The Epistemology Research Cluster at the University of Edinburgh is hosting this interesting conference on ‘The Aims of Inquiry and Cognition’. I like how the topic description starts from Aristotle’s thoughts about knowledge. Another point of interest is that Ted Sider is one of the keynote speakers; I’m guessing that he will talk about the issues discussed in his forthcoming book, Writing the Book of the World. In fact, the idea that inquiry could aim at ‘carving nature at the joints’ is mentioned in the descriptions of topics as well — it’s one of the central topics of Sider’s book. Unfortunately I don’t think I can make it, as I’ll be in the US. You have until the end of the year to submit your papers!

The Aims of Inquiry and Cognition
25 – 26 May 2012

Keynote Speakers:

Theodore Sider (Cornell University)
Carolyn Price (Open University)
Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (University of Arhus)
Stephen Grimm (Fordham University) & Kristoffer Ahlstrom (University of Copenhagen)

Contact Details
ahazlett@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/people/allan-hazlett

Topic:
The idea of a teleology of inquiry is familiar to epistemologists from Aristotle’s oft-quoted opening sentence of the Metaphysics, on which “all men by nature desire knowledge.” The picture is complicated, however, as at least three distinct aims might be posited: mere knowledge (suggested by the letter of the slogan), understanding (which Aristotle takes to be knowledge of explanations), and understanding of fundamental causes and principles (which is what Aristotle is seeking in the Metaphysics). Other candidates for the aims of inquiry and cognition present themselves: mere true belief, revealing nature’s fundamental structure, fitting the world or the situation, or the promotion of our practical or pragmatic goals.

Two related sets of questions arise here: the first having to do with the very idea that inquiry and cognition (and thought more broadly) have aims, and the second having to do with the nature of these aims. This conference seeks to advance the debate on these and related questions by bringing together scholars working in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of mind. Questions to be considered include:

• Does cognition have an aim? What does it mean to say that cognition “aims” at something? Do mental states other than cognitive states have “aims”?
• Is it a claim about the natural history of belief and/or the biological function of belief?
• Does belief “aim at truth”? In what sense? Is the claim normative, and in what sense?
• Are there aims essential to inquiry? Or to scientific inquiry? Is there a unique aim of inquiry, or are there a plurality of aims of inquiry? Are there aims of inquiry other than truth (e.g. understanding, “carving nature at the joints,” empirical adequacy, etc.)? Are certain aims of inquiry pragmatic as opposed to properly epistemic (e.g. theoretical virtues such as simplicity, elegance, etc.)?
• Why is it appropriate to characterize inquiry as having a goal or aim?
• Does the fact that belief or inquiry has a certain aim explain the value of knowledge? Does this fact illuminate the nature of epistemic evaluation?
• Can metaphysical or methodological naturalists endorse a teleological conception of belief (and other mental states)? Do they or should they accept the idea that the concept of belief (or mentality in general) is normative?

Submissions:

We invite submissions of papers for presentation at the conference on these and related topics. Send submissions (3,000 words) to Allan Hazlett no later than January 1st, 2012.

My paper ‘A Priori and A Posteriori: A Bootstrapping Relationship’, which was recently accepted for publication at the journal Metaphysica is now available as an Online Early article at www.springerlink.com. This paper is a follow-up to my 2008 piece, ‘A New Definition of A Priori Knowledge: In Search of a Modal Basis’, published in the same journal. In the new paper I expand on my novel definition of aprioricity and examine the relationship of a priori and a posteriori knowledge in particular, suggesting that they best understood as acting in a so called ‘bootstrapping relationship’. The paper may appear to be on epistemology rather than metaphysics, but my interpretation of aprioricity is metaphysical: I take it to be a special case of modal epistemology. I explain this in more detail in my 2008 paper.

I’ll note in addition that my experiences with Metaphysica have been extremely good, and I hope that the journal receives more attention. The current piece went from submission to Online Early in less than three months! In some journals it takes longer than that to even acknowledge submission… The paper will appear in print in the next issue of the journal later this year: Vol. 12, No. 2.

I’ve had another paper accepted for publication recently, but I’ll do a separate post about that once it has passed the proof stage.

Finally, here is the abstract of the new paper:

The distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge has been the subject of an enormous amount of discussion, but the literature is biased against recognizing the intimate relationship between these forms of knowledge. For instance, it seems to be almost impossible to find a sample of pure a priori or a posteriori knowledge. In this paper, it will be suggested that distinguishing between a priori and a posteriori is more problematic than is often suggested, and that a priori and a posteriori resources are in fact used in parallel. We will define this relationship between a priori and a posteriori knowledge as the bootstrapping relationship. As we will see, this relationship gives us reasons to seek for an altogether novel definition of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Specifically, we will have to analyse the relationship between a priori knowledge and a priori reasoning, and it will be suggested that the latter serves as a more promising starting point for the analysis of aprioricity. We will also analyse a number of examples from the natural sciences and consider the role of a priori reasoning in these examples. The focus of this paper is the analysis of the concepts of a priori and a posteriori knowledge rather than the epistemic domain of a posteriori and a priori justification.

