Category: Talks SOPhiA

Antonia Grunert Universität Leipzig The paper argues that interpersonal disagreement, i.e., disagreement among different thinkers, exhibits a paradoxical nature: Even though it is possible for a thinker to think of herself as having disagreed with another thinker in the past, there is a logical problem of identifying a state of interpersonal disagreement in the present.…

Medha Kalyani Nayar Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India Choices regarding courses of action are made via deliberation or reasoning. But sometimes we are left with a lingering sense of missing out on the merits of the choice we did not make. This regret over the unchosen course of action, which shows the weight of…

Niklas Jung Goethe-University Frankfurt Lying is standardly defined as asserting a proposition while believing it to be false (c.f.Chisholm and Feehan, 1977; Meibauer, 2005). This definition presupposes a binary conception of both belief and assertion. However, both notions are more plausibly understood as admitting of degrees. I will argue that lying is best captured as…

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)…