Preprints are made available only from January to March and only for purposes of discussion at the meeting.

	‘Just a Little Gay’: How Sexual Orientation Comes in Degrees Kevin Richardson, Duke University
		You can be a little gay or a lot gay. You can be mostly heterosexual. You can be somewhat lesbian. You can be bicurious. You can be heteroflexible. You can be sexually fluid. What I’m saying is: sexual orientation comes in degrees. This point is well-established in sexuality studies but largely neglected by philosophers. The on-off (or absolutist) model of sexual orientation, which is implicit in most philosophical theories of sexual orientation, misrepresents social reality. I aim to correct this state of affairs. I propose a theory of sexual orientation that is fundamentally scalar and multidimensional: scalar because sexual orientation comes in degrees; multidimensional because there are various dimensions of sexual orientation—desire, disposition, duration, etc.
	A Behavioral Approach to Social Institutions Megan Stotts, McMaster University
		When writing about social institutions, philosophers tend to emphasize the deep and distinctive ways in which their existence and nature are “up to us.” And this is certainly true. Trees and rocks could exist with the same basic nature in the absence of human activity; governments and religious organizations could not. But the extent to which social institutions are “up to us” has been overemphasized. My project is to explore what kind of account of social institutions we arrive at if we take as our starting point ways in which institutions are sometimes relatively less “up to us.” I will argue that this approach points toward a behavioral account of social institutions: social institutions are structures of copied behavior that clusters into roles, where all of the behavior works together to promote some result(s), and where there are alternative ways to promote the institution’s result(s).
	A Contribution to the Intensive Reading of ‘To Pantelos On’ at Sophist 248e7-8 Colin Smith, Pennsylvania State University
		This is a contribution to the “intensive” interpretation of the expression “to pantelos on” (“complete-perfect” being) in Plato’s Sophist (248e7-8). The phrase arises when the view of the “friends of forms” leads the Eleatic Stranger to question whether motion and “nous”(mind) are present in “‘complete-perfect’ being.” The meaning is debated: “extensive” readers hold that the Stranger means “complete” being, or the totality of things in the cosmos, and “intensive” readers that it concerns “perfect” being, or eternally self-same Platonic forms. Others have shown that the intensive reading is preferable on textual grounds, and here I discuss one way in which this reading captures the philosophical function of the phrase within the conceptual structure of the Sophist. There is parallelism between “to pantelos on” and the earlier indication of “to medamos on” (nonbeing or “being-in-no-way,” 237b7-8); here I argue that the Stranger shows that we can only understand nonbeing intensively.
	A Deontological Model of Moral Skill Nick Schuster, Australian National University
		Modeling virtue on ordinary practical skills is a promising strategy for explaining, in conceptually and empirically plausible terms, how virtue is acquired and how virtuous agents determine what to do. This is an important project for any ethical theory, but only the eudaimonist tradition has made extensive use of the skill model of virtue thus far. In this paper, I develop an alternative, deontological model of moral skill. I first argue that, like eudaimonist ethics, deontological ethics stand to benefit from a skill-like conception of virtue. I then identify three apparent challenges for a deontological conception of moral skill: skillful agency can involve breaking rules; mechanical decision-procedures are no substitute for practiced skill; and conforming to rules exhibits mere competence, not expertise. By responding to these challenges, I show that not only can deontological ethics conceive of virtue as moral skill, a deontological approach has distinct advantages over eudaimonism here.
	A Frame for Structural Epistemology Ezgi Sertler, Utah Valley University
		This paper proposes a frame for structural epistemology. This frame for structural epistemology characterizes the field based on two orienting questions: how structures (social and political arrangements and institutions) can condition the possibilities for knowledge production and how epistemological systems are structured. These two questions correspond to the two branches of structural epistemology I identify here. The first one concerns institutional governance of knowledge, and the second one concerns systemic governance of knowledge. Structural epistemology as studying institutional governance of knowledge focuses on how economies of epistemic agency and labor as well as norms for knowledge production are set up and maintained within structures. Structural epistemology as studying systemic governance of knowledge, on the other hand, questions the structure of epistemological systems by analyzing their limits, resilience, assumptions, commitments, and reflexive capacities.
	A Metaphysical Implication of Corporate Moral Responsibility Tom Costigan, University of California, Santa Barbara
		Some contend that there are genuine instances of corporate moral responsibility (CMR). These are instances when corporations—independent of the people—are morally responsible. If there are genuine instances of CMR, then, as I argue, this implies that corporations are entities that are distinct from the people and that they are the type of entity that can be held morally responsible. This means, to give a full account of instances of CMR, proponents are looking for metaphysical view of corporations where the corporation is a distinct entity but also the type of entity that can be morally responsible. In this paper I survey four metaphysical approaches that could be extended to corporations. However, I argue that none of these metaphysical views support the idea that corporations can be morally responsible independent of the people. Rather these metaphysical views suggest that the people are the bearers of moral responsibility.
	A Novel Argument for the Nonconceptual Content of Episodic Memory Arieh Schwartz, Ben Gurion University
		This paper presents a novel argument that there exists a nonconceptual content of episodic memory. The argument takes the form of an inference to the best explanation of the compatibility of three highly plausible yet apparently inconsistent propositions: (1) Some instances of episodic remembering amount to knowing; (2) Only truths are knowable; (3) Episodic remembering is never wholly devoid of inaccuracy. A rival propositionalist proposal is also considered according to which episodic memories are used much like scientific models, with only their accurate components being entertained with an attitude of endorsement or belief. The latter proposal is shown unsatisfactory.
	A Realist Reading of Kant? Disentangling Heidegger from Riehl and Külpe Morganna Lambeth, Purdue University
		Many commentators argue that Heidegger offers a realist interpretation of Kant, which follows in the vein of two contemporaries: Alois Riehl and Oswald Külpe, who defend the position of critical realism. However, I argue that Heidegger’s reading of Kant departs from critical realism in two key respects. First, Heidegger defends a two-aspect reading of Kant, where the thing in itself and the appearance refer to two perspectives on the same being; he does not defend a two-world view, where the thing in itself is the cause of the appearance. He thus avoids attributing independent metaphysical properties to the thing in itself. Second, Heidegger attributes intersubjective agreement about beings to a shared conceptual scheme, rather than explaining it by way of a common cause of multiple subjects’ experiences. He thus undermines a crucial argument motivating critical realism. I conclude that Heidegger does not offer a critical realist interpretation of Kant.
	A Solution to the Puzzle of Diminishing Grief Natalie McCosker, University of California, Davis
		If we grieve as the fitting response to the death of our loved one, and our loved one doesn’t come back to life, why is it that we stop grieving? I aim to answer this question by giving an account of what grief is the fitting response to and providing a debunking argument against the notion that our grief fittingly diminishes and/or ends in time. First, I will argue that grief is a fitting response to tragedy, so grief is a fitting response to the tragedy of the loss of a loved one. Second, I will argue that there are at least two types of grief, and that what is commonly taken to be the diminishment or end of grief is actually just grief transitioning from what I call “protest grief” to what I call “evaluative grief,” where the former protests the death of the loved one and the latter merely evaluates it as the tragedy that it is.
	Acceptable Apologies Lia Curtis Fine, University of Maryland
		I argue here for a distinction between grades of supererogation: I intend to distinguish between nodes on a continuum of moral repair. I will show that there is a morally significant difference between the acceptance of an apology and forgiveness of a wrongdoer. While both acceptance and forgiveness are supererogatory acts, when faced with a sincere apology that promises better behavior, it might be (to borrow Elizabeth Harman’s terminology) a “morally permissible moral mistake,” to refuse to accept. However, the same cannot be said of forgiveness. The incorporation of acceptance as an intermediary point between the rejection of an apology and the forgiveness of the wrongdoer allows for: (1) the completion of the wrongdoer’s apology wherein the process of restoration can begin, and (2) the victim to have more cognitive space to rationally process her resentment, and to do so without an obligation to forgive before the restorative process occurs.
	Actions, Slurs, and Ideologies Katie Wong, University of Michigan
		This paper offers a novel account of how the use of slurs helps reinforce and strengthen pernicious ideologies. I propose that the act of using a slur (call S) reinforces and strengthens the pernicious ideology it cues because of S’s status as a well-constituted move relative to that ideology’s norms. Drawing on Tamar Schapiro’s constructivist conception of action, I argue that when we perform an act that is well-constituted relative to—or accords with—a norm, N, we help uphold N. So, insofar as using a slur is well-constituted relative to the norms of the pernicious ideology it cues, the act helps uphold those norms and strengthens the ideology. My account has the virtue of explaining how slurs can do ideological work irrespective of the particular psychological effects they produce and regardless of the kinds of uptakes they get without rendering how one responds to a slur ideologically insignificant.
	Affective Bias and Some Norms of Attention: Lessons from Buddhaghosa Sean Smith, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
		This paper presents an argument that the pervasiveness of affective bias on our conscious attention makes our attention normatively assessable in various ways. Attention is affectively biased when preferential perception of a stimulus is instantiated based on the stimuli’s affective salience. We are being constantly biased by the pervasive influence of affects on our attentional commerce with our environment. I claim that all attention is affectively biased to some degree or another and this pervasive influence of the affects on our attention is the main reason that our attentional habits are apt for various forms of normative assessment. My view is inspired by the work of Buddhaghosa (5th-6th CE), a South-Asian Buddhist scholar-monk whose commentarial works in Pāli form the backbone of Theravāda Buddhism. This paper addresses how attention is dealt with normatively in Buddhaghosa’s account; specifically, I will analyze how wholesome forms of empathetic attention can go wrong.
	Against Risk-Aversion Zachary Barnett, National University of Singapore
		In a choice between saving one person for sure and taking a ¼ chance of saving five, many hold that saving the one is rationally permissible. This is an example of risk-aversion, a tendency to favor known outcomes over gambles—even when the gambles would maximize expected utility. To respect the rationality of risk-aversion, some have proposed alternative decision theories, which make room for different ways of valuing uncertain options. But close examination of these risk-aversion-permitting views reveals problems. Specifically, permitting risk-aversion turns out to commit us to choices which harm some and help none—a difficult result to accept. The paper will discuss how this argument against risk-aversion differs from existing criticisms, which traditionally appeal to the fact that risk-averse agents are likely to lose out in the long run. The argument developed here does not rely upon this observation and can be presented in the context of a single decision.
	Agential Value Nicolas Delon, New College of Florida
		Sentientists claim that all and only sentient (i.e., phenomenally conscious) beings have moral status, because all and only sentient beings are welfare subjects. But it is conceivable, indeed empirically plausible, that some beings are agents but not sentient (e.g., insects and future AI). I mount a challenge to sentientism and defend an alternative view according to which agency is a sufficient ground of moral status. I argue that agency is a source of basic prudential goods, hence is sufficient for welfare subjecthood—for one’s life to go well or poorly in the sense that matters to the subject. Given a plausible link between welfare and moral status, I argue that non-sentient agents have moral status. This has implications for how we understand animal welfare and leads us to expand the scope of candidates for moral status.
	Alienation, Idealization, and Judgment Subjectivism Kellan D.L. Head, Syracuse University
		Judgment Subjectivism maintains that when an agent believes (under ideal conditions) that some f is good for them, her belief establishes the f as a prudential good. I argue that Judgment Subjectivism is false since it’s not immune to alienation problems, since it’s possible for agents to be alienated by the things that the theory maintains are their prudential goods. That is, agents can believe that some object is good for them even if they’re alienated from it. I provide illustrative examples. I conclude by considering an objection: how could an idealized agent who’s a) given access to facts about the ways f would affect their attitudes and b) free of epistemic error still end up with the belief that an alien f is good for them? I maintain that it’s rational for some agents to engage in prudential deliberation during which they consult considerations external to their own attitudes.
	Amo on the Meaning of Freedom Iziah Topete, Pennsylvania State University
		In “Impassivity of the Human Mind” (1734), Anton Wilhelm Amo defends the radical claim that the human mind per se cannot sense. He claims that human minds are purely active substances and so they cannot be passive by definition. So granting Amo’s conception of mind, then it seems that we all should be absolutely free. Yet human beings clearly experience passivity and a lack of control. The author offers a solution to this interpretative problem by drawing on a distinction Amo makes in “Distinct Idea” (1734) between the freedom of the mind alone and the freedom of the whole human being. The first sense of freedom designates our absolute mental agency in defining our end-directedness, decidedness, and intentional nature. On the other hand, our freedom as a whole human being should be taken as finite freedom of action, which follows from our embodiment and so entails the possibility of passivity.
	An Analysis of Bias and Distrust in Social Hinge Epistemology Anna Pederneschi, University of California, Irvine
		The pervasiveness of trust in our everyday lives makes it a collective “bonding agent” that allows us to participate in epistemic practices. Distrust, on the other hand, can be quite damaging. Philosophical literature has focused on trust. However, I think understanding the rationality of distrust is crucial for our testimonial practices. My general aim is to show that unmotivated distrust is irrational. Firstly, I will adopt Annalisa Coliva’s account of social hinge epistemology and of hinge trust as the basic stance for our epistemic practices. Secondly, I will focus on how distrust based on negative identity bias can spread across other domains of interaction and jeopardize the practice itself. Thirdly, I will adopt an account of bias as a defeater to enforce the claim that unmotivated distrust is irrational. Finally, I will highlight the main difference between the rationality of motivated and the irrationality of unmotivated distrust in testimonial practices.
	An Argument Against Deserved Suffering and Flourishing Jason Lee Byas, University of Michigan
		I argue against theories that take suffering or flourishing itself to be the object of desert. This argument draws on the revulsion many have to retributivism’s idea that it can be good in itself for people to suffer. Once we locate the reason behind that revulsion, we see it applies generally to deserved welfare, both negative and positive. I first highlight a pervasive undercurrent of moral commonsense, the thought that we should always take others’ good as good at least in itself, and their bad as bad at least in itself. All apparent exceptions to this unrelated to desert are not exceptions, but instead applications of the principle given tradeoffs. I then show that both negative and positive desert conflict with this principle. This puts a justificatory burden on the idea of deserved welfare. Without meeting that burden, desertism of this kind is presumptively perverse.
	An Ethical Way to Make Recall Decisions: The Risk Payout Model Chris Tweedt, Christopher Newport University
		Cost-benefit analyses often underwrite recall decisions made by a manufacturer or its regulatory agency. However, some ethicists and journalists have objected that using a cost-benefit analysis to make a recall decision is morally problematic, especially since Ford’s highly publicized use of a cost-benefit analysis to choose not to recall their Pinto. In this paper, I examine objections to the moral permissibility of manufacturers’ use of cost-benefit analyses to make recall decisions and argue that the objections do not target the use of cost-benefit analyses as such but instead target a particular way of implementing cost-benefit analyses. I then recommend a novel model for issuing recalls, the Risk Payout Model: manufacturers offer a payout to customers in exchange for rejecting the recall and waiving the manufacturer of liability, effectively paying customers to assume risk. This model, I argue, has several moral advantages over an all-or-nothing recall model.
	An Instrumentalist Alternative to Recent Work in the Metaphysics of Propositions Jade Hadley, University of British Columbia
		According to the traditional account, propositions are structured entities which represent the world as being some way. However, many proposition theorists are now turning away from the traditional account, towards one which places fewer metaphysical demands on the nature of propositions. Drawing on the work of Simchen (forthcoming), I contend that both the traditional account and more minimalist alternatives share a default, yet nonetheless problematic, attitude towards propositions—one which takes them to be entities which reveal the nature of that which they represent. I argue that this attitude is mistaken, and that an instrumentalist attitude—one which does not have such revelatory ambitions—is preferable. I will show how adopting this attitude may enable one to hold on to key facets of the traditional account, whilst alleviating the issues which led theorists to move away from it in the first place.
	An Intro to Teaching Disability Cultural Competence Christine Wieseler, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
		Recent surveys suggest that many physicians lack the knowledge and training to feel comfortable providing care to disabled patients (Agaronnik et al. 2019a). Thus, there is a strong need to teach disability cultural competence (DCC) to current and future health care professionals in courses such as bioethics. Although this has been argued repeatedly, there is little guidance on how to teach DCC. To respond to this need, I have developed a workshop using More than Ramps: A Guide to Improving Health Care Quality and Access for People with Disabilities by Lisa Iezzoni and Bonnie O’Day that examines some of the concrete obstacles disabled people face in having their needs met in healthcare settings as well as proposing solutions. My abbreviated version of the workshop will involve assigning short reading selections to participants for small and whole group discussion in order to provide an example of how to teach DCC.
	Analytic Philosophy in Taiwan: Impact Within and Beyond Academia Ting-An Lin, Stanford University
		This paper offers a brief survey of the development of analytic philosophy in Taiwan, examines its recent impact within and beyond academia, and discusses the future directions of this discipline. While the root of analytic philosophy in Taiwan can be traced to the Japanese colonial era, due to the suppression under Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, it starts to thrive after Taiwan’s democratization in the 1980s. This paper thus focuses on the development of analytic philosophy in Taiwan since then and highlights its impacts along three dimensions: academia, education, and the political realm. I argue that analytic philosophy contributes to interdisciplinary engagements, furthers the education revolution, and continues advancing the pursuit of democracy in civil society. Recently, the burgeoning development of philosophy in Taiwan has urged reflections on the subjectivity of “Taiwanese philosophy”; this paper ends by examining the progress of this movement.
