Philosophy

Our discourse about fiction seems to pull us in different directions. On the one hand, Sherlock Holmes does not exist, on the other he was created by Conan Doyle. I argue that the best approach is to admit that fictional names are ambiguous, having both a referring and a non-referring use. I motivate and defend this proposal by looking at other cases of metonymic transfer.

The department will hold its 8th Annual In-house Graduate Philosophy Conference on Friday and Saturday, October 16 and 17, 2015. 

The purpose of the event is to give students the chance to present and discuss their research and learn about each others' work. It’ll also give us the perfect opportunity to welcome our new students.

In the talk it is argued that we should be pluralists about self-knowledge. What that means is, first, that we should acknowledge that there are cases of genuinely first-personal, as well as of third-personal self-knowledge. Second, that the latter depend on the application of a variety of epistemic methods. Third, that the correct account of the former, in fact, should dispense with any substantial
epistemology and embrace constitutivism. Finally, the latter has different sources depending on the kind of mental state at issue.

In this talk, I will compare two versions of irrealism about normativity: non-cognitivism, according to which normative judgements do not represent the world, and the error theory, according to which normative judgements do represent the world but always do so inaccurately. I will argue that non-cognitivism is incompatible with the thought that when two people make conflicting normative judgements, at most one of these judgements is correct. By contrast, I will argue, the error theory is compatible with this thought.