The Schedule

Wednesday, 1 July

12:30 – 13:00
Arrival

Please check in at the registration table upon arrival to receive your conference ID.

13:00 – 13:20
Opening Remarks: Tim Crane (Central European University) and Paulina Sliwa (University of Vienna)

13:30 – 15:00
Carolina Flores (University of Lisbon): Feeling Safe and Staying Ignorant

Abstract: In 1790, French plantation owner La Barre wrote home from Haiti: "We have nothing to fear on the part of the Negroes; they are tranquil and obedient. Freedom for Negroes is a chimera." Two months later, the Haitian revolution began. How could La Barre have been so off-target? I offer an account of a neglected but crucial root of privileged ignorance in cases like La Barre's, a factor generated by the very structure of practical agency: subjective security. To plan and act, agents need to feel that the social arrangements their plans depend on will hold. This felt security, in turn, requires a standing disposition to treat those arrangements as unquestionable background rather than live objects of inquiry. As a result, subjectively secure agents systematically fail to attend to, and seek out evidence of the social conditions that underwrite their privileges and to consider the potential for those conditions to change. This reveals a deep tension at the heart of agency in non-ideal conditions: the felt security that makes action possible is also what makes profound ignorance of injustice nearly inevitable for the privileged. And, I argue, the problem cannot be solved by cultivating some virtuous individual mean between oblivious security and hypervigilance. Instead, solutions require confronting the unjust social organization of security itself.

15:00 – 15:30
Coffee Break

15:30 – 17:00
J. Adam Carter (University of Glasgow): Know-How in Motion

Abstract:  We do all sorts of things. But how much of our behaviour manifests genuine know how? This practical scope question mirrors a familiar epistemological question – how much knowledge there is – and it invites a parallel kind of scepticism: perhaps far less of what we do really manifests know how than we ordinarily assume. A prominent constraint in the literature appears to deliver such a sceptical answer. According to the success only constraint (SOC), one manifests know how to φ only if one successfully φs. It is argued here that SOC is false for non basic telic tasks – viz., extended, multi step undertakings with a distinctive finish line. In such cases, know how can be on display in the agent’s intelligently controlled route toward the goal, even when the goal is never reached. I develop a trajectory based alternative: a Good Trajectories view, on which manifestation is tied not to completion but to the agent’s intentional control of a suitably substantial stretch of robustly progress making activity. The resulting picture preserves the thought that manifestations of know how must be non accidental and competence guided, while allowing interrupted, abandoned, and deliberately “thrown” performances to manifest know how in the relevant sense. It also supports a less sceptical – and, I argue, more accurate – answer to the scope question: our behaviour manifests significantly more know how than SOC would allow; when we act (indeed whether we succeed or fail) the manifestation of know-how is normal.

17:00 – 18:00
Welcome Reception

Thursday, 2 July

09:00 – 09:30
Morning Coffee

09:30 – 11:00
Berislav Marušić (University of Edinburgh): Solidarity, not Charity: On Ideals of Interpretation 

Abstract: The Principle of Charity, made famous by Quine and Davidson, states that one must translate another’s utterances into one’s own current idiolect, or one must interpret another’s utterances in light of one’s own current beliefs and desires. Mark Schroeder even goes so far to argue that persons are constituted by the most charitable interpretation of their contribution to the world. In this talk, I argue against charity as an ideal of interpretation. Charity is a unidirectional principle: For Davidson, we interpret another’s speech without thereby making ourselves understood—without thereby sharing our interpretation with them. For Schroeder, we interpret other people without thereby allowing them to understand our interpretation of them, and without thereby sharing our reasons. I contend that a better ideal is bidirectional: In interpreting another, we should strive for mutual understanding that makes possible shared reasoning and proper conversation.

11:00 – 11:30
Coffee Break

11:30 – 13:00
Elise Woodard (King's College London): Genealogical Debunking and Desire

Abstract: Genealogical debunking has been deployed against beliefs and concepts, but its application to desire—especially sexual desire—has been undertheorized. This paper examines feminist arguments that women's submissive desires are normatively suspect because they were produced by patriarchy. Such arguments require greater scrutiny than they’ve received. The standards available for the desire case (objective value, the agent's interests, coherence, authenticity) either lack the analog of truth that licensed belief-debunking or fail to deliver a verdict on individual women's desires. What genealogy does succeed in doing is denaturalization: exposing the contingency of what seems natural. The verdict on the desire remains the agent's to issue, from within her actual standpoint.

13:00 – 14:00
Lunch, Lia Cafeteria (Oskar Morgenstern Platz 1, 1090 Vienna)
See the lunch menu for Thursday here.

