System of Ethics. As a transcendental philosopher, Fichte argues that ethics is rooted in the very structure of subjectivity, contending that a moral community with shared norms is a necessary precondition for self-consciousness. Fichte, however, gave this argument in several works and I argue that a stronger foundation for second-personal ethics lies in the 1799 version of the Summons Argument, found in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo. I reconstruct this version of the argument with an eye towards grounding second-personal moral claims.

The idea that logic is not special regarding its subject matter, epistemic justification or methods of theory choice has gained currency in recent years, usually cashed out in terms of continuity with the empirical sciences. While the label "anti-exceptionalism about logic" (AEL hereafter) is new, I intend to show how the relevant issues for this trend are part of a long story dating back most crucially to the late 19th century. Since Quine's naturalism is taken as the main inspiration for the movement, I propose a comparative and historical study focused mainly on the influences of C. I. Lewis’ conceptual pragmatism, Dewey’s anti-foundationalism, Carnap's empiricism and, as the last stop, Frege's anti-psychologism in the context of the project of a scientific philosophy. By drawing attention to the development of anti-exceptional ideas about logic, the significance of AEL as a viable alternative epistemology of logic can be properly assessed.

Many trans and queer kids only figure out that they are trans or queer far into their adulthood. For them, for us, it often is a matter of recognizing the truth that always lingered in the shadows. Shadows thrown by a lacuna of understanding that there are concepts that can explain our experiences, emotions and desires. Too often our caregivers do not possess the epistemic tools to help us understand. Yet, sometimes they do and still they stay silent when we seek them out. This is, I argue, a hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007) and a case of willful hermeneutical silence. Our communication attempts fail not because of ignorance (Pohlhaus, Jr. 2012, Dotson 2011) but because our caregivers choose not to take up our bids for meaning seeking. We are, thus, shunted from speaking on and understanding sex and gender as equals with our endo-cisgender-heterosexual-allosexual-alloromantic peers who can speak freely about these matters and whose words easily find uptake. In the best case this only leads to failed communication attempts with the people who ought to help us understand. In the worst case some of us might suffer hermeneutical death or near death (Medina 2017).

It has recently been argued that testimony’s epistemic role exceeds the exchange of propositional knowledge (Hazlett 2025; Hills 2020; Fraser 2021; Sliwa 2023; Malfatti 2024): speakers can change not only what but how we think about some topic. For example, by influencing what we attend to, what we take as significant, the associations we make, and the inquiries we embark on.

In the literature, it’s implicitly assumed these cases involve some kind of epistemic dependence, beyond dependence for knowledge (Ibid). What’s unclear, however, is how to make sense of this: what is the nature of this dependence? More specifically, what precisely does the hearer depends on the speaker for? What is the relationship between the speaker’s utterance and the hearer’s resulting epistemic states or conduct? In what sense, if any, is the hearer taking the speaker’s word for something?

This article has two aims: 1) to elucidate the problem and lay out some desiderata for an adequate answer, and 2) to offer a tentative solution: at least in some cases, speakers issue indirect directives – to compare two things, to explore the implications of applying a certain concept to a situation – and recommend following these as epistemically fruitful.

When epistemologists turn their attention to the problem of remedying epistemic injustice and wrongdoing, they typically pursue forward-looking strategies. Such strategies are designed to reduce the number of new wrongs committed in the future, and aim to bring epistemic practice closer to an ideal state. In contrast, I will discuss a fresh, backward-looking design for avoiding epistemic wrongdoing and restoring epistemic agency, whose purpose is not to bring epistemic practice closer to an ideal state, but rather seeks to improve or mitigate the non-ideal epistemic environment by redressing and forgiving epistemic wrongdoing that has occurred in the past. Such a backward-looking strategy is explicitly focused on the victim's past suffering and its epistemic redress and thus, I argue, is more appropriate for remedying inclusionary forms of epistemic injustice and wrongdoing such as epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016), epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), “appreciative” silencing (Tobbi 2022) and hermeneutical excess (Dular 2023).

