After some complications, namely missing my flight, I made it back from the Société de Philosophie Analytique (SOPHA) Conference in Geneva. To put it shortly, it was one of the best conferences I’ve been to so far. This was also my first time in Geneva, where I’ve been meaning to go to for some time due to the interesting metaphysics that is being done there. And there was plenty of that (and other analytic philosophy): the conference ran for four days from 8.30am until 10pm. I don’t suppose that anyone would be able to attend it all, but I did manage a good number of talks, out of the 300!

Uni Mail, the conference venue

Needless to say, it was good to catch up with old mates from previous conferences and to meet a bunch of new people as well. The biggest name at the conference was no doubt Paul Boghossian (photo below) from NYU. His talk on relativism was both intriguing and accessible, although not in my primary area of research. The organisation of the conference was top notch, there was even a 10min pause between each talk to enable switching rooms and the chairs managed to impose this quite well. Thanks go especially to Philipp Keller.

My photos from the conference are available here. The thumbnails here lead to my gallery as well. I decided to start putting conference photos there as well, although I haven’t so far. I usually post them on Facebook, but not everyone is on there so I thought it’s better if they’re in my gallery as well. Anyway, I’ll add some photos from previous conferences as well if I have time at some point.

Paul Boghossian

My own talk, entitled Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics, Conceivability, and Modal Epistemology [the link leads to a version which is in need of revision...] was in the very first parallel session, which turned out to be a good time: people were still awake and attending. I had an ample audience and plenty of discussion afterwards, even if I didn’t get anything particularly useful out of it. The quality of the talks in general was fairly good, which many people commented on, although I did see some not-so-good talks as well. It’s difficult to pick a talk that I would like to comment on in more detail, but if I had to do it (and I will!), I think it would be John Divers’ talk, ‘A necessary condition of belief in absolute necessity’ (see photo below)

My talk

Divers is a known authority on modality, which is why I was especially concerned to see that he implemented features of two-dimensional modal semantics in his theory — I was specifically arguing against the 2D framework in my own paper. He suggested that we need to introduce a distinction between primary and secondary intensions, or something similar (as the 2D framework does), to handle the apparent conflict between McFetridge’s thesis and epistemic possibility. So, (original) McFetridge’s thesis (from Divers’ handout):

If X believes that it is logically necessary that P then X will be prepared to add P as a premise in reasoning from any supposition whatsoever.

Now, it seems that we can legitimately suppose that some a posteriori belief that necessarily P (=box-P) could have been false, which causes a problem for the above thesis. The suggested solution is that we must introduce a distinction between A-suppositions and C-suppositions, for instance: (A) Suppose that O didn’t kill Kennedy; (C) Suppose that O hadn’t killed Kennedy. Accordingly:

If X believes that box-P then, for any C-supposition, S, from which X aims to reason stably to conclusions which are true-in-S, X will be prepared to add P as a premise (in/to) S.

John Divers

Here S is to be interpreted as something that conflicts with box-P, i.e. not-P. Well, this looks just like the 2D framework to me. But an objection which I raised in my own paper applies: when we introduce S, we are just playing around with empirical defeasibility — that’s all that the epistemic possibility of not-P amounts to. And why does this matter? Well, if we remove the empirical part of the story, as we can do with certain examples, then the 2D framework produces unacceptable results, namely, it classifies metaphysically trivial and substantial statements in the same manner. You’ll have to see my paper for the details though, as I’m afraid that I’ve already lost most of the audience. In fact, when I confronted Divers about this afterwards he did make some concessions, but I’m interested to hear what he thinks of my dilemma for the 2D framework.

Peter Simons

Incidentally, this was also the first time since my viva that I saw Peter Simons, my external examiner (photo on the left). He gave an interesting talk about the glitches in our efforts to standardize dimensional concepts, although I would have rather heard something closer to actual metaphysics.

So much for the philosophical content. I didn’t have time to explore Geneva much, but there are a couple of photos from my brief stroll in the gallery. In any case, I did like the city, it’s just the right size: not too small, not too big. And very international. I might have that impression just because people spoke French, it always makes me feel international. Sadly I can’t speak French myself. Well, to make a long story short, I enjoyed Geneva so much that I am trying to organise a slightly longer visit there soon if at all possible. I’ve had this in mind for some time, but it’s easier now that I’ve been there. Also, my previous plan to go to NYU this academic year didn’t work out very well since Kit Fine will not be there, and he’s the main reason why I want to go. But news about this will follow in due course if it’s actually happening.

Right now I’m working on my next two presentations which will take place very soon in Nottingham and Portugal, respectively. I will be extremely busy until the end of September, so updates will probably follow in about three weeks or so. Let’s finish with a photo of all, or most participants of the conference, taken just before the conference dinner (I ended up being the photographer as Philipp was looking for someone with a proper camera).

The conference crowd