USC’s Speculative Society provides an informal forum for graduate students both to practice presenting papers to each other in the conference/colloquium format (i.e. fielding questions and objections), as well as to run new ideas past one another and receive suggestions for their further development. It’s an excellent opportunity philosophy graduate students to get to know each other, and learn more about the diverse interests represented at USC. The series is currently organized by Zhanming Gu.

 

 

Recent Series

 

Fall 2025

 

  • September 12, 2025
    Nurit Matuk, “Types and Fundamentality” Linguists, in order to account for the combinatory properties of languages, use syntactic categories that are more fine-grained than the semantic types philosophers of language and metaphysicians are familiar with. Though often these different categories fail to track any semantic differences, this is not always the case. In some languages, like Plains Cree, whether an expression can be used to talk about animate or inanimate beings determines which other expressions it can be combined with. Why don’t we do our metaphysical theorizing with base types that track this difference? Questions about types crop in other areas. For example, some think that we need plural types, while others think these are unnecessary. And we can imagine languages such that our e→t, the type of predicates, corresponds to a base type p, or languages where one type corresponds to both type e and type e→t. Why prefer languages with base types e and t over these? It doesn’t seem like those who are interested in figuring out which are the fundamental entities can avoid these questions. It seems they should say that some set of base types is privileged, and that that is why they are inquiring into entities of those types, or that they should say, at least, that there is no difference in using one of these languages instead of another. The problem is that the languages in which we typically do our metaphysical theorizing, like the simply typed lambda calculus, cannot be used to formulate many of these questions nor the answers to them. In this paper I argue that either we reject that many of these questions and answers are intelligible or we theorize about them in a language that allows us to quantify over types.

 

  • September 19, 2025
    Yasha Sapir, “How to Build a Pyramid with Vague Propositions”
    You have uniform credences regarding where the minute hand of a clock is located. You then learn that the minute hand of the clock is at roughly minute mark 10. Afterwards, your posteriors should be pyramid shaped. Where P(x) is your posterior that the minute hand is at minute mark x, P(x) should be a unimodal distribution with a peak at x = 10.
    Here’s my explanation. Let R be the proposition the minute hand is at roughly minute mark 10. When you are told R, you should condition on R. The result is a posterior credence function that is pyramid shaped.
    There are reasons to be skeptical. Reality is precise. But if so perhaps R must be identical to some interval proposition of the form the minute hand is between minute marks m and n. The problem is that conditioning on such an interval proposition will not generate pyramid shaped posteriors.
    I make two contributions. First, I defend a picture on which reality is precise and yet propositions can be vague. On the picture I defend, though R is representationally equivalent to some interval proposition, it isn’t identical to any interval proposition. Second, I present a novel explanation for why conditioning on R generates pyramid shaped posteriors.

 

  • September 26, 2025
    Yangming Qin, “A Puzzle of Expert Deference and Jeffrey Conditionalization”
    Nissan-Rozen (2013) has shown that standard deference principles and Jeffrey Conditionalization are inconsistent. A natural response is to replace standard deference principles with deference to informed experts, while retaining Jeffrey Conditionalization —two widely accepted principles. I prove that this combination leads to a new puzzle: it implies an implausible constraint on expert candidates. This puzzle shows that Nissan-Rozen’s challenge remains unresolved, that the two principles cannot both be true, and that some cases of expert identification are left unmodeled by any available principle.

 

  • October 3, 2025
    June Lee, “Person-Stages, Personites, and Persons: A Four-Dimensionalist Ethics”
    Recent discussions by Mark Johnston (2016, 2017) have highlighted an ethical challenge for four-dimensionalist theories of persistence. If persons are composed of temporal parts (“person-stages”), then we appear committed to extending moral status not only to persons but also to long-lived, non-maximal sets of person-stages that are sufficiently similar to persons, so-called “personites.” Johnston argues that the moral status of such beings conflicts with our basic understanding of morality. I defend a stage-first view according to which person-stages are the primary locus of moral concern and the psychological continuity relation holding among the stages underwrites our ethical practices. This framework shows that the four-dimensionalist ontology is compatible with a sensible moral theory.

 

  • October 17, 2025
    Ariel Gordy, “Re-assessing Deepfake Pornography: Depiction and Consent”
    Since their inception, deepfakes have primarily been used for pornography. Deepfakes have also become more profuse and technologically advanced, rendering current deepfake content often indistinguishable from genuine recordings. This has prompted philosophers to investigate the question of what, if anything, is wrong with deepfake pornography? Seemingly, some of the most prominent objections to pornography are irrelevant in the case of deepfakes, such as harm incurred to performers during production. As a result, a significant number of theorists land in the position that consent is what determines the moral status of deepfake porn. That is, if the individual depicted would not consent to being represented pornographically in a deepfake, the content is thus rendered impermissible, and vice versa. However, due to rapid changes in technology, deepfakes no longer utilize images of real individuals to create hyper-realistic visual representations. Instead, modern diffusion techniques are used to construct entirely synthetic fictions. Therefore, if no actual people are depicted, consent becomes inapplicable. Consequently, the question of what establishes the moral status of deepfake pornography is re-opened. In response, this paper argues that depicted content is what determines its moral permissibility. To defend this thesis, I will demonstrate that there is some deepfake pornographic content which is widely held to be impermissible, yet its forbiddance cannot be explained in terms of consent. Moreover, I will show that consent-based approaches to deepfake pornography must implicitly recognize the moral significance of depicted content in order to have any force. The result is that the moral status of deepfake porn ought to be grounded in its depicted content.

