Agency: types and implications

This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and the most important and longest within the last year. Also I have edited them to bring them up to date (2016). The copyright page has the date of this first edition and new editions will be noted there as I edit old articles or add new ones. All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds within the framework of our innate psychology as presented in the table of intentionality. As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important way, we are apes. If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., human ecology and psychology) in school, maybe civilization would have a chance. In my view these articles and reviews have many novel and highly useful elements, in that they use my own version of the recently (ca. 1980’s) developed dual systems view of our brain and behavior to lay out a logical system of rationality (personality, psychology, mind, language, behavior, thought, reasoning, reality etc.) that is sorely lacking in the behavioral sciences (psychology, philosophy, literature, politics, anthropology, history, economics, sociology etc.). The philosophy centers around the two writers I have found the most important, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, whose ideas I combine and extend within the dual system (two systems of thought) framework that has proven so useful in recent thinking and reasoning research. As I note, there is in my view essentially complete overlap between philosophy, in the strict sense of the enduring questions that concern the academic discipline, and the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (behavior). Once one has grasped Wittgenstein’s insight that there is only the issue of how the language game is to be played, one determines the Conditions of Satisfaction (what makes a statement true or satisfied etc.) and that is the end of the discussion. Now that I think I understand how the games work I have mostly lost interest in philosophy, which of course is how Wittgenstein said it should be. But since they are the result of our innate psychology, or as Wittgenstein put, it due to the lack of perspicuity of language, the problems run throughout all human discourse, so there is endless need for philosophical analysis, not only in the ‘human sciences’ of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, literature, religion, etc., but in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, mathematics, and biology. It is universal to mix the language game questions with the real scientific ones as to what the empirical facts are. Scientism is ever present and the master has laid it before us long ago, i.e., Wittgenstein (hereafter W) beginning principally with the Blue and Brown Books in the early 1930’s. "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads the philosopher into complete darkness." (BBB p18) Nevertheless, a real understanding of Wittgenstein’s work, and hence of how our psychology functions, is only beginning to spread in the second decade of the 21st century, due especially to P.M.S. Hacker (hereafter H) and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (hereafter DMS), but also to many others, some of the more prominent of whom I mention in the articles. When I read ‘On Certainty’ a few years ago I characterized it in an Amazon review as the Foundation Stone of Philosophy and Psychology and the most basic document for understanding behavior, and about the same time DMS was writing articles noting that it had solved the millennia old epistemological problem of how we can know anything for certain. I realized that W was the first one to grasp what is now characterized as the two systems or dual systems of thought, and I generated a dual systems (S1 and S2) terminology which I found to be very powerful in describing behavior. I took the small table that John Searle (hereafter S) had been using, expanded it greatly, and found later that it integrated perfectly with the framework being used by various current workers in thinking and reasoning research. Since they were published individually, I have tried to make the book reviews and articles stand by themselves, insofar as possible, and this accounts for the repetition of various sections, notably the table and its explanation. I start with a short article that presents the table of intentionality and briefly describes its terminology and background. Next, is by far the longest article, which attempts a survey of the work of W and S as it relates to the table and so to an understanding or description (not explanation as W insisted) of behavior. The key to everything about us is biology, and it is obliviousness to it that leads millions of smart educated people like Obama, Chomsky, Clinton and the Pope to espouse suicidal utopian ideals that inexorably lead straight to Hell On Earth. As W noted, it is what is always before our eyes that is the hardest to see. We live in the world of conscious deliberative linguistic System 2, but it is unconscious, automatic reflexive System 1 that rules. This is Searle’s The Phenomenological Illusion (TPI), Pinker’s Blank Slate and Tooby and Cosmides Standard Social Science Model. Democracy and equality are wonderful ideals, but without strict controls, selfishness and stupidity gain the upper hand and soon destroy any nation and any world that adopts them. The monkey mind steeply discounts the future, and so we sell our children’s heritage for temporary comforts. Thus I end with an essay on the great tragedy playing out in America and the world, which can be seen as a direct result of TPI. The astute may wonder why we cannot see System 1 at work, but it is clearly counterproductive for an animal to be thinking about or second guessing every action, and in any case there is no time for the slow, massively integrated System 2 to be involved in the constant stream of split second ‘decisions’ we must make. As W noted, our ‘thoughts’ (T1 or the thoughts of System 1) must lead directly to actions. It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves an heuristic for how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) view it, includes both conscious deliberative System 2 and unconscious automated System 1 actions or reflexes. Thus all the articles, like all behavior, are intimately connected if one knows how to look at them. As I note, The Phenomenological Illusion (oblivion to our automated System 1) is universal and extends not merely throughout philosophy but throughout life. I am sure that Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg and the Pope would be incredulous if told that they suffer from the same problem as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, but it’s clearly true. While the phenomenologists only wasted a lot of people’s time, they are wasting the earth. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019)

I provide a critical survey of some of the major findings of Wittgenstein and Searle on the logical structure of intentionality (mind, language, behavior), taking as my starting point Wittgenstein’s fundamental discovery –that all truly ‘philosophical’ problems are the same—confusions about how to use language in a particular context, and so all solutions are the same—looking at how language can be used in the context at issue so that its truth conditions (Conditions of Satisfaction or COS) are clear. The basic problem is that one can say anything but one cannot mean (state clear COS for) any arbitrary utterance and meaning is only possible in a very specific context. I analyze various writings by and about them from the perspective of the two systems of thought, employing a new table of intentionality and new dual systems nomenclature. It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves as an heuristic for, how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology, but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) view it, includes both conscious deliberative System 2 and unconscious automated System 1 actions or reflexes. Thus, all the articles, like all behavior, are intimately connected if one knows how to look at them. As I note, The Phenomenological Illusion (oblivion to our automated System 1) is universal and extends not merely throughout philosophy but throughout life. I am sure that Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg and the Pope would be incredulous if told that they suffer from the same problem as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, (or that that they differ only in degree from drug and sex addicts in being motivated by stimulation of their frontal cortices by the delivery of dopamine (and over 100 other chemicals) via the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens), but it’s clearly true. While the phenomenologists only wasted a lot of people’s time, they are wasting the earth and their descendant’s future. Although there are countless books on Wittgenstein, in my view only a few very recent ones come close to a full appreciation of him. None make a serious attempt to relate his work to one of the other modern geniuses of behavior John Searle and nobody has applied the powerful two systems of thought framework to philosophical issues from the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology. I attempt to do this here.

Newton Fund Conference on the Philosophies of Mind, Language & Action Book of Abstracts 19–23 September 2016 São Paulo Brazil 4 Committees Program Committee André Bazzoni Michelle Montague Marco Ruffino Luiz H. L. dos Santos Galen Strawson José Zalabardo Organizing Committee André Bazzoni Thayse Ferreira Rodrigo Silveira Danilo de Souza Bruna Thalenberg José Zalabardo Editors André Bazzoni Thayse Ferreira 6 Contents Committees 5 Programme 11 Quine Lectures 17 Consciousness (John Searle) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Language (John Searle) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Society (John Searle) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Tutorials 19 Wittgenstein’s Theory of Judgment (José Zalabardo) . . . . . . . . 19 Free Will (Galen Strawson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Worlds and Attitudes (André Bazzoni ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Keynote Talks What is the Attitude/Content Distinction? (Michelle Montague) . Qualitative Physicalism (Osvaldo Pessoa) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Superficially and Deeply Contingent A Priori Truths (Marco Ruffino) Physicalist Panpsychism (Galen Strawson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empiricist Pragmatism (José Zalabardo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 21 21 22 22 23 Abstracts On function of phenomenal consciousness (Nicolás Alarcón) . . . . Stoljar, Strawson and our Anti-physicalist intuitions (Uziel Awret) . Can I Intend to Raise Your Arm? (Tomás Barrero) . . . . . . . . . When did the Online Shopping occur? (Katja Behrens) . . . . . . . Embodied Cognition: Hubert Dreyfus and Merleau-Ponty on the Role of the Body in Intelligent Behaviour (Rodrigo Benevides) Decision myopia: Do framing effects undermine agentive control? (Juan Pablo Bermúdez ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Guiding Agency (Andrei Buckareff & Jesus Aguilar ) . . . . . . . . 25 25 26 27 28 7 29 29 30 Linguistic meaning in Self-regulated strategies: a doctoral research into Mobile Assisted Language Learning (Artur Campos & João Freitas) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dispositional essentialism and the regress of pure powers (Renato Cani ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to talk about looks (Filipe Carijó) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Singular Thoughts and Natural Numbers (Pedro Carné) . . . . . . Cognitive aspects of high-level abductive reasoning (Fabiana Carvalho) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joint Action as Coordination (Thiago Chaves) . . . . . . . . . . . . Unhidden situations: agreement mismatch in BrP and tough constructions (Luana de Conto) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agency: types and implications (Stéphane Dias) . . . . . . . . . . . Rethinking mental events. What can neuroscientific research on consciousness tell us about the mental (Anna Drozdzewska) . . Pure Experience and Panpsychism. Obsession and Flirt in the Philosophy of William James (Giacomo Foglietta) . . . . . . . . . Presentation and Interpretation: the Case for Impure Cognitive Phenomenology (Peter Forrest) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indifference to Origins (Kim Frost) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘We’ — the subject of collective intentionality (Rodrigo Gouvea) . . First-Person and Third-Person Content Ascriptions and Intentional Irrealism (Amir Horowitz ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Harmonia Philosophica (Spyridon Kakos) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Question of Method: Searle and the Logical Analysis of Linguistic Intentionality (Hayden Kee) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thought, language and compositionality (Raquel Krempel ) . . . . . Linguistic Analysis in Philosophy of Science (Marina Legroski & Álvaro Fujihara) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Representation without representations (David Lindeman) . . . . . The Combination Problem and the Phenomenal Bond (Haoying Liu) The Experience of Acting: an Empirical Question for Action Theory? (Beatriz Marques) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Singular thought, particular thought and de re thought: why they are not the same thing (Filipe Martone) . . . . . . . . . . . . Why some theories of language evolution may sound a little weird (Fábio Mesquita) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Process and Mind: Exploring the Relationship Between Process Philosophy and the Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Science of Cognition (Larry Moralez ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mindless Accuracy (Alexander Morgan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 31 32 33 34 34 35 36 37 37 38 39 40 41 41 42 43 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 The enactivist approach to consciousness (Laura Nascimento) . . Dilemmas and implications of Individual cognition and Social cognition as an alternative path (Hugo Neri ) . . . . . . . . . . . Mnemonic Externalism and the Extended Mind Hypothesis (Hugo Neri & Veridiana Cordeiro) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Can Neuroscience Help Select the Correct Metamorality? (Thomas Noah) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biocommunication (Hyungrae Noh & Carrie Figdor ) . . . . . . . Some remarks concerning Internal Realism in the Philosophy of History (Jacinto Páez ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eliminating Epistemic Possibilities (Meagan Phillips) . . . . . . . How do we refer to events, facts and states of affairs? (Ana Clara Polakof ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Abandoning the concept of causal reduction (Tárik Prata) . . . . Do the Laws of Physics Lie? The Representational (Metaphysical) Limitations of Science and its Implication for Interdisciplinary Discourse (Finney Premkumar ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why Are You Laughing? (On Humour) (Marion Renauld & Fabien Schang) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How the laws of semantics lie (Kevin Richardson) . . . . . . . . . Action Theory, Causal Exclusion, and Two Concepts of Causation (Matthias Rolffs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shared intentionality: from dominance to equality (Alejandro Rosas & Juan Pablo Bermúdez ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Naturalistic Account of Morality (Derya Sakin) . . . . . . . . . Perceptual Experiences and Aspect (Sebastián Sanhueza) . . . . . Wittgenstein’s Criticism of Russell’s Theory of Judgment (Antonio Segatto) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quinean holism (Leonardo Soutello) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Externalist solutions to the intentional matter: the rise of language in Frege, Wittgenstein and Haroldo de Campos (Vanessa Temporal & Franco Sandanello) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Different conceptions of Representations in Fodor and Searle (Rogerio Teza) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge, Storytelling, and the Fallacy of the Affective Fallacy (Flannery Wilson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . 