Schedule for Semester 2, 2024

23 July, 2024

Stephen Gadsby (Antwerp University)

30 July, 2024

Neil Mehta (Yale-NUS College)

A natural argument for contextualism

In the debate between contextualist and standard invariantist theories of knowledge, linguistic data have been the primary focus. This paper comes at the debate from a very different angle: I argue that contextualism is much better than standard invariantism at respecting the natural – i.e., objectively metaphysically privileged – structure of reality. From this, I draw three further conclusions: first, that contextualism is much better than standard invariantism at making sense of the idea that knowledge has a distinctive normative significance; second, that contextualism is, in one important respect, much more charitable than standard invariantism; finally, that if standard invariantism is nonetheless true, then we should replace our word “know” with a more natural word – perhaps its contextualist analog.

6 August, 2024

Michael Barnes (Australian National University)

Responsibility for Recommendations

Recommender systems are now a dominant part of most social media platforms. They play important roles for the billions of people worldwide who access these sites/apps each day. The typical user experience on these platforms consists of an endless stream of recommended posts to read, images to admire, videos to watch, users to follow, groups to join, and more. However, these systems have also been accused of contributing to horrific violence, including the ongoing crisis in Myanmar. This talk argues social media companies share responsibility for the harms that occur on their platforms by demonstrating how they are constitutive intermediaries, not the not mere intermediaries they (sometimes) claim to be. I use speech act theory and the concept of affordances to illuminate the contribution that platform companies make to our communicative acts, showing how platforms shape users’ speech, and also perform important speech acts themselves, with particular focus on recommendations.

13 August, 2024

Gillian Russell (Australian National University)

Logic for Virtual Worlds

In the second half of “Two Dogmas”, Quine argued that there could be empirical grounds to revise logic—at least in principle. Since then the most (though still not very) popular proposal for what those empirical grounds might actually be has involved quantum mechanics. Still, most logicians seem to think that quantum mechanics does not give us good enough reason for revision. This paper considers and evaluates an alternative proposal for what those grounds might look like and the logic they would support: perhaps the experiences acquired in virtual reality give us reason to adopt an assessment-sensitive logic.

20 August, 2024

Elias Dokos (Macquarie University)

Why skepticism about AI is wrong

Many commentators maintain a skeptical position in the wake of the resent surge of success in the field of AI. Such positions include claims that Language Models are essentially “stochastic parrots” that simply regurgitate probabilistic word sequences (Bender et al, 2021), or that they are better understood as function approximators or compression algorithms (e.g Chiang, 2022). I argue that this family of skeptical positions relies on an implicit model of these forms of artificial cognition as a massive idiosyncratic encoding of abstruse and arbitrary features of the training data.

Emerging evidence from computer science paints a radically different picture: that Deep Neural Networks encode sensible and generalisable representations of the target domain (e.g Morcos et al, 2018), and that they exhibit a spectacular level of convergence (e.g Ainsworth et al, 2022).

The skeptical view, properly understood, leaves no room for the capabilities that actually make successful AI models successful. Many skeptical claims simply describe the characteristics of flawed AI models, which tend to engage in overfitting: sheer memorisation, and an inability to generalise from their training data. Successful AI models are successful because they are capable of precisely what the skeptic denies them.

27 August, 2024

Hannah Tierney (UC Davis)

The Risky Business of Forgiveness

Philosophers have noted a tension between two independently plausible features of forgiveness: (1) Forgiveness is reasoned: it is something that agents do for reasons, and (2) Forgiveness is elective: it is not something that agents can be required to do. As Per-Erik Milam (2018) has recently argued, if something is done for reasons, particularly moral reasons, then those reasons can, at least sometimes, generate a requirement for an agent to do that thing. So, those who wish to defend both (1) and (2) must deny that reasons to forgive can be requiring and explain why these reasons possess this potentially unique feature. In this talk, I take up this challenge. I argue that forgiveness is reasoned and elective because it is risky. By reflecting on the riskiness of forgiveness, we can come to see not only how forgiveness can be both reasoned and elective, but also why forgiveness is not so unlike other attitudes at play in our moral lives.

