Philosophers of mind often seek to describe what it is like to undergo a particular experience, yet our phenomenological vocabulary frequently appears impoverished and insufficient for the task. Amy Kind recently argued that this so-called ‘impoverishment problem’ is something that can be overcome, at least in principle. She suggests that (1) we can refine or “enrich” our phenomenological vocabulary and (2) doing so “has the potential to enable us to make progress on a wide number of other philosophical problems connected to the mind” (Kind 2024, 119). I propose to call this view phenomenological optimism. Early phenomenologists, such as Brentano (1874) and Husserl (1911), were also strong advocates of phenomenological optimism. This paper examines the reasons they had for endorsing (1) and (2).

In this talk, I argue that genuine progress in philosophy consists solely in the accumulation of philosophical knowledge among relevant philosophers. This growth has both veritistic and epistemic dimensions. On the veritistic side, progress involves acquiring more true beliefs, organizing them in increasingly systematic and compressed formats, and ensuring they capture more and more levels of reality. Over time, such growth requires the production of general, positive, and explanatory beliefs.

On the epistemic side, what matters is not merely having true beliefs but acquiring knowledge—true beliefs held in ways that reliably exclude error. Otherwise, the pursuit of truth might tolerate a significant number of falsehoods. But this is obviously not compatible with our understanding of progress. Crucially, collective philosophical progress does not depend on all—or even most—philosophers expanding their knowledge. What matters is that relevant philosophers—those at the forefront of inquiry—do so.

I defend this account of philosophical progress against prominent alternatives, including views that disconnect progress from truth, equate it with improved understanding, or define it in terms of problem-solving.

In the second part of the talk, I address several major challenges to the idea of philosophical progress, including the prevalence of negative knowledge, persistent peer disagreement, and the lack of widely accepted evidence in the field. I argue that these challenges can be met if we adopt and consistently apply the account of progress I propose.

What is it for philosophy to make cognitive progress? According to Enabling Noeticism, there is a single, unified answer: Philosophical progress consists in putting people in a position to increase their understanding, where "increased understanding’" is a matter of better representing the network of dependence relations between phenomena (Dellsén, Firing, Lawler, Norton 2024, see also Dellsén, Lawler, Norton 2023). In this talk, I will present Enabling Noeticism. I will explain how it differs from other accounts that measure cognitive progress in philosophy in terms of convergence to the truth (Chalmers 2015, Grundmann 2018), its success in problem solving (Stoljar 2017), or the amount of acquired knowledge (based on, e.g., Bird 2016). Lastly, I will show how progress can be made on this view despite the fact that there is persistent disagreement among philosophical experts on numerous philosophical questions.

When a person experiences empathy for someone in need or distress, they usually experience not just warm and sympathetic feelings, but also distress, sadness and sometimes anger. The current trend is to separate out these various elements, either to find the “real” empathy or to differentiate the individual effects each emotion has on motivation (usually to help). But is it not plausible that co-experienced emotions have a reciprocal effect on one another? If so, to understand such mixed emotional episodes, we cannot do with simply understanding one element. In this paper, I argue in favor of a holistic approach to empathy where not only the empathic element, but also the experiential and motivational aspects are understood in terms of affect. In other words, what makes the emotion blend empathic is the addition of care, but neither the experience, nor the motivation can be understood in the absence of the co-occurring emotions sadness and distress.

In everyday life we see a lot of different behaviors associated with empathy: consolation, helping, compassion, to name just a few. Most of these behaviors are not shown by human adults only, but also by human children and apparently by other animals. Thus, the question arises, can all these behaviors be called empathic? Is empathy a unitary phenomenon or do we need to distinguish rather various types of empathy? The variability will be demonstrated by discussing the development of human children with two specific questions: At what age are they able to show compassion, consolation, and targeted helping? And in how far might their understanding of the other be different from that of adults? First, I will shortly introduce a model of 5 steps children undergo during typical development. Second, I will argue that these steps and what differentiates them can inform us on the abilities underlying the complex phenomenon of empathy and it invites to distinguish types of empathy. Splitting empathy into several underlying abilities does not only inform us about the phenomenon itself, but can enable empirical research to develop experimental designs for these specific abilities and thereby different aspects of empathic behavior.

To compare empathy in human and nonhuman animals (hereafter “animals”) we need an adequate conceptual framework characterizing similarities and differences between animal and human empathy. Such a framework is still lacking. The core intuition of our proposal is that empathy typically involves the registration of the other’s relevant affective state, the specific situation, and possibly even mental states (or processes). This is combined with a somewhat flexible selection of a response behavior that accounts for the mental states and the situation of the agent. More precisely: We think that we can cluster relevant elements into five main dimensions, starting with three forms of sensitivity for the other: (1) sensitivity for bodily and affective states of others, (2) perceiving others as individuals in a situation, (3) cognitive perspective taking in relation to the other; in addition, we include as relevant the kind of typically (4) other-oriented response, and (5) the level of flexibility which is connected with the response behavior. Each of these dimensions can be categorized by several different sub-abilities. Further, all five dimensions can be realized to a certain degree. Thus, for each dimension of empathy we can characterize to which degree it is realized in an animal; this leads to new evaluation of and questions about empathic behavior, e.g. is the recently described helping behavior of rats (Bartal, Decety & Mason, 2011) empathic behavior? In their famous experiment, a rat was freely moving in an arena while another rat from the same cage was trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the rat being able to move freely in the arena learned to open the restrainer (with another rat being in it). In a follow-up experiment, the rat could choose between opening the restrainer with her cage mate being trapped or opening a second retainer enabling access to tasty food, chocolate. The rat seemed to register the distress of the trapped animal and first opened her retainer and let her free before opening the second restrainer. Moreover, the helping rat even shared the chocolate with the other rat (Bartal, Decety & Mason, 2011). Should we interpret this as a case of full-blown empathy or do we need to employ a killjoy interpretation according to which the freeing behavior is just triggered by the egoistic desire for social interaction? Our multidimensional approach offers a new way of interpreting the observations.

The study of logic underwent a profound rebirth at the turn of the twentieth century. While logicians were traditionally concerned with the correctness of reasoning in ordinary language, Frege introduced formal languages as the primary medium and objects of logical enquiry. The shift from ordinary language to artificial languages containing formal expressions elevated the study of mathematics and philosophy to a new level of rigour and marked the beginning of the computer age.

But what exactly are formal expressions? Although the ontological nature of mathematical objects, such as numbers, has been a central topic in philosophy since antiquity, a systematic study of the ontology of formal expressions is hitherto lacking in the literature.

The aim of this talk is threefold. First, I will show that within the last century, the study of formal languages underwent a "structuralist turn". I will then argue that recent attempts to make the structuralist view of formal languages explicit are flawed. Finally, I will show how the structuralist view can be stated correctly.

The radical development of formal methods in logic in the past two centuries has brought logic closer to mathematics, and, at the same time, accentuated the tension between the previously disparate fields. The driving foundationalist agenda, which attained dominance at the turn of the 20th century, is at tension with ordinary mathematical practice - as it threatens its autonomy by stripping it of ultimate authority as to what counts as valid proof.

In a recent book, Juliette Kennedy draws attention to this tension. The notion of formalism freeness has a central role in Kennedy's work, which, put concisely, means “the suppression of any […] aspects of a logic or formalism, except semantics”. In my talk I will pause on the distinction between formal and natural language that I take to be at the heart of the matter. Kennedy’s notion of formalism freeness that pertains to the subject matter of mathematical practice, but, arguably, it is first of all the freedom of the mathematician that it is at stake - the freedom to use their natural language. I then propose a reverse perspective by which formal language is where the freedom of the mathematician is most starkly exercised.

Tarski notoriously argued, from consideration of the Liar paradox, that no consistent language can be semantically closed, and our only option for a consistent theory of truth is a hierarchy of languages. These claims have been subject to much criticism over the years. Many hold them to be prima facie implausible, and some hold that Tarski’s notion of a consistent language is itself a confusion. I, on the other hand, have long advocated for a highly revised form of a Tarskian hierarchy. In this paper, I return to the question of how to formulate claims about semantic closure, and I argue that a properly formulated hierarchical theory of truth is more plausible and natural than it is usually taken to be.

Many philosophers have argued that immortality is less good than it sounds. In this talk, I examine an argument in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Immortal” to the effect that immortal lives would be objectionably incoherent. Borges offers a probabilistic argument that “over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all [people].” I argue that Borges’s argument, suitably qualified, shows that typical mortal lives indeed exhibit a kind of incoherence. This incoherence, however, is different from the one at stake in the discussion about narrative theories of well-being, which hold that good lives have some of the virtues of good stories. Nonetheless, the incoherence of typical immortal lives makes being immortal less desirable in two respects: First, immortal lives cannot stand for something in the way mortal lives can because any commitment they might display gets superimposed by other, contradictory commitments. Second, immortal lives lack narrative intelligibility. Immortals cannot gain the kind of understanding of their own life stories that mortals can have. I illustrate both problems by way of Borges’s story and others of his writings. Finally, I briefly explore whether these shortcomings compromise the prudential value of an immortal life or some other value.

Public and private organizations increasingly deploy AI-systems for the autonomous execution of tasks and decisions. Given these systems’ inherent complexity, even the strictest safety measures cannot fully prevent adverse outcomes, subjecting individuals to serious harm. This raises the following question: Who ought to take responsibility for AI-related harm, when it is not the direct result of human fault? Drawing on the philosophy of tort law, I argue that AI-deployers have a strict moral duty to take responsibility for harmful outcomes, even if the deployment of the harm-imposing AI is morally permissible. In contrast to traditional responsibility accounts based on blameworthiness, the proposed account of strict responsibility is not predicated on a prior duty violation but on a proactive duty to provide redress in case individuals are harmed. It is a relational duty that arises from what I call the “accidental relationship”, which highlights the intrinsic connection between AI-deployers and the harmed individuals, and in which taking responsibility is an expression of recognizing the harmed individual as moral equal.

„Niemand darf einem Tier ohne vernünftigen Grund Schmerzen, Leiden oder Schäden zufügen“, heißt es in §1 TierSchG. Der "vernünftige Grund“ ist ein Schlüsselbegriff des vom deutschen Tierschutzgesetz verfolgten „ethischen Tierschutzes“, bezieht er sich doch auf die Rechtfertigung dafür, einem allgemeinen Nichtschädigungsgebot gegenüber Tieren zuwiderzuhandeln. Der Ethik ist für die Interpretation dieses unbestimmten Rechtsbegriffs mitunter die Rolle einer Rationalisierungsinstanz zugewiesen worden. In diesem Vortrag soll eine ethische Kritik an der Interpretation des vernünftigen Grundes als Ausprägung des Verhältnismäßigkeitsgrundsatzes entwickelt werden. Die Suche nach einem vernünftigen Grund als einem auf einer Güterabwägung basierenden Rechtfertigungsgrund vernachlässigt eine für die ethische Rechtfertigung Tiere schädigender Handlungen relevante Frage, nämlich die nach der Selektion des Schadensnehmers. Ein „ethisches“ Tierschutzgesetz müsste Rechtfertigungen für die Schädigung je spezifischer Individuen – und beispielsweise nicht als beliebige Vertreter ihrer Spezies – verlangen. Hinter dieser Überlegung steht die allgemeinere Frage danach, unter welchen Umständen ein Individuum (in der Rolle des moral patient) durch die Interessen eines moralischen Akteurs überhaupt zu einem Beteiligten einer Problemsituation gemacht werden kann. Der Vortrag erläutert die Relevanz eines modifizierten Zuständigkeitskriteriums für die Anerkennung von moral patients als Situationsbeteiligte und konkretisiert die sich daraus ergebende Kritik an der Konzeption des vernünftigen Grundes mit Blick auf die Tierversuchsdebatte.

Do judges have an obligation to apply the law of the legal system to which their courts belong? It can seem obvious that they do. But even the qualified proposition that judges in a legitimate legal system, i.e. one whose laws enjoy legitimate authority, have an obligation to apply the laws of that system is in fact far from simple to justify. The goal of this paper is to flesh out in some detail what such an obligation consists in – and thus what it is that one is trying to justify –, and to argue for a positive proposal as to how it could be justified. The proposal, which grounds judicial obligation on the value of the rule of law, has implications for our understanding of the nature of political legitimacy: that is, for our understanding of what is involved in establishing that some legally constituted political institution (or conglomerate of political institutions, such as those of a modern territorial state) is justified in its activities (including but not limited to coercive activities) and claims (including but not limited to the claim to possessing practical authority).

We probabilify the scenario approach to legal proof. The scenario approach searches for the scenario that strikes the best balance in explaining the available evidence, in fitting to general background beliefs, and in its degree of internal coherence. Our account provides a unified measure of the three dimensions in terms of probabilities, and so is proof that the scenario approach can be probabilified. Indeed, our account can be summarized by a version of Bayes Theorem: the most likely scenario in light of the evidence is the best. We thereby provide a Bayesian justification for the scenario approach.

In this talk I want to answer the question which criteria a scientific claim has to fulfill in order to be considered as acceptable to public reason in the Rawlsian sense. Belloio argues that a scientific claim is acceptable to public reason if it is a consensus among experts and is reached via a publicly accepted method. However, I argue that in the debate around what scientific claims should be acceptable to public reason the role of non-epistemic values is overlooked. For a statement to be acceptable to public reason it is not only important for it to be a consensus among experts and reached via a publicly accepted method but also that this consensus is based on a variety of non-epistemic values which represent the non-epistemic values held by the public to some extent. This is the case as different non-epistemic values can lead to different scientific results. So, a citizen who reasonably disagrees with the non-epistemic values which underlie a scientific consensus cannot be reasonably expected to accept this consensus as justification for coercion over her. Therefore it is important for a scientific consensus to be acceptable to public reason to rely on a variety of non-epistemic values.

Ich skizziere in meinem Vortrag eine Antwort auf die Frage, wie sich das Recht auf sexuelle Selbstbestimmung begründen lässt. Diese Antwort lautet, dass der Täter eines sexuellen Übergriffs darauf abzielt oder in Kauf nimmt, das Opfer in einen Zustand negativer sexueller Erregung zu versetzen. Negative sexuelle Erregung ist eine Form sexueller Erregung, deren motivationale, emotionale und sensorische Eigenschaften denen der prototypischen Form sexueller Erregung – Erregung, wie Menschen sie in von beiden Seiten gewollten und für beide Seiten sexuell erfüllenden sexuellen Interaktionen erleben –, konträr entgegengesetzt sind. Während positive Erregung mit der Motivation zum Vertiefen und Fortsetzen der sexuellen Interaktion, mit Emotionen des Glücks und der Lust und mit angenehmen körperlichen Sensationen verbunden ist, geht negative Erregung mit der Motivation zu meiden und zu fliehen, mit Empfindungen des Ekels und mit unangenehmen sensorischen Eindrücken einher. Da beide Formen sexueller Erregung unwillkürliche, durch das Subjekt nicht kontrollierbare Reaktionen auf sexuelle Stimuli sind, besteht eine Analogie zwischen dem Unrecht von Folter und dem Unrecht sexueller Übergriffe: im Zuge beider Verbrechen wird dem Opfer durch den Täter die Kontrolle über seine motivationalen, emotionalen und körperlichen Zustände entzogen, was eine gravierende Missachtung der Autonomie und potentiell eine dauerhafte Beschädigung der Subjektivität des Opfers bedeutet.