52 . 53 . 54 . 55 . 56 . 57 . 58 . 59 . 60 . 61 . 62 . 63 . 63 . 64 . 65 . 66 . 66 . 67 . 67 . 68 . 69 10 Programme Monday 19 MA Tuesday 20 MA Wednesday 21 MA Thursday 22 FFLCH Friday 23 FFLCH Registration 09:00–09:45 Quine Lecture 2 Searle 10:30–12:00 Quine Lecture 3 Searle 10:30–12:00 Contributed 1 10:00–11:00 Contributed 4 08:30–10:00 Opening 09:45–10:30 LUNCH 12:00–13:30 LUNCH 12:00–13:00 COFFEE 11:00–11:30 COFFEE 10:00–10:30 Quine Lecture 1 Searle 10:30–12:00 Tutorial 1 Zalabardo 13:30–15:30 Tutorial 3 Bazzoni 13:00–15:00 Release Quine, O sentido da nova lógica 11:30–12:00 Contributed 5 10:30–12:00 LUNCH 12:00–13:30 Tutorial 2 Strawson 15:30–16:30 COFFEE 15:00–15:30 LUNCH 12:00–13:30 LUNCH 12:00–13:30 Tutorial 1 Zalabardo 13:30–15:30 COFFEE 16:30–17:00 Invited 1 Ruffino 15:30–16:30 Invited 3 Strawson 13:30–14:30 Invited 4 Zalabardo 13:30–14:30 Tutorial 2 Strawson 15:30–16:30 Tutorial 2 Strawson 17:00–18:00 Invited 2 Montague 16:30–17:30 Contributed 2 14:30–16:00 Contributed 6 14:30–16:30 COFFEE 16:30–17:00 Tutorial 3 Bazzoni 18:00–19:00 Happy Hour Skye 18:00–21:00 COFFEE 16:00–16:30 COFFEE 16:30–17:00 Contributed 3 16:30–18:00 Invited 5 Pessoa 17:00–18:00 Tutorial 2 Strawson 17:00–18:00 Tutorial 3 Bazzoni 18:00–19:00 Dinner Camelo 20:00 13 Contributed 1 10:00–11:00 Contributed 2 14:30–16:00 Contributed 3 16:30–18:00 Contributed 4 08:30–10:00 Contributed 5 10:30–12:00 Contributed 6 14:30-16:30 Rolffs 10:00–10:30 Buckareff & Aguilar 14:30–15:00 Rosas & Bermúdez 16:30–17:00 Krempel 8:30–9:00 Carvalho 10:30–11:00 Neri 14:30–15:00 Barrero 10:30–11:00 Bermúdez 15:00–15:30 Gouvea 17:00–17:30 Carné 9:00–9:30 Dias 10:30-11:00 Premkumar 15:00–15:30 Morgan 10:00–10:30 Marques 15:30–16:00 Chaves 17:30–18:00 Martone 9:30–10:00 Moralez 11:00–11:30 Legroski & Fujihara 15:30–16:00 Nascimento 10:30–11:00 Forrest 14:30–15:00 Liu 16:30–17:00 Kakos 8:30–9:00 Benevides 11:30–12:00 Behrens 16:00–16:30 Richardson 10:00–10:30 Alarcón 15:00–15:30 Awret 17:00–17:30 Páez 9:00–9:30 Cani 10:30–11:00 Sanhueza 14:30–15:00 Soutello 10:30–11:00 Frost 15:30–16:00 Horowitz 16:30–17:00 Foglietta 9:30–10:00 Neri & Cordeiro 11:00–11:30 Carijó 15:00–15:30 Polakof 14:30–15:00 Kee 17:00–17:30 Drozdzewska 8:30–9:00 Prata 11:30–12:00 Campos & Freitas 15:30–16:00 Segatto 15:00–15:30 Phillips 17:30–18:00 Noah 9:00–9:30 Lindeman 11:00–11:30 Conto 16:00–16:30 Sakin 9:30–10:00 Teza 11:30–12:00 Noh 14:30–15:00 Temporal & Sandanello 15:30–16:00 Mesquita 15:00–15:30 Wilson 15:30–16:00 Renauld & Schang 16:00–16:30 14 Quine Lectures Consciousness John Searle University of California, Berkeley Lecture 1 19 Sep 10:30-12:00 Maria Antonia More crazy things are said about consciousness than just about any other subject in philosophy. In this lecture I want to refute the most crazy of the crazy things and give a correct account of the basic ontology of consciousness as part of the real biological world. Language John Searle University of California, Berkeley For most of the past century language was at the center of philosophy. Many people even thought that philosophy consisted in the logical analysis of language. After all that we ought to have a kind of accounting to see how much we achieved in all of our obsession with language. My conclusion will be that we should think of language as a biological phenomenon and that speaking a language is engaged in a form of rule governed activity. With this in mind we can explain the key notions of meaning, communication and the constitutive role of language in structuring human life and civilization. 17 Lecture 2 20 Sep 10:30-12:00 Maria Antonia Lecture 3 21 Sep 10:30-12:00 Maria Antonia Society John Searle University of California, Berkeley One of the great scandals in intellectual life is that the methods of the natural sciences have not given us the payoff in the study of social reality that they have in such subjects as physics and chemistry. Why have the social sciences been so disappointing? One reason is that the social scientists lack an adequate account of social ontology and in that respect they literally don’t know what they’re talking about. In this lecture I explain the nature of social ontology and discuss some of the implications that it has for explanation in the social sciences. 18 Tutorials Wittgenstein’s Theory of Judgment José Zalabardo University College London Tutorial 1 19-20 Sep 13:30-15:30 Maria Antonia We will discuss the origins of Wittgenstein’s pictorial theory of propositional representation in his attempt to overcome the difficulties that he found in Russell’s theory of judgment. Free Will Galen Strawson University of Texas I propose to consider the following theses and questions. [1] why there is a fundamental sense in which we can’t be morally responsible [2] why we can’t help believing that we are free and radically moral responsible [3] why the Libet results are irrelevant to the question of free will [4] what is the nature of mental action? how does this connect with the general question of free will? [5] what kind of free will is worth wanting? [6] what are the consequences of the fact that we can’t help believing in free will? 19 Tutorial 2 19 Sep 15:30-16:30 20 Sep 15:30-16:30 17:00-18:00 Maria Antonia Tutorial 3 19-20 Sep 18:00-19:00 21 Sep 13:00-15:00 Maria Antonia Worlds and Attitudes André Bazzoni University of São Paulo & University College London This tutorial will survey the main theories of attitude reports (focusing on the special case of belief), in connection with their standard treatment in terms of possible worlds. We will then discuss the possibility of analysing belief statements (and attitutes in general) from an alternative perspective on possible-world semantics based on partial, rather than totalistic worlds. Time permitting, we will link our discussion to the semantic analysis of socalled mixed quotation. 20 Keynote Talks What is the Attitude/Content Distinction? Michelle Montague 21 Sep 16:30-17:30 Maria Antonia University of Texas, Austin In describing the structure of conscious intentional states, philosophers typically appeal to what I will call the attitude/content distinction. On this view, attitudes are understood as relations relating subjects to contents, understood as propositions or something proposition-like. I will argue that the attitude/content distinction is not a ‘real’ metaphysical distinction. Rather, the words and concepts we use to distinguish between the attitudes (e.g. BELIEF, THOUGHT, DESIRE) are heuristic devices for grouping together certain classes of phenomenological properties, which themselves determine certain kinds of intentional content. In the end, all we have, metaphysically speaking, are phenomenological properties, intentional content, and a determination relation between them. I will focus on belief, thought, and perception. Qualitative Physicalism Osvaldo Pessoa University of São Paulo “Qualitative physicalism” is a view about the philosophy of mind that combines three assumptions: the reality of qualia, ontic physicalism, and mind-brain identity theory. The identity thesis is usually associated with the version that privileges the theoretical physicalist description of brain processes, but we formulate it by giving priority not to the theoretical physical description, but to the qualitative experience. The redness of the tomato is thus considered a real qualitative physical property of the brain. Since qualitative physicalism considers that a subjective sensation is identical to a real 21 23 Sep 17:00-18:00 FFLCH Room 8 physical quality in the brain, possibly of electrical nature, similar qualities may be extended to non-conscious matter, in what has been named “panquality-ism”, a form of “panprotopsychism”. 21 Sep 15:30-16:30 Maria Antonia Superficially and Deeply Contingent A Priori Truths Marco Ruffino State University of Campinas In this paper, I review some standard approaches to the cases of contingent a priori truths that emerge from Kripke’s (1980) discussion of proper names and Kaplan’s (1989) theory of indexicals. In particular, I shall discuss Evans’ (1979) distinction between superficially and deeply contingent truths. I shall raise some doubts about Evans’ strategy in general, and also about the roots and meaningfulness of the distinction. Finally, I’ll try to motivate an alternative approach. 22 Sep 13:30-14:30 FFLCH Room 8 Physicalist Panpsychism Galen Strawson University of Texas Panpsychism is a plausible theory of the fundamental nature of reality. It is fully compatible with everything in current physics, and with physicalism. It is an error to think that being physical excludes being mental or experiential. Anyone who endorses the following three views — [i] materialism or physicalism is true, [ii], consciousness is real, [iii] there is no ‘radical emergence’ — should at least endorse ‘micropsychism’ or psychism, the view that [iv] mind or consciousness is a fundamental feature of concrete reality, already present in the most basic forms of concrete reality. And given [v] the interconvertibility (fungibility) of all fundamental forms of physical stuff, panpsychism appears to be the most plausible form of psychism. 22 Empiricist Pragmatism José Zalabardo University College London I outline an account of truth that proceeds by specifying the rules that govern the practice of assessing certain conscious episodes as true or false, in contrast with representationalist accounts, which seek to explicate the notion by identifying the property that we ascribe to one of these episodes when we assess it as true. The rules that govern the practice are formulated in terms of the phenomenon of conviction, as a conscious, reidentifiable reaction produced by some conscious items. I compare this proposal with the rationalist versions of pragmatism advocated by Robert Brandom and others. 23 23 Sep 13:30-14:30 FFLCH Room 8 24 Abstracts On function of phenomenal consciousness Nicolás Alarcón Universidad Alberto Hurtado In the last decades of research in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the main focus has been on how the phenomenal consciousness arises and its relationship with neuronal processes (Block, 1995; Prinz, 2003, 2012). Is the phenomenal consciousness an epiphenomenon that supervenes on a physical layer? Or did the qualitative states are nothing more than the neural basis? However, there is a question of equal importance has been marginalized, or has attempted to answer indirectly, this is what the function of consciousness is. This research focuses on the biological value of phenomenal consciousness, that is, what it is the proper function exercised. In particular, I will argue that the phenomenal consciousness has a fundamental role in changing the behavior of the organism possessing the trait, specifically, qualitative states play an important role in the flexible response mechanism (FRM). With this I seek to answer, or at least show the direction to take, concerning: i) the contribution of a complex trait as is the phenomenal consciousness, showing that their presence is not accidental, but rather adaptive; ii) zombies scenarios can’t be put together, while duplicates not behave identically to the originals (Raymore, 1997). 25 22 Sep 15:00-15:30 Room 24 22 Sep 17:00-17:30 Room 24 Stoljar, Strawson and our Anti-physicalist intuitions Uziel Awret Trinity Washington University In the last chapter of his recent little book, “What kind of creatures are we?” Noam Chomsky relates his own thinking on consciousness to a philosophical tradition beginning with Hume, Priestly and Russell and ending with Galen Strawson and Daniel Stoljar, all who hold that when it comes to the mind body problem it is not just that we don’t understand mind, we do not understand ‘body’. Chomsky concludes that: “[...] with the collapse of the traditional notion of body (etc.), there are basically two ways to reconstitute some problem that resembles the traditional mind-body problem: define ‘physical’, or set the problem up in other terms, such as those that Priestly anticipated.” The first is pursued by Strawson’s broadening of the physical defining it as anything that possesses a spatiotemporal existence (or at least a temporal existence) including “experiential events” and the second by Stoljar’s ‘Ignorance Hypothesis’ “[...] according to which we are ignorant of a type of experience-relevant nonexperiential truths, so that the ‘logical problem of experience’ [Why is it that the phenomenal seems to both supervene and not supervene on the physical?] unravels on epistemic grounds”. This paper will attempt to reconcile these very different approaches in a way that preserves their respective advantages and avoids their pitfalls. The advantage of Stoljar’s epistemic view is that it is not a positive view and avoids some of problematic commitments of Russelian monism, its disadvantage (Papineau) is that it is still just as difficult to conceive of nonexperiential facts that help in any way with the conceivability argument. Here we will try to produce a positive account of Stoljar’s view ‘light on primitive orthodoxy’ by using a version of reflexive protopsychism which is similar to Strawson’s Reflexive Panpsychism that can neutralize the conceivability argument without providing a full causal explanation of consciousness. 