Archive for the ‘Epistemology’ Category
Talk at Bilkent 31 March: Mehmet Elgin
Mehmet Elgin (Muğla University)
“Why Do Evolutionary Biologists Formulate A Priori Laws Rather Than Empirical Laws?”
Friday 31 March, 2017, 11-12:30, G160.
Abstract: Unlike any branch of physics, evolutionary biology is peppered with a priori mathematical models. It is important to explain why this is the case. I will argue that when we examine the principle of natural selection carefully, we see that this law relates fitness to gene frequencies. Fitness appealed to in this law is stripped away from any physical or biological details and it represents a mere mathematical value. When we relate this value to gene frequencies, we are relating two mathematical values. As a result we end up with a priori laws. I will then provide a more general argument for this fact: Fitness is a genuine multiply realizable property. Only laws that can be formulated about genuinely multiply realizable states are a priori laws. Therefore, only laws that can be formulated about fitness are a priori laws. I will finally argue that such a priori laws in evolutionary biology have very important functions: They are essential for us to be able to formulate empirically testable causal hypotheses about the evolution of specific populations and they are also indispensable in developing causal explanations systematically.
Lucas Thorpe at Bilkent
Lucas Thorpe (Boğaziçi University)
“Knowledge Doesn’t Entail Belief: Avoiding the Seductive Charm of Indo-European Grammar and Remembering Unbelievable Kisses”
Date: Thursday 22 December, 2016
Time: 1040-1230
Place: G160
Abstract: In this paper I will sketch a model of the relationship between perceptual knowledge and belief. My position is influenced by the work of the 18th century Scottish common sense philosopher Thomas Reid. I will argue that knowledge is a much simpler mental state than belief and that the capacity to know is developmentally prior to the capacity to believe. I will argue that perceptual knowledge is objectual whereas beliefs are propositional attitudes; perceptual knowledge involves grasping the world conceptually, whereas belief involves taking an attitude towards our concepts, namely marking them as instantiated. Belief require some capacity for meta-cognition, whereas perceptual knowledge does not. It is possible to deploy a concept in an act of perception without also taking an attitude towards this concept. If this is right then we need to drop what I call the entailment thesis: namely the claim that knowing entails believing. I will suggest that philosophers such as Tim Williamson who support a “knowledge first” epistemology have no good reason to accept the entailment thesis. I will also provide a number of thought experiments and appeal to some recent empirical research to support my position.
Eylem Özaltun at Bilkent
Eylem Özaltun (Koç University)
“Acting as a Way of Knowing the World”
Abstract: Philosophers generally agree that agents bear a special epistemic relation to their own intentional actions. But what exactly does an agent know abou
t her action by acting intentionally? The traditional two-factor account answers this question as follows: what an agent knows in virtue of acting intentionally is her intention, and what actually happens is known separately, by observation or inference. Against the traditional account I defend the view that what an agent knows in virtue of acting intentionally is what actually happens; acting intentionally is a way of knowing how things are outside of the mind and body. In this talk I do not argue for this view directly but by way of undermining the appeal of the traditional account. I focus on the reasons provided by epistemologists of action in favor of the two-factor approach. I show that what motivates the traditional account is a genuine difficulty of giving a unified analysis of two important, but seemingly incompatible, features of knowing by acting: immediacy and fallibility. Then I argue that these features are not specific to an agent’s knowledge of her actions; in fact they are the necessary features of our epistemic activities in general, and they are no easier to account for in the case of perception. I conclude that the two puzzling features of an agent’s knowledge do not by themselves give us a reason to deny that action is, in its own right, a way of knowing the world.
Date: Friday 16 December, 2016
Time: 1640-1800
Place: G160
İlhan İnan at Bilkent
“Is the Speed of Light Knowable A priori?”
