18 November 2009
REPORT: Formal Philosophy Seminars
Posted by Rasmus Rendsvig under: Conference and workshop reports .
Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson reports on the Formal Philosophy Seminars hosted by the Formal Epistemology Project at the University of Leuven undertaken during the semester so far:
Hemdat Lerman argued for the contemporary relevance of the debate concerning knowledge of objects by acquaintance for the epistemology of perception. Hemdat challenged the standard representational view of experience with a Relational view. Here, objects and their properties are presented by perceptual to the observer. This relation is basic in the sense that it is not mediated by representation. The obvious issue here is how it is exactly that the relational view can account for hallucination, and it is on precisely this issue that question time concentrated on.
Albert Visser came to FEP with logic and mathematics to philosophise on. In particular, what to make of interpretations? Interpretations saturate logic and mathematics, and their ubiquity demands that we provide a substantive and maximally general theory of them. Although most general theories of interpretations fall down, there is character to be built by searching for them. Albert’s definition of sameness of interpretations relates between sameness of models and sameness of theories in the following sense: Each notion of sameness on models induces some notions of sameness on interpretations, and each notion of sameness of interpretations induces a notion of sameness of theories.
Aviv Hoffmann’s hard-hitting talk demonstrated the incompatibility of two previously-thought-to-be compatible positions on propositions: (1) Propositions are sets of (complete and consistent and metaphysically-individuated) possible worlds, and (2) the principle of Object Dependence: the existence of singular propositions about contingent existents is ontologically dependent on those existents. Aviv’s alternate view, that a proposition be identified with a disjunction of the (complete and consistent and metaphysically-individuated) possible worlds at which the proposition is true, avoids the reductio resulting from the combination of (1) with (2). Question time turned on (a) hyperintensionality alone gives us reason to reject (1), and (b facts about the semantics of natural language with respect to negative existentials give us independent reasons to reject (2).
Paul Weirich’s learned presentation on decision theory presented several open problems, and invited the audience to engage in their solution. One issue is how we might go about de-ldealising decision theory in order that it can deal with non-ideally rational agents. Another issue is how to generalise decision theory from mono-agent to multi-agent scenarios. The discussion touched on a large number of issues, with one general consensus being that it was most likely via game semantics that progress will be made.
Next month, Sonja Smetts and Marie Duzi!
Pics of the FPS seminars are available here: http://formalphilosophy.org/gallery
The full FPS program is available here: http://formalphilosophy.org/fps
Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson
Formal Epistemology Project
University of Leuven
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