Verzeihen ist ein komplexes Phänomen. Um besser zu verstehen, wann Verzeihen geboten, verboten oder erlaubt ist, müssen wir verschiedene Fallgruppen unterscheiden. Hierzu wird zunächst ein klarer und von den mittlerweile üblichen Emotionstheorien abgegrenzter Begriff des Verzeihens entwickelt, anhand dessen drei Fallgruppen unterschieden werden: (1) Fälle, in denen ein Tatvorwurf gegenüber der Täterin nicht länger statthaft ist, (2) Fälle, in denen der Tatvorwurf an die Täterin zwar nicht unangebracht ist, die Täterin aber dennoch Gründe bietet, wie Reue, die positiv für ein Verzeihen sprechen, und schließlich (3) Fälle, in denen die Täterin keine Gründe zum Verzeihen anbietet. Hierauf aufbauend werden fünf unterschiedliche deontische Zuschreibungen je nach Fallgruppe unterschieden und vorgenommen: vollkommene Pflichten zu verzeihen, milde Pflichten, unvollkommene Pflichten, ein Verbot zu verzeihen und ein ethisch neutrales Erlaubtsein. Supererogatorische Fälle werden hingegen abgelehnt. Im Ergebnis argumentiert der Vortrag für eine Stufung von Gebotenheit, Verbotenheit sowie Erlaubtheit des Verzeihens, die feingliedriger als die üblichen Alternativen und zugleich systematisch begründet ist.

Ob es moralische Expert*innen geben kann, ist in der philosophischen Literatur umstritten. Auf der einen Seite wird betont, dass sich moralische Expertise von Expertise in anderen Bereichen fundamental unterscheidet (assymetry thesis). Demgegenüber wird andererseits auf grundsätzliche Ähnlichkeiten moralischer und anderer, etwa wissenschaftlicher Expertise, verwiesen (unity thesis). Als Erklärung dafür wird u.a. die Existenz moralischer Tatsachen herangezogen: Insofern es moralische Tatsachen gibt, spricht prima facie nichts dagegen, moralische Expertise durch einen privilegierten Zugang zu diesen Tatsachen auszuweisen.

Vor diesem Hintergrund ergibt sich die Frage, ob die Annahme moralischer Expertise auf einen metaethischen Realismus festgelegt ist. Im Vortrag gehen wir dieser Frage anhand einer Analyse zweier Strategien nach, die einen Konnex nicht-realistischer Ansätze und moralischer Expertise aufzuweisen versuchen. Daraus entwickeln wir eine Reihe von Bedingungen, deren Erfüllung es auch metaethisch nicht-realistischen Theorien erlaubt, von moralischer Expertise zu sprechen. Damit möchten wir die These belegen, dass moralische Expertise nicht notwendigerweise einen moralischen Realismus voraussetzt.

In meinem Vortrag argumentiere ich für die Notwendigkeit einer Neukonzeption des Phänomens der nichtsuizidalen Selbstverletzung (NSSV), indem ich die moralische Dimension möglicher diskursiver Effekte bestehender NSSV-Konzeptionen aufzeige. Meine These lautet, dass NSSV-Konzeptionen, die auf medizinisch signifikante Formen von NSSV beschränkt sind, verdeckte normative Hintergrundannahmen implizieren, die Selbstverletzungen sowie Verhalten, das diese evoziert, qua der Kategorisierung als NSSV als nicht-gesund, als deviant und als krank setzen, und dass hierdurch Stigmata gegenüber Betroffenen verstärkt werden können. Daraus leite ich ab, dass eine adäquate NSSV-Konzeption nicht auf medizinisch signifikantes Verhalten beschränkt sein und NSSV somit nicht prima facie pathologisiert werden sollte. Stattdessen schlage ich vor, NSSV als ein Kontinuum menschlichen Verhaltens und als genuin heterogen aufzufassen.

Hierzu lege ich argumentativ dar, dass (1) neben medizinischen auch gesellschaftliche Konzeptionen von Krankheit sowie von Elementen dieser Kategorie existieren, die negative moralische Implikationen aufweisen, und (2) dass gesellschaftliche NSSV-Konzeptionen per se unter der Kategorie Krankheit verortet sind. Wenn (2) zutrifft, dann weisen gesellschaftliche NSSV-Konzeptionen durch (1) notwendigerweise negative moralische Implikationen auf, wodurch Betroffene Stigmatisierungen erfahren. Um dem entgegenzuwirken, plädiere ich für eine Neukonzeption von NSSV, die NSSV nicht per se pathologisiert, sondern zunächst wörtlich auffasst.

Normative blackballing is a practise that actively terminates a friendship. This paper argues that normative blackballing is not morally permissible in cases where one party develops morally bad beliefs if we hold the view that friendships are robust attachments. I will draw on Brennan’s work (2023) and take the argument as given that no objective sufficiency criteria can be offered to justify normative blackballing. I will then show how subjective accounts also fail to justify normative blackballing by showing that there is no mechanism to appropriately weigh trivial, but passionately held, beliefs, nor beliefs that betray a ‘special interest’ in a particular moral topic. If any belief an agent themself considers sufficiently bad justifies normative blackballing, then this undermines friendship’s robust nature. We either have to accept the subjective criteria and reject robustness, or accept robustness and deny that beliefs are sufficient for normative blackballing. Given how undesirable and counter-intuitive the former option is, I suggest we adopt the latter position.

“Predictive analytics”(PA) defines the use of algorithms and techniques such as data analytics and Machine Learning to infer sensitive attributes (personal information, future behavior) of target individuals based on large data sets about many other individuals. The pervasiveness of PA raises ethical questions about its legitimacy, and claims of legal shield against the imposed harms. As predictive systems do not extort information and merely generate probabilistic predictions, however, public discussions, normative conceptualizations, and legal frameworks are not adequately equipped to address moral and regulatory demands. This paper argues that, while concerns are legitimate, most attempts in the literature, which appeal to the concept of privacy, do not answer them successfully. Rather, I shift the focus here on a critical albeit unexplored issue: while other cases of elicitation of information or privacy breaches impose harms on us as identified victims, we are statistical victims of predictive systems, as the identity of target individuals cannot be known ex-ante, when training data are collected. The statistical victim problem, a key issue in moral philosophy, thus provides useful conceptual lenses to normatively assess PA. As different responses to the normative relevance of statistical victims are reasonable, more or less stringent obligations might be justified.

In this talk we investigate the implications of rescue cases featuring risk and overlapping outcome groups. We argue that a look at these cases provides a new perspective on the numbers debate in general and on the contentious issue of aggregation in rescue cases in particular. The former concerns the insight that proposals that were previously thought to coincide with saving the greater number or giving it a greater chance do not consistently do so after all. The latter concerns the insight that in some cases, one needs to aggregate people's claims against their will in order to save the greater number or at least give it a greater chance to be saved. We deem this insight to pose challenges for proposals (be it lottery solutions or proposals to save the greater number outright) that justify their numbers-sensitivity by pointing to the autonomous, self-interest-based choices of the very claimants they aim to save.

The Relevance View promises to reconcile aggregationist and anti-aggregationist intuitions: we should aggregate people’s claims, but only those relevant, that are sufficiently strong compared to another claim. However, the Relevance View is confronted with two challenges. (i) In multiple-option choices, it implies cyclical obligations. (ii) In choices between heterogeneous groups, it dismisses irrelevant claims too easily. Some proponents solve (i) by a global interpretation, but they cannot account for (ii). Others address (ii) by a local understanding, but they fail to avoid (i). I tackle both challenges together by considering cases with multiple options and heterogeneous groups. The key is to distinguish the relevance of claims and the reasons provided by relevant claims. I argue that (ii) requires a local relevance: claims are relevant not in general but only relative to particular other claims. To solve (i), we should understand the reasons as global: reasons in favour of an option relative to not only one but all alternatives. However, local relevance doesn’t entail local reasons, and global reasons don’t need global relevance. Locally relevant claims that are satisfied under an option can, thus, provide global reasons to choose that option rather than any other available alternative.

It is often considered an important advantage of deontological theories that they don't share the counterintuitive verdict of consequentialism that we ought to violate duties or rights when this leads to overall less instances of such duty or rights violations. However, deontological theories struggle explaining why we ought to prevent duty violations when this is possible by morally innocuous means. Since deontology recognizes non-consequentialist duties, the importance of preventing their violation cannot always be explained in terms of their bad consequences. But at the same time, it seems that permitting that these non-consequentialist duties are violated does not violate these duties themselves. This paper argues that the only viable option for deontologists that allows them to explain why one ought to prevent immoral actions is to reinterpret deontological duties in terms of defeaters that diminish the strength of consequentialist reasons rather than proving additional reasons themselves.

Maximizing Objective Act-Consequentialism (MOAC) holds that an action is morally right iff no alternative would produce better consequences. One central challenge to MOAC is the Collective Action Problem (CAP), roughly the observation that in some collective decision situations, apparently right individual actions fail to bring about the best possible outcomes. This has been seen as a violation of the Principle of Moral Harmony (PoMH)—the idea that adequate moral theories should guarantee that their adherents collectively produce the best achievable world.

I argue that this critique misdiagnoses the problem: rather than generating incorrect moral assessments, MOAC theories are deontically incomplete, i.e., they fail to generate any (non-conditional) deontic assessments in the relevant class of collective decision situations. CAP, then, is the result of the consequentialist attempt to obscure its own deontic incompleteness.

To address this nexus of problems holistically, I propose a Multi-Agent Criterion of Rightness (MA-CoR), which extends MOAC using game-theoretic principles and mixed strategies to determine morally right actions in collective contexts. By addressing CAP without compromising MOAC’s core commitments, this approach offers a structurally robust conservative extension of the established consequentialist framework for handling collective moral decision-making, transforming an apparent weakness of MOAC into a comparative advantage.

I argue that first-order moral theory often overlooks a crucial mistake: moral hubris. A moral view is guilty of moral hubris when it “goes too far”—that is, when it implies moral claims that fail to respect what I call the function constraint. This constraint sets the boundaries of what moral norms can demand while still qualifying as moral norms. It arises from the fundamental purpose or function of morality, where “morality” refers to our actual socio-cultural moral practice.

In short, moral hubris occurs when a moral theory advocates norms that conflict with the very purpose of moral practice. After introducing the function constraint and arguing that morality has an underlying point or function, I suggest that longtermism (MacAskill 2022) exemplifies a hubristic moral view. If my argument is persuasive, a broader conclusion follows: the content of moral norms is constrained by morality’s function. As a result, normative ethicists must adhere to the function constraint to avoid moral hubris in their theories. Finally, I suggest that utilitarian views are more prone to moral hubris than Kantian or contractualist perspectives.

There is an overlooked dilemma for the overdemandingness objection. The intuition behind this objection is that morality must allow agents to live good lives. Yet, the two most obvious ways to spell out this intuition are unsatisfactory.

(1) Morality must leave room for a person to live their good life, by pursuing their central commitments, projects, and preferences (CPPs). This is too permissive: Morality could not ask agents to sacrifice the pursuit of any CCPs that happen to be central to their lives.

(2) Morality must leave room for a person to live a good life, irrespective of how this life relates to who they are right now. This is too restrictive: Agents could be required to sacrifice the pursuit of any and all of their central CCPs, if it would be possible for them to change into a person who would live a good life by pursuing different CPPs.

To overcome this dilemma, the demandingness debate must shift its focus. Instead of asking how much agents can be asked to sacrifice of the pursuit of their actual CPPs, we must ask under what conditions and in what way agents can be expected to change the content of these CCPs.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between subjective experience, self-awareness and scientific knowledge through the lens of cognitive science and the evolution of causal thinking. We present a developmental (historical) account of how scientific knowledge emerges from two alienation processes: the organism’s differentiation from its environment (enabling the manifest image) and from its own body (enabling self-awareness and the scientific image). By exploring these evolutionary dynamics, we build on Sellars’s integrative vision, suggesting that the scientific image, rather than replacing the manifest image, is fundamentally dependent on it. This approach sheds light on enduring philosophical concerns about agency, free will, and the tension between subjective experience and scientific objectivity.

Is the human mind a similarity machine or a probability engine? Perhaps it’s both – but if so, how do these mechanisms work together? These are perennial questions from the cognitive psychology of rationality. The influential heuristics and biases program treated similarity-based reasoning as an efficient, but ultimately irrational shortcut for probabilistic, or Bayesian reasoning. By contrast, I argue that similarity and probability are complementary principles of reasoning, drawing on the relationship between Conceptual Spaces (CS), a similarity-based framework for conceptual content, and Predictive Processing (PP), a Bayesian account of cognition. While CS and PP may operate at different Marr-levels, I focus on recent advances that show how CS can generate priors for Bayesian reasoning, offering a concrete mechanism for integrating similarity and probability. This approach resists reductionist interpretations, such as Tenenbaum and Griffiths’ account of perceptual categorization, by emphasizing the semantic interpretability that similarity provides for Bayesian models of reasoning.

Benchmarking, the evaluation of machine learning (ML) models based on predictive performance and competitive ranking, is a cornerstone of ML research and an increasingly prominent tool in scientific arguments. This paper argues that benchmarking constitutes a scientific epistemology, offering a powerful framework for scientific inference. We identify four core types of inferences drawn from benchmarks: those about the best (1) model, (2) learning algorithm, (3) deployment decision, and (4) prediction. We demonstrate that the validity of each of these inference relies on additional assumptions, analogous to ensuring construct validity in psychological tests. Through case studies in image recognition, life outcomes prediction, and weather forecasting, we examine these assumptions and their implications for inference validity. Finally, we discuss the social roles of benchmarks in organizing scientific communities and their potential threats to validity, offering strategies to mitigate these challenges and improve benchmark design and interpretation.

