NIP Events and Visitors

14 July, 2012: Basic Knowledge Workshop X

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 18 October, 2011

22 November, 2011: Ole Hjorltand (The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU))

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 3 October, 2011

24 November, 2011: Ole Hjorltand (The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU))

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 3 October, 2011

Super Special Seminar (Normalization and Harmony: To Lie Like a Bullet)

7 November, 2011: Patrick Greenough (University of St Andrews)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 3 October, 2011

10 November, 2011: Patrick Greenough (University of St Andrews)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 3 October, 2011

Super Special Seminar: 'Knowledge for Nothing?'

8 November, 2011: Patrick Greenough (University of St Andrews)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 3 October, 2011

Super Special Seminar title: 'Scepticism: Disease, Diagnosis, Treatment'

9 November, 2011: Patrick Greenough (University of St Andrews)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 3 October, 2011

Basic Knowledge Seminar: 'Meta-Epistemic Scepticism: Disease, Diagnosis, Treatment'

5 December, 2011: Dan López de Sa (ICREA Researcher at Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència & LOGOS)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 25 August, 2011

6 December, 2011: Dan López de Sa (ICREA Researcher at Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència & LOGOS)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 25 August, 2011

Super Special Seminar (title TBC)

11 October, 2011: Michael P. Lynch (University of Connecticut)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 25 August, 2011

13 October, 2011: Michael P. Lynch (University of Connecticut)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 25 August, 2011

Super Special Seminar 'The Price of Truth'

5 November, 2011: Basic Knowledge Workshop IX

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 9 August, 2011

The title for the 9th Basic Knowledge Workshop is ‘Inferentialism and the Epistemology of Logic’

Schedule

Saturday 5 November 2011

10.00 – 10.30	Tea, Coffee
10.30 – 12.30	Philip Ebert (Stirling): 'The easy mathematical knowledge problem' Chair: Aidan McGlynn
12.30 - 1.30	Lunch
1.30 – 3.30	Sinan Dogramaci (Texas): ‘Conventionalism about Basic Deductive Reasoning’ Chair: Martin Smith
3.30 – 4.00	Tea, Coffee
4.00 – 6.00	Alan Weir (Glasgow): 'The Force of Reason: why logic compels' Chair: Federico Luzzi
8.30	Workshop Dinner at Howies here

Sunday 6 November 2011

10.00 – 10.15	Tea, Coffee
10.15 – 12.15	Alexander Oldemeier (Leeds): ‘Implicit definition and epistemic analyticity’ Chair: Douglas Edwards
12.15 - 1.00	Lunch
1.00 – 3.00	Gillian Russell (Washingston): ‘Logic and Meaning’ Chair: Giacomo Melis
3.00 – 3.15	Tea, Coffee
3.15 – 5.15	Yuri Cath (St Andrews):'Understanding, Enabling and Knowing' Chair: Paula Sweeney

24 May, 2012: NIP 2012 Reading Party

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 9 August, 2011

2 June, 2012: Relativism & Rational Tolerance Workshop I

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 9 August, 2011

30 June, 2012: NIP Early Career Conference 2012

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 9 August, 2011

25 May, 2011: Dr Allan Hazlett (Edinburgh)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 12 May, 2011

25 May, 2011: Dr Allan Hazlett (Edinburgh) - 'Irrelevant Knowledge and the Right to Believe'

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 12 May, 2011

ABSTRACT: According to entitlement theories of reasonable belief, someone’s belief that p can be reasonable even if she has no good evidence that p is true. On one such theory, someone can be entitled to believe p in virtue of p’s being a “hinge proposition” vis-à-vis some species of inquiry. An important question that arises for entitlement theories of reasonable belief (and one that arises in particular in connection with the problem of skepticism) is whether a proposition might be known in virtue of its being reasonably believed by someone entitled to believe it. However, some philosophers (e.g. Wittgenstein) have been reluctant to say that “hinge propositions” are known, and the view that they are known seems to run afoul of the Gettier problem: beliefs that I am entitled to are in no sense “cognitive achievements,” but on the most promising solution to the Gettier problem, knowledge is essentially a cognitive achievement. In this paper I explore the prospects for entitlement theories of knowledge (e.g. those on which “hinge propositions” can be known), and provide a tool for defending such views: attributing knowledge often implies that the knower enjoys a “privileged epistemic position,” and this explains why we are reluctant to say that “hinge propositions” are known.

