FRIDAY, APRIL 6TH
Barco Law Building 113

1:00–2:00 Registration

2:00–3:05 Danny Pearlberg (The Ohio State University)
"Modifying the Interventionist Solution to the Problem of Causal Exclusion"
Comment: Karen Zwier

3:15–4:20 Blake Thompson (Virginia Tech)
"The Interpretation of Interpretation: the Scope and Limits of Its Scope and Limits"
Comment: Ruth Poproski

4:30–5:35 François Claveau (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
"The Independence Condition in the Variety-of-Evidence Thesis"
Comment: Conor Mayo-Wilson

5:45–6:50 Alex Worsnip (Yale University)
"How to Have Pragmatic Reasons for Belief"
Comment: Adam Marushak

8:30–12:00 CONFERENCE PARTY

SATURDAY, APRIL 7TH
University Club Conference A

10:00–11:05 Daniel Wodak (Princeton University)
"Externalism, Amoralism and Fetishism"
Comment: Joshua Hancox

11:15–12:20 Alison Fernandes (Columbia University)
"Why (It Seems) We Cannot Influence the Past: an Appeal to Deliberative Agency"
Comment: Mike Miller

12:20–1:30 LUNCH

1:30–2:35 Mike Dacey (Washington University in St. Louis)
"What’s So Special about the Conscious Will? Responsibility and Credit Applied to Automatic Processes"
Comment: Marcus Adams

Keynote talk:
2:45–4:15 Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College)
"Of Monkeys and Men"

4:15–4:30 BREAK

Faculty talk:
4:30–6:00 Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh)
"DeFreuding Implicit Attitudes"

6:30–7:30 DINNER

Danny Pearlberg (The Ohio State University)
"Modifying the Interventionist Solution to the Problem of Causal Exclusion"
I defend the interventionist account of causation against a compelling objection raised by Michael Baumgartner, according to which the interventionist solution to the problem of causal exclusion is actually committed to denying the causal efficacy of supervening properties. Although Baumgartner is correct in pointing out a flaw in the interventionist account of causation when applied to the problem of causal exclusion, this flaw may be fixed by means of a slight modification to the interventionist account as it currently stands. The modification retains the spirit, if not the letter, of the interventionist account, and it allows the interventionist to endorse the causal efficacy of the mental. In addition, given the wide range of variables studied throughout the sciences that bear supervenience relations to one another, the modification is critical not just for the purposes of solving the problem of causal exclusion, but also for the purposes of salvaging interventionism as a credible account of the role played by causation in scientific practice.

Blake Thompson (Virginia Tech)
"The Interpretation of Interpretation: the Scope and Limits of Its Scope and Limits"
The subject of this presentation will be the proper interpretation of the interpretivist stance on intentionality, appealing to a system of Davidsonian commitments that will act as a constraint on that interpretation. What motivates this task is that, under one interpretation, interpretivism falls prey to the charge of vicious regress-or-circularity. In the first part of the presentation, I will lay out the interpretation of interpretivism for which the vicious regress-or-circularity is a problem and explain how this regress-or-circularity takes hold. In the second part of the presentation, I will lay out an alternative to the interpretation offered in Part One. I will then defend this interpretation on the grounds that it manages to escape the regress-or-circularity charge that its counterpart falls prey to. In the third part of the presentation, I will show that this interpretation is consistent with other central interpretivist commitments, in ways that its counterpart is not. The thesis of this paper will be that the interpretation of interpretivism employed in the regress-or-circularity charge is uncharitable, that there is a more charitable interpretation of interpretivism available that does not fall prey to this regress-or-circularity, and thus that the charge of vicious regress-or-circularity is unfounded.

François Claveau (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
"The Independence Condition in the Variety-of-Evidence Thesis"
The variety-of-evidence thesis says that the degree of warrant given to a hypothesis by an evidential set increases with the variety of this evidential set, ceteris paribus. In other words, if my evidential elements are more ‘independent’ of one another, my hypothesis will be, all things equal, better supported. Many philosophers were claiming that Bayesian epistemology could give a formal proof of this thesis until Bovens and Hartmann (2002, 2003) proposed a Bayesian model in which independence backfires under special circumstances. Should scientists worry about this result? This paper points to two limitations in the model of Bovens and Hartmann: their conceptualization of unreliable evidential sources and the restriction to comparing full independence to full dependence. It is shown that the variety-of-evidence thesis is rehabilitated when unreliable sources are reconceptualized. It turns out however that also allowing for degrees of independence leads to qualify the variety-of-evidence thesis: as Bovens and Hartmann claimed, more independence does not always imply stronger confirmation.

