"Ancient Fallacies," Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Durham, September 21-23, 2011.

Greek philosophers 'invented' the discipline known as 'logic', the study and classification of valid forms of argument and inference (the 'invention' is usually attributed to Aristotle, but less systematic reflections on logical issues can be traced back at least to Plato). Since its beginning and throughout antiquity, this inquiry remained intimately connected to the investigation, diagnosis and classification of forms of argument that are invalid or otherwise unsound, and especially of those forms of argument which, despite their invalidity, somehow appear to be valid and thus can easily induce in error. To be able to spot and unmask 'fallacies' in someone else's argument was particularly crucial in a context in which philosophy itself had an intrinsic dialectical nature, and fallacy was often used consciously or 'sophistically' to win the debate or put one's rival into a corner. The conference will investigate ancient theories of fallacies and sophisms, practices and examples of fallacious argumentation, and philosophical attitudes towards them.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/classics/events/upcoming_events/?eventno=10391

"Between Scientists and Citizens: Assessing Expertise in Policy Controversies," Iowa State University, June 1-2, 2012.

Keynote speakers:

Sally Jackson, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

Massimo Pigliucci, Lehman College, CUNY

We are increasingly dependent on advice from experts in making decisions in our personal, professional, and civic lives. But as our dependence on experts has grown, new media have broken down the institutional barriers between the technical, personal and civic realms, and we are inundated with purported science from all sides. Many share a sense that science has lost its "rightful place" in our deliberations. Grappling with this cluster of problems will require collaboration across disciplines: among rhetorical and communication theorists studying the practices and norms of public discourse, philosophers interested in the informal logic of everyday reasoning and in the theory of deliberative democracy, and science studies scholars examining the intersections between the social worlds of scientists and citizens.

For this conference, we invite work from across the disciplines focused on argumentation, reasoning, communication and deliberation, with special emphasis on:
• lay assessment of expertise and expert testimony
• detection of and response to distorted science and "manufactured controversy"
• pedagogies for developing critical thinking about science in controversies
• roles scientists and scientific information play in civic deliberations and policy-making
• transformation of arguments as they travel between technical, personal and civic spheres
• expert testimony as a source of knowledge
• roles of traditional journalism, new media, "boundary organizations" and "trading zones" in constructing public knowledge of science
• design of institutions for providing trustworthy advice on controversial issues
• special problems of communicating scientific information in health, organizational, legal, crisis, risk and other contexts

 

https://sites.google.com/site/gpssarg/

"Perspectivalism," Universiteit Ghent, January 19-20, 2012.

"Nothing dictates whether the skies shall be marked off into constellations or other objects. We have to make what we find, be it the Great Dipper, Sirius, food, fuel, or a stereo system." (Nelson Goodman)

Various philosophers have claimed that facts of a certain sort somehow depend on our perspective on the matter. It has for example been suggested that causal facts, temporal facts, moral facts, facts concerning existence, identity, boundaries, etc. are perspective-dependent. Such a position goes under various names: perspectivalism, anti-realism, metaphysical relativism. This workshop aims at reviewing new arguments for and against.

Example questions: (i) What does perspective-dependence amount to? (ii) What sort of facts are perspective-dependent? (iii) Does perspectivalism entail some sort of relativism? (iv) Is perspectivalism coherent?

http://www.philosophy.ugent.be/index.php?id=278&type=content

Fourth Conference, Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies, Pennsylvania State University, May 10-12, 2012.

We welcome new participants and perspectives from across the academy and outside it that provide feminist discussion on any topic in epistemologies, methodologies, metaphysics, or science studies. Note the following broad themes of recent and ongoing interest:

• Practicing & teaching science as a feminist
• Gender, justice & climate change
• Liberatory approaches to science policy
• Feminist perspectives on cognition, logic, argumentation & rhetoric
• Liberatory methodologies
• Knowledges of resistance
• Experience, authority & ignorance
• Science, technology & the state
• Public philosophy

Proposals must be submitted using the EasyChair conference system. Please register at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=femmss4. Enter an abstract of 250-300 words plus bibliography in the “abstract” section, then 3-10 keywords in “keywords” space. Upload a CV of no more than 3 pages in .pdf format or Word (.doc or .docx) into the space for a “paper.” Submissions are due by August 1. (If you have any difficulty with the system contact Cate: hundleby@uwindsor.ca.)

Shermer, Michael. "Stephen Hawking's Radical Philosophy of Science." BIG QUESTIONS ONLINE November 23, 2010.

Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow.  The Grand Design.  New York: Bantom, 2010.

The models generated by biochemical processes in our brains constitute “reality.” None of us can ever be completely sure that the world really is as it appears, or if our minds have unconsciously imposed a misleading pattern on the data. I call this belief-dependent realism. In my forthcoming book, The Believing Brain, I demonstrate the myriad ways that our beliefs shape, influence, and even control everything we think, do, and say about the world. The power of belief is so strong that we typically form our beliefs first, then construct a rationale for holding those beliefs after the fact. I claim that the only escape from this epistemological trap is science. Flawed as it may be because it is conducted by scientists who have their own set of beliefs determining their reality, science itself has a set of methods to bypass the cognitive biases that so cripple our grasp of the reality that really does exist out there.

According to the University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking, however, not even science can pull us out of such belief dependency. In his new book, The Grand Design, co-authored with the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking presents a philosophy of science he calls “model-dependent realism,” which is based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events and assume that the models match reality (even if they do not), and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, Hawking and Mlodinow claim that “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” . . .

Visit: http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/michael-shermer/stephen-hawking%E2%80%99s-radical-philosophy-of-science.

"Knowledge / Culture / Social Change," Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, November 7-9, 2011.

The humanities and social sciences today struggle to come to terms with the explosion of knowledge in increasingly complex, diverse and networked societies. Which forms of knowledge work best for managing, challenging or engaging with rapid social change? Do new kinds of information play an increasing role in economic and social management? Do these changes raise questions about what ‘knowledge’ is, or is to become? What are the new rules for engagement between academic and other knowledge practices and institutions?

This conference will bring together theorists and practitioners from a range of backgrounds and knowledge institutions to debate these questions in relation to the following themes:

Shifting knowledge maps: Discipline boundaries are increasingly permeable within the humanities and social sciences and across these and the natural and physical sciences. Yet it often proves difficult to connect these new knowledge maps both within academia and across sectors (university/government; public/private; NGO/university/government, etc.). Knowledge engagement is more problematic, just as it is becoming more important and desirable. How are these problems best addressed?

Knowledge and globalisation: Processes of globalisation undermine the relevance of purely national knowledge frameworks, while the hegemony of Western knowledge systems is challenged on many fronts: the increasing influence of Asia; the resurgent interest in indigenous and community knowledges; and the competing perspectives of multiple modernities. How can the relations between these multiple knowledge practices best be engaged with?

A (Post)humanities? The nature/culture dualism is under challenge from a diverse range of knowledges (ecological, post-rational, feminist, animal studies, etc). These interventions engage the global predicament presented by climate change, blurring the boundaries between natural and social environments, while medical and nano technologies radically restructure our sense of the boundaries and constituents of personhood. How can we now best understand our entanglements with the more-than-human?

Digital knowledge practices: New electronic and digital technologies are rapidly changing the mechanisms and speeds of knowledge flows with profound consequences for intellectual property and the practices of knowledge institutions, while also enabling new ways of knowing that significantly challenge older relations of knowledge production. How can our practices respond to these new knowledge possibilities?

Knowledge and governance: New kinds of data – quantitative and qualitative – and methods and techniques of visualisation play an increasingly important role in economic and social management, while science/arts divisions are undermined by new kinds of art/science practice. Knowledge institutions and technologies play new roles in processes of social and cultural change; e.g. archives, museums, science centres, statistical and other data banks. In what ways do these new knowledge practices actively intervene and shape social life?

Keynote Speakers:

Dawn Casey, Director, Powerhouse Museum; Chair, Indigenous Business Australia.
Museums, Conflicting Cultures and the Politics of Knowing.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago.
The Human after Climate Change.
Penny Harvey, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester; a Director in the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.
Surface Dramas, Knowledge Gaps and Scalar Shifts: Infrastructural Engineering in Sacred Spaces.
Bruno Latour, Scientific Director, Professor and Vice President for Research, Sciences-Po.
Social Theory, Tarde, and the Web [via videolink].
Nikolas Rose, James Martin White Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics; Director, BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society.
The Human Sciences in the Century of Biology.

Visit: http://www.uws.edu.au/centre_for_cultural_research/ccr/events_and_news/kcsc_conference.

Baggini, Julian. "The Whole Truth." PROSPECT MAGAZINE April 20, 2011.

