Are there neural representations?
Seminar
Are there neural representations? This talk lays out traditional philosophical criteria for mental representations, and considers whether neuroimaging provides evidence of them. It briefly reviews previous work suggesting that FMRI, and in particular, Representational Similarity Analysis, provides…
2025 John Passmore Lecture with Professor Niko Kolodny
Lecture
Join us for the 2025 John Passmore Lecture by Professor Niko Kolodny on Two Concepts of Consent. Niko will explore how consent transforms moral duties and what conditions give it normative force. A compelling discussion on ethics, autonomy, and the power of permission.AbstractIn his exploration of…
Counterfactuals Workshop
Workshop
Workshop Agenda9:30 - 10:00 Greetings, muffins, and coffee10:00 - 11:00 Adam Wingardh: "Why Conditionals Are Ambiguous”Short break11:15 - 12:15 Karen Lewis (by Zoom): "Contextual Relevance for Counterfactuals”12:15 - 1:15 …
Explanatory Realism
Lecture
The cement of the universe is not causation: it is explanatory dependence. Reality is a network of facts connected by a single, irreducible, mind-independent “because”. It is widely held that explanation is a sort, interest-sensitive practice that aims to provide information only about other things…
Reanimating Ayer's Significance Criterion
Seminar
The unmitigated failure of A. J. Ayer’s significance criterion in Language, Truth, and Logic reveals the fundamental folly of any attempt to formulate such a criterion. This is the familiar, critical appraisal of the historically contentious search for a precise litmus test that…
Kantsequentialism and Agent-Centered Restrictions
Seminar
On a given moral view, an agent-centred restriction (hereafter, simply ‘restriction’) prohibits agents from performing acts of a certain type, even if doing so would prevent two or more others from each performing a morally comparable instance of that act-type. In this chapter of the…
Factfulness and Metalinguistic Agency in Humans and Language Models
Seminar
Language models (LMs) are known to suffer from a variety of infelicities of language such as hallucinations, inconsistencies, continuity and coherence problems, etc. Some of these difficulties suggest that LMs have no idea what they are saying when they “speak”. And yet LMs often also behave in…