SEG'07 Conference Schedule

All talks will take place in the Health Professions, Nursing, and Pharmacy building (HPNP) on the campus of the University of Florida.

Friday, March 23^rd

1:00 - 2:00 pm — Registration (Courtyard HPNP)

2:00 - 3:15 pm

· Room G307—
Andrew Alwood (Cornell University)
"Preserving Hume’s Law"
Commentator: Nobel Ang
Since Hume, philosophers have been divided over whether an ‘ought’ can be derived from an ‘is’. In this paper, I defend a precise version of Hume’s law that focuses on the meanings of ‘ought’- and ‘is’-terms, and on the relations between them. The truth of this version is required for a certain project in evaluative semantics: the project of explaining how certain terms are evaluative in virtue of their meaning. I dismiss potential counterexamples from the literature and I also foray into issues about thick concepts.

· Room G301A—
Elisabeta Sarca (Boston University)
"Leibniz and Krikpe on Trans-World Identity"
Commentator: Shawn Burtoft
Traditionally, the views of Leibniz and Kripke are seen as opposites on the spectrum with regard to trans-world identity: Leibniz argues against it, while for Kripke it is crucial for explaining the very notion of possibility. My paper proposes a reading that blurs the distinction between the two positions – but this, it will be shown, does not absolve them from the now common difficulties they must face when confronted with modal statements.

3:30 - 4:45 pm

· Room G301A—
Richard Vulich (University of California Irvine)
"Frege’s Sharpness Requirement and Natural Language"
Commentator: Chris Lubbers
Controversy exists concerning the consequences of Frege’s sharpness requirement for concepts and functions. Some say that the sharpness requirement, if taken to be a necessary condition for truth functional language use, renders most of our natural language discourse meaningless. This is because most if not all natural language concepts and predicates are not sharp. In this essay I argue first that Frege does indeed see the sharpness requirement as a necessary condition on a language’s truth-functionality in all contexts in which language is used, and that the attempt to eschew the difficulty that this requirement presents by stipulating within a metalanguage what the extensions of our natural language concepts and predicates shall be is fundamentally at odds with Frege’s conception of logic. I then turn to a possible application of Frege’s notion of sharpness as a set of metaphysical presuppositions underlying the everyday use of concepts in contexts in which truth is being addressed.

· Room G307—
Steven W. Halady (SUNY Buffalo)
"Merricks, Causation, and Powers"
Commentator: David Tostenson
Trenton Merricks has given a powerful argument for eliminativism, the ontological position which claims that the ordinary objects of our common sense worldview such as baseballs, do not exist. His central argument for eliminativism is the Overdetermination Argument. This argument states that objects such as baseballs would be causally irrelevant to the events their constituent particles cause, that all of the causal power lies with the particles which would compose a baseball. This leads to rampant overdetermination in any ontology that accepts the existence of these middle-sized objects, which is grounds for the rejection of their existence. I maintain that there is a key error in the Overdetermination argument, namely that Merricks does not provide any account of what is required for causation. I briefly provide an account of causation based on power properties, and then show how on this account of causation, many ordinary objects are able to avoid the Overdetermination Argument. I then defend my position against the claim that I beg the question against Merricks on the existence of ordinary objects. I do not argue that the Overdetermination Argument necessarily fails, but that its lack of an account of causation renders it weaker than it first appears.

· Room G301—
Dustin Locke (University of Michigan)
"A Defense of Ramseyan Humility"
Commentator: Elka Shortsleeve
In his unpublished paper “Ramseyan Humility,” David Lewis argues that “we are irremediably ignorant about the identities of the fundamental properties that figure in the actual realization of the true final theory”. Three authors (Rae Langton, Jonathan Schaffer, Ann Whittle) have independently argued that even if we accept the metaphysical and linguistic assumptions of Lewis’ argument, we need not accept his epistemic conclusion. This paper defends Lewis against these authors by, first and foremost, offering a much-needed clarification of Lewis’ conclusion and his argument for it.

5:00 - 6:15 pm — Keynote Address

Room G101—

Jonathan Schaffer (UMass, Amherst)
“On What Grounds What”

6:30 pm — Reception (Room G103)

Saturday, March 24^th

9:00 - 10:00 am — Registration & Breakfast (Main Lobby HPNP)

10:00 - 11:15 am

· Room G301A—
Octavian A. Busuioc (Queen's University, Kingston ON Canada)
“Thinking of Particulars in a Conceptual World”
Commentator: Casey Woodling
A notion of particulars permeates much philosophy of language and philosophy of mind in both recent and past literature. The following paper explores this notion of particulars as it is related to a distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual thought content. In the literature, this relation is discussed in terms of a distinction between de re thought (thought of particulars) and de dicto thought (general thought). I focus on this distinction as it is related to two different interpretations of Fregean sense: one that treats sense as descriptive and the other that recognizes a distinction between modes of presentation and senses and thus recognizes that sense is not descriptive in character. I argue that the descriptive interpretation of Frege leads one to postulate nonconceptual content, a position which I argue is untenable. I then propose that the nondescriptive interpretation of sense provides an escape from an uncomfortable oscillation between a view that treads closely on idealism because it leaves no room for particulars, and a view that is realist in character but leaves us with an odd notion of nonconceptual mental content.