İlhan İnan (Boğaziçi University)
Abstract: Given the current “definition” of the concept of meter a simple argument appears to show that some scientists could come to know the answer to the question “how many meters does light travel in a vacuum in one second?” without having to do any observations or calculations. It would then seem that their knowledge of the speed of light would have some unusual epistemic properties such as being certain, infallible and indubitable, and perhaps also analytic. What is more shocking is that we may also be able to conclude that these scientists know the speed of light a priori. This appears to be a new version of the puzzle about how long the “standard meter bar” is, which Wittgenstein discusses in his Philosophical Investigations, later taken up by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity yielding the puzzling conclusion that certain contingent truths are knowable a priori. In this talk I discuss how the new version of the puzzle differs from the old one, why Nathan Salmon’s and Keith Donnellan’s “solutions” to the old puzzle are really not solutions, how the current literature on mental files can be employed to approach the puzzle. I then argue the notion of apriority employed in the argument requires further elaboration so that we may conclude, following Nenad Miscevic, that “interesting a priori knowledge cannot be gotten for cheap.”
Date: Wednesday 7 December, 2016
Time: 1100-1230
Place: G160
Talk at Bilkent by Ulf Hlobil (Pittsburgh): “Do It! But Don’t Listen to Me!: Moral Testimony and Practical Inference”
Ulf Hlobil
Department of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
“Do It! But Don’t Listen to Me!: Moral Testimony and Practical Inference”
DATE: Wed 10 February 2016
TIME: 15:40-17:30
PLACE: G-160, Bilkent University, Ankara
Abstract:
What, if anything, is wrong with acting on moral beliefs that we accept
merely on the say-so of others? Why could it be problematic to act on a
moral belief that we take to be true without understanding why it is true?
I defend a qualified and novel version of what is called “pessimism” in
the controversy over pure moral testimony. I argue that we can rationally
come to hold the premises of moral reasoning through testimony, but that
moral testimony is problematic in cases where the agent lacks the ability
to make the correct practical inference. The problem is that inferential
abilities cannot be shared via testimony. The role that moral testimony
can play in our moral lives is therefore limited. My account gives the
correct verdicts for common examples in the literature on moral testimony.
It, moreover, incorporates many of the optimists’ insights and is more
general and informative than rival accounts.
Prof. Osman Bakar // The Epistemologies of al-Farabi and al-Ghazzali: Comparative Perspectives
Istanbul Sehir University Philosophy Talks 17
“The Epistemologies of al-Farabi and al-Ghazzali: Comparative Perspectives”
Prof. Osman Bakar
Distinguished Professor and Director Sultan Omar ‘Ali Saifuddien Centre for Islamic Studies (SOASCIS) Universiti Brunei Darussalam
Al-Farabi (870 AD– 950 AD) and al-Ghazzali (1058 AD – 1111 AD) are among the intellectual giants in the history of Islam. They were separated in time by nearly two centuries but judging from their writings they appeared to have been contemporaries. They belonged to two different intellectual schools of thought, al-Farabi to the Peripatetic school and al-Ghazzali to the school of kalam (“dialectical theology”). Their thoughts have both similarities and differences. Professor Bakar will discuss their similar ideas such as in their acceptance of the ideas of hierarchy of knowledge and tawhidic epistemology as well as their differences with regard to their understanding of the relationship between intellect-reason and revelation, their notions of philosophy, and the relationship between religion and philosophy. Professor Bakar presents arguments that despite their differences on many intellectual issues they are united in their thinking at a deeper level and as such are to be regarded as coming from the same intellectual universe of Islam.
Kant Reading Group at Bogazici (Mondays, 5.15-7pm)
Lucas Thorpe and Ken Westphal will be running a Kant Reading Group at Bogazici University that will meet every Monday from 5.15pm-7pm in TB365 (starting on Monday October 13th 2104).
We will start by reading the manuscript of Ken Westphal’s new book – Moral Constructivism: Hume’s and Kant’s Natural Law Constructivism.