The problem with telling “the truth” starts with the definite article, because there is always more than one way to give a true account or description. If you and I were to each describe the view of Lake Buttermere, for example, our accounts might be different but both contain nothing but true statements. You might coldly describe the topography and list the vegetation while I might paint more of a verbal picture. That is not to say there is more than one truth in some hand-washing, relativistic sense. If you were to start talking about the cluster of high-rise apartment blocks on the southern shore, you wouldn’t be describing “what’s true for you,” you’d be lying or hallucinating.

So while it is not possible to give “the truth” about Lake Buttermere, it is possible to offer any number of accounts that only contain true statements. To do that, however, is not enough to achieve what people want from truth. It is rather a prescription for what we might call “estate agent truth.” The art of describing a home for sale or let is only to say true things, while leaving out the crucial additional information that would put the truth in its ugly context. In other words, no “false statement made with the intention to deceive”—St Augustine’s still unbeatable definition of a lie—but plenty of economy with the truth. . . .

Visit: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/04/philosophy-of-lying-truth-ian-leslie/.

Bowell, T. "Feminist Standpoint Theory." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY March 10, 2011.

Feminist standpoint theorists make three principal claims: (1) Knowledge is socially situated. (2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. (3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized. Feminist standpoint theory, then, makes a contribution to epistemology, to methodological debates in the social and natural sciences, to philosophy of science, and to political activism. It has been one of the most influential and debated theories to emerge from second-wave feminist thinking. Feminist standpoint theories place relations between political and social power and knowledge center-stage. These theories are both descriptive and normative, describing and analyzing the causal effects of power structures on knowledge while also advocating a specific route for enquiry, a route that begins from standpoints emerging from shared political struggle within marginalized lives. Feminist standpoint theories emerged in the 1970s, in the first instance from Marxist feminist and feminist critical theoretical approaches within a range of social scientific disciplines. They thereby offer epistemological and methodological approaches that are specific to a variety of disciplinary frameworks, but share a commitment to acknowledging, analyzing and drawing on power/knowledge relationships, and on bringing about change which results in more just societies. Feminist scholars working within a number of disciplines—such as Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar and Donna Haraway—have advocated taking women’s lived experiences, particularly experiences of (caring) work, as the beginning of scientific enquiry. Central to all these standpoint theories are feminist analyses and critiques of relations between material experience, power, and epistemology, and of the effects of power relations on the production of knowledge. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/.

Fish, Stanley. "Dorothy and the Tree: a Lesson in Epistemology." Opinionator Blog. NEW YORK TIMES April 25, 2011.

At one point in The Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy (Judy Garland) picks an apple and the tree she picks it off protests: “Well, how would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?” Dorothy is abashed and she says, “Oh, dear — I keep forgetting I’m not in Kansas,” by which she means she’s now entered an alternate universe where the usual distinctions between persons and objects, animate and inanimate, human beings and the natural world that is theirs to exploit do not hold. In Kansas and, she once assumed, everywhere else, trees are things you pick things off (even limbs) and persons are not. Persons have an autonomy and integrity of body that are to be respected; trees do not. A person who is maimed has a legal cause of action. A tree that has been cut down has no legal recourse, although there may be a cause of action (not, however, on behalf of the tree) if it was cut down by someone other than the owner of the property it stood on.

All this seems obvious, but what the tree’s question to Dorothy shows is that the category of the obvious can be challenged and unsettled. . . .  Hers is not a failure of memory. Hers is not a failure at all, but the inevitable and blameless consequence of having a consciousness informed by certain assumptions about the classification of items in the world, assumptions that deliver those items already catalogued and labeled, exactly in the manner Darwin labels those to whom sympathy is being extended “lower animals” and drops the adjective “useless” ever so casually, that is, without thinking. Rorty is no less limited (not a criticism, but a description) in his vision of things when he restricts the category of the unjustly marginalized to “people.” What about cats, trees, stones, streams and cockroaches?

The obvious answer to this not entirely frivolous question is, “you can’t think of everything,” and that’s the right answer. Despite imperatives like “broaden your thinking” or “extend your horizons or “widen your sense of ‘us,’” thought is not an expandable muscle that can contain or comprehend an infinite number of things. Thought is a structure that at once enables perception — it is within and by virtue of thought’s finite categories that items emerge and can be pointed to — and limits perception; no structure of thought can enable the seeing of all items, a capacity reserved for God. It follows that when you have a change of mind (of the kind the tree is trying to provoke when it addresses Dorothy) you won’t see more; you will see differently. A system of distinctions (and that is what thought is) will always privilege some categories of being and devalue others, sometimes even to the extent of not recognizing them. And when one system is succeeded by another and new things come into view, some old things will have been consigned to the category of chimera and, except for histories of error, will have vanished from sight. (Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution is a primer on the process.) . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1700945566886988248.