This paper critically examines Shagrir’s semantic view of computation according to which representational contents play an indispensable individuative role for vehicles of computation. I show that attempting to use representational contents to individuate vehicles of computation may lead to incoherent computational descriptions. I use an illustrative case-study – locust looming-object avoidance behaviour. A crucial component of the mechanism underlying this phenomenon is the lobula giant motion detector (LGMD) neuron, which multiplies angular velocity of an approaching stimulus with the negative angular size of the same. I show that interpreting the computation performed by the LGMD in semantic terms is exceedingly difficult. The representational contents of the outputs are not related to the representational contents of the inputs by the mathematical operation proposed by the model. The representational contents of the outputs do not individuate the vehicles of computation – these seem to be determined by the prevailing disciplinary norms (membrane voltages, instant firing rates). Furthermore, the representational content ascribed to one of the inputs seems to be unavailable for at least one of the functionally relevant class of stimuli (disconnected sequentially appearing dots). Thus, the utility, or even practicability, of semantically individuating the computation performed by the LGMD is questionable.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists inspired by the work of Vygotksy (1986) typically hold that complex thought results from the internalization of social interactions in development. More specifically, they propose that internalized speech facilitates various cognitive processes, including meta-cognition, reasoning and planning (Frankish, 2018; Kompa & Müller, 2022; Gauker, 2018). However, what exactly is internalized has not been spelled out in detail. In the literature on inner speech, it is usually held that what is internalized is a kind of dialogical structure (e.g. Fernyhough, 1996). In order to get a better handle on the structures involved, I present some ideas on discourse structure (Sanders et al., 1992; Thompson & Mann, 1987), and show how they can be applied to naturalistic data of overt private speech (Nelson, 1989). I will argue that these ideas allow us to describe 1) inner speech structure above the level of individual speech acts and 2) the function of individual inner speech utterances as part of a larger train of thought.

Could the genesis of artificial intelligence be the exodus of natural intelligence? Our current effort of engineering ever more capable artifacts mainly evokes concerns about the nature of artificial intelligence. But perhaps more pressing is what that reveals about the nature of our natural intelligence. We seem inclined and incentivized to utilize intelligent tools that solve our cognitive tasks for us. This is made possible by developing technologies that can receive parts of our cognitive skills which we would usually exert internally for those tasks. Such interaction strategies may profoundly decrease our own cognitive engagements and responsibilities, ultimately rendering us extracted cognizers. The hypothesis of extracted cognition states that we have a tendency to seek external artifacts that solve our cognitive tasks rather independent of us, namely by making or letting them capture, mimic, and eventually replace those cognitive skills we would otherwise employ and train internally. Three questions shall lead us to this idea: First, how do we make intelligent artifacts? Second, how do we use intelligent artifacts? Third, how do we thereby become extracted cognizers?

This talk raises the question of whether the Chinese Room Argument (CRA) applies to large language models (LLMs). The thought experiment at the center of the CRA is tailored to Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI) systems. However, natural language processing has made significant progress, especially with the emergence of LLMs in recent years. LLMs differ from GOFAI systems in their design; they operate on vectors rather than symbols and do not follow a program but instead learn to map inputs to outputs. Consequently, some have suggested that the CRA is no longer relevant in discussions surrounding artificial language understanding. Contrary to these authors, I argue that if the CRA successfully demonstrates that implementing a symbolic computation is not sufficient for language understanding, then it also shows that implementing an LLM is not sufficient for language understanding. I begin by presenting a thought experiment called “the flashcard sorter”, which resembles the Chinese Room thought experiment but is tailored to LLMs rather than GOFAI systems. I then discuss the analogy between the flashcard sorter and modern LLMs, along with four objections to my claim that the CRA applies to LLMs. I conclude by presenting a modified version of the CRA.

Large Language Models (LLMs) invite a re-evaluation of the concept of intelligence by pointing to the unclear boundary between human and machine intelligence. The representational view of intelligence posits that intelligence requires: a) the existence of semantic representations, and b) the causal role of representations in driving behavior. This paper argues that the representational view is not well-founded. First, I challenge the idea of semantic representations as a requirement for intelligence as a consequence of our non-scientific and anthropocentric conception of intelligence. On a second step, I argue that even if such representations exist within AI systems, there are not sufficient reasons to claim they causally drive intelligent behavior. Finally, I propose some observable criteria for a less suspect concept of intelligence, drawing on scientific approaches from the cognitive sciences. These criteria suggest that LLMs, despite presumably lacking semantic representations, may still exhibit some degree of intelligence worthy of recognition. I conclude that requiring mental representations, and particularly their causal role, not only unjustifiably anthropomorphizes the concept of intelligence but also imposes unnecessarily high standards for intelligence attribution, including humans themselves. Therefore, a more operational and deflationary view of intelligence is preferable for understanding both human and machine intelligence.

Despite the recent success of large language models (LLMs), philosophers and AI researchers widely reject the claim that LLMs can understand, speak, or act, arguing that it is both false and excessively anthropomorphic. My presentation aims to challenge key aspects of this skepticism. To that end, I frame questions about the ability to understand, speak, and act as subsets of a broader question, the question of rule-following. For that reason, my paper examines the extent to which LLMs can be said to follow rules. I show that the predominant attempts to deny LLMs the ability to understand, speak, and act stem from misguided conceptions about rule-following, which I refer to as “mentalism” and “neurophysiologicalism”. In opposition to these misconceptions, I develop a new non-reductionist and deflationary approach to rule-following. On this basis, I argue that today’s LLMs are in interesting, but substantive respects capable of rule-following. I also demonstrate how my deflationary account of rule-following opens up novel ways to assess the capacity of LLMs to understand, speak, and act. Lastly, I reject the charge of anthropomorphism: while my approach exhibits a philosophically unproblematic, epistemically beneficial form of anthropocentrism, it manages to mitigate anthropomorphism.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has come with a new kind of representations. We argue that these ‘artificial’ representations differ from the familiar notions of scientific and mental representations and it would therefore be a mistake to refer to them as either. Both mental and scientific representations fulfill familiar functions, albeit different ones. A key purpose of mental representations is to help cognitive systems to act and survive in complex environments. Scientific representations are diverse tools that are used to describe, explain, and predict phenomena in the natural world.

In this paper, we argue that AI representations do not currently fulfill either of these functions and that it is thus not clear what is meant when researchers refer to their AI models as “representing”. We focus on three key differences to mental and scientific representations: content, the status of misrepresentations, and a use condition. Based on these insights, we present criteria that AI systems should fulfil to be rightfully ascribed representations of their own kind. We conclude that AI systems are useful despite the unclear status of their internal states. But their usefulness does not justify to interpret these states as familiar representations, in the mental or scientific sense.

This presentation links the alignment problem in artificial intelligence (AI) to the alignment process in social interaction, exploring a procedural scheme based on normative inferentialism. Alignment as a problem in the development of technologies reveals potential inconsistencies between human goals and machine operations. The current widespread use of AI models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) underlines the difficulty of pursuing universal alignments due to their data-driven nature and the variability of human values. Through comparisons with alignment in human social interaction, it will argue that alignment is a dynamic process rooted in mutual adaptation of contexts. Drawing on Robert Brandom's normative inferentialism, which emphasizes reciprocal licensing and tracking of normative statuses in the language game of giving and asking for reasons, this presentation will propose a procedural approach to the alignment problem. LLMs constrained by data and design assumptions can be aligned through reinforcement learning with human feedback and dynamic user interactions. This alignment can be performed as an ongoing negotiation that enables AI models to be socially adaptive, context-aware, and capable of meeting diverse human needs.

Debates in animal cognition research are often polarized between the romantic view that some animals have human like cognitive capacities and the killjoy view that human cognitive capacities are unique. This lack of progress towards agreement is especially surprising since debates concerning cognitive capacities like causal understanding, theory of mind, or animal belief remain largely unaffected by new empirical evidence. The goal of this talk is to a) diagnose reasons for disagreement, and b) suggest a way to make progress. Concerning a) I will discuss three potential reasons for this situation: (1) researchers subscribe to different principles of interpretations; (2) the methods to investigate animal cognition necessarily result in a problem of underdetermination, and (3), what I take to be the central problem: disagreement is largely conceptual, i.e. researchers have different views on how to best characterize cognitive capacities. On the assumption that this analysis is correct I’ll b) argue that this does not boil down to merely verbal disagreement, and that the most promising approach to solve the conceptual question is to shift our attention from the question whether or not animals have a cognitive capacity to treating them as informative concerning how to best think about these capacities.

On the classical conception of excuses, an agent is fully excused for φing in circumstances C on account of x iff φing was not blameworthy, yet still all-things-considered wrong. Here, I field a novel argument against this view. This argument takes its cue from the possibility of agents overcoming the obstacles on account of which they count as fully excused. As I argue, defenders of the classical conception face a dilemma in accounting for the surmountability of x. Either overcoming x and not-φing is impossible, in which case considerations of Ought Implies Can yield that φing in C is not wrong. Or overcoming x and not-φing is possible and supererogatory, in which case conceptual features of supererogation again guarantee that φing in C is not wrong. I then sketch an alternative view holding that excuses are a special agent-centred class of Dancy-style disablers. Specifically, these are factors that disable the reason-giving force of considerations for agents because these agents cannot be expected to φ in S. I flesh out and defend this view, showing how it allows us to retain crucial conceptual features of excuses without committing us to the problematic idea that excuses can remove blameworthiness without affecting permissibility.

What determines the moral requirements that we have? According to the widely held practical reasons view, what we are morally required to do is determined by practical reasons – reasons for performing or refraining from actions. I argue that proponents of the practical reasons view face a dilemma if they attempt to make room for supererogation by appealing to the distinction between moral and non-moral reasons. In most cases where actions are judged to be supererogatory, they must either regard them as morally required or as rationally objectionable. If the moral reasons for these so-called supererogatory actions are stronger, they must regard them as morally required; if the non-moral reasons are stronger, they must regard them as rationally objectionable. Both alternatives are undesirable, and the occasions on which neither is the case are rare. The distinction between moral and non-moral reasons does not help us out of this dilemma; rather, it leads us into it. For the practical reasons view to be defensible, it needs to be adapted so that it is no longer vulnerable to the dilemma. This applies, for example, to de Kenessey’s (2023) view, which, in the form in which it is presented, seems untenable.

This paper aims to contribute to the deontic buck-passing project, that is, the project of analysing deontic properties and concepts in terms of normative reasons. I focus on the question of whether the project of analysing the deontic notion of a claim-right in terms of reasons is neutral with respect to other questions about rights. I argue, specifically, that buck-passers about rights must accept that rights are contributory rather than absolute notions, that their content is fully general rather than specified with exceptive clauses, and that they cannot be fully neutral among different theories of rights. First, I argue that since moral reasons could not be in principle indefeasible, insofar as rights are grounded in reasons, they cannot be indefeasible or absolute. Second, I argue that since specificationism about rights entails absolutism and buck-passers must reject absolutism, they must also reject specificationism. Finally, I argue that since rights correlate to directed duties, the notion of directedness must also be located at the level of reasons. However, one cannot make sense of this notion at the level of reasons if one appeals to theories such as the will theory. Hence, insofar as buck-passers must reject the will theory.

This paper defends a novel version of explanationism about normative reasons:

Virtue-Explanationism (VE): For R to be a normative reason for A to Q in situation S is for R to be a reason why A would Q in S, if A were virtuous.

The paper starts by motivating VE with a Kantian insight about the relationship between normative guidance and ideal agency. It then argues that VE, when combined with a plausible Davidsonian analysis of explanatory reasons, can elegantly account for both the weight and directionality of normative reasons, and the striking metaphysical similarities between normative reasons and causes. The paper closes by defending VE against charges of extensional inadequacy and circularity.

Explanationism holds that facts involving normative reasons reduce to facts involving the explanation of deontic properties. This paper argues that explanationism fails to account for the link between normative reasons for action and rational motivation, i.e., why agents act for those reasons. Two versions of the challenge are developed, drawing on two internalist principles--a metaphysical and an agent-centered one.

The metaphysical principle suggests that normative phenomena directly guide rational agents. However, if explanationism takes the reasons relation to be merely descriptive, then only deontic status properties qualify as genuinely normative. These properties might direct agents to do the right action, but they do not explain why agents act for certain reasons.

The agent-centered principle holds that rational agents respond to their recognition of a fact as a normative reason. Yet it remains unclear why agents should be motivated simply by the grounds of deontic properties. An appeal to the idea that agents base their actions on evidence for an action’s rightness still does not explain how such evidence itself becomes a motivating reason. Consequently, a competing view like reasons-primitivism--which treats normative reasons as irreducible--may better capture the connection between reasons and rational motivation.

According to holism about reasons, reasons are variant: whether a given fact is a reason for, a reason against or neither varies across situations. One argument against this view is the thick reasons argument: the argument that, since (1) thick reasons (e.g. the fact [Kim’s action is dishonest]) are invariant and since (2) they are indicative of what reasons are paradigmatically like, it follows that reasons are paradigmatically invariant. There are two strategies for defending reasons holism against this argument. The first strategy is to reject premise (1) and argue that thick reasons are variant. The second strategy is to reject premise (2) and argue that, insofar as thick reasons are invariant, they are outliers, not paradigms of reasonhood. In this paper, I first criticize these two strategies, before suggesting an alternative. Specifically, I suggest that, instead of attacking the premises of the thick reasons argument, reasons holists should reject its main presupposition: that thick facts are reasons. Thick facts, I argue, should be viewed as facts about reasons (e.g. the fact [Kim’s action is dishonest] is the fact [[Kim’s action is a believed-false statement] makes Kim’s action pro tanto wrong]). I close by responding to two objections.

According to a popular view, intentional actions are intentional under a description. Against current orthodoxy, I argue that the analogous view holds true of intentional attitudes: Beliefs, desires and emotions are intentional under a description, too.

Consider the following case:

Mistaken Identity. Alex aims a firearm at a silhouette which he mistakenly takes to be Bernard’s. Only after pulling the trigger does Alex realise that he in fact shot Chris.

There is unanimous agreement across both common law and civil law jurisdictions that Alex is to be held liable for the intentional killing of Chris. After all, the argument goes, Alex intended to shoot the person in front of him and succeeded in doing so. And although the identity of the victim may bear on Alex’s motive, it is entirely irrelevant to his intention.

In my paper, I argue that the legal orthodoxy is action-theoretically misguided. The above claim would hold true only if Alex intended to shoot the person in front of him as a particular. But, as I argue, we rarely intend particulars; most frequently, we intend under a description. And once we understand Alex to have intended to {kill the person in front of him}, both a de dicto and de re reading become available, each of which has different implications for the precise scope of his intention. I spell out these implications and assess their upshots for the question of Alex’s liability.

