CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2013 MLAG

Graduate Conference in Philosophy

The Mind, Language and Action Group invites submissions from graduate students for a conference hosted by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto, to be held on the 21 and 22 of November, 2013. The theme of the conference is: Perception, Thought and Judgment – Perspectives on Subjectivity.

We encourage submissions in a broad range of philosophical traditions.

Keynote Speakers:

Charles Travis

Professor of Philosophy, King’s College – London

Kenneth Westphal

Professor of Philosophy, University of East Anglia

The deadline for submission of papers is August 15, 2013.

Guidelines:

Submit papers to gcmlag@gmail.com by August 15, 2013. Papers should not exceed 4000 words and must be suitable for a 40-45 minute presentation. All submissions must be in PDF or Word formats. Papers should be prepared for blind review.

Submit a separate cover letter in PDF or Word format with the following details: name, paper, title, institutional affiliation, and contact information.

Authors must be current graduate students in philosophy. Co-authored papers are permitted if all authors are current graduate students.

Successful applicants will be contacted by August 31, 2013.

Send questions or concerns to gcmlag@gmail.com

Lecture series – Unmediated Consciousness:

Back to the Cartesian Intuition -

Internalism, externalism and the mental

Professor Gerhard Preyer

Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

30- 31 May |  17h30 |Sala do Departamento de Filosofia | FLUP

University of Porto:

Sofia Miguens

João Alberto Pinto

Paulo Tunhas

Tommaso Piazza

Mattia Riccardi

Susana Cadilha

Eduardo Rego

University of Santiago de Compostela:

Juan Vázquez

Concha Martínez

José Miguel Sagüillo

Luis Villegas

Uxìa Rivas

José Luis Falguera

New University of Lisbon:

Luísa Couto Soares

Ana Falcato

Consultants

Charles Travis – KCL

Tim Crane – University of Cambridge

Quassim Cassam – University of Warwick

Jocelyn Benoist – Université de Paris – Panthéon Sorbonne

Abstract: Taking Frege´s conception of judgment (Frege 1918, 1983, 1993) as a key, this project aims at understanding what it is to be a thinker. Its central proposal is the notion of ‘bounds of judgment’, i.e. the idea that there are limits for something to count as a judgment. Based on this proposal we intend to continue exploring the contrast between the subpersonal nature of cognition and the intersubjective and objective nature of thought, which lay at the core of former project Rationality, Belief, Desire II – from cognitive science to philosophy (POCI/FIL/55555/2004) (Miguens 2008). The specific issues regarding logic, mind, language and action to be approached according to this plan are identified below.

Judgment is a posture towards the world. A judgment fixes how the world would matter to its correctness; the world then does its mattering. This rough account is enough to point to some bounds within which some people have thought genuine judgments must remain.

1. Emptiness of demands on the world. A posture may fail to be a judgment by failing to ask the world to matter in any substantive way. Wittgenstein once, or sometimes, had such an idea. One might suspect such failures in laws of logic, some of mathematics, paradoxes and definitions.  If, e.g., a law of logic would be true no matter what, as Frege thought, just how can the world speak to its correctness? (Travis 2006)

2. Objects not sufficiently woven into the fabric of the world. A posture might fail to be judging because it is (ineliminably) towards something unfit to be an object of judgment. That is the case of what Frege termed ‘Vorstellungen’ (ideas). This raises a set of issues in philosophy of mind, and perception, such as: a) What sort of posture can we take to our own inner experience? Can it ever be an object of judgment? Does it make any sense, in alternative, to think of inner experience (and of perception) in terms of qualia? (Martin 2006, Travis 2009)

3. Usurpation. a) Expressivism: From Hume on many philosophers have thought they detected, in various areas of discourse, putative judgements which were imposters. The trouble was that something—usually some sensibility parochial to us—seemed to usurp the world’s sole sway over the correctness of the posture. That sort of worry has arisen for ethics, aesthetics, and a host of other things. b) Alien thought: if, say, ethics were really a domain of judgment, then judging that there are ethical facts would have to rely on some parochial capacity: one available, perhaps, to thinkers like us; but not available to just any thinker, merely in virtue of being a thinker. So, to see how bad that is (Frege apparently took it to be bad enough), one might ask whether there could be judgments available to one sort of thinker but not another. Might alien judgment be utterly different from ours? Conversely, would judgment be at all possible without the benefit of (our) parochial capacities? (McDowell 1998)