Fig leaves such as “I’m not a racist but” or “I’m not transphobic but” represent pervasive yet insidious rhetorical devices, obscuring the impropriety of other utterances. On a common understanding, championed by Jennifer Saul and others, fig leaves block hearers from forming beliefs about the impropriety of the target utterance. I challenge this understanding on two grounds: first, it overlooks the varied epistemic impact of fig leaves, and second, it doesn’t capture how fig leaves are evidentially devious. To address these shortcomings, I propose a revised account. On my view, fig leaves are evidentially inert on their own while having an evidential effect when paired with flawed background beliefs. As a result, they often yield irrational credences regarding the impropriety of the target utterance. Based on this proposal, I discuss some strategies for resisting the pernicious effects of fig leaves.

Der epistemische Konsequentialismus versteht epistemische Rationalität instrumentell, d. h. eine Überzeugung ist genau dann gerechtfertigt, wenn sie unserem epistemischen Ziel (z.B. der Vermehrung wahrer Überzeugungen) dient. Eine zentrale Herausforderung für diese Position sind sogenannte Trade-Off Fälle: Was, wenn eine offensichtlich falsche Überzeugung dazu führt, dass wir insgesamt mehr wahre Überzeugungen haben? Ist diese falsche Überzeugung dann gerechtfertigt? Der epistemische Konsequentialismus scheint dies bejahen zu müssen, was intuitiv höchst problematisch ist. Einige halten die mit Trade-Off Fällen verbundenen Probleme für so gravierend, dass sie eine instrumentalistische Position eindeutig widerlegen. Im Gegensatz dazu argumentiert der Vortrag für zweierlei: Erstens gibt es trotz der Trade-Off Fälle gute Gründe, am epistemischen Konsequentialismus festzuhalten. Zweitens lassen sich aus einer detaillierten Analyse dieser Fälle wertvolle Lehren für eine konsequentialistische Position ziehen. Durch gezielte Modifikationen und Präzisierungen kann sie gegen die verschiedenen Trade-Off Einwände immunisiert werden. Dazu sind insbesondere drei Anpassungen erforderlich: (a) Der Konsequentialismus muss als internalistische Position ausgestaltet werden, (b) das epistemische Wahrheitsziel muss in bestimmter Hinsicht modifiziert und (c) um eine spezifische Variante des epistemischen Ziels des Verstehens ergänzt werden. Eine konsequentialistische Position, die (a)–(c) in ihre Theorie integriert, kann sämtliche in der Literatur diskutierten Trade-Off Einwände erfolgreich umgehen.

According to the Balancing View of Ought (BV), an agent A ought to ϕ if and only if A’s reasons for ϕ-ing outweigh any competing set of reasons. Applied to belief, (BV) implies that we ought to believe p whenever the reasons for believing p are stronger than any competing set of reasons. However, we often seem permitted to refrain from believing what we have the strongest reasons to believe. For instance, we are not required to believe all the trivial implications of our evidence, even though they are strongly supported by epistemic reasons. I argue that (BV) can accommodate this permissivist intuition if we recognize that reasons for believing p not only compete with reasons for disbelieving p or suspending judgment about p, but also with reasons against forming any doxastic attitude toward p at all. Unlike more radically permissivist views, the resulting framework explains not only why we are typically permitted to refrain from forming evidentially supported beliefs, but also why doing so is epistemically impermissible when we attend (or ought to attend) to the relevant evidence in order to determine whether p is true.

Proponents of the view that there is an ought simpliciter struggle when it comes to explaining how epistemic reasons relate to the reasons the ought simpliciter is to be based on. In one crucial respect, epistemic reasons are too much like moral and prudential ones, and in another, they are too much like reasons arising from social norms (like rules of etiquette). In my talk, I will suggest a way out of this dilemma that consists of two components: First, epistemic normativity is best taken to be purely evaluative. As a consequence, epistemic reasons do not directly enter into deliberations on what we should believe all-things-considered. Second, we always have moral pro tanto reasons to believe in accordance with our evidence. These moral reasons suffice to explain our intuitions regarding the general (albeit often low) significance of evidential considerations for what we ought simpliciter to believe.

