Programme seminar series (2022): abstracts
October 12
TITLE: Changing pākehā minds
SPEAKER: Justine Kingsbury (Waikato)
In common parlance, changing your mind is replacing one
belief or intention with another, as in “I’ve changed my mind about
whether masking helps to restrict the spread of Covid-19”, or “She’s
changed her mind – she’s not coming to the picnic after all”.
In cases like these there are reasons, stated or unstated, for the
change, and if you want someone to change their mind about
something, the usual method is to provide reasons – arguments
against something they currently believe and in favour of some
competing claim.
In situations where two parties have very different worldviews,
reason-giving breaks down because of a lack of shared background
assumptions. There are a range of ways of getting people to do what
you want when you can’t rationally persuade them – “nudging”,
incentivising, coercing, and so on - which are to varying degrees
morally questionable.
This talk is about what I think is a different kind of mind-changing
and what I hope are less dodgy methods of bringing it about. For
those who have what might very broadly be called a western
scientific worldview, there are aspects of te ao Māori
that are very difficult if not impossible to understand, and this is
so even for individuals who are motivated to try to understand. The
change of mind that is needed is not so much a change of beliefs as
a change of perspective or conceptual scheme. Like beliefs,
perspectives and conceptual schemes are not things we can change
just by deciding to change them. This paper suggests some approaches
to changing our own (and perhaps other people’s) minds.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, October 12; in Burns 4 (Arts Building ground floor)
October 05
TITLE: The Border and the Flesh
SPEAKER:
Neil
Vallelly (Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
History Programme, Otago)
It goes without saying that borders separate things, like citizens
and immigrants, interior and exterior, self and other. In their
influential book Border as Method (2013), Sandro Mezzadra
and Brett Neilson argue that “the border is an epistemological
device, which is at work whenever a distinction between subject and
object is established.” Building on this assertion, this paper
examines not only how borders divide subject and object but, more
importantly, how they intertwine subject and object.
Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of “the flesh,” developed
in his famous essay ‘The Chiasm—The Intertwining’ (1964), this paper
argues that the border acts as a mechanism of the flesh—or a “hinge,
as Merleau-Ponty might call it—in a way that provides the
ontological foundations for the border’s power to separate on a
political and social level. For Merleau-Ponty, the human body is
both subject and object simultaneously, it can see and be seen,
touched and be touched, and “the flesh of the world” is where this
“reversibility” comes together. Thinking through the border as a
mechanism of the flesh can enable us to better understand how the
things and experiences the border separates on a political and
social level are ontologically intertwined. Understanding this, I
argue, can help us re-think politically the ways in which we attempt
to challenge and overcome the violence perpetuated by nation-state
borders in the twenty-first century.
September 28
TITLE: Epistemic Gatekeeping, Pride or Prejudice?
SPEAKER:
Joe
Ulatowski (Waikato)
The continuous growth of intellectual ecosystems leads to an
environment that is populated by mutually uncomprehending
hyperspecialised groups. That there are such groups can be taken to
reflect the way that human knowledge has expanded and deepened to
such an extent that one person may only ever have a detailed grasp
of a very narrow topic. People, for example, no longer specialise in
medicine or law but hyperspecialise in endocrinology or patent law.
They occupy a specialised cognitive niche with its own epistemic
standards and linguistic register. Enter gatekeepers whose sole
responsibility is to judge whether new entrants meet disciplinary
standards. If the novice fails to meet the niche group’s standards,
then gatekeepers are tasked with making sure that they do not gain
full entrance to that group. Whilst there is no doubt that these
gatekeepers are experts and highly skilled practitioners of their
craft, such skill and expertise do not preclude them from acting
upon cognitive biases and prejudices. On the contrary, as I argue in
this paper, it may be that they may be even more likely to act on
biases and prejudices than their non-expert counterparts because of
(i) the social and intellectual reinforcement that gatekeepers
receive from peers, (ii) the gatekeeper’s inability to assess their
own limited capacities, and (iii) the gatekeeper’s ignorance of the
limits of hyperspecialisation. The gatekeepers lofty professional
position may oblige them to eject interlopers, but some of the
decisions that they make may have more to do with misogynistic,
transphobic, and racist tendencies than with the merits of the new
entrant’s work.