4. Articulation and Agency. A judgment is a (partial) articulation of a thinker’s posture towards the world. In turn, it is what is articulable into elements— we might call these concepts. It is interesting to ask just how essentially tied up with agency a posture towards the world must be to be articulable into judgments. It is sometimes said that to be a thinker is, essentially, to be an agent. It is seldom said what it means to say this, or why one should. Frege provides the basis for saying more and we want to develop it in this project. Here a leading question is: to what extent, if any, is a judgment obligated (if it is to be a judgment) to make the world matter to how agents conduct lives? b) The second question centres on the issue, raised by Frege, of whether, and in what sense, a judgment might have essential structure. How does a judgment differ, notably, from a vehicle for its expression (i.e. language) in the way it is (or is not) tied to particular articulations of it? (Travis 2008)

Building on Frege’s conception of judgment, the project intends to develop answers to each of the questions above. These should be explicitly contrasted with alternative answers arising from Kant’s conception of judgment (Longuesse 1998). We believe that Kant and Frege offer us utterly different conceptions of the nature of thought and thinkers, and of mind-dependence, and we believe this is important for the way contemporary philosophy sees itself through the viewpoint of its history (Floyd & Shieh 2001).

Finally, it is an global objective of this project to use the question of the nature of judgment as a way of addressing the relations between apparently distant fields of philosophy, such as philosophy of logics, philosophy of mind and perception and moral philosophy. This, we believe, is essential if we want to fully understand what being a thinker is.

State of the art / Literature review

This project arose from the conviction that Frege’ thought is of heuristic value for the issues regarding logic, mind, language and action on which the Porto-Santiago research team has been working for a number of years (for some recent results cf. Miguens 2008, Pinto 2007, Vazquez 2006, Martinez, Falguera, Saguillo 2007)). In thinking this we were very much influenced by Ch. Travis and by his wittgensteinian readings of Frege (or fregean readings of Wittgenstein) (Travis 2006, 2008).

Although the project has Frege as a reference, its main aim is not historical: what we are ultimately interested in is developing an approach to thought and cognition. Yet, we do have a concern with history, both with Frege scholarship and with Frege’s place in the history of contemporary analytic philosophy (Floyd & Shieh). As for Frege scholarship, the whole project takes as starting references the work of important interpreters of Frege such as Dummett (1981, 1991), T. Burge (2001, 2005), C. Diamond (1991), T. Ricketts (2010), P. Sullivan (2005),W. Goldfarb (2001) as well as Ch. Travis (2006, 2008). Some of these authors use Frege to deal with questions regarding truth, thought, mind (Burge 2001, 2005, Travis 2006, Travis 2009a) some are particularly interested in Frege’s views on logics (Ricketts, Sullivan, Goldfarb), some in his influence on Wittgenstein (Diamond, Travis). All of this aspects are of interest to us in this project, in which our intent is to aplly the lessons of Frege’s conception of judgement to four main areas: philosophy of logic, philosophy of mind and perception, moral philosophy and issues regarding (and connecting) language and action. Thus the project engages with a number of ongoing discussions in different fields of philosophy, which we believe come together by our focus on judgment.

Section ´Emptiness of demands on the world´ of the project is dedicated to the issue of judgment in the philosophy of logics. It starts from the way Frege (Frege 1983, 1993) himself addresses questions such as What is a law of logics? What is it for a law of logic to be true, if it is true? Are laws of logic a priori? If so, what does that mean?. The way Frege interpreters such as Dummett, Burge, Sullivan, Goldfarb and Ricketts see his positions will be our reference here. For Frege laws of logic are thoughts, they are not about how people reason. Yet people reason by making steps from thoughts to thoughts – what do the laws of logic tell us about the validity /invalidity of human reasoning? All these questions speak to members of the research team who work in history and philosophy of logics and mathematics (Martinez, Saguillo, Pinto, Rego). They will bring former work conceptions of the nature of logics (and mathematics), the nature of the a priori, relations between computation, information and reasoning (Martinez, Falguera Saguillo) inspired by authors ranging from Boole to H. Field and J. Corcoran to bear on our study of Frege on logic and judgment.