Alex Worsnip (Yale University)
"How to Have Pragmatic Reasons for Belief"
It is a psychological fact that we find it hard to deliberately and directly respond to non-evidential considerations in our belief-forming processes. Some philosophers, such as Nishi Shah, have felt that this psychological fact supports the normative thesis of ‘evidentialism’, whereby only evidential considerations can provide normative reasons for belief. In this paper, I defend the possibility of non-evidential, or ‘pragmatic’, reasons for belief against this line of thought. In part I, I argue that responding to pragmatic reasons indirectly suffices for pragmatic reasons for belief, and that we are capable of such indirect responses. In part II, I develop an alternative story about why it is (at least normally) psychologically impossible to respond to pragmatic reasons for belief directly. I rehabilitate an explanation, dismissed by Shah, that turns on the redundancy of the truth-predicate, plus some conceptual truths about belief and evidence. In turn, this yields an alternative doxastic constraint which requires coherence between our beliefs and our beliefs about our evidence, not between our beliefs and our actual evidence. I show that the former is compatible with the kind of indirectly-pursued pragmatic reasons for belief defended in part I.

Daniel Wodak (Princeton University)
"Externalism, Amoralism and Fetishism"
Internalists hold that an agent cannot form a moral judgment without a corresponding motivation unless she is practically irrational. Externalists deny that this is so. In this paper, I identify two reasons to to be dissatised with this argument: it is unclear if such intuitions track metaphysical possibility or epistemic uncertainty. Secondly, if we shift the debate away from amoralism, internalists can rely on a powerful argument about the possibility of moralism. Current externalist theories of moral motivation struggle to explain how agents can be reliably motivated to do the right thing without being fetishistic.

Alison Fernandes (Columbia University)
"Why (It Seems) We Cannot Influence the Past: an Appeal to Deliberative Agency"
David Albert explains an apparent asymmetry in our ability to influence the past and future by appealing to an initial low-entropy state of the universe—the Past Hypothesis. The Past Hypothesis implies that in general there are less ways of influencing macroscopically interesting features of the past than the future. Albert then argues that in cases where we can influence the past, we cannot use this influence for addition gain. But there is an important type of case Albert fails to consider, where we can knowingly influence the past for profit—cases where our actions in the present count as records of the past. In order to explain why it seems we cannot influence the past in these cases, I suggest we should appeal to a deliberative account of agency. To be actors in the world requires taking our decisions to be epistemically unconstrained, meaning we cannot take our actions to be records of the past at the time we decide to act. Accepting this deliberative conception of agency means once again we have a good explanation for why it seems we cannot influence the past.

Mike Dacey (Washington University in St. Louis)
"What’s So Special about the Conscious Will? Responsibility and Credit Applied to Automatic Processes"
It is common for commenters on research in automatic psychological processes to claim that the ubiquity of automatic processes in psychology is problematic for notions of responsibility. I argue here that these claims are not warranted by the current evidence. What matters for responsibility is that the processes that produce actions are reasons-responsive in some way relevant to the task at hand. There is good evidence that many automatic processes are complex enough that they may count as reasons-responsive. In particular, associative processes respond to substantive information, rather than arbitrary residues of experience. As such, the conscious will should not be seen as the root of all attributions of moral responsibility: what really matters for such attributions is the responsiveness of the process that produces the action, be it conscious or automatic.

Keynote talk:
Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College)
"Of Monkeys and Men"
The brain sciences are providing new means of investigating brain processes involved in decision making. However, our ability to understand decision-making at the computational level requires methods unsuitable for use in humans. Here I argue that monkeys are attractive models of human decision-making, and that single-cell recordings in monkeys can provide insight into decision processes. I explore a number of objections to the relevance of monkey data to understanding human decision-making, including the importance of language and consciousness, and argue that none undermines the applicability of the model, though some may limit it. Finally, I'll briefly address the relevance of studies of decision-making to questions of free will.

Faculty talk:
Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh)
"DeFreuding Implicit Attitudes"
Psychologists and philosophers treat implicit attitudes such as implicit racism as automatic and unconscious mental states. In this talk, I present a competing view about the nature of these psychological constructs: I argue that attitudes are, not mental states, but traits, and that as a consequence it is erroneous to speak of implicit attitudes. I show that this view is better supported by the empirical evidence.