This talks pursues a meta-epistemological approach to the classic internalism vs. externalism debate about epistemic rationality. Dogramaci (2012) advocates for the view that ascriptions of rationality serve what I call the policing purpose, that is ascriptions of epistemic rationality have the function of encouraging others to follow correct belief-forming rules. I argue that accepting this policing purpose supports a modest kind of externalism. This modest externalism respects intuitions regarding the new evil demon case and differs from established externalist theories like reliabilism or knowledge-first epistemology. The main idea is that the fittingness of S being policed by others is not solely a matter of S’s actual psychology. Therefore, as internalism suggests a strong link between epistemic rationality and S’s psychology, that is S’s (accessible) mental states, the metaepistemological approach that links epistemic rationality to epistemic policing does not favour internalism, but externalism.

Die Beförderung von Urteilskompetenz stellt eines der wichtigsten Ziele des Philosophie- und Ethikunterrichts dar. Entsprechend gilt auf unterrichtspraktischer Ebene das Prinzip der Urteilsbildung als philosophiedidaktischer Standard: Schüler:innen, so die Überlegung, erwerben nur dann die Kompetenz, angemessene Urteile zu schwierigen Fragen zu bilden, wenn sie genau dies in unterrichtlichen Kontexten regelmäßig einüben. Aus erkenntnistheoretischer Sicht wirkt dieses Prinzip jedoch problematisch: Schließlich scheint es vorauszusetzen, dass Lernende in kürzester Zeit fundierte und wohlbegründete Urteile zu hochkomplexen Problemfragen fällen können, die selbst unter professionellen Philosoph:innen kontrovers sind. Ich möchte eine Lösung für die hier drohende Spannung zwischen didaktischer und epistemischer Angemessenheit unterrichtlicher Urteilsbildungen vorschlagen. Dieser Vorschlag besteht im Kern in einer spezifischen Interpretation dessen, was unter einem philosophischen Urteil in unterrichtlichen Kontexten überhaupt verstanden werden sollte. Konkret werde ich dafür argumentieren, dass unterrichtliche Urteilsbildungen sowohl auf didaktischer als auch auf epistemischer Ebene völlig angemessen sein können, insofern unter Urteilen in diesem Zusammenhang keine Überzeugungen, sondern Akzeptanzen verstanden werden. Die entscheidende Idee ist dabei, dass vor dem Hintergrund einer solchen Interpretation epistemische Normen der rationalen Überzeugungsbildung überhaupt nicht ohne Weiteres auf unterrichtliche Urteilsbildungsprozesse übertragen werden müssen, da Akzeptanzen – im Gegensatz zu Überzeugungen – in ihrem normativen Profil durch kontextuell variable Ziele bestimmt sind.

Obwohl sprechakttheoretische Einsichten in der Argumentationstheorie eine zentrale Rolle spielen, werden sie in der Vermittlung von Logikkenntnissen oft vernachlässigt. Im Vortrag wird ein Ansatz zur sprechaktorientierten Vermittlung von argumentativen Fähigkeiten präsentiert, wobei insbesondere die Förderung der Fähigkeiten zur vertieften Argumentationsanalyse und der Präsentationskompetenzen berücksichtigt wird. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass eine Berücksichtigung von Aspekten der Performativität und eine Differenzierung des performativen Status von Prämissen didaktische Vorteile bietet, insbesondere in Bezug auf Transparenz, Reflexionsfähigkeit und Kritikkompetenz. Im Vortrag werden der übliche Prämissen-Konklusion-Ansatz, Argumentationskarten und ein Redehandlungsansatz anhand eines Beispiels erläutert. Es werden Defizite des Prämissen-Konklusion-Ansatzes identifiziert und der Redehandlungsansatz wird als didaktischer Ansatz zur Vermittlung argumentativer Kompetenzen eingeführt. Der Redehandlungsansatz ermöglicht eine genauere Identifikation argumentativer Komponenten (z. B. Annahmen, Gründe, Zwischenfolgerungen) und fördert eine weniger interpretationsbedürftige Argumentationsrekonstruktion. Zudem unterstützt er Studierende darin, eigene Argumentationen strukturiert zu präsentieren. Der Ansatz, der bereits erfolgreich in universitären Kursen eingesetzt wurde, integriert bewährte Methoden wie den Prämissen-Konklusion-Ansatz und Argumentationskarten und trägt dazu bei, sowohl analytische als auch rhetorische Fähigkeiten zu verbessern. Abschließend werden die Vorteile und mögliche Herausforderungen des Redehandlungsansatzes diskutiert und seine Übertragbarkeit auf schulische Kontexte skizziert.

