Ela Drążkiewicz: The State is Lying to Us! Understanding the meanings of conspiracy theories in Ireland and Poland
Ela Drążkiewicz (Institute of Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences) The State is Lying to Us! Understanding the meanings of conspiracy theories in Ireland and Poland ABSTRACT: How can we understand suspicion towards public health measures: immunization campaigns and pandemic restrictions? Is every conspiracy theory a sign of paranoid thinking? Is it possible to take conspiracy theories seriously? Taking a comparative perspective, using examples from Ireland and Poland, in this talk I will examine how conspiracy theories can provide a powerful tool for expressing and addressing tensions between state and citizens, healthcare professionals and patients. The paper will also analyse the role of conspiracy theories in refocusing existing critiques of the socio-political-economic orders. Finally, the talk also questions universalizing treatment of apparently similar conspiracy theories, showing that often the same key tropes are in fact expressing diverse, context-specific ideologies, fears, and desires in relation to different instantiations of the state.
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Johana Kotišová: Covering the Russo-Ukrainian war: transnational journalistic teams and postcolonial epistemologies
Johana Kotišová (University of Amsterdam) ONLINE TALK: Zoom link: https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/93668679118 Covering the Russo-Ukrainian war: transnational journalistic teams and postcolonial epistemologies ABSTRACT: Mass media provide full coverage of conflicts, wars, and invasions worldwide. However, little is known about the locals working behind the scenes assisting foreign media. The first part of the lecture points to the least visible practices and actors of foreign correspondence, multidirectional power relationships within the transnational teams, and the kinds of risks that media practitioners covering a warzone face. In the second part of the lecture, I focus on the reporting on the Russian-Ukrainian War and show how the neocolonial logic permeating the war newsmaking practices manifests itself in epistemological practices.
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Ivan Ferreira da Cunha: Otto Neurath’s Utopias: Social Science and Modernism
Ivan Ferreira da Cunha (Federal University of Santa Catarina UFSC, Brazil) Otto Neurath’s Utopias: Social Science and Modernism ABSTRACT: This talk discusses Otto Neurath’s philosophy of the social sciences, his scientific utopianism, in the context of cultural modernism. Recent scholarship presents Neurath and other Vienna Circle members in close relation to modernist cultural, artistic, and architectural movements of the interwar period, such as the Bauhaus, the Neue Sachlichkeit, the Austrian Werkbund and the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). Neurath took part in the fourth meeting of the Congrès in 1933, but the cooperation failed completely amid controversies with other member of the group. This talk explores the stark contradiction between the scientific world-conception defended by Neurath and the Vienna Circle and the openly metaphysical world-view assumed by the architect Le Corbusier, one of the leading figures in CIAM. In this world-view Le Corbusier considers that science is an expression of a mystical world-order that establishes an aesthetic harmony in the universe. Neurath’s pluralist and fallibilist view of science and democracy is incompatible with Le Corbusier’s stance that influenced CIAM. The social sciences as Neurath regarded them cannot contribute to architecture and urban-planning oriented by Le Corbusier’s perspective. Hence […]
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Bartosz Kaluziński: Inferentialism and Social Externalism
Bartosz Kaluziński (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) Inferentialism and Social Externalism ABSTRACT: Social externalism, as advocated by Burge (1979, 1986, 1988, 1989, 2003), is a very popular view in the philosophies of mind and language. It seems that the main lesson for philosophical theories of linguistic meaning that one can draw from Burge is that 1) linguistic meaning is determined by the linguistic community, and 2) the role that relevant experts play in determining meaning in many cases is crucial. This is to say that when a person says, for example, “I have arthritis”, the meaning of that expression is determined by the doctors, not laypeople. Inferentialism is a use theory of meaning, and as such it identifies linguistic meaning with some sort of communal use. If meaning is determined by communal use, the question arises how it is possible to make room for relevant experts to play a crucial role in determining meaning. This paper addresses issues at the intersection of two leading ideas in the philosophies of language and mind: inferentialism and externalism. The aim of this paper is to clearly demonstrate that these two frameworks are actually compatible and, moreover, how they are compatible. I argue […]
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Indrek Reiland: Language as Expression of Thought
Indrek Reiland (University of Vienna) Language as Expression of Thought ABSTRACT: In his famous paper “Language as Thought and as Communication” Sellars argued (perhaps implicitly against Grice) that language should primarily be viewed as a form of expression of conceptual thought and not as a vehicle for communication (Sellars 1969). However, he also suggested understanding expression of thought and thought itself in a way which makes language prior to thought. This presents a package of answers to two separate questions. First, whether we can understand language and linguistic meaning in expressive, non-communicative terms (Sellars) or whether they’re somehow essentially communicative or audience-directed (Grice, Davidson)? Second, whether language is prior to conceptual thought and can explain it (Sellars), whether conceptual thought is prior to language and can explain it (Grice, Lewis), or whether they’re somehow on a par (Davidson)? In this talk, I will present a view which takes public language as it exists to be conventionally expressive of thought and thus not essentially communicative, and explore whether and in what sense it is committed to taking some conceptual thought to be prior to language and involved in the explanation of it.
