Below you’ll find all short term changes to the GAP.9 program that have reached us after the official program booklet was already in print.
program change in the colloquium “Philosophy in the Face of Peer Disagreement”
The talk by Dirk Koppelberg on “Does Disagreement in Philosophy Lead to Skepticism?” has been cancelled and is replaced by Thomas Grundmann’s talk on “Metaphilosophical Skepticism and Peer Disagreement”.
Metaphilosophical Skepticism and Peer Disagreement
Thomas Grundmann (University of Cologne)
Abstract
Disagreement often helps us to overcome errors and thus stimulates epistemic progress, because it forces us to seek further evidence and to engage in self-critical thinking. If everything works out well the result will be a convergence of our views over time. The situation that we find in philosophy seems to be very different. Leading philosophical experts who regard each other as peers and who have carefully considered the relevant evidence over an extended period of time nevertheless often come to conflicting judgments. What is more, these conflicts have no tendency to disappear over time; and they seem to be quite ubiquitous in philosophy. Many epistemologists think we should draw general skeptical conclusions for philosophy as a potential source of knowledge from these observations.
In my talk I will mainly do two things: (i) I will explicate the arguments that draw skeptical consequences from peer disagreement – it will turn out that epistemic principles of defeat play a key role here; (ii) I will argue that these skeptical arguments are rarely applicable to philosophy, partly due to the specific characteristics of this discipline. If I am right, there is no reason to be especially worried about widespread peer disagreement in philosophy.
cancellations section talks
Hannah Altehenger (section 11)
Gregor Betz (section 6)
Alexander Dinges (section 6)
Cord Friebe (section 4)
Mantzavinos, Chrysostomos (section 4)
Stefan Reining (section 7)
Christoph Schickhardt (section 12)
Olivier Sartenaer (section 5)
re-scheduled section talks
The talks by Anna-Maria Eder and Insa Lawler have been switched. The new dates and rooms for both talks are as follows:
Lawler, Insa, “Knowledge-Why Revisited”: Wednesday, 3:15 p.m.–4:00 p.m., 11/213
Eder, Anna-Maria, “Getting Rid of Ideal Agents”: Thursday, 9:00 a.m.–9:45 a.m., 11/214
The talk by Guillermo Del Pinal and Kevin Reuter has been moved to the following slot:
Del Pinal, Guillermo / Reuter, Kevin, “Jack is a True Scientist: A Philosophical and Empirical Study on the Content of Dual Character Concepts”: Tuesday, 1:30 p.m.–2:15 p.m., 11/214
The talk by Jonathan Mai has been moved to the following slot:
Jonathan Mai, “Resistant Rigidity”: Tuesday, 4:00 p.m.–4.45 p.m., 11/214
cancellations posters
Anders Landig (section 1)
Fabian Seitz (section 5)
new posters
The following posters have been added to the program:
Florian Fischer (Poster P2.8)
Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
fischerf@uni-bonn.de
Universal dispositional laws of nature
Does the globality problem undermine the universality of dispositional laws of nature?
One important problem for dispositional theories of laws of nature is the tension between the locality of dispositions and the being global of the laws. Already within the debate about dispositions a similar problem arises: how do dispositions synchronise their behaviour if each of them is only local? Also the laws natural necessity seems endangered by the locality of the dispositions. I sketch a theory of dispositions as natural kinds, which come with inbuilt combination principles for other natural kinds.
Martin Grajner (Poster P 2.9)
Technische Universität Dresden
martin.grajner@tu-dresden.de
Grounding as Entailment and Explanation
A lot of philosophers have claimed that the predicate ‘grounds’ expresses a notion that resists analysis in more primitive terms. Audi (2012), Fine (2012), Rosen (2010), and Schaffer (2009) subscribe to a view of this kind. The primitivist view is motivated by the idea that grounding does not appear to be analyzable in counterfactual or modal terms and that analyses in terms of other notions¾such as ontological dependence, supervenience, or identity¾fail to capture what we have in mind when we say that one fact is grounded in another. In this paper, I shall propose an analysis of ‘grounds’ that maintains, very roughly, that grounding might be understood by reference to the notions of entailment and explanation. I’ll try to show that this account is able to accommodate the features that we pre-theoretically associate with the notion of grounding and that this account is further able to deal with the examples that seem to speak against analyzing the notion of grounding in terms of supervenience or closely related notions.
Gregor Hochstetter (Poster P 11.6)
Universität Tübingen
gregor-hochstetter@gmx.net
Everyday Actions, the Causal Theory and the Anarchic Hand
Looking at everyday actions reveals an interesting contrast. Some actions are deliberation-driven. However, a lot of everyday actions are environmentally-driven reactions towards salient objects without prior deliberation. A key problem in providing an account of everyday actions is that they are very similar to behaviour that we find in ‘Anarchic Hand Syndrome’ (AHS). AHS-behaviour resembles normal environmentally-driven actions in being goal-directed, fluent, and flexible. However, AHS-behaviour cannot be suppressed.
Proponents of the Causal Theory of Action (CTA) explain environmentally-driven actions in terms of an underlying structure of mental states that cause these bodily movements (Searle 1983, Mele 1992). The central challenge for CTA is to provide an account of everyday actions that sufficiently distinguishes them from AHS-behaviour. The obvious solution is to supplement the accounts with an additional mental state to ‘suppress’ (Pacherie 2007) or ‘veto’ (Mele 2009) unwanted reactions. Yet, this strategy leads to an implausible account of action.
changes chairs
TUE, 15.9., 1.30 – 4.45 p.m. (section 4): Sebastian Lutz instead of Cord Friebe
THUR, 17.9., 9.00 – 10.30 a.m. (section 6): Peter Brössel and Insa Lawler instead of Anna-Maria Eder