Begriffsanalyse ist ein Kerngeschäft philosophischer Arbeit. So ist zum Beispiel eine seriöse Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen Was-ist-Fragen (Was ist Wahrheit? Was ist Wissen?) und ein angemessener Umgang mit (begrifflichen) Gedankenexperimenten kaum möglich, wenn man zentrale Kompetenzen der Begriffsanalyse nicht besitzt. Umso überraschender ist es, dass hierzulande noch kein etablierter Diskurs darüber existiert, wie Lernende systematisch dazu befähigt werden können, das anspruchsvolle Geschäft der Begriffsanalyse zu bewältigen. Mit diesem Beitrag möchten wir zu einer vertiefenden Auseinandersetzung mit dieser Frage anstoßen, indem wir einige Schlüsselkompetenzen der Begriffsanalyse vorstellen und Ideen skizzieren, wie diese im Unterricht vermittelt werden könnten.

Konkret schlagen vor wir, dass man mit Schüler:innen Folgendes erarbeitet: (1) den Unterschied zwischen ‚Begriff‘ und ‚sprachlicher Bedeutung‘ und eine grobe Idee davon, was ‚sprachliche Bedeutung‘ ist; (2) den Unterschied zwischen ‚konventionaler‘ und ‚non-konventionaler‘ Bedeutung; (3) den Unterschied zwischen jenen Eigenschaften, die die Referenten von Begriffen schon rein aufgrund ihrer Bedeutung haben und anderen (‚kontingenten‘) Eigenschaften; (4) den Unterschied zwischen ‚analytischen‘ und ‚stipulativen‘ Definitionen; (5) Methoden, die für die Ermittlung adäquater ‚analytischer‘ Definitionen hilfreich sind (zum Beispiel begriffliche Gedankenexperimente, Korpusanalyse, Kontextanalyse, Widerspruchstest, Abgrenzung von Synonymen, Aufdeckung von Antonymen); (6) ein Grundverständnis von Mehrdeutigkeit und begrifflicher Vagheit.

Seit einigen Jahren findet das Forschungsfeld Public Philosophy zunehmende Beachtung, ist allerdings noch in seinen Anfängen. Was sind Ziele der Public Philosophy, welche wissenschaftlichen Standards sollten dafür gelten? Ich plädiere dafür, die Public Philosophy stärker an der philosophischen Fachdidaktik zu orientieren.

Sowohl die allgemeine Struktur als auch die tendenzielle Stoßrichtung des Forschungsfeldes Public Philosophy stimmen mit denen der Philosophiedidaktik überein. Dementsprechend ergeben sich viele gemeinsame Fragestellungen. Ausgehend von Diskursen der Fachdidaktik lassen sich Fragen der Public Philosophy besser strukturieren und durch zahlreiche Argumente bereichern.

