Colloquia & Lectures 2024 - 2025
Thursday, October 17th, 2024
Seth Yalcin (University of California, Berkeley)
4:10-6:00 PM
716 Philosophy Hall
"Counterepistemic Knowledge"
We know that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. We also know that if Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, someone else did. This variety of conditional knowledge — where you know that (indicative) if P, then Q, while also knowing that P is false — is curious. Although it is tied up with what is true at possibilities that are counterfactual relative to what is known, it isn’t a kind of counterfactual knowledge. (To know that if Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, someone else did, isn’t to know that if Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, someone else would have.) I label this sort of conditional knowledge counterepistemic. If ordinary thought and talk are any guide, we possess a nontrivial body of counterpistemic knowledge. But it is not easy to make theoretical sense of this knowledge, and not easy to make semantic sense of the associated language of counterepistemic knowledge ascription. I’ll bring some of the main problems into focus, and take some steps. Inter alia we’ll see that these ascriptions make for apparent failures of factivity, and that counterepistemic knowledge is hard to construe as knowledge of facts.
If you are an outside guest, please RSVP here.
Thursday, November 21st, 2024
Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London)
4:10-6:00 PM
716 Philosophy Hall
"How is agency incompatible with causation by a part of the agent?"
Christine Korsgaard’s account of agency is designed to apply to the most sophisticated reflective reasoners. Tyler Burge’s account of ‘minimal’ agency is designed to apply to simple organisms, like motile bacteria, that lack even representational states. Although it looks like they must be concerned with different phenomena, there is in fact a striking parallel between the two accounts. They both hold that behaviour caused by a mere part of an agent does not count as agentive. This suggests that understanding a system to be an agent involves a common schema, albeit one that applies in different ways. The schema does not just involve identifying a control mechanism, such that behaviour that does not issue from the control mechanism does not count as agentive. There is a deeper insight shared by Korsgaard’s and Burge’s accounts. Both hold that agents display a characteristic unity - a unity, not just of control, but of purpose or what is valued. Reflective moral agents and minimal agents achieve unity of purpose through different organizing principles.