	Anscombe’s Knowledge Thesis and the Argument from Distinct Thresholds Mikayla Kelley, Stanford University
		In her groundbreaking Intention, G.E.M. Anscombe defends the Knowledge Thesis: while intentionally Xing, one knows without observation that one is Xing. This thesis has proved deeply controversial, largely due to what looks like a wealth of counterexamples. Among those who follow Anscombe, some have defended weaker versions of the Knowledge Thesis. Some weaken the necessity of the connection between knowledge and action, usually by granting the proposed counterexamples. Others retain the necessary connection, but alter the features, content, or species of the knowledge necessary for action. In this paper, I present an argument to the effect that we have good reason to think that there is no necessary connection between intentional action and knowledge, no matter the assumed features, content, or species of the knowledge. Further, rather than argue by counterexample, I present an argument that explains why we continue to find counterexamples to claims of a necessary connection between action and knowledge. The explanation is in the spirit of Gilbert Harman’s separation of intentional action and belief and Michael Bratman’s separation of intentional action and intention in that it relies on the place of intentional action in ethical life.
	Are There Reasons Governing Our Actions Toward the Pre-Conditions of Reasons? Jay Jian, Academia Sinica
		Suppose you have a normative reason to f. Just as there’re some necessary means that are indispensable for your f-ing and complying with this reason, there’re also some pre-conditions that are indispensable for your having this reason in the first place. Now, your normative reason to f seems to entail a normative reason for you to take its necessary means. But does your normative reason to f also entail any normative reasons governing your actions toward its pre-conditions? I’ll first make this normative pre-condition question more precise by providing a characterization of the pre-conditions of normative reasons. I’ll then consider the proposal that your normative reason to f entails a wide-scope reason for you to [f, and also not cancel the pre-conditions for your reason to f]. Although this proposal can be supported by the consideration against normative self-undermining, I’ll point out three types of normative reasons that don’t entail this wide-scope reason and call for normative self-undermining instead.
	Aristotle on the Rationality of Recollection Jungsuk Lee, University of California, Los Angeles
		In his De Memoria et Reminiscentia (DM), Aristotle contrasts recollecting (anamimneskesthai) and remembering (mnemoneuein), describing the former as “a sort of reasoning” (sullogismos tis). What is puzzling, however, is that, despite such a characterization, we don’t see anything obviously similar to reasoning in his detailed account of recollection. Rather, Aristotle spares considerable space for describing recollection as a thought process based on something like “association of ideas,” which is often understood as a much more passive—almost mechanistic—process than reasoning. Thus, in this paper, I take up the task of answering the question of in what sense recollection is a sort of reasoning. Having suggested two complementary answers to the question, I end by making a preliminary remark about how the current investigation into Aristotle’s notion of recollection may enrich our understanding of Aristotelian rationality.
	Art as Possibility with Nietzsche and Bataille: A Collaborative Study in Risk Taking Abigail Iturra, Northwestern University Aurora Laybourn-Candlish, DePaul University
		The possibility of overabundant creation born from transgressive processes of risk-taking is thematic in the thinking of both Nietzsche and Bataille. While fear of failure often equates failure with the end of a possibility, these thinkers show us that the failed and the futile are not the same; for failure denotes neither merely lack nor absence of meaning but rather, as Bataille highlights, its excess. Our work, like Nietzsche’s tightrope-walker, explores the precarity of risk-taking in both content and method. Whereas the work of Abigail Iturra engages with risk abstractly through the process of creating unique ink images from accumulated chance errors, the multimedia collages of Aurora Laybourn-Candlish examines risk concretely through the re-appropriation and breakdown of familiar images. The risks our methods take oppose and challenge each other thereby inviting the question of whether the history behind appropriated errors within the creation process enables or impedes new possibilities.
	Art, Imagination, and Experiential Knowledge Antony Aumann, Northern Michigan University
		Lovers of art often extol its cognitive benefits. Among them is its ability to aid our imaginations. Novels, movies, pictures, and poems can enhance our native abilities in this domain. They can help us imagine things we otherwise couldn’t imagine. But how far does this go? There’s a famous limit on imagination. It’s said that we can imagine what an experience is like only if we’ve gone through it ourselves. My question in this paper is whether art can help us overcome this limit. Can reading novels etc. help us imagine what it’d be like to have experiences we haven’t had before? I’ll argue that they can—provided we add some qualifications.
	Artificial Systems as Social Interaction Partners Anna Strasser, Independent Scholar
		Soon we will share much of our social life with various kinds of artificial systems. In everyday life, we sometimes treat artificial systems as social agents rather than mere tools. However, describing them as social interaction partners poses a conceptual problem for philosophy. Since conditions for full-fledged social agency are primarily tailored to humans, artificial systems fall through the conceptual net. A dichotomous distinction between action and behavior leads to a terra incognita in which we find phenomena for which we have no established notions yet. Assuming that not all human-machine interactions can be satisfactorily reduced to mere tool-use and recognizing that machines do not meet the demanding conditions philosophy places on social interaction partners, I explore the opportunities of a gradual approach to capture such in-between cases and elaborate on the conditions artificial systems have to fulfill to qualify as social interaction partners.
	Autonomy and Intelligence of Artificial Agents: Modeling, Experimentation and Simulation in AI Ioan Muntean, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
		This paper discusses the epistemic aspects of experimentation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The main argument advanced here is that some results in AI and robotics can be interpreted as experiments with data-driven, exploratory models. The paper explains in what sense these experiments on artificial agents generate new knowledge about natural agents (human and animal agents). The epistemic issue is the possibility of a knowledge-transfer from experiments and simulations in AI to cognitive science and psychology. We focus on epistemic uncertainties surrounding concepts such as “autonomy” and “intelligence” in psychology and cognitive science and how experiments in AI can cope with these uncertainties. We distinguish in the AI models of autonomous agents two types of uncertainties: (i) data uncertainty and (ii) model uncertainty. We finally discuss a case study of experiments in the field of “apprenticeship learning” in AI.
	Bayesian Randomness Simon Huttegger, University of California, Irvine Sean Walsh, University of California, Los Angeles Francesca Zaffora Blando, Carnegie Mellon University
		In this paper, we pursue two goals. First, we develop a Bayesian perspective on algorithmic randomness: a branch of computability theory concerned with characterizing the notion of a sequence displaying no effectively detectable patterns. Second, we argue that taking a Bayesian point of view on randomness leads to new insights for Bayesian epistemology-specifically, for two pillars of Bayesian epistemology: convergence to the truth and merging of opinions. In particular, adopting such a perspective reveals that, for computable Bayesian agents, the sequences of observations, or data streams, along which convergence to the truth and merging of opinions occur are uniformly characterizable in an informative way: they are the algorithmically random data streams.
	Beyond Contract Unions—Better Understanding the Diverse Union Landscape Alex Wolf-Root, Ohio State University
		There is a growing movement in the US of workers joining together in unions that don’t follow the typical National Labor Relations Board style majority, collective bargaining model. Many workers are joining in unions that might lack a majority of workers as members or not engage in collective bargaining at all, yet they’re still making meaningful workplace changes. Despite the growing power and popularity of minority, non-contract unions, the labor literature seems to largely focus on the more recognizable collective bargaining style union, to its detriment. This paper aims to do two things. It will propose a definition of union that captures the wide ways that unions can be, and it will illustrate where some discussions in the labor literature, especially concerning democracy, need to account for the wider union landscape that includes unions without contracts or majorities.
	Calling Up Intelligence as Cognitive Liberation: Republic 523a-524b and 515c-516c John Proios, University of Chicago
		In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Socrates describes prisoners living in cognitive delusion and imagines a process of liberation for a single prisoner. He then articulates an educational program that corresponds to the prisoner’s escape. One part of that program has received much scholarly attention: the “Summoners Passage” (523a-526c), which argues that certain perceptual confusions lead the soul toward being. Yet, this passage poses problems for aligning the educational theory with the Cave, and while scholars disagree about how the texts differ, the consensus is that there is some discrepancy. This paper aims to correct the record. I argue that the Summoners Passage bundles the first two stages of liberation together: the soul goes from perception to a sensible original, after which it hypothesizes properties as separate, intelligible realities. The end of the paper suggests some implications for Plato’s ideas about contradiction, cognitive liberation, and the practicality of truth.
	Can a Single Account of Supererogation Handle Both Finite and Infinite Cases? Holly M. Smith, University of California, Berkeley and Rutgers University
		Discussions of supererogatory acts usually focus on cases in which the agent can choose among a finite number of options. For example, the agent can permissibly choose to supererogatorily donate one, two, or as many as ten eggs to an infertile woman to enable her to become pregnant. However, Daniel Muñoz has recently discovered that cases in which the agent faces a chain of infinitely less good supererogatory options make trouble for many existing definitions of supererogation. Ideally we want a definition of supererogation that appropriately handles both finite and infinite cases. I argue that this ideal is unattainable: we need separate definitions of supererogation for the finite and infinite cases.
	Can the Norm of Assertion Be Functional? Alejandro Vesga, Cornell University
		Several epistemologists hold that there is a constitutive link between the norm of assertion and the speech act of assertion. I present a problem for a novel way of specifying this view, namely etiological functionalism about assertion. Whether the speech act of assertion has the etiological function of generating this or that epistemic good is a contingent matter, determined by the specific selection pressures the practice was selected by. Therefore, etiological functional norms cannot fulfill the constitutive role that epistemologists interested in the norm of assertion have in mind. I offer an alternative path towards a constitutivist functionalism. Functionalists should abandon etiological functions and endorse artifactual functions to account for the constitutive norm of assertion.
	Categoricity Problem for LP and K3 S. Kaan Tabakci, University of California, Davis
		In this paper, we will investigate whether we can define the semantic notions of the logical theories of Strong Kleene Logic and Logic of Paradox based on their inferences. In particular, we will focus on semantic strategies discussed in Bonnay and Westerstahl (2016) and Belnap and Massey (1990) to define the truth-conditions of the connectives from their provable inferences. That is, we will investigate different ways to obtain categoricity results for them. Our main reason for the choice of these logics is that their proof systems are not very well-behaved, and, hence they are not generally motivated on inferentialist grounds, yet, they are well-motivated from a model-theoretic semantics point of view. Being able to define the semantic notions in their logical theory based on inferences at least provides some inferentialist grounds for endorsing these logics.
	Civic Virtue, Political Polarization, and Philosophical Dialogue Zac Odermatt, Florida State University Wes Siscoe, University of Notre Dame
		Voters in the United States are becoming increasingly polarized along political lines. In order to combat this crisis, we designed a course that incorporates intergroup dialogues—small, diverse discussion groups that students participated in for the duration of the semester. Intergroup dialogues have been shown to help students develop a number of skills crucial to democratic dialogue, including empathizing with others and resolving conflict, but they have rarely, if ever, been used in the philosophy classroom. In this session, we share our approach to incorporating intergroup dialogue into the philosophy classroom, exploring the lessons we learned that may be of help to other philosophy instructors. The sessions will be interactive, with session attendees participating in a model intergroup dialogue, and presentation attendees will leave equipped with (1) best practices for conducting intergroup dialogues and (2) experience putting those ideas into practice. Looking forward to seeing you there!
	Cognitive Guidance and the Normativity of Intentionality Derek Green, University of Central Florida
		Some recent critics of views under which intentionality is a prescriptively normative phenomenon object that the apparent rules expressed in “ought”-claims about intentional states or acts are not genuinely prescriptive (i.e., guiding) rules. Thus the views are false. This paper refutes the objection. To be prescriptive, the rules in question need not to guide the standardly-abled subjects they enjoin. In fact, subjects with non-standard cognitive capacities can be guided by these rules. Because they can, and they are otherwise relevantly similar to standardly-abled subjects, the rules are prescriptive; if they enjoin one type of subject, they enjoin the other.
	Competitiveness as a Virtue Rich Eva, Baylor University
		I argue that competitiveness is the virtuous trait-disposition of a person who (i) loves the game, (ii) seeks to win, and (iii) understands the game. Competitiveness can be thought of as a golden mean between the excess of a win-at-all-costs mentality and the deficiency of a try-your-best indifference to winning. The virtuous competitor aims to win while simultaneously desiring that their opponent competes at their best. A unique feature of my account is that the virtuous competitor understands games and, thus, recognizes the gamification of real-world activities. This is salient given the dangers of gamification that C. Thi Nguyen’s recent work has highlighted, like the gamification of social media. Reliably distinguishing good games from bad games becomes a vital trait for living a good life. So, competitiveness is—surprisingly—a desirable trait for everyone, not only athletes or gamers.
	Constructing Moderate Deontology Ryan Marshall Felder, Stanford University
		Moderate deontology holds that deontological constraints against certain actions admit of exceptions, while absolutist deontology holds that deontological constraints do not have exceptions. Moderate deontology has been criticized as mere pluralism or as ad hoc, and therefore as demanding a principles account of why it is genuinely deontological. In this paper I discuss three recent attempts to answer this question, which appeal to reactive attitudes toward constraint violations, moderate deontology as a risk-minimizing moral procedure, and to moderate deontology as an unreflective moral pre-set, and show that they are lacking for various reasons. I then argue that a moderate deontological account that incorporates a framework from Kantian constructivism, including Rawls’s four-stage sequence, and Scanlonian contractualism, can effectively explain why deontology is not ad hoc or mere pluralism while avoiding problems that beset existing accounts.
	Contractualism and Non-Identity Owen Clifton, Queen’s University
		Many contractualists boast that their moral theory can solve—or dissolve—“the Non-Identity Problem”: the problem of explaining why a choice can be morally wrong, even when its ostensible “victims” would never exist with worthwhile lives but for it. I argue these contractualists get their own theory wrong. Contractualism, properly understood, has no ready solution to the non-identity problem. Consequently, it has no ready account of why it would be wrong to, for example, impose serious costs on future generations by failing to mitigate climate change.
	Creating Communities: Two Necessary Conditions for the Growth of Thick Trust Kayla Bohannon, University of Kentucky
		A community and a society can be differentiated from one another by the nature of the trust relationships among their members. In communities, relationships of thick trust often arise naturally within interpersonal relationships; however, it would be a mistake to say that the mere existence of such relationships is sufficient for creating thick trust. Rather, certain conditions must first obtain within a community in order for its members to develop this sort of trust in each other. This reality remains underexplored in the literature, as thick trust is often assumed to be a natural and necessary consequence of interpersonal relationships. This paper will demonstrate the inadequacy of this assumption, and define what I take to be two necessary conditions for the growth of thick trust.
	Decision-Theoretic Virtue Ethics Ralph Wedgwood, University of Southern California
		How can those who reject consequentialist ethical theories give an account of how to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty? A solution is proposed here: decision-theoretic virtue ethics (DTVE). DTVE provides an account of what makes acts subjectively permissible in cases where the agent is uncertain about some of morally relevant facts, and also of what makes acts objectively permissible in cases where the workings of the world are indeterministic. More specifically, DTVE is act-focused: it focuses on the virtue-properties—such as justice or prudence or beneficence—that are instantiated by the available acts themselves (not by the agents of those acts). These virtues come in degrees: some acts are more just, or more beneficent, than others. In this way, this kind of virtue ethics is an essentially scalar view, this is what allows it to be united with decision theory in a precise and coherent way.
	Defending the Value-Free Ideal Weimin Sun, California State University, Northridge
		There are a lot of recent discussions on the proper roles of values for scientific practice in the last two decades, and their main target is the value-free ideal. This paper will defend the classical form of the value-free ideal in scientific inquiry, like that expressed in the work of Carl Hempel. I will examine some strong arguments, including the argument from Inductive Risk, against the value-free ideal, especially those from Heather Douglas’s work. My main point is that Hempel’s distinction between the rules of confirmation and the rules of acceptance still holds true today, and we can generalize this distinction to a broad framework that can explain away all the challenges that have been raised against the value-free ideal. My focus is on Douglas’s three arguments, though my arguments are general enough to handle other similar challenges.
	Defensive Ingratitude, Forgiveness, and Functional Forever-Fitting Feelings Joseph Orttung, Cornell University
		I first present an attitude which I call “defensive ingratitude,” standing as a structural counterpart to forgiveness. Forgiveness involves forswearing resentment; defensive ingratitude involves forswearing gratitude. I argue, by considering a woman in an abusive marriage whose husband has done something genuinely nice for her, that this attitude can sometimes be the appropriate one to hold. I then offer a functional account of gratitude, which explains defensive ingratitude theoretically. Gratitude aims to draw us into beneficial relationships, but its fittingness conditions are imperfect. Actions which express a good quality of will make gratitude fitting, but not all who perform such actions are worth forging relationships with. Defensive ingratitude covers the gap. Finally, I argue that the practice of defensive ingratitude is consistent with regarding gratitude as forever-fitting, when it is fitting. Similarly, we should regard resentment as forever-fitting, despite the fact that forgiveness can be an appropriate attitude at times.
	Defensive Injuries and the Prorating of Punishment William Bell, Washington University in St. Louis
		In my view, any plausible account of what justifies the visiting of defensive or punitive harms upon a wrongdoer must invoke the notion of rights forfeiture. However, insufficient attention has been given to how these different types of forfeiture relate to one another. In this essay, I seek to outline the various conceptual options for how the imposition of defensive harms might impact one’s vulnerability to punishment. The question pursued is this: Does an injury sustained through the successful use of defensive force in averting a culpable attacker reduce the attacker’s subsequent moral liability to punishment? Ultimately, I attempt to motivate the claim that all defensive injuries have some rights-reclaiming effect against punishment.
