Philosophy Talks 2012
Spring 2013 Speaker Series
Shaun Nichols, Professor, University of Arizona
Public Lecture: Two Senses of Self
Thursday, April 11, 7:00 pm
Media & Communications Room 00057
Philosophers have uncovered apparently conflicting patterns of intuitions about personal identity (e.g., Williams 1970; Sider 2001). In some cases, it seems that personal identity depends on the continuity of psychological properties; in other cases, it seems that personal identity is preserved despite a radical discontinuity in psychological properties. Survey studies have shown a similar split in how ordinary people think about the self (Nichols & Bruno 2011). This talk will report a series of new studies in which we manipulated how people think about the stability of their traits. We find that this affects economic decisions, but not other future concerns. I'll suggest that these results follow from two different senses of self. The proposal that there are two senses of self is bolstered by research on amnesia patients (Klein et al. 2004; Klein & Nichols 2013), but it remains unclear exactly how we, as philosophers, should react to the plurality of senses of self.
Shaun Nichols, Professor, University of Arizona
Department Colloquium: Rational Learners and Non-utilitariun Rules
Friday, April 12, 4:00 pm
Eng/Phil 264
Hundreds of studies on moral dilemmas show that people's judgments do not conform to utilitarian principles. However, the exact nature of this nonconformity remains unclear. Some maintain that people rely on deontological "side constraints" that are insensitive to cost-benefit analysis. However, the scenarios that are used to support this intuition, e.g., the magistrate and the mob, contain an important confound. In these cases, we consider whether it is appropriate for one person to violate a moral rule in order to prevent others from committing similar violations. In that case, people tend to say that it would be wrong to violate the rule. In a series of experiments, we showed that people give very different responses when the question is whether an agent should violate a moral rule so that she herself doesn't have to commit more such violations in the future. This suggests that a critical feature of our moral rules is that they function in an intra-agent, rather than inter-agent manner. But this raises a further question --why do our rules have this non-utilitarian character? One prominent view (e.g. Mikhail 2007) holds that the structure of moral rules plausibly depends on an innate moral grammar. We propose instead that given the evidence that the young child has, a rational Bayesian learner would in fact arrive at non-utilitarian rules.
Christopher Hom, Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University and Jeremy Schwartz, Visiting Assistant Professor, Texas Tech Univeristy
Department Colloquim: What the Frege-Geach Problem is Not
Friday, April 19, 4:00 pm
Eng/Phil 264
The negation problem for expressivism says that expressivists can't provide sufficient structure to account for the various ways in which a moral sentence can be negated. In this paper, we argue that the negation problem does not arise for expressivist accounts of all normative language but arises only for the specific examples on which expressivists usually focus. Looking to non-normative cases we find that a very similar negation problem can be generated for language that has hidden adverbial structure. We propose, therefore, that what separates language that faces the negation problem from language that does not is that the former, unlike the latter, has hidden adverbial structure. Accordingly, we suggest an analysis of 'wrong' and 'required' as unconditional normative disapproval or endorsement and explain how this analysis overcomes the negation problem. Finally, we compare our own account to the influential account given in Schroeder 2008.
Susan Haack, Professor, University of Miami
Departmental Colloquium: The World According to Innocent Realism: The One and the many, the real and the imaginary, the natural and the social
Monday, April 29, 7:30 pm
Eng/Phil 264
Innocent Realism is a metaphisical theory, and as such is about the world (not our concepts or language). Its key thesis is that there is one real world, which is at once very heterogeneous, and yet integrated. An exploration of the meaning of "one," and then of the meaning of "real," reveals that "real" contrasts with "fictional, imaginary"; and that, since fictionality is a matter of degree, so too is reality.
Susan Haack, Professor, University of Miami
Inistitute for Study of Western Civilization Lecture Series: The Integrity of Science: What It Means, Why It Matters
Tuesday, April 30, 5:30 PM
Student Union Building, Escondido Theatre
Joel Velasco, Ahmanson Postdoctoral Instructor in Philosophy, California Institute of Technology
Public Lecture: The Tree of Life: Metaphor, Models, and Reality
Thursday, May 2, 7:00 pm
Media & Communications Room 57
Common ancestry is one of the pillars of Darwin's theory of evolution. Today, the Tree of Life, which represents how all life is genealogically related, is often thought of as an essential component in the foundations of biological systematics and so therefore of evolutionary theory – and perhaps all of biology itself. It is an iconic representation in biology and even penetrates into popular culture. Massive amounts of time, effort, and money are being put into understanding and reconstructing the Tree. Yet there are serious debates as to the usefulness and even the very existence of the Tree. Here I will attempt to critically evaluate the merits of some of these worries. In doing so, we will see that questions about the Tree and the foundations of systematics can only be answered in the light of not only a wide range of empirical considerations, but of philosophical considerations as well. An historically informed picture of how and why we got to where we are today is important for understanding these debates; however, here I can give only the briefest of introductions to the history of the Tree as it has been used in systematics. Then we will focus on contemporary discussions, and finally, look to the future.
Joel Velasco, Ahmanson Postdoctoral Instructor in Philosophy, California Institute of Technology
Departmental Colloquium: Evolutionary and Newtonian Forces
Thursday, May 3, 4:00 pm
Engl/Phil 264
A number of recent papers have criticized what they call the "dynamical interpretation" of evolutionary theory found in Elliott Sober's The Nature of Selection. Sober argues that we can think of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces analogous to Newtonian mechanics. These critics argue that there are several important disanalogies between evolutionary and Newtonian forces such as that unlike evolutionary forces, Newtonian forces can be considered in isolation, they have source laws, they compose causally in a straightforward way, and they are tertium quid in a causal chain.