26 Can I Intend to Raise Your Arm? Tomás Barrero Universidad de los Andes How to restrict the objects of intention? The Own Act Condition (OAC) imposes a prima facie reasonable option: I can only intend my own acts. OAC entails that the proper logical form of “intend” includes an agentive or infinitival subject-less clause: I intend to raise your arm. OAC’s foes like Ferrero (2013) have rejected that form to propose a regular propositional account. OAC’s supporters like Thompson have endorsed it to reject propositional accounts. The whole semantic dispute, however, is only apparent given that both parties implicitly accept at least one of twin theses, which have shaped the debate. The first is descriptivism concerning practical modals: when I say I can intend that you raise your arm “can” would serve to describe some features of reality, the relevant elements in the context of use in assessing the that-clause. This view conflates two levels of meaning, though, informational content and semantic value. Acceptance of it easily produces kaplanian “monsters”. Descriptivism as to practical modals, then, seems false. The second thesis is factualism concerning practical modality: when I say (1) I can intend to raise your arm that would be true/false given a class of facts about what is practically possible or necessary. Thompson (2008) identifies this class with etiological structures in reality, process or event-forms, which can[not] cause its own parts. Practical modal judgments would, then, be grounded in processes/mereological-facts. Against this proposal one can argue that in (1) there is no grounding process/mereological-fact involved, but an expression of a kind of question (in)sensitivity. You don’t care why to move your arm. This insensitivity and not some process/mereological-fact, rules you out as a full-blooded agent. Factualism concerning practical modalities seems false, too. In any case, OAC remains true on a non-factualistexpressivist approach to practical modalities. 27 22 Sep 10:30-11:00 Room 118 23 Sep 16:00-16:30 Room 8 When did the Online Shopping occur? Katja Behrens Oxford Brookes University Online action has become a conventional form of conduct in many cultural communities, certainly in 21st century Europe. Conceptions of how an act of shopping is understood online are altered, but not completely removed from offline shopping. But what does it mean for an online shopping to occur? Indeed, what does it mean for any action to occur? Enquiries into the matters of action occurrences evolved in the philosophy of action. Fostering conceptions of actions as discrete, ontological objects such as events (Bennett, 2015; Davidson, 2001; Thompson, 1971); the latter were sought out to occur in a particular spacio-temporal location. Applied to online actions however, the whens and whereabouts present themselves as increasingly complex matters. Whereas I might physically move my body to click the mouse in the UK, the bank transaction might take place in Switzerland and the product is posted from Italy. How helpful is a question for a particular spacio-temporal occurrence of an action then? Failures in determining the latter recurrently rendered event-views in the philosophy of action as problematic. When communicating about acts of shopping, issues at stake are worked out through daily interaction. Different questions about an action then, highlight different senses of it. I will show that it is beneficial for action conceptions to allow for spacio-temporal imprecision. This is, one might argue the node connecting physical theories of action and their human realities. The answer to when any given action occurred is highly depend on inquisitive aims of the interaction, for it is possible to precisely locate e.g. my clicking, the posting of the parcel or the reception of the goods in space and time, but it is dubitable whether these locations are valid proxies for the shopping as a whole. 28 Embodied Cognition: Hubert Dreyfus and Merleau-Ponty on the Role of the Body in Intelligent Behaviour Rodrigo Benevides 23 Sep 11:30-12:00 Room 8 Federal University of Ceará Our goal here is to present the argument developed by Hubert Dreyfus on What Computers Can’t Do (1972) about the necessity of a body in order for intelligent behaviour to be produced. Based upon the assumption that the work of the central nervous system relies on the existence of the locomotive and perceptual systems, Dreyfus presents the idea — heavily influenced by the insights formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) — that the so called higher or logical type of intelligent behaviour is necessarily derived from our bodily structure and its situatedness. The embodied mind thesis — as Francisco Varela would put it — can be seen as an alternative to orthodox cognitivism or computational/representational theories of mind, being the main argument for this kind of enactive or situated cognition the idea that the process of apprehension of reality comes not only from neural processes, but from a more general, prereflective involvement of the subject’s body in relation to the environment, producing what we could call a non-representational mode of being-in-the-world. Furthermore, we’ll present recent views on cognition developed within the fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence that corroborate with the thesis defended by Dreyfus and Merleau-Ponty. Decision myopia: Do framing effects undermine agentive control? Juan Pablo Bermúdez Universidad Externado de Colombia Recent cognitive science has stressed the ubiquity of automaticity in everyday behaviour, and philosophers have argued that automaticity’s pervasiveness does not undermine our agency. This often implies constructing intentions as synchronic, structuring causes of action that pick out relevant cognitive inputs and map them onto behavioural outputs relevant to a higherorder goal. Such accounts can explain how reflective processes, though slow and resource-limited, can recruit automatic processes towards the production of intentional actions. 29 22 Sep 15:00-15:30 Room 118 These accounts, however, do not explore the origination of intentions. How do intentions come about, and do we have some kind of control over the intention-production process? I argue that control over intention production is essential for agency, by pointing to the case of scopolamine victims, who can structure their behaviour in accordance with higher-order goals, but lack control over the goals they pursue. We would thus not call their behaviour ‘actions’, but normal agents differ from them only in degree given automatic phenomena like framing effects: cognitive illusions that make us shift our preferences because of irrelevant aspects of the way the options are framed. After illustrating the control-undermining consequences of framing effects, I rely on recent accounts of the normativity of automaticity to describe the intuitive, automatic control underlying our decision-making. The process starts with a fully automatic phase guided by norms of affective tensiondissolution, which attributes degrees of relevance to the practical situation’s features. Framing effects influence this initial phase. Reflection can access only what already seems relevant, so reflecting harder is unlikely to neutralize framing effects. Accordingly, evidence suggests that modifying the choice environment is much more efficacious than thinking harder in cancelling framing effects. This suggests that agentive control over decisions is realized partly outside of our brains and bodies, distributed throughout our practical environment. 22 Sep 14:30-15:00 Room 118 Guiding Agency Andrei Buckareff & Jesus Aguilar Rochester Institute of Technology & Marist College In this paper we offer a blueprint for a general causal theory of agency (“CTAg”) and put it to use as an answer to one of the standard causal theory of action’s (“CTA”) traditional problems, namely, the problem of action guidance. We have chosen this problem as a good way of showing the strengths and promise of CTAg’s capacity to provide a unified answer to fundamental problems associated with the traditional CTA. Our hope is to make a strong prima facie case in favor of what turns out to be a general theory of agency. In this sense, the present effort should be seen as a prolegomenon to a much larger enterprise. We begin by briefly rehearsing the traditional way of understanding agency embedded in the standard story of action identified with the CTA and single out the problem of action guidance as a serious challenge to the traditional way of understanding agency. We then introduce some of the key features 30 that distinguish CTAg. In particular we focus on those features that help answer the challenge of action guidance. In presenting our account, we rely on an alternative, non-Humean view of causation and an overlooked account of employing intentions-in-action as the source of agential control in action guidance. Finally, we support this agential model of action guidance by drawing from resources offered by recent work on the cognitive neuroscience of intentional action. Linguistic meaning in Self-regulated strategies: a doctoral research into Mobile Assisted Language Learning Artur Campos & João Freitas New University of Lisbon Throughout the development of a doctoral thesis on the use of smartphones and tablets applications to increase second language acquisition — English; we have researched how some specific mobile learning environments (Beatty, 2010; Kukulska-Hume, 2009, 2012; Traxler, 2009) provide language learning potentialities to students who are in charge of their own learning processes (Bandura, 1986; Kili-akmak, 2010). Since the purpose of MiLAct 2016 is to discuss “the role of human activity as a crucial component of linguistic meaning” and as the man-smartphone linguistic interaction has been a ubiquitous and inescapable reality lately; it is adequate to see papers researching Mobile-Assisted-Language-Learning. As an English language and Literature university professor in Brazil, I have been using M.A.L.L. in classrooms. Mobile-Assisted-Language-Learning (Beatty, 2010; Kukulska-Hume, 2009) requires in its ‘ethos’ the development of characteristics that basically define Self-Regulation or Self-Regulated Learning (Zimmerman, 1990). SRL is a principle where the proper control to execute pedagogical attainments is taken by the student in his/her discovery learning (Bruner, 1961). According to Zimmerman (1990) in Carneiro, Lefrere, & Steffens (2007), Self-Regulated Learning shows better results when learners are “self-regulated to the degree that they are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviourally active participants in their own learning process”. This paper presents a doctoral analysis of how the app design (Banga & Weinhold, 2014) as well as the Human Computer Interface (Bastien & Scapin, 1993; Dix, Finlay, Abowd, & Beale, 2004) of two language learning applications — Babbel; Speak English Daily — are developed following or 31 23 Sep 15:30-16:00 Room 24 not the framework of SRL in their linguistic experiences and narratives. We also ponder on the Content Flow (Banga & Weinhold, 2014) of these apps for considering it a vital element that enacts right strategies to a thorough execution of each app lesson. 23 Sep 10:30-11:00 Room 24 Dispositional essentialism and the regress of pure powers Renato Cani Federal University of Paraná According to dispositional essentialism (DE), the fundamental properties of things are pure powers (i.e. they have dispositional essences), so that their identities supervene on relations with other properties. I will address two versions of regress objection which intend to undermine the dispositionalist claim. (I) Epistemological Regress: according to Swinburne (1980), in order to recognize a power, one needs to be aware of its effect. However, since this effect is also a power, recognizing it would require the knowledge of further effects, and so on. Thus, Swinburne concludes that (DE) makes it impossible to recognize any property at all. In response, I will argue that it is possible to acknowledge a certain property without knowing all its effects. (II) Ontological Regress: if all the properties are powers — as Bird (2007) claims —, so the identity of property P1 relies on its power to manifest P2 , which is also a power. So, P2 is the power to manifest P3 , and so on. Clearly, this leads to regress or circularity, so that the dispositional essentialist is caught in a dilemma: if the dispositionalist admits that powers are grounded on categorical base (first horn), she will have problems to explain how categorical properties can bestow metaphysical necessity upon laws of nature; if, conversely, she holds that all properties are ungrounded powers (second horn), she will have to explain how to determine properties identity without making the circularity a vicious one. Ellis (2001) addresses the first horn, as he regards spatiotemporal properties as categorical. Still, Bird addresses the second one, for he claims that the identities of dispositional properties supervene on the pattern of the relations holding between them. I will argue that Ellis’ strategy leads to major problems, which Bird’s analysis seems to avoid. 32 How to talk about looks Filipe Carijó Federal University of Rio de Janeiro There is a question of whether there is a noncomparative sense of “looks”, which is roughly the question of whether it is possible to express the ways things look to us in experience noncomparatively (as opposed to comparatively, such as in “this looks just like red things normally do”). The question matters because philosophers have argued from looks (in the noncomparative sense) to perceptual content, to intentionalism and to sense-data. The traditional argument from illusion itself assumes that there is a noncomparative sense of “looks”. And even when noncomparative looks are not explicitly invoked, belief in something like them clearly seems to be a motivation for the content view of perceptual experience. Making substantive progress in the philosophy of perception thus requires knowing (1) what exactly it would take for there to be a noncomparative sense of “looks”, (2) whether there is such a sense and (3) whether an affirmative answer to (2) entails that perception has content. I begin by stating what it takes for there to be a noncomparative sense of “looks”, which leads me to draw a distinction between a strong noncomparative sense and a weak noncomparative sense. I show how a tendency to conflate them has been the source of some confusion. I then show how an argument by Travis against the noncomparative sense of “looks” fails. Finally, I argue that there is a noncomparative sense of “looks” by pointing out that only if there is such a sense can we account for a crucial aspect of the gap between the manifest image and the scientific image of the world. This, however, is not such good news for defenders of the content view of perception as it may seem, for it does not follow that experience has content. 