	Degrees of Dys/Utopia in Plato’s Republic and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Julian Rome, University of Michigan
		Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and its recent sequel The Testaments (2019) feature a dystopian society, The Republic of Gilead, which bears striking resemblance to the utopian society outlined in Plato’s Republic, the kallipolis. However, Plato’s kallipolis is not the only alternative society posited in the dialogue: there are two earlier societies, namely, the “city of pigs” and the “city with a fever.” In Atwood, too, readers are presented with the worlds prior to, and following, Gilead’s regime. In this paper, I argue, first, that Plato’s “city of pigs” is presented by Plato as a utopia preferable to the kallipolis; and second, that Atwood’s three societies are analogous to Plato’s. This reading of Atwood brings out not only the dystopian character of Plato’s kallipolis, but also the nuances of the utopian “city of pigs.”
	Democracy Without Shortcuts: Democratic Self-Government and the Problem of Blind Deference Cristina Lafont, Northwestern University
		Amidst growing discontent proposals for democratic reform are on the rise. However, it is not always easy to evaluate their democratic potential. In this lecture, I argue that blind deference offers a useful criterion for evaluation. I focus on proposals from pluralists, epistocrats, and lottocrats. I show that these proposals expect citizens to blindly defer to the decisions of actors over whom they can exercise no control. Pluralists justify blind deference on populist grounds, epistocrats do so on technocratic grounds, and lottocrats appeal to technopopulist grounds. For all their differences, the expectation of blind deference makes their proposals incompatible with democratic self-government. Against these views, I defend a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that rejects both technocratic and populist assumptions. To illustrate the difference, I show how democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies could help us achieve genuine democratic aims if they were institutionalized without an expectation of blind deference.
	Dimensions of Nociceptive Experience in Pain Asymbolia Kimberly Soland, Independent Scholar
		Pain asymbolics identify their perceptions of nociceptive stimulation as pains, but their reports and behavior indicate that their pains do not hurt. Studies of these individuals have influenced theories about the nature of pain, especially with respect to the unpleasant, negative-affective dimension of pain that their experiences apparently lack. This paper focuses instead on those dimensions of pain experience that arise in the pains of both asymbolics and normal perceivers. I argue that pain asymbolics’ ability to differentially discriminate nociceptive from non-nociceptive stimuli does not constitute evidence that nociceptive experiences are proprietarily distinct from innocuous tactile sensations, for even if there is a proprietary phenomenal dimension to nociceptive experience, neuroscientific evidence suggests that pain asymbolics cannot feel it. Pain asymbolics’ discriminatory capacities are best explained by not by perception, but by phenomenal differences brought about by attentional processing.
	Direct Manipulation as a Threat to Intentional Agency (and Not Just Free Agency) Andrei Buckareff, Marist College
		An account of what sort of causal integration is necessary for an agent to exercise agency is offered in support of a soft-line response to Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument against source-compatibilism. I argue that, in cases of direct manipulation, the manipulative activity affects the identity of the causal process of which it is a part. Specifically, I argue that causal processes involving direct manipulation fail to count as exercises of intentional agency because they involve heteromesial causal deviance. In contrast, standard deterministic causal processes do not involve heteromesial causal deviance and are agency-preserving. The upshot is that there is a relevant difference between a causal process involving direct manipulation by another agent and a deterministic causal process that involves no such intervention. If this is right, then Pereboom’s four-case argument does not pose a threat to source-compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility.
	Disability and Achievement Ian Dunkle, University of Southern Mississippi
		In this paper, I explore the impact of disability on one of life’s goods: great achievement. Contra Campbell, Nyholm, and Walter, I argue that construing the magnitude of achievements in terms of subjective effort trivializes what it means to achieve. This poses a problem for the authors’ argument that disability, in general, does not reduce access to this good. I draw on an alternative construal from the literature on achievement in order to show that, indeed, many disabilities do not restrict access to this good. I defend this argument against an objection that my argument problematically relativizes the achievements of persons with disability, and I close with general lessons for future work.
	Disjunctivism, Skepticism, and the Capacity for Perceptual Knowledge Evan Jones, Florida State University
		In this paper, I consider Crispin Wright’s skeptical objection to John McDowell’s epistemological disjunctivism (henceforth “disjunctivism”). McDowell claims that we can have indefeasible warrant concerning facts about the external world, since perception puts us in direct touch with the facts. Wright has argued that such direct contact with facts fails to provide an answer to the skeptic. In defending disjunctivism, I argue (1) that disjunctivism ensures the actuality of perceptual knowledge and (2) that disjunctivism provides a plausible account of how perceptual experiences serve as reasons for perceptual belief. Wright fails to see that the position he is criticizing has the resources to reply to the skeptic, once we reflect on our capacity for perceptual knowledge (which the skeptic claims is never successfully exercised). I conclude that disjunctivism can secure perceptual knowledge.
	Do Thoughts Have Parts? Peter Abelard: Yes! Alberic of Paris: No! Boaz Schuman, Københavns Universitet
		Spoken sentences have parts. Therefore they take time to speak. For example, a speaker who says “Socrates is running” begins by uttering the subject term (Socrates), before carrying on to the predicate. But are the corresponding predications in thought also composite? And are such predications accordingly extended across time, like their spoken counterparts? Peter Abelard gave an affirmative response to both questions. His contemporary, Alberic of Paris, rejected the first, and, as a corollary, the second as well. Here, I set out Abelard’s reasoning, before giving an account of Alberic’s arguments to the contrary, reconstructed from the (occasionally fragmentary) manuscripts of his school. I conclude with an observation about our present moment in the history of philosophy: this twelfth-century debate points to an unstated (and largely undefended) assumption common to our latest thinking about propositions. We don’t have to buy Alberic’s conclusions, but we should at least refute them.
	Doctors, Patients, and Risk Attitudes Nicholas Makins, King’s College London
		A lively topic of debate in decision theory over recent years concerns the rationality of different risk attitudes. In the context of clinical medicine, the presence of both doctor and patient raises the question of whose risk attitude matters for the choice at hand and what to do when these diverge. Must doctors make risky choices when treating risk-seeking patients? Ought they to be risk-averse in general when choosing on behalf of others? In this paper, I will show how existing arguments for widely held anti-paternalistic views about medicine can be extended to include not only patients’ evaluations of possible health states, but also their attitudes to risk. However, I will also show that this view needs further refinement: patients’ higher-order attitudes towards their risk attitudes must also be considered in order to avoid some counterexamples and to accommodate different views about what sort of attitudes risk attitudes actually are.
	Does Moral Judgment Refer Disjunctively? Michael Bruckner, University of Wisconsin-Madison
		Moral thought pluralism states that there are multiple kinds of moral judgment, including belief-like and desire-like ones. It promises to reconcile the representational and practical aspects of moral judgment. I argue in two steps that the moral thought pluralists’ unique strategy comes with a unique challenge. First, I show that moral thought pluralists are committed to the claim that the concept MORAL JUDGMENT (like the concept JADE) refers disjunctively to two different kinds. Second, I problematize this commitment. I consider four explanations of MORAL JUDGMENT’s disjunctive reference. These turn on reference magnetism, linguistic deference, conceptual role, and family resemblance, respectively. I conclude that each of them is at least prima facie problematic. I also consider whether moral thought pluralists might evade this explanatory burden by pivoting from conceptual analysis to conceptual amelioration. While this maneuver looks promising, it raises questions about the practicality of reengineering MORAL JUDGMENT that remain unaddressed.
	Doxastic Wronging (by Failing to Believe and Failing to Believing in) & Doxastic Benefiting Winnie Ma, King’s College London
		I have two primary aims in this paper. The first aim is to present a broader notion of “doxastic wronging” according to which we can morally wrong persons in virtue of failing to be in the right doxastic states toward them. This broader notion of doxastic wronging accommodates two additional kinds of moral wronging that aren’t accommodated by the original notion: moral wronging by failing to believe persons, and by failing to believe in persons. My second aim is to argue for the complementary claim that we can doxastically benefit persons—that is, we can do something morally good for someone just in virtue of being in the right doxastic states concerning them. In support of this latter claim, I focus on cases from the #BelieveWomen movement in which persons who said that they believed women who came forward with testimony about been sexually assaulted intuitively morally benefited them.
	Drawing a Line, Rejecting Resultant Moral Luck Alone Huzeyfe Demirtas, Syracuse University
		The most popular position in the moral luck debate is to reject resultant moral luck while accepting or allowing the possibility of other types of moral luck. But it’s unclear whether this position is stable. Some argue that luck is luck and if it’s (ir)relevant for moral responsibility anywhere, it’s (ir)relevant everywhere. Some argue that given the similarities between circumstantial moral luck and resultant moral luck, there’s good evidence that if the former exists, so does the latter. At any rate, as some point out, the challenge is especially pressing for the large group in the moral luck debate that focus exclusively on resultant moral luck. In this paper, I argue that the other types of moral luck can, but resultant moral luck doesn’t, exist. This is because the other types of luck can, but the results of an action don’t, affect what makes one morally responsible.
	Duty and Demand Anni Raty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
		Suppose you have promised to deliver me a batch of widgets. In virtue of that promise, I now have a right against you that you do so, and you have a corresponding duty. What’s more, I can now demand that you deliver the widgets as promised. More generally, right holders possess standing to demand the object of their right from whoever bears the corresponding duty. This natural thought about right holders and their standing to make demands is at the core of Gilbert’s demand theory of rights. This paper poses two problems for the demand theory, and suggests that standing to demand attaches to directed duties, not rights.
	Elizabeth on Attributal Predication: Exclusive and Non-Exclusive Dualism Emanuele Costa, Vanderbilt University
		In this essay, I argue that—despite widespread belief—the role of Elizabeth of Bohemia in the development and discussion of Early Modern theories of predication and substantiality was not exclusively dependent on her (epistolary) conversation with Descartes. Instead, I show how Elizabeth displays an original and genuinely innovative theory of predication, by collocating her discussion of the notion of principal attributes and modifications within the context of a general abandonment of the Medieval conception of accidents. In particular, I place Elizabeth in dialogue with the Port-Royal logic of Arnauld and Nicole, identifying her as an original contributor to the debate regarding the nature of attributal predication. Elizabeth’s interest in the subject involved an examination of the connection between a substance and its principal attributes, and specifically of the two key concepts of inseparability and inherence.
	Embodied Souls in Plato’s Timaeus Christopher Buckels, Independent Scholar
		I argue that Platonic souls in the Timaeus are images of the Form of Living Thing that organize various psychic capacities and properties. Souls, on this interpretation, are both simple, since each is an image of a single Form, and complex, as the standard tripartite model demands. Three further points are that these souls must be embodied, contrary to some opinions, that they are not subject to a Cartesian Interaction Problem, and that their nature explains the possibility of Recollection. I use several passages of the Timaeus as jumping off points for these arguments, referring to other Platonic dialogues as space allows. I also use a trope-bundle interpretation of the relation between Forms and physical objects as the basis for my interpretation of the soul. Trope-bundle theories have been used to explain the physical world in Plato in the extant scholarship, but they have not been applied to souls.
	Embodied Wisdom: Neuroscience, Trauma, and Practice of the Virtues Jean Keller, College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University
		Research into the neuroscience of trauma complicates Aristotle’s account of the virtues. Trauma can result in a “recalibration of the brain’s alarm system” such that survivors over- or under-respond to stressors. This hyper- or hypo-arousal simulates bad character or incontinence. Neuroscience suggests trauma is better understood as an internally compelled involuntary action involving the autonomic nervous system or Aristotle’s “nutritive part of the soul.” Aristotle states this part of the soul has “no share in human virtue.” Drawing on Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, I argue the ability to settle one’s nervous system is, to use Darcia Narvaez’s language, a baseline condition necessary to exercise the virtues. This research suggests Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean requires more than learning virtuous habits from our earliest years and more than exercising reason-based practical wisdom. It requires, in a variation on Aristotle’s suggestions in the Politics, use of embodied practices to cultivate virtue.
	Enduring Shame Experiences as a Genuine Form of Shame Qiannan Li, University of Minnesota
		The predominant account of shame considers shame feelings to be painful emotions concerned with the failure to attain to certain standards, norms, and ideals. In this paper, I argue that this account is flawed because it fails to account for enduring shame experiences, which are frequently experienced by women and other marginalized groups. The enduring shame experience, as a feeling of finding one’s way of being in the world to be shameful, has unique phenomenological features. It differs from shame episodes and shame dispositions and can occur without a realization of standards and failures. Moreover, I argue that there is insufficient reason to deny that enduring shame experiences are genuine shame experiences. The recognition of the enduring shame experience allows people to see a kind of injustice. That is, the positive and negative values of shame feelings are unequally distributed among different groups of people.
	Enthymeme Reduction in Thirteenth-Century Place Logic Milo Crimi, Occidental College
		One conjecture about thirteenth-century place logic is that it’s aimed toward enthymeme reduction. But many of Peter of Spain’s examples raise doubts about this interpretation—or at least that the system is successful. One such case is “The smith is good; therefore, the knife is good.” Another is “There is a house; therefore, there is a wall.” It isn’t clear that these can be reduced to syllogisms using the resources of Peter’s theory. Here I explore the extent to which enthymeme reduction is possible. This will turn on identifying a shared general structure among the so-called “maxims” of place logic. I’ll then consider two further specifications of this structure: maxims-as-rules and maxims-as-axioms. I’ll show that enthymemes are reducible by maxims-as-rules to a sui generis class of topical inferences and are reducible by maxims-as-axioms to hypothetical syllogisms.
	Entrenchment, Postulation, and Phenomenal Evidence Gordon Haist, University of South Carolina Beaufort
		Attempts to describe properties of induction since Goodman’s “new riddle of induction” show an interesting variety. Goodman based lawlike generalizations on the projectability of “entrenched” predicates; Quine, following that, suggested predicates were entrenched in natural kinds. According to Norton’s material theory of induction, all induction is local, based on facts and not on universal schemas. Facts become material postulates. In the 14th century Gangesa developed a theory of direct perceptual knowledge based on universal-based extraordinary perception. Gangesa’s approach suggests a way to read entrenchment as perceptual, not habitual as with both Goodman and Hume, and material postulates as Gestalt-like facts. If supportable, this would provide induction a phenomenal reading of evidence, which this paper seeks to reexamine.
	Epistemic Virtue Signaling and the Double-Bind of Testimonial Injustice Catharine Saint-Croix, University of Minnesota
		Virtue signaling is “the act of engaging in public moral discourse in order to enhance or preserve one’s moral reputation” (Westra, 2021). But, what about profile pictures framed by “Vaccines work!”? Or anti-vaccine memes echoing the view that “Only sheep believe Big Pharma!”? These actions don’t express moral views—both are empirical (if imprecise). Nevertheless, they serve a similar purpose: influencing the judgments of their audience. But, rather than guiding their audience’s views of the agent’s moral goodness, these guide their views of the agent’s epistemic goodness. They are instances of epistemic virtue signaling (EVS). The first goal of this paper is to offer an account of EVS. I then show that EVS illuminates a double-bind faced by those who suffer from and seek to overcome testimonial injustice. This, in turn, highlights the fact that targets of epistemic injustice not only ought not be responsible for overcoming it, but cannot be.
	Every Good and Perfect Gift Brian Ballard, University of Pittsburgh
		According to traditional theism, every good we enjoy is a gift from God. If this were true, what axiological implications would this have? I argue that it would furnish a complex and multifaceted case for personal pro-theism, the view that God’s existence would be good for us. For instance, one argument I advance is that God, by actively benefiting us, treats us as valuable, and in general, when we are treated as valuable, this contributes to our well-being. However, if every good is a gift from God, there are potential downsides of this we must consider as well, most notably, the debts an dependency we incur. I argue, however, that it is not clear why being in debt to God and dependent on Him would be detrimental for us. Features of debt and dependency that make these conditions undesirable for us are lacking in the case of God.
	Evidence of Fairness Will Fleisher, Georgetown University
		I argue that the major problems for statistical algorithmic fairness criteria stem from an incorrect understanding of their nature. These criteria are primarily used for two purposes: evaluating AI systems and constraining machine learning optimization problems. The former purpose requires treating each criterion as a necessary condition for fairness. The latter use involves treating criteria as sufficient conditions for fairness. Since the criteria are used for both roles, some researchers have treated them as both necessary and sufficient conditions, i.e., as definitions of algorithmic fairness. However, serious problems have been raised for the use of fairness criteria. Under ordinary circumstances, it is impossible to satisfy multiple criteria at the same time. Moreover, there are counterexamples to both the sufficiency and necessity for fairness of each criterion. I argue that we should instead understand fairness criteria as merely providing evidence of fairness. In other words, satisfaction (or violation) of these criteria should be understood as potential evidence of fairness (or bias). Whether a criterion counts as evidence in a particular case will depend on stakeholders’ background knowledge and on the specific features of the task. This evidence account of fairness conditions provides guidance on appropriate uses and limitations of fairness criteria.
	Expected Accuracy and Educated Guesses Gabrielle Kerbel, University of Michigan
		How should we assess the accuracy of our credences? The educated guessing framework, introduced in Horowitz (2019), outlines a model for answering this question in terms of how many true and false guesses are licensed by an agent’s credences. For the framework to succeed, it must account for Truth Value Approximation, the principle that it is better for one’s credence in some proposition P to be closer to the truth value of P. I argue that the guessing framework fails to properly account for Truth Value Approximation, because it only shows that our guesses about self-evaluative statements (and not our guesses about P) do better in these cases. I propose to solve this problem by supplementing the guessing framework with a notion of expected accuracy, and show how the expected accuracy model can be used to properly account for Truth Value Approximation.