 

  • October 22, 2025
    Grace Atkins, “Constituting Holes”
    In 1969, artist Michael Heizer displaced 240,000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone to carve two trenches on Nevada’s Mormon Mesa. These trenches formed Double Negative, a piece of land art defined by absence. In the artist’s own words: “there is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.”
    In this talk, I use Double Negative as a case study for statue-lump puzzles of material coincidence where the ‘lump of clay’ is a hole and the ‘statue’ is an artwork. One popular response to such cases is to claim that the clay constitutes the statue, where constitution falls short of identity. Yet, Hudson (2007) remarks that in apparent cases of hole-sculpture coincidence, the ‘prospects of constitution are dim’. The remark is left undeveloped. This paper reconstructs an argument on his behalf. I address two questions: one specific, and one general. Do holes constitute sculptures like Double Negative? And can holes stand in the constitution relation at all? I argue no to the former, and yes to the latter.

 

  • October 24, 2025
    Jordan Myers, “A Unified Response to Skepticism About Epistemic Blame”
    Philosophers have recently raised skeptical challenges against the existence of epistemic blame. One challenge argues that all seeming instances of epistemic blame are nothing more than moral blame in disguise. A second challenge asserts that epistemic blame is in fact nothing more than mere negative evaluation. I aim to defend the existence of epistemic blame against these two challenges. To do so, I first examine three of moral blame’s neighboring phenomena: excuses, exemptions, and the objective attitude. These phenomena are intimately connected to blame while not to negative evaluation. Moreover, it seems as though these phenomena exist in the epistemic domain. Excusing and exempting pleas are offered in response to (perceived) epistemic transgressions or poor performances, and we appear to adopt an objective stance towards those in light of their epistemic irrationality. I provide an example of each of these neighboring phenomena in action, demonstrating (a) that each case is an example of either an excuse, exemption, or objective attitude, (b) that the excuse/exemption/objective attitude targets more than negative evaluation, and (c) that each phenomenon is epistemic in nature, not moral. I argue that because these phenomena are intimately connected to blame in the moral domain, their presence in the epistemic domain provides strong reason to believe in the existence or epistemic blame as well.

 

  • October 31, 2025
    Shu Wang, “Does it Make Sense to Date an AI Companion?”

     (1) Does it make sense to date an AI companion? I argue that this is not a theoretical but a practical question, a question about deciding on our shared lifestyle. (2) Why do philosophers of AI approach it as a theoretical question? I argue that it is because they assume a particular understanding of the person concept and related mental concepts. (3) How should philosophers help with answering this practical question? I argue that they should do what the ordinary people are already doing (e.g., making metaphors), but do it more coherently.

 

  • November 7, 2025
    Yannis Polychronopoulos, “A Similarity Theory of Chance”

    The standard analysis of counterfactuals in terms of similarity takes the counterfactuals ‘if A then B’ and ‘if A then not B’ to be true just in case, respectively, B is true in all or none of the most similar worlds in which A is true. Between these two extremes, there can be different proportions of most similar worlds in which A&B is true to most similar worlds in which A is true. These proportions (‘counterfactual probabilities’) are commonly thought to bear a close connection to chances. My aim will be to spell out this relationship. First, I will motivate the concept of counterfactual probability and argue that it is philosophically important. Second, I will argue that counterfactual probability is not a composite of (reducible to) counterfactual conditionals and chances. I will conclude with a theory that goes the other way around, reducing (deterministic) chances to counterfactual probabilities.

 

  • November 21, 2025
    Yoorim In, “Fake It Till You Make It — In Defense of Intellectual Vanity”
    This paper argues that intellectual vanity—the desire to appear more knowledgeable than one actually is—can serve as an effective mechanism for knowledge advancement and intellectual progress. Philosophers have traditionally condemned vanity about X on two grounds: as morally problematic and as an obstacle to genuine acquisition of X. While this paper does not dispute vanity’s moral shortcomings, it challenges the second claim by demonstrating that it does not hold for intellectual vanity. Specifically, intellectual vanity possesses four distinctive properties that enable it to promote, rather than hinder, genuine learning and epistemic engagement. In short, this paper presents a prudential rather than moral defense: it argues that individuals and societies have practical reasons to encourage, or at least not discourage, intellectual vanity.

 

  • December 5, 2025
    Aaron Suduiko, “Freedom and Friendship”
    The Constitutivist view of personhood developed in Korsgaard (2009) offers a rich explanation of how we identify ourselves with the values and projects we bring into the world. But it also crystallizes an all-too familiar puzzle: if taking actions from a coherent set of values is what it means to succeed as a person, then what do we need friends for? Intimate friendship seems like an obvious mark of the good life, yet it also seems right to worry that the distinct interests of our friends can call on us to give up some of our control over our lives, and perhaps, thereby, to give up some of our power to render ourselves maximally coherent. By developing resources from Aristotle’s answer to his own version of this problem, I ultimately suggest that Constitutivism can explain how close friends make us into better, richer—and, indeed, more coherent—versions of ourselves.

 

Past Series

 

Spring 2025

 

  • January 27, 2025
    Yasha Sapir, “Ignorant Complicity”
    According to the intuition of many, if you help a ne’er-do-well do wrong, but you had no reason to think that’s what you were doing, then you’re not morally complicit in the ne’er-do-well’s wrongdoing. I ask whether this intuition is correct; and if so why. Three answers to these questions are considered. According to the first, the intuition is correct, because there is an epistemic condition on being blameworthy and complicity is a kind of blameworthiness. According to another, the intuition is correct, because there is an epistemic condition on having a duty, and being complicit requires that you had a duty which you failed to abide by. Finally, I consider a solution on which the intuition is false, and we only think it’s true because we falsely believe it’s impossible to be blamelessly complicit. Upshots of my discussion include that the intuition denying answer is kind of crazy but the two intuition-preserving answers are probably false.

