Category: Talks SOPhiA

David Lussi University of Bern According to explanationism about normative reasons, a fact is a reason for an agent to φ insofar as it explains a normative fact related to the agent and φ-ing. One influential version of this view, good-explanationism, holds that reasons are facts that explain what would be good. A standard objection…

Jana Baum University of Leipzig In his paper The Search for Logically Alien Thought (1992) Conant argues that the idea of a logical alien – a being that thinks in a way that is fundamentally different and, in that sense, in disagreement with the way we do – is unintelligible. The insight is that whenever…

Essence Ujah University of Innsbruck This paper introduces a broader concept of epistemic injustice called Educational Epistemic Injustice (EEI), that addresses the wrong done to someone not just in their capacity as knowers, but also in their attempts to become knowers. Existing accounts of epistemic injustice have been limited to wrongs done to someone in…

Emese Havadtői Central European University In this talk, I examine a metaethical approach that locates normative truth within agents while rejecting the Kantian attempt to ground morality in rationality alone. The leading example of such a view is Sharon Street’s Humean constructivism, which offers an agent-relative account of normative truth, grounding it in psychological states.…

Caterina Lupieri University of Trieste This paper examines a set of Italian insults formed through pejorative suffixation applied to socially connoted bases (e.g., donnuccola ‘woman+DIM.DEROG’, poveraccio ‘poor+DEROG’, dottoruncolo ‘doctor+DIM.DEROG’) within the framework of the Presuppositional Account of Hybrid Evaluatives and argues that they can contribute to philosophical theories on slurs and hate speech. The analysis…

Ruoyun Yu King’s College London In most recent discussions of Frege’s Puzzle it is treated as a puzzle about substitution failure in attitude reports (e.g., Kripke, 1979; Salmon, 1986; Soames, 1987; Sosa, 1996; Braun, 1998). The puzzle, so construed, is supposed to be solved when we have a plausible answer of why such substitutions go…

Veronika Lassl University of Vienna In his 2022 book The A Priori Without Magic, Jared Warren develops a theory of epistemic a priori warrant. As part of it, he claims that there are synthetic a priori truths, for example: (CRIM-RED) “Everything crimson is red”. However, according to Warren, (CRIM-RED) is not only a synthetic a…

Christian Ennsgraber Universität Salzburg In the Blue Bus hypothetical, a plaintiff is injured by an unidentified bus; the only evidence is that the defendant runs 80% of the buses on the route. This is widely taken to threaten formal-probabilistic models of legal fact-finding: a Bayesian who reads the civil standard of proof as P(liability|evidence) >…

Julian Vincent Laggner University of Vienna According to Humphreys’ paradox (Humphreys 1985), there is a structural tension in the propensity interpretation of probability because propensities are causal and temporally asymmetric, while conditional probability is symmetric within the Kolmogorov framework. In Propensities and Pragmatism (Suárez 2013), Mauricio Suárez rejects the Identity Thesis, proposing the notation “»”…

Fabricio Carvalho University College London In biology, functional statements are usually linked to teleological terms such as purpose, goal or design. To explain this connection, Ratti & Germain defend that function-talk retained the treatment of organisms “as if they were designed objects” as a relic from early physiological practices. However, after Darwin, they argue this…