The settling thesis about belief says: the functional role of belief is to settle whether p for the purposes of reasoning and action. The thesis has an intuitive problem. Many belief ascriptions represent ascribees, explicitly or implicitly, as insufficiently confident to rely on their belief in reasoning and action. Contra likely expectations generated by the settling thesis, these ascriptions are felicitous and common.

In fact, they are. I argue that this is no problem for the settling theses. Unsettled belief ascriptions ascribe doxastic seemings, i.e., states in which it seems to the ascribee that p, given all the evidence they know. This is revealed in the similarity (and appropriate difference) of unsettled belief ascriptions involving “believe” to ascriptions of ordinary seemings. The paper also distinguishes two belief-believer relationships. In one, beliefs are doxastic seemings, suspending the other, more common one, in which in they fulfill their functional role.

Inner speech is often said to be a by-product of motor control, the product of a forward model driven by an efference copy of a cancelled motor command to speak. The auditory imagery of inner speech is said to arise when the product of this forward model becomes conscious. This conception of the genesis of inner speech founders on some very basic questions about the auditory imagery of inner speech and about the interaction between inner speech and episodes of imagination. Further, the empirical evidence cited in support of this theory falls short. An alternative starts with a general conception of constructive imagination, which is our capacity to produce mental images (visual, auditory, etc.) of objects and events that do not exist. Inner speech may be conceived as a species of constructive imagination. The auditory imagery of inner speech is the conscious form of inner speech. We become conscious of inner speech because doing so provides targets for acts of attention. Inner speech represents speech that does not actually exist. Inner speech also indirectly represents events in the world, inasmuch as the nonexistent episodes of speech represented would do so if they existed.

I aim to argue for the distinctiveness of a form of valuing, which I call existential valuing, the main function of which is to justify living one’s distinct life rather than regarding questions of interest. Self-interested and altruistic or moral valuing are forms of valuing concerned with what is in people’s interest – either one’s own or other people’s respectively. Existential valuing is pre-eminent with respect to questions of interest in the sense that, whilst it often overlaps with self-interested and altruistic valuing, it also provides an affirmative and definitive answer to the Existential Question “What justifies, in your eyes, living your distinct life?” Existential valuing grounds the possibility for one’s life to be perceived as meaningful, whereas self-interested valuing and altruistic valuing do not necessarily contribute to one’s life’s meaningfulness in terms of justification for living one’s distinct life. After having clarified the notions of valuing and of existential valuing in particular, I will show how the objections that have been raised against the distinctiveness of meaning in life as an evaluative domain independent from self-interest and morality do not apply to existential valuing, encouraging understanding the psychology of meaning in life in terms of existential valuing.

Traditionally, deliberation - linked to terms like ‘controlled’, ‘reflective’, or ‘conscious’ - is seen as uniquely human, and cashed in terms of abstract, intellectual processes (Kahneman, 2012; Broome, 2013). Nonhuman animals are denied such capacities: their minds are commonly considered as limited to unconscious, automatic processing. While Buckner’s (2019) deflationary account of deliberation, which involves minimal executive and cognitive control challenges this intellectualist view, and renders minimal deliberation attributable to nonhuman animals (e.g., uncertainty monitoring or inhibition), I take a step further and argue for ‘beyond minimal’ deliberation in nonhuman animals. I analyze the evidence from Osvath & Osvath’s (2008) study: apes chose between an immediate small reward and a tool enabling future access to a larger reward that is not perceptually available nor cued. Since the decision-making process involves comparing the decoupled value of the absent reward against the immediately tempting smaller reward, I argue that the apes' choice in this study suggests a capacity for deliberation that goes beyond the minimal executive control and actually involves reflection or metacognition. In this proposal, I also reconceptualize the metacognitive process involved - as affective metacognition, which involves evaluating values of different options through felt preferences.

Perspectival realism (PR) emerged as a pluralist defense of scientific realism (Giere 2006, Mitchell 2009, Massimi 2022). PR seeks to integrate scientific pluralism with a commitment to scientific realism, presenting a challenge: how can the proposed pluralism be reconciled with scientific realism as a stable middle ground?

This talk aims to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from Barry Loewer’s Package Deal Account (PDA) (cf. Loewer 2024; Author 2023 for a similar proposal). Two key interpretations of PDA are explored: PDA Pluralism and PDA Realism. PDA Pluralism posits that the history of science reveals various "packages," such as Newtonian, Lagrangian, and relativistic frameworks. PDA Realism, on the other hand, emphasizes the structure of the world may support multiple package deals. However, there is a fact of the matter that one does not know which properties are metaphysically instantiated

Together, PDA Pluralism and PDA Realism give rise to a hybrid position called Perspectival PDA, which identifies a pattern of knowledge preservation—formulated as laws—across historical package deals. The Perspectival PDA thus offers a stable middle ground, harmonizing the pluralist and realist commitments within a coherent and unified framework.

The Better Best System Account (BBSA) of laws of nature is a descendant of Lewis's Best System Account (BSA). However, the BBSA divorces with the notion of natural properties and instead features a relative freedom on the selection of the basic set of properties. But this move evades an important issue regarding the selected properties: their relationship to the world. In this paper, I want to assert, with [schrenk 2023] that the BBSA proponents should give an account of the semantic theories that could coincide with their claims.

However, I will argue, against Schrenk, in favour of a certain understanding of Semantic Externalism (SE) supported by Putnam. To support this claim, I will answer the first main objection given by Schrenk against SE to show it can be be a genuine option for the contemporary humean accounts of laws. SE can still, in a rightful way, provide a form of freedom in the choice of predicates / properties required for the pluralistic approach of the BBSA.

This paper challenges the common view that scientific theory confirmation must be contrastive (requiring examination of rival theories). Drawing on scientific practice, it argues that theories can be confirmed by evidence alone when that evidence is exceptionally strong. The argument is supported by three case studies: (1) Perrin's work on atomism, where he largely ignored rival theories; (2) mod-ern biology textbooks' presentation of evolution, which emphasizes evidence quality rather than rival theories; and (3) scientists' current treatment of well-established theories like atomism as uncontested facts. The paper examines four possible explanations for (3) – scientists' implicit justification of these theories – arguing that it stems from their immersion in overwhelming evidence with strong con-firmatory features, rather than from considering rival theories or historical chains of testimony.

A frequently invoked principle for theory appraisal in the sciences and humanities (including, especially, philosophy) are the so-called ‘virtues of a good theory’, such as simplicity, predictive power, and coherence with well-established theories. It is commonly held, though, that a clear understanding of the virtues is still lacking. An approach that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated as an answer to this problem has been pursued by Paul Thagard under the label ‘coherence-based inference’. As a specific implementation of this approach, Thagard’s ‘Theory of Explanatory Coherence’ (TEC) operationalizes the theoretical virtues and their interplay through formal ‘coherence principles’. However, TEC faces several challenges: (1) It is ambiguous with regard to the case of comparing more than two competing theories. (2) A preference for simpler (i.e., less ad hoc) explanations is not covered sufficiently in the coherence principles laid down within TEC. (3) A preference for more consilient (or ‘unified’) explanations is not sufficiently operationalized in the coherence principles. I propose solutions to challenges (1)-(3) and argue, on basis of a review of the theoretical virtues discussed in the literature, that the revised version of TEC can afford an illuminating model of theory appraisal, unifying the variety of virtues.

This paper examines the discourse surrounding the role of pluralism within the heterodox school of ecological economics. It contributes to the extensive literature on scientific pluralism within general philosophy of science by integrating two major accounts of pluralism. The argument will be presented that there is sufficient common ground between Hasok Chang’s interactive and Helen Longino’s critical pluralism to extend Chang’s three original modes of interaction with a fourth mode of critical interaction. This modified account of interactive pluralism not only addresses the pluralism question internal to ecological economics but also offers a novel approach to the wider discourse on a purported lack of plurality in contemporary economics. There is, in fact, substantial plurality, which manifests in numerous different schools of thought. The critical issue, nonetheless, lies in the lack of interaction among these schools along the lines of the four proposed modes of interaction.

First it is shown that post-intervention probabilities can be understood as conditional probabilities whose conditions are sufficiently informative: they specify not merely that something is true but that it is made true. Then a few consequences of philosophical relevance are pointed out.

The talk examines how astroparticle physics (APP) combines machine learning with causal-mechanistic explanations. To separate data from background in cosmic ray measurements, machine learning is employed. This separation results in probabilities for attributing signals to cosmic sources. APP combines these probabilistic results with causal stories about messenger particles that transfer information from cosmic sources to the Earth, raising philosophical problems regarding the theory-ladenness of data and their interpretation in terms of scientific realism vs. instrumentalism. For clarification, a closer look at the data analysis of APP is taken here, focusing on two questions: How does the machine learning used in the data analysis model the physical data-background-relation? How can probabilistic data give rise to causal stories that explain single signals? As a case study, the neutrino signal measured in 2017 by the IceCube detector in Antarctica serves. I argue that here machine learning was a mere statistical tool, whereas the causal interpretation tracing the signal back to a cosmic source depended crucially on a coincidence with the high-energy gamma ray activity of the blazar TXS 0506+056, indicating the significance of independent evidence and common-cause-arguments in multi-messenger astronomy.

Several authors have recently made a connection between algorithmic bias in machine learning and the debate about the value-free ideal in the philosophy of science. Using arguments that set out from the underdetermination of inductive conclusions by the data, a trait shared by scientific reasoning and machine learning algorithms, some have concluded that machine learning algorithms *must* be value-laden.

Drawing from the philosophy of induction, I aim to show why a general argument from underdetermination does *not* already settle that learning algorithms are value-laden. I first clarify the relevant notions of “value-ladenness” and “machine learning algorithm”. Then, relying on a distinction between domain-general learning rules and their domain-specific inductive biases, I argue that underdetermination does not yet preclude that either component is epistemically motivated or even justified. I illustrate my observations by the general framework of Bayesian induction and by the specific example of a classical convolutional neural network.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are transforming fields like Particle Physics, but their black box nature challenges scientific understanding. This talk explores whether DNNs can serve as vehicles for scientific understanding and what conditions must be met for this to occur.

I propose a minimal account of scientific understanding distinguishing between understanding as a state and a process. Scientific understanding requires both (moderate) factivity and usability. Additionally, representational devices must be intelligible and allow reliable inferences to provide understanding. The problem is that DNNs themselves are often not understood, making it difficult to use them as vehicles for scientific insight.

A promising direction lies in eXplainable AI (XA)), but many methods focus on how DNNs work rather than what they reveal about physics. To regain understanding, researchers must extract meaningful structure from DNNs, not just interpret their internal mechanics. However, a fundamental dilemma remains: intelligiblee methods often solely confirm known physics, while novel insights frequently lack clear scientific interpretation. I argue that bridging this gap is crucial for making DNNs genuine tools for scientific understanding and will discuss ongoing efforts in Particle Physics to tackle this challenge.

In this paper, I discuss the ambiguity problem which concerns the heterodox view on the qualitative identity/difference of similar fermions. According to the heterodox view, similar fermions are (almost always) qualitatively distinct, so that Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is valid (this view contrasts with the orthodox view, according to which the opposite is the case). However, several authors have pointed out that there is an ambiguity problem for the qualitative individuation of similar fermions, i.e., individuation via properties is not unique. More specifically, there is a type of ambiguity according to which fermions sometimes possess definite spin properties in more than one direction (at the same time), which straightforwardly contradicts quantum-mechanical principles. I discuss this alleged spin-ambiguity, and conclude that (luckily) it does not survive closer scrutiny.

A fundamental objective of philosophy of science is to determine how scientific theories relate to reality. While much attention has been given to the ontological status of concepts like the wave function in quantum mechanics, the status of fiber bundles has received comparatively little discussion. This is unfortunate, given that our most fundamental physical theories can be written in the geometrical language of fiber bundles. More precisely, our currently most successful and fundamental physical theories—namely, the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity—are gauge theories, and their most general mathematical framework is expressed in terms of fiber bundles. This naturally raises the question of whether fiber bundles are physically real. Although this question is not often explicitly addressed, it has been argued that similarly to how Einstein’s notorious hole argument rules out spacetime substantivalism, a generalized version of the argument rules out fiber bundle substantivalism. In my talk, I will show that by employing the recently established dressing field method, which eliminates gauge redundancy, we can construct a dressed principal bundle that is immune to the hole argument under certain conditions. This sheds new light on fiber bundle substantivalism and deepens our understanding of gauge theories.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) enables machine-assisted semantic analysis of text in an unprecedented manner, bringing into reach new research methods for text-based sciences like philosophy. Despite their immense potential, however, LLMs face crucial limitations, such as the dilution of nuanced philosophical content or missing information about texts that have not been included in the training data. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems address these issues by first setting up an explicit corpus of texts, and then, for each research question, retrieving relevant texts before generating responses on this basis. In this way, RAG systems can crucially enhance precision and depth of the results. This talk explores the potential applications of RAG systems in philosophy, their methodological challenges—including semantic search relevance, corpus selection, and granularity—and their technical implementation. Using a RAG system built on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I illustrate both its promise and the complexities of fine-tuning it for reliable philosophical inquiry.

The United Nations condemns discrimination under the following definition: “Discrimination is any unfair treatment or arbitrary distinction based on a person’s race, sex, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, age, language, social origin or other status.” Discrimination, so understood, is considered morally wrong. Many scholars argue that calling an act discriminatory communicates, by conceptual necessity, its wrongfulness. According to this view, DISCRIMINATION is a thick concept. In contrast, Descriptive View claims that DISCRIMINATION signifies a specific type of differential treatment. Proponents of the Descriptive View argue that related terms can be used in both a moralized and a descriptive sense.

Based on converging empirical evidence from four empirical studies, we argue that the folk concept of “discrimination” is a thick concept with an inseparable evaluative component. Two corpus analyses reveal a historical shift, with “discrimination” evolving from a neutral to an evaluative term. A cancelability test shows that denying the evaluative aspect of “discriminatory” leads to contradictions, indicating the communication of moral judgment by default. In a vignette study, cases often cited as examples of descriptive discrimination were judged either non-discriminatory or as morally wrongful. These results clearly support the Moralized View and propose “discrimination” as a thick concept.

This paper examines the linguistic practices of Polish non-binary speakers, focusing on their use of

neuter grammatical gender. In many languages, using "it" or neuter gender for people often

expresses negative judgments and distances the referent from full human status. Neuter gender and

the pronoun "it" commonly have pejorative connotations, reflecting a broader dehumanization or

objectification. I argue that when non-binary people refer to themselves with neuter grammatical

gender it is not merely linguistic innovation but a practice akin to slur reclamation.