September 21 (was September 14)
TITLE: The ethics of cryptocurrencies
SPEAKERS:
Mike King (Bioethics, Otago) and James Maclaurin (Philosophy, Otago)
Some see cryptocurrencies as a desirable democratisation of personal
finance, others as a pernicious usurpation of the financial powers
of governments. Aotearoa will soon have to decide how to regulate
them and how to educate the public about this poorly understood and
novel technology. This paper addresses the possibility of making
that process both informed and humane. The problem is important and
urgent—in Aotearoa, 9.5% of us own cryptocurrencies and a further
11% plan to buy. Māori are disproportionately involved, with 18%
currently invested. The problem is also complex because of confusion
about what cryptocurrencies are and the great diversity of their
potential opportunities and risks. This paper proposes a scholarly,
ethical analysis of the use of cryptocurrencies in Aotearoa which
will be a valuable resource for regulators, institutions, groups and
individuals.
September 7
TITLE: Wittgenstein, Blind Rule-Following and Wright's "Minor
Premise Problem"
SPEAKER:
Alex Miller (Otago)
In my seminar last October, I suggested that one way of reading
Wittgenstein’s notion of blind rule-following (“I follow the rule
blindly”) in Philosophical Investigations §219 is as a
reiteration of the claim in Philosophical Investigations
§201 that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an
interpretation”. I argued that this suggestion might help us
neutralize the “logical difficulty” that Saul Kripke (in Wittgenstein
on Rules and Private Language) finds in the idea that
grasping a rule might be a sui generis state of mind, as
well as the “Inference Problem” outlined by Paul Boghossian in his
papers “Epistemic Rules” and “Blind Rule-Following”. In this seminar
I will use the same reading of “blind rule-following” to develop a
response to the problem (the “Minor Premise Problem”) outlined by
Crispin Wright in his 2007 paper “Rule-Following Without Reasons”
and 2012 reply to Boghossian.
August 24
TITLE: Maximum Scholarly Value for Minimal Harm: Practical Climate
Ethics for Academics
SPEAKER:
Elisabeth Ellis (Otago)
Even if every commitment made in Glasgow last year were fulfilled,
the world would still fall short of its commitment to keep global
mean surface temperatures below the target of 1.5°C above
pre-industrial norms. We can not rely exclusively on international
efforts like the Paris Agreement, nor can we expect aggregated
individual behavior change to be sufficiently rapid and
transformative to drive necessary changes in emissions. Urgent
climate action is needed at all levels, including the level of civil
society. Scholarly associations and their academic members must
therefore do their part to achieve the climate stability on which
everyone’s flourishing depends. But what constitutes a fair share of
climate action for a scholarly association? There has been good work
done recently on how scholarly associations can reduce
their associated emissions (see especially, Klöwer et al. 2020, in Nature).
Groups like Flyingless.org offer practical advice for carbon
footprint reduction. But the critical questions of why and
how much for associations have not been much addressed in
the literature. In this paper I argue that scholarly associations
should be guided by ambitious, provisional, revisable principles
that preserve our options for collectively successful climate
action.
August 17
TITLE: Neurophilosophy after Aristotle
SPEAKER:
Grant Gillett (Bioethics, Otago)
Current neurophilosophy lacks a post-colonial voice and uses
post-industrial metaphors which misrepresent human neurocognition. A
return to Aristotle as a founding voice for non-dualistic naturalism
ushers in Phronesis, Eudaimonea, Arete, within a
conception of human natural function. The first of these, phronesis
or knowing how to do things by being in command of a range of
techniques, the second is flourishing, and the third a good or
well-functioning character. Rats and their discontents caused by
aversive contingency regimes suggest this is a broad problem in the
animal kingdom.