Section ‘Objects not sufficiently woven in the fabric of the world’ is dedicated to the issue of judgment in philosophy of mind and perception. We think that if one looks carefully at Frege, one finds, among other things, a fertile philosophy of mind and perception (Frege 1918). So we intend to use Frege as guide of our approach to the current debate in the philosophy of mind and perception known under the name of ‘disjunctivism’ (Byrne & Logue, Haddock & McPherson, Szabo-Gendler & Hawthorne). In particular, we want to assess Travis’ hypothesis that Frege is the ‘father of disjunctivism’. We are also particularly interested in understanding the disjunctivist approach as a critique of qualia and of representationalism in philosophy of mind (Putnam 1999, Martin 2006, Travis 2009b) – these are issues which have been at the center of the interests of the philosophers of mind in the group (Miguens 2002, Miguens 2008, Pinto 2007, Vazquez 2006).

Section ‘Usurpation’ is centrally dedicated to the issue of judgement in moral philosophy – according to expressivist, non-cognitivist, positions in cases such as those of ethic judgments, these putative judgments are imposters, i.e. not real judgments, whose correctness is decided by how things are in the world, but rather mere expressions of emotional states of subjects (Travis 2006 McDowell 1998). We will build on previous work on McDowell (Miguens 2008) and on the idea of ‘the parochial’ (a main theme of Ch. Travis work, whose forthcoming (2010) OUP collection on Wittgenstein will bear that title) to develop an approach to the objectivity of moral judgments (here we have also been influenced by Putnam (Putnam 1992)).

The central idea of section 5, ‘Articulation and Agency’, is the claim that thinkers are necessarily agents. This is the idea which connects contextualist positions in the philosophy of language (formulated for truth, thought and language, and thus for the ‘personal level’ of agents) with antirepresentationalist approaches to cognition (Noe 2004, Noe 2006) formulated for the subpersonal level. We will work on both language as action (as it appears in the contextualist side of the contextualism-anti-contextualism debate (Preyer & Peter 2005)) and cognition as action, trying to explore relations between the two. In the background Travis occasion-sensitive conception of truth (see Occasion sensitivity, Travis 2008) and Noe’s proposal of mind as action. As a result of contrast (human) thinkers should appear as a specific kind of mind, yet sharing this ‘enacting’ characteristic with other kinds of minds. In this context we also want to consider the role of language in thought (Travis 2008).

These are the sections of the project. In them, buiding on readings of Frege and of Frege on judgment we will be working on logics, mind, language, action. There is yet another strand in the project: the contrast bewteen Frege and Kant on judgment, where we will be guided by B. Longuesse’s work (Longuenesse) and its relevance for history of contemporary philosophy. We chose Frege for this project to help us in thinking about thinking to build a case against what we see as the dominance of a naturalized epistemology stance in philosophy of mind language and action in the last half of the 20^th century (this was already an issue in Miguens 2002).

It is our conviction that some impasses in current analytic philosophy call for a look upon history (Floyd & Shieh 2001, Putnam 1992, Putnam 1999) as a good route to new views. This is one reason for the project to center on Frege, a founding figure. The connection with more general history of contemporary philosophy we want to explore is the following: Frege began his career with a critique of Kant and he had Kant, and Kantians, in mind throughout his career. To a Kantian—certainly to his contemporaries—this may seem to be confined to a small, encapsulated, point—Kant’s conception of analyticity. As philosophy developed in the 20th century, maybe this is not such a small point. The way we see it, Frege was particularly concerned to attack idealism in its 19th century German form (‘transcendental’ or not).

References

Benoist, 2009, Sens et sensibilité – l’intentionalité en contexte, Paris, Cerf.

Burge, 2001, Frege on apriority, in Boghossian & Peacocke 2001, New Essays on the A Priori, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

Burge 2005, Truth, Thought and Reason, Essays on Frege, Oxford Oxford University Press.

Byrne and Logue 2009, Disjunctivism – contemporary readings, Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Dummett, 1981 Frege Philosophy of Language, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd edition

Dummett, 1991, Frege and Other Philosophers, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Diamond, Cora, 1991, The Realist Spirit – Wittgenstein and the mind, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

Floyd e Shieh 2001, Future Pasts – the analytic tradition in 20^th century philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Frege 1983, Nachgelassene Shriften und wissenschftlicher Briefwechsel, Hrsg. Von H. Hermes, K. Kambartel, F. Kaulbac, F. Meiner Verlag, Hamburg (Bd I und Bd II)

Frege 1993, Logische Untersuchungen, Gottingen, Vandenhoek und Ruprechet, Hrsg Gunther Patzig

Frege 1918, Der Gedanke, Beitrage zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, 2, 58-77

Goldfard, 2001, Frege’s conception of logic, in Floyd and Shieh 2001

Haddock e McPherson 2008, Disjunctivism – perception, action, knowledge, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Longuenesse, Béatrice, 1998, Kant and the Capacity to judge – sensibility and discursivity in the transcendental analytic of the critique of pure reason, , Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.

