Earlier I began to give a brief report on the first day of the Yale/UConn Graduate Conference that I recently attended…while I have a minute today, and before I gorge myself on some veggie turkey, I figured I would finish up…

Sadly, I missed the morning sessions due to having a jaccuzi-tub at the B&B I was staying at 🙂 I intended to show up for the afternoon sessions, though I missed the first presentation on emodied cognition and mind reading (by Shannon Spaulding of the University of Wisonsin)…judging from the comments and questions the paper was very interesting.

The next talk was on Moral Advice and the Structure of Moral Explanation (by Uri Leibowitz of U Mass). He argued that normative theory and a theory of moral advice are seperate. For instance, our normative theory may be a utilitarian one, and our theory of moral advice may be ‘do what Grandma says to do’…totally seperate. He then argued that a plausible theory of moral advice is something like ‘if after reflection you do not judge the action to be immoral, then perform the action’ (this is an approximation…the conference was a couple of weeks ago!)…He then argued that utilitarians could not account for why this is good moral advice because they could not account for how agents could keep track of the ‘goodmaking’ properties that utilitarianism postulated.  Now I think that it is very odd indeed to think that our normative theory can be seperated from our theory of moral advice…I tend to think that a normative theory is a theory of moral advice…that to say that something is right just is to say that it ought to be performed…though I can see why utilitarians think they way that they do (and in fact I think maybe Kantians should to)…but at any rate, once you really seperate these two (as, for instance Sidgwick did) Leibowitz’s argument against utiliatarianism falls apart (this was brought out nicely by Jeff Sebo in discussion). The commentator on the paper (Gwen Bradford of Yale) pointed out that the moral advice that Uri argued for was wierd because it wouldn’t be of any help to someone who did not know what to do. During discussion he was pressed on this and he said that he would give that advice to anyone, no matter their moral thoery. So I pointed out that the relativist and ammoralists out there would use his moral advice to do some very immoral things, and that makes the claim that it is good moral advice seem very strange. His response was that, more people, on average, would do good acts when using this advice…I don’t share this intuition. It seems to me that most people would reflect and conclude, for some bs reason or another, that there was nothing imorral about the action and then proceed to do all kinds of immoral actions…

During the break I had some very interesting discussion about the aims of cognitive science. I was arguing that in order to have a ‘completed’ cognitive science we would have to have a ‘completed’ scientific understanding of the world. Cognitive science is not a special science in the sense that it is not autonomous from, say, physics. I was suprised to find that quite a few people disagreed with me. It seems that they thought that we could have a complete theory of the mind even if we did not fully understand the full nature of physical reality, or indeed, whether there were anything else besides the physical. This seems wrong to me because, for instance, in order to give a theory of mental content we have to assume that the world is some way or other. So, if we take the view that the causal theory of reference is right then we are committed to materialism or to the view that non-physical entities can causally interact with our mind. In both cases we have to wait until physics is decided until we can have a completed theory of mental content.

This discussion was interupted by Paul Horwhich’s keynote address (how rude! 🙂 ). The title of his talk was ‘The Nature of Paradox’. He spent a lot of time talking about Schiffer’s view that paradox arises from ‘defective concepts’…a defective concept is one whos possesion conditions pull us in different directions and so result in paradox. For instance, our concept of truth (i.e. that ‘p’ is true if and only if p) leads to the semantic paradoxes. Horwhich argued against this view and for the Witgensteinian view that paradox results from our bewhichment by language. So, in the case of the semantic paradoxes, we see that the ‘truth’ predicate works in a certain way in one kind of discourse (scientific discourse aimed at explanation and prediction) and then we over generalize and think that it must work that way in all cases. The job of philosophy is to correct this over generalizing tendancy that we have. Now this seems to me to be commiting the very same kind of mistake that he sees others as making. So in the one case we are being overly scientific and so think that all of language must be like the language we use when we are doing science. So we think that ‘true’ must stand for some property. But this is a mistake. Recognizing this mistake lets us see that the deflationary view of truth is correct and this resolves the paradox. But isn’t this still to be bewitched by language? Someone like Horwhich sees that there are different uses of the word ‘true’ and so concludes that there is no thing which ‘true’ stands for. The only difference is that he is bewitched by language use in general and not in one particular area (science). I raised this issue in discussion in the following way. He was arguing that the existence of the semantic paradoxes (and others as well) is evidence that our naive theories about truth are wrong and we should just reject the assumption that the truth predicate acts like the predicate ‘electron’. So his view recommends that we not hold on to assumptions inspired by the way language works if they lead to paradox. But his own view leads to paradox. So, we may have evidence against some view and yet not have a reason to reject that view (as in a known about Gettier example). This shows that he is overgeneralizing in the same kind of way as the people who he is critisizing…OK< but that is enough for now!  