 

  • February 3, 2025
    Grace Atkins, “Constitution: The Hole Story”
    In 1969, artist Michael Heizer set to work displacing 240’000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone to construct two large trenches on the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, Nevada. The trenches were the basis of his work “Double Negative”, a piece of land art famous for consisting in what is not, what has been removed. In the artists’ own words: “there is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.”I draw on cases like Double Negative to present a variation on statue-lump puzzles of material coincidence, where the ‘lump of clay’ is a hole, and the ‘statue’ is an artwork. One popular response to statue-lump cases is to claim that the lump of clay constitutes the statue, where this relation falls slightly short of identity. In this talk, I consider a few reasons why one might think that the constitution solution is not available in the hole/artwork variation of the puzzle. Then, I argue that these reasons don’t stand up to scrutiny. If you think that lumps can constitute statues, you should think that holes can constitute artworks, and perhaps other things, too.

 

  • February 10, 2025
    Nurit Matuk, “The Values We Must Impose”
    Perfectionists and public reasons political philosophers, as I’ll understand them, disagree about the conditions in which one can impose some values, that is, the conditions in which one can permissibly act so as to make the state be guided by some values. Perfectionists think that one can impose values even if reasonable people would disagree with one about which values to impose, which, objectors say, seems to threaten the legitimacy of the state for such reasonable people. Public reasons theorists think one can impose values only if reasonable people would not disagree with one about which values to impose. Perfectionists object that either that this view collapses into perfectionism, by building values into the notion of ‘reasonable’, or that it entails that no values can be imposed, given widespread disagreement. I offer a way of understanding the public reasons claim such that it avoids these objections, and shows why perfectionism threatens the legitimacy of the state: one can impose values only if people who lack psychological defects, like psychopathy or insanity, do not disagree with one or if they could be rationally persuaded, with enough time, to not disagree with one about which values to impose. The values that satisfy this condition, in turn, are not most varieties of autonomy or equality, but rather values that entail more radical state actions than those to which typical public reasons liberals are committed.

 

  • February 24, 2025
    Matthew Wiseman, “Reciprocal Just Savings”
    There is an unresolved tension in John Rawls’s account of intergenerational justice. Rawls claims that principles of justice would be chosen in the original position only if they satisfy Reciprocity: those who are better off are not better off to the detriment of those who are worse off. Yet his own preferred principle of intergenerational justice—the Just Savings Principle—fails this condition, as it requires the first generation to save for later richer generations, leaving the latter better off to the detriment of the former. In this talk, I resolve this tension by offering a new type of just savings principle that requires generations subsequent to the first to compensate previous overlapping generations for having saved. This principle not only rescues Rawls’s view from incoherence, but also promises a more general solution to a significant obstacle facing any contractualist account of intergenerational justice: the so-called problem of the first generation.

 

  • March 3, 2025
    Irene Bosco, “The Innocence Triangle”
    The status of victim, the emotional reaction of sympathy, and the speech act of complaint are all interrelated in what I call the “Innocence Triangle”. More specifically, the unifying thesis that I defend is that only victims can issue a valid complaint and be worthy of sympathy. Innocence, viz., the lack of responsibility, is the underneath condition that holds the triangle together. To show this, I put forth the following argument:

    • P1: victims are individuals who have been wronged or innocently harmed;
    • P2: The one and only proper objects of sympathy are wronged or innocently harmed individuals;
    • P3: The main function of complaint is to evoke sympathy in the addressee;
    • P4: An invitation or request to hold an unfitting attitude is not valid/felicitous

    C: only victims can make a valid/felicitous complaint

 

  • March 10, 2025
    Arthur Wu, “The Languages of Quantifier Variance”
    Quantifier variance maintains that some ontological disagreements are insubstantial or ‘merely verbal’ because the parties of the disagreement can be seen as speaking different, yet equivalent, languages. However, the question of in which language quantifier variance itself is formulated has rarely been examined. In this talk, I offer a thorough examination of this question, and show why quantifier variance fails.

 

  • March 24, 2025
    Rodrigo Garro Rivero, “The Problem of Translation”

 

  • March 31, 2025
    Anja Chivukula, “A Strong Principle for Limited Aggregation”
    You might sometimes find yourself in a rescue scenario or a resource allocation problem in which multiple groups of people have claims on you to help them, but you can only help one of those groups. Such problems can vary by the number of people in each group asking for your assistance and in the severity of the harms those people are facing. Limited Aggregation views claim that we should only sometimes treat groups of people as if their claims to assistance aggregate to a single stronger claim. For instance, an LA proponent might think there’s some number of people facing a severe injury where you should save them over saving one person’s life, but that there’s no number of people facing mild headaches for which that would be true. Recent contributions in the literature have raised questions about the ability of LA theories to satisfy basic constraints on decision procedures, like Equal Consideration for Equal Claims. In this talk, I show that, when considering cases of pairwise, non-probabilistic choice, Limited Aggregation is compatible with an even stronger principle than has previously been discussed (which entails Equal Consideration, among other things). I do so in part by illustrating an example view which can comply with LA and this new principle while deciding a wide range of cases.

 

  • April 7, 2025
    Yudi Huang, “Two New Axioms for Lewisian Logics of Counterfactuals”
    Lewis’ logics of counterfactuals are mainly motivated by his semantic analysis. Despite the elegance of the semantics, the logics are controversial. Some axioms Lewis used to formulate the logics lack semantics-independent motivation, while some others have been attacked by counterexamples. In this paper, I propose two new axioms for Lewis’ logics of counterfactuals, one for his minimal “variably strict” logic V and another for his “strong centering” logic VC. I argue that they can be motivated independently and are immune to current counterexamples.