33 23 Sep 15:00-15:30 Room 24 23 Sep 9:00-9:30 Room 8 Singular Thoughts and Natural Numbers Pedro Carné Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro “Singularity” is a complex phenomenon that has generated much controversy in several areas. In this talk, I am going to focus on the phenomenon of singularity as it occurs in thought and language when directed towards arithmetical objects. More precisely, my aim is to approach the phenomenon by tackling the following specific issue: what are the grounds for the claim that there are singular thoughts about natural numbers? There are many ways of tackling it; I will take it into account by discussing Azzouni’s theory. Azzouni’s interest in (statements about) natural numbers is prior to his interest in singular thoughts. He defends a deflationary nominalism regarding the metaphysical status of mathematical abstracta. On his view, if there are singular thoughts at all, there are singular thoughts about natural numbers. As Azzouni puts the matter, “the mere use of a public-domain numeralname suffices to activate object-directed thought even without a (genuine) information channel.” I intend to analyze in this talk in which way Azzouni’s theory answers the guiding question. To do so, I will evaluate his theoretical assumptions, particularly the relationship between his deflationary nominalism and the phenomenon of singular thought. 23 Sep 10:30-11:00 Room 8 Cognitive aspects of high-level abductive reasoning Fabiana Carvalho University of São Paulo Abduction is triggered by an anomalous or inconsistent phenomenon that cannot be attained on the basis of the agent’s current base-knowledge. Abductive inference is a process that includes two epistemological stages. The first is the early and creative stage of arriving at hypothesis in which there are merely suggestions that something may be. It is at this point that new ideas are introduced. The second abductive stage is an inductive, late stage of selecting hypotheses to test, to see if something generated by the creative stage is actually operative. If no satisfactory response to the doubt is obtained at the end of the process, the agent goes back to the creative stage. Thus, abduction is a cycling process involving hypothesis generation and testing. 34 The aim of the present work is to propose three cognitive prerequisites that would allow the agent to engage in high-level abduction and also sustain the progressive process over time. High-level abduction engages mechanisms of knowledge-rich cognition to deal with causes not directly observed, and its consequence is the transformation of the agent’s epistemic space by conceptual change. We hypothesize that the first (creative) abductive stage, when applied to high level abduction, engages processes of metacognition, since the agent actively looks for more information by sharing and discussing explicit representations of cognitive processes with other people, as well as searching for extra information in sources of cumulative culture (e.g. written language). We hypothesize that high-level abduction (which includes the creative and inductive stages) demands three main cognitive aspects/mechanisms, which we call cognitive prerequisites: Linguistic (allowing high-level conceptual abstraction, both propositional and symbolic); Temporal (allowing combination of online and offline contextual properties in a temporally extended process); and Collective Intentionality (allowing the construction of ‘collective base-knowledge’, and sharing of explicit representations of cognitive processes between agents). Joint Action as Coordination Thiago Chaves Federal University of Minas Gerais & State University of Piauı́ In a near future I will ask my personal robot to help me with some tasks. For instance, we will change the light bulb of the kitchen together. What is necessary for this joint action to occur? Intuitively we may say that the robot must have a capacity to act jointly. But how should we understand this capacity? One possibility is to understand it as essentially a cognitive capacity. The robot must have beliefs about my preferences, intentions and about my own beliefs about its preferences, intentions and beliefs. That is to say that agents who act jointly must reason and act on common knowledge of agents’s preferences, intentions and beliefs. Is this cognitive approach to joint action correct? Searle (1990) argues that it is not, since a joint action is not the same as an aggregate of individual actions. For a joint action to occur intentionally there must be some kind of primitive collective intention possessed by each agent that cannot be analysed into individual intentions plus mutual beliefs. Drawing inspiration from Lewis’s Convention (1969), I argue that acting jointly is the same as coordinating actions which reach 35 22 Sep 17:30-18:00 Room tba a state of coordination equilibrium, and the capacity to act jointly can be seen as essentially based on cognitive capacities. But although joint action as coordination may not imply cooperation, the additional capacities for cooperative activity should not be left to background capacities, as Searle argues. I first examine Searle’s counterexamples to a reductionist approach to collective intentions and show that the implication of cooperation from collective intention, as Searle conceives it, is not unproblematic. Then I present some undesirable consequences of Searle’s analysis of “we-intend” as a distinctive kind of attitude. These consequences are presented as implications from his commitment to internalism. 23 Sep 16:00-16:30 Room 24 Unhidden situations: agreement mismatch in BrP and tough constructions Luana de Conto Federal University of Paraná Copular sentences of Brazilian Portuguese can sometimes present agreement mismatch between the subject and the adjective. This formal peculiarity is followed by some difference in meaning: in sentences with agreement mismatch the property of the adjective applies to a situation involving the subject and not the subject itself — which would be the case for sentences with regular agreement. Our proposal is to derive this situation reading from a fact that has remained untouched in previous analyses, the fact that this sentences are tough-constructions. We show that the adjectives that occur in this construction have the syntactic and semantic properties of toughpredicates. Hence, the situation reading present in sentences with agreement mismatch is a consequence of the adjective’s selection for an infinitival complement, and the referent of the infinitive object is the same referent of the copula subject due to the syntactic configuration. One important observation about the description of this sentences is that the situation can vary depending on the context. This is also explained by our analysis since the conditions on infinitive deletion for tough-constructions rely on contextual information. We are aware that a similar analysis would also be available for sentences with regular agreement — since the predicate would still be the same — but we suggest that when agreement works properly the structure is different, and that can be proved with data testing adjective modification with except-phrases, which are only compatible with regular agreemen 36 Agency: types and implications Stéphane Dias 23 Sep 10:30-11:00 Room 118 PhD in Linguistics — CNPq/2014-2015 & Fulbright-Capes Visiting Research Student — RuCCS (Rutgers University) Searle (2001) makes a distinction between desire-dependent and desireindependent reasons for action. Connected to this distinction, I assume the existence of agent-types, considering, among other things, types of reasons that drive agents’ behavior, centrally socially driven-agency motivated by commitment and individually driven-agency motivated by desire. In this talk, I will point out the linguistic base of commitment relations that ground the restricted universe of actions available inside an agency scope and how the model has further implications for the study of collective action. Rethinking mental events. What can neuroscientific research on consciousness tell us about the mental Anna Drozdzewska Université Catholique de Louvain John Searle famously stated that our tradition is heavily influenced by the dualism of mind and body, which makes it difficult to think of neurobiological processes as having conscious and conceptual properties (Searle, 2002); he called this conceptual dualism (Searle, 2015). The, often implicit, grip of this type of dualism is visible not only in philosophical debates but also in the neuroscientific experiments on notions such as free will, where, frequently, the physical basis of the mental is not accounted for. In this presentation I will first analyze the experiments on free will, and from there I will turn to recent discoveries in the neuroscientific research on consciousness. I hypothesize that thinking of mental events in terms of their similarity to physical ones suggest the existence of a localized, specialized brain region solely responsible for them. However, recent experimental data suggests that complex phenomena, such as consciousness, are the result of global synchronous processes rather than confined to a localized brain area. I will examine those results, focusing mainly on the Global Neuronal Workspace theory. The broad distribution of the neurons firing in synchrony suggests that they are connected only as far as they give rise to the mental phenomenon, for example - conscious access. Thorough the synchronous firing, the physical processes are seen as causal, giving rise to the higher cognitive functions. In this presentation I will suggest that all mental events are potentially a result 37 23 Sep 8:30-9:00 Room 118 of global neuronal ignition. I will then analyze how that model fits into the concept of emergence and if mental events could potentially be seen as causal in this set-up. I will conclude this presentation by discussing the potential impact such an approach would have on the concept of supervenience as the connection between the mental and the physical. 23 Sep 9:30-10:00 Room 24 Pure Experience and Panpsychism. Obsession and Flirt in the Philosophy of William James Giacomo Foglietta Independent Researcher For all his life William James has dealt with the problem of the origin of human consciousness from elementary forms of consciousness, and with that, closely related, of the relationship between mind and matter. The psychology of his time was not reductionist and framed these questions in a panpsychist frame where the psychic was an intrinsic property of the material. Although James repeatedly get close to panpsychism, his eventual acceptance of it remains controversial. Indeed, he considered that such a vision was suffering from some challenging problems, and in fact he developed his original speculative proposal, known as pure experience. Today many philosophers of the mind are returning to the adoption of a panpsychist vision borrowed from the early twentieth century. At the same time, there is a tendency to read, in a more or less “strong” way, the Jamesian pure experience in a panpsychist sense, in particular through the mediation of Whitehead. It is not clear however if this is correct, since James has always tried to characterize his monism as “neutral”, that is, as neither material nor mental. Although panpsychism claims to go beyond this duality, I would try to show that it maintains a transcendentalist aspect that makes it an abnormal form of correlationism (in the sense in which Quentin Meillassoux (2012) use this term). In fact neutral monism born precisely to move beyond correlation, and then its panpsychist reading coincides with the loss of its own way. And it is precisely this loss that James has always tried to avoid. 38 Presentation and Interpretation: the Case for Impure Cognitive Phenomenology Peter Forrest University of New England In this paper, I respond to a recent puzzle presented by Michelle Montague (2015). The puzzle arises for anyone who accepts that our thoughts can be conscious but denies the existence of sui generis cognitive phenomenology (CP). It seems the options are either that thoughts are conscious for some reason entirely independent of phenomenology, or else they are conscious in virtue of being somehow closely associated with familiar forms of sensory phenomenology. But the problem for the first option is that standard non-phenomenal accounts of consciousness fail to describe a genuine form of consciousness at all. The problem for the second option is that sensory experiences cannot make a thought conscious, because sensory phenomenology by itself does not manifest the thought’s content to the conscious subject. So either there is CP that makes thoughts conscious by representing their contents, or else there is no conscious thought. I explore the possibility of solving Montague’s Puzzle by elaborating on Joe Levine’s suggestion that sensory experience can be “cognitively inflected” (2011). The basic idea is that thoughts are conscious in virtue of a relation that holds between a thought’s content and some phenomenal character, though the phenomenal character is wholly sensory. The relevant relation that holds is that of “interpretation”: thought contents influence how a conscious subject “takes” or “interprets” what she experiences, and thus the content is manifest in consciousness indirectly, by affecting the subject’s grasp of the qualitative properties that are directly manifest. Montague briefly discusses Levine’s position, but she seems to overlook the possibility that “cognitive inflections” are changes to sensory experience that go beyond mere changes to the arrangement of sensory phenomenal properties — because interpreting sensory character in particular ways requires the subject to entertain certain thoughts — but without involving the addition of novel, irreducibly non-sensory phenomenal character. 39 22 Sep 14:30-15:00 Room 24 22 Sep 15:30-16:00 Room 24 Indifference to Origins Kim Frost Syracuse University Davidson’s Swampman is a useful test case. We learn about the structure of views in philosophy of mind by investigating the reasons they credit Swampman with thought or not, at the moment it emerges from the swamp. There is a tradition in philosophy of mind, found in the work of McDowell, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Hegel and Aristotle, that treats conceptuallyarticulated intentionality as a power of thought that one acquires by being initiated into a social practice. It is natural to think that views in this “social practice tradition” must deny that Swampman thinks at the moment it emerges from the swamp, because Swampman was never initiated into a relevant social practice. This verdict counts against the plausibility of such views, either because they seem committed to some kind of parochialism about thought, or because they do not do justice to the way our physical constitution sustains our powers (including our powers of thought). I argue that views in the social practice tradition need not deny that Swampman thinks (and thinks about what he seems to think about). The reason is that some social practices exhibit indifference to origins. A practice exhibits indifference to origins when it explicitly or implicitly declares acts to fall under it when the act exhibits the right spirit, regardless of the accidents of origin that historically led up to acts of that kind exhibiting that spirit. Practices that exhibit indifference to origins have the resources to recognize creatures like Swampman as already a common participant in a relevant practice despite the fact that Swampman was not brought up in such a practice. Views in the social practice tradition that exploit the possibility of indifference to origins are interesting in that they can credit Swampman with thought, but need not be “internalist” about mental content. 