Check this out:
This just came out and was presented to John at his birthday party at the CSLI, Stanford. I’ll teach a seminar based on this book this term. More later…
Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy 2012
John Perry: Three Theories of the Attitudes
This year’s Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy will be delivered by John Perry. The exact dates are not fixed yet, but it will probably be in the last week of June. These are the topics John will cover:
I. Folk-psychology as an amazing Intellectual Accomplishment
- How our lives depend on our “theory” of mind
- Basic categories: Feelings, cognitions, ideas
- The “Propositional Attitudes”
- Properties of the PAs
- Causal
- Phenomenological
- How we report and describe them
II. Three theories of the attitudes
- Frege’s Picture of the attitudes: agents, times, relations, propositions (The Simple Content Picture).
- Fodor’s Picture of the attitudes: agents, times, and mental representations. (The Simple Representational Picture)
- Representations and contents
- The Complex Picture (Cognitions with Contents)
III. Self-Locating Belief
- Names, Descriptions and Roles
- Role based-”modes of presentation”.
- Roles and Frege’s picture
- Roles and Fodor’s picture
- Roles and the Complex Picture
IV. Beliefs about the Self
- Primitive self-belief
- Beliefs about the Self
- Self-notions
- Self-notions, buffers, detached notions
- Lewis’s concept of “self-attribution of properties” confuses primitive self-belief and having beliefs about oneself.
V. The general theory of Content (Reflexive/Referential Theory)
- Indexical content
- Referential Content
- Network Content and empty names
VI. Reporting Attitudes
- Traditional Problems
- The Crimmins-Perry Theory
- The Thread Theory
Guest Lecture by Keith Devlin on “The Philosophy of Real Mathematics” on UT.TV
Here: http://uttv.ee/naita?id=8239 is the lecture that Keith Devlin presented some weeks ago at Tartu. The title of the lecture was “The Philosophy of Real Mathematics”. Enjoy.
CfP: Special Issue of Erkenntnis on “Disagreements”
People agree and disagree about a lot of things: what happens around them, what to do, about matters of taste, and, more generally, about world views, values, policies, theories, philosophies, etc. Some disagreements appear to be “faultless” — no party in such a dispute needs to be mistaken. Other disagreements, seem to be “merely verbal”, and perhaps no real disagreements at all. In both cases, philosophers have argued that this diagnosis should lead to deflationism about the subject-matter of the initial (apparent) disagreement. If disagreements about a certain subject matter are faultless, then there are no objective truths about that subject matter; if disagreements about a certain subject matter are merely verbal, then they concern a pseudo-problem. Still some other disagreements seem to involve less what people explicitly believe or think about something than their dispositions to act towards a given goal. This special issue of Erkenntnis is devoted to the varieties of disagreement that arise in different areas of discourse.
The special issue is edited by Teresa Marques (Lisbon) and Daniel Cohnitz (Tartu).
Papers should be emailed to mariateresamarques@campus.ul.pt or cohnitz@ut.ee no later than
April 1st, 2012.
Submissions must be in English and conform to the submission standards of Erkenntnis (please consult the “instructions for authors” here: http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/10670#)
All submissions must be prepared for blind review.
Two Estonian Science Foundation Grants for Theoretical Philosophy!
Happy New Year! Good news today: theoretical philosophy received two (!) Estonian Science Foundation grants in last year’s competition. The research grants will last from 2012 to 2015. One grant went to Dr. Bruno Mölder and his research group in philosophy of mind, the other went to our research group in philosophy of linguistics & language. For more information on the philosophy of linguistics & language project, see
http://daniel.cohnitz.de/index.php?Linguistic-Reality-and-it-Psychological-Basis
Public lecture on “The Philosophy of Real Mathematics” by Keith Devlin
Invitation from the UT computer science department:
Prof Keith Delvin, Director of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University will give a public lecture entitled:
THE PHILOSOPHY OF REAL MATHEMATICS
on Monday, December 5, 14:15-15:45, Liivi 2-111, Tartu.
Prof Keith Delvin from Stanford University is one of the most active scientist in the world popularizing math. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences e.g. teaching math for children by using video games and therefore doing it in a creative and natural process. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Keith Delvin has been recognized by many prizes for his work and he is an author of numerous writings and textbooks. Even in 2011 he published 3 books.
Keith Delvin is the founder and director of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR) at Stanford University (http://hstar.stanford.edu/). H-STAR is an interdisciplinary research center
focusing on people and technology – how people use technology and how it affects them, how to develop and design the technology in order to make it more useable (and competetive on the market), it looks on the innovative useof technologies in research, education, art, business, entertainment,
communication and other walks of life.