In November 2024, after years of using the same opening formula, Tagesschau discontinued the use of “Damen und Herren” (“Ladies and Gentlemen”) in an effort to make its language more inclusive and accessible. This change sparked an online debate, with some arguing that its going initially unnoticed suggests a lack of significance, while others view it as a step toward greater inclusivity. Drawing on the framework of analytic philosophy of language, this paper explores the dynamics of the strategic use of silence, examining whether this choice aligns with the speaker’s intended message and identifying the potential challenges and implications of such a decision. Specifically, I argue that current frameworks still struggle to adequately account for the meaning conveyed by this silence, and thus leave open various questions about the potential consequences, both positive and harmful, of this communicative choice. I argue in this paper that while the shift away from traditional formulas may have some merit in promoting inclusivity, it can also lead to unintended consequences, such as those explored in the analysis: the potential for the speaker to absolve itself of responsibility and the potential for the omission to subtly stigmatize the omitted phrase and influence listeners’ speech practices.

Recent philosophy of language has seen a surge of interest in how language can change the attitudes and feelings of conversational parties, in particular when it comes to hate speech and political speech. Another socially relevant area where language plays a key role in changing feelings and attitudes is psychotherapy. After all, a large number of therapeutic approaches is done verbally, in the form of a conversation between therapist and client. This raises the question whether insights from philosophy of language also help shed light on the workings and the effectiveness of therapeutic conversations. The main thesis of the present talk is that David Lewis' scorekeeping model of language use enhances our understanding of the effectiveness and the linguistic workings of several core methods and interventions of talking therapy. Speaking on an abstract level, these methods and interventions are effective by changing the score of the therapeutic conversation, in particular in the form of accommodation. Using various examples, we will show that this can affect different components of conversational score.

The term "Greenwashing" has become a central battleground in climate and environmental debates, with activists, journalists and NGOs accusing businesses and governments of falsely or deceptively advertising their products, policies and actions as environmentally or climate friendly. My claim is that greenwashing is a speech act with propagandistic purpose for governments and corporations that seek to limit, silence or undermine climate and environmental policies, constituting what Stanley (2016) calls “undermining propaganda” as it initially appeals to a political ideal that it ends up undermining. I provide three observations to support my claim. Firstly, greenwashing is a way for governments and corporations to illocutionarily disable advocates of climate and environmental policy, silencing climate activists, journalists and scientists and making their assertions misfire with their audiences. Secondly, greenwashing mirrors what Saul (2018, 2024) calls covert intentional dogwhistles by exploiting existing social resentments as a tool for political manipulation away from climate and environmental policies. Thirdly, greenwashing constitutes what Shields (2022) calls conceptual domination, a form of conceptual engineering that exploits institutional authority to enforce the uptake of a revised concept. Greenwashing is an excercise in conceptual domination of green, climate and environmental concepts to make them more convenient for governments and corporations.

An attractive way to characterize substantive disagreement as opposed to merely apparent disagreement is in terms of noncotenability. Noncotenability is standardly described in terms of exclusion of joint truth in a broadly Kaplanian framework. Against this standard model, it has recently been suggested that this kind of truth-based noncotenability – sometimes called “referential” noncotenability – is not sufficient for substantive disagreement. The reason for this is that substantive disagreement often seems to require a more fine-grained understanding of content. In this vein, Verdejo and de Donato-Rodríguez (2021) argue that disagreement is best characterized at the level of intension conceived of as Fregean sense, or mode of presentation. This paper agrees that referential noncotenability is not sufficient for disagreement. However, it argues against the conclusion that disagreement is best described at the level of Fregean sense. Contending that neither a referential nor a Fregean characterization covers all intuitive cases and thus fails to get the extension of “substantive disagreement” right –, the paper recommends a conceptual ethics approach to the notion of substantive disagreement. It argues that considerations stemming from the debate about peer disagreement in social epistemology should guide our delineation of this notion in philosophy of language.

Despite intense debates on particular philosophical methods, such as conceptual analysis, the foundational question “What is a method?” remains surprisingly underexplored. This may be due to Russell’s dictum that “Nothing of value can be said on method except through examples,” which is, however, at odds with philosophers’ treatment of other key topics, like knowledge. This talk challenges Russell’s dictum constructively with a general account of methods as monotelicly coordinated generalized impersonal plans. The account crucially draws on observations about everyday methods, e.g., that methods (1) have constitutive goals, (2) are sketchy in practically irresolvable ways, (3) depend on contextual factors, and (4) exhibit goal unclarity. The account is supplemented with accounts of method-adoption and method-application. Roughly, adopting a method consists in personalizing its impersonal plan, and applying a method in realizing its generalized plan by a contextually particularized plan. Inter alia, the account enables a more systematic examination of method-evaluation in terms of, e.g., reliability and efficiency, goal-appropriateness and goal-clarity, and contextual adequacy. The account also sheds light on particular methods, such as philosophical argumentation or reflective equilibrium, and important methodological controversies, like the debate about “the scientific method”, which is plagued by a rigid and unrealistic understanding of methods.

The philosophical program of conceptual engineering is habitually presented as marking a methodological shift in philosophy. But for all the recent interest in methodology, there is little debate on what philosophical methodology amounts to, or how philosophical programs might impact it. Drawing on the idea that we can capture impact on methodology (uncountable) by tracing impact on methodologies (count noun), we develop a proposal as to how one may track methodological impact, and we apply it to conceptual engineering. First, we set off philosophical methodology against philosophical methodologies. Second, we engineer a simple model of philosophical methodologies as types of minimal philosophical projects, which we understand as triples <A,M,C> combining a proximal philosophical aim A, a philosophical method M, and a philosophical concern C. Finally, we use our model to argue that conceptual engineering is apt to impact philosophical methodology in three ways – (1) by popularizing a characteristic engineering methodology combining aims A, methods M, and concerns C into a generic type of philosophical project, (2) by popularizing the characteristic practical concern of improving the world by ameliorating language, and (3) by bringing conventional philosophers to shift their proximal aims to engineering aims, and their methods to engineering methods.

We should typologise the thought experiments we employ as tests for theories, i.e., formulate abstract case-types of which our specific thought experiments are case-tokens: When proposing a case-type, we make a hypothesis about which of the case’s structural features guided our intuitive evaluation. If we present both a thought experiment and our suggestion what case-type we think it’s a token of, we open up means for assessing whether our intuition about the case should have evidential weight in the process of theory-testing. An intuition about a thought experiment should only have evidential weight if it is directly replicable, i.e., if an exact repetition of the experiment yields the same result. But even if this is confirmed, we cannot be sure the intuition is accurate. The thought experiment might be deceptively formulated, misleading people’s intuitions. We should therefore use the hypothesised case-type as a blueprint for formulating additional case-tokens, and then test whether these evoke the same intuition. If they do, we have a conceptual replication, lending some support for using our intuitions about tokens of this case-type as evidence. If they don’t, further research is needed: Either our original thought experiment is deceptively formulated or our hypothesised case-type is wrong.

The orthodox view holds that verdicts about hypothetical cases in thought experiments are based on intuitions. Cappelen, Deutsch, and more recently Horvath (collectively CDH) challenge this view, arguing instead that such verdicts are based on arguments. CDH support their view by citing textual evidence from contemporary thought experiments. This paper raises two objections to the argument view, specifically regarding Gettier's thought experiments. First, the linguistic reasoning indicators in Gettier's text are insufficient to substantiate the argument view. Reasoning may facilitate understanding without serving as evidence, leaving room for intuitive justification. Second, the argument view fails to account for the compelling epistemic force of Gettier's case, a point I will substantiate through various arguments.

There are few texts addressing the issue of the distinction between true philosophy and ‘false’, ‘bogus’ or ‘pseudo-philosophy’. All the approaches so far share a similar structure – pseudo-philosophy is defined in terms of certain relation to the standards of true philosophy. The difference between these approaches lies only in the different definition of this relationship. This shared structure of the previous theories of pseudo-philosophy results in an impasse. Firstly, it entangles the issue in the problem of uninformativeness, since there is no agreement on the content of the ‘standards of true philosophy’. Secondly, it fails to grasp the difference between pseudo-philosophy and ‘bad’ philosophy, i.e. low-quality deliberation. In my talk, I will review previous approaches and describe the problems mentioned above. I will then present my own attempt to overcome the impasse in considering pseudo-philosophy. I shall call it ‘social metaphilosophy’, i.e. an approach to the discipline that shifts the focus from philosophical rules, values and essential properties to the socio-institutional aspects of philosophizing. I will attempt to argue that social metaphilosophy elucidates the notion of pseudo-philosophy better than the traditional ‘individual’ approach.

Wer sich in der Philosophie umsieht, gerät zuweilen ins Staunen. Philosophen scheinen sich nur über wenige Thesen einig zu sein; vielmehr scheint die Kontroverse der Normalfall. Können wir vor diesem Hintergrund guten Gewissens von „Fortschritt“ in der Philosophie sprechen?

Ich werde dafür argumentieren, dass die Diagnose, die Philosophie erziele keine nennenswerten Fortschritte, während Natur- und Technikwissenschaften rasant voranschritten, fehlgeleitet ist. Dabei werde ich zunächst erörtern, welche Argumente üblicherweise gegen die Existenz philosophischen Fortschritts vorgebracht werden, und in einem nächsten Schritt auf die Frage eingehen, in welchem Verhältnis die Philosophie zu denjenigen Wissenschaften steht, denen nahezu vorbehaltlos Fortschritte zugeschrieben werden. Ich werde drei unterschiedliche Konzeptionen philosophischen Fortschritts diskutieren: i) die Elimination als falsch erwiesener Positionen oder logisch-begrifflicher Widersprüche, ii) die Präzisierung philosophischer Probleme und ihrer Lösungsvorschläge, sowie iii) die Aktualisierung philosophischer Konzepte und Positionen angesichts neuer Erkenntnisse anderer Wissenschaften oder soziokultureller Veränderungen. Ich werde schließlich die Position einnehmen, dass die Philosophie als Teil eines methodisch differenzierten Wissenschaftsgefüges anzusehen ist, dessen einzelne Disziplinen durch Familienähnlichkeiten zusammengehalten werden, und den eigenen Anspruch auf Erkenntnisfortschritt und Wahrheitsermittlung keineswegs aufgeben muss.

Sextus Empiricus reports arguments against voice and mental movements as truth bearers. I argue that some of these arguments are Stoic and justify the Stoic view that truth and falsity belong to a third item, the lekton – the incorporeal signification of linguistic utterances. The argument against voice is that only significant voice can be true or false, but those who do not speak our language can hear our voice without understanding the signification. So truth cannot lie in the voice, but in its signification, by grasping which we recognise the truth or falsity of what someone has said. Mental movements are private to each individual and others cannot even know for sure what another person’s thoughts are, let alone whether they are true or false. There would be no way to establish an agreement on what is true. These arguments contain the desiderata that a truth bearer must be publicly accessible and able to be known. These desiderata are fulfilled by lekta as they are signified by linguistic utterances but not identical to mental movements. In this way, I propose to answer the question of why the Stoic truth bearers are lekta and not something else.

In Kants Augen unterscheidet sich das sogenannte infinite Urteil „Steine sind unsterblich“ nicht nur strukturell, sondern auch inhaltlich vom verneinenden Urteil „Steine sind nicht sterblich“, weil es mehr besagt, als dass es Steinen an Sterblichkeit mangelt. Laut Strobach besteht dieses Mehr darin, dass ein Objekt, das unter einen negierten Begriff fällt, unter den zugehörigen nichtnegierten Begriff fallen könnte. Diese Deutung ist allerdings mehreren Problemen ausgesetzt. So stimmt sie nicht mit Kants Diktum überein, dass die Kategorie Limitation aus der Verbindung der Kategorien Negation und Realität entspringt. Ich stelle deshalb eine Interpretation vor, die sich aus der „traditionellen Begriffstheorie“ herausziehen lässt, wie sie Kant zugeschrieben wurde. Nach dieser Theorie sind Begriffe in Gattung-Art-Hierarchien organisiert, die durch „logische Einteilung“ entstehen. Dementsprechend gehören die Dinge, die unter einen Begriff und seine Negation fallen, zu einer gemeinsamen Gattung, die beide Begriffe in ihrer Anwendung einschränkt. Abschließend wird dem Einwand begegnet, dass diese Interpretation – anders als die von Strobach – keine allgemeine Regel für die Ermittlung der einschränkenden Gattung bietet. Tatsächlich stimmt dies mit unserer Verwendung negierter Begriffe überein: Wer einen Begriff und die Kopulanegation beherrscht, beherrscht damit noch nicht den zugehörigen negierten Begriff, weil dafür eben auch die relevante Gattung bekannt sein muss.

Kant’s pre-critical possibility proof for the existence of God, which he develops in detail in the Beweisgrund from 1763/64, is often thought to have Spinozistic implications. One key reason for this is that Kant’s reasoning in the Beweisgrund appears to entail that God is extended or spatial. Kant argues that God exemplifies all fundamental or primitive predicates. Since he also treats extension as such a fundamental predicate, it straightforwardly seems to follow that God is extended. This paper argues that Kant’s argument in the Beweisgrund does not, in fact, lead to this Spinozistic conclusion. In other writings from the same period Kant distinguishes between concepts that are fundamental for us and concepts that are fundamental in themselves, and he even applies this distinction to the concepts of space and time. With this distinction in hand, Kant is equipped with the resources to block the Spinozistic conclusion that God is extended: he can accept that extension is a fundamental concept for us while simultaneously rejecting that extension is a concept fundamental in itself. Thus, extension need not be a predicate that is exemplified by God, and the Spinozistic threat can be averted.

Kant’s rejection of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is both explicit in his own writings and unanimously acknowledged by commentators. By contrast, Kant’s stance on the Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, i.e. Leibniz’s Law, surfaces only sparsely in his writings and has escaped direct attention in Kant scholarship. Leibniz’s Law roughly states that if a and b are identical, then b has every property a has, and vice versa. In my talk I will present a comprehensive study of the scant writings pertinent to a reconstruction of Kant’s position. Prima facie these passages suggest two opposing lines of interpretation. According to the first, Kant approves of Leibniz's Law (Approval Reading). According to the second, Kant rejects Leibniz's Law (Rejection Reading). Yet the opposition of the Approval and the Rejection Reading is, as I will show, merely apparently exhaustive — an Ecumenical Reading is available: I will argue that, while Kant ,approves' of the truth of the proposition expressed by Leibniz's Law, he ,rejects' Leibniz's Law as a genuine principle.