	Fittingly Diminished Grief and Relationship Re-Establishment Narrative Dong An, Zhejiang University
		According to Na’aman’s diachronic account of fittingness, self-consuming emotions fittingly diminish as a part of a fitting process. For example, anger fittingly diminishes when anger together with apology constitute a fitting process of moral repair. I argue that this account actually creates a puzzle about grief, a paradigmatic self-consuming emotion. Grief is about the loss of a valuable relationship with the deceased. For the diachronic account to work, grief should be part of a fitting process. However, given that the dead cannot take further actions to change the relationship between her and the alive, grief becomes forever fitting. To face the challenge, I use Goldie’s proposal about multiple perspectives to argue that a specific narrative account of grief that emphasizes the re-establishment of the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased can create room for potential changes. These changes can in turn contribute to the fitting diminution of grief.
	Foucault on Ideology and Social Order Anthony Garruzzo, Columbia University
		In this talk, I reconstruct Michel Foucault’s argument for opposing use of the concept of “ideology” to orient socio-historical analysis. Foucault argues that centering ideology in the analysis of social organization and power obscures the technical and strategic rationality that is essential to processes of power. According to Foucault, social order is established not through ideology but instead through the development and deployment of rational techniques designed to enable the management and coordination of individual and group behaviors. If ideology disposes people to be obedient to social expectations and to accept the status quo of the socio-political order by obscuring aspects of social reality, then it is only one technique of power among countless others and, according to Foucault, one that has little importance in modern societies—especially when compared to the techniques centered in his analyses, including the techniques of surveillance, discipline, criminal rehabilitation, and population management.
	Fundamental Social Categories Sara Bernstein, University of Notre Dame
		Social categories like Black and woman are often assumed to be non-fundamental metaphysical entities. However, I will explore the idea that some social categories are best thought of as fundamental, on a certain conception of fundamentality. Social categories are not best explained by anything “below” or “above” them. There are differences in fundamentality between social categories, and some categories carve social reality at its joints. As a type of fundamental entity, social categories can be causal.
	Fundamentality and Ontology of Quantum Mechanics Bixin Guo, University of Pittsburgh
		There are various competing proposals on the table for the ontology of quantum mechanics (QM) given various interpretations of QM. Most discussions in this debate aim at drawing the fundamental ontology of the world from QM while focusing on the ontology of nonrelativistic particle QM. Since we know that nonrelativistic particle QM is not the fundamental theory, these discussions leave open the question of how its ontology can tell us anything about the fundamental ontology of the world. In this paper, I propose a solution to this problem. I first argue that QM can plausibly be considered as fundamental if it is understood as a framework theory (in contrast to a particular concrete theory). I then argue that we can still draw ontological implications from QM, even though as a framework theory it does not have a unique ontology. To demonstrate that, I focus on Wave Function Realism as an example.
	Gangesha and Goodman: The Grue Paradox Kisor K. Chakrabarti, Independent Scholar
		Goodman argued that the same inductive evidence that may confirm a given empirical hypothesis will also confirm a rival hypothesis with a concocted predicate leading to conflicting predictions. For example, take the hypothesis (1) “all emeralds are green” that may be confirmed by observation of green emeralds and non-observation of non-green emeralds. Now take the predicate grue that means observed as green until now or observed as blue later. The evidence confirming (1) also confirms (2) “all emeralds are grue.” But if (1), the next observed emerald should be green and if (2) that should be blue resulting in conflicting predictions. It seems that any number of predicates like grue may be fabricated jeopardizing any empirical hypothesis. I argue that solutions of this problem offered by Goodman, etc. are unsatisfactory and the solution of Gangesa (13th century Navya Nyaya philosopher) who anticipated the problem is reasonable.
	Gendered Material Objects Helen Han Wei Luo, Columbia University
		Ordinary material objects can exert oppressive and harmful effects regardless of agential or systemic behaviour. Gendered oppression caused by material objects is not only shaped by existing sexist norms and institutions, but in turn reify them by systematically harming women and influencing conceptualizations of gender. In particular, ordinary objects that are not suited for women’s bodies reinforce notions of their natural inferiority and justify their social exclusion. Paradigm cases of particularly pernicious gendered material objects include seatbelts that are only tested on men, prescription medication that are calibrated only for male bodies, and personal protective equipment that do not fit women and pregnant people. By including gendered material objects in the standard feminist lexicon, the feminist egalitarian project is also able to identify solutions: namely, by improving access to objects that promote gender equality and inclusion.
	Great Timing but Disputed Tools Ann Garry, California State University, Los Angeles
		Philosophers giving the Dewey Lecture are charged with reflecting broadly on American philosophy from their own personal intellectual history. In that spirit, I plan to discuss a few issues concerning philosophical methods and boundaries that have troubled me from the early days of feminist philosophy in the 1970s until today. I also want to convey some of the promise and joy of conversations that are generated as new movements of philosophers seek to rethink their discipline from the politics of their everyday lives.
	Homelessness and Liberal Legitimacy geraldine ng, Independent Scholar
		Claims about the injustice of homelessness are commonly grounded in communitarian values: the state is failing to make good on its basic societal responsibilities. But, where a state is based on liberal values, such as the U.S., politics privileges securing the conditions for citizens to exercise their individual agency. My discussion concerns the conceptual foundations of liberalism. I argue that, where homelessness prevails in a nation-state that purports to be liberal, the demands of agency raise questions about its legitimacy. My focal point is Kant’s Rechtslehre. Familiarly, with rights come obligations. I claim that homelessness undermines agency not because an agent’s rights are compromised, but because, in a condition of homelessness, an agent is incapable of discharging the obligations of justice entailed in her natural right. A homeless citizen is un-free. This illustrates the societal aspect of liberal individualism.
	Implicit Attitudes: States, Not Traits Michael Sechman, University of Colorado Boulder
		Edouard Machery argues that implicit attitudes are traits, not states. As Machery acknowledges that his intended target of his critique is one specific version of the state picture (implicit attitude monism), it is worth investigating whether his critique applies with equal force to pluralist versions of the state picture. In this paper, I argue that it does not and, so, Machery fails to establish the superiority of his trait picture over the state picture simpliciter. In support of my position, I develop a novel version of the state pluralist picture and demonstrate that it successfully accounts for the data that motivates Machery’s trait picture.
	In Praise of Responsibility Gap-Fillers Michael Da Silva, University of Southampton
		Responsibility gaps arise where the quanta of responsibility for a state of affairs one can attribute to any set of entities (individuals, collectives, etc.) is non-equivalent to the quanta pre-reflective judgments would seek to attribute somewhere. There is, in other words, a mismatch between philosophically justified and intuitive judgments on the amount of responsibility that can be attributed to specifiable entities. This work explores an underdeveloped aspect of work on responsibility gaps, namely how one should treat individuals who fill gaps, directly or as representatives of group or similar agents (e.g., states, collectives). It argues that such individuals should be praised or compensated for gap-filling. “Gap-fillers” accept responsibility they would not otherwise accrue and attendant costs to fulfill/further goods enjoyed by others. They should be praised for so doing (at least where they do not receive offsetting compensation) and it can be appropriate to compensate them for attendant costs.
	Incas, Aliens, and Anarchists Jesse Spafford, Trinity College Dublin
		Egalitarianism has a levelling down problem: if inequality is unjust, then we must lower everyone’s level of advantage to match that of past persons like the Incas who lived low-quality lives due to limited technology. This paper attempts to solve this problem by modifying Spafford’s recently proposed social anarchist position. This position assigns each person a claim against others using resources in a way that leaves her worse off through no fault of her own, where these claims can be superseded by the establishment of private property. However, Spafford argues that no one can establish property rights because all attempts fail to satisfy the Lockean proviso. This paper argues that property rights should be relativized such that one can establish such rights against some persons but not others. It then argues that we can establish such rights against Incas, thereby negating the conclusion that we owe them a levelled-down distribution.
	Insinuations and Speech Acts Antonio Monaco, Georgia State University
		Insinuations are indirect speech acts done for various reasons: a speaker S may insinuate P (i) because an insinuation is more polite, and S can save her face by non-explicitly saying P (Brown and Levinson 1987; Searle 1975), (ii) because S can deny having insinuated P and avoid the responsibility of explicitly stating P, and (iii) because S perceives to be in a competitive rather than cooperative conversation, and she wants to pursue her interests strategically (Asher and Lascarides 2013; Camp 2018; Lee and Pinker 2010; Pinker et al. 2008). These views assume that to insinuate P, S must also intend to use the deniability of P for dealing with a possible non-cooperative hearer. I want to show that this requirement is too strong and falls short of accounting for cases in which S intentionally performs a deniable indirect speech, but S has no intention to use that deniability.
	Internalism about Testimonial Injustice Matthew Turyn, Cornell University
		Testimonial injustice is usually construed first and foremost as a matter of what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls credibility deficits: attributions of credibility to others at a lower degree than the evidence suggests they deserve. My aim in this paper is to challenge this assumption and to argue that testimonial injustice can occur even when someone attributes an accurate level of credibility to their interlocutor. As such, we should reject what I will call externalism about testimonial injustice: the view that facts external to an agent’s reasoning process—the facts about their interlocutor’s credibility level—are relevant to determinations of whether someone has committed testimonial injustice. I will argue that internalism about testimonial injustice—the view that the only facts relevant to whether an agent has committed testimonial injustice are the facts about the agent’s own reasoning process—can better explain the problem cases for externalism and that we should thus accept internalism.
	Jane Austen, Humility, and the Doctrine of the Mean Eva Dadlez, University of Central Oklahoma
		In his “Jane Austen and the Moralists” Gilbert Ryle identifies Jane Austen as someone who is interested “from the south side in some…theoretical problems about human nature and conduct in which philosophers proper were and are interested from the north side.” Ryle points out that, in Persuasion, Jane Austen presents…”a good rendering of Aristotle’s doctrine of the Mean.” I will argue that Austen offered a thorough exploration of that doctrine in the last two novels she completed. Emma and Persuasion complicate familiar conceptions of humility by showing us what its absence and its superabundance might really look like, and what the consequences of such deficiencies and excesses might be in the everyday world. To be interested in such problems from “the south side” is nonetheless to offer significant insights into a genuinely philosophical set of problems.
	Killjoy Joy: Keeping Our Feminist Minds ‘Switched On’ Lel Jones, University of California, Davis
		There exists a lacunae within the literature on turning off the “feminist mind” to turn on the capacity to enjoy. This sentiment, what I call the “killjoy claim,” takes it that in order to glean joy from pop culture/media, feminists must ignore their feminist knowledge, beliefs, or values. However, there is curiously little said on using the feminist mind for enjoyment. The foundation of these debates rests on the assumption that when we are aware of the problematic nature of pop culture/media, it precludes our ability to enjoy it. The dialectic is factioned into two groups: those who argue the “killjoy” claim is a reason for switching-off our feminist mindset and those who argue it’s a reason for keeping it on. Both groups, however, seem to take the “killjoy” claim itself as true. In this project I give reasons to reject the killjoy claim and discuss why this rejection is important.
	Knowledge-How Dismissal Jules Salomone-Sehr, McGill University Camille Ternier, Independent Scholar
		Epistemic injustice theorists have predominantly focused on the injustices that insult our capacity for knowledge of facts. In this presentation, we join a growing number of philosophers in turning our attention to injustices that target our capacity for knowledge-how and we develop a new concept of epistemic injustice: the concept of know-how dismissal. Know-how dismissal is the injustice you suffer when you are unduly barred from deploying knowledge-how that you possess in some practical domain. To arrive at this concept, we use a method developed by Miranda Fricker: we reflect on our epistemic needs, the social practices we turn to in order to satisfy such needs, as well as the wrongs that knowers might suffer when such practices are distorted by unjust social forces. When applied to knowledge-how, this method reveals that knowers-how can be unfairly preempted from deploying their knowledge-how, a possibility that our concept of know-how dismissal captures.
	Laws of Ground Derek Haderlie, Brigham Young University Jon Litland, University of Texas at Austin
		Many authors have proposed that grounding is closely related to metaphysical laws. In this paper we develop a general theory of grounding laws, proposing that they are generative relations between pluralities of propositions and propositions. We develop the account in an essentialist language; this allows us to state precisely the sense in which grounding is an internal relation and the sense in which grounding might be reduced to laws. We then apply the theory to defend monism about ground; to explicate the sense in which there is no gap between the grounds and the grounded; and to show how moral principles can play a role in explaining particular moral facts.
	Lessons from Anita about Social Justice Rosamond Rhodes, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and The Graduate Center, CUNY
		Having worked closely with Anita Silvers for more than 20 years, I had the opportunity to learn a great deal from her insights and experiences. A good deal of what she taught me came from collaborating with her and Peggy Battin on two editions of our collections of solicited papers in Medicine and Social Justice. Specifically, I learned that justice is not one simple concept from which we can deduce what a just health care system should provide. Instead, as Anita’s wisdom revealed, it is important to consider the actual positions of people and the barriers that they have to grapple with and overcome in order to achieve acceptable outcomes when they need medical interventions. Because people face a variety of different challenges, we need to employ a multiplicity of principles of justice in order to understand what we need to do in order to achieve justice in our society.
	Liberal Legitimacy and Future Citizens Emil Andersson, McGill University
		If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Prima facie, it appears plausible to demand that such actions, in order to be legitimate, should be justifiable to these future citizens. Surprisingly, this possibility has been overlooked in the literature. In this paper I address this neglected issue, and explore how Rawls’s principle can take future citizens into account. I identify two serious problems for the currently dominant interpretation of the principle, and suggest a revision of the view that would make it better equipped to account for the insight that future citizens matter for political legitimacy.
	Logical Consequence and Explicitness: A Case Study Diego Arana, Rutgers University
		In his article “Higher-Order Logic Reconsidered,” Jané argues that second-order canonical consequence is inadequate to axiomatize set theory since it fails to meet a requirement he calls non-interference. Although Jané does not explicitly define this criterion, he provides examples in which it is clearly violated. These give us a rough idea of what this requirement might be and of the reason it is demanded of the background logic of an axiomatic theory. Nevertheless, the inadequacies exhibited in Jané’s examples are significantly different than the case of second-order consequence. In this essay I will consider an alternative diagnosis on what goes wrong in these examples and argue that second-order consequence steers clear of the specific problems exhibited by the examples in question.
	Logical Life and the Puzzle of Ontological Generality Alexander Englert, Princeton University
		Hegel contends that life can be derived from dialectic of the Science of Logic without appeal to empirical examples. From this pure derivation, the category not only possesses—Hegel thinks—necessity, but furthermore ontological generality. Although logical life has received renewed interest in the scholarship, few take Hegel’s claims about its ontological generality seriously. This paper explores the question of what it means, on Hegel’s account, to speak of entities as alive, which traditionally are considered inanimate. I first detail what Hegel means by logical life and then explore what it amount to when instantiated by non-traditional entities. I take up two of Hegel’s own examples, namely, crystals and artworks.
	Making Epistemically Rewarding Relations Bryan Chambliss, Susquehanna University
		Acquaintance is a paradigmatic epistemically rewarding relation (ERR). ERRs like acquaintance are often taken to have two features: they are a part of the natural world, found by thinkers instead of made by their actions, and they are to be understood individualistically in that they fundamentally consist in a relation between an individual thinker and an object. I argue against both claims. Many ERRs are not merely found but made in the sense that they are initiated and maintained by a thinker’s intentional actions. Further, some ERRs are made jointly by the cooperative actions of multiple thinkers, while others are even made collectively by groups of thinkers. These differences between ERRs can further elucidate the differences between shared, collective and joint attention. This discussion not only clarifies the nature of ERRs but illustrates why they are an important tool for understanding the varieties of thinking about objects together.
	Making Philosophy Three-Dimensional: Using Interactive Pedagogy to Bring Students into the World of Philosophy Kyle Thompson, Harvey Mudd College
		I will share engaging activities and assignments I use to make philosophy three-dimensional—i.e., immersive, inviting, and concretely connected to students’ lives. Here are some examples: 1) Kuhn Meets Wordle—after reading Structure, students played that day’s NYT Wordle and considered how the strategies they used analogize to Kuhn’s notion of puzzle-solving within a paradigm; 2) Radical Compassion—after reading Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, students got to interact with a guest speaker who had donated his kidney to a stranger; 3) Free Will and the Multiverse—after exploring free will and Ted Chiang’s fiction, students found themselves in different “universes” on Zoom—i.e., breakout rooms—where they explained how their group navigated a scenario involving a temptation to cheat on a philosophy assignment. In addition to providing examples of interactive pedagogy, I will also share tentative advice in creating innovative activities for one’s own classes.
	Making Sense of Socratic Disobedience: Irony in Plato’s Crito Henry Curcio, Western Michigan University
		Facing the option of escape in the Crito, Socrates personifies the Laws of Athens—through them arguing escape is disobedient and unjust. In the Apology, Socrates state he will disobey the law if it commands him to stop philosophizing (Ap. 29d). These claims appear to be in tension. I provide a solution to this puzzle, arguing the voice of the Laws is not Socrates’. Instead, the Laws are introduced as an ironic mechanism used to mock Crito’s arguments for escape. Mockery is not all, however. By introducing irony, I supply a novel interpretation of what the Laws mean when they demand for Socrates to persuade-or-obey them. This insight explains why Socrates refuses to escape prison despite disagreeing with the Laws. Simply put, escape would violate his mission—described in the Apology. So, a peculiar Socratic disobedience emerges—giving us insight into what Socrates took living justly to entail.
