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…
Putting others on a pedestal: Testimony, Admiration, and Due Respect
Seminar
Parents of children with disabilities often share their stories to attest to the positive impact parenting such a child has had on their lives. It is important to give due respect to such testimony, but what does due respect entail? Recently Chris Kaposy has argued in “Choosing Down Syndrome,” that…
Making the Goods in Work Accessible and the Paternalism Objection
Seminar
Work can enable people to get consumption items, develop capacities, socialise, contribute to society, give direction to their lives, gain knowledge, and foster their self-esteem and self-respect. This paper outlines a normative argument for policies supporting workers’ access to these goods and…
Quantifying the Human
Seminar
Quantitative measurement in the human sciences remains controversial. Are depression scales, intelligence tests, etc. valid measurement instruments? Do they deliver quantitative or merely ordinal information? Cristian discusses two approaches for understanding practices of quantitative measurement…
Work, Leisure, and the Sources of Meaning in Life
Seminar
Matthew begins with the question ‘what is work?’ Many argue that ‘work’ is a hopelessly indeterminate term that cannot be adequately defined. Against this view, he defends a novel account of what work is. Building on this, he then develops accounts of three other types of human activity that can be…