Being unheimlich reminds us that an
increasingly common human experience is of displacement,
marginalisation, homelessness, and not being at home in one’s ‘ways
of going on’ (Wittgenstein).
Dynamic adaptation to a bio-psych-social context
restores a person’s way of being or their “mastery of techniques”
(Wittgenstein) or well adapted ‘being in the world’.
Logico-mathematical mental structures as a conception of
neuro-cognition is give us a partial picture of the human
mind-brain.
Flexible culturally inflected being embodies the self-images of the
age, is realistic in the light of neuroscience and yields us to a
more inclusive view of human thinking and acting, and therefore of
ethics.
Being discursive allows us to imagine and execute
life plans on the basis of all these broader neurocognitive ideas
(Harre & Gillett).
The ethical significance of consciousness and
intention is that we engage in moral action with wide and growing
choices which make a difference to the world. The best metaphysical
abstraction falls into those clustered around supervenience or
epiphenomenalism depending on the variety of the formulation
involved.
August 03
TITLE: ‘Conspiracy Theory’ as a tonkish term: The runabout
inference-ticket form truth to falsehood
SPEAKER:
Charles Pigden (Otago)
You know what I hate? Philosophical papers which relate some matter
of great political pith and moment to some arcane issue that is
neither understandable by, nor of any interest to, anyone but
professional philosophers, their authors often operating under
the grotesque delusion that they are thereby doing their duty as
public intellectuals.
This I am sorry to say is just such a paper.
I draw on Prior’s famous paper ‘The Runabout Inference
Ticket’ plus some of Dummett’s remarks in Frege: the Philosophy
of Language to argue that ‘Conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy
theorist’ are Tonkish terms and I use this idea to clarify the
debate about conspiracy theories , arguing that since the extensions
of ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ are generated by
the application of mutually inconsistent tonkish rules, there is no
‘there’ there for social scientists to investigate.
June 1
TITLE: Is
Reasoning a Mental Action?
SPEAKER:
Zach Swindlehurst (Australian National University)
It is widely taken for granted that reasoning (or inferring) is
something that you actively do rather than something that
merely happens to you. According to the mental action thesis,
reasoning is a form of mental agency and thus a mental action. This
paper reconstructs two prominent lines of argument for the mental
action thesis and argues that they fail, before suggesting that the
sort of agency at work in reasoning is of a more deflationary
nature. First, there is the taking argument, according to
which reasoning is a mental action because it necessarily requires
you to take your premises to support your conclusion and
to draw your conclusion because of this fact. Second,
there is the rule-following argument, according to which
reasoning is a mental action because it is a form of rule-following.
But both arguments fail to substantiate an important distinction
between mental action, on the one hand, and mere mental activity,
on the other. The two arguments show, at most, that reasoning
involves mental activity; they do not show that it is a mental
action. The upshot is that we have no grounds for thinking that the
kind of agency involved in reasoning goes beyond the kind of agency
involved in responding to reasons (and responding to reasons as
reasons).
May 18
TITLE: Objective
List Theory
SPEAKER: Andrew Moore (Otago)
Derek
Parfit presents Objective List Theory (OLT) as the claim that
certain things are good or bad for us, whether or not we would
want to have the good things, or to avoid the bad things. Guided
by core ideas in Parfit’s account, this talk aims to make OLT
more determinate, and more sharply contrastive with its
subjectivist rivals. It also engages with other influential
commentators analysts of OLT, including Arneson, Bradley, Lin,
and Fletcher.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, May 18; in Otago Business School seminar room 1.19
May 11
TITLE: Human
Essence in Spinoza's Ethics
SPEAKER: Michael LeBuffe (Otago)
I
hope to arrive at a better understanding of Spinoza’s accounts
of humanity in the Ethics by means of an emphasis on
the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII): "Two or
more distinct things are distinguished from one another either
by a difference in the attributes of substances or else by a
difference in their affections" (E1p4). Attention to the PII in
the argument of the Ethics suggests, I argue, that
Spinoza takes human essence to be a single, real thing.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, May 11; in Otago Business School seminar room 1.19
May 4
TITLE: Revision
without revision?