40 ‘We’ — the subject of collective intentionality Rodrigo Gouvea 22 Sep 17:00-17:30 Room tba Federal University of São João Del-Rei There are good reasons to accept that collective intentionality occurs only when members of a group share an intentional state. The talk argues in favor of this claim, and presents a condition for sharing intentional states: an intentional state is shared (and collective intentionality occurs) iff an attribution of the state to a group is made true by the intentional states of its members. It follows from the mentioned condition that the subject of collective intentionality is a group whose members would correctly refer to with the word ‘we’. Thus, a we is presented as the subject of collective intentionality. The talk indicates then two ways of determining the membership conditions for groups that are the subject of collective intentionality. In some cases, a determinate and fixed set of people is considered as constituting a group, but in most of the cases we attribute intentional states to groups whose set of members is indeterminate and can change at any time. First-Person and Third-Person Content Ascriptions and Intentional Irrealism Amir Horowitz The Open University of Israel The purpose of this talk is to undermine intentional realism. In part I I argue that content ascriptions that are made from the first-person point of view are vacuous. In Part II I argue that content ascriptions that are made from the third-person point of view have “naturalistic” truth conditions, and that there is something basically flawed with naturalistic reductions of intentionality. Conjoining the conclusions of both parts yields a vindication of a version of intentional irrealism. In part III I further clarify this version via a discussion of the claim that intentional irrealism is self-refuting. 1. Suppose that one thinks “Grass is green”. For moving from the introspectible “Grass is green” to the (“disquoted”) proposition or content that grass is green, I have to have an independent referential access (in a sense to be explicated) to the content in question, that is, a thirdperson rather than merely first-person access. Purely first-person based ascriptions are vacuous. 41 22 Sep 16:30-17:00 Room 8 2. In scientific reductions we couple macro properties and micro properties, and the latter are supposed to have explanatory power in relation to the former. In supposed reductions of intentionality the natural relation is not matched with intentionality in its “macro” phase but rather with ascriptions of intentionality. It follows that the reducing natural relation need not match with anything in order to be correctly ascribable by content ascriptions, so there is no criterion that is external to the practice of content ascriptions for the truth of such ascriptions. It follows that there are no (practice-independent) intentional facts. 1 and 2 together vindicate intentional irrealism. 3. Intentional irrealism entails that no-one believes this very thesis. I show that the sense in which this is true on the suggested version of intentional irrealism is innocuous. 23 Sep 8:30-9:00 Room 24 Harmonia Philosophica Spyridon Kakos National Technical University of Athens Could all philosophers be correct at the same time? Could time be an illusion? Have we lost connection with the One? Do we over-analyze things? Are we too logical in an illogical world? Does science progress through logic or through “madness”? Thinking logically entails the acceptance of various assumptions. But can thought based on assumptions be free? Thinking irrationally could be the key to the understanding of the cosmos. Forgetting how to think is the only way to think. And to discover again what we once knew... 42 A Question of Method: Searle and the Logical Analysis of Linguistic Intentionality Hayden Kee 22 Sep 17:00-17:30 Room 8 Fordham University Searle’s project in the philosophy of language is original for calling for increased naturalization of the philosophy of language problematic. Language, on Searle’s view, needs to be understood as an extension of biologically more basic capacities and intentionalities, such as those of perception and action, belief and desire. A central question for the philosophy of language, then, is to understand these developments and the relationships between the intentionalities in question. Though I agree with Searle that this is an excellent guiding question for the philosophy of language, I contend that the method of logical analysis that he uses to pursue it is inadequate to the task. The inadequate method leads to a contortion of the problematic, and an inability to understand the truly genetic nature of the phenomena in question and the uniqueness of the intentionality of language. I propose a more robust method for approaching this problem, drawing on resources from phenomenology and the natural sciences and taking language acquisition as the locus of investigation for understanding the relationship between pre-linguistic and linguistic intentionality. Thought, language and compositionality Raquel Krempel University of São Paulo In several books Jerry Fodor argues, based on the productivity and the systematicity of thought, that there must be a language of thought. Thought seems to be productive because we can entertain, in principle, an unlimited number of different thoughts. It seems to be systematic because the ability to have certain thoughts is intrinsically related to the ability to have certain others. Language also appears to be productive and systematic, and these phenomena are traditionally explained by the assumption that language is compositional. Fodor’s idea is that, analogously, the assumption that thought is compositional seems to be the best explanation for its productivity and systematicity. Since thought seems to be compositional like language, it seems reasonable to assume that there is a language of thought. It is therefore surprising that in “Language, thought and compositionality”, Fodor denies that language is compositional. There, Fodor investigates 43 23 Sep 8:30-9:00 Room 8 what comes first in order of explanation: the content of thought or language. According to him, any adequate theory of content must accept that content is compositional. He argues that the content of thought is prior to that of language because thought is compositional. I intend to raise three issues against his arguments. First, the idea that language is not compositional undermines the argument for the existence of a language of thought. Second, I’ll point out that by failing to recognize that language is compositional, its productivity and systematicity are left as a mystery. Third, I’ll argue that the assumption that language is not compositional doesn’t even succeed in playing the role that Fodor expects it to play in his argument. In arguing that language is not compositional, Fodor assumes that the content of thought is explanatorily prior to the content of language, which was precisely what he wanted compositionality to decide. 23 Sep 15:30-16:00 Room 8 Linguistic Analysis in Philosophy of Science Marina Legroski & Álvaro Fujihara University of Ponta Grossa & Federal University of Paraná Dascal (1994) identifies a crucial point of analysis to the philosophy of science in the broad group of polemical discourses and, more specifically, in the subgroup of the scientific controversies. He also points to a bridge between the field and that of the linguistic research, in as much as he elects pragmatics as his tool of choice to approach the phenomena, recognizing the fundamental role language plays in scientific progress. However, as Dascal himself recognizes, pragmatics must refine its framework to be able to handle the character sometimes cooperative and sometimes competitive of scientific controversies — which can lead agents to particular forms of compliance or no compliance to the principles of cooperation and charity. The present work intends to analyze the implications of non-cooperation to a gricean pragmatic model, considering the modifications necessary to one such model (as proposed by Fujihara, 2016) so as to handle the case of scientific controversies, as well as analyzing the implcations of this particular perspective to the study of controversies. As we will argue, only minor changes to the general gricean framework are needed to include cases of non-cooperative types of dialogue (a clarification on the notion of purpose of the talk and a counterfactual interpretive device). This approach allows us to understand the rationality of scientific evolution, even when from a traditional normative perspective it would not seem so, and also points to some interesting directions for future research. 44 Representation without representations David Lindeman Johns Hopkins University If (i) folk psychology (FP) is successful, (ii) its success turns on the truth of the propositional attitude (PA) ascriptions at the heart of it, and (iii) the ascriptions ontologically commit to representations in the heads of ascribees, then — it seems likely that — (a mature) cognitive psychology, too, will make recourse to such objects. Thus the marriage of FP and the computational theory of cognition, according to which PAs are computational relations borne toward internal representations expressing the propositions in question. Building on the work of Daniel Dennett, Robert Matthews, and Robert Stalnaker, among others, I develop an alternative view of PA ascriptions and their (and so FP’s) relation to cognitive psychological explanation. On this view, PA ascriptions do not ontologically commit to the existence of representations qua objects. Beliefs that p are not realized (object-like) logical forms with localizable positions in the heads of believers. To ascribe the belief that p is not to posit a relation between objects — viz. a believer and a mental representation — but, rather, to ascribe a dispositional property to an individual. Taken as explanations of behavior, then, such dispositional properties as those ascribed in PA ascriptions do not go very deep. The ascriptions do not provide a guide to the workings of the relevant underlying mechanisms — or, the algorithmic and implementation levels. With regard to the relevant stretches of the science, such ascriptions furnish not the explanans but mark the explanandum. The explanation for the capacities is mechanistic (in a sense I develop in the talk) and proceeds by functional decomposition. A key part of such functional decompositions are semantic descriptions. But on the view I defend, such descriptions situate mechanisms describable in computational terms (a syntactic form of description, as I argue, capturing the causal organization of the system) in the environments in which they operate. Again, they do not pick out the objects — representations — over which the computations are performed. There are no such representations. 45 23 Sep 11:00-11:30 Room 118 22 Sep 16:30-17:00 Room 24 The Combination Problem and the Phenomenal Bond Haoying Liu University of Massachusetts Amherst Panpsychism, the view that fundamental, micro-level entities have experience, has received some recent attention among philosophers, because it seems to be the only approach which allows one to explain consciousness, and at the same time (i) maintain a generally physicalist world view, (ii) maintain that consciousness exists, and (iii) avoid the epistemic gap between physical facts and phenomenal facts. However, panpsychism is threatened by the combination problem, which is the puzzle on how micro-level conscious entities can combine to give rise to consciousness in large-scale, macro-level creatures. In this paper I will consider how to solve this problem. I will present Phillip Goff’s proposal to understand combination of micro-level conscious entities with phenomenal bonding relation, which is supposed to bind microlevel conscious entities into larger conscious entities1 . I will then argue for a modified account of panpsychism (phenomenal bond panpsychism), according to which there is experience and conscious subject iff there are multiple fundamental entities related by their mutual phenomenal bonding relation. On this account, at the fundamental level there is phenomenal bonding relation, but the micro-level entities themselves have no intrinsic phenomenal properties. Thus, phenomenal bond panpsychism is in contrast with standard mental ash panpsychism 2 , the view that micro-level entities instantiate intrinsic phenomenal properties and are thus conscious. I argue that phenomenal bond panpsychism is a decent rival to mental ash panpsychism. My hope is that phenomenal bond panpsychism is the least mysterious account of panpsychism, if panpsychism should be taken seriously. 1 See Phillip Goff, “The phenomenal bonding solution to the combination problem”, forthcoming in G. Bruntrop and L. Jaskolla (Eds.) Panpsychism, Oxford University Press. 2 The term “mental ash” is borrowed from Godehard Bruntrup. See https://www.hfph.de/forschung/netzwerke/ geiststaub-netzwerk. 46 The Experience of Acting: an Empirical Question for Action Theory? Beatriz Marques Federal University of Amazonas Well-known Agent Causation (AC) theories (Lowe 2008, O’Connor 2000, Nida-Rumelin 2007) rely on the experience of acting that humans allegedly have when they act to defend their claim that explanations of action that do not involve agent-causation present an incomplete picture of human action. This would be the case because, according to these theories, event-causation could not explain action while also accounting for the irreducible role of the agent in producing her action, to which the experience in question is said to correspond. I, however, contend that claims about the experience of acting raise questions that are in fact empirical, and cannot be settled from the armchair. How could one claim that humans have this experience based solely on one’s own introspection? The examination of the taxonomy of the experience of acting (Pracherie 2008, Marce 2003, Bayne and Levy 2003) is crucial, for in itself the term may invite confusion and vagueness. A clear definition of the experience in question is a considerable aid to its investigation, since it will clarify what aspects are relevant to it. Furthermore, there has been some empirical work in neuroscience on the subject of the agents’ experience of acting that should be taken into consideration, because they may add significant evidence of the experience, as well as of its relevance to the production of action (Haggard and Clark 2003). Furthermore, the new field of experimental philosophy could add to the discussion by investigating the grounds for AC’s claim (which does not mean that it is a matter of intuitions). Therefore, empirical investigation is a useful method for the investigation of the experience of acting, and particularly for inspecting the grounds for AC’s claim that humans have an experience of acting that justifies preference for their theory in opposition to the Causal Theory of Action. 