“It Just Looks the Same: Differences in Racial Categorization among Infants and Older Humans”
By Kamuran Osmanoğlu (University of Kansas, Philosophy)
Thursday 16th November, 2017, 1540-1715 , H-232
Archive for November 2017
Talk by Jack Woods at Bilkent, Tuesday 5 December.
Constructivism, Yes! Constitutivism, No! (at least for serious naturalists)
By Jack Woods (University of Leeds, Philosophy)
Tuesday 5th December, 2017, 1640-1800, H-232
Abstract:
Many contemporary naturalistic pictures of normativity struggle with extensional adequacy. If we tie our reasons to our psychological states, practices, values, or the like, as any serious naturalist should, then we face the problem that our actual psychologies, practices, and values are radically disordered and incomplete. We are limited creatures, after all, and we make many mistakes. We thus need to augment these pictures with ways of ironing out the wrinkles and stretching them to cover all the applicable situations.
Both constructivism and constitutivism offer tempting ways of doing this. The former explains our reasons in terms of acceptable procedures—deliberation, refinement, etc—for ironing out the basic materials we start with. For example, views which start with our values and go on to look at what we’d accept under a process of bringing these into nice accord with each other are constructivist. Constitutivism looks to see what reasons and principles are required by the facts about what we are—agents, rational beings, actors—and uses these to augment what we actually care about, value, or do. Both strategies, and especially their combination, look to solve various problems about the extensional adequacy of contemporary naturalistic views. Unfortunately, it seems to me that both moves, and especially their combination, inevitably come into conflict with the intuitions which motivated these naturalistic pictures of normativity in the first place. In particular, justifying instrumental and theoretical rationality this way requires that we posit either mysterious normativity or psychological unreality.
My aim here is to sketch how we can and why we should lean back on constructivism to flesh out naturalistic accounts of reasons, then to show that using constitutivism to avoid problems for constructivism runs into serious problems. I then propose a way of doing much of the work constitutivist pictures are supposed to do, for a hybrid conventionalist-humean picture, without running into the serious problems which arise for constitutivism. The key idea is to view instrumental and theoretical rationality as just yet more standards which we have independent reason to conform to.
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MBB Seminar, Aslı Kılıç at Bilkent 24 November
Aslı Kılıç (METU, Psychology) “Interference in recognition memory”
Friday, 24 November, 2017, 1240 – 1330, H232.
Abstract: Recognition memory refers to the ability to discriminate recently studied items from new ones. Forgetting in recognition memory has been defined as worsening memory due to interference caused by various sources. These sources include memories of other items and contexts in which the test item has been experienced before. The experiments that will be presented in this talk aims to examine the role of context and other items on interference theory by investigating how list strength, list length and output interference interact with each other in recognition memory. For example, strengthening items during study decreases interference in subsequent tests. On the other hand, studying items in shorter lists does not contribute to stronger memories that reliably. Theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed in reference to extent models of recognition memory.
Organized by the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Group at Bilkent University.
Gürol Irzık at Bilkent 23 November
Gürol Irzık (Sabancı) “Epistemic Public Trust in Science”
Thursday, 23 November, 2017, 1540-1715, H-232
Abstract: In this presentation I provide an analysis of public’s having warranted epistemic trust in science, that is, the conditions under which the public may be said to have well-placed trust in the scientists as providers of information. I distinguish between basic and enhanced epistemic trust in science and provide necessary conditions for both. I then present the controversy regarding the (alleged) connection between autism and measles-mumps-rubella vaccination as a case study to illustrate the offered analysis. The realization of warranted epistemic public trust in science requires various societal conditions, which I briefly introduce in the concluding section.
Talk at Bilkent on Thursday 16 November: Kamuran Osmanoğlu
Abstract
Forms of racial cognition begin early: from about 3 months onwards, many human infants prefer to look at own-race faces over other-race faces. What is not yet fully clear is what the psychological mechanisms are that underlie racial thoughts at this early age, and why these mechanisms evolved. In this paper, we propose answers to these questions. Specifically, we use recent experimental data to argue that early racial preferences are simply the result of a “facial familiarity mechanism”: a mental structure that leads infants to attend to faces that look similar to familiar faces, and which probably has evolved to track potential caregivers. We further argue that this account can be combined with the major existing treatments of the evolution of racial categorization, which apply to later forms of racial cognition. The result is a heterogeneous picture of racial thought, according to which early and later racial categorization result from very different psychological mechanisms.
Travel grants for the history of philosophy
The Journal of the History of Philosophy invites applications for its Kristeller-Popkin Travel Fellowships in the History of Philosophy.
Two awards of up to $4000 (depending upon the project budget) are offered annually to young scholars in the history of philosophy to defray expenses while travelling to do research. It is expected that the award would normally cover at least 10 days of research. Applicants must have received their Ph.Ds but may not have received them more than six years prior to applying. Applicants who do not receive awards in one year’s competition are invited to apply in successive years.
Deadline for applications: December 1.
For further information and application forms please visit
Talk by Saniye Vatansever (Yeditepe University) at Koç University on “KANT’S RESPONSE TO HUME IN THE SECOND ANALOGY: A CRITIQUE OF BUCHDAHL’S AND FRIEDMAN’S ACCOUNTS” (07/11/2017)
Talk by Saniye Vatansever (Yeditepe University) at Koç University on “KANT’S RESPONSE TO HUME IN THE SECOND ANALOGY: A CRITIQUE OF BUCHDAHL’S AND FRIEDMAN’S ACCOUNTS”
Date: 7 November, Tuesday, 2017
Time: 10:30-12:00
Place: SOS 277,
Title: “KANT’S RESPONSE TO HUME IN THE SECOND ANALOGY: A CRITIQUE OF BUCHDAHL’S AND FRIEDMAN’S ACCOUNTS”
Abstract: While commentators mostly agree that in the Second Analogy Kant responds to the “Humean problem,” there is not yet an agreement on exactly which Humean problem he aims to solve and what the argument establishes have not yet been agreed upon. L.W. Beck, Gerd Buchdahl, Graham Bird and Henry Allison, among others, argue that the Second Analogy addresses Hume’s “problem of causation,” which is a problem concerning the justification of the concept of causation and the Causal Principle. In this paper, I focus particularly on Buchdahl’s interpretation of the Second Analogy, to which I refer as the “modest reading” because on his reading the Second Analogy has a modest goal of solving only Hume’s problem of causation. In response to Buchdahl’s modest reading, Michael Friedman, among others, argue for the “strong reading” of the Second Analogy, according to which Kant addresses not only Hume’s problem of causation, but also the problem of induction. In fact, Friedman claims that Kant’s main objective in the Second Analogy is to solve Hume’s problem of induction, which requires an a priori justification of the principle of the uniformity of nature. Contra these two popular readings, which view the Second Analogy as addressing one or the other of the Humean problems, I argue that the Second Analogy achieves more than addressing the problem of causation, and yet falls short of solving the problem of induction. The alternative reading I offer contains in the following three theses (i) the Second Analogy argument proves both the necessity of the Causal Principle and the existence of its particular determinations, i.e., necessary empirical causal laws; (ii) contra Buchdahl and Friedman, empirical laws express two different kinds of necessity which are not reducible to each other; and finally, (iii) even though the Second Analogy guarantees the existence of (necessary and strictly universal) empirical laws, it does not guarantee the uniformity of nature, which in turn means that the Second Analogy argument falls short of addressing Hume’s problem of induction.