· Room G307—
Blake Roeber (Northern Illinois University)
"Contextualism and Virtue Perspectivism: How to Preserve Our Intuitions About Knowledge and ‘Knows’"
Commentator: Kevin Savage
Contextualism is a linguistic thesis; it is a theory not about knowledge but about the word ‘knows.’ Almost invariably, contextualists defend their position as necessary for preserving our epistemological intuitions in the face of the so-called ‘skeptical paradox.’ In this paper, I undermine the case for contextualism by showing how a properly Chisholmed theory of knowledge might preserve our epistemological intuitions more successfully than the linguistic thesis forwarded by contextualism. My aim is not to demonstrate that contextualism is false. Rather, I aim at orienting the debate away from the preservation of intuitions and toward the linguistic data surrounding the word ‘knows.’

11:30 am - 12:45 pm

· Room G301A—
C. Daniel Dolson (University of California, Santa Barbara)
"On Naming Everything"
Commentator: Jesse Butler
Abstract: The present paper is concerned with whether everything that exists is capable of being named. Specifically, we are interested in C. Anthony Anderson’s recent suggestion that there are no good arguments for (or against) the hypothesis that everything is nameable. The position we defend is that Anderson is mistaken; formal arguments used in computation theory are discussed and then certain philosophical applications are drawn. We conclude that everything, with specific emphasis on the real numbers, is capable of being named.

· Room G307—
Jonathan Scott Miller (Bowling Green State University)
"Are Mystical Experiences Evidence for the Existence of a Transcendent Reality? An Evaluation of the Metaphysical Claims of Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg"
Commentator: Ed Perez
Are mystical experiences all in the brain? Neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili have developed a model of what happens in the brain during mystical experiences, which has been quite influential in the psychology of religion. They have also attempted to draw metaphysical implications from their research, arguing that mystical experiences are evidence for the existence of a transcendent reality, which they refer to as “Absolute Unitary Being.” Newberg and d’Aquili’s metaphysical arguments are problematic, however, for at least three reasons. First, they rely on an insupportable dichotomy between “subjective” and “external” ways of looking at the world, which leads to problems faced by dualistic theories of consciousness. Second, when taking the so-called subjective perspective, they rely on the “subjective vivid sense of reality” of an experience as the sole criterion for its reliability, which threatens to include hallucinations and delusions among veridical experiences. Third, when taking the so-called external perspective, they overlook the importance of being able to independently verify the content of an experience as well as the potential mechanisms for its generation. In short, d’Aquili and Newberg fail to show that mystical experiences cannot be explained solely in terms of the relevant sorts of brain activity.

1:00 - 2:45 pm — Lunch Break

3:00 - 4:15 pm

· Room G301A—
Jason Waller (Purdue University)
“Spinoza’s Attributes and the ‘Intermediate’ Distinctions of Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus”
Commentator: Eugene Zaldivar
In this paper I argue that the “mysterious” distinction which separates Spinoza’s attributes might be a Scholastic “intermediate” distinction similar to Henry of Ghent’s (d. 1293) intentional distinction. My argument for this conclusion takes place in three sections. In section one, I contrast the nature of Henry’s intentional distinction with Scotus’s formal distinction. In section two, I deduce the nature of Spinoza’s “mysterious” distinction from Descartes’s real and conceptual distinctions and recast the problem concerning the nature of the attributes. In section three, I argue that the attributes are likely intentionally distinct.

· Room G307—
Jeremy J. Kelly (University of South Florida)
"The Purification and Elimination of Correspondence: a re-examination of the Austin-Strawson debate"
Commentator: Emil Badici
I argue that Austin’s early view on truth is deficient in a way that Strawson’s ‘performative-redundancy’ view is not and that the semantic categories with which we approach the truth-predicate are inadequate for an analysis of the concept of truth. In support of this claim I show that the defects in Austin’s view are a consequence of failing to distinguish between two concepts of truth which may be discerned in an analysis of the speech-act of assertion and the sentences by means of which assertions are said to be made. Austin does claim, contra Strawson, that we “refer” to a given state of affairs in predicating ‘is true’ to a given sentence, conceding that this ‘referring’ itself entails another sentence, which, as asserted, receives a truth-value on grounds distinct from those by which we judge true the initial assertion. But while Austin is correct to say that we make another, numerically distinct statement in this way, and in doing so assert another truth, he does not explain that the means by which we make such assertions is a consequence of the application of the two (aforementioned) concepts of truth.

4:30 - 5:45 pm —
Faculty Speaker

· Room G101—
John Biro (University of Florida)
“Things and Stuff”

6:30pm —
Conference party (location TBA)