Tractarian Metaphilosophy: Rethinking Elucidation and Nonsense

The status of the pseudo-propositions of the Tractatus has long puzzled interpreters. On the one hand, they are nonsensical (unsinnig) and therefore lack sense. On the other, their nonsensical character seems to depend on the very views on language they appear to express. This tension has traditionally been addressed in two ways. Traditional readings distinguish between substantial and accidental nonsense, allowing the Tractatus to express substantive views through substantial nonsense. By contrast, resolute readings reject this distinction and maintain that all nonsense is accidental, so that the pseudo-propositions express no philosophical doctrines. This presentation proposes a third alternative. I argue that Erläuterung (elucidation) and Unsinn (nonsense) are used analogically in the Tractatus. Treating these notions as analogical explains how the pseudo-propositions can perform a distinctive philosophical role, while also clarifying the source of the tensions underlying both traditional and resolute interpretations. If time permits, I will conclude by suggesting some implications of this interpretation for contemporary debates in metaphilosophy.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes – VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Plenary speaker

The ‘force of the better argument’ and the limits of discursive rationality

The idea that good arguments have a special ‘force’ is a widespread tenet across various philosophical traditions: good arguments have the ability to compel and convince by rational means rather than by coercion, leading to truth and consensus. Recent exponents of this view include John Stuart Mill, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Robert Brandom, all of whom offer ideal(ized) theories of discursive practices. But how does the “force of the better argument” operate in complex social realities? In this talk, I present the main lines of an alternative, more realistic model of discursive practices, which acknowledges the inherent cognitive limitations of ‘bounded’ human agents and the effects of power relations for discursive rationality. As a broadly Kantian project, my account investigates the limits of discursive rationality, moderating unrestricted optimism about the power of reason while also recognizing the significant role that arguments play in various domains (science, politics, education, and so forth).

Sven Rosenkranz – ICREA and University of Barcelona, Spain

Dialectica Lecture

On what there presently is

Presentism and its rivals, Permanentism and the Growing Block Theory, offer competing answers to the question of what there presently is. I know what these different theories say on the matter—what, in Quine’s phrase, they take to be the values of variables. I know that these theories say different things and literally contradict one another. I also have a fair idea which theories are ontologically more parsimonious than others, and which are ideologically simpler and logically more powerful than others. Yet I sometimes wonder what is really at stake in the debate between Presentists and their opponents. Drawing on joint work with Fabrice Correia over the past decade and a half, I will explore some candidate answers and, along the way, try to clarify what I mean by that very question.

Kordula Świętorzecka – Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University

History of Philosophy, History of Analytic Philosophy

Infinite Proofs for Contingent Truths: From Leibniz to Infinitary Modal Logics

Leibniz believed in the actual infinite, maintaining, among other things, that there are infinitely many monads and possible worlds, and that space and time are infinite. Our starting point will be the notion of infinity involved in the distinction between necessary and contingent truths. According to Leibniz, the justification of every contingent truth, unlike that of necessary truths, requires an infinite analysis—the formulation of a certain kind of infinite proof, either direct or indirect. Necessary truths are provable in a finite number of steps. Within the framework of the contemporary theory of deductive systems, the distinction between necessary and contingent truths can be applied to the theses of any deductive theory: the former can be viewed as the logical laws of the theory, while the formulas characterizing the theory are treated as contingent truths. The Leibnizian approach to justifying necessary and contingent truths resembles the paradigm of modern infinitary systems for various modal logics. In such systems, infinitary rules of inference are redundant when applied solely within logic, but their use is essential for proving the completeness of consistent specific theories that are extensions of this logic. Our aim is to reconstruct the Leibnizian notion of proof using the contemporary methodology of infinitary systems of modal logic.

Massimiliano Carrara – University of Padua

Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics

Varieties of neutrality in logic, varieties of neutral logics

Logic is commonly regarded as neutral. Although this neutrality is not always explicitly articulated or defended, it is often assumed to be one of its typical traits: for instance, since logic is supposed to be neutral on substantial issues, it is traditionally seen as an impartial arbiter in extralogical disputes. Classic accounts of the neutrality of logic include topic-neutrality and ontological neutrality. A third way of understanding neutrality concerns logic’s instrumental character, related to the traditional conception of logic as an organon, that is, a neutral tool for theorizing. In this talk, I present an account devoted to capturing this aspect of logic’s neutrality, discussing various logics that model it in different ways. The guiding idea is to understand logic’s neutrality in theory building in terms of mere theory closure, further specifying what a neutral logic should not do and what it should do.