Once we have finished this we will decide collectively what to read next. If you would like to join the reading group, be sent a copy of the manuscript, and be added to our mailing list, please email Zubeyde: zkaradag(at)gmail.com.
Everyone welcome.
Philosophy/Cog-Sci Reading Group: Concepts and Beliefs, from Perception to Action (Wednesdays, 17.15-19.00, Bogazici University, TB365)
As part of a three year Tubitak 1001 project on “Concepts and Beliefs: From Perception to Action” we will be running a weekly reading group, that will meet on Wednesdays from 17.15-18.00 in TB365 at Bogazici University. If you would like to participate and be added to our mailing list (and receive copies of the readings) please contact Merve Tapinc (mrvtpn@gmail.com)
Hopefully we will have a website for the project up and running in a month or so.
The schedule for the first 5 weeks of the reading group will be as follows:
(1) September 24th, 2014
Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, ‘Concepts and Cognitive Science’ in Concepts: Core Readings, Edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, MIT Press (1999), pp. 3-83
(2) October, 1st, 2014
Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, ‘Concepts and Cognitive Science’ in Concepts: Core Readings, Edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, MIT Press (1999), pp. 3-83 (continued)
(3) October 8th, 2014
Lawrence and Margolis (cont.)
(4) October 15th, 2014
James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, LEA Publishers, 1979
(5) October 22nd, 2014
Gibson (cont.)
Talk at Bilkent – Adam Crager (Princeton): “Aristotle on the Finitude of Essence”
Adam Crager form Princeton University will give a talk at the Bilkent University, Department of Philosophy on April 10, 2014 Thursday at 17:40 o’clock, Room G160.
Talk at Yeditepe by Sinem Elkatip Hatipoğlu (Sehir) on “Consciousness and Misrepresentation” (21/03/2014)
YEDITEPE UNIVERSITY COGNITIVE SCIENCE SEMINARS (SPRING 2014)
“Consciousness and Misrepresentation”
by Assist. Prof. Dr. Sinem Elkatip Hatipoğlu (Şehir University), on March 21, at 16.00, in Law Building Room 332.
Abstract: No one denies that we humans differ significantly from what one might call our cognitive relatives, i.e. complex machines such as robots or other forms of living beings. However what marks the difference is difficult to pin down. Consciousness has been taken to be one of the best candidates to account for this difference but an account of consciousness is just as difficult to give. In this talk I focus on one particular theory of consciousness, viz. the higher-order theory of consciousness and a troubling aspect of this theory. Higher-order theories assert that a mental state is conscious when there is a higher-order representation of that mental state. For instance the perception of a blue chair is conscious when there is a higher-order representation of the perception. But since representations are not infallible, higher-order theorists embrace the possibility of having a conscious perception of a blue chair where there is a perception of a red chair or even where there is no perception. The former is usually called a misrepresentation and the latter radical misrepresentation. Even though higher-order theories have many virtues, I suggest that the possibility of a radical misrepresentation undermines some of those virtues. As such either the possibility of a radical misrepresentation needs to be denied or the phenomenon of a radical misrepresentation needs to be understood in a different way.
Conference at Boğaziçi: Curiosity – Epistemics, Semantics, Ethics (7-8/03/2014)
There will be a conference at Boğaziçi University on Friday and Saturday, March 7th and 8th on the Philosophy of Curiosity: Epistemics, Semantics, Ethics.