14:00 – 15:30
Maria Lasonen (University of Helsinki): Unseen possibilities: moral learning as unlearning

Abstract: Sometimes epistemic progress is inhibited because we fail to see a range of possibilities. I explore two ways this might happen, through lack of conceptual resources or through false beliefs or assumptions. The two are often related: encountering new concepts and representational devices can help expose and make explicit often implicit false assumptions that restrict our view of how things might be. I focus on epistemic progress that involves not (merely) acquiring new evidence, but retraction of false beliefs and assumptions. I discuss several examples of moral learning, arguing that they involve retraction. 

15:30 – 16:00
Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:30
Johanna Thoma (University of Bayreuth): Accountability and Credibility in Tension: On the Conflicting Roles of Expert Councils in a Democracy

Abstract: Modern democracies increasingly rely on the input of various types of independent expert councils. Many of these have two key functions beyond policy advice: On the one hand, they hold governments to account and enable citizens to do so. On the other hand, they enable governments to make credible commitments, which is crucial for effective governance over time. Fiscal councils are a prime example: They provide independent and public assessments and forecasts of a nation’s finances and the impacts of government budgets, which can be used by anybody to hold governments to account. And they are usually tasked in particular with assessing whether governments abide by previously adopted objectives or fiscal rules, thereby also contributing to establishing discipline and thus, ex ante, credibility. One might think that in this and similar cases, the two roles can be fulfilled in tandem, simply by being epistemically responsible and aiming for the most accurate assessments and forecasts feasible. I argue, however, that when the relevant assessments and forecasts rely on value-laden indicators — which is inevitably the case for fiscal councils — the two roles require different approaches. To establish the credibility of commitments, expert bodies need to themselves commit, namely to a single and fixed way of measuring whether government commitments have been abided by. But to enable citizens in a democracy to hold governments to account, they should follow a pluralistic and flexible approach to measurement. I explore the implications of this argument for fiscal councils and similar bodies. 

19:00 – 21:00
Conference Dinner, Heuriger Schübel-Auer (Kahlenberger Str. 22, 1190 Vienna)

Friday, 3 July

09:00 – 09:30
Morning Coffee

09:30 – 11:00
J. Carr (UC San Diego): Interestingness

Abstract: Interestingness affects what information we seek, attend to, and retain; we can be epistemically manipulated by interesting information, not just interesting misinformation. This talk proposes a general theory of interestingness. I discuss how interestingness is related to accuracy, epistemic importance, and the value of information. Interestingness is, unsurprisingly, highly context-sensitive; this talk explores which features of context are relevant to assessments of interestingness, and in what ways. 

11:00 – 11:30
Coffee Break

11:30 – 13:00
Endre Begby (Simon Fraser University): Partisan Selective Exposure Theory: False, Non-Explanatory, and Normatively Misleading

Abstract: According to Partisan Selective Exposure Theory, contemporary tendencies toward political polarization are best explained by the fact that people increasingly get their information from different politically aligned news sources. Either by individual choice or through algorithmic filtering, we are led into “information bubbles” where we are only exposed to news-stories and perspectives that corroborate our pre-existing outlooks. As a result, citizens are pulled farther and farther apart, and might as well be “inhabiting different worlds,” politically and epistemically speaking. In this paper, I will take a closer look at Partisan Selective Exposure Theory, aiming to assess it along three crucial dimensions: its empirical grounding, its underlying explanatory model, and its normative implications. 

13:00 – 14:00
Lunch, Lia Cafeteria (Oskar Morgenstern Platz 1, 1090 Vienna)
See the lunch menu for Friday here.

14:00 – 15:30
Robin McKenna (University of Liverpool): What Is Wrong with Politicisation?

Abstract: The "crisis of knowledge" is, in large part, a crisis of politicisation: knowledge and the institutions that produce it have become sites of political conflict. This paper addresses two questions: what is politicisation, and when is it a problem? I argue that answering the second question requires starting with a minimal definition of politicisation, which does not smuggle in a particular conception of the political. Different conceptions of the political not only imply different understandings of politicisation but also different diagnoses of when it becomes problematic. I illustrate this by examining Robert Talisse's account of political saturation, which is tied to a deliberative conception of the political that obscures some of the causes of political saturation. I suggest that the republican conception highlights some aspects of political saturation that Talisse misses and develop this conception by drawing on Albert Hirschman's influential discussion of exit and voice in Exit, Voice and Loyalty, which, I argue, gives us an account of the conditions under which politicisation might enhance or curtail political agency.

15:30 – 16:30
Networking & Farewells