See the follow-up article, "Ideas and Theory: the Political Difference," here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/ideas-and-theory-the-political-difference/.

Cfp: "Feminist Epistemology and Philosophical Traditions," Society for Women in Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, November 18-19, 2011.

The aim of this conference is to reflect critically on the relation of feminist epistemology to the various philosophical traditions that generated it and those that have nourished it intellectually and challenged it in the past three decades. These traditions include that of epistemology itself (of course), but also more generally the analytical philosophical traditions, the continental philosophical traditions, feminist philosophical traditions, and other philosophically inflected theoretical traditions, for example psychoanalytical theory. It is to be hoped that responses to the call for papers will add to this list.

Questions to be addressed include:

• What, currently, is the relation between feminist epistemology and the more mainstream traditions of epistemology?
• What influence has feminist epistemology had on the more mainstream traditions of epistemology, if any?
• Is there any unity to ‘feminist epistemology’ across its relation to different philosophical traditions (for example the analytical and the continental traditions)?
• How have other theoretical traditions influenced and challenged feminist epistemology?
• What is the significance of the mainly Anglo-American constitution of the field of feminist epistemology?
• 'What, if anything, remains distinctive about 'feminist epistemology'? That is, when is 'feminist epistemology' simply 'epistemology'?

Plenary Speakers:

• Kirsten Campbell (Goldsmiths, University of London), ‘Feminist Epistemology and Psychoanalytical Theory’ -- Respondent: Stella Sandford (Kingston University)
• Miranda Fricker (Birkbeck College, University of London), ‘Feminist Epistemology as Social Epistemology’ -- Respondent: Stella Gonzalez Arnal (University of Hull)
• Gillian Howie (University of Liverpool), ‘Is There a “Continental” Feminist Epistemology?’ -- Respondent: Alison Stone (Lancaster University)
• Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff University), ‘From Margin to Centre: Feminist Epistemology asv Socially Responsible Epistemology’ -- Respondent: Kathleen Lennon (University of Hull)

Contact: Stella Sandford (S.Sandford@Kingston.ac.uk).

Clough, Sharyn. Review of Alexandra L. Shuford, FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY AND AMERICAN PRAGMATISM . NDPR (April, 2011).

Shuford, Alexandra L.  Feminist Epistemology and American Pragmatism: Dewey and Quine.  London: Continuum, 2010.

Feminist Epistemology and American Pragmatism: Dewey and Quine by Alexandra Shuford is the third in a recent series of books from Continuum that will be of interest to those following debates within feminist epistemology and philosophy of science (the other two books are Rationality and Feminist Philosophy by Deborah K. Heikes, reviewed earlier this year in NDPR, and Objectivity in the Feminist Philosophy of Science by Karen Cordrick Haely). Each of these three books is authored by philosophers new to these debates, consistent with Continuum's mission to "actively seek out the emerging generation." These slim volumes are not inexpensive ($120.00 each and not available in paperback), but each contains something of value.

The strength of Shuford's presentation is her application of Dewey's theory of inquiry to the problem of the high rate of caesarean sections in US hospitals. This latter problem is serious and Shuford's analysis is a welcome addition to feminist attempts to address it. This key chapter, "Feminist Pragmatist Inquiry," is the last of six that also include "Birthing Feminist Pragmatist Epistemologies," "Quine's Naturalized Epistemology," "Antony's Analytic Feminist Empiricism," "Nelson's Holistic Feminist Empiricism," and "Dewey's Theory of Inquiry."

Shuford's main thesis is that Nelson and Antony's feminist use of Quine, though in the right pragmatist spirit, still fails to acknowledge fully the embodied nature of knowing that is captured by Dewey and is necessary for understanding and criticizing phenomena. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23309.

"Agnotology: Ways of Producing, Preserving, and Dealing with Ignorance," Bielefeld University, May 30-June 1, 2011.