Two-Day Conference on Neurology, Philosophy of Biology, and Artificial Intelligence, organized by Koç University Philosophy Department (Venue: Beyoglu – RCAC)
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Speakers include but are not limited to: Bernard Stiegler (Université de Technologie Compiègne), Alva Noë (University of California, Berkeley), Barry Smith (University of London), and Güven Güzeldere (Harvard University)
Conference Program
May 25th Saturday
9.30 Opening
9.45-11.45 First Session
Hilmi Demir: “A Recent History of Philosophy of Mind: Convergence Points between Cognitive Sciences and Phenomenology”
Barış Korkmaz: “Self: Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis”
Aziz Zambak: “Plasticity: The Forgotten Principle in Artificial Intelligence”
11:45-12:00 Coffee Break
12:00-13:00 Second Session
Bernard Stiegler: “From Neuropower to Noopolitics”
13:00-14:30 Lunch Break
14:30:16:30 Third Session
Patrick Roney: “Neuro-aesthetics”
Zeynep Direk: “Neuroethics and the question of alterity”
Stephen Voss: “What do I mean when I say I”
May 26th Sunday
9:30-10:30 First Session
Alva Noë: “The Fragile Manifest: Presence in Thought and Experience”
10:30-10:45 Coffee Break
10:45-12:45 Second Session
Barry Smith: “Are Flavours in the Brain? The Phenomenology and Neuroscience of Flavour Perception”
Güven Güzeldere: “Unity of Consciousness in a Divided Brain?”
12:45-14:30 Lunch Break
14:30-16:30 Third Session
Fuat Balcı: “Reward Maximization: The Role of Time and its Psychophysics”
Emrah Aktunç: “On Bickle’s ‘Ruthless Reductionism in Cellular/Molecular Neuroscience: What are they Reducing?”
Hakan Gürvit: “Plasticity: Via Regia to the Neuroscientific Subjectivity”
Venue: Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations – Beyoglu
Distributed cognition and memory research
Our special issue of Review of Philosophy and Psychology is now out:
Contents:
- Kourken Michaelian, John Sutton. Distributed Cognition and Memory Research: History and Current Directions
- Robert D. Rupert. Memory, Natural Kinds, and Cognitive Extension; or, Martians Don’t Remember, and Cognitive Science Is Not about Cognition
- Deborah P. Tollefsen, Rick Dale, Alexandra Paxton. Alignment, Transactive Memory, and Collective Cognitive Systems
- Georg Theiner. Transactive Memory Systems: A Mechanistic Analysis of Emergent Group Memory
- Martin M. Fagin, Jeremy K. Yamashiro, William C. Hirst. The Adaptive Function of Distributed Remembering: Contributions to the Formation of Collective Memory
- Robert W. Clowes. The Cognitive Integration of E-Memory
- Santiago Arango-Muñoz. Scaffolded Memory and Metacognitive Feelings
- Nils Dahlbäck, Mattias Kristiansson, Fredrik Stjernberg. Distributed Remembering Through Active Structuring of Activities and Environments
- Paul Loader. Is my Memory an Extended Notebook?
Talk at Bogazici: Adam Green (University of Innsbruck) “Knowledge as a Team Sport” (08/03/2013)
Adam Green (University of Innsbruck) will be giving a talk on March 8th:
“Knowledge as a Team Sport”
Friday, 5-7pm, TB130
ABSTRACT: Virtue epistemology and credit theories of knowledge think about knowledge as a kind of achievement. Knowing is achieving a true belief through cognitive excellence or, at least, through reliable faculties. Virtue epistemology has a lot of strengths to recommend it, especially its account of the normativity and the value of knowledge. Many, however, consider it to be a non-starter because of a growing list of problems some of the most well known of which concern testimony, that is, coming to believe things on the say-so of others. There are at least three problems for virtue/ credit views associated with testimony. First, if anyone deserves the credit for one coming by a true testimonial belief, it would seem to be the testifier not the recipient of testimony. Second, one commonly predicates testimonial knowledge of children despite the fact that they are gullible and thus not skillful recipients of testimony. Third, results from social psychology challenge the idea that we are at all reliable in monitoring others for trustworthiness, deceit, or competence. In this talk, I develop an anti-individualistic virtue epistemology, and I use it to resolve these three supposed shortcomings of virtue epistemologies and credit theories of knowledge.
Two talks by Ken Westphal at Bogazici. (29 & 30/11/2012)
Ken Westphal (East Anglia/ Bielefeld), the internationally renowned Kant and Hegel scholar, will give two talks at Bogazici next week.
