Category: Talks SOPhiA

Arianna Laura Savelli University of Trento QBism interprets quantum states as expressions of an agent’s personal degrees of belief and construes quantum theory as a normative framework governing probabilistic coherence. At the same time, it maintains that agents interact with an agent-independent reality that “kicks back” and underwrites the regularities captured by the Born rule.…

Kristina Malzahn Leibniz University Hannover, Institute of Philosophy A widely accepted premise in the philosophy of science is that scientific images possess epistemic value, derived from their capacity to represent reality. On this image-centric view, the evidential value of a visualization derives exclusively from its visual content. An unambiguous depiction of a phenomenon is considered…

Andrea Sanders ILLC (Master of Logic), University of Amsterdam This paper develops a new epistemic theory of grooming that shifts the focus from norm transgression to the manipulation of trust, arguing that Lauren Leydon-Hardy’s (2019; 2021; 2025) existing account mislocates both what is distinctive about grooming and wherein the primary harm lies. The contribution of…

Victoria Weronika Grygorczuk Universitat de les Illes Balears Recent debates in the ontology of fiction divide broadly between deflationary approaches,  which treat fictional entities as artefacts grounded in social practices, and inflationary frameworks that anchor fictional truth in robust modal or metaphysical structures. This paper introduces a third option that has received insufficient attention: Roman…

Alba Lavagnoli Gonzalez Universidad de Valladolid Gilbert Ryle (1949) introduced a fundamental distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how”, defining the latter as a type of practical or dispositional knowledge. Starting from this dichotomy, this paper aims to investigate whether the knowledge generated by machine learning and deep learning can be classified precisely as “knowing…

Marvin Thinschmidt University of Potsdam In this paper, I will discuss one of the most popular theories of quotation: the demonstrative theory. I will then defend this theory by formulating a rebuttal of one of the central arguments often brought forward against it.According to the demonstrative theory of quotation, which is primarily associated with Davidson…

Jorge Ramos UNED, Madrid Biology is an autonomous from physics (Mayr, 2004), intrinsically complex and methodologically pluralistic (Leonelli, 2019) science. I argue that this autonomy extends to its metaphysics. I propose basing it on its practices to account for its pluralism. Physics and its metaphysics do not exhaust the ontology revealed by biological practices, such…

Luca Buratta Univeristy of Turin Backtracking reasoning poses two challenges for theorists of subjunctive conditionals (counterfactuals). The first concerns the distinction between forward and backward counterfactuals:  the former state that if something had been different, later events would have been different, whereas the latter state that if something had been different, earlier events would have…

Donggeon Kim Sungkyunkwan University The aim of this paper is to gloss the epistemic logician’s operator ‘K‘ in a novel way using the concept of epistemic environment suggested by Martin Miragoli (2025), so that we can account for the distinctively epistemic failure in a case of sanctioned white ignorance. To this end, I will refer…

David Kubíček Masaryk University In the second half of the last century, as a result of rapid scientific progress, prenatal genetic diagnosis began to be implemented and legalized. Thanks to this, we are able today to diagnose potential disabilities in a fetus and, based on this diagnosis, terminate the pregnancy prematurely. Many advocates for the…