Luca Incurvati – University of Amsterdam

Philosophy of Language

Directives and deontics

In recent work, I have defended an inferential expressivist account of deontic modals, according to which the meaning of ‘must’ and ‘may’ is explained in terms of their inferential connections to directives. In this talk, I plan to extend this account to so-called weak necessity deontic modals such as ‘ought’ and ‘should’. I will argue that certain imperatives ought to be understood as effecting a tentative proposal to add an action to the addressee’s to-do list. I will then show that these tentative imperatives can be used to provide an inferential expressivist account of weak necessity deontic modals. If time permits, I will also discuss how the issue of how to treat weak necessity deontic modals in an inferential expressivist framework turns out to bear important connections with the issue of how to account for the phenomenon of free choice.

Tuomas Tahko – University of Bristol

Metaphysics

Natural Kind Fundamentalism

This paper defends Natural Kind Fundamentalism (NKF), the view that the ontological category of natural kind is fundamental. I develop a primitivist account of categorial fundamentality based on the Complete Categorial Basis (CCB) criterion, which requires that fundamental categories form a complete and minimal system irreducible to other categories through ontological dependence relations. I argue against bundle-theoretic reductions and in favour of the view that natural kinds are substantial universals serving as principles of unity for property clusters. This framework distinguishes between the metaphysical ‘why’ question (answered by substantial universals as unifiers) and the empirical ‘how’ question (concerning specific unification mechanisms). I demonstrate that natural kinds and properties exhibit mutual but asymmetric dependence: properties depend generically on kinds for instantiation, while kinds depend rigidly on their essential properties. The resulting formal ontological structure satisfies the CCB criterion and explains why certain property clusters are non-arbitrary without reducing kinds to properties or vice versa.

Maria Lasonen – University of Helsinki

Epistemology

Feasibilist inquiry

In this talk I discuss inquiry within the context of a broad normative framework I have defended called feasibilism. I begin with a dogmatist puzzle. Assume that knowledge is the goal of inquiry. If you know p, the answer to a question you are inquiring into, then the goal of this inquiry has been achieved. Are you nevertheless permitted to continue inquiring, gathering more evidence bearing on whether p? There is an argument for thinking that you are not, at least if gathering more evidence could not further the goal of any other inquiry you are engaged in. After all, by gathering more evidence you risk losing knowledge, whether by defeat or by losing your belief. However, many find a prohibition to gather more evidence implausible. I first apply feasibilism to inquiry by distinguishing between successful inquiry and inquiry that manifests the best feasible zetetic dispositions. According to the approach defended, we can assess zetetic dispositions by proxy, by assessing the doxastic dispositions rendered feasible by manifesting the zetetic dispositions. I then walk through an example involving ex ante dogmatist reasoning, showing how a feasibilist norm of inquiry permits inquiring even if one already knows and hence, even if one’s inquiry has already succeeded. Interestingly, the reasoning can be seen as an application of a well-known formal result (Good 1967/Oddie 1997), but with a novel interpretation of the formalism that diverges from that of epistemic decision theory.

Alyssa Ney – LMU Munich

Philosophy of Science

Disentangling John Wheeler’s Vision of Quantum Reality: The Participatory Universe, It-from-Bit, and Law without Law

The aim of this paper will be to disentangle the various parts of John Wheeler’s vision of quantum reality, which he often intentionally conflated. These are (i) participatory realism, that reality is created in acts of “observer-participation”, (ii) it-from-bit, that this reality is generated more specifically in the form of answers to yes/no questions, and (iii) law-without-law, the claim that the stable regularities we observe in nature are the result of an underlying reality in which there are no laws. These theses are clearly logically independent, but were, for Wheeler, crucially interconnected. Several contemporary proponents of participatory realism, including the QBists, follow Wheeler in taking these theses to be a package deal. I will argue that they should be disentangled, by considering especially the arguments that led Wheeler to endorse them.