McDowell, 1998, Mind, Value and Reality, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press

Martin 2006, On Being Alienated, in Szabo-Gendler & Hawthorne 2006

Noe 2004, Action in Perception, Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Noe 2006, Experience without the head, in Szabo-Gendler & Hawthorne 2006

Preyer & Peter 2005, Contextualism in Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Putnam, 1999, The Threefold Cord: mind, body and world, New York, Columbia University Press.

Putnam, 1992, Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.

Ricketts, 2010, The Cambridge Companion to Frege, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2010, many papers available at authors websites)

Sullivan 2005, Metaperspectives and internalism in Frege, in M. Beaney and E. Reck, eds, Frege: critical assessment, London, Routledge, vol 2, 85-105

Szabo Gendler & Hawthorne eds 2006, Perceptual experience, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Travis 2000, Unshadowed Thought, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press

Travis 2004, The silence of the senses, Mind, 113, 449, 59-94

Travis 2006 Morally Alien Thought”, in What Determines Content, Tomas Marvan, ed., Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 243—270.

Travis 2006 Thought’s Footing, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Travis 2008 Occasion-Sensitivity – Selected Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Travis 2009a, Truth and Merit in M Gustafson & R. Sorli eds. New Essays on the philosophy of J L Austin, forthcoming

Travis 2009b, Gazing Inward, A. O’Hear ed, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures for the year 2007/2008, forthcoming

Some former publications by members of the research team:

Martinez, Falguera e Saguillo, 2007 Current Topics on Logic and Analytic Philosophy, Santiago de Compostela, USC Publicacións.

Miguens 2002 Uma Teoria Fisicalista do Conteúdo e da Consciência – D Dennett e os debates da filosofia da mente, Porto, Campo das Letras.

Miguens 2008, Será que a minha mente está dentro da minha cabeça? – da ciência cognitiva à filosofia (ensaios), Porto, Campo das Letras.

Pinto 2007 Materialismo, superveniência e experiência – uma perspectiva sobre o problema da consciência na filosofia da mente, Porto, Campo das Letras.

Vazquez 2007, Mente y Mundo, Madrid, Akal.

Research Team:

Sofia Miguens

João Alberto PInto

Paulo Tunhas

Luísa Couto Soares

José Manuel Curado

Sara Bizarro

Pedro Madeira

Consultants:

Stephen Stich (Rutgers)

Alvin Goldman (Rutgers)

Simon Backburn (Cambridge)

Publication:

“Racionalidade, Crença, Desejo: um programa de investigação” / “Rationality, Belief, Desire: a research programme”, in Miguens & Mauro (eds.), Perspectives on Rationality. Colecção MLAG Discussion Papers, vol. I, Porto, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 2006, pp. 13-57. (bilingual introduction to RBD II as a research programme)

Principal Investigator: Sofia Miguens

In this project we aim at exploring prospects for a 21st century post-analytic and post-phenomenological philosophy of thought, mind and language. The project involves a strong component of history of 20th century philosophy, in both traditions, a working out of genealogies, and a critique of the caricatures of analytic and continental philosophy as being, respectively, anti-metaphysical and scietificist and antiscientificist. We will look at work of authors on both sides who have been proposing theoretically challenging readings of the history of 20th century philosophy, namely those of the Harvard based B. Dreben school (Floyd & Shieh 2001), and also J. Benoît. (Bemoit 2005). Work on the history of philosophy around B. Dreben is emblematic of a rising of historic consciousness within the analytic tradition, which is generally seen as anhistorical by its adversaries. B. Dreben has also claimed that the analytic tradition ended with Wittgenstein and Quine, and part of our intention in this project is to assess that claim. The project will focus on specific issues which make comparisons possible, such the nature (and limits) of intentionality, starting wih the way it was approached in the times of Frege /Husserl, the status of perception vs language in the analysis of meaning, psychology/philosophy relations and the reasons for rejecting psychologism, (P. Engel ) and the realism/anti-realism debate. We will also try to formulate and assess accusations of idealism to analytic linguistic philosophy. Throughout the project, we will pay especial attention to those philosophers such as L. Wittgenstein, J. McDowell and H. Putnam who already exemplify in their writings some of the convergences we are looking for.
Collaborators: Pedro Alves (UL), André Barata (UBI), Urbano Sidoncha (UBI), Rui Sampaio (Uaç))

Publications:

Miguens & Teles, Aparência e Realidade, Lisboa, Colibri, 2010.