	Making Thinking Critical: Incorporating Debate into Philosophy Courses James Mollison, Purdue University
		Debate is a paradigm of active learning, one that simultaneously develops critical thinking and oral communication skills. Depending on the topic under consideration, debate can concurrently satisfy additional learning outcomes. Debates over salient passages—whether from introductory or advanced texts—promote close and critical reading skills, just as debates about ethical dilemmas cultivate foundational knowledge of ethical theories while examining their applications. Generalizing the point: most learning outcomes can be actively pursued by students alongside critical thinking and oral communication skills by integrating debates into one’s curriculum. In this session, I bring over two decades of experience coaching intercollegiate debate to bear on philosophy instruction. After reviewing several formats and topic-styles that might be incorporated into classes, and after reviewing my own trials in deploying these suggestions, we will discuss how in-class debates might be used in lower- and upper-division, undergraduate courses.
	Medical Ethics and Mindfulness Rich Eva, Baylor University
		Moral and political discourse is difficult. Sometimes opposing arguments feel like personal attacks. We are prone to lash out or shut down. I teach a Medical Ethics course where students are required to debate sensitive subjects like abortion and COVID-19 response measures. What if students entered these debates in a restful state? Can we mitigate their fight or flight responses? This past fall I conducted a trial-run study implementing a “quiet time” before certain in-class debates. During this time students participated in restful activities, including prayer, meditation, sleep, and mindfulness. I wanted to know how quiet time affected their perceptions of the debate. Did they feel more confident, less anxious, or more open to changing their minds? I am curious how other philosophy teachers cultivate restfulness in their own classrooms, and how they might incorporate restful activities.
	Metaphysical Agency and Virtues in Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Activism Roxanne Kurtz, University of Illinois Springfield
		Conceptual engineering and activism demonstrate the existence of metaphysical agency and the need for virtue metaphysics. Conceptual engineers and activists take seriously that concepts shape reality. Rather than taking the world as given, they use the practice and products of metaphysical theorizing to exercise metaphysical agency, with the world as a metaphysical patient that deserves consideration. Metaphysical agents exercise their agency in the metaphysical domain through their capacities to involve metaphysical principles, norms, and theories to reason, to make decisions, and to act to shape their metaphysical outlooks and reality. They are metaphysically responsible and accountable for exercising this agency well. Note that moral and epistemic agency do not suffice to describe the agency of conceptual engineers and activists. For, different kinds of agency admit of different kinds of errors. The performance of conceptual engineers and activists seeking to ameliorate normative problems matters to their success. Thus, we ought to have a theory of virtue metaphysics, to identify virtues of excellent metaphysical agents grounded in the good of making the world a better place.
	Millian Russellianism and the Principle of Acquaintance Paolo Bonardi, Universität Wien
		Russellianism is the doctrine that the semantic content of any sentence in a context of use is a Russellian proposition, i.e., a structured proposition whose basic constituents are properties, relations, functions, and individuals. Millianism is the doctrine that the semantic content of any proper name is just its referent. The Principle of Acquaintance states that if a subject has a (mental) attitude towards a Russellian proposition, then s/he is acquainted with all its constituents. The present paper aims to determine a version of Russell’s Principle of Acquaintance compatible with Salmon’s Millian Russellianism and to defend it from some objections.
	Modal Knowledge for Expressivists Peter Hawke, Lingnan University
		What does “Smith knows it might rain” mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, whereby “Smith knows it might rain” is equivalent to “it is consistent with what Smith’s knows that it will rain” or “Smith doesn’t know that it won’t rain.” Pernicious transparency has direct counter-examples and undermines vanilla principles such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features.
	Moral Principles and Normative Generality Jim Hutchinson, Nazarbayev University
		What are “moral principles”? Many hold that moral norms must meet a generality condition to qualify as principles, and that this can explain why so-called “supervenience generalizations” do not count. I raise two problems for this idea, given the standard account of “generality.” First, the “Incompleteness Problem”: this standard account does not assign any generality at all to a wide range of norms which should qualify as principles. This can be overcome by a natural extension of the standard account. Second, the “Degree Problem”: the notion of “degrees” of generality makes no sense on the standard account, and this disqualifies the sorts of generality conditions that most theorists state and leaves us unable to state any suitable generality condition. I conclude that theorists must either give up thinking of moral principles in terms of a generality condition or seek a new account of generality itself, or of its degrees.
	Moral We-Intentions as Individualistic We-Attitudes Ronald W. Loeffler, Grand Valley State University
		I propose an individualistic reading of Wilfrid Sellars’s account of moral we-intentions, according to which what Sellars, in Science and Metaphysics, calls the intersubjective form of moral we-intentions that p—their distinguishing feature—consists in a token moral we-intention’s involving an implicit first-person plural normative attitude towards the community of rational beings to promote the realization of p. One may I-intend that p, in which case one simply sets the realization of p as a goal—without taking a normative attitude towards anyone else. The intention lacks intersubjective form. Or one may morally we-intend that p, in which case one not only sets the realization of p as a goal but also treats p as what “we rational beings jointly” ought to help realize. The intention has intersubjective form. I defend this proposal against various objections.
	No Science Without Composites Alex LeBrun, University of California, Santa Barbara
		In this paper, I present an indispensability argument for the existence of composite objects. This argument relies on a widely held principle about ontological commitment. Philosophers (Dorr, Sider, Hofweber) have recently debated whether composite are indispensable to our best scientific theories. My argument differs from these in the sense that I consider the role that certain properties play in our scientific theories. I present examples of properties that play essential explanatory roles in our best microbiology, and I argue that these properties are had only by composite objects. My argument is one that philosophers of science and scientifically inclined metaphysicians should take seriously.
	On Racial Disagreements and Racial Realities Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval, University of California, Davis
		An influential variety of social constructionism about race—call it representational constructionism—holds that the existence and nature of each racial group is grounded in the beliefs or belief-like representations about the racial group which are widely available within a society. In this paper, I present a novel objection against representational constructionism. I start by surveying examples of systematic phenomena studied in sociology and psychology wherein reasonable disagreement about individuals’ racial membership arises. These include the phenomena of inverse colorism, class-based discrimination, and hypodescent. Then, I develop the following objection: (1) there is no guarantee that there are society-wide stereotypes about a racial group R which could ground R’s existence; and, in fact, (2) there is reason to doubt that such stereotypes exist for various important features (phenotypical appearances, characteristic behaviors, etc.), since members of different significant milieux systematically vary in their racial categorizations based on these stereotypes.
	On Self-Formation: Salomé and Stein Katharina Kraus, Johns Hopkins University
		The paper explores theories of mental life as developed by Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) and Edith Stein (1891-1942). Both understand the human mind primarily in terms of its temporal development in the course of life. Accordingly, mental life is constituted by the exercise of mental faculties in time, but at the same time it is conditioned by physical and intrapsychic as well as interpersonal contexts of life and action. A key concept for both Salomé and Stein is lived experience (Erleben), which was decisively shaped by Wilhelm Dilthey and also became central in Husserl’s phenomenology. In comparing Stein’s and Salomé’s theories, three levels of mental life and their respective temporal structure are examined: the basal stream of consciousness composed of lived experiences, causally conditioned psychic events, and the unfolding of a goal-directed mental being in the whole of life.
	On the History of Chinese Analytic Philosophy and Its Contribution to Modern Chinese Philosophy Yi Jiang, Shanxi University
		With the eastward expansion of Western philosophy, analytic philosophy entered Mainland China, conflicted and merged with traditional Chinese philosophy, changed the historical trends of the Chinese intellectual tradition, and resulted in a new picture of contemporary Chinese philosophy. The historical investigation and philosophical explanation of the history of analytic philosophy in Mainland China in the 20th century are essential to studying contemporary Chinese philosophy. The study of analytic philosophy in Mainland China can be roughly divided into two categories. The first attempts a historical description of analytic philosophy in Mainland China in the 20th century. The second explores the methodological significance and theoretical construction of analytic philosophy in Chinese philosophy. This article attempts to show chronicle the history of analytic philosophy entering Mainland China and to reveal how the interaction between analytic philosophy and Chinese philosophy resulted in the contemporary form of the latter.
	Overriding Normative-Work and the Collapse of Logical Pluralism Kory Matteoli, University of California, Davis
		I argue that Blake-Turner is wrong when he argues that the logical pluralist can avoid the collapse objection to logical pluralism if they adopt the notion that a logic does genuine normative-work iff it makes a difference to what an agent is entitled or obligated to do. Rather it is what our logics tell us what we should, all things considered, actually do that determines whether a logic does genuine normative-work. If this is the case, then the logical pluralist doesn’t avoid collapse.
	Persons as Organisms and the Pregnancy Problem: An Upshot for Abortion Debates Evangelian Collings, University of Pittsburgh
		Abortion is often evaluated as a case of killing or of death. To evaluate such a death, we must know what entity it is that is said to have died. Without an understanding of the kind of thing that perishes, the morality of abortion cannot be assessed. “Animalism” is the philosophical view that we are human animals: it answers questions about the persistence of persons with respect to the continuity of our physical, biological bodies. Animalism’s usefulness for the abortion literature has depended on its assumption that the foster is an individual organism. However a closer look at the definitions of “organism” suggest that the foster is better seen as a part of the gravida, rather than an organism unto itself. The answer “human animal” cannot answer the question of what dies in abortion, leaving the abortion literature in search of a different theory.
	Phenomenal Anti-Imperialism Mason Westfall, Washington University in St. Louis
		“Phenomenal Imperialism” is the thesis that perception immediately justifies only those contents that correspond to contents presented perceptually. In this paper, I argue that Phenomenal Imperialism is false. Often, perception immediately justifies judgments that outstrip what is perceptually presented. This result has important implications for our theory of how perception confers immediate justification. In particular, if Phenomenal Imperialism is false, then some prominent explanations of perceptual justification—those involving the distinctive “phenomenal force” of perceptual presentation, for example—are incorrect. If we have immediate justification to judge contents that are not presented at all, then evidently this justification is not explained by these contents being presented at all, regardless of the associated “phenomenal force.” Instead, I suggest we should adopt a virtue theoretic explanation of perceptual justification. The virtue theoretic explanation avoids the problem I identify, and, for this reason, is preferable.
	Philosophy Education in the U.S.-Mexico Border: Towards a Grounded Pedagogy Manuela Gomez, El Paso Community College
		This paper presents findings from a five-year qualitative study that explores the lived experiences of seven Mexican American philosophy students in their journeys of becoming philosophers on the U.S.-Mexico border. I examine what it means to them to be a philosopher and their process of becoming one in a transnational context. Through a phenomenological analysis of testimonies and observations, I utilize the frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality, and figured worlds to analyze their lived experiences and identities. Findings reveal that philosophy is a tool for understanding the complexity of the participants’ border identities. Additionally, they disclose the pedagogical factors and mentorship resources that allow them to succeed. I introduce the concept of Desenterrando Conocimientos (Unearthing Knowledge) as a process of inquiry and praxis that reveals and produces knowledge of the U.S.-Mexico border and as a grounded pedagogical tool to put philosophy into action.
	Philosophy for Figuring Out What’s Next Angela Barnes, Arizona State University Laura Gurskey, University of Southern California
		With the rise of university programs aimed at teaching philosophy to highschoolers, and growing awareness that philosophy has value outside of its more traditional contexts, it’s important to consider ways in which our pedagogical methods should be altered to best meet the needs of today’s pre-college demographic. With access to more information than we could have dreamed of in high school, these kids are overwhelmed. Everyone is making claims on their attention and their actions. As teachers, we can play an important role if we engage with them where they are at: considering what they are going to do when they step out into the world. What should they believe? What should they make of their lives? In this session, we explore a few lessons we’ve learned on this theme, and unpack some strategies that we’ve found helpful for the pre-college context.
	Post-Critical Platonism: The Speculative Metaphysics of Michael Polanyi Martin Turkis, Independent Scholar
		I argue that Michael Polanyi, Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher best known for his theory of tacit knowing, is a Platonist and that the metaphysical underpinnings of his epistemological work provide a launch pad for a post-critical Platonism—a viable, speculative metaphysical program relevant to discussions of realism on both sides of the analytic/continental divide. I develop core metaphysical concepts from Polanyi’s work, especially the comprehensive entity, explain how Polanyi’s Platonist metaphysics fit within his understanding of the tradition of Copernicus, show how Polanyi is a Platonist with respect to universals, and sketch out the tripartite contours of a post-critical Platonism: an Eleatic metaphysical hierarchy tracked by causal potency, a flat ontology of comprehensive entities, and a mereology that explains the relationships of comprehensive entities to the subsidiary particulars of which they are constituted.
	Practical Nous of Universal Minor Premises: A New Interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics 6.11 Russell Helder, University of California, Berkeley
		Nous, according to Aristotle, is the state of the soul that grasps the starting points of theoretical reasoning. In Nicomachean Ethics 6.11, Aristotle describes a practical analogue of nous that grasps the starting points of practical reasoning. Commentators have latched onto this passage as evidence that Aristotle thinks reason can determine our ends. Some say that practical nous leads to an intellectual grasp of the end via induction; I argue that practical nous is not part of induction but rather a product of induction. Others say that practical nous directly grasps the end; I argue that, unexpectedly, practical nous is a grasp of a universal minor premise. Practical nous is thus not of the end, but rather of how to achieve the end. Nicomachean Ethics 6.11 is therefore consonant with Aristotle’s claim that virtue makes the end right while practical wisdom makes the things that are for the end right.
	Pragmatic Encroachment on Standards of Proof Karina Ortiz Villa, University of California, San Diego
		There are two myths regarding the law: (1) when presented with compelling evidence, a judge will always decide the outcome of cases correctly; and (2) fact-finders know exactly what standards of proof mean. More often than not, fact-finders weigh evidence above and beyond what the standard of proof calls for creating systemic problems in the application of law and decision-making. What is clear is that the practical has a crucial role to play in legal proof that has not been clarified. In this paper, I argue that we should understand the standard of proofs as pragmatic encroachment on justification rather than contextualist. In §2, I outline these two senses of pragmatic encroachment. In §3, I describe standards of proof and show the best interpretation is pragmatic encroachment on justification. In §4, I consider two potential objections and respond to them. In §5, I conclude with potential practical and policy considerations.
	Pragmatist Relational Equality: Equality as a Process of Equal Treatment Colin Koopman, University of Oregon
		Though philosophical pragmatism hovers in the background of much recent egalitarian political theory, its potentially distinctive contributions to egalitarianism remain under-surveyed. This paper develops a full pragmatist orientation for the (already partly pragmatist) theory of relational equality associated with Elizabeth Anderson’s work. Bringing together pragmatism and relationality, it is argued that relational equality is best understood as a process and practice of equal treatment. Equal treatment, rightly construed, captures well what equality, understood pragmatically as a process, requires. After presenting an argument for relational equality as requiring a process of equal treatment, the paper considers two implications of this view at odds with current theories of relational egalitarianism. First, pragmatism rejects the claim that equality requires attitudes of equal regard above and beyond actual practices of treatment as an equal. Second, pragmatism endorses an institutionalist rather than individualist account of the agent responsible for equality.
	Preannounced Lie and the Intention to Deceive Kok Yong Lee, Independent Scholar
		The traditional analysis of lying endorses “the deception thesis,” i.e., A lies to B in uttering that p only if by uttering that p, A intends to deceive B into believing that p. In this paper, I construct a novel counterexample to the deception thesis based on the phenomenon of preannounced lying. When a lie is announced in advance, the speaker and the hearer may commonly know that the speaker is lying. This may further result in the speaker not believing that the hearer will be deceived by her lie. But if the speaker does not believe that the hearer will be deceived by her lie, she may lack the intention to deceive the hearer into believing that p in the first place. Hence, some cases of preannounced lying are counterexamples to the deception thesis.
	Privacy as Protection from Domination Sophia Wushanley, University of Michigan
		In today’s data-driven world, our personal information is collected constantly, and demands on theories of privacy are higher than ever. The aim of this paper is to argue that any complete account of privacy must capture the crucial link between privacy and non-domination. Whatever privacy is, its ability to protect individuals from domination is one of its core justifications, and an essential feature of privacy protections is their function as barriers to domination. I take Andrei Marmor’s account—which argues that privacy is justified by our interest in controlling how we present ourselves to others—as a starting point. I object to the self-presentation view because it excludes the privacy concerns brought about by big data’s novel information-flows, specifically in situations involving anonymity and abuse of power. I show that the missing element is a theorization of the link between lack of privacy and vulnerability to abuse of power.
	Race and Parfitian Survival Ezekiel Vergara, University of Pennsylvania
		In the metaphysics of persons, Derek Parfit prominently argued that the relationship of survival (or Relation-R) matters between persons over time. However, how does race affect Relation-R? To answer this question, I first reconstruct Parfit’s account of Relation-R, contrasting it with numerical personal identity. Then, I present several thought experiments to showcase that race creates two discount rates that affect persistence over time. First, I defend a race-based, societal discount rate, according to which, whether one persists depends not only on psychological factors, but on the societal differences between races. Second, I argue for the existence of a race-based, subjective discount rate. According to this second discount rate, whether one persists turns on one’s own subjective, personal identification with their racial identity. To conclude, I examine how these two discount rates might affect anti-racist social policy, focusing on the case of reparations.