How is inquiry possible? Since Meno’s paradox, it has seemed that inquiry requires some intuitive grasp of ultimate explanations. Yet a core tenet of Kant’s philosophy is that reason is discursive, i.e. conceptual. While some scholars argue that discursivity accounts for the demand for explanation, I contend that this thesis cannot explain the possibility of inquiry—for it fails to generate its goals. To address this gap, I propose an alternative approach. Rather than collapsing discursivity and the demand for explanation, I isolate them as distinct aspects of reason, which allows us to understand how they interact in generating goals of inquiry. First, I argue that the logical use of reason, tied to discursivity, fails to guide inquiry toward explanations. Second, I propose that the real use of reason, which generates concepts of totalities of grounds, is the source of the demand for explanation. Finally, I introduce two models for understanding such totalities—ontological and representational—and argue that the latter enables us to treat totalities as goals, rather than given realities—thereby making inquiry purposive. This provides a Kantian solution to Meno’s paradox by reconceptualizing inquiry as an active process that generates knowledge through the approximation of explanations.

In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant introduces gratitude as an imperfect duty to others. Kant’s characterisation of the duty of gratitude is, however, not easily reconciled with the idea that being thankful is an imperfect duty, i.e., a duty which allows agents to find their own distinctive ways in which to realise the demands of the moral law. Rather, Kant appears to suggest that recipients of beneficent gifts are required to reciprocate favours as if they had to make up for a debt, thereby bringing gratitude close to the fulfilment of a perfect duty. In this talk, I aim to challenge the view that Kant wants us to understand gratitude as a duty to repay a debt. To that end, I propose a novel reading which helps us make sense of gratitude as an imperfect duty. On the Opportunity Reading, as I shall call it, the duty of gratitude consists in taking acts of benevolence one has received as opportunities to become oneself a benefactor to others. In this regard, the duty of gratitude turns out to be a version of the duty of beneficence and thus a genuine imperfect duty to make the well-being of others one’s end.

In the existing literature, the concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ are built upon a central assumption: trust and trustworthiness are intimately linked because trust is agent-directed. The two concepts are reciprocal: all else being equal, an agent should trust the trustworthy agent. Most accounts assess trust and trustworthiness based on a normative requirement, treating them as two sides of the same coin. In contrast to these views, my account begins with the observation that trust and trustworthiness can come apart, both on the descriptive level and on the normative level. Descriptively, agents can and do sometimes trust untrustworthy agents or fail to trust a trustworthy agent. Normatively, we should sometimes trust untrustworthy agents. due to the ‘feedback-loop’ of trust, where trust encourages trustworthiness. Conversely, we should sometimes not trust otherwise trustworthy agents because trustworthiness is often domain- (or situation) specific.

I propose that we first understand trust and trustworthiness descriptively, as distinct phenomena. By developing an accurate descriptive account based on recent findings in psychology, I aim to provide a novel, empirically grounded metaphysical view. Once both descriptive and metaphysical accounts are established, we can then address the normative question of when an agent should trust another.

The epistemology of testimony is a central pillar of social epistemology.

It is, however, analyzed primarily from the point of view of the justification of the beliefs an audience learns from testimonial reports.

This leaves out important dynamics, in part because the audience is not actually limited to an epistemic interest in the proposition reported on by the speaker in a given testimonial interaction.

Hence, we introduce a game-theoretic representation of testimony to recover a wider range of interests.

Using the model, we analyze a type of epistemic exploitation, a kind of epistemic injustice which occurs in testimonial exchanges.

It is widely agreed that we can and should defer to experts in fields such as the natural sciences. The case is different for morality. Here, many oppose of deference on the grounds that if we defer, we cannot gain knowledge, or fall short of showing an appropriate epistemic or affectional response. In my opinion, however, this is based on a misconception of moral testimony as simple or single-sentence testimony and can be refuted if one conceives of it as narrative testimony – which makes sense because those who speak about morality often have (personal) moral stories to tell.

Some epistemologists argue for the claim that we can wrong others by what we believe about them. In this paper, we shall argue that if we believe in the notion of doxastic wronging, then we should also be open to the possibility of zetetic wronging, i.e. the possibility to wrong others by having an inquisitive attitude about them, irrespective of any subsequent action. First, we shall show that intuitions from cases, as well as the apology argument, provide prima facie support for the concept of zetetic wronging. By parity of reasoning, if these arguments support doxastic wronging, they should likewise support zetetic wronging. Second, we shall explain how inquisitive attitudes can wrong. We shall argue that inquisitive attitudes toward a question Q can be wrongful because of the kind of attitude they are: (i) they are incompatible with holding an outright belief about the answer to Q, (ii) they are goal-directed attitudes and come with satisfaction conditions, (iii) they are responsive to reasons. Finally, we shall argue that zetetic wronging is best thought of as an alternative to doxastic wronging as it can explain the wrong of paradigmatic cases, as well as additional wrongs that doxastic wronging cannot address.

Dilemmic cases in epistemology have attracted a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we suggest a novel approach of how to handle dilemmic cases in epistemology. We will argue that if we adopt an agent-centered view of evidence and reasons, the cases that allegedly give rise to epistemic dilemmas will fail to qualify as genuinely dilemmic.

When we learn that someone holds irrational beliefs, we often respond by reducing our epistemic trust in them: regarding the topic in question, we are less inclined to believe them, less confident in their abilities to form true beliefs, and less willing to partner with them in inquiry. In my talk, I will propose a novel account of epistemic trust reductions. The recently popular relationship-modification account of epistemic blame (RMA) will serve as a foil for this project. RMA says that epistemically blaming others for their epistemic failings involves modifying our epistemic relationships with them, paradigmatically via a reduction of epistemic trust. RMA has faced two challenges, which I will show result from a mistaken view about epistemic trust reductions. On my account, epistemic trust reductions play an essential role in governing the division of epistemic labor. By drawing on resources from legal theory, I will more specifically argue that trust reductions bear all the hallmarks of so-called non-punitive measures, which exclusively serve preventative collective purposes. The resulting account of epistemic trust reductions as non-punitive epistemic measures (NoPEM) explains when and why it is appropriate to reduce epistemic trust and shows where RMA goes wrong.

Institutional facts (facts constituted by the collective recognition of their existence) appear to be ontologically peculiar, and a realist perspective on them appears to encounter certain problems. One issue is the possibility of inconsistencies, which may occur when inconsistent states of affairs are collectively recognized.

In a recent article, Richard Corry proposes a solution to this problem. His suggestion is that institutional facts do not exist absolutely but are ontologically relative. According to his proposal, the collective recognition that p through G does not entail the straightforward occurrence of p; rather, it results in the occurrence of p-relative-to-G.

In our presentation, we aim to show, first, that Corry’s account faces significant problems: (a) it is ontologically revisionary, (b) its development appears epistemically ad hoc, and (c) its extension is materially inadequate, if we trust general intuitions.

Secondly, there seems to be an inherent dilemma in the attempt to avoid the inconsistency problem by adopting relativist ontological assumptions, as proposed by Corry. It seems that, quite generally, an account either fails to capture the institutional facts as we conceive of them adequately, or it succumbs to the inconsistency problem.

Ongoing processes require a metaphysical conception of time according to which the world is existentially dynamic. Within the framework of the growing block theory of time, a crucial question emerges concerning the precise nature of becoming in a growing block universe: What exactly happens at the edge of becoming? Does a process constitute an expanding whole – complete yet growing – or is a dynamic processual entity inherently incomplete due to open-endedness? In this talk we want to discuss whether what is situated at the edge of becoming is not yet a temporal part of the (therefore open-ended) process, but rather transforms into its temporal part immediately afterwards. Then, the process is either still ongoing or it has gone on. Through this interpretation, of what dynamic processes are/do at the edge of becoming, open-endedness may not require or constitute an incompleteness of the growing block universe.

My presentation is a contribution to contemporary analytic metaphysics of time and its connection to processualism, i.e., the thesis that processes are fundamental. The discussion of Zeno's arrow paradox has, since Aristotle, been understood to pertain to the mereological structure of time, namely whether it is constituted by points (atomism) or extended intervals (synechism).

Yet, following Whitehead's process philosophy, one should distinguish between the continuity of time and the continuity of becoming. On a processual understanding, Zeno's paradox can be resolved if one questions the premise that processes, in particular the process of becoming, are continuous. It is the discontinuity of becoming that dissolves the troubles posed by Zeno's arrow. Surprisingly, however, the time that is brought about by becoming is continuous.

Such a solution critically rests on the idea that processes, in particular the process of becoming, are more fundamental than time. In light of recent developments in the metaphysics of science and particularly the fundamentality or emergent nature of spacetime, I aim to reevaluate the processual answer and discuss its implications.

This talk examines the divide between events and processes, questioning whether a deep ontological distinction is necessary. Dualists argue that events are static, closed, and perduring, while processes are dynamic, ongoing, and enduring, drawing on aspectual expressions like perfectivity and telicity. I challenge this framework and propose a unified, monistic account that explains the differences without positing distinct ontological categories.

Central to my proposal is a slot-structured mereological framework, where occurrences are four-dimensional individuals composed of instantaneous states or temporal stages. I introduce a distinction in how occurrences realize their essential kind, which models the above mentioned expressions. This structural approach preserves the explanatory power of dualism without requiring fundamentally different ontological categories.

Through this distinction, I show that occurrences can accommodate change and persistence within a perdurantist framework, challenging the dualist claim that only enduring entities can change. I also address the problem of interruption, arguing that interrupted events are better understood as unfulfilled attempts at realization, while occurrences that realize their kind continuously are never incomplete—they simply end. My approach offers a parsimonious framework to unify telicity, persistence, and change.

A perdurant extends through time in virtue of having temporal parts, so it does not directly instantiate any of its temporary properties. If my cold mug was hot, its later temporal parts directly instantiate cooler temperatures, and its earlier temporal parts directly instantiate hotter ones. However construed as a temporally extended whole, the mug only derivatively instantiates heat and coldness, in virtue of its parts doing so. In fact, the mug doesn’t have a temperature at all - its parts do, but the mug itself doesn’t. I’ll call this the perdurantist’s problem of temporary properties.

I argue that Parsons (2000) inadvertently supplies the perdurantist with the tools they need to solve this problem when he posits ‘distributional properties’ which are instantiated by objects over a spatial region or interval of time. If we select the entire pattern of a certain kind of temporary property an event instantiates over its lifetime, then we can say that the whole event does indeed directly instantiate those of its properties that change, in virtue of instantiating this special kind of property.

Martin Pickup (2023) has recently proposed a novel account of change, which he claims to circumvent the well-known concern about B-theoretic accounts that they fail to take change seriously enough: his situationalist account is supposed to accommodate all the desiderata that are thought to be crucial for viewing change as a robust phenomenon. According to the situationalist, what is the case is always relative to situations, but when two situations ‘disagreeing’ about how things are fuse into a larger one, it is metaphysically indeterminate how things are in the larger situation even though they are perfectly determinate in its proper parts—‘zooming out’ makes things fuzzy. The situationalist thus posits ‘worldly’ indeterminacy in any situation in which an object undergoes change—and indeterminacy of such a large scope is likely to alarm even those who are in general sympathetic to the idea. In this paper, I present an alternative, less costly account of the ‘unsettledness’ of large situations, one that views it as a matter of non-uniformity rather than indeterminacy.

Catherine Elgin famously argued that scientific representations (e.g. models, diagrams) are ‘felicitous falsehoods’, insofar as they diverge from ‘truth’ by simplifying or idealizing their target system but this divergence is exactly what makes them epistemically felicitous since it facilitates understanding (cf. 2017, 1). Elgin thus defines the ‘felicitousness’ of scientific representations solely in epistemic terms which excludes the possibility that they might engender understanding but nevertheless be ‘infelicitous’ due to ethical-political reasons, such as some of Marie and Otto Neurath’s Isotypes which e.g. reveal a racist aesthetics by representing East Asians with yellow-coloured figures and using similar visual stereotypes.

In this talk, I critically discuss Elgin’s conception of scientific representations as ‘felicitous falsehoods’ using the example of the Neurath’s Isotypes and their use of racist visual stereotypes and show that this leads to a ‘dilemma’ since the epistemic success of such representations depends essentially on the use of politically problematic visual stereotypes. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s artwork-essay (1969), I analyze this dilemma in terms of the opportunities and dangers coming along with a ‘collective aesthetic’. Concludingly, I follow Benjamin’s call for a ‘politicization of the aesthetic’, arguing for an account of scientific representations which complements Elgin’s with a political dimension.

We argue that the Harmony Problem in architecture actually consists of two problems that are often conflated in the literature: the Inter-Harmony Problem and the Intra-Harmony Problem. The Inter-Harmony Problem arises when buildings do not harmonize with other buildings, whereas the Intra-Harmony Problem arises when the proper parts of a building do not to harmonize. We argue that both problems demand an explanation in the context of modern architecture. We defend a new explanation of the Inter-Harmony Problem based on the notion of degrees of freedom, and we compare our approach with (i) Silber’s, who blames the celebrity architects’ lust for attention, (ii) Scruton’s, who identifies a lack of grammar in modern architecture, and (iii) de Clercq’s, who exposes a tendency of dehumanization in modern architecture.

Die platonistische Partei hat sich in der werkontologischen Diskussion des letzten Jahrhunderts immer wieder auf Freges Begriff des Objektiv-Nichtwirklichen bezogen. Doch während Freges paradigmatische Kandidaten für Objektiv-Nichtwirklichkeit (Begriffe, Zahlen und Gedanken) als ewig bzw. außerzeitlich gelten, erscheinen Werke als per definitionem geschaffen; sie haben folglich einen Anfang in der Zeit. Wenn aber – wie es von hier aus den Anschein haben kann – Objektiv-Nichtwirklichkeit Außerzeitlichkeit impliziert, dann müsste eine platonistische Werkontologin den prima facie absurden Schluss ziehen, dass auch Werke, so wie Begriffe, Zahlen und Gedanken, in Wahrheit keinen Anfang in der Zeit hätten, und dass sie also durch ihre jeweilige Autorin gar nicht erfunden, sondern lediglich gefunden würden. Ich argumentiere, dass dieser Schluss vorschnell ist: Freges Argument für die Objektiv-Nichtwirklichkeit von Entitäten erzwingt keineswegs eine Außerzeitlichkeit derselben. Frege nennt vielmehr diejenigen Entitäten objektiv-nichtwirklich, die zwar nicht als solche sinnlich wahrnehmbar sind, die aber in unserer diskursiven Praxis immer schon als objektiv vorausgesetzt werden. Ich zeige, dass sich dieses Argument in der Tat auf Werke (als geschaffene Entitäten) übertragen lässt. Damit eröffnet sich die Möglichkeit, dass Werke sowohl objektiv-nichtwirklich als auch erfunden sein können. Der Vortrag untersucht die Konsequenzen dieser Position für die Begriffe von Autorschaft, Erstmanifestation und Werkidentität.