3 September, 2024

Karen Jones (University of Melbourne)

Recentre/Unlearn: White Policing of the Borders of Philosophy and How to Stop Doing It

This talk, cowritten with Francois Schroeter, is a response to comments by current (and former) First Nations students that philosophy is not culturally safe for First Nations Australians and that settler philosophers first have to do work among ourselves before we are fit partners for collaboration. We identify the many ways in which the discipline of philosophy is subject to white policing, both of its borders and of its centre. We explore strategies for remedy including: 1. Leave space (or “resign from the police”), 2. Add to the mix; and, 3. Co-create, before advocating for 4. a model we call “recentre/unlearn”. Our preferred model calls for placing the experiences and concerns of First Nations people (our students, their mobs) at the heart of how we approach philosophy and taking ourselves to be answerable to them. What this requires will depend on which node of a decentred conception of disciplinary norms someone occupies. Recentring is process rather than goal. We conclude by exploring obstacles to implementing our proposal including especially the status you have and the status you seek.

10 September, 2024

Annie Sandrussi (Macquarie University)

Nurturing Colonial Futures: Public Health Messaging and the Gestational Body in the Postcolonizing State

In this paper, I argue that public health messaging as it relates to the practices related to the gestational body articulate atomistic notions of maternal responsibility for future health that maintain Indigenous mothers and their children outside of the representation of motherhood. Focusing mainly on the so-called ‘Australian’ context, I analyse public health messages that emphasise the importance of pro-health behaviours related to preconception, gestation, breastfeeding and early childhood. Existing analyses of this messaging are driven by feminist critique of political intervention into gestational bodies. Despite the importance and value of these critiques, I argue that they tend to exacerbate the way that public health messaging centres white mothers and children, and, being based on atomistic accounts of maternal responsibly, obscure institutional responsibility for harms done to Indigenous mothers and their children. I draw on Lugones’ modern/colonial gender system, Moreton-Robinson’s discussion of the role British postcolonizing state, and the figure of the child as a colonial projection, from Faulkner, to argue that maternal responsibility interacts with colonial understandings of domesticity, the household and the child as future citizen, as based in a colonial ontology of gender as a mechanism of the postcolonizing state. In so doing, I show that public health as a colonial institution maintains Indigenous maternal bodies outside the scope of public representation and thus obscures institutional violence against Indigenous children.

17 September, 2024

John Tasioulas (University of Oxford)

Content Moderation, Human Rights, and Democracy

This talk will look at the UNGPs on business and human rights as a basis for content moderation, and consider the extent to which content moderation needs to be democratised.

Note: this talk will exceptionally take place at 2pm, since it is also part of a workshop organized by the Ethics & Agency Research Centre.

24 September, 2024

[No meeting - Mid-semester break]

1 October, 2024

Daniele Valentini (Osnabrück University)

Virtual Reality and the scaffolded mind: Immersive beneficial and hostile scaffolds and their relationship

Virtual Reality (VR) has started to alter how we carry out our mental abilities. From surgical training to emotion regulation therapies, VR has been leveraged to enhance human cognitive skills and affective life. Times are ripe to examine the scaffolding mechanisms of VR, an underexplored aspect in the 4E debate. This is what I will do in this talk. Specifically, I will investigate the new possibilities that VR offers in terms of technological embodiment and environmentally supported cognitions and emotions. VR’s defining characteristics – presence, immersion and multisensory feedback – will be pursued along both their beneficial and hostile scaffolding outcomes. Considering the former, I will dissect how VR can aid professionals, reduce racial bias and help depressed patients. Concerning the latter, I will present how, in the near future, VR might be co-opted by extremist individuals and groups to promote violent radicalization. Zooming in on radicalization, I will then show how, in some cases, the strict distinction between helpful and hostile scaffolds adopted so far, may lead scholars to miss out on some crucial details of affective experiences. I will introduce the notion of scaffolding transformation to highlight how the same evolving scaffolding relation can turn initial beneficial affective effects into deleterious emotional burnouts.