Thursday November 29th, 5-7pm, TB130
“Natural Law, Social Contract & Moral Objectivity: Rousseau’s Natural Law Constructivism”
Friday November 30th, 5-7pm TB130
“Conventionalism & the Impoverishment of the Space of Reasons”
Ken Westphal has published almost 100 articles and the following books:
As Author:
Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism.
Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel, Hume und die Identität wahrnehmbarer Dinge: Historisch-kritische Analyse zum Kapitel Wahrnehmung in der Phanomenologie von 1807.
Hegel’s Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
As Editor:
The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Pragmatism, Reason, & Norms: A Realistic Assessment.
An Introduction to Hegel’s Logic , by Justus Hartnack.
Pragmatism and Realism , by Frederick L. WILL (Foreword by Alasdair MACINTYRE).
William Caldwell: Pragmatism and Idealism – and Responses and Reviews (with John Shook).
Abstracts below the fold.
Talk at Bogazici: Erhan Demircioglu on “Recognitional Identification and the Knowledge Argument” 02/11/2012
Talk at Bogazici: Dan Korman (UI-UC) on ‘Debunking Perceptual Beliefs about Ordinary Objects’ Monday, 08/10/2012
Dan Korman (UI-UC) will be giving a talk on ‘Debunking Perceptual Beliefs about Ordinary Objects‘ on Monday October 8th from 17:00-19:00 at Bogazici University, room TB130 (in the philosophy department).
A draft copy of the paper can be found here. And the handout here.
ABSTRACT: On our natural way of “carving up” the world into objects, some collections of objects together compose something (e.g., the trunk and branches of a palm tree) and others do not (the trunk and the dog lying beside it). Reflection on the sorts of factors that might underwrite or influence such judgments about which objects there are give rise to powerful (and under-appreciated) “debunking arguments” against our perceptual beliefs about ordinary objects. I assimilate these arguments to arguments that arise in meta-ethics and the philosophy of math, and I examine a variety of way of trying to resist the arguments.
Conference: ‘Ideals and the Ideal in Kant’, Bogazici University, May 23rd-26th, 2012
All talks will be in the Turgut Noyan Salonu (North Campus, next to the library). Details can be found here.
The program (including links to some handouts) is below the fold.
Philosophy in Assos, July 2-5, 2012: “Passions and Emotions in Ancient and Modern Philosophy”
The program is now up for the Philosophy in Assos summer event. For those of you who have never been before, this is one of the nicest events on the Turkish philosophical calendar.
Assos is a very small seaside village and is a natural venue for philosophy events as Aristotle lived there for many years. The events (organised every year by Örsan Öymen) are really good philosophically, and lots of fun.
This years speakers are: Fulvia De Luise (University of Trento), Stephen Leighton (Queen’s University), Pascal Engel (University of Geneva), Amy Schmitter (University of Alberta), Simon Blackburn (University of Cambridge), Kevin Mulligan (University of Geneva) and Toni Ronnow-Rasmussen (Lund University).
Further information can be found here. The program is below the fold:
Robert Gordon (UM-St. Louis) at Bogazici, May 2nd, 5-7pm.
Robert Gordon will be giving a talk jointly organised by the Bogazici cognitive -science program and the philosophy department, on May 2nd from 5-7pm. Venue: M2170 (Engineering Building)
Professor Gordon is the founder of Simulation Theory. As far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong about this) he introduced this expression in his extremely influential 1986 paper ““Folk Psychology as Simulation”.