47 22 Sep 15:30-16:00 Room 118 23 Sep 9:30-10:00 Room 8 Singular thought, particular thought and de re thought: why they are not the same thing Filipe Martone State University of Campinas In this presentation I will argue that the notions of singular thought, de re thought and particular thought should not be conflated. I argue that, albeit related, these three notions have different characteristics and explain different aspects of our cognitive life. The structure of the presentation is as follows. I first present my interpretation of Russell, arguing that the reason for his distinction between singular and descriptive thought was to account for the fundamental difference between ways of grasping objects. In other terms, Russell’s singular/descriptive distinction has to do with the necessity of conceptualization (or the lack of it) for making a certain object available to cognition. I call this the Russellian Motivation. I then argue that, if we take this characterization seriously, then only perception, memory and some relations to abstract objects seem to warrant singular thinking. If this is right, then many typical de re thoughts, such as thoughts through causal and communication chains, are not singular, but descriptive. I also claim that singular thought should not be confused with particular thought. A particular thought is simply a thought about a particular individual, and is the type of thought that typically causes the opening of a mental file. Since we have good reasons to believe that we can have descriptive files and files about non-existent individuals, then particular thought cannot be equated with singular thought nor with de re thought. I conclude that distinguishing between these three notions helps to accommodate our intuitions about some problematic cases much more nicely than any proposal currently on the market. 48 Why some theories of language evolution may sound a little weird Fábio Mesquita Federal University of Paraná Modern studies of evolution of language can bring diametrically opposed statements which may sound puzzling to different specialists. On one side, there are claims like “language is a complex trait, so it has to be the product of gradual evolution”. On the other side, we may hear “there is no reason to suppose that language has evolved gradually”. In regard to function, some people take the correlation between biological fitness of Homo sapiens and its communicative skills almost like a pressuposition for any evolutionary account of language, while others assume that language emerged as a better reasoning system, so this system would be co-opted for communication only later. In order to understand these apparent contradictions, we need to consider different conceptions of (a) a feasible scientific explanation, and (b) language. Evolutionary studies which follow neodarwinian modern synthesis usually look for causal relations between ecology and phenotypical traits (or genomic, but this is still very hard to do in the case of language). The ones who embrace this perspective tend to explain how and why language may have evolved in terms of function and utility. Meanwhile, others disregard evolutionary pressures because they would not contribute to a formal algorithmic theory. Concerning (b), I propose an abstract distinction between two major conceptions of language: one externalist, the other internalist. The first one attempts to explain “visible“ language according to a non-mentalist account of phonology, morphology, pragmatics and so on. In this case, it is easier to see how these things would evolve gradually. The other searches for a computational account of the mind and treats external language as output. Under this perspective, a system like human language would have changed dramatically because of one single computational operation, so there is no place for intermediate stages in the evolution of this system. 49 23 Sep 15:00-15:30 Room 118 23 Sep 11:00-11:30 Room 8 Process and Mind: Exploring the Relationship Between Process Philosophy and the Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Science of Cognition Larry Moralez University of Central Florida This work examines the relationship between process philosophy and the nonlinear dynamical systems framework for studying cognition. I argue that the nonlinear dynamical systems approach to cognitive science presupposes many key elements of process philosophy. The metaphysics of process philosophy posits events and the dynamic relations between events as the fundamental substrate of reality, as opposed to physical substances. Scientific frameworks in fields of inquiry such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Sociology, have begun the transition towards process based metaphysical frameworks. I present several of the major justifications for rejecting substancebased metaphysics that have been offered by proponents of process philosophy dating back to the ancient Greeks. In following, I will present empirical studies from cognitive scientists using the tools and methods of nonlinear dynamical systems theory to examine, model, and explain cognition. I will show that this framework corresponds with process philosophy in so far as it rejects a theoretical paradigm guilty of positing discrete particulars as fundamental, while also placing greater emphasis on the inherent relational nature of cognitive systems. To conclude, I suggest that the nonlinear dynamical systems approach to studying cognition supplements the existing scientific evidence confirming and validating process philosophy. Furthermore, I argue that the process metaphysical schema can play a significant role in cognitive science by serving as the proper metaphysical background theory to guide inquiry. 50 Mindless Accuracy Alexander Morgan Rice University Intentionality was traditionally regarded as a distinctively mentalistic phenomenon. However, in recent years many philosophers have sought to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by characterizing it as a species of causal relation that holds between a representational state and a distal entity, whereby the representational state functions to carry information about, or ‘track’, the distal entity. These ‘tracking’ theories invariably dementalize intentionality in the sense that they encompass states of all sorts of mindless systems, such as thermostats or plants. In his 2010 book Origins of Objectivity, Tyler Burge seeks to articulate a rementalized, or distinctively psychological, conception of intentionality by appealing to the results and methodology of perceptual psychology. Burge argues that the constancy capacities of perceptual systems yield states that can be understood in terms of the conditions under which they accurately or inaccurately represent the world. These accuracy conditions aren’t merely adventitious, according to Burge, but rather play a crucial role in psychological explanation. Indeed, it’s in virtue of having explanatorily robust accuracy conditions that these states are said to be distinctively psychological. In this talk, I argue that Burge’s constancy-based view ends up dementalizing intentionality in the same way tracking theories do. Most importantly, I argue that there’s nothing distinctively psychological about explanatorily robust accuracy conditions; biologists routinely ascribe accuracy conditions to circadian clocks to explain the diurnal activities of plants. I then trace the underlying cause of dementalization to the fact that Burge and tracking theorists fail to provide an account of how informationbearing states are integrated into the egocentric perspective of a system, such that they are intelligible as mental states of a psychological system. I close by sketching such an account, by drawing from from research into the neurocomputational mechanisms by which multisensory information is integrated into an egocentric frame of reference. 51 22 Sep 10:00-10:30 Room 24 22 Sep 10:30-11:00 Room 24 The enactivist approach to consciousness Laura Nascimento State University of Campinas The aim of this paper is to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the enactivist approach to consciousness, especially concerning the issue of qualia. It is widely assumed that mental phenomena can be accounted by purely physicalist descriptions. Nevertheless, philosophers insist that even a full comprehension of physical or material matters will not answer what might be considered the most relevant question: why should these physical structures and patterns in the brain give rise to the phenomenal character of experience remains unexplained. The problem is subject to a variety of formulations, like the identification of Levine’s Explanatory Gap (1983). Sometimes, it is assumed that dualism is true. However, it is possible to argue, as embodied approaches propose, that the difficulties concerning consciousness derive from mistaken assumptions, such as that the brain is the locus where consciousness is to be found. Therefore, embodied approaches emerge as an alternative: even though they are committed to what might be considered a materialist view, in the sense that the mind-body problem might be accounted by natural sciences and philosophy, they propose a wider image of what is to be considered the subject of Cognitive Science, that is, a framework that comprises not only the brain, but also the body and environment. They claim their approach bridges the explanatory gap and, hence, that there is no “explanatory gap” at all, even though they don’t deny the existence of the phenomenal character of experience. However, the enactivist approach faces a variety of difficulties such as how to articulate the nature of sensorimotor contingencies and how to account for practical know-how in a materialist framework So it remains unclear whether it can really bridge the explanatory gap. 52 Dilemmas and implications of Individual cognition and Social cognition as an alternative path Hugo Neri University of São Paulo The old epistemological problems of what knowledge is and what are its conditions of occurrence nowadays affect even applied scientific fields especially artificial intelligence. Firstly, we assume that the set of different conceptions of mind, consciousness, intelligence and cognition directly determines the conceptions of knowledge and its change. We argue that these conceptions are of two kinds: individual cognition and social cognition. The former is a conception of mind preceding the social world, which would be a product progressively built through communicative regulation of perception and cognition of different individuals. At some point and in some way, it gets such objectively that it would be able to impose itself on the individuals. Conversely, collectivist solutions assume that the social world precedes individuals and minds, which they would be the product or a possibility it. In this case, the entities that make up the social knowledge would be emergent properties. This paper puts forward two central theses: a negative and another positive. In the negative thesis, there is an attempt to demonstrate that the individualist option, taken by different authors in different areas of knowledge such as Max Weber, Karl Popper, Noam Chomsky and John Searle, is not able to solve the problem of social knowledge. This happens due to the dilemma that individual cognition routes: either one accepts a radical innateness, which means determinism of different types, or one falls into infinite regress. Finally we argue that Artificial Intelligence researches are build on the idea of individual cognition, implying that a critic over the latter has consequences to the former. 53 23 Sep 14:30-15:00 Room 8 23 Sep 11:00-11:30 Room 24 Mnemonic Externalism and the Extended Mind Hypothesis Hugo Neri & Veridiana Cordeiro Phd Candidate at Philosophy Departament — University of São Paulo Phd Candidate at Sociology Departament — University of São Paulo This work intend to defend the idea of a mnemonic externalism coupled with the most recent developments of the extended mind hypothesis, especially those that handles with social epistemological problems. The first idea derives from the theory of collective memory of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, which considers ‘memory’ as a social phenomenon directly dependent on collective mechanisms. Maurice Halbwachs brought this new idea in 1925 in his book Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire as part of an ambitious project to demonstrate how society remains cohesive and how society is performed in the individual subjectivity. The main idea brought in this book is that the mnemonic contents are shared by a group and the memory mechanisms/procedures (the way the memory is formed) depends on the social frameworks of memory which are always suitable to present conditions. The main propose is to consider a possible integration between the theory of collective memory and the actual externalist approaches. In general, the externalism tries to explain phenomena subjectively experienced emphasizing the external factors. In this way, we tried to integrated both theories. First, we have to explain that the collective memory phenomenon is a mnemonic process originated in the individual perception of past events. And finally, on the one hand, filling the gap of Halbwachs’ lack the “mind”, a theory of mind and an understanding of other mental phenomena, with the concept of extended mind. On the other hand, filling extended mind gap of the “social”, a theory of the social world that is robust enough to consider groups and their representations. 54 Can Neuroscience Help Select the Correct Metamorality? Thomas Noah University of Pennsylvania Psychologist Joshua Greene thinks that neuroscience (or, more properly, neuroscientific evidence) can held us to identify the correct metamorality. Metamorality, according to Greene, is a global morality that rationally resolves disagreements between competing local moralities. According to Greene, any acceptable metamorality must satisfy what I call Possession: human beings with otherwise normal psychologies must possess the cognitive and motivational resources necessary to both understand and care about that which the candidate system says they must understand and care about. Greene thinks that only classical utilitarianism satisfies Possession. By contrast, rights-oriented deontology and neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics fail as metamoral candidates because they do not satisfy Possession. I provide a series of arguments that show that Greene is forced into a dilemma: D1 Either people have the cognitive and motivational resources such that they can “get” utilitarianism and also deontology and virtue ethics, or D2 People do not have the cognitive and motivational resources such that they can “get” deontology and virtue ethics and also utilitarianism. The dilemma is true on many readings of “can.” What Greene needs then, I argue, is a sense of “can” such that people can get utilitarianism but not deontology or virtue ethics. I argue that he thinks that science will provide us with the relevant sense of “can”. There is something about the brain, he thinks, that makes utilitarianism quite attractive. However, neuroscience does not provide the right interpretation of the modality such that classical utilitarianism is uniquely selected as the correct metamorality. 