SPEAKER: Zach Weber (Otago)
Paraconsistency
in mathematics allows
some contradictions. Classical
mathematics does
not. So there is a natural sense in which paraconsistency is revisionary,
challenging or rejecting some aspects of conventionally accepted
wisdom. Surprisingly, though, most of the (few) people who have
worked in paraconsistent maths have not advocated for
revisionism; they suggest various ways it is more conservative
after all, and seek instead reassurance that
no classical mathematics is lost. In this talk I consider
whether paraconsistent maths is best thought of as revisionary,
or not, by considering two detailed case studies in logic and
computability theory. I argue that, if the paraconsistentist
pursues revision without revision, this provides reassurance
without reassurance.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, May 4; in Tower Block Lecture Room TG08 (155 Union Street East)
April 27
TITLE: Ways of Knowing: Posing the Question (moved from Weds 30 March)
SPEAKER: Greg Dawes (Otago)
Philosophers commonly regard truth as a necessary condition for knowledge. But this makes it difficult to make sense of the idea that there can be different ways of knowing. On this view, facts are facts, one either knows them or not. The paper examines this argument and outlines a way in which it could be answered. It offers an alternative understanding of what it is to know that allows radically different ways of representing reality to be instances of knowledge.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, April 27; in Richardson 7N10
March 9
TITLE: What Thrasymachus Should have Said
SPEAKER: Charles Pigden (Otago)
ABSTRACT: In the Republic
Thrasymachus argues that ‘justice is the advantage of the
stronger’, that is that the laws and conventions governing a
society support the interests of the rulers or the ruling
class. Hence acting justly – obeying those laws and
customs of one's society in one's dealings with other people – is
not necessarily, not usually or maybe not even ever in
an agent’s best interests. This is a problem for Plato who wants
to prove that it necessarily pays to be just. So his spokesman
Socrates leads Thrasymachus into a trap. Suppose (as surely
happens from time to time) the rulers make a mistake and enact
laws (or foster customs) that are not in their best interests. In
that case justice won’t be to ‘the advantage of the
stronger’ and their subjects’ acting justly won’t be in the
rulers’ best interests. Clitophon offers Thrasymachus a lifeline.
Perhaps justice is what the stronger think is in their
interests. But Thrasymachus won’t have a bar of it. If a ruler
makes a law or issues an order that is not in his
interests he thereby ceases to be a real ruler. So justice is
always to the advantage of the stronger , since if it isn’t,
the stronger cease to be strong. This is both decidedly silly and
gets him into a lot of dialectical trouble. I suggest on
Thrasymachus’ behalf a Darwinian response which entails that
justice is usually or at least often to ‘the
advantage of the stronger’. This in turn in entails that it does
not necessarily pay to be just, which negates Plato’s desired
conclusion. My reconstructed Thrasymachus will be less of a
proto-fascist and more of a radical democrat than Plato’s
Thrasymachus appears to have been.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, March 9, via
Zoom
March 2
TITLE: Naturalising the Philosophy of Time
SPEAKER: Heather Dyke (Otago)
ABSTRACT: In the debate between the A-theory
and the B-theory it is generally agreed on all sides that the
B-theory, unlike the A-theory, is at least consistent with what
physics tells us about time. The B-theory therefore looks to be
the best candidate for a naturalistic metaphysical theory of time.
However, the B-theory is prima facie inconsistent with our
ordinary experience of time, which tells us that there is a
privileged present moment, and that time flows. In this paper I
argue that the B-theory can incorporate a naturalistic account of
our ordinary temporal experience, and so offers a complete,
naturalised metaphysics of time that coheres with both physics and
temporal experience.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, March 2, via
Zoom