	Re-Imagining the Quality of Life Lorraine Besser, Middlebury College
		In recent papers, Besser defends the intrinsic value of the interesting, and the intrinsic disvalue of the boring. Her arguments introduce two claims with important implications for discussions of the quality of life. The first is that it comes to experiences, there’s more value at stake than pleasure alone. The second is that there is value to cognitive engagement itself, even when it is unstructured by desires and/or reasons. In this paper, I’ll explore the important consequences these conclusions have for how we appraise the quality of life of subjects with dramatically impaired cognitive capacities (such as patients with advanced Alzheimer’s or patients in a persistent vegetive state). I’ll examine whether such groups are capable of experiencing the interesting and by extension, what degrees of self-awareness are required to experience the kind of cognitive engagement at stake in interesting experiences.
	Reflexive Testimonial Injustice, Disorientation, and ADHD Sabrina P. Leeds, Georgetown University
		If testimonial injustice is when identity prejudice causes a hearer to attribute a credibility deficit to a speaker, then reflexive testimonial injustice is when internalized identity prejudice causes an individual to attribute a credibility deficit to themself. In this paper, I argue that, due to compulsory able-bodiedness, people with ADHD often fall prey to reflexive testimonial injustice in understanding their own experience and communicating it to others. Additionally, I suggest that such instances of reflexive testimonial injustice can be interpreted as inevitably doomed attempts to reject the disorientation of coming to realize that you are disabled and to reorient yourself within an ableist society. Ultimately, I aim to illustrate that this kind of reflexive testimonial injustice, grounded in learned ableism, might help to explain why so many people with ADHD are hesitant (1) to recognize ADHD as a disability and (2) even if they do, to identify as disabled themselves.
	Reframing Epistemic Partiality: Acceptance and the Cognitive Work of Friendship Laura Soter, Duke University
		Your friend has been accused of something serious, and the evidence is not in their favor. Epistemic partialists argue that when the epistemic chips are down, we sometimes owe friends belief against the evidence. Opponents counter that honest, authentic friendship requires rational belief about our friends, and (perhaps more pointedly) that we cannot have doxastic duties of friendship because we lack the ability to believe against the evidence for moral or practical reasons. I argue the debate is at a stalemate because it targets the wrong doxastic attitude: what we owe our friends are not duties of belief but rather of acceptance—characterized as the cognitive work of regulating the characteristic downstream role of belief in guiding cognition, reasoning, and action. I argue that reframing this debate around acceptance captures our doxastic obligations of friendship without eliding the importance of rational belief or overlooking the problem of doxastic control.
	Reparations, Recognition, and the Restoration of Relational Equality Alexander Motchoulski, University of Virginia
		I defend a relational egalitarian theory of reparations for historical injustice, according to which reparations are owed to persons who are descendants of victims of injustice in order to achieve relational equality among persons alive today. I lay out the following desiderata of a theory of historical reparations: (i) sensitivity to wrongdoing, the duty to provide reparations must be related to past wrongdoing; (ii) reparations supersession, the theory must explain how claims to reparations might dissipate over time; (iii) burden justification, the theory must explain why people alive today ought to bear the burden of providing reparations; and (iv) reparations legitimacy, the theory must provide a justification of policies of reparations that can be legitimately enacted in a democratic society. I then elaborate on the concept of relational equality and show that duties of reparations grounded in duties to achieve relational equality satisfy all of the above desiderata.
	Resisting Moral Encroachment Leena Abdelrahim, University of Toronto
		Defenders of moral encroachment argue that the epistemic status of a belief can depend on its moral features. On one view, the relevant moral factor is the degree to which a belief can cause harm if acted on. This view is supposed to explain the problem with racial profiling. I argue that we need not appeal to moral considerations, rather the primary harm in cases of forming beliefs on the basis of racial profiling tends to stem either from an appeal to race as the best indicator of behaviour. This is an epistemic flaw which gives rise to moral harm. More generally my argument is that moral harms can alert us to epistemic flaws in our reasoning, and morally loaded cases can therefore be useful for illuminating epistemic flaws that tend to beset our reasoning with statistics.
	Rights Against the World Gopal Sreenivasan, Duke University
		For philosophers, rights against the world are equivalent to rights in rem. Contrary to what H.L.A. Hart (1955) thought, however, this does not make them equivalent to general rights. Moreover, despite what “in rem” means in Latin, rights against the world include more than property rights. For example, they also include moral human rights. Rights in rem contrast with rights in personam, whereas general rights contrast with special rights. After explaining each of these contrasts, I show how the two distinctions come apart. To do this, I follow Waldron’s (1988) strategy of using property rights as justified by Locke’s theory of property as a case of rights in rem that are also special rights. Rights against the world can therefore be either general rights or special rights, as long as their correlative duties are borne by “everyone,” in what I call the dynamic sense.
	Russellian Objections Against Modal Meinongianism Joe Petraroli, Tufts University
		In “On Denoting,” Russell claimed everything exists. Meinong claimed some things do not exist. If Russell is correct, one can use the quantifier ?x to express existence. ?x cannot be used if Meinong is correct, so a substitute like the predicate Ex must be used. Russell raised serious objections against Meinong’s object theory and most declared him the winner of the debate. But Priest claims his theory modal Meinongianism supports Meinong’s thesis and is immune to Russell’s objections. I examine Russell’s objections against Meinong from excluded middle and non-contradiction. I consider replies from the modal Meinongian, and ways Russell’s objections might be reformulated against modal Meinongianism. I conclude that Priest’s modal Meinongianism is no less vulnerable to Russell’s objections than Meinong’s object theory.
	Scientific Evidence and the Duty to Disclose Conor Mayo-Wilson, University of Washington
		We argue that several theories of statistical evidence—including versions of likelihoodism and Bayesian confirmation theory—answer the ethical question, “When is a scientist obliged to disclose experimental data or analysis thereof?”
	Second-Order Quantification and Ontological Commitment Sanggu Lee, Syracuse University
		In this paper, I argue that Cameron’s dilemma against the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment fails. This dilemma may be stated in the following inconsistent triad: (1) the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment is true, (2) second-order quantification is sui generis, and (3) reality is independent of us. Cameron’s dilemma goes as follows. Either Quineans who accept (1) have to reject (2) or (3). They must reject (2) because (1) and (3) together contradict (2). Given (1) and (3), second-order quantification must reduce to first-order quantification. Otherwise, they must reject (3) because (1) and (2) together contradict (3). Given (1) and (2), what exists is dependent on our language. However, since (3) is arguably uncontroversial, and (2) is assumed, (1) has to go. I suggest two possible Quinean responses to the dilemma. I then anticipate and address two objections to the second response.
	Structuralism Saves Fundamental Individuals Alexander Jackson, Boise State University
		Shamik Dasgupta (2009, 2017) argues that there are no fundamental individuals. Given the qualitative structure the world exemplifies, it makes no difference to anything else which individuals play which roles. So fundamental individuals would be “explanatory idlers,” argues Dasgupta. I propose a new way to formulate “structuralism” about fundamental individuals. Dasgupta’s argument shows that we should be structuralists about fundamental individuals, not that we should dispense with them. A theory of the fundamental facts is structuralist about some objects iff: the theory uses only new names for them. New names are pure “theoretical terms” of the particular theory of the fundamental facts (Lewis 1970). Statements of structuralist theories that posit the same qualitative structure, but use different new names, are mere notional variants. So structuralism does not posit explanatorily idle facts about which individuals are playing which roles. Structuralism is not subject to Dasgupta’s complaint.
	Stubborn Social Emotions and Their Harms Kaitlyn Creasy, California State University, San Bernardino
		In this project, I investigate a species of emotional recalcitrance, a phenomenon in which an individual’s emotional states stubbornly endure in the face of beliefs that conflict with them. Specifically, I examine obstinately self-deprecating social emotions: persistent negative self-regarding emotions that conflict with self-affirming, reflectively endorsed beliefs about oneself, and result from socially or culturally inculcated beliefs, norms, and habits of feeling. (For example, due to features of the patriarchal sociocultural context she inhabits, a woman might persist in feeling ashamed of her assertiveness even though she believes it to be a good quality of hers.) I argue that these emotions constitute a unique, under-theorized ethical harm which can be captured in two main points. First, this variety of emotional recalcitrance disrupts one’s ability to self-determine. Second, this species of emotional recalcitrance impedes self-respect, which is critical for an individual’s flourishing.
	Supererogation, Dual-Role Views, and Defeasible Logic Aleks Knoks, University of Luxembourg David Streit, University of Luxembourg
		The core idea behind dual-role views is that normative reasons can relate to actions in two fundamentally distinct ways: a reason can either require conformity, or it can justify an action without requiring that it be taken. This paper sets up a simple formal model of the way reasons relate to actions and supplements it with the core idea of dual-role views. The model is used to provide a unified treatment of several puzzles about supererogation, including Horton’s All or Nothing Problem and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. The model also shows how accounts that prioritize reasons over other notions can distinguish between oughts, requirements, and permissions.
	Teaching/Learning Apprenticeships: Pedagogical Opportunities for Undergraduate Philosophy Students Ann J. Cahill, Elon University Billie Waller, Elon University
		This co-presentation by an undergraduate philosophy major and a philosophy instructor will introduce the audience to a curricular innovation: Teaching/Learning Apprenticeships. TLA’s provide the opportunity for undergraduate students to develop pedagogical skills and knowledge by substantially contributing to teaching an undergraduate course and studying the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). The co-presenters will describe the general structure of TLA’s, including current institutional requirements and standards, before describing in detail one TLA that they have participated in. The presentation will conclude a reflection on the pedagogical value of TLA’s for all involved: the apprentice, the students in the class, and the lead instructor.
	Teresa’s Demons: Teresa of Ávila’s Influence on the Cartesian Skeptical Scenario of Demonic Deception Jan Forsman, University of Iowa
		Recent research in late renaissance and early modern meditative genre has showcased the similarity of Descartes’s Meditations to St. Teresa of Ávila’s El Castillo Interior. Particular influence has been seen in the skeptical scenario of demonic deception: Both Descartes’s and Teresa’s meditators struggle against deceiving demonic powers, which confound the meditators and temporarily halt the meditative progress. Yet, despite the influence, there are likewise clear differences between Teresa’s and Descartes’s approaches which deserve a closer look, for placing the influence properly. Similarly, little attention has thus far been given to Teresa’s demonic deception’s relation to the possibility of deception by God, which was a hotly debated matter in late medieval and early renaissance philosophy. I analyze Teresa’s use of deceptive demons and its influence on the Cartesian deceiving demon, while contrasting demonic deception with the skeptical scenario of deceiving God, highlighting differences in the two approaches.
	That’s What I Mean: Madhyamaka, Meaning, and Truth Laura Guerrero, College of William and Mary
		Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophers have a difficult time explaining the sense in which cognitions can be considered accurate or statements true given their global anti-realist metaphysics. Having completely undermined the possibility of grounding truth in any kind of metaphysical foundation, Madhyamaka philosophers often appeal to convention to explain why we accept certain cognitions or statements as true while rejecting others. However, appealing to convention threatens to relativize truth and its associated norms in ways that make the Buddha’s teachings themselves difficult to defend. It also leaves such Buddhists with little ground from which to criticize conventional social norms that perpetuate suffering and injustice. In this paper, I will critically evaluate the idea that pramāṇa, or ways of knowing, can be accepted and used merely conventionally to differentiate between genuine and pseudo knowledge and rescue Madhyamaka from the charge of relativism.
	The Agent-Directed Account of Epistemic Blame Alexandra Cunningham, Washington University in St. Louis
		We regularly blame others for their beliefs or failures to live up to a set of recognized epistemic norms. When we do, we are epistemically blaming. In this paper, I outline a set of desiderata for any account of epistemic blame. Next, I propose a novel account of epistemic blame, and demonstrate that it satisfies each desideratum. On my view, which I call the Agent-Directed Account, there are two components to epistemic blame: (1) a judgment of epistemic blameworthiness (i.e., a judgment that someone has culpably committed an epistemic wrongdoing), and (2) a set of agent-directed reactive dispositions that manifest themselves as a result of that judgment. The novel portion of this view is that the reactive dispositions associated with epistemic blame are necessarily agent-directed, as opposed to state-of-affairs-directed. I argue that it is only by way of making this distinction that we can accommodate all five of our desiderata.
	The Artistic Rights of Photographers Daniel Star, Boston University
		This forms part of a book project on the ethics of photography. Often discussions of the ethics of photography focus on the rights of photojournalists. Here the focus will instead be on the defeasible rights of photographers insofar as they are engaged in artistic endeavors. An account of the moral rights of artists in general will be developed. A useful, albeit imperfect analogy involves parental rights. We may understand such rights to be somewhat contingent, and grounded in various respects in the wellbeing of parents themselves, the wellbeing of children, and the wellbeing of everyone in society at large. When we turn from considering the role of parents to considering the role of artists, difficulties in narrowly specifying this role may be avoided by acknowledging the particular autonomy-based interests of artists with respect to artistic endeavors. Thinking about photography helps us understand the practical importance and limits of artistic rights.
	The Concept of Unliveability: Frantz Fanon’s ‘The North African Syndrome’ (1952) Sujaya Dhanvantari, University of Guelph
		This paper locates the concept of unliveability in a broader history of systemic racism and colonial oppression. I argue for making this history integral for understanding the social and political dimensions of today’s psychopathologies. This paper asks: What is revealed when critiques of racial and colonial oppression are centered in the concept of unliveability? How is intergenerational pain and trauma reflected in the bodily and psychic health of racialized and colonized peoples? By expanding the racial and colonial categories of unliveability through a reading of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 essay, “The North African Syndrome,” I argue for an understanding of unliveability vis-à-vis the unredressed historical trauma of racialization and colonization. My contention is that Fanon’s theorization of unliveability enables us to devise new tools for addressing the impact of colonial legacies on contemporary institutions of care. Fanon, I propose, provides a racial and colonial lineage for conceptualizing unliveability today.
	The Construction of Emotion: A Reply to Berislav Marušic’s ‘Puzzle of Accommodation’ Parker Rose, University of California, Los Angeles
		In On the Temporality of Emotions, Berislav Marušic identifies a puzzle known as the “puzzle of accommodation.” The puzzle is that the diminution of grief over time seems reasonable, yet the reasons for our grief remain unchanged over time. Given the persistence of the reasons for grieving, why can our grief reasonably diminish? In this paper, I present a novel solution to the puzzle of accommodation. The view I present—the Constructionist View—garners insight from the “constructionist” theory of emotion in the psychological literature. According to the view, emotions are composed of parts, including “core affect” and “judgment.” I argue that what reasonably diminishes is core affect, not judgment, while the reasons that remain unchanged support the judgment, not the affect. Furthermore, in showing that core affect is inherently physiological, I also show that the diminution is neither reasonable nor unreasonable, but rather arational.
	The Dissociative Model of Habit: On the Relationship Between Habit, Attention, and Agency Laura Bickel, University of British Columbia
		This paper aims to defend the dissociative model of habit that defines habit-driven action in terms of attention. I will begin by revisiting the associative model of habit that reduces habit-driven action to an automatically performed stimulus-response sequence. I then identify two issues concerning (i) the defining feature of habit and (ii) the relationship between habit and attention. If we accept the associative view, then habit-driven action lacks attention and thus, provides a counterexample to Wayne Wu’s action-centered theory of attention. I respond to these problems by introducing the dissociative model of habit. Building on the latest findings in the field of affective cognitive neuroscience, I propose that every habit-guided action is attended to in a way that is mediated by experiential history. Having sketched my account, I maintain that the defining feature of habit is attention and thus, habit-driven action is compatible with Wu’s theory of attention.
	The Disunity of Courage Charles Starkey, Clemson University
		In this paper I argue that courage is heterogenous, and that recognizing the disunity of courage and its different forms is crucial because it can clarify and resolve important debates about the use of the terms “courage” and “courageous” and can thus further both research on courage and public debate. I focus on two distinctions. The first distinction is between conventional and individual courage. Conventional courage involves acts that most people would find difficult, and individual courage involves acts that are difficult for the actor but not typically difficult for others. The second distinction, which I will consider in more detail than the first is between process and accolade courage. Courage attributions in the case of process courage refer to the psychological processes of the actor, whereas courage attributions with accolade courage function to commend the act and actor rather than describe the processes underlying the act.
	The Dutch Book Norm Theo Korzukhin, Cornell University
		Dutch book arguments are widely used in decision theory, but there is no agreement on how they work. Further, there are many scenarios in which one is exploitable and yet not to blame for the sure loss. This, among other things, has lead some to claim that Dutch books “merely dramatize” some further, underlying inconsistency, or are “mere symptoms” of irrationality and, as such, not ipso facto irrational. I defend an anti-skeptical proposal according to which Dutch books are ipso facto irrational. Further, I argue that the Dutch book norm (to the effect that it is irrational to be Dutch-booked) can be understood as a norm of coherence: that there is a set of attitudes that can plausibly be thought to be incoherent and is such that one has these attitudes if and only if one is Dutch-bookable.
	The Duty to Protect Collective Autonomy from Addictive Technology Tim Aylsworth, Florida International University Clinton Castro, Florida International University
		There has been much discussion of the moral and prudential reasons we have to restructure our relationship with technology in virtue of the harmful effects it has on us as individuals. But if we restrict our focus to the ways that technology can harm us as individuals, we overlook morally significant harms to groups qua groups. We argue that addictive technology weakens our capacity to act autonomously as a group. We defend this claim by arguing that the certain features of the attention economy (e.g., that it contributes to polarization ) threaten to undermine the legitimacy of political institutions.