María Álvarez – King’s College London

Philosophy of Mind and Action

Abilities and Agential Possibilities

Contemporary discussions of abilities account for what I call someone’s ‘agential possibilities’ – what she can do as an agent – in terms of different types of abilities possessed by the agent. Accordingly, they distinguish between ‘general’ vs ‘specific’ abilities to mark the distinction between what an agent can do in general, and what she can do on a particular occasion; and some authors also invoke more or less ‘global’ or ‘local’ abilities; ‘object-specific’ abilities, etc.; and also between ‘robust’ and ‘simple’ abilities to account for what an agent can do ‘reliably’ vs what she does (can do) through luck, etc. In this paper, I propose a different account of agential possibilities in terms of two fundamentally different factors: abilities and opportunities. I develop some details of the account, and explain the attractions of this, over the ‘types of ability’ approach, for some thorny problems about ability attribution and about claims about what agents can and cannot do.

Bart Streumer – University of Groningen

Ethics

How to be a Self-Effacing Consequentializing Quasi-Realist

Consequentialists often argue that their opponents’ views can be consequentialized or that their own view is partly self-effacing. These arguments resemble the quasi-realist moves that many expressivists make. I argue, however, that consequentializing and self-effacement are surprisingly hard to accommodate within an expressivist framework. This threatens to show that expressivism is false, since it threatens to show that there are meaningful normative sentences that do not express noncognitive attitudes. I then argue that this threat can be neutralized by taking expressivists’ quasi-realist moves further than they are normally taken. This also reveals a deeper resemblance between quasi-realist moves and self-effacement.

Emanuela Ceva – University of Geneva

Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law

The Architecture of Institutional Action

In this talk, I lay out a unified account of institutional action and use it to reconsider the public/private distinction. Building on an interactive social ontology, I present institutional action as interrelated: persons-in-roles jointly enact, specify, and sometimes revise an institution’s raison d’être, i.e. the ideals and values that justify its establishment and regulate its functioning. Institutions vary in open-texturedness, which shapes both the exercise of powers of office and accountability among officeholders. On this background, I argue that institutional architectures should be classified by the contrast between institutions with simple and focused raisons d’être and institutions with complex and composite ones. Public institutions often instantiate the latter architecture through practices of office accountability. The neo-classical view of corporations models them as oriented to closed-textured corporate purposes and governed by office liability. But this distinction is not set in stone and hybrid cases are possible as well as reforms that transform institutional architectures by modifying institutional justificatory practices.

Elisabeth Schellekens – Uppsala University

Aesthetics

The Noetic Theory of Aesthetic Experience and Conceptual Mapping

On the noetic account, aesthetic experience is primarily defined in terms of an explorative thought-process grounded in our abilities for sense-making, problem-solving and making associations; a seeking-to-understand. Aesthetic experience is i) inquisitive, ii) epistemically generative, iii) processual and iv) psychologically integrated. In this paper, I further unpack the explorative aspect of such experience, and identify the main epistemic benefits which can be seen to arise from exploration in general, especially conceptual mapping and mental navigation. I connect these epistemic benefits to the aesthetic case and open up for a new cognitivist argument in aesthetics.

John Haldane – University of St. Andrews

Philosophy of Religion

Anscombe on Natural Theology

Citing her two essays ‘On Transubstantiation’ (1974) and ‘Faith’ (1975), Anscombe wrote in her Collected Philosophical Papers (CPP) III (1981), that her interest in philosophy of religion was in particular religious questions (in contrast to abstract natural theology). On the other hand, she also wrote (in CPP II) that what got her into philosophy was dissatisfaction with and efforts to improve upon a version of the First Cause argument. And in the 1960s she carried on an extensive correspondence concerning such proofs. Later in the 1980s she explored the nature of Anselm’s Proslogion argument proposing that it was not intended as an ontological proof. In other unpublished material she reflects on the relation between religious belief and philosophical argument, seeming to suggest that rather than the latter supporting the former it is aspects of the former that give meaning to concepts featuring in theological metaphysics. I will be exploring both her ventures into natural theology and her thoughts about the relation between philosophy and religious belief.