The laws of nature have a special relation to counterfactuals that distinguishes them from non-laws. For example, If the Earth’s axis had been perpendicular to its orbital plane, many things would be different (for example, there would have been no seasons). But we think that the laws of nature still would be the same. Explaining this characteristic counterfactual invariance is challenging for Humean theories of laws. Humeans hold that laws of nature are mere regularities in the distribution of the non-modal properties. However, if the laws are mere regularities, why should they have any special modal status with regard to counterfactuals? Dorst (2022), and Loew and Jaag (2020) have recently offered pragmatic explanations for the counterfactual invariance of laws: We use counterfactuals for prediction and confirmation, and they serve these evidential purposes best if we hold the laws of nature fixed. Lange (forthcoming) criticizes these accounts by arguing that counterfactuals do not in fact play the relevant evidential roles. In this talk, we argue that Lange’s criticism leaves the broader Humean strategy intact by clarifying the evidential role of counterfactuals. Moreover, we argue that Humeans can consistently hold that laws are invariant under counterfactual variations despite lacking inherent necessity.

According to Humeanism, the laws of nature are the theorems of a ‘best’ system, i.e. a theory which correctly captures the non-modal facts about our universe and which offers the best trade-off between theoretical virtues such as strength and simplicity (Lewis 1973). Humeans commonly assume that there can only be one best system and accordingly only one set of laws of nature (Lewis 1994, Hicks 2018, Loewer 2007). In recent years, however, it has been argued that the possibility of cases of tied best systems—in which multiple systems score equally well in terms of the tradeoff—should be taken seriously (cf. Hall 2015, Loew and Jaag 2020, Linnemann and Michels ms.). The aim of our talk is to discuss how Humeans should best deal with such tied cases. We critically evaluate five different options, and ultimately argue that adherents of the BSA will likely have to accept the existence of indeterminate laws, whereas a kind of contextualist account looks like the best option for pragmatic Humeans (cf. Hicks et al. 2023).

According to the standard Humean account of laws of nature, laws are selected partly as a result of an optimal trade-off between the scientific virtues of simplicity and strength. Roberts and Woodward have recently objected that such trade-offs play no role in how laws are chosen in science. In this paper, we first discuss an example from the field of automated scientific discovery which provides concrete support for Roberts and Woodward's point that scientific theories are chosen based on a single-virtue threshold. However, we then use this very same example as a starting point to argue that i) by insisting on a single best theory, Humeans rely on an overly simplistic conception of trade-offs, that ii) this conception should give way to one which allows for a Pareto front of equally optimal theories, and iii) that given this new conception, threshold behaviour for a virtue like strength is a) compatible with the existence of a genuine trade-off and b) can even play the positive role of a selection criterion.

In this paper, we analyse causation in terms of factual difference-making. Factual difference-making is an alternative to counterfactual difference-making which does not face the problem of redundant causation. Our analysis defined in a framework of causal models solves many causal scenarios with which accounts in terms of counterfactual difference-making still struggle. The upshot is that causes are, perhaps, better understood as factual difference-makers rather than counterfactual ones.

Abstract objects like properties and propositions, I believe, can be construed as the result from reification, the metaphysical counterpart of nominalization. My talk explicates reification as higher-order construction, combining two recent alternatives to classical platonism: constructionism and higher-order metaphysics.

Die Debatte über personale Identität konzentriert sich traditionell auf die Frage, unter welchen Bedingungen eine Person zu verschiedenen Zeitpunkten als dieselbe Person gelten kann. Der psychologische Ansatz basiert auf der Annahme, dass psychologische Kontinuität die zentrale Bedingung personaler Identität ist. Diese Annahme wird jedoch durch den Zirkularitätseinwand infrage gestellt. Der biologische Ansatz verweist zur Klärung der personalen Identität auf die Identität des menschlichen Organismus und geht davon aus, dass beide zusammenfallen. Allerdings bleibt oft unklar, worin genau die Bedingungen menschlicher Identität bestehen, sodass eine bloße Verschiebung des Problems droht. Die Philosophie der Biologie bietet hier eine bisher unterschätzte Perspektive: Die Debatte um biologische Individualität enthält aufschlussreiche Überlegungen zu den Bedingungen der Identität von Organismen. Insbesondere der Closure-of-Constraints-Ansatz kann genutzt werden, um eine biologisch fundierte Antwort auf die Frage nach den Bedingungen menschlicher Identität zu liefern und damit die Debatte über personale Identität zu bereichern.