Within the last 10 years historians of science such as Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Peter Galison, and Naomi Oreskes, have been promoting a new area of enquiry—Proctor calls it agnotology, the study of ignorance—which they suggest is of as much relevance to philosophers and social scientists and others as it is to historians. Indeed, the suggestion is that agnotology offers a new approach to the study of knowledge, an approach at least as complex and important as its more established sister, epistemology. The aim of this workshop is to map out this new ignorance-centered terrain in an effort to determine just what and where it might add to knowledge-centered terrains such as epistemology and philosophy of science and how valuable the additions might be. Topics will range over the naturalness and even inevitability of certain kinds of ignorance and the unnaturalness or deliberate production of other kinds—for example, on ignorance created through government secrecy and censorship, cultural prejudice, industry influence on scientific research, and so on—and the epistemological and societal implications of such ignorance. The ultimate goal is to make a significant contribution to this new kind of enquiry.

Speakers will include historians Norton Wise (UCLA), Naomi Oreskes (San Diego), Peter Galison (Harvard), and Robert Proctor (Stanford); sociologists Peter Weingart (Bielefeld) and Stefan Böschen (Augsburg); neurobiologist Stuart Firestein (Columbia); mathematician/philosopher of science Daniel Andler (Sorbonne); and philosophers Nancy Cartwright (LSE and San Diego), Philip Kitcher (Columbia), Pat Kitcher (Columbia), Hugh Lacey (Swarthmore and São Paulo), Kevin Elliott (South Carolina), Torsten Wilholt (Bielefeld), Martin Carrier (Bielefeld), and Janet Kourany (Notre Dame). The program will also feature a screening of Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s documentary film “Secrecy.”

"The Problem of Relativism in the Sociology of (Scientific) Knowledge," University of Siegen, March 22-23, 2011.

Are knowledge and our epistemic norms culturally and socially relative? What would be the consequences of such a relativism for traditional topics in philosophy? Questions like these are the focus of recent discussions in epistemology and philosophy of science. Moreover, they have also been intensively discussed in the sociology of knowledge since 20th century.

The aim of the conference is to dicuss the problem of relativism in the sociology of (scientific) knowledge from historical (Mannheim, Fleck) as well as systematic perspectives. By bringing together leading philosophers and sociologists working in the field, the conference's objective is to develop a genuine interdisciplinary exchange. A special focus lies on recent discussions, for example, on Naturalism, Incommensurability, and the Strong Programme.

Confirmed Speakers:

Maria Baghramian (Dublin) - "Contested Truths, Constructed Realities"
Barry Barnes (Exeter) - "Relativism as an Extension of the Scientific Project"
Martin Endreß (Trier) - "Methodological Relationalism"
Eva-Maria Jung (Münster) - "Theoretical and Practical Knowledge Revisited"
Hubert Knoblauch (Berlin) - "Relativism, Meaning and Explanations in the New Sociology of Knowledge"
Richard Schantz (Siegen) - "Realism, Naturalism and Relativism"
Markus Seidel (Münster/Siegen) - "Karl Mannheim, Relativism and Knowledge in the Natural Sciences - a deviant interpretation"
Harvey Siegel (Miami) - "Is Relativism Really Incoherent? On Some Recent Arguments For and Against"
Claus Zittel (Florenz/Olsztyn) - "Thinking Styles in Action. Fleck's Concept of Style and the Problem of Relativism"

Visit the conference website here: http://www.uni-muenster.de/Wissenschaftstheorie/veranstaltungen/conference2011/index.html.

Schulz, Kathryn. "The Bright Side of Wrong." BOSTON GLOBE June 13, 2010.

Schulz, Kathryn.  Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.  New York: HarperCollins-Ecco, 2010.

Being wrong, we feel, signals something terrible about us. The Italian cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini summed up this sentiment nicely. We err, he wrote, because of “inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance,...ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, as well as aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.” In this view — and it is the common one — our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings.

Of all the things we’re wrong about, this view of error might well top the list. As ashamed as we may feel of our mistakes, they are not a byproduct of all that’s worst about being human. On the contrary: They’re a byproduct of all that’s best about us. We don’t get things wrong because we are uninformed and lazy and stupid and evil. We get things wrong because we get things right. The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to err is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent.

Misunderstanding our mistakes in this way — seeing them as evidence of flaws and an indictment of our overall worth — exacts a steep toll on us, in private and public life alike. Doing so encourages us to deny our own errors and despise ourselves for making them. It permits us to treat those we regard as wrong with condescension or cruelty. It encourages us to make business and political leaders of those who refuse to entertain the possibility that they are mistaken. And it impedes our efforts to prevent errors in domains, such as medicine and aviation, where we truly cannot afford to get things wrong.