This paper argues that aesthetic emotions—emotions experienced when evaluating art as art—are inherently epistemic emotions, as they enhance cognitive processing and understanding. This claim will be discussed within a framework of Affective Aesthetic Cognitivism that posits that emotional engagement with art is central to fostering cognitive expansion, reflection, and creative insight. I will conduct a Philosophically Guided supplementary Analysis (PGsA) of existing empirical data from published studies, demonstrating that aesthetic emotions in their datasets are correlated to both high ratings of artistic value and cognitive transformations, including moments of insight and shifts in perspective. This paper bridges the gap between philosophical aesthetics and empirical research. It will discuss the embodiment, core affect, and semantic dimension of wonder, and demonstrate that it is a paradigmatic aesthetic emotion that tracks the artistic value of art. 

There seems to be a puzzle, as all the following three sentences appear to be true: (1) Single pictures can be narrative; (2) Sequences of time are an integral part of narratives; (3) Single pictures cannot represent sequences of time. To solve the puzzle one of the sentences is wrong and in need of adaptation. In this paper I argue that that sentence (3) is wrong, and I argue that single pictures can represent sequences of time and therefore can be narrative.

But if pictures can be narrative, how can they be narrative? How is it possible that single pictures, without words, can transport a narrative content? There are three options: (a) the narrative content is depicted, (b) the narrative content is represented, (c) the narrative content is conveyed by (using) pictures in some other way. For sentence (1) to be true, either option (a) or option (b) must be possible. With the help of examples, I show that it is possible to formulate semantic rules that take us from a depicted content to a represented narrative content, and thereby offering an account that provides a solution to the puzzle and the subsequent how-question.

The talk considers the categorization of affective injustice as a form of pure structural injustice and its consequences for guilt, blame and responsibility. Starting from the premise that affective injustice is a form of structural injustice according to Young, the talk argues that a paradigmatic form of affective injustice (“uptake injustice”) qualifies as pure structural injustice according to McKeown. This means that there are no agents who have the power to directly change the social structures relevant to the injustice. At the same time, and contrary to other forms of pure structural injustice, the individual manifestations of this injustice are not blameless. It is possible to hold individuals responsible for the harm caused, because the relevant harm has an individual cause as well as a structural one. Accordingly, moral responsibility can exist where theories of structural injustice only locate political responsibility. These hybrid causes of the harms of certain forms of affective injustice show that the relations between power, guilt, blame and responsibility in theories of structural injustice must be further differentiated.

In this paper, I discuss social hierarchies as a phenomenon of the occupational division of labor. Social hierarchies rank individuals and social groups according to status and esteem. While democratic–egalitarian societies subscribe to the idea that all humans are equals, our social world is still full of status asymmetries: professors, managers, and physicians are ranked above students, cleaners, and nurses. These rankings are a function of a system of division of labor. Through a division of labor, we produce the goods needed for social reproduction, but at the same time it creates different types of labor, and with it, different social roles. Some of these roles are intuitively higher than others, a ranking that expresses normative valence, which in turn is indicative of social hierarchies. This is a moral problem for a society of democratic equals. Does the occupational division of labor necessarily constitute a social hierarchy? If it does, then division of labor is incompatible with the idea of democratic equality. If it does not, the question arises what distinguishes social hierarchies from morally more benign social asymmetries, and whether and how we can turn the former into the latter.

Dieser Vortrag leistet einen Beitrag zur Analyse sexistischer und epistemischer Unterdrückung, indem er ein Konzept männlicher Ignoranz entwickelt und in den Zusammenhang bisheriger Debatten um epistemische Ungerechtigkeit stellt. Er argumentiert erstens, dass Charles Mills‘ Konzeption Weißer Ignoranz und männliche Ignoranz sich als verschiedene Formen privilegierter gruppenbasierter Ignoranz insofern analogisieren lassen, als dass die beiden Unterdrückungssysteme Race und Gender Nichtwissen in ihren Epistemologien enthalten, die die jeweilige Unterdrückung perpetuieren und sichern. Zweitens wird im Zusammenhang mit anderen Formen epistemischer Unterdrückung dafür argumentiert, dass Ignoranz das grundlegendere und kausal vorgelagerte Phänomen ist, weswegen ein Konzept männlicher Ignoranz dazu beiträgt, andere Formen epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit in Bezug auf Gender aufzudecken und zu kritisieren.

Philosophers engaged in the debate on cultural appropriation have observed that such appropriation appears morally problematic when it affects oppressed cultural groups but not when it affects dominant ones. In this talk, I will focus on a specific kind of cultural appropriation called style appropriation. Style appropriation occurs when members of one cultural group adopt styles distinctive of another, such as certain clothes, hairstyles, adornments, or designs. The aim is to offer a novel argument for why style appropriation is morally problematic when it affects oppressed but not dominant cultural groups. The argument proceeds in three steps: (i) Style appropriation can cause the silencing of people who use culturally specific styles to communicate their cultural identity. (ii) This silencing is morally problematic when it affects members of oppressed cultural groups because it undermines vital interests linked to their group’s social status. (iii) In contrast, such silencing isn’t similarly problematic for members of dominant cultural groups because, due to their group’s status, they don’t have these same interests.

Historical theories of gender (Bach 2012; George & Briggs manus; Godman 2018; 2021) claim in different ways that gender is a historical kind. I examine the prospects of such theories of gender in terms of their theoretical grounding in cultural evolutionary theory and their ability to do justice to the experiences of trans* people, especially non-binary people, with gender.

I argue that those historical accounts proposing that gender kinds are culturally reproduced lineages of women, men, non-binary people, etc. (cf. Bach 2012; Godman 2018; 2021) have unrealistic empirical implications and cannot do justice to the complexity of the experiences of trans*, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people do with gender. There are no culturally reproduced lineages of women, non-binary people, etc. but rather at best culturally reproduced lineages of individual gendered traits and practices.

Furthermore, I argue that a multi-level analysis, i.e., acknowledging the different levels of (social) organization on which evolutionary processes occur, is necessary when looking at the cultural evolutionary processes surrounding gender. This enables viewing gender categories as features of social groups that depend on the cultural reproduction of social practices and gendered traits of individuals, and divorcing the membership conditions of gender categories from cultural reproductive processes.

Understanding how humans navigate social interactions is central to social cognition research. Traditional folk psychology, grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), emphasizes inferring mental states as critical for predicting and coordinating behavior. However, this mindreading-centric approach faces growing criticism for over-intellectualizing social cognition and neglecting simpler, adaptive strategies. Studies in behavioral ecology and distributed cognition suggest that humans often rely on heuristics and context-sensitive strategies to reduce cognitive demands. Social scripts emerge as a compelling alternative framework, offering structured, context-dependent templates that simplify social coordination by embedding shared norms and practices. They function as evolutionary adaptations, scaffolding social learning and facilitating efficient coordination without taxing cognitive resources. Recent interdisciplinary work highlights scripts’ grounding in neural processes, their normative role, and their flexibility across contexts. Building on these insights, I propose the MIND Script framework, which reconceptualizes scripts as Modular, Interdependent, Negotiable, and Distributed. This framework unifies diverse script approaches, incorporates the often-overlooked affective dimension, and emphasizes scripts as foundational mechanisms for social cognition. Using real-world scenarios, such as cross-cultural dining and classroom settings, MIND Script demonstrates how individual agency, collective practices, and environmental scaffolding interact dynamically, offering a unified, ecologically valid perspective on structured yet flexible social interactions.

Difficult actions, such as quitting smoking, pose a paradox for rational confidence. Statistical evidence suggests that failure is likely, leading to the intuition that agents should have low confidence in success. Yet successfully quitting smoking requires sustained high confidence to maintain perseverance. This creates a tension between epistemic and practical rationality—should one be less confident based on evidence or more confident to be able to succeed?

In response to this paradox, I introduce a novel account, Confidence Dualism, which distinguishes between epistemic confidence (grounded in degrees of belief) and practical confidence (grounded in degrees of acceptance).

First, I show why orthodox monistic-epistemic approaches to rational confidence struggle to resolve the paradox. Some argue that epistemic rationality is a form of instrumental rationality. Yet this leads to the incommensurability problem and fails to explain how one can simultaneously have epistemic reasons for low confidence and practical reasons for high confidence.

Then, by extending Bratman’s model of the agent’s cognitive background of deliberation to include degrees of acceptance, I argue that practical confidence is grounded in degrees of acceptance. This enables agents to rationally pursue difficult actions without epistemically overestimating success, thereby resolving the paradox of difficult action.

This paper argues for the existence of a kind of action, involving multiple agents, that is not captured by our accounts of joint action. In these cases, one agent acts in support of another, rather than the two agents acting together to realise a shared intention. It argues that the extant accounts of joint action involve a symmetry between the agents, each acting with the same intention, which is a feature not just of the accounts but of the phenomenon they describe. Following this, examples of ‘dependent intentional action’ are offered, to illustrate that this kind of action is commonplace. These are cases of ‘direct helping,’ but not in the course of a joint or collective action. Moreover, dependent actions lack the necessary symmetry to themselves be instances of joint action. Rather than each agent acting with the same intention, one acts with an intention to φ, and the other to help the first to φ. The supported agent, acting with an intention to φ, also has a guiding role over the action as a whole that adds to this asymmetry. These actions complicate the picture we have of the ways we can act alongside one another.

In this paper, I propose a framework to analyze ordinary acting from an action-theoretical perspective that focusses on the first person as agent and creator of their very own everyday life. My first thesis is that any plausible theory of ordinary acting has to explain three salient features of everyday life: everyday life is shaped by experience and education; it is produced through repetition and internalization; it is characterized by stable expectations and certainty in acting. My second thesis holds that Quill R Kukla’s notion of embodied stances can be used to develop a more specific notion of stable embodied stances to understand how people navigate their ordinary lives. Stances are embodied strategies for interacting with the world, shaped by experience and education and ingrained through repetition. These stances form stable patterns of action which allow people to perform actions without effort and with a sense of certainty. My third thesis is that we should differentiate between two paradigmatic types, habits (quasi-automatic stances) and routines (more complex, knowledge-based and intentionally controlled stances). Finally, stable stances do not limit individual freedom but enable it. Individuals can consciously shape their lives by choosing which stances to develop and by reviewing established stances.

The discussion of negligence in moral philosophy literature is often one-sided as a result of a primary focus on the agent's risk assessment. To be sure, negligence is characterized by culpably lacking knowledge. However, most of the literature only focuses on the riskiness of the action with regard to harm. Further reference points for culpable ignorance are often neglected.

The following questions are to be answered: Which reference points can this lack of knowledge possibly have? Do the common characterizations of negligence apply to all possible points of reference? I argue that more of these are relevant than discussed in literature. The two reference points I focus on are, firstly, the knowledge of the ability to intervene if required , and, secondly, culpably erroneous knowledge of justifying circumstances. Both cases show that there is negligent action with full awareness of the risk of harm.

Furthermore, the diversity of duties of care that play a role in negligence is often overlooked. These duties can have various content. A satisfactory understanding of negligence requires taking this diversity into account and recognizing duties of care as secondary obligations to ensure compliance with more general primary duties such as preventing harm.

In his seminal work Logic and Conversation Grice has explicated the phenomenon of conversational implicatures. As Grice makes clear, conversational implicatures arise due to features of the utterance context in combination with certain maxims that underlie our conversations. Depending on which maxim is responsible, he distinguishes four kinds of conversational implicatures: Relevance implicatures, quality implicatures, quantity implicatures, and manner implicatures. While some of these subtypes have extensively been investigated, there is barely any research on manner implicatures. This talk aims to fill this lacuna by examining how exactly manner implicatures arise. While Grice has identified a rather wide variety of maxims that are responsible for their emergence ('Be brief, be orderly, avoid ambiguity, avoid obscurity'), it is argued that there is a uniform maxim that brings manner implicatures about, i.e. the maxim 'Avoid atypicality'.

Grice (1989) and and later Lewis (1969, 1975) offered well-known and influential reductive explanations of linguistic meaning, both taking the linguistic meaning of a sentence in a speech community to be grounded in certain distributions of attitudes (intentions, beliefs, desires) amongst the language using members of the community. This paper addresses three important objections to this general approach: (i) the objection that the account incorrectly requires language users to have higher-order beliefs (Glüer & Pagin 2003), (ii) the objection that the account wrongly locates language processing in the instrumental reasoning part of the mind (Laurence 1996) and (iii) the objection that the accounts idealise inappropriately by assuming that cooperative assertoric language use is central (Keiser 2023). The paper argues that these objections reveal shortcomings in the Grice-Lewis programme, shortcomings that need to be addressed if the programme is to be successful. Finally, the paper proposes to exploit more recent theories of conversation in an attempt to resurrect a reductive explanation of linguistic meaning in terms of Lewisian conventions.

In this paper, I introduce the concept of multimodal lies and examine its implications for definitions of lying. Traditional content-based definitions, such as those by Saul (2012), Carson (2006), and Stokke (2013, 2014), restrict lying to explicit assertions of a believed-false proposition. Commitment-based definitions, developed by Viebahn (2017, 2019, 2020, 2021), broaden this scope by including non-literal, presuppositional, and pictorial lies. However, both approaches remain limited to single expressive modes and do not fully explain how multimodal communication generates commitment. I argue that multimodal communicative acts can establish commitments equivalent to explicit assertions, challenging the assumption that lying is necessarily linguistic. By introducing multimodal lies, I aim to demonstrate their role in modal reinforcement, wherein multiple expressive modes converge to increase communicative commitment. This reinforcement reduces interpretative flexibility and constrains plausible deniability, strengthening the speaker's commitment to the conveyed content.

It is widely agreed that ‘therefore’ constructions, such as ‘He is an Englishman, and, therefore, brave’, convey a dependence and that this dependence projects out of entailment cancelling environments. Focusing on narrative uses of ‘therefore’, I show that ‘therefore’ constructions can convey a causal dependence that is not suitable for projection. I also show how this finding puts pressure on standard accounts of ‘therefore’s semantic contribution in terms of conventional implicatures (Grice 1975; Potts 2007) or triggered presuppositions (Pavese 2017, 2021, 2022; Stokke 2017; Kocurek and Pavese 2022). In particular, this finding indicates that, in its narrative uses, the causal dependence is a part of ‘therefore’s core semantic content.