55 23 Sep 9:00-9:30 Room 118 23 Sep 14:30-15:00 Room 118 Biocommunication Hyungrae Noh & Carrie Figdor University of Iowa Communication requires some degree of redundancy of information, and in linguistic communication such redundancy is generated not only by semantics but also by structural aspects of language. Nevertheless no philosophical analysis of the relationship between structural aspects and semantics has been made so far. This paper shows that in animal signaling communication the coevolution between the producer and consumer gives rise to structural aspects of the signal and semantics of the signal ontologically and epistemologically depends on the structural aspects. Birds in Central America learn to interpret the dorsal coloration conspicuousness of poison frogs as the alarm. Given that there is no genotypic relationship between frogs’ conspicuousness and toxicity, the correlation between the two traits requires phenotypic explanation like predator selection. This implies that the coloration-signal is the result of coevolution between the producer and consumer. The coevolutionary thesis predicts that any token of animal (or plant) signals only contingently correlates with the signed and such contingent correlation holds to the extent where the probability of correlation has been adjusted in accordance with the fitness of both the producer and consumer. Semantics of the coloration-signal underdetermines the communication between frogs and birds because a bird cannot choose the purported message unless the structural aspects are embedded in the use of coloration-signal. Ontologically the correlation depends on the phylogenetic traits of the producer and consumer. For instance the correlation between luminance contrast of frogs’ color and their toxicity score accords only with the tetrachromatic system, namely the visual system of avian predators. Epistemologically a bird’s ontogenetic learning of the use of the coloration-signal depends on its perceptual biases in the use of the signal. For instance, a bird’s gustatory apparatus is adequately biased towards the purported message — the taste of a poison frog is bad. 56 Some remarks concerning Internal Realism in the Philosophy of History Jacinto Páez Universidad Diego Portales Echoing the developments of the philosophy of language, there is a tendency to understand that the proper object of study of historical theory is the actual practice of historians. This practice consists, among other things, in the research tasks of historians or the process of writing history. One important aspect is the fact that historians accept a set of propositions that can be arguable considered as problematic from the standpoint of contemporary epistemology. Perhaps the most striking one is the claim that they, the historians, pursue the knowledge of what had truly happened. This can be considered a strong realistic claim. In view of this realist assumption, Chris Lorenz has proposed to establish a new epistemological approach in philosophy of history. His attempt is to offer a theory that combines both, the realist presupposition of historians and the more sophisticated conception of knowledge reached in epistemology. Following Putnam, he thinks that his own theory as a type of internal realism (Lorenz 2004). One of the alleged virtues of this model is that it allows us to gain clarity about the relation between facts and values on the inside of historical research. To sum up, Lorenz claims that his proposal represents a post-foundationalist paradigm. My objective in the present paper is to assess the virtues of this extrapolation of internal realism to the field of historical theory. I will focus my interest in the distinction between facts and values. This distinction is said to be a relative one, while at the same time the concept of value plays a key role in the configuration of historical perspectives. This takes me to suspect that a stronger concept is underlying this theory or, at least, the practice of historians. 57 23 Sep 9:00-9:30 Room 24 22 Sep 17:30-18:00 Room 8 Eliminating Epistemic Possibilities Meagan Phillips Northern Illinois University In “Eliminating Epistemic Possibilities”, I develop a pragmatic account of an epistemic possibility expression (EPEs) such as “It might be raining”. Contextualists such as Keith DeRose and relativists such as John MacFarlane offer semantic accounts of EPEs which entail that an utterance of an EPE is true just in case some relevant epistemic agent doesn’t know that the embedded proposition isn’t true, or ¬KA ¬p. For example, “It might be raining” is true just in case some relevant subject doesn’t know it isn’t raining. The contextualist semantic account takes the epistemic agent to be relevant at a context of use, while the relativist contends that EPEs are sensitive to epistemic agents at a context of assessment. Both analyses have been criticized by appealing to counterexamples which seem to undermine the semantic analyses of both contextualists and relativists. In these cases, a relevant subject utters an EPE despite knowing that the embedded proposition isn’t true. I contend that both accounts can be defended by appealing to a generalized implicature that rises in tandem with EPEs. In particular, I argue that an EPE generally implicates that a relevant subject doesn’t know that the embedded proposition does obtain, or ¬KA p. Finally, I will consider exchanges in which an EPE is denied on the basis of an interlocuter’s knowledge that an embedded proposition obtains. For instance, in response to “It might be raining”, an interlocutor may felicitously say: “No, it is raining”. One might consider such accounts to be reason to take the implicature ¬KA p as part of the semantic content of an EPE. I argue that such exchanges should be analyzed as instances of pragmatic denial, in which the implicated contents of an assertion are targeted by a denier. 58 How do we refer to events, facts and states of affairs? Ana Clara Polakof Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro We defend that events, facts and states of affairs are distinct ontological categories and must be identified differently. Even though they share some characteristics, they are different entities. For instance, events are concrete, while facts and states of affairs are abstract; events and facts are contingent, while states of affairs are necessary; facts and states of affairs depend on instantiated properties, while events do not; and the list goes on. These differences are sufficient to defend that they are different ontological categories. We argue that this must be reflected by the phrases we use to refer to them. Even though there are controversies regarding which phrases refer to events, it is commonly accepted that at least some deverbal nominalizations (as talk ) and common nouns (as hurricane) are used to refer to them. But, what happens with facts and states of affairs? Since they are both abstract, they may be referred to with similar constructions. They may involve the combination of the gerundive of the copula plus the adjective that describes the property being instantiated (being + red, or being + different), or deadjectival nominalizations (redness or difference). However, things are not as simple as they seem. Since facts appear at all levels from level 1, many logical properties may involve facts. This implies that in some cases the same derived noun (as difference) may be used to form a definite determinate phrase that refers to a fact (the difference between Ana and Martin) or to a state of affairs (the difference between identity and transitivity). Something else needs to be said, then, concerning how we refer to them. In this presentation, we will define in what aspects the definite phrases that refer to these entities differ. 59 22 Sep 14:30-15:00 Room 8 23 Sep 11:30-12:00 Room 24 Abandoning the concept of causal reduction Tárik Prata Federal University of Pernambuco With his “Biological Naturalism” John R. Searle claims to have overcome both dualism and physicalism, maintaining the true part of each view. However, the problem lies in the fact that, at the same time he asserts the ontological irreducibility of consciousness, his view about the supposed causal reduction of conscious states seems to commit him with some kind of reductionist physicalism. The causal reduction of consciousness is Searle’s means to avoid property dualism. When the author formulates such reduction, he affirms that the causal powers of consciousness and of brain processes are exactly the same, or that consciousness has no causal powers beyond those of brain processes. The claim that the causal powers are the same suggests an identity of powers that could be understood as implying an ontological reduction of consciousness and the claim that consciousness has no causal powers sounds as epiphenomenalism (two views refused by Searle). Such similarities with (a) ontological reductionism and (b) epiphenomenalism are evidence that the concept of causal reduction is not helpful for someone that wants overcome physicalism. Instead of using this concept, it is more productive for the treatment of the mind-body problem to conceive the causal powers of consciousness in a more flexible way. The present paper aims to show that the concept of constitution of causal powers is more fruitful to the explanation of mind-body relationships. In the case of conscious mental states, it is better to explain the causal powers of a token mental state in terms of its constitution by the powers of the token brain process that underlies it. Such view explains the causal efficacy of consciousness without falling back on ontological reductionism and avoiding the problem of causal overdetermination. 60 Do the Laws of Physics Lie? The Representational (Metaphysical) Limitations of Science and its Implication for Interdisciplinary Discourse Finney Premkumar Azusa Pacific University What does science and especially the laws of physics tell us about the cosmos we inhabit? Can the purposed access or representational and metaphysical reach of science which has been historically assumed be sustained? In other words, can ‘empirical claims’ lead to ‘existence claims’ or Truth such that science can be shown to have the requisite representational power that has customarily been attributed to it? This paper will, first and foremost, briefly discuss the nature of science (especially physics) and its rigorous methodology in an effort to show that it is not necessarily truth-conferring or metaphysical in nature. I will discuss the ‘no miracles’ argument put forth by Hilary Putnam for scientific realism and present the case that it conflates methodology and truth. Secondly, I will discuss the underdetermination of theory by evidence arguing that it is not only relevant to the immediate context but also for the future direction of scientific research. I will examine the availability of relevant alternatives and include a novel argument regarding unconceived alternatives and consider how that casts further doubt on theory selection. Thirdly, I’ll briefly discuss the pessimistic meta-induction in an effort to show that the history of science does not seem to converge on what Richard Rorty would call a ‘final vocabulary’. I will concluded that we should approach the various disciplines, including science, as historically contingent narratives engaged in an internal dialogue within the constraints of terms and definitions that are systemic in scope. This will dictate a more interdisciplinary scheme where science and the various disciplines within the academy can undertake mutually enriching dialogues without any metaphysical privileging of one over the other. 61 23 Sep 15:00-15:30 Room 8 23 Sep 16:00-16:30 Room 118 Why Are You Laughing? (On Humour) Marion Renauld & Fabien Schang Université de Lorraine & National Research University Higher School of Economics Against cognitivist or psychological theories of humour, we rather start with a definition relying analogically upon the Socratic definition of knowledge. A given sentence p is humoristic if and only if: (i) p is funny; (ii) p is understood to be funny (i.e. brings about good humor by its incongruous content); (iii) p creates some connivance (from speaker to hearer). But our main argument is that humour is better viewed as a speech-act endowed with peculiar success conditions. Borrowing from Searle and Vanderveken’s illocutionary logic, we argue that laughative acts can be depicted as statements of the form Lp, where L is an illocutionary force attached to a sentential content p and fulfilling a number of requirements to be successful. We claim that L is a proper statement, although it infringes on two main features of speech-acts: being literal, and serious. But, even so, L doesn’t belong to the class of assertives, because laughative acts are both hybrid and self-contradictory speech-acts that violate fundamental rules of illocutionary logic: by performing Lp, the speaker performs both Fp and ¬Fp — where F includes every aspects of speech-acts at once. Nevertheless, we argue that four main success conditions of Searle’s speech-act theory need to be amended: the non-iterativity of illocutionary forces, the sincerity condition, the direction of fit, and the degree of force. Finally, through an ontologically non-committing reading of laughative acts and unlike Searle’s realist account of fictional discourse, we argue that Lp is one-and-a-half degree speech-act: neither completely right (first degree of discourse) nor completely wrong (second degree of discourse), due to its virtuous ability to reveal general truths in a funny way. So we defend a value theoretical approach to humour as conveying moral statements through joyful passions, highlighting the prescriptive character of laughative acts. 62 How the laws of semantics lie Kevin Richardson 22 Sep 10:00-10:30 Room 8 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radical contextualists believe that language is radically context-sensitive. One major criticism of contextualism is that it contradicts the dominant formal approach to semantic theorizing. Formal semanticists make lawful generalizations about meaning, but contextualists appear to rule out those kinds of generalizations. I argue that there is no contradiction here. We can coherently make lawful generalizations about the meanings of expressions while rejecting the existence of semantic laws. The key to coherence is to accept the utility of semantic laws while rejecting their reality. I argue that contextualists should be fictionalists