6 June, 2011: Professor Bob Hale (Sheffield) - 'What is absolute necessity?'

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 12 May, 2011

13 July, 2011: Basic Knowledge Workshop VIII

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 9 May, 2011

-->

Schedule

Wednesday 13 July 2011

10.30 – 12.15	Dylan Dodd (NIP): ‘On proportioning belief to the evidence’ Chair: TBA
12.15 - 1.00	Lunch
1.00 – 2.30	Aidan McGlynn (NIP): 'Risk-Minimization and Higher-Order Evidence' Chair: TBA
2.30 – 2.45	Break
2.45 – 4.30	Nikolaj Pedersen (SERG, University of Copenhagen): 'No need for Entitlement' Chair: TBA
4.30 - 4.45	break
4.45 – 6.15	Fed Luzzi (NIP): 'How to Abandon Knowledge Counter-Closure' Chair: TBA
7.00	Workshop Dinner

5 July, 2011: NIP Truth, Paradox and Abstraction Workshop

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 9 May, 2011

Grateful thanks go to the British Academy for funding this event.

Schedule

Tuesday 5 July 2011

1.30 – 3.00	Roy Cook (Minneapolis): ‘Logicism, set theory, and the axiom of separation’ Chair: TBA
3.00 - 3.15	tea/coffee
3.15 – 4.45	Øystein Linnebo (Birkbeck): 'Grounded abstraction' Chair: TBA
4.45 – 5.00	tea/coffee
5.00 – 6.30	Stewart Shapiro (Ohio State): ‘Sets, properties, satisfaction, and truth’ Chair: TBA
7.00	Workshop Dinner

Wednesday 6 July 2011

9.00 – 9.30	Tea, Coffee
9.30 – 11.00	Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins (Nottingham): 'Beall's Spandrels' Chair: TBA
11.00 – 11.15	tea/coffee
11.15 – 12.45	Marcus Rossberg (UConn): ‘Semantic paradoxes: the successes and failures of non-classical logics’ Chair: TBA
12.45 - 1.30	Lunch
1.30 – 3.00	Kevin Scharp (Ohio State): ‘Truth, Revenge, and Internalizability' Chair: TBA
3.00 – 3.15	tea/coffee
3.15 – 4.45	Graham Priest (Melbourne): 'Revising Logic’ Chair: TBA
4.45 – 5.00	tea/coffee
5.00 – 6.30	PANEL DISCUSSION / ROUND TABLE

26 May, 2011: Dr Alan Hájek (ANU)

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 4 May, 2011

26 May, 2011: Dr Alan Hájek (ANU), "A Plea for the Improbable"

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 4 May, 2011

"A Plea for the Improbable"

19 May, 2011: NIP Reading Party

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 27 October, 2010

1 June, 2011: NIP Review

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 27 October, 2010

28 June, 2011: NIP Summer School

The Northern Institute of Philosophy — 27 October, 2010

The summer school is targeted at graduate students and is intended to mirror the level of a US PhD program taught component. It will cover the following three streams of research.

RELATIVISM AND OBJECTIVITY

Guest Speaker: Crispin Wright (NIP and NYU)

This stream will examine the topic of disagreement and its bearing on relativism and objectivity. The focus will be on recent attempts to motivate a relativist or anti-realist treatment of particular discourses (morals, aesthetics, etc). These often start from the contention that the discourse in question contrasts with ordinary empirical discourse—discourse about how things stand with familiar ‘medium-sized dry goods’—in permitting disagreements that are both genuine and faultless. It is difficult to evaluate the claimed contrast without some grip of how these matters play out in the ordinary empirical case, and so in the first session we will cover the recent debate on how to respond rationally to disagreement with an epistemic peer concerning ordinary empirical matters. In the second session we will consider in detail a number of arguments for various sorts of anti-realism about a discourse—error theories, fictionalism, intuitionism, and relativism—based on the idea that the characteristic claims of that discourse can be the target of faultless disagreement, in a sense precluded by a realistic construal. The third and final session examines apparently faultless disagreement as a source of empirical support for recent incarnations of relativism as an empirical semantic proposal. Suppose, for example, we want to take seriously the idea that there can be genuine but faultless disagreement about what is tasty. Maintaining that ‘tasty’ is indexical in even a broad sense seems unsatisfactory, since there is then no one content that you affirm and I deny when you assert ‘Rhubarb is tasty’ and I assert ‘Rhubarb is not tasty’, suggesting that our apparent disagreement isn’t genuine after all. If we want to allow for genuine but faultless disagreement, it looks like we have to find room for the idea that the same content can be true in your mouth but false in mine, and this looks like a job for relativism, in its recent semantic incarnation. We will assess whether such arguments for departing from a more traditional, non-relativist semantics are cogent, and whether the relativist alternatives really deliver on their promise to allow us to form a stable conception of genuine but faultless disagreement.

Tutors: Aidan McGlynn (NIP) and Paula Sweeney (NIP)

Relativism and Objectivity Reading
Session 1:

Required reading: Richard Feldman 'Epistemological Puzzles About Disagreement' (2006) in Stephen Hetherington (ed.) Epistemology Futures. OUP

Optional reading: Thomas Kelly 'Peer Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence' (2010) in Alvin Goldman & Dennis Whitcomb (eds.) Social Epistemology: Essential Readings. OUP

Session 2:

Required reading: Crispin Wright 'Intuitionism, Realism, Relativism and Rhubarb' (2006) in Patrick Greenough & Michael Lynch (eds.) Truth and Realism. Clarendon Press.