So, I am back from the Yale/UConn conference (semi-summary here), which was a huge success! A very well organized and interesting conference. Hats off to all involved! Things have not changed much since I left in 2003…it is still cold as ever (but it was nice to see some familiar faces)

I have a little time today before I have to re-work the final chapter of my dissertation (and avoid playing Manhunt 2) so I figured I figured I would report on the conference…but first…

The Importance of Graduate Conferences

It’s funny because I know a certain UConn alum who is famous for arguing that graduate conferences are a wast of time. His point is that when you are on the job market no one cares about your presentations at graduate conferences. All that matters to search committees is your presentations at ‘real’ conferences.  I must say that I was convinced by this for a while, but I think I have come to change my mind a little about the overall importance of graduate conferences.

For one, they are often far more competitive than regular conferences. They are usually only one day, with no concurrent sessions, which means far fewer slots. So, for instance, their were only 8 papers accepted out of hundreds submitted (I am assuming this from my experience with the CUNY grad conference). This makes for something like a 4% acceptance rate. Also, each paper has a large audience, say 20-30 people, and will usually include some well known philosophers (in this case Paul Horwich and Austen Clark); an audience like that at a regular conference is unusual (unless the person is well known). Not only that, but with fewer papers presented there is the opportunity to actually have a semi-significant amount of time for discussion. Whereas I have been to many regular conferences where there is five minutes for discussion, which in my opinion is something like absurd! Lastly, we were all treated to dinner, courtesy of the organizers!

So, why aren’t hiring committees more interested in graduate conferences?

A Brief Summary

Sadly, I showed up two seconds before the session I was commenting in began; It was a bit dramatic. Jeff was arguing that there is something right about the Korsgaardian strategy of arguing for a constructivist metaethic based on the success of constructivism as a normative theory. Any one who is interested can see my comments here. The jist is simple. I argued that 1. Either constructivism is not a distinctive metaethical position or it is just a version of relativism 2. The success of the normative claim that the constructivist makes is not evidence for any metaethical view. Any metaethical view is compatible with any normative view. 3. The success of the normative claim is not evidence against the semantic claim that the realist makes. Imagine that there were a group of people who were taught the Platonic semantics for ‘good’ and ‘right’. They were told that the word ‘good’ stood for some mind-independent property and that the role of the word in a sentence was to predicate that property of some object (ditto for ‘right’). It seems to me that these people would eventually start using those words to talk about the things that they value (i.e. constructed properties). If this is true then the fact that people use these predicates to talk about constructed properties (if they in fact do) can’t be evidence against the claim that the realist makes.

After this session, Austen Clark gave his talk on modeling sensory awareness. His was trying to answer the question ‘how could we build a creature that could have an experience of purple?’ During the course of this he presented the evidence ofr what is called ‘proto-objects’. A proto-object is a term for what happens at the early stages of visual processing. The idea is that the brain processes information about the ‘basic features’ of objects (info about shape, orientation, color, etc) and then stores this info without putting the basic features together. So, the proto-object is ‘a shapeless bundle of features’. It is not until selective attention is focused on the proto-objects that they are arranged into the shape that the stimulus has. During discussion I asked why we should think that there are proto-objects. It seems to me that what is likely going on here is that the stimulus produces a representational state in the perceiver which is a representation the fully formed object and  that the reason why subjects are unable to report accurately is due to the fashion which their higher-order state is representing the first-order representation (of the fully formed stimulus). Austen responded that this is unlikely because we don’t see the ‘pop-out effect’ in these experiments. But how do we know that. So, I tried to think of an experiment that might show something one way or the other. This is what I came up with. We take the standard pop-out effect stimulus and present it subliminally, so that the subjects cannot consciously detect its presnce. We then put soem markers up on the screen (one of which is at the location where the attention would have been drawn had the subject consciously saw the stimulus). We then force the subject to pick a marker by saying ‘I know you did not see anything, but if you had to pick a marker, which one would you pick?’. If they picked the one that marked the pop-out location then we could conclude that there was unconscious pop-out and so conclude against proto-objects.

Shesh! That’s a lot!! And I still have the second day to talk about…I guess I’ll do that some other time.