	The Equanimity Approach to Sagehood in the Zhuangzi Lianghua Zhou, University of Michigan
		Zhuangzi famously argues that one can achieve sagehood by establishing a kind of equanimity. In the secondary literature, scholars have proposed many different readings of Zhuangzi’s equanimity approach to sagehood, but all focus on his treatment of human affects, disputing over whether his sage must eliminate all or at least some human affects. I argue for a richer and more subtle reading than theirs, according to which for Zhuangzi one can achieve equanimity and therefore sagehood by forgetting, in a particular order, all psychological states that constitute the shaped mind, including human perceptions and distinctions that ground most human affects (except for fated affects), as well as the love of life, which, being a fated affect, is the primary cause for all these other psychological states. To fully achieve equanimity further requires one to see the cosmic order as being single and eternal, involving no changes of life and death.
	The Flaw of Generics Katja Vogt, Columbia University
		The truth of generics such as “ducks lay eggs” is often taken to be intuitive. For the Stoics, this intuition is flawed. Qua thoughts, they argue, generics are neither true nor false. Qua utterances, generics are not bivalently truth-apt. The Stoics ascribe the following flaw to generics: generics predicate something of a kind that is only true of some instances of the kind and that can only be predicated of “somethings.” Given the Stoic rejection of Forms, forms, and essences, kinds are not somethings. And yet, the Stoics are greatly interested in the fact that generics can seem true to us. Their study is part of a normative approach in logic. The virtues of non-precipitacy and non-randomness, as well as other logical virtues, are needed in order to avoid flawed reasoning, including assent to generics.
	The Idea of Mechanistic Nature Mathis Koschel, University of Southern California
		I address the longstanding problem in Kant scholarship of how the concept of mechanism is to be understood. In relation to the antinomy about organisms, this concept even gives rise to a dilemma. Either we take Kant to simply adopt 18th century orthodoxy with respect to that concept, but then the antinomy would not be necessary. Or its necessity is vouchsafed by identifying mechanism with causality, but then mechanism would be constitutive of experience and we could not even perceive organisms. I argue that Kant’s usage of the concept of mechanism in formulating the antinomy has to be understood in light of our idea of nature as thoroughly, materially unified. Such a unification is only possible according to the mechanistic laws laid out in the MFNS. In this way, the dilemma can be avoided and it can be explained why Kant formulates the antinomy in the way he does.
	The Introduction to Philosophy Essay at Scale Eric de Araujo, Purdue University
		For many, teaching students to write a philosophy essay is an essential part of an introduction to philosophy course. There are good reasons for this. Among others, it engages students in the practice of professional philosophy and develops analytic skills that transfer to other disciplines. Several constraints, like lack of grading support, higher teaching loads, and larger classes can make providing formative feedback on and assessment of these essays untenable for instructors. I present how, through the use of educational technology tools and several teaching strategies, I was able to retain an essay assignment in the design of an online introduction to philosophy course for over 100 students. Through scaffolding, modeling, peer-review, and self-reflection students learned the process of writing a philosophy essay by evaluating essays themselves.
	The Joint Commitment Account of Collective Religious Belief Tiffany Zhu, University of California, Irvine
		Epistemological debates centering on religious belief have largely focused on individual believers and the cognitive attitudes they hold. I suggest that the attitude that groups of people collectively hold toward religious propositions is a phenomenon that warrants its own discussion. I propose a conception of collective religious belief under Margaret Gilbert’s joint commitment framework involving plural subjects. On this account, a group of people may jointly commit to believing that p as a body to give rise to the group religious belief that p. This framework explains some puzzling features of individual religious attitudes that have been noted in the literature. It examines religious belief qua social phenomenon. It sheds light on how religious belief functions at the communal level and how it might influence individual cognitive attitudes and behavior. Finally, it provides a robust framework for understanding the puzzling yet recalcitrant phenomenon of collective religious hypocrisy.
	The Lady Doth Protest Too Little: Moral Protest and Forgiveness Hannah Winckler-Olick, Cornell University
		In this paper, I argue that Pamela Hieronymi’s moral protest view of forgiveness is incomplete. Hieronymi’s argues that authored events communicate claims about appropriate and allowable treatment of others is. When an event tells us that the author does not respect our basic rights, the claim poses a threat to our future. Resentment marks claims as wrong. According to Hieronymi, we forgive when we judge that our resentment is no longer necessary as a protest against a threat because it has disappeared—in the most paradigmatic cases, because the perpetrator has apologized. I argue that in the cases of publicly appraisable egregious wrongs, a threat persists even after the perpetrator has genuinely apologized. I will argue that we need to distinguish between types of threats such that forgiveness can occur when personal, participant-involving threats go away, but also such that we can maintain a protest against the remaining threatening claim.
	The Modal Argument Against Social Grounding Samuele Chilovi, University of California, Los Angeles
		Epstein (2015, 2019a, 2109b) presents a powerful and influential argument for the introduction of a novel relation of metaphysical determination he calls “anchoring” and, correlatively, against identifying anchoring with metaphysical grounding. The argument aims to establish this conclusion by showing that anchoring and grounding have different properties: anchoring “exports” whereas grounding does not, as it is “world-bound.” As a consequence, they have different extensions at different worlds, and so must be different relations, since they relate different things. In this paper, I provide a novel diagnosis of where the argument goes wrong. Contrary to common lore, I argue that anchoring may be a form of grounding even if all the argument’s premises are true. What Epstein’s argument does provide, however, is a compelling reason for thinking that social rules play no role in the metaphysical explanation of particular social facts.
	The Moral Revolt Against Moral Realism Ryan Lam, University of Texas at Austin
		Moral realists claim that morality is neither created nor influenced by our thinking about it. Recently, several philosophers have proposed separate but related moral objections to this realist view. These objections are based on charges of how realism promotes passive forms of moral inquiry, the realist’s improper conditionalization of morality on moral facts, and the realist’s tendency to “pander” to the patterns of some moral realm. In this paper, I first consider various interpretations of moral objections to realism. I then suggest a novel reason for thinking that realism is not threatened by any such objections: moral objections to realism are self-undermining, because they implicitly appeal to a stance-independent construal of immorality. I conclude by proposing one way that these objections can still improve our understanding of why things morally matter.
	The Perils of Approximate Ontology Laura Ruetsche, University of Michigan
		The mathematical centerpiece of many physical theories is a Lagrangian, a function that determines what histories are possible for a system of interest, and underwrites empirical predictions concerning that system. Imagine that there’s some Lagrangian we trust. Should that induce us to endorse an ontology? If so, what ontology, and how is it related to our trustworthy Lagrangian? I’ll examine these questions in the context of quantum field theoretic Lagrangians. When these Lagrangians are understood as “merely effective,” a variety of approximations figure in the physics they frame. I’ll suggest that these approximations complicate, and even confound, the project of reading an ontology off of (or into) a trustworthy Lagrangian. Complicated and confounded as well is the aspiration to strike a realist stance toward that ontology.
	The Possibilities Aren’t Endless If You Have a Life Jason Bowers, North Carolina Central University Meg Wallace, University of Kentucky
		A person is modally endless when they have an infinite modal extent, just as a person is immortal when they have an infinite temporal extent. We seem to be modally endless. Yet if we are, a puzzle about immortality arises at the modal level: it seems that any two people must have indistinguishable modal profiles, and this entails that our lives lack a specific sort of value that we would normally expect—and want—them to have. Because of its inspiration in literature, we call this Borges’s Modal Worry. After explaining the problem, we present a thesis—modal existentialism—as a possible solution.
	The Presupposition Strategy and the Two Truths John Spackman, Middlebury College
		The presupposition strategy is a method for avoiding the apparent contradictions arising from the negative tetralemmas that appear in Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which involve a rejection of four statements: p, not p, both p and not p, and neither p nor not p. According to this approach, we can preserve the logical consistency of these statements by viewing each as making a false presupposition, namely that there are entities that have svabhāva, intrinsic nature, and therefore as semantically deficient. The viability of the presupposition strategy is threatened, however, by recent debates concerning presupposition, which question whether presupposition is a real phenomenon at all, and whether, if real, it is pragmatic rather than semantic. This paper argues for two claims. First, the statements of the tetralemmas are best seen as making presuppositions that are pragmatic rather than semantic. Second, however, this fact does not undermine the viability of the presupposition strategy.
	The Privileged Access of the Underprivileged Teed Rockwell, Sonoma State University
		This paper discusses the differences and similarities between socioeconomic privilege and epistemic privilege. In discussions of identity politics, a lack of socioeconomic privilege gives one a kind of epistemic privilege similar to the privileged access often discussed in philosophy of mind debates. This is why privileged people can be accused of gaslighting when they question the assertions of marginalized people. I argue that marginalized people do have a kind of privileged access to experiences of oppression, but that this privileged access does not make their judgments on their oppression to be infallible. In certain cases, however, it does make their judgments incorrigible: i.e., they may sometimes be wrong, but they should be trusted ceteris paribus because they are more likely than anyone else to be right. These judgments should also only be considered incorrigible on questions of value (what is offensive, etc.) not on questions of fact.
	The Reasons of Love in Plato’s Phaedrus Van Tu, California State University, San Bernardino
		This paper examines the conception of love (eros) as madness (mania) defended by Socrates in the palinode of Plato’s Phaedrus (234e9-257b6). While madness is thought to be a pathological condition to be avoided in the popular imagination, Socrates insists that love, the greatest good for humans, has its origin in madness (244a6). I argue that this conception of love presents a challenge to an influential view developed by Gregory Vlastos, among others, that the Platonic lover is a rational egoist solely motivated by reasons of self-betterment. This is because decisions reached in a manic mental state cannot result from sober analysis and calculation guided by self-serving reasons. As Plato explains, the madness of love compels the lover to prioritize the well-being of the beloved above her own. Yet, it is by adopting genuine other-regarding concerns for the beloved that the lover achieves the ultimate object of love: contemplation of Beauty.
	The Role of Demonstration in Instructive Knowledge in Locke Jesse Loi, Ohio State University
		An objection to Locke, raised by both historic (Leibniz, Hume, and Henry Lee) and contemporary philosophers (Carson 2006) is that moral knowledge can only be trifling, not instructive, if Locke has moral demonstrations. In the Essay, Locke never explicitly takes a stand on this matter but has been interpreted as thinking that moral knowledge is instructive. I aim to show why Locke would have thought that moral knowledge could be instructive by offering a reading of his theory of demonstration. In particular, I show that a need for demonstration is a necessary (and plausibly sufficient) condition for instructive knowledge and that Locke’s attempts to show that moral knowledge can be demonstrated is evidence that Locke aimed for moral knowledge to be instructive. In other words, instructive knowledge is that which can only be acquired through instruction and not intuition.
	The Second Sailing as Dialogue: Rereading Phaedo 99c ff. Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire, University of Chicago
		This paper is a reappraisal Socrates’ famous “second sailing” (δεύτεροςπλοῦς) in the Phaedo. First, I contend that scholars have not taken the specifics of the second sailing metaphor seriously enough in their understanding of this Socratic reorientation. The kind of second-best that the δεύτερος πλοῦς implies is one in which the best option is unavailable for reasons that are external and not internal to the philosopher. Second, I argue that the δεύτεροςπλοῦς is not formal causality or to the hypothetical method, but the turn to λόγοι as images of beings and, in extenso, the turn to dialogue as the mode of philosophical inquiry par excellence. Forms and hypotheses suppose and depend upon that prior reorientation according to speeches. Third, I argue that the πρῶτος πλοῦς is not teleology but an impossible direct empirical inquiry, and thus, that the second sailing does not abandon teleology altogether.
	The Simple Function of Telling Allan Hazlett, Washington University in St. Louis
		Why do we tell each other things, and why do we want to be told things? What is the function of the practice of sharing information by telling? According to the information-sharing account of the function of telling, the function of telling is sharing information. In this paper I argue against the information-sharing account by arguing that telling has a function distinct from the function of sharing information: the function of establishing trust. We sometimes tell people things because we want them to trust us and we sometimes want people to tell us things because we want to trust them. Telling sometimes serves our social needs to trust and be trusted, not merely our intellectual need to know.
	The Simplicity of Physical Laws Eddy Keming Chen, University of California, San Diego
		Physical laws are strikingly simple, although there is no a priori reason they must be so. I propose that nomic realists of all types (Humeans and non-Humeans) should accept that simplicity is a fundamental epistemic guide for discovering and evaluating candidate physical laws. This principle of simplicity clarifies and solves several problems of nomic realism and simplicity. A consequence is that the often-cited epistemic advantage of Humeanism over non-Humeanism is exaggerated, undercutting an influential epistemological argument for Humeanism.
	The Spread of Online Hate: Complex Contagion Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, University of Manchester
		Our time is marked by a resurgence of hate that threatens to re-entrench oppression. Social media has contributed to this by acting as a medium through which hate speech is spread. How should we model the spread of hate? This paper considers two models. First, I consider a simple contagion model. In this model, hate spreads like a virus through a social network. This model, however, fails to capture the fact that people don’t acquire hate from a single infectious contact. Instead it builds up in a person’s beliefs and attitudes through time until the infection reaches a level where the subject themselves becomes a generator of hate speech. Second, to accommodate this, I consider an alternative model known as complex contagion. I argue that not only is a complex contagion model better, but it can be used to explain why certain features of social media cause it to be a promoter of hate.
	The Two Faces of Working Memory Javier Gomez-Lavin, Purdue University
		Recent work argues that working memory, a cornerstone of cognitive psychology that describes our ability to retain and transform information it in the service of behavior, is unexplanatory. This paper examines working memory’s roots to help diagnose its explanatory posture and begin its rehabilitation. By “going back to basics” and deploying a “substitutional methodology,” I argue that working memory’s explanatory failures stem from three conceptual mistakes: (1) working memory, through an act of philosophical laundering, uncritically incorporates philosophical concepts, including volition, into itself. (2) working memory, since its earliest iterations, has unhelpfully blended philosophically-inflected person-level terms with sub-personal processes. And, (3) theoretical treatments of working memory have focused on its outward-facing explanations of person-level cognitive behavior at the exclusion of inner-facing, scientifically meticulous work involved in cataloguing how brains’ maintain and manipulate information. Rehabilitating working memory requires privileging this inner-facing aspect and decoupling the concept from a robust explanatory role.
	The Unconscious Generation of Testimonial Knowledge Natalia Nealon, University of California, Irvine
		Within the philosophy of testimony there is a controversy regarding the extent at which knowledge may be considered “testimonially based.” Transmission theorists limit testimonial knowledge to cases where the content and epistemic status of a hearer’s testimonial belief matches the speaker’s testimonial utterance. Generativists, on the other hand, argue that this type of identity condition is not necessary for testimonial knowledge and allow for a much broader scope. Here, I predominantly focus on Sanford Goldberg’s “Testimonially-Based Knowledge from False Testimony” where Goldberg demonstrates the role of conscious inference and background knowledge in the generation of testimonial knowledge. This paper expands on current generativist accounts to include unconscious processes, specifically, unconscious attention: I argue that testimonial knowledge can be generated reliably at the unconscious level via attention selection, guided by epistemic motivations that are modulated by epistemic needs.
	The Unity of Marx’s Concept of Alienated Labor Pascal Brixel, Clemson University
		Marx famously argues that labor under capitalism is alienated. What does this mean? Marx defines alienated labor as “external” to the worker, and he suggests that it is unfulfilling, unfree, and egoistically motivated. But is there really a single concept with a meaningful unity here, or merely a cluster of unrelated problems? I argue that the concept does possess a genuine unity. The key feature of alienated labor, I argue, is that it is motivated not by its product but by an extrinsic incentive. This motivational structure of alienated labor explains the sense in which such labor is external to the worker, and also explains why it is necessarily unfulfilling, unfree, and egoistically motivated. In this way, we can recover from Marx’s work a concept of alienated labor which is genuinely unified—and which, perhaps surprisingly, does not depend for its content on a substantive conception of human nature at all.
	The Untouchables: The Medium in Aristotle’s Theory of Perception Rosemary Twomey, Queens College
		Discussions of the role of the medium in Aristotle’s theory of perception typically address what kind of change the medium undergoes. I ask why he posits a medium in the first place. The question arises most vividly in the case of touch, since, like the word “touch,” the Greek word haphê, can also characterize non-perceptual physical contact. Why suppose touch has a medium? It has been argued that Aristotle insists on touch being mediated for the sake of parsimony. I will argue instead that the presence of a medium is essential to his account of perception as a change that is the taking on of form without matter. The role of the medium also helps to explain how at least some perceptible qualities are not only distant objects of perception but can also alter the perceiver’s body, contra Sarah Broadie.
	The Veridical View of Virtual Reality Casey Landers, Texas State University
		What kinds of properties do we visually experience in virtual reality (VR)? Is visual experience in VR veridical or illusory? I map out three theories that give different sets of answers to these and more questions about visual experience in VR. The Illusion View says that visual experience in VR is fundamentally illusory, and is likely the most intuitive and widely-held view about perceptual experience in VR. The Digital Realist view says that visual experience in VR is veridical because we accurately visually experience real digital objects and properties, and is defended by David Chalmers. The third view says that visual experience in VR is veridical because we accurately visually experience gestalt properties, which has not been explicitly defended yet. I aim to cash out this view and show how it provides a novel and interesting set of responses to our questions about visual experience in VR.