Here we defend and extend the forces analogy by arguing that each of these criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of Newtonian forces. We then examine the some of the criticisms of Sober's causal claims and here we find some agreement with the criticisms of the dynamical view. Our discussion also has the interesting consequence that natural selection turns out to be more similar to forces such as friction and elastic forces rather than the more 'canonical' gravitation.
Fall 2012 Speaker Series
Francesca diPoppa, Associate Professor, Texas Tech University
Department Colloquium: Some Remarks on Religious Exemptions for Health Care Professionals
Friday, October 5, 4:00 pm
Eng/Phil 264
Democratic countries offer some legal protection to health care professionals who refuse to perform requested medical interventions because of conflicts with faith-based moral convictions. Aside from legal arguments, which will not be addressed in this paper, there is an intuitively appealing defense for these protections based on the notion that individuals should not be asked to act against their moral or religious conscience. I will argue firstly that this argument could bring serious dysfunctions into the medical profession, unless unavoidably arbitrary distinctions are put in place. Then, I will argue that such protections constitute unacceptable violations of patient autonomy. Health care professionals ground their authority on their unique medical expertise. Such expertise can sometimes justify overruling a patient’s autonomy. However, medical expertise does not include superior competence in moral or religious decision-making. Therefore, it should not overrule a patient’s own moral or religious conscience.
Michael Serra, Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University
Department Colloquium: Cue-Utilization in Metacognitive Judgments of Learning
Friday, October 19, 4:00 pm
Eng/Phil 264
When people think about or evaluate a cognitive state or process, they are said to be engaging in metacognition, or “thinking about thinking”. Metacognitive processes are particularly relevant when students are learning new information and studying for tests. For this reason, much empirical research on human metacognition has focused on students’ monitoring and control of their learning and study processes. Importantly, metacognitive monitoring is inferential in nature, so the accuracy of students’ evaluations of their learning (and, therefore, the efficacy of their ongoing study behaviors) will be limited by the predictability of the cues they consult to inform their metacognition. Towards this point, I will discuss my empirical research into some specific cues that students use to inform their judgments of learning and how their utilization of these cues leads to accurate or inaccurate metacognitive monitoring in various situations.
Adam Sennet, Associate Professor, University of California, Davis
Public Lecture: Whither Philosophy of Language?
Thursday, November 8, 7:00 pm
Media & Communications 00057
Philosophy of language took a prominent role in 20th century philosophical thinking, but it is one of philosophy's less well publicly understood areas. Generally when philosophers of language tell people what they do, they are told that it sounds like linguistics rather than philosophy. When they tell linguists, they are told it sounds like philosophy rather than linguistics. This talk will tease apart some of the themes and methods of philosophy of language and try to explain why it's hard-to-pin-down image is a mark of its success rather than failure to articulate clear philosophical questions.
Adam Sennet, Associate Professor, University of California, Davis
Departmental Colloquium: Expressivism and Subjunctive Conditionals
Friday, November 9, 4:00 pm
Eng/Phil 264
Expressivism is a view about indicative conditionals that is debated, but some of the arguments for expressivism about indicative conditionals extend to subjunctive conditionals as well. We (Hirsch and I) show that the arguments extend to cases involving modals in general and that thus these arguments are either far too strong or they reveal that our modal talk, both epistemic and metaphysical, is expressivist rather than cognitivist in nature
Cynthia Freeland, Professor & Chair, University of Houston
Public Lecture: Icon and Index Revisited: Artistic Explorations of Medical Imaging Technologies
Thursday, November 29, 7:00 pm
Media & Communications 00057
This talk explores a range of medical imaging technologies that challenge the icon/index distinction articulated by C.S. Peirce, ranging from electrocardiograms to X-rays, ultrasounds, and fMRI images of the brain. Dr. Freeland questions the nature of realism in such images and examines the role of interpretation and aesthetic choice in their creation. Finally, she discusses work by various artists who have used “automatic” imaging technologies for creative purposes, including Robert Rauschenberg, Gary Schneider, Aline Mare, Gabriele Leidloff, Gabriel de la Mora, and Wim Delvoye.
Cynthia Freeland, Professor & Chair, University of Houston
Departmental Colloquium: Revisiting Plato on Images and Art
Friday, November 30, 4:00 pm
Eng/Phil 264
In his 2002 book The Aesthetics of Mimesis (Princeton) Stephen Halliwell argues that Plato held inconsistent views about mimesis (which he translates as “representation”): first, that there are accurate forms of rendering reality; second, that art involves mere appearance and hence must be distrusted. Halliwell thus challenges the standard interpretations of Republic X’s notorious dismissal of all mimesis as false and psychologically damaging. My paper follows up on this line of thought by examining other relevant texts from Plato (Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Cratylus, and Laws). I seek to clarify the connection between mimesis and images or appearances in Plato. This requires a review of his analysis of vision as well as of his claims about how images, whether faithful ones (eikones) or “mere” appearances (fantasmata), can mislead the soul into experiencing so-called false pleasures (Philebus). My aim is to produce a more subtle and considered view of Plato’s ideas about art. In closing I will briefly sketch a story about the influence of Plato’s views upon Neoplatonic and Byzantine treatments of images and icons.