 

  • April 21, 2025
    Antonio Maria Cleani, “Quantificationalism and the Intelligibility of Free Higher-Order Quantification”
    Some people object to the intelligibility of higher-order logic on the grounds that natural language does not contain higher-order quantifiers. In response, proponents of higher-order logic argue that we understand higher-order quantification because classical higher-order quantifiers are uniquely pinned down by their inferential roles, up to provable equivalence. This response, however, is not available to those who think higher-order quantification is not classical. In standard higher order logics, we can prove there are multiple entities that satisfy the inferential role of free higher-order quantifiers that are not even coextensive. Which one is the primitive quantifier symbol the higher-order free logician employs supposed to pick out?I argue that free higher-order logicians can get out of this impasse by embracing quantificationalism, the view that some truths are false at some domains of quantification. In the best logic for quantificationalism, we can prove a uniqueness result about existence predicates: any two predicates that satisfy the axioms of existence predicates in this logic are provably equivalent. Since free quantifiers are uniquely pinned down by their existence predicates, a uniqueness result for free higher-order quantifiers follows as an immediate corollary.

 

  • April 28, 2025
    Jin Zeng, “Epistemicism without Ignorance”
    If someone constitutes a borderline case of being tall, it is widely agreed that no one knows whether she is tall. According to Williamson’s epistemicism, vaguess is entirely due to the semantic plasticity of vague expressions, which, by his notorious matelinguistic safety principle, entails the ignorance at issue. This is really puzzling. In this talk, I’ll first point out that assuming Williamson’s account of vagueness, there exist borderline cases in which we know whether one is tall and the metalinguistic safety principle is false. But I’ll also show that Williamsonian epistemicism still contains enough theoretical resources to explain away our intuition concerning our ignorance. The lesson is that perhaps vagueness has more to do with our assertions (or, more broadly, our linguistic behaviors) than with our knowledge (or, more broadly, our mental states).

 

  • May 2, 2025
    Yuanye Hu, “Value of Information for the Modest”
    The Bayesian principle that free information never harms (VOI) clashes with the reality of epistemic modesty—agents’ uncertainty about their own rationality. While Dorst et al. (2021) propose reconciling VOI and modesty via Total Trust, this paper argues their solution is illusory. I show that Total Trust only accommodates a thin notion of modesty, failing to address the substantive modesty concerning rational performance and evidence quality that truly drives the conflict. Instead of seeking reconciliation, I advocate embracing the tension between VOI and substantive modesty as competing rational ideals, offering a framework to understand when acknowledged fallibility makes refusing information rational.

 

 

Fall 2024

 

  • September 6, 2024
    Svenja Schimmelpfennig, “A Skeptical Challenge for Epistemic Safety from Quantum and Statistical Mechanics”
    Safety: If at a world w one knows P on basis b, then at any world close to w at which one believes a proposition P* close to P on b, P* is true.
    Many philosophers suggest that some version of Safety constrains knowledge (e.g., Williamson (2009), Pritchard (2005, 2016), and Sosa (1999, 2007)). Hawthorne & Lasonen-Aarnio (2009) present a skeptical challenge for safety: If it is the case that low-chance propositions are true at close worlds, then many beliefs about ordinary physical events cannot be knowledge. Quantum and statistical mechanics (QM & SM) assign non-zero chances to tunneling and entropy decreasing events. The proponent of safety should thus deny that low-chance propositions are true at close worlds. Hawthorne & Lasonen-Aarnio (2009) conclude that a successful denial requires making safety about ‘super-centered worlds’. This, they argue, comes at the cost of giving up multi-premise closure (MPC) for knowledge. I show that by individuating belief-forming bases externally, the proponent of safety can reconcile super-centering and MPC. An externalist individuation of bases is also motivated by other, independent challenges for safety (cf. Schulz (2021)). However, I also show that the challenge Hawthorne & Lasonen-Aarnio (2009) present can be re-instantiated without referencing chances altogether. It is generally argued that safety not only yields the desired results in Gettier cases, but also explains the widespread intuition that we lack knowledge in lottery situations. Once we look at QM and SM descriptions of how tunneling and entropy-decreasing events could come about, we discover that not a lot would need to be different for these events to occur, in much the same sense in which not a lot would need to be different for a participant to win the lottery. Super-centering and external individuation of bases are of no help in overcoming this challenge. What the proponent of safety needs to do is to either explain why lotteries and QM/SM systems are relevantly different, or allow for knowledge in (some) lottery cases. Normality constraints on knowledge have the best shot at achieving the former. But they also mark a significant departure from standard safety. Additionally, one of the most prominent formulations of normality as provided by Smith (2010, 2016, 2017) does not yield that tunneling and entropy decreases are abnormal. I argue that the best a proponent of safety can do is to try and ‘fine-grain’ closeness such that some lottery winning, tunneling, and entropy decreasing events are closer to actuality than others. They should then argue that only the closest of these events interfere with our knowledge. We find the beginnings of such a strategy in Bacon’s (2014) margin of error model.

 

  • September 27, 2024
    Rodrigo Garro Rivero    , “The Format of Spatial Representation”
    Recently it has been argued that humans exhibit flexible usage of polar coordinate systems to represent small-scale spatial relations. Two important findings should be highlighted from these studies. First, observers represent angle and distance independently. Second, observers display a particular pattern of errors — i.e. observers’ representations are centered around the desired target. In this paper, I argue that by understanding these representations as analog instead of digital we can have a straightforward explanation of two findings mentioned above. One of the interesting consequences of this framework is that it indicates a mixture of properties that have been thought to be mutually exclusive. While polar coordinate systems have a canonical composition and a simple syntax, they have also analog constituents instead of digital or symbolic constituents.