I heard about this massive conference when I was in Cologne in May 2010. Although the conference is likely to lack metaphilosophical discussion of the Aristotelian stripe (possibly with the exception of Jonathan Schaffer), it should nevertheless be very interesting. I should perhaps submit something on the methodology of Aristotelian metaphysics, but an easy option would be to simply comment on one of the competing views, such as Tim Williamson’s account in his The Philosophy of Philosophy.

Here is the original CFP:

Call for Papers:

The Epistemology of Philosophy
University of Cologne
13-17 June 2011

http://rvps2011.net/epistemology/

Despite various challenges to “armchair philosophy,” the fact
remains that many central philosophical questions are still investigated
from the armchair – questions in metaphysics, in the philosophy of
mind, and in value theory, for example. What do philosophers bring with
them into the armchair to try to answer these questions? They bring at
least their grasp of concepts and of language, their imagination, and
their ability to engage in different forms of reasoning. The purpose of
this conference is to provide a forum for exchange between philosophers
working on the foundations of non-empirical knowledge and philosophers
working on the methodological and epistemological questions arising in
specific areas of philosophy. Invited speakers include:

Alex Byrne (MIT)
David J. Chalmers (ANU/NYU)
Andy Egan (Rutgers)
Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale)
Thomas Grundmann (Cologne)
Terence Horgan (Arizona)
Martine Nida-Rümelin (Fribourg)
Paul Pietroski (Maryland)
Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers/ANU)
Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers/ANU)
Russ Shafer-Landau (Wisconsin)
Michael Smith (Princeton)
Zoltán Gendler Szabó (Yale)
Timothy Williamson (Oxford)

The conference will also include presentations chosen by submission, and
we encourage researchers to submit abstracts suitable for a 45-minute
presentation on any topic pertinent to the themes of the conference.
Possible topics include the following: Imagination, modal reasoning,
understanding, a priori knowledge, the epistemology of philosophy of
mind, ethics and metaphysics, philosophical explanation, and
disagreement and progress in philosophy. This list is merely meant to be
suggestive. We invite submissions in all areas of metaphilosophy, and we
encourage philosophers working in all sub-disciplines to submit work
that reflects on the epistemology and methodology of their
sub-discipline and on how it relates to the philosophical enterprise
more generally.

The deadline for submissions is 15 February 2011. See the conference web
page for submission instructions: http://rvps2011.net/epistemology/

Please feel free to contact the conference organizers with any questions
or concerns:

Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (mbalcerakjackson@me.com)
Brendan Balcerak Jackson (bbalcerakjackson@gmail.com)

Emmy Noether Research Group
Understanding and the A Priori
http://fromthearmchair.net

The conference will take place as part of the Rhine Valley Philosophy
Summer 2011, a series of independently-organized events in the
Cologne-Bonn region. See http://rvps2011.net for information about the
other events.

Anne Meylan is editing a special issue of dialectica on justification. It’s a topic that I don’t specifically work in, but I have some interests towards it, and in fact I’ve just given a lecture on justified true belief and will give another one on the Gettier cases next week. I don’t suppose that I will have anything to submit, but you never know… Here is the actual call for papers:

Call for Papers

Special Issue of dialectica

Justification Today

Guest editor: Anne Meylan

Post-Gettier epistemology and the difficulty of analysing knowledge have often led to scepticism about the notion of justification. It has been suggested that one should either move beyond justification or simply get rid of this notion within epistemology. But is the notion of justification really useless if knowledge turns out to be unanalysable ? Is the debate between internalist and externalist conceptions of justification still relevant ? How should we view the relationships between epistemic justification and other kinds of justification (in particular in the ethical case)? Is justification subjective? The aim of this special issue is to help to clarify the seemingly new role that the notion of justification plays in contemporary epistemology by answering these questions.

To do so, dialectica invites submissions for publication in a special issue on the topic of Justification Today.

Please send a pdf prepared for blind reviewing to anne.meylan@unige.ch

Deadline for submission: July, 1. 2010

Notification of acceptance, resubmission, rejection: September, 1. 2010

Final version due: December, 1. 2010

Welcome the 106th edition of Philosophers’ Carnival — a gourmet selection of philosophy related blog posts from around the blogosphere.

The menu selections for tonight are arranged as follows:

The Hors D’œuvres: Moral Philosophy to be consumed before setting down at the table.
The Entrées: Some sautéed Epistemology.
The Main Courses: Slowly cooked Metaphysics.
The Desserts: A rather special mix of glazed Logic & Language.
The Digestives: Some Philosophy of Mind & Action to help with the digestion.
The Wine List: A true connoisseur’s take on wine with some Philosophy of Science.