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Willem deVries: Semantic Holism and the Clash of the Images
Willem deVries (University of New Hampshire) Semantic Holism and the Clash of the Images ABSTRACT: I begin with a quick review of Sellars’ distinction between the Manifest and Scientific Images and why that distinction is significant for his thought. He thinks the Scientific Image will replace the Manifest Image, but with an important qualification: we will need to “join” the language of intentions to the descriptive vocabulary of science. I then explain why Sellars thought this qualification poses no particular difficulty. But I then argue that he is wrong about that, presenting two arguments. The first I call the argument from semantic holism, which makes the point that Sellars cannot presume that the descriptive resources science makes available and the expressive resources that underwrite normativity in his view are distinct enough that we can sensibly talk of “joining” the one to the other, as if they could initially be entirely separable. The second argument, from the unity of a person is, in fact, perhaps the same argument from a different perspective: the holistic unity between the epistemic and agential aspects of a person again put into doubt any attempt to separate a purely descriptive vocabulary or language-fragment from […]
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Thematic Series: Diego Marconi: Grounds of Semantic Normativity
LMS Centre cordially invites everyone to the second talk of the Online LMS Series “Inferentialism on Naturalized Grounds”: Diego Marconi (University of Torino) Grounds of Semantic Normativity ABSTRACT: There are two prevalent accounts of semantic normativity: the prescriptive account, which can be found in some of Wittgenstein’s remarks, and the regularity account, which may have been Sellars’s view and is nowadays defended by some anti-normativists. On the former account, meanings are norms that govern the use of words; on the latter, they are regularities of use which, in themselves, do not engender any prescriptions. I argue that only the prescriptive view can account for certain platitudes about meaning, which motivate the very idea of semantic normativity. After some preliminary clarifications about the form that alleged semantic norms should take in order to be prima facie plausible, I argue -against some antinormativists- that whatever normativity is involved in the meaning of words cannot be brought back to a general norm of truth as distinct from specifically semantic norms, for semantic norms already involve a norm of truth (or truthfulness, depending on how they are phrased). Next, I examine what I take to be the strongest objection to semantic […]
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Thematic Series: Antonio Scarafone & John Michael: Getting Ready to Share Commitments
LMS Centre cordially invites everyone to the sixth talk of the Online LMS Series “Inferentialism on Naturalized Grounds”: Antonio Scarafone (Central Europen University) & John Michael (University of Milan) Getting Ready to Share Commitments ABSTRACT: Paul Grice’s theory of meaning has been widely adopted as a starting point for investigating the evolutionary and developmental emergence of linguistic communication. In this picture, reasoning about complexes of intentions is a prerequisite for communicating effectively at the prelinguistic level, as well as for acquiring a natural language. We argue that this broadly ‘Gricean’ picture rests on an equivocation between theories of communication and theories of cognition, and that it leads to paradoxical or implausible claims about human psychology. We defend an alternative conception of prelinguistic communication, inspired by Bart Geurts and based on the notion of commitment. Adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to avoid the pernicious equivocation, and it provides a better systematisation of the key empirical findings. We develop our argument with respect to: (1) infants’ sensitivity to ‘ostensive signals’; (2) infants’ pointing; (3) and infants’ endorsement of normative attitudes in joint activities. Finally, adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to argue that sophisticated forms of […]
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Miloš Taliga: What is knowledge if it is not a justified true belief?
Miloš Taliga (FF UMB, Banská Bystrica) What is knowledge if it is not a justified true belief? ABSTRACT IN SLOVAK: Ak je pravdivosť objektívnou vlastnosťou výrokov, tak stojíme pred nasledujúcou dilemou: Ak je podmienka pravdivosti nutnou podmienkou poznania, tak sa poznanie nemôže vyvíjať a ani zanikať, pretože pravdivé výroky sa nemôžu stať nepravdivými, a súčasne, ak podmienka pravdivosti nie je nutnou podmienkou poznania, tak poznaním môže byť aj niečo, čo je nepravdivé. Podmienka pravdivosti buď je alebo nie je nutnou podmienkou poznania. Preto, poznanie sa buď nemôže vyvíjať a ani zanikať alebo poznaním môže byť aj niečo, čo je nepravdivé. Prednáška sa pokúša dilemu odvrátiť kritickou analýzou jej konjunktívnej premisy. Odmieta podmienku pravdivosti ako nutnú podmienku poznania, aby vytvorila priestor pre vývoj a zánik poznania. Argumentuje, že vývoj a zánik poznania sa dajú vysvetliť, ak budeme poznanie chápať (približne) ako nevyvrátené kritizovateľné hypotézy.
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