ABSTRACT
If mathematics is regarded as a science, then the philosophy of mathematics can be regarded as a branch of the philosophy of science, next to disciplines such as the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology.
However, because of its subject matter, the philosophy of mathematics occupies a special place in the philosophy of science. Whereas the natural sciences investigate entities that are located in space and time, it is not at all obvious that this is also the case with respect to the objects that are studied in mathematics. In addition to that, the methods of investigations of mathematics differ markedly from the methods of
investigation in the natural sciences. Whereas the latter acquire general knowledge using inductive methods, mathematical knowledge appears to be acquired in a different way, namely, by deduction from basic principles. The status of mathematical knowledge also appears to differ from the status of
knowledge in the natural sciences. The theories of the natural sciences appear to be less certain and more open to revision than mathematical theories. For the reasons mathematics poses problems of a quite distinctive
kind for philosophy. Therefore philosophers have accorded special attention to ontological and epistemological questions concerning mathematics.
Additional links:
http://courses.cs.ut.ee/visionaries/Main/201112KeithDevlin
http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/
November 25, 2011: Mattia Gallotti (CNRS, Jean Nicod Institute) presents in Theoretical Philosophy Colloquium
Mattia Gallotti from CNRS, Institute Jean Nicod will present in our colloquium on Friday, November 25 from 16:30. Mattia will be presenting on Can Collective Intentionality be a Scientific Theory?. Everybody interested is invited to participate.
Abstract:
Over the last twenty years, the theory of collective intentionality has turned out to be an invaluable tool for exploring a wide range of issues in social ontology and cognition. The root idea is that whenever people intend to do something together, joint action results from the capacity of individuals to think of agents, both themselves and the others, as a collective. Famously, John Searle postulates a distinctive ‘mode’ of mental representation responsible for the sharing of intentional states. On his argument, for a mental state to be collective people have neither to entertain representations with identical or similar mental content, nor to possess high-level conceptual representations. They just need to access the relevant content in the same ‘we-mode’. For naturalists of all stripes, however, it is challenging to accept theories of collective intentionality that posit ‘mysterious’ entities at the mental level in the absence of scientific support.
One methodological objection is that the existence of a putative we-mode is not a self-evident fact to be ascertained on a priori grounds. The claim that there is an intrinsically collective mode of intentionality in individual minds can only be justified by a piece of robust empirical evidence (if any) and, thus, by making appeal to the theory and practice of science. In the past few years, various experiments in the sciences of mind and brain have indeed shown that a mechanism for sharing mental states can play a causal role in coordinating individual actions. Yet, can this evidence be taken as decisive to vindicate philosophers’ intuitions about collective intentionality? Given that most experimental works seem to entail common-sense understanding of collective intentionality, can scientific research be used to augment one philosophical analysis over the others?
In this paper I shall discuss the possibility and scope of empirical social ontology. I will present collective intentionality theory as a thrilling example of the challenges facing philosophers of society nowadays, starting with the question whether empirical evidence can settle issues of social ontology such as the nature of thinking and acting in we-mode. This will give me the opportunity to develop more general considerations on the relation between traditional, philosophical-conceptual, work and experimental practice in the philosophy of social science.
November 11: Ahti Veikko Pietarinen (TUT) presents in Theoretical Philosophy Colloquium
Ahti Veikko Pietarinen, who was recently elected professor at TUT will present in our colloquium on Friday, November 11 from 16:30. Ahti will be presenting on Peirce’s Development of the Quantification Theory. Everybody interested is invited to participate.
Abstract
Three major transitions in Peirce’s development of the quantification theory are identified: the indexical (-1885), which presupposed a substitutional interpretation, the symbolic (objectual/game-theoretic, -1902), and the iconic (diagrammatic/continuity, 1897-) interpretation. The latter two abandoned the substitutional interpretation. The crucial idea of the dependent quantifier was preserved throughout.
EuroUnderstanding Launch Meeting Talk Malmö
Here is our talk from the EuroUnderstanding Launch Meeting in Malmö yesterday:
It’s a more introductory version of the PLM talk. A written version of the main ideas is hopefully available soon.
Are Theories of Reference Empirically Testable?
Here is my presentation of the talk I just gave at the first PLM conference:
http://prezi.com/ejjlavml5ini/stockholm-plm-talk/?auth_key=7c7a767f2d2b59177b934e6dd4cf12c8e6b62850