Optional reading: Karl Schafer 'Faultless Disagreement and Aesthetic Realism' (2011) Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (2): 265-286.

Session 3:

Required reading: John MacFarlane 'Relativism and Disagreement' (2007) Philosophical Studies 132: 17-31.

Optional reading: Carl Baker 'Indexical Contextualism and the Challenges From Disagreement' (forthcoming) Philosophical Studies

FALLIBILISM AND INFALLIBILISM

Guest Speaker: Brian Weatherson (Rutgers and Arché)

These sessions focus on the following issues that relate to the issue of fallibilism vs. infallibilism in epistemology.

Fallibilist vs. Infallibilist accounts of knowledge: Here we take an infallibilist account of knowledge to be an account of knowledge which either says that if S knows that p, then p is entailed by S’s evidence, or says that if S knows that p, then the probability of p on S’s evidence is 1. David Lewis once said that a point in favor of infallibilism was that concessive knowledge attributions, utterances of the form ‘S knows p, but it’s possible that q’, where q obviously entails not-p, sound contradictory. He thought that concessive knowledge attributions should often be true if fallibilism were right. Does the infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions provide evidence for infallibilist accounts of knowledge? We’ll see that one can provide an argument for infallibilism that starts with their infelicity. We’ll discuss what resources fallibilists have to respond to this argument.

The dogmatism paradox In Thought, Gilbert Harman provides the following puzzle (which he attributes to Saul Kripke). Say one knows that p. Then by epistemic closure, one knows that any future evidence one will acquire that seems to tell against p will be misleading. Since one knows this, it seems that one is justified in ignoring any evidence one may acquire that bears on p. Knowledge, then, justifies one in being dogmatic and ignoring evidence. In this session we’ll discuss how one might avoid this conclusion, and how this puzzle relates to the issue of infallibilism vs. fallibilism.

Tutors: Dylan Dodd (NIP) and Jonathan Ichikawa (Arché)

Fallibilism and Infallibilism Reading
Required reading:

Angelika Kratzer 'What 'must' and 'can' must and can mean' (1977) Linguistics and Philosophy 1/3: 337-355.

Keith DeRose 'Epistemic Possibilities' (1991) Philosophical Review 100/4: 581-605.

David Lewis 'Elusive Knowledge' (1996) Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74/4: 549-576.

Optional reading:

Patrick Rysiew 'The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions' (2001) Nous 35/4: 477-514.

Dylan Dodd 'Against Fallibilism' (forthcoming) Australasian Journal of Philosophy (online first paper).

TRUTH AND PARADOX

Guest Speaker: Alan Weir (Glasgow)

Tarski’s (1933) work on the undefinability of truth for formal languages provided a serious challenge: account for the logical (or semantic) paradoxes involving the notion of truth. Following Kripke’s (1975) seminal paper, four rival approaches emerged:

(i) Revise classical logic. [e.g. Burgess (1986), Dunn (1969), Martin & Woodruff (1975), Priest (1979), McGee (1991), Visser (1984), Yablo (1985)]

(ii) Revise the notion of truth. [e.g. Feferman (1984), Friedman & Sheard (1987), Gupta (1982), Herzberger (1970).]

(iii) Accept the paradoxes, but limit their damage. [e.g. Brady (1989), Chihara (1979), Dowden (1984), Priest (1979).]

(iv) Attempt to bar the paradoxes from ever arising. [e.g. Barwise & Etchemendy (1987), Burge (1979), Gaifman (1988), C. Parsons (1974).]

The main focus will be on the most recent developments of formal theories that follow route (i) [e.g. Beall (2009), Field (2008), Weir (2005)]. Those who favour (i) are often forced – via ‘revenge’ problems, or limitations on expressibility – to adopt a secondary strategy. This stream will teach participants the basic logics and truth theories of the dominant non-classical approaches. We will focus on two main evaluative questions. First, what is the character and significant of ‘revenge’ for each theory/logic? Second, is it ever appropriate for those who endorse (i) to adopt a secondary strategy from (ii)-(iv) to address ‘revenge’?

Tutors: Aaron Cotnoir(NIP) and Colin Caret (Arché)

Truth and Paradox Reading
Required reading:

Hannes Leitgeb 'What Theories of Truth Should Be Like (But Cannot Be)' Philosophy Compass 2/2 (2007): 276–290

Alan Weir 'Naive Truth and Sophisticated Logic' in Deflationism and Paradox, (eds.) Jc Beall and Bradley Armour-Garb, OUP 2005, pp. 218-249

Optional reading:

Jc Beall 'Prolegomenon to Future Revenge' in Revenge of the Liar, (ed.) Jc Beall, OUP, 2007.

Jc Beall 'The Liar Paradox' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

If you have any questions regarding the summer school, please email Paula Sweeney (p.sweeney@abdn.ac.uk).