 

  • October 4, 2024
    Shishir Budha, “Unconscious Imagination”
    Unconscious mental states are frequently posited to explain behaviors that cannot be sufficiently explained merely by conscious mental states. There has been a growing trend among theorists to bring up unconscious imagination to explain various phenomena like pretense behaviors, unconscious perception, and implicit bias. I argue that the arguments for unconscious imagination fail. To posit a distinctive cognitive state, one must establish that it fulfills a distinct functional role. In the case of unconscious imagination, it would have to be similar enough to conscious imagination, while also being different enough from other unconscious states like unconscious beliefs, perceptions, and emotions. I argue that unconscious imagination satisfies neither one of these constraints and, consequently, that imagination is paradigmatically conscious.

 

  • October 25, 2024
    June Lee, “Reasons for Deceived Rational Subjects?”
    In the New Evil Demon cases, there is the troubling intuition that systematically deceived subjects can be rational, despite there being no external fact to point to as a reason for their beliefs. Recent works by proponents of the reasons-responsiveness view of rationality (RRR) have tried to accommodate this intuition by claiming that the deceived subject may respond to reasons different than the fact-given reasons of their undeceived counterpart. I argue that the solutions provided by existing accounts of RRR are unsatisfactory and propose an understanding of rationality as a kind of competence  manifested by the subject. I explain understanding rationality as competence allows us to better capture what rational subjects have in common and appreciate the active role the subject plays when responding to her reasons.

 

  • November 1, 2024
    Aaron Suduiko, “The Normative Landscape of Video-Game Stories”
    Must we disregard the interests of others if we want to get clear on the experience of our practical activity? Some seem to think so. In Games: Agency as Art (2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that many games invite us to disregard all other norms—like social and moral considerations toward our fellow players—as we pursue our goal in the game. When we do so, Nguyen says, we can experience remarkably crisp aesthetics of our own agency: qualities like harmony reveal themselves in an action we can only manage at the height of our abilities, exercised as a solution to a problem the game has asked us to solve in order to progress. Nguyen makes a scintillating case for our ability to channel and appreciate our practicality through games, but he errs in claiming that the crispness of these aesthetics depends on players ignoring all normative considerations beyond the goal given to them by the game. Many of the games Nguyen has in mind give players crisp aesthetic experiences through the complex consideration of their pursuit of their goal alongside the distinct goals of player-characters, characters which players control during gameplay. The result is that games reveal a wealth of aesthetics grounded in emotional, moral, and otherwise normatively colored activity that we can appreciate only if we jettison the assumed restriction on normativity from Nguyen’s account.

 

  • November 15, 2024
    Brian Haas, “A Theory of Manipulation”
    Manipulation is an important concept in ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of law. Manipulation can invalidate consent and mitigate moral responsibility. But what is manipulation? As I argue, manipulators exert control over their victims. When a manipulator manipulates a victim’s beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, or actions, those attitudes and actions are, in an important sense, not fully their own.  This theory of manipulation suggests a broadly Kantian theory of its unique and essential wrong, in addition to a framework for the unique and essential wrong of individual manipulative methods.

 

  • November 22, 2024
    Yudi Huang, “Counterpossibles without Impossible Worlds”
    Classical theories of counterfactuals claim that all counterpossibles, counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent, hold vacuously. Opponoents of this vacuism about counterpossibles have used impossible worlds semantics to account for nonvacuous counterpossibles. As a consequence, the resulting logic invalidate many appealing theorems in conditional logic. On the one hand, vacuists take this as an objection to the whole nonvacuist view. On the other hand, nonvacuists may argue that these theorems are invalid, if we consider counterpossibles seriously. In this work, I argue against both views. I first argue that, contra nonvacuists, many theorems are valid even in counterpossible contexts. I than argue against vacuists that nonvacuism can accommodate these logical requirements. Instead of the impossible worlds analysis, I propose a nonvacuous analysis of counterfactuals based on an intuitive notion of the connection between the antecedent and the consequent. I formalize the idea in the framework of (exact) truthmaker semantics à la Kit Fine and argue that it establishes favorable logical results.

 

  • December 6, 2024
    Aaron Suduiko, “Games: Crisp Aesthetics of Agency through Complex Normativity”
    Must we disregard the interests of others if we want to get clear on the experience of our practical activity? Some seem to think so. In Games: Agency as Art (2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that many games invite us to disregard all other norms—like social and moral considerations toward our fellow players—as we pursue our goal in the game. When we do so, Nguyen says, we can experience remarkably crisp aesthetics of our own agency: qualities like harmony reveal themselves in an action we can only manage at the height of our abilities, exercised as a solution to a problem the game has asked us to solve in order to progress. Nguyen makes a scintillating case for our ability to channel and appreciate our practicality through games, but he errs in claiming that the crispness of these aesthetics depends on players ignoring all normative considerations beyond the goal given to them by the game. Many of the games Nguyen has in mind give players crisp aesthetic experiences through the complex consideration of their pursuit of their goal alongside the distinct goals of player-characters, characters which players control during gameplay. The result is that games reveal a wealth of aesthetics grounded in emotional, moral, and otherwise normatively colored activity that we can appreciate only if we jettison the assumed restriction on normativity from Nguyen’s account.