If we hope to avoid those outcomes, we need to stop treating errors like the bedbugs of the intellect — an appalling and embarrassing nuisance we try to pretend out of existence. What’s called for is a new way of thinking about wrongness, one that recognizes that our fallibility is part and parcel of our brilliance. If we can achieve that, we will be better able to avoid our costliest mistakes, own up to those we make, and reduce the conflict in our lives by dealing more openly and generously with both other people’s errors and our own.

To change how we think about wrongness, we must start by understanding how we get things right. . . .


Get the answer here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/06/13/the_bright_side_of_wrong/?page=full.

Visit the book's website here: http://www.beingwrongbook.com/.

"Yes, but How do you Know? Scepticism and Philosophy." PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE June 5, 2010.

This week, we meet Stephen Hetherington, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, who believes that sceptical thinking is one of the most authentic forms of philosophical thinking there is. Scepticism isn't just any old refusal to believe: it's an orderly reconsideration of what we know and why we think we know it. How much can we know about our surroundings? Do we in fact have any surroundings or could we just be disembodied brains in vats being fed what feels like experience? Scepticism is a radical way of thinking and, in a way, it's the beginning of thinking philosophically. Listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/2915047.htm.

Prado, C. G. Review of Lee Braver, A THING OF THIS WORLD. NDPR (June 2010).

Braver, Lee. A Thing of This World: a History of Continental Anti-Realism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2007. This impressive book is characterized by three special virtues: first, it presents difficult philosophical ideas and developments clearly; second, it manifests an unusual and admirable facility with both analytic and continental positions and methodologies; and third, it boasts an extraordinary level of scholarship. My strongest endorsement of Braver's book is that I dearly wish I'd had it two decades ago. . . . The Introduction begins with a comparison of the contemporary split between analytic and continental philosophy and the split between rationalism and empiricism at the end of the eighteenth century, a split that culminated in rationalist metaphysical excess and empiricist epistemological bankruptcy. Braver maintains that the ground for reconciliation of analytic and continental philosophy is "the very idea that forms the core of the Critique of Pure Reason and the linchpin of its rationalist-empiricist synthesis" and this is "the idea that the mind actively organizes experience" (5). This is where Braver's originality shows itself, and also where things begin to get complicated for readers who don't approach the book with an open mind. Braver goes on to say that the mind's organizing activity is seen as entailing anti-realism by analytic philosophers and has been extensively discussed by such notables as Davidson, Dummett, Goodman, Putnam, Quine, and Wittgenstein. Given Kant's influence on continental thought, the mind's organizing activity is also pivotal for continental philosophers. Braver's idea is that if the two traditions' different vocabularies are properly understood and correlated by members of each, we will be able to "identify Kant's idea as seminal for both camps" and thereby have a basis for "informed dialogue and debate" (5). . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19848.

"On Error," Research Group in Continental Philosophy, Goldsmiths College, University of London, October 29-30, 2010.

Confirmed Speakers:

Keith Ansell-Pearson (University of Warwick),
Paul Davies (University of Sussex),
Christoph Menke (Goethe University Frankfurt),
John Roberts (University of Wolverhampton)

Is a form of discourse, philosophical or otherwise, conceivable without a relation to error: the errors it considers potentially amendable, the errors it seeks to distinguish itself from, or the errors it inadvertently generates? If this relation is neither uniform nor stable, if the status, value, and identity ascribed to error may vary across disciplines or even within a single philosophical corpus itself, what does this variability express? And what consequences will the transformations in philosophy’s understanding of error have for its procedure in general? This two-day international conference, organized by INC, the Research Group in Continental Philosophy at Goldsmiths, University of London, aims to ascertain the meaning and function of error for philosophical thought today. Researchers are invited to submit original papers of forty minutes reading time devoted to any aspect of the theme in question.

Areas of research may concern (but are not limited to) the following: Error and . . .
• Deception, ideology, and false consciousness
• Its relation to concept, category, or statement
• Methodologies of correction or adaptivity
• History (transmission and persistence of problems)
• Determinacy and indeterminacy
• Accountability
• (Un)predictability: the aleatory instant
• Reinventions of the truth-error relation (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Canguilhem, Foucault)
• Being wrong or being right: logics of argumentation
• Wilful error (dissimulation, méconnaissance, detour, fabulation, etc.)
• Psychoanalysis: situating the subject in the “dimension of making a mistake”

Submissions: Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words in length, along with your name, department, institution, and email address. Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2010 (You will be informed of our decision by 1 August 2010). Email abstracts to: onerror@gold.ac.uk.