	The Wear and Tear of Things: Towards Marx’s Entropic Materialism Omar Quinonez, Washington and Lee University
		The nature of Marx’s materialism remains largely shrouded in the philosophical assumptions of the twentieth century. What follows will reconsider Marx’s turn to the material, with especial attention to his use of the German term Verschleiß in his study of capital, translated as “wear and tear” or sometimes “deterioration.” My view is that his approach to materiality arises from an appreciation of entropy, in particular through the wear and tear of physical life. An entropic universe is that in which order must continuously be reinforced to prevent what otherwise would be increasing disintegration. I base this view here on a close reading of Marx descriptions of the materiality of things. Together, these examples illustrate Marx’s entropic approach to materialism, where materiality describes physical life’s tendency to fall apart or disintegrate, moving from order to disorder, if no effort is made to prevent it.
	The Wrong in Negligence John Oberdiek, Rutgers University
		The tort of negligence comprises the following elements: injury, duty, breach, and actual and proximate cause. As torts are understood to be wrongs, it seems to follow that there is a wrong if and only if all of the elements of the tort of negligence are satisfied. It seems to follow, then, that the wrong of negligence is constituted by the completed tort of negligence. This is the conclusion that I wish to challenge here. I shall contend that the wrong of negligence does not require the kind of legally cognizable injury that the tort of negligence plainly requires. Causing a material harm to another is not a prerequisite for wronging them. Instead, one wrongs another when one breaches the duty of care that one owes to them.
	The Wrong of Colonization and the Claims of Future Generations Paul Garofalo, University of Southern California
		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.
	This Is a Sheet of Paper: Wittgenstein and Prajñakaramati on Sense Jed Forman, Simpson College
		In the Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a modal theory of sense. Propositions make sense when they picture possible states of affairs at the exclusion of others (Wittgenstein 2009, §2.201-2.202). However, this entails that logical propositions—those propositions that describe all possibilities—are senseless (2009, §6.1-6.11). This seems odd, since it means that adherence to senseless rules determines propositions’ sense (2009, §6.54 & §7). Wittgenstein argues that this concession avoids a vicious regress (2009, §2.0211). I argue that we can avoid this absurdum. To make my case, I borrow from the thought of the Indian Buddhist thinker Prajñakaramati (950-1030 CE). Prajñakaramati shares Wittgenstein’s modal theory of sense. But he argues that sense is established by sensible conventions, not senseless logical propositions (Vaidya 1960, 190). He thus offers a viable resource to rehabilitate Wittgenstein’s theory. In the end, we must accept a regress, but one that does not amount to Wittgenstein’s fears.
	Throwing the Embryos Out with the Bathwater? A Novel Evaluation of Discarding Surplus Embryos Megan Kitts, University of Colorado Boulder
		It is common practice in the United States to discard extra embryos that exist as a result of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Here, I will defend the thesis that it is impermissible to discard these surplus embryos. My primary aims are to detail a unique and compelling case for the non-instrumental value of embryos to show that discarding surplus embryos generally fails to recognize this value. I will do so by arguing that embryos are symbolically valuable in the same way that human corpses are valuable. I will first establish the symbolic value of corpses. I then argue that embryos are similarly valuable and that value can provide reason to treat embryos in particular respectful ways. Specifically, I argue that discarding embryos is inconsistent with recognizing this value.
	Time: The Number of Change Counted by the Soul—on Aristotle’s Physics IV.10-14 Huaiyuan Zhang, Pennsylvania State University
		Aristotle’s analysis of time in Physics IV.10-14 ends in aporia. Unlike the scholarly attempts that try to dissolve the aporias in Aristotle’s system, this paper listens to the reasons for his indecision facing aporias. Aristotle dialectically establishes his definition of time beginning from the aporias of time. In particular, the conception of time as a discrete number rather than a continuous process reflects his emphasis on the function of the soul in the generation of time. While there is no time without the soul and theoretically there can be the soul without time, evidence in On the Soul elucidates that the latter is not true to Aristotle’s worldview. Crucially, Aristotle has not settled the aporia regarding the relationship between nows contained in the first aporia. By characterizing the double nature of nows using a psychological-arithmetic analogy and a physical-geometric analogy, Aristotle preempts Heidegger’s criticism of the reification of time.
	Tolerance Without Analyticity James Andrew Smith, Indiana University Bloomington
		Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance says we are free to adopt any linguistic rules we wish, but we must share these rules in order to agree or disagree. Spurred by recent work on Carnap, I ask: is there a principle recognizably similar to Tolerance, and consonant with Carnap’s motivation for it, without requiring linguistic rules or analyticity? Yes. On my appropriation of Tolerance, it says: (1) It is epistemically permissible for anyone to hold fixed any sentence S as true—to believe S is true and reject any reason for believing S is not true and (2) my use of S does not mean the same as another’s use of S if one of us holds S fixed and the other does not believe S is true. In articulating this Carnap-inspired view, I hope to shed new light on the epistemological and semantic debates surrounding Carnap’s work, and to provoke Quineans.
	Toward a Pluralist Account of Belief Edward Mark, University of California, Irvine
		The philosophical use of the term “belief” remains the subject of some controversy with dispositionalists, representationalists, and commitment theorists using the term to pick out distinct and conflicting concepts. It is clear that each of these theories of belief possesses some explanatory power. However, it is equally clear that each faces substantial challenges as well with no single theory gaining the upper hand. How ought we reconcile these various views? I argue for a pluralist answer by noting that the relations that bind together the various quotidian and philosophical uses of the term “belief” are what Wittgenstein would have called relations of family resemblance. What allows our belief talk to having meaning is not that the usage is guided by a single, well circumscribed concept of belief; rather, our usage is guided by a cluster of concepts that are uniquely interrelated.
	Transparency, Ideality, and Epistemic Possibility Peter Hawke, Lingnan University
		We outline three puzzles concerning ideal modal knowledge; that is, concerning knowledge of claims involving epistemic possibility, held by a logically and introspectively ideal agent. We conclude that it is untenable to endorse certain combinations of intuitively attractive theses on the interaction between epistemic possibility and ideal knowledge. We then explore one strategy for resolving the puzzles, incorporating, inter alia, preservation of the classic thesis that knowledge entails true belief and of a certain “transparency” thesis for reducing ideal modal knowledge to epistemic states without modal content, while ejecting an initially attractive transparency thesis for ideal modal ignorance. We outline and criticize a sophisticated attempt in the recent literature to partially execute this strategy: the safety semantics of Beddor and Goldstein (2021). Finally, we present a novel semantic theory that demonstrably succeeds in executing the strategy in question: stable acceptance semantics.
	Two Kinds of Reference Ayoob Shahmoradi, University of California, San Diego
		I present a distinction between (what I call) “independent mental reference” versus “dependent mental reference.” Subject s dependently refers to object o iff s refers to o and his reference too succeeds in virtue of standing in an appropriate relation to some s* who is able to refer to o. By contrast, s independently refers to o iff s refers to o but his reference succeeds without relying on any other subject’s referential abilities. I use this distinction to resolve the disagreement between Fregean and Kripkean theories of reference. While Fregeans typically believe that one cannot refer to some object o unless one is able to uniquely individuate o, Kripke and his followers have argued that this is not true. I show that Kripke’s cases involving reference via proper names all fall under the category of dependent reference. This category also involves many of Donnellan’s cases which, according to him, reference succeeds when the subject mis-characterizes the referent. None of these cases, I argue, shows that mental reference does not require one to uniquely individuate the referent. Instead what is shown is that if some subject s* is in a position to refer to o, then s can also refer to o without having the ability to uniquely individuate o as long as s stands in some appropriate relation to s*. That is, s can dependently refer to o even if s cannot uniquely individuate o. However, this does not entail, nor does it suggest, that s can independently refer to o even if s fails to uniquely individuate o. I also explain how this distinction explains some puzzling cases.
	Two Ways of Discerning Reasons: A Puzzle about Theory and Method in Ethics Stephen Marrone, University of Virginia
		This paper examines two popular ways of discerning reasons in ethical theory. The first invokes a formal condition for distinguishing between considerations that do and do not count: if I have a reason to do something, then anyone who finds themselves in a sufficiently similar situation also has this reason. The second makes substantive claims about when reasons are morally relevant. The paper then argues that each of these ways of representing reasons artificially excludes an under-explored class of human experiences, activities and relationships that properly feature as reasons in actual people’s lives. Next, it shows why this exclusion represents a serious methodological failing. First, if there are important human pursuits whose value is systematically misrepresented by the way theorists think about reasons, then the substantive conclusions about the reasons we have to undertake such endeavors will be correspondingly stunted. Second, it opens an important and oft-ignored gap between the reasons we have in personal moral deliberation and those we can offer as interpersonal justification. Finally, it lights the way toward a methodological explanation of why philosophical theorizing about ethics is often marginalized or even dismissed by those outside the field.
	Understanding and Respect: Limiting Empathy Sarah Vernallis, University of California, Berkeley
		Empathy is a popular fix-it for problems from polarization to interpersonal blaming. Feeling “seen” by others is considered a deeply important good. This paper cautions against too complete an empathy. I identify two crucial values that motivate empathetic efforts: a desire to care for others by offering our understanding and a desire to respect the perspective and experience of another as theirs, without projecting ourselves onto them. Taking a simulationist account of empathy and imagination as my target, I argue that too exhaustive an understanding of another jeopardizes the value of respect. I motivate by example a number of moral hazards that lurk in the realm of exhaustive understanding. My examples all involve accurate, non-critical, exhaustive understandings of another to avoid issues surrounding incorrect or negative judgments of others. Even these positive understandings of another can run the risk of: manipulation, triggering the objective stance, condescension, and invasion of privacy.
	Unfortunate Formative Circumstances and Strawsonian Accounts of Blame Andrés Abugattas, Northwestern University
		It is widely accepted by philosophers and non-philosophers that a person’s unfortunate formative circumstances may count as reasons against blaming her—provided that there is some explanatory connection between such a tragic past and her condemnable action. Some maintain that accounts of blame based on P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” cannot satisfactorily explain this widely accepted fact about blame. A well-known source of these criticisms is Gary Watson’s “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil.” In my paper, I argue for a way in which Strawsonian accounts of blame can provide a natural response to criticisms in the style of Watson. My main focus will be the criticism that, when attempting to deal with unfortunate formative circumstances, these accounts open the door for pervasive skepticism about blame. I will also argue that this particular discussion paves the way for responding to related criticisms and some misinterpretations of the Strawsonian project.
	Universally Quantified Propositions in Stoic Logic Simon Shogry, University of Oxford
		In intro logic class, we learn that universal propositions like “All men are mortal” can be expressed as conditionals with a variable bound by a universal quantifier (“For all x, if x is a man, then x is mortal”). Although they do not employ variables for this purpose, ancient Stoic logicians also recommend reformulating universals as conditionals in contexts where rigor and precision are paramount. This paper explores the logical and metaphysical motivations driving the Stoics to propose this reformulation. I survey the use of conditionals with universal import as premises in Stoic arguments and suggest that Seneca—a Roman Stoic not otherwise known for a keen interest in logic—shows awareness of the equivalence between universals and certain kinds of conditionals and flags it as a point to be mastered by the Stoic moral progressor.
	We Can Trust AI and Sometimes That’s Okay Elizabeth Stewart, Howard University
		Can we trust AI? Many philosophers conclude that we cannot because AI lacks the interpersonal features necessary for trust. This conclusion can be understood in three distinct ways: as a conceptual claim about the nature of trust, an empirical claim about how humans act, and a normative claim about how humans ought to extend trust. In this paper, I argue that we should focus on the normative claim. Through an analogy with empathy, I show that we can retain the conceptual understanding of trust as fundamentally interpersonal while acknowledging the empirical possibility that people may extend this attitude to AIs. Thus, we should understand the claim that we cannot trust AIs as a normative claim. However, we should not answer the question of whether to trust AI with a blanket “no.” Our answer, instead, should depend on what it is that we are trusting AIs to do.
	What a Shame She ‘Went Mad’: Righteous Anger, Madness, and Disability (In)Justice Erica Bigelow, University of Washington
		In this paper, I explore the ways that rereading righteous anger—anger spurred by injustice—as Madness makes the angry subject vulnerable to some epistemic and affective injustices on the basis of their newfound proximity to psychiatric disability or Madness. I begin by exploring the phenomenon of righteous anger, drawing from recent works by theorists including Myshia Cherry and Amia Srinivasan to consider what makes a particular instance of anger justified. Then, in my final two argumentative moves, I explore (1) the ways that righteous anger becomes reread as Madness and, (2) the kinds of injustices, namely epistemic and affective, that this rereading enables. Much of these two discussions hinges on anger being read as irrational, or Mad, and rationality being understood as a component of sanity. Thus, when the righteously angry are portrayed as Mad, their thoughts and experiences become liable to dismissal.
	What Is Indigenous Kinship Ethics?: Visibilizing Indigenous Kinship Ethics in the Discipline of Philosophy Áila O’Loughlin, University of Minnesota
		Indigenous Kinship Ethics is a major normative ethical theory developed in the discipline of American Indian and Indigenous Studies without due attention in the discipline of philosophy. The purpose of this essay is to provide a primer text on Indigenous Kinship Ethics (IKE) for philosophers and the philosophically-inclined. In Part One: What is Indigenous Kinship Ethics?, I provide an overview of five key tenets of Indigenous Kinship Ethics; and, In Part Two: What kind of relationships are we talking about when we practice Kinship?, I consider four facets of healthy Relationality in the ethical theory of IKE. In Part Three: Apprehending IKE by Comparative Analysis, I compare components of the theories of Kantianism and Existential Ethics with the IKE theory to situate Indigenous Kinship Ethics alongside other major normative theories. Preceding this three-part primer, I provide some historical context for working with Indigenous Kinship Ethics in the discipline of philosophy.
	What Lyric Poetry Shows Us about the Fiction-Nonfiction Distinction Hannah Kim, Macalester College
		Poets, readers, and philosophers all disagree on whether lyric poems are fiction or nonfiction. After discussing reasons to think of lyric poems as either fiction or nonfiction, I consider another prevalent intuition that lyric poems are neither and draw a few lessons from taking that intuition seriously: only works that represent states of affairs qualify to be either fiction or nonfiction; and we only ask about a work’s status if we’re unclear about what we’re meant to do with the represented states of affairs. These lessons push us towards a normative understanding of the fiction-nonfiction distinction where a work’s status isn’t about any inherent features of the work but about the expectations consumers bring to the work. I conclude by introducing a new category, non-nonfiction, works whose content don’t aim at truthfulness but don’t invite fiction-like engagements. A thought experiment is offered as an example of non-nonfiction.
	When Structuralism Meets Inferentialism Chanwoo Lee, University of California, Davis
		In this paper, I ask how structuralism in philosophy of mathematics can benefit from embracing inferentialism about mathematical terms, i.e., the metasemantic position that the meanings of mathematical terms are determined by their inferential roles. Inferentialism offers a solution to an influential argument that, based on the assertory-algebraic distinction of mathematical axioms, you cannot be “structuralist all the way down.” I argue that inferentialism helps secure the “contentfulness” of axioms without limiting the scope of structuralism, which makes structuralism thoroughgoing and thereby theoretically more virtuous. Conversely, I also discuss how this inferentialist solution can be defended against the backdrop of structuralism. Thus, structuralists can, and have a reason to, accept inferentialism.
	Why Am I Me and Not Someone Else? The Non-Trivial Problem of Personal Identity and Consciousness Deniz Satik, Harvard University
		The goal of this paper is to show that the question “why are my experiences live from my perspective and not someone else’s perspective?” is a meaningful and non-trivial question. Answering this question has originally been alleged to be an issue for substance dualists by Benj Hellie: if the locus, or center, of one’s conscious experiences is a non-physical “soul-pellet,” then it is unclear why this locus is associated with one subject of experience and not with another. I argue that this question is equally problematic for non-reductive physicalists as well. I first appeal to the notion of a locus of consciousness for a subject of experience, which is the center of one’s conscious mental states. I provide three thought experiments to demonstrate that one’s locus, or unique point-of-view in the world, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient part of their personal identity.
	Why Go Effective? Michael Miller, University of Toronto
		Quantum field theories can be understood as effective theories, that is, as theories with an explicit restriction on their domain of applicability. An important class of quantum field theories must be understood in this way in order to be well-defined. Perhaps surprisingly, the currently available evidence suggests that this class includes the Standard Model of particle physics, our best effort at a fundamental description of microphysical reality. In this talk, I will argue that this result is indeed forced upon us, but for reasons different than one sometimes encounters in the literature, and I will consider how it bears on the project of using our best physics as a guide for our metaphysics.
	Zetetic Harms Daniel Friedman, Stanford University
		To achieve many of our most important goals as inquirers we need one another. This fact, for better or for worse necessitates our participation in group inquiries. It also raises a question: what do we owe those with whom we inquire? In this paper, I offer part of an answer to this question by focusing on the harms we can suffer in our capacities qua inquirer. The conception of “zetetic harm” I develop bears important parallels to recent discussions of epistemic injustice and doxastic wronging. Importantly, it is not excused by holding evidence about the epistemic vices a co-inquirer possesses. The presence of zetetic harms also serves to elucidate a design-specification of sorts for group inquiries—an opportunity for all relevant inquirers to contribute. This, in turn, has ramifications for understanding social groups and pushes us towards increased inclusivity across our institutions.