The utterance of “because”-sentences is typically construed as an assertion of some explanatory or grounding relation between the propositions expressed by the adjacent sentences. With an utterance of “The street is wet because it has been raining,” the speaker asserts that the fact that it has been raining causally explains the fact that the street is wet. In our paper, we highlight an often neglected use: what we call the reason-giving use of “because”-sentences. By saying, “John likes Mary, because he brought her flowers,” the speaker gives a reason for believing that John likes Mary. We hold that reason-giving acts are not descriptions of explanatory relations between two propositions, but expressions of basing-relations between attitudes. We will (i) discuss possible ways of determining on the basis of linguistic and epistemological criteria which of the two uses is at play in a given case, (ii) analyse both uses in terms of a contrast class-based analysis, and (iii) claim that utterances of “because”-sentences are level-ambiguous: “because” can operate on propositions or on the beliefs that represent those propositions. We conclude by pointing out some implications for both metaphysics and epistemology.

An argument is valid if, and only if the conclusion of the argument is true under all interpretations under which the premises are true. In contrast to most modern incarnations of this definition, I take truth (or rather satisfaction) to be a primitive notion. Interpretations are understood as substitution instances. In contrast to Tarski's typed approach, the notion of logical validity is applicable to the language in which it is formulated. In contrast to the usual model-theoretic definition of logical validity, my account features an intended interpretation. Moreover, for every model of the language, there is a substitutional interpretation, that is, a substitutional instance plus a specification of the values of the free variables of the substitution instances.

The model-theoretic definition of logical consequence presupposes a division of the expressions of a language into logical and non-logical. The idea that invariance of denotations captures an important aspect of the formality of logic has long been taken to supply at least a necessary criterion for the logicality of an expression. This idea, however, seems to rely on classical presuppositions, such as bivalence and a (classical) set-theoretic background theory. This is problematic since the model-theoretic definition finds application in a host of non-classical logics. Yet, in how far is its usage in these contexts justified if it crucially depends on classical assumptions?

In this talk, we investigate the nature, role and justification of invariance criteria in non-classical settings. We examine whether commonly used criteria continue to provide reliable classifications of logical expressions in these frameworks and study how they might be modified or supplemented in order to provide well-motivated and adequate demarcations of non-classical constants. A core contention of our proposal is that the type of invariance appropriate for a given logic is not independent of its characteristic (non-classical) features. We demonstrate how this idea can be spelled out for a selection of non-classical logics.

We argue that Gödel's Programme, understood as the search for new axioms possibly extending ZFC and ultimately leading to an exhaustive description of the set-theoretic universe, is destined to fail.

Initially motivated by the discovery of independence phenomena, Gödel's Programme seeks to identify axioms A such that ZFC+A resolves interesting independent questions and is maximal according to some canonical justification method. Various axiom justification approaches -- intrinsic and extrinsic justification, Maddy's naturalism, consistency strength, interpretability power -- have been proposed. However, they face at least two issues: uncertainty and mutual incompatibility.

Uncertainty arises when a justification method J ranks theories ZFC+A and ZFC+B equally, yet they describe vastly different set-theoretic universes. Mutual incompatibility occurs when two justification methods J and Q disagree, i.e. when J ranks ZFC+A higher than ZFC+B, while Q ranks ZFC+B higher than ZFC+A.

A possible solution is to apply multiple justification methods, but the order of application influences the outcome, still yielding incompatible theories. Another is to scrutinise the philosophical motivation for J and Q, justifying a particular order of application. We explore these possibilities and underpin them with examples. We argue that this issue is particularly challenging for the universist.

I aim to draw a connection between higher-order metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics, in particular set theory. Higher-order metaphysics means carrying out metaphysical debates in higher-order logic, using higher-order quantifiers to regiment talk of propositions, properties, and relations. A prominent topic in this area is grain science, the investigation of individuation conditions of propositions, properties, and relations. These topics seem purely metaphysical. But I will argue that they are intimately connected to questions in (the philosophy of) mathematics. In particular, I will argue that views about grain science can resolve the continuum hypothesis. To do so, I will present an example of such a view. I won't argue for it, but I hope to motivate, first, that the view is attractive, or at least not implausible; second, that the view doesn't obviously prejudge controversial questions in (the philosophy of) set theory; and third, that the view nevertheless settles the continuum hypothesis. The view assumes that sets obey the principles of ZFC set theory, and that propositions form a structure which corresponds to a particular complete Boolean algebra. Adapting standard forcing results using Boolean-valued models, we can show that this higher-order metaphysical view entails the failure of the continuum hypothesis.

This talk aims to answer two main questions: Can foundational theories be explanatory? If yes, can explanatoriness be used as a criterion for the preference of specific foundational theories? This is investigated by bringing together two debates, the one about explanations in mathematics and the other about criteria for preference of foundational theories. To answer the first question, an account of explanatoriness of foundational theories is developed. Here foundational theories are the explanans for mathematics (the explanandum) by fulfilling at least one of the criteria of Explanatory Systematization (ES) or Explanatory Reduction (ER), therefore also allowing for degrees of explanatoriness. ES can be expressed by epistemic accounts of explanation such as the unificatory account proposed by Kitcher (1989). ER corresponds to ontic accounts and is expressed here by the account of Pincock (2015) where explanation derives from dependency relations between objects of different abstractness. With this, the second questions is answered: It is argued that set theory fulfills ES but not ER, whereas category theory fulfills ER but not ES. Therefore different preferences for foundational theories can be linked to different ways in which these theories explain.

This paper aims to resolve the recent debate over whether belief is incompatible with inquiry. I first argue that belief that p is either metaphysically or rationally compatible with merely having some doubt about whether p, whereas it is incompatible with being in doubt about it. Being in doubt about whether p is a stronger way of being uncertain about whether p than having some doubt about whether p. One has some doubt about whether p if and only if one is neither certain that p nor certain that not-p. But being in doubt about whether p also requires being in a state that disposes one to be reluctant to take a stand on whether p. I then motivate the idea that inquiry is an activity of resolving doubt and, as such, is sustained by doubt. Since doubt comes in two varieties, inquiry can be sustained by two kinds of doubt. Inquiry into whether p is incompatible with belief that p when it is the inquirer’s being in doubt about whether p that sustains inquiry, However, it is compatible with belief that p when it is the inquirer’s having some doubt about whether p that sustains it.

Is akrasia necessarily irrational? My answer is “yes”. I respond to recent arguments attempting to show that epistemic akrasia is not, which encourages the thought that rationality does not forbid the akratic state. Key to my diagnosis is a generalization of the akratic state beyond beliefs (epistemic akrasia) and intentions to act (practical akrasia) to a wider class of attitudes: the reason-sensitive attitudes. I contend that a failure to notice this generality has prevented commentators to correctly identify the akratic state and invited false diagnoses. In this paper, I first argue that a subject may be akratic with regards to any of her reason-sensitive attitudes, which include for instance motivated desires. Second, I show that the akratic state so understood reduces to believing a contradiction, which is necessarily irrational.

In my talk, I will discuss the recently presented claim by Tilton and Toole that dominant knowers can and should hold marginalized standpoints. While their arguments are mostly convincing, I will show that some problems arise with this view that have not been discussed in standpoint epistemology. For instance, standpoint epistemologists have conceived the method for achieving a standpoint (consciousness-raising) as exclusionary to dominant knowers. I will argue that we should understand consciousness-raising as a process of epistemic cooperation. Then, I will provide some epistemic norms for such cooperation between marginalized and dominant knowers for the latter to achieve standpoints. To do so, I will also discuss a joint paper by Tilton and Toole in which they respond to Taiwo’s critique on deference. Contrary to them, I will argue that for dominant knowers to achieve standpoints, they must defer to epistemically superior marginalized knowers to access relevant evidence and epistemic virtues and behaviours. I will conclude with some words of caution for dominant knowers on how not to dominate marginalized knowers but help to further (epistemic) justice for them.

Feminist epistemologists have long observed that otherwise disadvantaged social positions sometimes come with epistemic benefits. Although such benefits imply comparative deficits on the part of those occupying more advantaged social positions, the distinctive deficits on the part of otherwise privileged persons remain underexamined. This paper focuses on certain epistemic deficits suffered by those occupying positions that grant coercive power. I argue that those occupying such positions are systematically disadvantaged due to this power. In short, coercive power functions—or, at least, can function—to bias the flow of information toward the agent possessing this power.

Such biasing can cause at least three sorts of epistemic challenges for those in positions of coercive power. First, such agents may be fed information intended to please them, rather than to inform them, and may consequently be misinformed. Second, unwelcome information may be withheld from such agents, and thus such agents may be uninformed. Finally, even if agents in positions of coercive power are not misinformed or uninformed, the mere plausible threat that the information they receive is subject to such bias may be enough to compromise the warrant for their beliefs.

Recent debates have characterized suspension of judgment in various ways: as the mere absence of belief and disbelief, as a higher-order belief about one’s lack of commitment, or as a distinct cognitive attitude governed by its own norms. Despite these differing perspectives, there is broad agreement on its linguistic properties: suspension is a question-directed attitude, naturally expressed with interrogative complements. We contribute to the debate with a novel distinction between what we may call standard suspension—e.g. where one does not know whether a proposition is true or false—and radical suspension—e.g. where one is unsure whether the proposition is even on topic to the question under discussion. We discuss the philosophical relevance of the distinction, its problems and possible consequences. Then, to formally capture these distinctions, we propose a game-theoretic semantic framework based on Bochvar’s three-valued logic, where the third value (b) represents an off-topic status. The model incorporates two sub-games: a cooperative sub-game determining topic relevance and a competitive sub-game assessing truth value. In the final part of the talk, we explore the normative profile of radical suspension and how it sets itself apart from other forms of suspension.

Peirce’s pragmatist theory of truth posits that truth is the eventual outcome of an indefinitely extensive amount of scientific research. The minima trivialia objection challenges this theory by pointing to common sense truths, such as what one had for breakfast, which are not the result of prolonged collective scientific effort. However, this objection fails if we adopt Sellars’s distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of humanity in the world, along with the associated scientific realism. In this Sellarsian framework, minima trivialia are viewed as akin to claims defended from the perspective of the manifest image, like the existence and persistence of material objects, and not as genuine truths, which are recognised only from the scientific image’s viewpoint. But the myth of the categorial given, according to Sellars, entails that the views from the manifest image are essentially naïve realist claims about the categorial dimension of reality. Hence, only claims that properly belong to the scientific image—explanatorily and empirically adequate—are good candidates for satisfying categorial truths. So, in the end, embracing this distinction, which aligns well with Peirce’s framework, circumvents the minima trivialia objection.

Der Vortrag argumentiert dafür, dass sich personale Selbstverständnisse kohärenztheoretisch konzeptionieren lassen und damit wahrheitsfähig sind. Um dieser These nachzugehen, wird exemplarisch Linda M. Alcoffs kohärenztheoretischer Ansatz aus Real Knowing (1996|2018) herangezogen und auf personale Selbstverständnisse angewendet werden. Das Konzept des Selbstverständnisses entspringt der narrativistischen Debatte und bezeichnet das Verständnis einer Person davon, wer sie ist. Während in dieser Debatte implizit angenommen wird, dass es richtige und ‚falsche‘ Selbstverständnisse gebe, bleibt fraglich, woran sich der Wahrheitswert von Selbstverständnissen bemessen lässt. Denn es gibt mindestens zwei Herausforderungen für eine erkenntnistheoretische Konzeption von Selbstverständnissen: Die Fehleranfälligkeit autobiografischer Erinnerungen und die Produktivität des Selbstverstehens. Der Vortrag zeigt, dass sich diese Herausforderungen jedoch bewältigen lassen, wenn man eine Kohärenztheorie wie die von Alcoff nutzt. Alcoff schlägt mit dem „Immanenten Realismus“ einen Ansatz vor, der abzubilden vermag, wie Wissen in einem politisierten Kontext tatsächlich produziert wird. Sie begreift Wahrheit dabei als emergente Eigenschaft aller Elemente, die in einem spezifischen Kontext involviert sind. In diesem Sinne lassen sich personale Selbstverständnisse nach Alcoff als Kohärenzmenge beschreiben, die aus der Interaktion zwischen Realität und Menschen entsteht. Der Vortrag konkludiert damit, dass es mit Alcoffs Ansatz prinzipiell möglich ist, Selbstverständnisse als wahrheitsfähig zu konzipieren.

Inquiry and its relation to knowledge have recently gained significant philosophical attention. Some theorists argue for a close connection between knowledge and inquiry, while others think that they are more distinct. The existing discussions, however, ignore the question of whether knowledge and inquiry are co-extensive, that is whether everything that we can know we can also successfully inquire into and vice versa. In this paper, I will argue that they are not co-extensive, discussing several kinds of propositions that, even though they can be known, we cannot properly inquire into whether they are true. I will introduce rationality requirements for suspension of judgment that limit the possibilities of rational inquiry but not of other potential procedures of knowledge acquisition. As I will show, we cannot rationally inquire in cases where new and independent information is required that is not available. This limitations concern inquiry via bootstrapping and inquiry into the truth of indications that can only be delivered by a single source at a single occasion. However, we can clearly know in this latter case and, arguably, we can also know via bootstrapping. Hence, there are propositions that we can know but into which we cannot rationally inquire.

An agent simplifies her reasoning when she deliberates using only a subset of the available information. Sometimes, simplification is motivated by environmental pressures, other times by default, and other times by the express intention to do so. Doxastic states play a simplification role because they serve as inputs to deliberation. This means that the causal role they play, in part, explains why they help to simplify. In the literature, it has been objected that beliefs can play this role because they are involuntary doxastic states while simplification can be voluntary. This presentation pushes back against this argument by showing that the voluntary nature of a doxastic state is separable from the voluntary nature of their formation process and therefore from the causal roles they can play. I conclude by showing that belief voluntarism can still be attacked on the intuitive grounds that beliefs are involuntary.

The aim of this talk is to explore some of the relations between argument and virtue. In particular, I explore the prospects of an account of virtuous argument along the lines of Ernest Sosa's AAA framework in virtue epistemology. I start with a brief critical assessment of virtue argumentation theory, a field which draws on virtue epistemology and applies it to argumentation, and show how a more nuanced picture of the relations between argument and virtue is called for. As a step in this direction, I propose to give an account of virtuous argument acts in terms of apt argument acts, i.e. argument acts that are accurate because they are adroit. I close with reflections on the merits and flaws of the AAA framework in its application to argumentation and the analogy with its application to the case of knowledge.

While the study of reasons is of central interest in some parts of contemporary philosophy, it is mostly ignored in others. In my talk, I want to counter this fragmentation by suggesting a systematic bridge between the philosophical theory of epistemic reasons (normative reasons for belief) and Bayesian formal epistemology. If I am right, both sides can benefit from joining forces.