Hors D’œuvres: Moral Philosophy

• Thom Brooks at The Brooks Blog wets our appetite with his paper ‘Punishment and British Idealism’, which discusses the work of philosophers such as Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, and T. H. Green, and particularly their views on punishment — we are being told that there is an important overlap here between the views of these philosophers and other idealists. Comments on the paper are invited!
• Richard Chappell at Philosophy, et cetera discusses The Limits of Moral Theory over some appetiser drinks. And make those drinks strong, because he tells us that there is no moral theory which manages to guarantee the best possible outcomes even if its requirements are satisfied!
• Eric Michael Johnson at The Primate Diaries entertains us with a pre-dinner talk with the intriguing title ‘Why I Am Not A Humanist’, taking his cue from Bertrand Russell’s essay ‘Why I Am Not A Christian’. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I’ll let you know that it has something to do with apes…

Entrées: Epistemology

• C. Bosco at Hammers of Flight starts our entrée assortment with a discussion of the Gettier cases and justification in the post Overlapping Arrows from Nowhere. He claims that the term ‘justification’ is problematic and that nothing is justified per se.
• Hans Bluedorn at the Fallacy Detective reminds us that something isn’t true simply because nobody has yet given any evidence to the contrary with this funny video: “Proof By Lack of Evidence” Fallacy.

Main Courses: Metaphysics

• Andrew Brenner at The Florida Student Philosophy Blog starts off our main meal options with some seafood straight from The Ship of Theseus. He discusses two arguments in favour of mereological nihilism — which would suggest that we can avoid the Ship of Theseus problem — and then responds to three objections to mereological nihilism.
• Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking offers another possibility for the main course, even though he thinks that not quite everything is possible: “Anything is possible.” No, not really. The gist is that an omnipotent god is logically impossible, but there is some very interesting discussion on the varieties of modality as well. A lively discussion is also going on in the comments section.
• Your host for tonight right here at ttahko.net would like to continue on the same note and offer a supplement on the Varieties of Modality. I invite comments to a draft paper of the same name, which is a survey of our options in interpreting varieties of modality, especially metaphysical, conceptual, and logical modality.
• Ross Cameron at metaphysical values changes the flavour towards abstract objects and offers An argument against Platonism. Interestingly, the argument relies heavily on certain supposed conceptual possibilities, such as ‘For everything that exists, it is conceptually possible that it not exist’.
• Martin Cooke at Enigmania offers another maths related dish with a post on Resolving Lévy’s paradox. The paradox concerns the logical possibility of arbitrarily selected real numbers and the upshot is that standard mathematics may be in trouble.
• Kenny Pearce at blog.kennypearce.net finishes the main course options with a post on How reductive theories of mental representation lead to phenomenalism, considering the plausibility of the argument according to which mental representation can be reduced to phenomenal content.

Desserts: Logic and Language

• Edgar Aroutiounian at The Florida Student Philosophy Blog starts the dessert options with an amusing cartoon from xkcd.com on the explosiveness of classical logic: Boom, there goes Classical Logic. The problem is of course that of everything following from a contradiction, and some discussion of our options follows.
• Peter Smith at Logic Matters has been putting up his notes about the work of a philosopher who did not eat so well: Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. I recommend this introduction to Gödel’s theorems to anyone who, like myself, is not very mathematically competent.
• Andrew Bacon at Possibly Philosophy concludes out dessert choices with some notes about Interpreting the third truth value in Kripke’s theory of truth. Contrary to Kripke and one common view, according to which the third truth value is not really a truth value at all, he suggests that we can indeed view the third truth value as a third truth status.

Digestives: Philosophy of Mind & Action

• Avery Archer at The Space of Reasons starts off our digestive drinks with a discussion of Burge’s Alternative to M-rationalism. M-rationalism, which is short for ‘Motivational Rationalism’ suggests that ‘a psychological transition is rational only if the agent is motivated to complete the transition by her belief that it accords with a rational principle’ and this post suggests that Tyler Burge’s alternative to M-rationalism bears some similarity to R. J. Wallace’s M-rationalist account.
• David Chalmers at fragments of consciousness invites comments on his new paper The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis while we finish off our drinks. The paper discusses the supposed intelligence explosion that could happen if and when machines become more intelligent than humans.

Wine List: Philosophy of Science

• Terrance Tomkow at Tomkow.com has a vintage on offer: Darwin and his Defenders. This is a discussion of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong.
• Eric Schliesser at It’s Only A Theory wonders if mathematical models can help in choosing our wine (or at least our philosophy) in a post on Mathematical models and philosophical progress.
• Bryan W. Roberts at Soul Physics offers the final choice for a wine to accompany our meal with some amusing clips about Constructing the Ultimate Machine.

There you have it, some fine choices for your philosophical gourmet dining experience! Apologies to those whose entries were not included — there’s only so much one can eat. The next Philosophers’ Carnival will be hosted at Brains on April 26th. Submit your entry here. In the meanwhile, you’re always welcome to come back to ttahko.net!