The Graduate Speculative Society - School of Philosophy

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 Svenja Schimmelpfennig.

Recent Series

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.

Past Series

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 21, 2022
Matthew Wiseman, “Justifying Democratic Representation for Future Generations”
In response to the climate crisis, recent years have seen increasing calls from activists and academics alike for the representation of future generations within democratic institutions. Imagine, for example, proxy representatives in congress deliberating and voting on behalf of future people, alongside the usual representatives acting on behalf of present people. A natural thought is that such proxy representatives can be justified by appeal to the All-Affected Principle – the claim that all those whose interests are affected by a democratic decision should have their interests represented in the making of that decision. Some, however, have suggested that the fact that the decisions of democratic institutions will change the identities of those who come into existence in the future means such future people are not affected in the relevant sense. In this talk, I draw on and develop recent work in population ethics to offer an interpretation of the All-Affected Principle that can justify proxy representatives for future generations despite the non-identity problem.

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”