Link to publisher (COLIBRI)

Sponsored by: FLAD - Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento

The main aim of project “Conversations on Practical Rationality” is a volume of interviews focusing on philosophy of action and exploring its direct links to moral philosophy, moral psychology and the philosophy of economics.

The structure of the book will be the following: a) an introductory article by the editors, presenting an overview of the field, in which the central questions of philosophy of action are explained in a way that is acessible to students but also useful for a more advanced audience; b) interviews with the authors, presenting each with (common) basic questions about the field, then exploring questions related to their own work), c) concluding remarks, taking up issues from the interviews.

Confirmed participating authors are: Alfred Mele, John Broome, Michael Bratman, Michael Smith, Joshua Knobe, Daniel Hausman, Hugh McCann, George Ainslie and George Schueler.

The 6 general introductory questions are the following:

1) In your view, what are the most central (or important) problems in the philosophy of action?

2) For some or all of the problems below – action, agency, agent – what do they contrast with most significantly?

3) Which of these are liable to be rational/irrational?

4) In what sense is the thing to do to be decided by what is rational? Are there limits of rationality?

5) What explains action and how? What is the role of deliberation in rationality?

6) How is akrasia possible (if you think it is)?

The general specific question is the following:

7) How do you think your own work has contributed to the field ? What do you think are your most important contributions? What are your plans for future research?

Each chapter of the book will be devoted to one author, who will be asked the 6 general questions and the specific question.

The authors whom we chose to interview make it clear that it is our intention to provoke a juxtaposition between purely conceptual philosophy of action and issues arising from economics and cognitive science – i.e., research from empirical areas. This is a dialogue which we believe can be fruitful, without distorting our central purpose of outlining the state of the art in the philosophy of action. Also, it serves our other main purpose with the book which is to strengthen relations between people working in the fields of Philosophy, Economics and Psychology.

We thought about a way to make this book appealing, in addition, of course, to the interest arising from the subject itself. That is why we decided there should be a moment in the editorial process in which the interviewees have access to each other’s answers and are encouraged to post comments, objections, questions and answers – this happens in a private blog (to which only the interviewees and the editors have access). This should make the editorial process richer and promote a greater interaction among the authors.

Research team: Sofia Miguens, Carlos Mauro, Susana Cadilha.

Principal Investigator: Sofia Miguens

Editors and translators:

Miguel Ámen, Departamento de Filosofia e Instituto de Filosofia (MLAG), Universidade do Porto (editor)

Maria Clara Dias, Departamento de Filosofia e Centro de Ética e Filosofia da Mente, UF-RJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (editor)

Vítor Guerreiro, Departamento de Filosofia e Instituto de Filosofia (MLAG), Universidade do Porto (translator)

Sofia Miguens, Departamento de Filosofia e Instituto de Filosofia (MLAG), Universidade do Porto (editor and translator)

João Alberto Pinto Departamento de Filosofia e Instituto de Filosofia (MLAG), Universidade do Porto (editor)

We are currently working on a Philosophy of Mind anthology to be published both in a Portuguese and a Brazilian edition. This is a reference work, which we believe is much needed. It will be extremely useful in Portuguese-speaking academic philosophy. We believe it may also reach a wider audience.

The contents selected for translation are the following:

1. Raymond  M. Smullyan, An Unfortunate Dualist.
2. Hilary Putnam, Brains and Behavior
3. U.T. Place, Is Consciousness a Brain Process?
4. Hilary Putnam, The Nature of Mental States.
5. Ned Block, Troubles with Functionalism (excerpt).
6. Donald Davidson, Mental Events.
7. Donald Davidson, Material Mind
8. Jerry A. Fodor, Special Sciences.
9. Jaegwon Kim, Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction.
10. Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like To Be a Bat
11. Frank Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia.
12. Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (excerpt).
13. Joseph Levine, Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.
14. Paul M. Churchland, The Rediscovery of Light.
15. Colin McGinn, Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?
16. Paul M. Churchland, Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.
17. Jerry Fodor, The Persistence of Attitudes
18. Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
19. John Haugeland, Semantic Engines: An Introduction To Mind Design.
20. John R. Searle, Minds, Brains and Programs

Principal Investigator: Sofia Miguens (Project internal to the Institute of Philosophy)