Virtual book of abstracts
Are joint-carving concepts epistemically better?
Sofia Bokros (Uppsala)
In Writing the Book of the World (2011), Ted Sider argues that joint-carving concepts are intrinsically epistemically better than non-joint-carving concepts. In this paper, I will address the question of whether we can make sense of the intuitive betterness of joint-carving concepts without having to appeal to intrinsic goodness or postulating joint-carving as its own epistemic value. In other words, I will explore whether we can account for the intuitive or apparent betterness of joint-carving concepts in terms of other, more familiar and already widely recognised epistemic values. Three main proposals will be explored: (1) that joint-carving concepts allow for more true generalisations, (2) that joint-carving truths are more valuable than other truths, and (3) that joint-carving representations of explanations generate understanding. I argue that none of these proposals succeeds in accounting for the epistemic value of joint-carving concepts.
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How Can Norms of Conversation Help Assess the Moral Validity of Informed Consent?
Emmi Jennina Kaaya (Tartu)
One way to facilitate morally valid informed consent is to ensure that the consent-giver is given accurate and relevant information about the proposed activity. Grice's maxims of conversation can become helpful in assessing whether a particular information disclosure facilitates morally valid consent. By employing these maxims, I conducted an analysis of the content of three biobank consent forms to examine how information about possible future uses of biobank data is communicated to potential tissue donors. The analysis reveals that while potential tissue donors receive truthful information about the possible future uses of biobank data, the content of the information disclosures implies falsehoods due to violations of the maxims of quantity, relevance, and manner. Consequently, the analysed consent forms may inadvertently provide potential tissue donors with misleading information regarding possible future uses of biobank data. Misleading information disclosure fails to facilitate morally valid consent.
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Contextualism Reinforced: New Empirical Evidence
Nikolai Shurakov (Tartu)
The operationalization of knowledge context-sensitivity, introduced and employed by Dinges and Zakkou (2020) in "Much at Stake for Knowledge," hinges on retraction. In my talk, I will discuss the follow-up experiment. The proposed experiment attempts to gather further evidence in favour of either contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism, two dominant competing theories. Subject-sensitive invariantism posits that changes in the stakes of the person attributing knowledge (i.e., one asserting "S/he knows that p") do not provoke retraction, contrasting with the prediction of contextualism. Therefore, the experiment does two things: (i) it replicates the findings of Dinges & Zakkou, and (ii) it examines third-person scenarios. The obtained results indicate that the conclusions of Dinges & Zakkou are replicable. Secondly, I observed a significant effect between the Neutral, Stakes, and Evidence conditions (Neutral < Stakes < Evidence) for third-person scenarios, which provides further evidence favouring epistemic-contextualism. In a discussion section, I will argue that the overall experimental evidence favours contextualism due to the similar results of Grindrod et al. (2019), who used a different experimental design, and due to some problems with the evidence-seeking experimental design. In this way, contextualism finds much more support in x-phi than subject-sensitive invariantism.
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Fake News and Ideals of Journalism: a revisionary account
Maurizio Mascitti (San Raffaele-Milan and Uppsala)
The philosophical debate over fake news is predominantly dominated by two non-competing models of theoretical justification: what I call the epistemic dysfunction model and the intellectual imposture model of fake news. Here, I firstly reject those two models by virtue of an argument of conceptual fruitfulness. Then, I present a new model of theoretical justification for fake news that may overcome the complications of previous models. According to this proposal, “fake news” identifies a set of phenomena that is deceptive in a peculiar sense. The deceptiveness of fake news is due to their being forms of communication that violate a specific set of journalistic ideals and are suitable for the spread of false information. These forms consist of both stylistic and pragmatic features that characterize the mode of presentation of a piece of news. I call the suit of these features “fake look”. Hence, I define fake news as news published in such a way that journalistic ideals of news presentation are not observed, that is news wrapped in a fake look.
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Racial Terms and Conventionally Perceived Collections
Andreas Stokke (Uppsala)
I propose a theory of racial terms like "black" and "white" according to which racial terms have non-empty extensions. This means that declaratives involving racial terms can be true or false. In turn, I suggest that the extensions of racial terms are collections of people that have certain physical traits which are conventionally called e.g. "black" or "white", but which are unified only by being perceived to be similar. I argue that this view provides a satisfactory account of both how we use racial terms in explanation and argumentation and the observation that races are at best arbitrary groupings of individuals.