 

  • December 11, 2024
    Levy Wang, “A Distressing Consequence of Clinically Significant Distress”.
    Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (DSM-IV) introduces the clinical significance criterion requiring symptoms causing “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” as a necessary criterion for many psychiatric disorders. This criterion aims to minimize false positive diagnoses where maladaptive (e.g., a period of disturbances after traumatic events) and/or non-conforming behaviors (e.g., nail biting or skin picking.) were previously incorrectly pathologized.I argue that adding the clinical significance clause still results in false positives regarding non-conforming behaviors. Mainly, mere non-conformity can cause agents to experience distress in virtue of being in a minority group. The level of distress could present indiscernibly from the type of distress clinicians try to capture with the clinical significance criterion.
    Further, I argue that failure to distinguish different sources of distress is harmful. Most obviously, it leads to false positives and harm to misdiagnosed individuals. Less obviously, the most recent DSM-5 perpetuates prejudice and discrimination of social minority groups. To show the second point, I use hyposexual desire disorder (HSDD) introduced in DSM-5 as a case study to show how it still incorrectly pathologizes asexuality. This is the case even though clinicians (probably) add clinical significance criterion to avoid this problem.

 

Spring 2023

 

  • January 17, 2023
    Brian Haas, “What is Deception?”
    We all have been lied to, misled, tricked, hoodwinked, and duped, and many of us have done our fair share of each. Interpersonal deception, in one form or another, permeates our life. Not only is deception common, it is also important. Fake news, either in virtue of its content or presentation, is commonly thought to be deceptive. Lying is commonly thought to require an intention to deceive. Deception played a pivotal role in the Allies’ victory in World War II, cost Nixon his presidency, and laid the foundations of the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021. Deception can start or end a war, save or doom a relationship, bring applause or ire. It can bring us together and keep us apart. Despite deception’s importance and prevalence, it hasn’t attracted nearly the philosophical attention which it deserves. One aim of this chapter is to help remedy this deficiency, the other is to shed some light on deception’s nature.

 

  • February 3, 2023
    Yasha Sapir, “Vague Communication”
    Epistemicists hold that vague declarative sentences semantically associate with just a single proposition for each context. Multipropositionists disagree, and hold that for each context vague declarative sentences associate with multiple propositions. A semantics for vague declarative sentences should have something to say about how hearers respond to speakers who use vague declarative sentences to straightforwardly communicate information, in situations where all goes well. Call this vague communication. I show that, in the final analysis, epistemicists and multipropositionists should give nearly functionally equivalent analyses for how hearers should update how they act in response to vague communication. In particular, both epistemicists and multipropositionists should say that hearers should update in response to vague communication as though their interlocutor had simultaneously partially asserted a basket of propositions. In light of this, the epistemicist’s posit that given a basket of a vague sentence’s meaning candidates, one of them must be privileged, begins to look like a posit that is doing little explanatory work.

 

  • February 10, 2023
    Antonio Maria Cleani, “Dependence and Impredicativity”
    I spell out and motivate a notion I call dependence. Very roughly, a linguistic item is said to depend on a domain of a given type when its extension supervenes of which objects from that domain belong to the range of quantifiers of that type. In the non-linguistic case, a proposition or property is said to depend on a domain of a given type if the extension of that proposition or property supervenes on which among the entities from that domain exist. The notion of dependence, or something very close to it, is sometimes conflated with the rather ubiquitous yet not very clear notion of quantifying over, which appears in discussion of topics as diverse as absolute generality, ontological disagreement and impredicativity. But it pays to distinguish the two notions, and once one does one realizes that more than a few of these topics are better understood through the lense of dependence. This talk focuses on the case of impredicativity.

 

  • February 17, 2023
    Paul Garofalo, “The Wrong of Colonization and the Claims of Future Generations”
    One account of how colonialism wrongs the colonized is that it unilaterally imposes a political association onto the colonized. Call accounts like this political imposition accounts of colonialism. These accounts aim to provide an essential wrong of colonialism, that is, a wrong that attends to all cases of colonialism. In this paper I raise the question of whether political imposition accounts provide the whole story of the essential wrong of colonization. I argue that the wrong of colonization gives rise to certain pro tanto claims on the part of the colonized and their descendants, in particular a pro tanto claim to independence against the authority of the state. The wrong identified by the political imposition account, though, is unable to explain how the descendants of the colonized could have such a claim. Correspondingly, there must be some other essential wrong of colonization beyond that identified by political imposition accounts.

 

  • February 24, 2023
    Megha Devraj, “Civil Disobedience as an Imaginative Challenge”
    What do protestors aim to communicate when they defy norms or break laws? In my view, we cannot answer the question by looking to the framework of Rawlsian civil disobedience. According to Rawls, civil disobedience is an appeal to reasonable, publicly accepted standards of justice through a non-violent and conscientious breach of law. But challenging unreflectively held public views is often the very point of lawbreaking. Rather than appealing to reasonable, publicly accepted norms, I argue, defiant protestors typically aim for us to recognise that our norms are unreasonable. I replace the notion of civil disobedience with the more expansive notion of collaborative defiant protests. An act is a collaborative defiant protest when it is a public and spectacular breach of norms or laws which (i) challenges some socio-political norm, institution, value structure, or hierarchy, (ii) aims for the audience to reimagine the socio-political norm, institution, value structure, or hierarchy in question. I argue that this expansive notion better captures the communicative purpose of most cases of civil disobedience.

 

  • March 3, 2023
    Weng Kin San, “Aggregating Value across Time and People”
    The central question of population axiology is: how do we aggregate welfare across people? But much of population ethics is “static”. They ignore the fact that people’s lives are extended across time. Welfare needs to be aggregated not just across people but also across time. I argue that the extra dimension of time raises problems for various axiologies. In fact, the only axiology that satisfies two plausible axioms concerning temporal aggregation is the axiology which simply adds up the welfare of each person at each moment in time.