“The Shared World in Which Minds Meet”
Abstract:
The title is based on William James, writing against Berkeleian idealism:
“Practically, … our minds meet in a world of objects which they share in common…. Your objects are over and over again the same as mine. If I ask you where some object of yours is, our old Memorial Hall, for example, you point to my Memorial Hall with your hand which I see. If you alter an object in your world, put out a candle, for example, when I am present, my candle ipso facto goes out.” (Radical Empiricism)
In the spirit of this quote, I defend a kind of externalist account of folk psychology, grounded in a hypothesis about shared neural representation. Shared representation (strongly overlapping neural implementation) is well‐established for visualizing and seeing, to give just one example; also, for pain and the perception of pain in others. I describe a kind of shared external representation that would cause us to frame our understanding of others in terms of a Jamesian shared world, by default. It is implicit in this default understanding that others have epistemic access to the world – that is, that the facts (as we ourselves believe them to be) are known to others. Shared representation of this sort would seem to support Williamson’s “knowledge first” thesis in epistemology. Although shared external representation would be consistent with a simulation account of folk psychology, it would be consistent with a pluralistic account as well; however, it would not support your typical “belief‐desire theory” theory.
Philosophy Seminar at Istanbul Technical University, 13th March
David Horst (University of Leipzig) will present a seminar paper on ‘Practical Knowledge’ (abstract below)
Day: Tuesday, 13th March
Time: 13:30
Place: Seminar Room, Department of Humanities and Social Science, Faculty of Science and Letters, Istanbul Technical University, Ayazağa Campus (which is in Maslak not Ayazağa!), on the metro line from Taksim.
Wenglish: A Language with No Sentences
It has been more than a year since I have been working on the idea that truth is in fact a form of reference. I started writing a text last year around this time, intending it to be a journal article, but then it got so long that I am now thinking of turning it into a book. The idea first came up when I was working on one of the chapters of my book on curiosity which just recently came out. I hold that being curious requires one to attempt to refer to something unknown to him/her. This allowed me to deal with the wh-questions easily but I had a serious problem with direct questions, or better yes/no questions. Initially I used Frege’s theory to tackle with it but it was too artificial. I liked the Fregean idea that sentences are in fact referring expressions, but I could not convince myself that true sentences refer to the True (whatever that may be)– and even worse is that false sentences refer to the False. So I started searching for an alternative theory which is what led to this work. I then revised and made substantial additions to my curiosity book, but it was at best scratching the surface. In the past year or so I gave four separate talks on it, originally with the title *TRUTH IS REFERENCE*, in Virginia, Milan, St Andrews, and Bogazici. The part of the talk that attracted the most amount of attention is where I develop a hypothetical language that I call *Wenglish*. This is a language which is just like English except that it does not have declarative sentences. Well that’s what I say, and though most of my listeners seemed to agree with me someone in the audience in one of my talks objected to it (I think it was in Virginia and it might have been Trenton Merrics, but I have to check this). Wenglish also does not have a separate truth predicate, but of course it has the notion of *reference*. *Reference* is not a predicate though, because Wenglish does not have any predicates either. Rather it has descriptional functions that do same job. Anyway I argue that whatever that we can say in English we can say in Wenglish. If this is correct it shows all three things that I wish to show: truth is a form of reference; to say that a sentence is true is to say that it refers; and to say that a sentence is false is to say that it fails to refer. Anyway here is a short passage in Wenglish for you to figure out how it works:
Knowledge is not a Propositional Attitude (at least, not in Turkish)
I’m writing a paper at the moment arguing that knowledge does not entail belief. Part of my argument is that knowing is not a propositional attitude, whereas believing is. I think there is a clear ontological distinction between facts and propositions and that what can be known are facts (and perhaps also states of affairs, and Objects) whereas the objects of belief are propositions. The essential difference between facts and propositions is that facts are not truth apt, whereas propositions are. Amongst philosophers today the claim that knowing is not a propositional attitude is extremely idiosyncratic, however historically something similar to the position I defend was probably the view of the majority of philosophers. In a later post I’ll give some evidence to back up this historical claim. In this post I want to point out that what I believe to be one of the strongest motivations for the claim that knowing is a propositional attitude is based on a contingent feature of English (and other Indo-European languages).
Hesperus is Bosphorus 