For further details: http://www.gold.ac.uk/inc/incconferenceonerror/.

"Yes We Kant! Critical Reflections on Objectivity: its Meaning, its Limitations, its Fateful Omissions," University of Ghent, May 27-29, 2010.

Hosted by the Centre for Critical Philosophy. In the Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl points out that scientific objectivity, as it gradually took shape through the modern sciences in the form of a mathematization of nature, rests on a "fateful omission", the one namely of forgetting to inquire back into the subjective-historical, dynamic and living context out of which it first of all emerged. This omission is of the essence, so he says, because without it, modern science would not have been able to realise what it has until this day. The production of objectivity intrinsically rests on the possibility to exclude that which is seen, from there on as historically subjective. Its fate is sealed in these terms, and it thus determines as such a specific space in which the necessary, the possible and the contingent are mutually defined. Descartes was perhaps the first to have pointed out this intimate connection, in acknowledging the need for a subjectivity – albeit as a res cogitans – in the midst of an overwhelming machinery of production of objectivity. Kant, however, more poignantly bears witness to this intimate relation between subjectivity and objectivity. In our view, he is the philosopher par excellence for having explored, throughout his three Critiques, but also in his pre-critical works, the idea that there can be no objectivity without subjectivity, and vice versa, that there can be no subjectivity without objectivity. It is indeed through the developments in modern science that subjectivity can appear in its capacity to contribute to the constitution of objectivity, as well as in its capacity to fail in this endeavour. And vice versa, it is through the articulation of subjectivity that objectivity can appear as intrinsically dependent on very specific subjectively grounded constitutive procedures. Most of the time, Kant has been read from a determinative, constitutive angle, and has as often been turned into a static, detached, and even obsessive thinker. His aim is considered to be to determine the limits and the range of the newly identified cognitive capacities as a neutral referee, without having to genuinely try them out. A divergent perspective is possible, however, that attempts to argue for a more dynamic view on objectivity, one in which objectivity is not seen as ultimately detached and static, but in which it is on the contrary the precarious and ever questionable result of dynamic processes of co-constitution. In this regard, there is certainly much to be learned from Kant’s third Critique, because that is the place where Kant most explicitly deals with the issue of coconstitution, and faces this problem in terms of the ways in which objectification encounters failure or disappointment (Enttäuschung). In the third Critique, his basic question is indeed the one about the meaning of a determinative or constitutive ambition, in the principled absence of the means to carry it through. What does this principled resistance, the encounter with an impossibility, that Kant so stubbornly exposes through the beautiful, the sublime and the living, mean? What is its place in his critical system and in critical thinking generally? What are its implications for a conception of objectivity that is, perhaps too hastily, conceived of in terms of neatly acquired and well defined capacities of subsumption under universal concepts? What are its implications for a conception of subjectivity that is, perhaps too quickly also, conceived of in terms of the subjective-relativecontingent. Clearly, Kant’s work, and most definitely his third Critique, is incompatible with a marked and static opposition between two terms, the subjective and the objective, leading to an oppositional space of subjectivism versus objectivism. But does this mean that the issue of resistance and failure, in the process by which objectivity and subjectivity are time and again codetermined and co-defined, is already sufficiently articulated? Is the figure of the “fateful omission” Husserl is referring to, and by which he also points at the historical dimensions of objectivity as well as subjectivity, already sufficiently explored? The aim of this three-day international workshop is to present and exchange various critical viewpoints on objectivity and subjectivity, and to more specifically focus on the various interpretations of necessity in its relation to contingency. This approach on the matter can find inspiration in Kant’s third Critique, that works out the idea that the need and the possibility to articulate the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity emerges to the extent that something resists the anticipative procedures of a living, actively engaged being. This need and this possibility are by him interpreted from within the background of contingently based feelings of pleasure and displeasure, that Kant considered as the constraining and enabling context – the horizon – within which eventually all processes of cognition and morality are to be situated, and in relation to which the faculty of judgment has a specific unifying role to play. But this source of inspiration should certainly not be considered as the only possible one. Husserl's gesture to extrapolate the coconstitutive relation between objectivity and subjectivity to history is but one example of objectivity seen from a dynamical, contingently, historically and subjectively grounded background, the lifeworld. The meeting is certainly open to explore other backgrounds. To realize that end, we invite speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds – physics, mathematics, biology, psychology, … – and embedded in quite divergent philosophical contexts – continental/analytical, in as far as this distinction is a relevant one. This meeting is not in the first place about critically, exegetically, discussing Kant’s texts. Its aim is rather to inquire whether, and in what sense, a return to Kant and to neo-Kantianism can be important to open certain unsuspected perspectives on objectivity (and subjectivity). We conjecture that this approach can be relevant for (i) a contemporary reading of basic texts in the tradition of transcendental philosophy, (ii) a conception of objectivity that can have a relevance in current philosophy and in philosophy of science in particular, (iii) for the development of a transcendental viewpoint in philosophy of science, supplementing and challenging current dominant analytical viewpoints. Invited and confirmed speakers: Michel Bitbol (CREA, Paris) Mario Caimi (Buenos Aires) Paul Cobben (Utrecht) Arnaud Dewalque (Uliège) Arran Gare (Melbourne, Australia) Jasa Josifovic (Germany) Hans-Herbert Koegler (Un. Of North Florida) Koichiro Matsunu (Nagaoka, Japan) Lenny Moss (Exeter, UK) Frank Pierobon (Brussels) Jaco Rivera de Rosales (Madrid) Norman Sieroka (Zürich, Sw.) Serguei Spetchinsky (ULB, Berlin) Joan Steigerwald (York University, UK) Maarten Van Dyck (Ugent) Of the Centre for Critical Philosophy: Emiliano Acosta Liesbet De Kock Boris Demarest Anton Froeyman Filip Kolen Eli Noé Frank Rottiers Gertrudis Van de Vijver Joris Van Poucke Visit the conference website here: http://www.criticalphilosophy.ugent.be/events.

