6 October 2021
Elliot Porter
Futility thinking and epistemic injustice
Futility Thinking is a particular normative outlook associated with depression, and which shares a number of important features with the philosophical position called practical nihilism. Unlike practical nihilism, futility thinking is not a position one reasons themselves into and, crucially, is not one a person can be reasoned out of. Futility Thinking is, therefore, the intentional profile of a particular mood, which makes certain views on the world available or not available. Given this immunity to reflection, we might doubt that futility thinking is the kind of normative outlook which might speak for an agent, or that they have access to moral- or self-knowledge whilst in this state. How, then, should we interact with futility thinkers as knowers? This paper explores the twin injustices of epistemic non-agenting and of holding an epistemic agent to standards they cannot meet.
20 October 2021
Vittorio Serra
Genuine Modal Realism is not modal realism
Genuine Modal Realism (GMR) is David Lewis’s solution to the problem of the truth-values of modal propositions, and to making sense of everyday modal talk. It involves the claim that there are real possible worlds – just as real as the world we inhabit – in which events play out that are merely possible here. This has a number of well-known issues, not least the extreme profligacy of the ontology it implies.
This talk will not directly address this, or many of the other individual issues that have so far been raised in the literature against GMR, but rather question whether GMR can be properly regarded as a form of modal realism at all. To this end, appeal will be made to the work of Charles S. Peirce, who was a kind of modal realist but who would have rejected GMR, instead regarding it as an instance of what he called ‘nominalistic Platonism’, in which a solution is proposed but, at the same time, put out of our epistemic reach.
Peirce’s own approach to modality may not be immediately attractive to everyone – it involves three distinct but interdependent modes of being – but it is hoped that it may enable realists to adopt a position towards modality that can be defended against erzatists and fictionalists, and without the massively inflationary ontology of GMR.
17 November 2021
Mark Garron
Successful Cognition in the case of Depression
There are many physicists and philosophers of science that believe we can do without time. Likewise there are many psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists that believe we can do without the concept of the self. The reason why these two approaches are so attractive is that there is a further belief about epistemology that claims that truth is the only epistemic goal.
I argue that these two propositions depend on a further premise that our models of the world can purely reflect a mind independent world. I take a Neo-Kantian approach. The world that we experience and describe with our science is not fully mind independent. In this paper I apply Kvanvig’s successful cognition model of epistemology. This can be best described as epistemic goals pluralism. As an epistemic goal, truth is embedded in with all the other goals of epistemology. They include but are not limited to understanding, wisdom, rationality, justification and sense-making, in addition to getting to the truth and avoiding error. It is my thesis that in order to achieve ‘successful cognition’ the right balance of epistemic goal maximization is required. Understanding, wisdom and sense making are embedded in a sense of self as well as ones endurance through time. Self- consciousness is necessary for phenomenal consciousness. This is how we attain meaningful truth.
In contrast to epistemic goal pluralism is evidentialism. This can be broadly construed as epistemic ought monism. This is the view that whether a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition is determined entirely by the person’s evidence. Fundamentally, it is a supervenience thesis. According to which facts about whether or not a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition, supervene on facts describing the evidence that person has. According to evidentialism, epistemic evaluations are distinct from moral and prudential evaluations of believing.
There are however examples of conscious states in which the individual lacks any sort of self consciousness. These offer good examples of disruptions in cognitive success. In this paper I examine cases of sever depression. Cases of sever depression are significant because those who experience depression describe a loss of the experience of times flow, the loss of one’s self as an agent with the loss of the ability to do things in the world. The depression realist hypothesis claims that the depressed are actually less prone to bias. Their impoverished sense of self and loss of time’s flow might therefore reflect the true nature of the world according to this hypothesis. I argue against this by claiming that this strips these propositions of epistemic value. They reduce to absurdities such as truths without meaning and truths without value.
15 December 2021
Patrick
Directing attention as an alternative to doxastic shear-pins in delusion formation
McKay and Dennett suggest that that some misbelief is due to the action of doxastic shear-pins, ‘components of belief evaluation machinery that are “designed” to break in situations of extreme psychological stress’. Gunn and Bortolotti go on to examine the testimonies of three people who suffer from clinical delusions, and argue that the formation of their delusion could be doxastic shear-pins, beliefs that formed to protect the people in question from an overwhelmingly distressing reality.
I argue that at least one of Gunn and Bortolotti’s case studies (Barbara’s testimony) could be better accounted for by hypothesising that the protection that Gunn and Bortolotti identify was due to Barbara directing her attention away from distressing aspects of her life. And that her deluded belief was extremely naïve because of the limited range of experience she allowed herself, but otherwise it was a normally formed belief.