Category: Talks SOPhiA

Julian Lee-Sursin & Hong Joo Ryoo École Normale Supérieure & John’s Hopkins University This paper advances a regress argument against treating “self-healing” as a coherent property of artificial intelligence agents. By self-healing we mean an agent’s capacity to detect and correct its own failures without external intervention, a notion that has acquired prominence in work…

Juan Pablo Cortés University of Valencia Pluralism about introspection is the view that there is more than one method or process that generates special, first-personal knowledge of our own mental states. Its opposite is introspective uniformity, the view that there is only one such method or process. Until recently, the uniformity of introspection was a…

Erik Ossenkopp Saarland University (Universität des Saarlandes) Let epistemic ex-ante contractualism (EEAC) be the claim – a variant of which is defended by Johann Frick – that, other things equal, an action is right iff it minimizes the sum of the strengths of the relevant complaints against it, where (i) the strength of a person’s…

Samuel Geiger University of Vienna In a series of correspondences with his mother, Kurt Gödel professed his belief in an afterlife. His reasons for believing so had to do with his conviction that the world exhibits a rational order. In a letter from July 23, 1961, he writes: “is there reason to assume that the…

Adriano Aguado Nocilla University of Barcelona The notion of proposition has been central to analytic philosophy due to its multiple explanatory roles: as bearer of truth, semantic content of utterances, object of propositional attitudes, and referent of that-clauses. However, these roles generate a well-known tension. On the one hand, propositions must be coarse-grained enough to…

Nike Charlott Frings Humboldt University of Berlin With her proposal of a “zetetic turn,” Jane Friedman calls for a radical rethinking of epistemology and has made the debate of inquiry a hot topic. According to Friedman, true inquiry requires action and an interrogative attitude (short IA; Friedman 2019).  By contrast, I will examine the phenomenon…

Dimana Orlinova Anastassova Roma Tre University In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented results, reigniting the debate on whether machines can understand language [12, 6, 3, 2]. However, despite their successes in NLP tasks, scholars believe that LLMs still struggle significantly with natural language understanding (LU)…

Max Forster Stanford University How should agents adjust their credences when faced with higher-order de-feat? According to level-splitters, agents may rationally retain their first-ordercredence, while lowering their higher-order confidence that their credence isthe right one to have. Steglich-Petersen (2019) endorses a version of level-splitting, but adds an important requirement: higher-order defeat rationallyrequires agents to lower…

Tyler Miniati University of Florida Whether abductive reasoning (more commonly known as “inference to the best explanation”) can be synthesized with Bayesianism is a central question in contemporary philosophy of science and epistemology. A common proposal is that abduction is a (perhaps heuristic) method for estimating or constraining the Bayesian probabilities of explanations. In “Can…

Simon Eggersmann Heidelberg University The sensitivity account of knowledge is a famous but rarely defended theory in contemporary epistemology. Most commonly, it is rejected on the basis of its denying plausible principles of epistemic closure, i.e., there are cases in which S knows a proposition p, competently deduces q from p, and yet fails to…