about formal semantics, and I briefly sketch a fictionalist account. Action Theory, Causal Exclusion, and Two Concepts of Causation Matthias Rolffs University of Bonn The biggest challenge for non-reductive physicalism is certainly Jaegwon Kim’s Argument from Causal Exclusion (ACE). Kim (1998, 2005) argues that non-reductive physicalism inevitably leads to epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism, however, is tantamount to ‘the end of the world’, as Jerry Fodor (1989) puts it. So non-reductive physicalism must be abandoned. Ned Hall (2004) distinguishes two concepts of causation: production and dependence. Kim (2005, 2007) concedes that the ACE’s plausibility rests on a production-account of causation. Non- reductive physicalists typically try to defend themselves against the ACE by putting forth some kind of dependence-account of causation (cf. Loewer (2007), Woodward (2008)). I take it that both Kim and his non-reductive opponents are perfectly right: Given non-reductive physicalism, mental properties really do not produce physical properties. But still, even given non-reductive physicalism, physical properties causally depend on mental properties. Therefore, the decisive question is: What kind of mental causation is worth wanting? In my talk, I will argue that (i) the main source for the felt importance of mental causation is causal action theory and that (ii) causal action theory does not require the existence of mental production but only the existence of mental dependence. The upshot of this reasoning is that non-reductive 63 22 Sep 10:00-10:30 Room 118 physicalists do not need to worry about the reductionists’ ACE: There is no mental production, but there is no reason to think that mental production is important anyway. There are, however, good reasons to think that mental dependence is important. But mental dependence does not fall prey to the ACE. 22 Sep 16:30-17:00 Room tba Shared intentionality: from dominance to equality Alejandro Rosas & Juan Pablo Bermúdez Universidad Nacional de Colombia & Universidad Externado de Colombia Shared intentionality refers to the ability to form beliefs and intentions shared with other individuals such that the state of being shared is known to all, and that the participants can predicate these mental states of a collective subject: “we think”, “we intend”, etc. It is a crucial cognitive ability that underlies the human capacity to engage in collaborative action (Bratman 1992), follow and enforce norms and create social institutions (Tomasello & Carpenter 2007). In this paper we argue in favor of two theses: 1) the ability to form higher-order intentions is necessary, but insufficient, for shared intentionality; and 2) the extra condition required for shared intentionality is the ability to attribute an equal status to oneself and others. We argue for the first thesis on the basis of experimental results from comparative primatology. These have shown that subordinate chimpanzees understand when a dominant currently sees or has recently seen a given piece of food subject to competition. But experiments from Tomasello’s lab comparing children and chimpanzees also suggest the latter do not, and probably cannot, think in terms of “we”. These experimental results suggest that shared intentionality is not achieved by a recursive iteration of intentions that refer to intentions that refer to intentions..., and so forth. We make this argument by means of a thought experiment that we call “the game of spies”. Spies can laboriously climb to higher-order intentions, i.e., in knowing that the other does not know that I know, etc., but they never reach a state of shared intentionality. Our second thesis is that the missing element is a sense of equality. It seems that meeting others as equals is a constitutive condition of shared intentionality. Thus, in evolutionary terms, shared intentionality must co-evolve with a sense of mutual equality. 64 A Naturalistic Account of Morality Derya Sakin Middle East Technical University Organisms have different kinds of behaviors. Altruistic or selfish behaviors can be observed in organisms. Although altruistic behavior may not appear reasonable at first sight such as a worker bee sacrificing itself for the benefit of the hive, it can be said that there is a logical ground behind this behavior. As behaviors have been evolving in the process of evolution, altruistic or selfish behaviors have been seen as the product of the evolutionary process. When morality is counted as an evolutionary product, morality can be given an adaptive explanation. Thus, morality is an outcome of the evolutionary process just as our hands or eyes. There is no consensus whether animals are moral, two opposite views are argued about that. One view is that animals lack moral concepts because they lack self-awareness, conscious intentions and regrets for their past actions. They cannot separate the judgment of “What is good?” or “What is bad?”. They do not have these concepts because of the lack of language. They also cannot be moral due to the fact that having some component of morality does not imply that animals are moral. In addition to that, human nature is basically evil and morality is a human product to restrain selfish inclination. However, it can be opposed that animals are devoid of moral formation when compared to humans. The basic social behaviors such as reciprocity, conflict resolution and community concern are observed especially among chimpanzees which we consider as common ancestors. We presumably have common capacities inherited from the common ancestor. It can be verified that morality which is seen both in humans and non-humans to survive in the world by exhibiting exactly the same moral behaviors such as empathy, fairness, reciprocity, cooperation, and compassion. 65 23 Sep 9:30-10:00 Room 118 23 Sep 14:30-15:00 Room 24 Perceptual Experiences and Aspect Sebastián Sanhueza Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile A number of contemporary philosophers of mind have brought considerations from the study of aspect — that is, the study of the ’different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation’ (Comrie 1976, 3) — to bear on the ontological question how perceptual experiences persist over time (cf. O’Shaughnessy 2000; Soteriou 2007, 2011, 2013; Crowther 2009). This approach is initially appealing insofar as it bypasses controversial questions concerning the way our mental lives conceptually and ontologically relate to their physiological underpinnings. However, it also faces problems. While the relevant philosophical debate is primarily ontological, it borrows concepts and distinctions linguists elaborate when discussing aspect — a pervasive but widely varying feature from natural language to natural language. Apart from rare exceptions, relatively little attention has been devoted to assess whether the way we talk about perceptual ocurrences can thus be applied to discussions of ontological matters in general, let alone discussions about the ontological nature of perception. The goal of this piece is to argue that a number of grammatical tests developed in the aspect literature and then tailored for the ontological classification of occurrence-types are by and large silent on how we should conceive our perceptual experiences. 22 Sep 15:00-15:30 Room 8 Wittgenstein’s Criticism of Russell’s Theory of Judgment Antonio Segatto State University of São Paulo This paper consists of a commentary on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logicophilosophicus 5.54-5.5423. My aim is to answer the following questions: 1) what is Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s theory of judgment?, and 2) why is this criticism related to Wittgenstein’s denial of the theory of knowledge? The connection between these two questions is the following: given that Russell’s theory of judgment was inseparable from a theory of knowledge, the denial of the former means, according to Wittgenstein, the divorce between logical investigations and any kind of epistemological investigations. The purpose of this paper is to show that this is the background against which one must understand the claim in 4.1121, in which we read that the theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology. 66 Quinean holism Leonardo Soutello 22 Sep 10:30-11:00 Room 8 State University of Campinas Quine’s holist theory is often understood as an epistemic doctrine and not as a semantic doctrine, sometimes it is understood as an epistemic doctrine with semantic implications, an also, not seldom, it is also understood as meaning holism (semantic holism). We can find textual support for all these interpretations in several writings by Quine, for he is not crystal clear when he writes about this theme. I intend to present these interpretations — and the passages that support them — for the consideration of their rightness. Thus, I hope to show that they are inconsistent with Quine’s aims and with his writings taken as a whole. Nonetheless, my main concern is to show that Quinean holism can only be correctly understood as an epistemic and semantic single doctrine. Confirmation holism and meaning holism are two — bonded and inseparable — sides of the same coin, i.e. they must be considered one doctrine in a Quinean framework. For, to consider them as two separate doctrines, that a reader can have one and not the other depending on his interpretation of Quine would be inconsistent with the nature of the doctrines themselves and with Quine’s aims. Externalist solutions to the intentional matter: the rise of language in Frege, Wittgenstein and Haroldo de Campos Vanessa Temporal & Franco Sandanello Federal University of São Carlos/University of Lyon 3 & State University of São Paulo/University of Paris 3 Based on “Brentano’s problem” — which characterizes consciousness as an intentional opening to the world that enables the production of mental images —, the present work discusses how Frege, Wittgenstein and Haroldo de Campos’ theories present alternatives to internalism, as they eliminate, via a reflection on language, the need for the objects’ duplication in an internal image. We rely on the observation that, in order to relate the spirit to the world in terms of intentionality, we are necessarily changing categories. That’s the requirement for an intentional lexicon. Even if we don’t comprehend spirit as a thing, as Brentano, we are still obliged to refer to subjectivity using categories we use for material objects — id est, using a substantialist 67 22 Sep 15:30-16:00 Room 8 lexicon. We are obliged to deal with the nature of spirit using the same categories used for material objects. This is a difficulty that intentionality sets forth: how is it possible to say psychic objects? Is this an ontological or a grammatical problem? Therefore, we sustain that the perspectivist language game present in Frege and Wittgenstein, as well as the reflection on language’s materiality in Haroldo de Campos, are valuable resources to revalue the problem of intentionality and to reexamine Brentano’s problem of manworld correlation, without simplifying it in terms of an interiority-exteriority relationship. 23 Sep 11:30-12:00 Room 118 Different conceptions of Representations in Fodor and Searle Rogerio Teza University of São Paulo It is not hard to see that the concept of representation plays a central role in many theories of mind. Specially Fodor and Searle are well acknowledged for using it. Both considered that the physicalist reduction is not possible, although they acquainted with the existence of the mind due to a material substratum and causality. The resemblance is also reinforced by their approaches in terms of linguistic features. In spite of many similarities, there are also huge differences. In short, Fodor explores the syntactic structure; on the other hand, Searle is concerned about semantics. It follows they have diametrically opposed understanding of what a representation indeed is. Based on papers written by them in Eighties (that said, popular Science papers rather than technical), I seek in this presentation to draw a distinction between them. Moreover, I have a further aim: to show that misconceptions related to representation have misguided the scientific approaches to the brain. The cause is not the unclearness related to the conceptualization of representation, though. That still constitutes a problem because the objectivety of Science is not able to embrace the subjectivity of propositional attitudes and intentionality. 68 Knowledge, Storytelling, and the Fallacy of the Affective Fallacy Flannery Wilson University of California Riverside In his essay “Stories and the Meaning of Life”, John Martin Fischer argues that we value free will because it “renders us artists”; in virtue of acting freely, we are able to shape our lives into stories with narrative value (12). Literary theorist Gérard Genette proposed that narratives require both a narrator and an audience. In writing the stories of our lives, surely we act as narrators. But are narrators and audience members mutually exclusive? Can narrators also be audience members? If not, we should conclude that our lives contain narrative value for someone other than for ourselves. Per Genette’s definition, our lives cannot contain narrative value unless we are both the narrator and audience of our own stories. Genette and Fischer do not carry their analogy far enough. We can invert their lines of reasoning by reconsidering the paradox of fiction. Just as it seems strange to imagine ourselves being entertained by our own stories, it seems equally strange to imagine ourselves being entertained by fictional characters. After all, not only do we not know these people — we know them to be non-existent. How can we feel as if we know people that do not exist? Bertrand Russell observed that there are concepts, like the color red, that we begin to recognize in virtue of having seen many examples of red objects. These are universals; things that can be divided into those known by acquaintance, those known only by description and those not known either by acquaintance or by description. Memories, according to Russell, are similar to objects that we perceive in the present, but in the past. We understand the concept of “past” because we know what a memory is: an image of an object in our minds. And yet, Russell notes, this image cannot be what actually constitutes memory because the image appears in the present while what is remembered remains in the past. If this is so, how can we separate true memories from false ones? Russell concludes that there are certain “self-evident” propositions, known by acquaintance, that cannot be described in terms of truth or falsity. Building on this idea, I argue that we can be acquainted with propositions — that is, we can “know” them without having to “know” whether or not they are true or false. Moreover, it may be a mistake to think of this type of acquaintance knowledge in terms of truth and falsity in the first place. 69 23 Sep 15:30-16:00 Room 118

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