In this paper, I analyze the relationship between us and our digital avatars. Adopting a four-dimensionalist metaphysics, I argue that persons are “hybrid” fusions whose temporal parts are partly located in virtual and non-virtual worlds. Virtual parts are defined as temporal parts existing in virtual worlds, making the relationship between our biological persons and our digital avatars akin to the one between our present self and our past self. I contend that if we characterize persons as maximal aggregates of non-virtual and virtual parts, we can better understand why responsibility for actions in virtual worlds ultimately resides with the people we see and interact with in the biological world. Digital avatars, while not persons themselves, function as non-maximal temporal parts of a person, and then their actions do not merely reflect on persons but are their actions.

I take into consideration a possible objection based on a version of Johnston's (2016) "personite problem", namely the “avatar-personite problem”: biological persons and their avatars may have opposing interests, complicating responsibility attribution and accountability. I maintain that Priority Perdurantism (Skrzypek, 2024) offers a robust solution to the avatar-personite problem and responds to Sweeney's (2023) concerns about the "epistemic gap" and responsibility attribution.

We present a dilemma: either we consider the aptness criterion of Independence to be unnecessary, or we accept the distinction

between default and deviant behavior as outlined in the causal modeling literature. The current work addresses positions that advocate

for non-psychological solutions to resolve structural isomorphism,

explicitly focusing on McDonald’s solution, which introduces a new aptness requirement known as Evident Mediation, framed in purely structural terms.

We show that in cases where this new requirement introduces an additional variable that leads to a positive reversal of the causal verdict,

breaking therefore, the isomorphism between models under examination, there is a possible intervention on the added variable leading to a metaphysically

impossible scenario. Hence, the modified model violates the criterion of Independence. Ultimately, in the context of the inquiry, this does not satisfy Woodward’s criterion of Independent Fixability, which is necessary for models to count strictly as causal. In conclusion, although both sides of the dilemma present advantages and disadvantages, we underline that the structural solution of adopting McDonald’s aptness criterion outweighs its benefits. Until a more effective constraint that enhances Evident Mediation emerges to address these shortcomings, introducing the default/deviant distinction remains the more favorable approach to avoid structural isomorphism.

One is practically irrational when one holds beliefs and intentions standing in incoherent relations. However, to be truly practically irrational, does one also need to believe that one’s incoherent intentions can make a difference in one’s future actions? In other words, does practical irrationality constitutively implicate a belief in the self-efficacy of one’s incoherent intentions? Intriguingly, an overwhelming majority of contemporary philosophers have given an affirmative answer to this question when it comes to instrumental irrationality. However, I argue that the seemingly innocuous incorporation of self-efficacy belief within our analysis of practical irrationality has dangerous results. And I motivate an alternative view on the relation between practical irrationality and self-efficacy belief.

We argue that when faced with a hard decision, we can and sometimes should decide decision-making away by (e.g.) flipping a coin. Deciding decision-making away might look suspect: it seems that conforming with the verdict of a coin flip and φ-ing as a result involves making the decision to φ. To address this worry, we inquire into the psychological structures that make deciding decision-making away possible. Our main contention is that it involves conditional intentions: you form the intention to φ if the coin lands on heads and ψ otherwise. We then use some commonly accepted features of intention to show why we do not make the decision to φ when the coin flip tells us to φ. We conclude by examining the normative status of deciding decision-making away. Not only is it often permissible, whether the choice situation is mundane or life-defining; deciding decision-making away is sometimes required.