 

  • March 10, 2023
    Rachel Keith, “A Broader Account of Doxastic Wronging”
    Person A can doxastically wrong Person B in virtue of one or more beliefs Person A holds. In the literature, it is taken to be that, in order for Person A to doxastically wrong person B, Person A’s wrongful belief must be about Person B. I challenge this assumption. Some of our beliefs about the world can wrong others, even when those beliefs are not directly about the injured party. I argue that our identities are partly constituted by beliefs we have about the world, and we can be doxastically wronged by beliefs that deny our identity-constituting beliefs.

 

Fall 2022

 

  • September 2, 2022
    Brian Haas, “Lying and Apologizing”
    We all have lied. We all have also apologized. But is it possible to lie by apologizing? As I argue, not only are such lies possible, but a speaker can lie by apologizing in two different ways: (1) By apologizing for something they know they haven’t done, and (2) By insincerely apologizing—apologizing without feeling regret or shame for the action they apologized for. Both of these ways of lying pose problems for the orthodox view of lying on offer in the literature. According to orthodoxy, to lie is to make a believed false assertion. The possibility of lying by apologizing shows orthodoxy to be doubly wrong. First, a speaker can lie by presupposing—but not asserting—disbelieved information. Second, they can lie by expressing a state (i.e., regret or shame) which they are not in—not by asserting disbelieved information. These lies necessitates a dramatic shift away from the traditional, assertion-based accounts of lying which dominates the literature and towards a heterodox, expressing-based one.

 

  • September 9, 2022
    Mitchell Barrington, “Superiority and Separability”
    Superiority is the view that there exists some pair of valuable objects x and y such that some quantity of x is better than any quantity of y; it is very plausible when x is an important good and y is trivial, such as in the Repugnant Conclusion. This paper shows that (given modest auxiliary assumptions) Superiority is incompatible with Separability—the principle that in comparing the value of two outcomes, we may ignore people whose welfare and existence are unaffected.

 

  • September 15, 2022
    Zeb Dempsey, “The Puzzle of Victim Anger”
    I raise a puzzle that I call ‘the puzzle of victim-anger’ that is parallel to Bernard William’s puzzle of agent-regret. Suppose a truck driver is driving down the street when a child happens to walk in front of them. Through no fault of their own, the driver hits and kills the child. It is well understood that the driver will, and probably should, have some sort of guilt-like response, called agent-regret. However, it would also be unsurprising to find out that the child’s parents were angry at the driver for killing their child, and this observation has been largely overlooked in the literature on agent-regret. This anger is totally intelligible—we might even feel deeply alienated by a parent who didn’t feel it in the wake of their child’s avoidable death. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see how this anger could be rationally defensible: aren’t the parents just lashing out at an innocent party? I show how the traditional philosophical account of anger fails to yield a satisfactory solution to this puzzle. As a result, I argue that we ought to reject the traditional account and outline a few challenges that any alternative account capable of solving the puzzle needs to meet.

 

  • September 21, 2022
    Noah Gordon, “Humean Moral Laws”
    Humeanism about moral laws is the view that moral laws are mere summaries of particular matters of fact. In this talk, I will explain why Humeanism is an attractive view of the laws. Then, I will defend Humeanism from a recent objection which claims that the Humean cannot explain moral supervenience.

 

  • September 30, 2022
    Levy Wang, “A defense of non-factive motivating reasons”
    I argue that there are three central principles prevalent in the discussion of motivating reasons, i.e., the agent’s actual reason for action. The principles are anti-psychologism — that motivating reasons are propositions, an explanatory constraint — motivating reasons must explain the agent’s action, as well as a deliberative constraint — the agent must deliberate from the motivating reasons. The first part of the talk will introduce the three principles and show that though individually plausible, cannot be satisfied together. The second part of the talk aims to show that we should relax the explanatory constraint and prioritize the deliberative constraint. This is because motivating reasons serve a unique (normative) role that distinguishes them from merely explanatory reasons. We often make some (normative) evaluation of an agent’s reasoning process in addition to assessing whether their action is right or wrong. For example, we evaluate whether they acted for good reasons or whether the reasoning leading up to the action is cogent. Similar kinds of evaluation have been explicitly discussed in the moral worth literature, but I think it should be extended beyond the moral domain.

 

  • October 6, 2022
    Anja Chivukula, “Demystifying Conversational Relevance”
    Relevance is a key part of some of our most basic tools in analytic philosophy of language, like Gricean inference and the Stalnakerian common ground. However, pinning down exactly what it means for an utterance to be relevant has proved elusive. Thus far, there have been approaches to relevance which work for contexts of inquiry (QUD, discourse goals) or for casual conversation (SDRT, coherence relations), but none that can explain conversational relevance as a more general phenomenon. In this talk, I propose that we can combine approaches based on discourse goals and on coherence relations in order to get an account of conversational relevance which is independently motivated, can explain some of our intuitions, and can fill the necessary role in conversational mechanisms like the common ground. Connections to generative linguistics and Relevance Theory will be discussed, time permitting.

 

  • October 28, 2022
    Anthony Nguyen, “Grounding the Wrong of Colonialism in Self-Respect”
    Colonialism is always seriously pro tanto wrong. But why? Is colonialism wrongful for merely contingent reasons? If so, then, in principle, colonialism could be wholly unobjectionable. I argue against this possibility. Colonialism always involves political subjugation of the colonized people. By politically subjugating the colonized, colonial institutions treat them as inferior with respect to the Rawlsian moral powers for a conception of the good or for a sense of justice. By treating the colonized in this way, colonial institutions seriously threaten their social bases of social respect. But the social bases of self-respect are the most important social primary good, the most important good to distribute justly. Colonialism is therefore unjust and, at the very least, pro tanto wrong. I conclude by comparing my view to the two most influential existing accounts of why colonialism must be necessarily wrongful: Stilz’s (2019) political autonomy account and Ypi’s (2013) political association account. I argue that the self-respect approach has advantages over both.

