Three Things Reasons Do: Transmission, Aggregation, and Difference-Making
Seminar
Reasons for action can do many things. They can give rise to further reasons, combine to provide stronger support, and favour one option over another. Each of these phenomena has received considerable attention in the literature, but largely in isolation. I argue that they are systematically…
Jack Smart Lecture: Taking Risks for Others
Lecture
We sometimes make choices on behalf of others. If we knew how the options would turn out, making these decisions would require only knowing what’s best for the affected person. But in cases of risk, decisions are more complicated—particularly if we assume that there is a wide range of rational…
2026 John Passmore Lecture
Lecture
Smaller Chance of Mistake, More Innocents Dead: A Different Problem with Using AI Systems in War (and Elsewhere) AbstractUsing AI systems in identifying targets may very well increase accuracy, in the following sense: For each person suspected to be a legitimate target, the chance of a false…
Frege’s Puzzle and Nature of Semantic Facts
Seminar
Frege noted that sentences that differ from each other only by the substitution of coreferential proper names can differ in their role in rational linguistic activity. For example, “Robert Zimmerman is Bob Dylan” can be used to make an informative assertion; “Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan” cannot.…
What the Tortoise Told The Skeptic
Seminar
Over forty years ago, Saul Kripke did the unthinkable — producing an exposition of Wittgenstein's Rule-Following Argument that was actually intelligible. More than that, it was interesting as well. In this talk, Drew Khlentzos will discuss Ludwig Wittgenstein's Skeptical Paradox about rule…
What kind of representationalism has a good chance of being true
Seminar
Representationalism about perceptual experience is conventional wisdom these days. Despite this, some version is likely true, but what version? Professor Frank Jackson discusses this question after a short reminder of why representationalism is so attractive. He ends by noting an issue for…
Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI
Seminar
At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan “knowledge is power” has been used to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and information. We know that being able to shape the informational environment for a group is a way to shape their decisions; it is essentially a way to…