Human motivations sometimes change. A travel lover stops flying to distant places in the face of climate change. A politician begins to seek power instead of justice. Sometimes changing preferences seems to be a good thing; at other times, it appears regrettable. How we evaluate such changes is an important question. Of equal importance, we must understand how preference change comes about in the first place. Why do one person’s preferences change in response to a given situation when the preferences of another person – in a similar situation – do not? When is it rational to change one’s preferences? Despite its strengths, standard decision theory cannot answer these questions. That is, it cannot describe fundamental preference changes. Moreover, emerging new theoretical models of preference change are still scarce and remain underdeveloped. In particular, existing approaches often overlook the fact that some preferences are more resistant to change—or “stickier”—than others. In this paper, we propose a commitment-based theory of preference change. This theory explains how and why certain preferences endure while others shift when confronted with experiences.

Ongoing debates about the ontology and epistemology of trust – both generally and in the context of epistemic trust in science – often conceptualize trust as reliance supplemented by an additional factor, such as the trustee’s willingness (Hawley, 2014). In the context of science, epistemic trust depends on three conditions: (1) reliance on the trustee’s competence, (2) reliance on their willingness, and (3) acceptance of the trustor’s vulnerability. These conditions highlight the epistemic and normative dimensions of trust, both of which are undermined when scientific findings supporting policy decisions are challenged or denied.

This paper examines key agnotological strategies used to deny scientific findings that underpin political regulations, particularly in epidemiology and climate research. I argue that these strategies not only foster distrust but actively redirect trust toward alternative structures constructed to signal trustworthiness. Rather than viewing science denialism as merely an effort to discredit science (Hansson, 2017), this frames it as a strategic attempt to redirect existing trust in science.

Furthermore, I propose that those influenced by doubt-mongering are not excessive skeptics but individuals placing trust in unreliable sources. Addressing this requires strengthening the socio-epistemic infrastructure to enhance the devision of epistemic labor, alongside measures like inoculation against misinformation.

The assumption that there is such a thing as “THE scientific method” is widespread, both within science and in the public’s understanding of science. It represents a view of science that places hypothesis testing at the center of the scientific enterprise and sees observations as irrevocable benchmarks for evaluating theories.

In my talk, I argue that the prevalence of the ‘myth’ that there is such a thing as ‘THE scientific method’ can foster distrust in science for two reasons: First, it makes science vulnerable to external attacks when research does not conform to these standards. Second, treating hypothesis testing as the gold standard of scientific practice can lead scientists to overlook alternative scientific reasoning strategies, such as mechanistic understanding. When this occurs in situations where urgent answers are required from science, it can further erode public trust in science.

In this talk we use climate tipping points as case study to investigate conditions under which scientists may legitimately communicate deeply uncertain scientific claims to policy-makers and the public. We identify three distinct concerns: the question of appropriate evidential standards for policy purposes; the legitimacy of appealing to deeply uncertain knowledge in policy advice; the problem of how properly to communicate deeply uncertain knowledge. We propose recommendations for addressing each of them: Decisions concerning the appropriateness of evidential standards need to be made communally and transparently; when uncertain knowledge should be communicated ought to be dependent on the needs and vulnerabilities of stakeholders, influencing what kind of knowledge is policy relevant and what science-policy decision framework we should adopt; the framing is key when it comes to inherently and deeply uncertain knowledge and here recent story-line approaches can play an important role.

Moral norms are widely thought to have an inescapable authority over us. One of the currently most influential strategies to explain this presumed authority is constitutivism, according to which moral norms can be understood as constitutive rules for activities or practices, such as practical deliberation, which, themselves, are taken to be inescapable for us. The best-known version of this strategy is, arguably, Kantian constitutivism, as developed, eg by Christine Korsgaard. In my talk, I will look at the prospects of a robustly capacity-based version of constitutivism. I will look at different respects in which taking practical and moral norms to emerge from the rational capacities available to us for solving practical problems might have significant advantages over other forms of constitutivism. I will also consider how such an approach relates to the issue of how we should understand moral responsibility. While the general approach of a capacity-based constitutivism has been suggested, eg, as an interpretation of Kant's own views, its systematic potential still merits further exploration, which might open yet another fertile field of application for a realistic understanding of faculties and capacities.