Lisa Ellis (Otago): The collective ethics of flying
Other
Unconstrained and accelerating greenhouse gas emissions associated with air travel threaten everyone's wellbeing. Popular discourse notwithstanding, neither efficiency gains nor voluntary action (via restraint or the purchase of carbon offsets) has any prospect of having a meaningful effect on…
Connie Rosati (U Arizona)
Seminar
What Obergefell v. Hodges Should have Said Connie S. Rosati University of Arizona In Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, held that under the Fourteenth Amendment, the States must license marriages between persons of the same sex and must recognize valid…
Una Stojnic (NYU & ANU) Semantics and What is Said
Seminar
A commonplace view is that only a semantic theory that interprets sentences of a language according to what their utterances intuitively say can be correct. The rationale is that only by requiring a tight connection between what a sentence means and what its users intuitively say can we explain why…
Julia Driver (WUSTL): Undermining Promises
Other
Conditional promises such as my promise to donate to Oxfam, if you donate to Oxfam, can only be broken if the condition event is realized. In this case, the condition event would be you giving money to Oxfam. At that point, if I do not give any money to Oxfam, I have broken my promise. Breaking one…
Janice Dowell (Syracuse): Flexible Contextualism, Contrastivism, Inheritance, and Iffy ‘Ought’s
Seminar
Title: Flexible Contextualism, Contrastivism, Inheritance, and Iffy ‘Ought’s J.L. Dowell and Aaron Bronfman Fabrizio Cariani has argued against a Kratzer-style semantics for deontic modals on the grounds that it validates both the principle of Inheritance (if p entails q, then ought p entails ought…
Alex Sandgren (ANU): In Defence of Idiosyncrasy
Seminar
Descriptivist theories of belief content (for example those of Quine, Lewis, Braddon-Mitchell, and Jackson) imply that ordinary agents do not often have beliefs with the same content. Common complaints made against descriptivism concern communication, agreement, disagreement, and the norms of…
Gillian Russell (UNC): Deviance and Vice: Strength as a theoretical virtue in the epistemology of logic
Seminar
Abstract: Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in an abductive approach to the epistemology of logic. The rough idea would be that different logics represent different theories of the relation of logical consequence, and that we should select among these as we do in other sciences…