8 October, 2024

David Plunkett (Dartmouth University)

Topic Continuity, Realism, and the Objects of Philosophical Inquiry (co-authored with Tristram McPherson)

Consider the following three familiar philosophical issues: the nature of consciousness; what distributive justice requires; and what constitutes knowledge. These issues – as well as countless others throughout many subareas of philosophy – are object-level ones directly about certain relevant things themselves (e.g., consciousness, distributive justice, and knowledge), rather than representational-level ones about how we think and talk about these things (e.g., what our concept consists in, what people mean by the term ‘justice’, or what pattern of judgments about “knowledge” people have). How should one identify what such objects are that philosophers aim to study, and how are they related to descriptive, representational-level facts about how people think and talk? A lot of philosophical argument rests (often implicitly) on the idea that the objects of “object-level” philosophical inquiry are (or at least should be) things that we can smoothly identify using the intuitively corresponding words and concepts. For example, in epistemology, a common idea is that when philosophers study knowledge, they are (or at least should be) studying something that our current term ‘knowledge’ refers to. In this paper, we argue for an alternative view. On our view, objects of “object-level” philosophical inquiry are, in the first instance, tethered to facts about topics, rather than to facts about our words and concepts. We advance this view using a notion of topics that draws on our recent work about “topic continuity” within “conceptual engineering”, which, put roughly, concerns what it takes to preserve a given topic over linguistic and conceptual change. We advance our view about object-level inquiry in philosophy both as a descriptive and normative proposal. Roughly, we propose that it both helps us understand important existing parts of such inquiry and also provides a good model for how important parts of such inquiry should proceed. Our proposal has a number of important payoffs. First, it helps illuminate – and explain the substantive importance of – aspects of a range of meta-philosophical debates, including ones about realism, pragmatism, and the methodological role of conceptual analysis. Second, it helps illuminate interesting ways in which philosophical work on conceptual engineering connects to other parts of philosophical inquiry. Third, it helps provide an interesting framework for thinking about metaphysical debates (e.g., about such issues as realism, nihilism, and mind-dependence) across different subareas of philosophy, including in ethics, philosophy of math, and philosophy of race.

15 October, 2024

David Barack (Lingnan University)

Foraging and Thought

The dynamics of an ever-changing world are at the heart of biology. In this talk, I will canvas several aspects of my research that reflect the centrality of dynamics. First, I will present some conceptual work on foraging and relate principles drawn from foraging theory to inquiry. Second, I will explore some of the psychological processes and neural mechanisms underlying information foraging. These analyses exemplify the importance of neural dynamics to explaining cognition, which I describe as the Hopfieldian approach to the brain. I’ll conclude with some discussion about how the dynamical approach may offer a new angle on the unification of biology.

22 October, 2024

Michelle Liu (Monash University)

The Imagistic Harm of Language

Language can transmit harmful representations. It is usually thought that pernicious language about social groups transmits prejudiced beliefs and associations about those groups. Focusing on generics and metaphors, this paper explores a distinct but related type of harmful representation transmitted by language, namely, harmful mental imagery. While it is unsurprising that pernicious language begets harmful mental imagery, the nature and scale of this imagistic harm are underappreciated. Empirical literature on language processing suggests that mental imagery is a pervasive feature of language processing. Furthermore, mental imagery plays an important role in shaping our memories and judgements. The paper argues for the importance of mental imagery in theorising about harmful language and suggests ways in which the imagistic harm may be combatted.

29 October, 2024

Jean-Philippe Deranty (Macquarie University)

Presenting The Case for Work (OUP, 2024)

The Case for Work is a book exploring arguments for and against the idea that work is a “central” component in the lives of individuals and of human communities. In this talk, I briefly present the book’s main aims, the structure of its argument and some of the key claims made in it.