 

  • November 10, 2022
    Jin Zeng, “Classical Normativity”
    Classicism identifies provable equivalence in classical higher-order logic with identity. It implies intensionalism, according to which two propositions/properties/relations are necessarily co-extensive in the broadest sense only if they are identical. Over the past two decades, many philosophers have argued that intensionalism gives us no interesting metaethics. But this is not the case. In this talk, I first develop a concrete theory of normativity within a picture of Classicism, the core of which consists in a characterization of the property of being normative as well as the operation of normative necessity. This theory vindicates the widely accepted thesis that every normative truth holds in virtue of some non-normative truth. As a bonus, it also provides us a straight way of understanding Hume’s law that one “can’t get an ought from an is”. Yet my theory is far from the whole story. I then briefly mention several theoretical degrees of freedom allowed by Classicism. We will end up with a very general framework of doing metaethics within a very coarse setting of grain: on the one hand, it shows that inquires about normativity can be based, with formal rigor, on a maturely developed world view; on the other hand, we gain some abductive reasons for Classicism.

 

  • November 18, 2022
    Stephanie van Fossen, “Comparing Claims to Benefit”
    There are some cases where it seems permissible to perform a rescue at someone’s expense, and other cases where it seems impermissible to do so. Existing explanations for our asymmetric moral judgments about such cases either fail to provide intuitive moral verdicts or lack a satisfying rationale. In this paper, I propose a new explanation of what is morally problematic about certain rescues that is subject to neither issue. My proposal is a version of the so-called means principle which adds the essential caveat that there is no moral presumption against using someone as a means to benefit herself. By attributing moral significance to the victim’s relationship to the beneficiary rather than the agent alone, my solution points to a new underlying rationale for the means principle as well as extensional and explanatory inadequacies in competing theories.

 

Spring 2019

 

  • Michael Fiorica, “How to be Gay with Words: Coming Out as an Illocutionary Act”
  • Andrew Stewart, “Responsibility, Rationality, and Determinism”
  • Nicola Kemp, “The Ethics of Failing to Make Happy People: Why Deontologists Don’t Escape the Problem of the Procreation Asymmetry”
  • Jaime Castillo Gamboa, “Towards a Reductionist Account of Linguistic Expressions”
  • Brian Haas, “Debugging Lewis’ Convention Based Semantics”
  • Lisa Bastian, “Conceptual Injustice”
  • Zach Goodsell, “Instrumental Modals”
  • David Clark, “The ‘So What?’ Objection to Normative Realism”
  • Laura Nicoara, “Pornography, Speech Acts and Fiction”
    Radical feminists want to argue that pornography wrongs women in general – that is, possibly all women, and certainly not just the women who are harmed as a result of being involved in the production of pornography, or those who are hurt by men whose attitudes and beliefs have been causally influenced by pornography consumption. In this paper I aim to do four things: (1) describe and motivate a popular approach to arguing for this claim within the analytic tradition, i.e., the idea that pornography performs speech acts that are harmful to women; (2) formulate an objection to the speech act approach which shows it cannot adequately support the anti-pornography thesis; (3) in light of the objection, provide a condition that speech act-based anti-pornography arguments must satisfy; (4) attempt a new argument against pornography that satisfies this condition.
  • Vilma Venesmaa, “The Conceptual Truth of Normative Supervenience as an Explanation Problem for Analytic Reductionism”
  • Eleonore Neufeld, “Meaning Externalism and Causal Model Theory”
    One of the main insights the philosophical community has drawn from Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiments and Kripke’s modal arguments for a theory of direct reference is that meaning is individuated externalistically. In this paper, I propose an account of the structure of concepts that correctly predicts the Putnam-Kripke intuitions, while preserving an internalist conception of meaning. After presenting and systematizing the Putnam-Kripke data, I propose and defend a Causal Model Theory of conceptual structure, on the basis of which we can model the semantics of natural kind terms and predict the key Putnam-Kripke intuitions.

 

Fall 2018

 

  • Brian Haas, “Grice & Herod: Cases of Showing are Cases of Speaker’s Meaning”
  • Jaime Castillo Gamboa, “Epistemicism and Robust Moral Realism”
  • Isaiah Lin, “From Ontological Pluralism to Mereological Pluralism”
  • Paul Garofalo, “Liberty and Obligation in Hobbes: Against a Causal Theory”
    Hobbes claims that obligation and liberty are inconsistent with one another. This claim generates two questions: how is obligation inconsistent with liberty? and what is the sense of “liberty” with which obligation is inconsistent? There are two main interpretations answering the “how” question: obligations might be inconsistent with liberty because they cause us to lose liberty or because they constitute the loss of liberty. Each interpretation then invokes a different sense of “liberty” to answer the “what” question. In this paper I explore the claim that obligations cause us to lose liberty and argue that this is an implausible interpretation of Hobbes. This answer either makes obligations too strong such that their violation is impossible or makes liberty too weak such that any influence causes us to lose liberty. I conclude by offering preliminary remarks concerning how to pursue the claim that obligations constitute the loss of liberty.
  • Takasaki Shohei, “An Argument Against the Methodology of the Manipulation Argument”
  • Philip Li, “Individual Responsibility in Global Warming as a Kantian Imperfect Duty”
  • Weng Kin San, “Disappearing Diamonds: Results in Bi-modal Logic and Their Implications”
  • Andrew Stewart, “Anger, Revenge, and Tort Law”
  • Anthony Nguyen, “The Radical Account of Bare Plural Generics”