Cfp: "Gendered Ways of Knowing? Gender, Natural Sciences and Humanities," Trento, Italy, December 1–4, 2010.

The aim of this congress is to push the question about the epistemological function of the category “gender” further, in particular from the perspective of multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. Since the rupture epistemologique of the late 18th century science has fabricated tools for sexualizing the objects of the world, while modern anthropology and biology have contributed to the universalization of gender cosmologies and the ontologization of binary gender codes. While gender studies have challenged this binary construction, they have also had a share in the naturalization of gender by using it as an independent variable. In recent years, however, the critique of gender studies has contributed to a self-critical reflection about methodologies and presumptions underlying research activities in different fields (including gender studies themselves), questioning the notion of knowledge itself. The conference is organized into four topic areas of particular interest: 1. Developments: The history and philosophy of sciences Gendering science and disciplining gender; the historicity of both gender and natural and human sciences; historical developments in both areas of research; how we arrived at the methods and categories we take for granted today. 2. Profiles: Research and researchers The issue of gender, knowledge and science(s) with regard to specific disciplines; importance and consequences of ‘objectivity/subjectivity’, need to ‘produce’ and to ‘re-present’ knowledge; methodologies of gender classification and reinforcement of binaries (or not); reflections on the “ideal researcher” and gender aspects in his/her construction; presentation of particularly important/significant figures. 3. Effects: Social, cultural and individual consequences How do representations and visualizations of scientific results (e.g. brain scans, anatomic drawings, genetic codes, statistics etc.) contribute to social and cultural perceptions of gender, and influence the communal and individual experience of bodiliness? What are the consequences on the level of biopolitics and the organization of culture and society? Effects of medical visualiziation on everyday self-perception and processes of normalization. 4. Perspectives: Politics and the organization of research European policies for research; inter-/transdisciplinarity as a focus; issues in biopolitics; gender issues in politics of employment, contracts, working conditions. We invite proposals for papers on any of the above topics. Abstracts of not more than 600 words should be sent by email to gender2010@fbk.eu by April 30, 2010. Please indicate the topic area your paper relates to. Authors of papers that have been accepted will be notified in July. Full versions of selected papers will be published after the conference. Conference languages are Italian and English. For further information and updates of the program please consult our webpage: http://gender2010.fbk.eu/ or send an email to gender2010@fbk.eu.

Fish, Stanley. "The True Answer and the Right Answer." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES January 11, 2010.

The right answer is the answer a system invested in its own machinery will recognize no matter what the true facts may be. . . .  This is almost always the case in the law, especially in a legal system like ours that privileges procedure over substance. Lawyers know that what they have to do is find the legal rubric that will allow them to frame an issue in such a way that when the system’s questions are posed, the right answer, not the true answer, will be generated. Courts sometimes explicitly announce that the procedurally correct answer is preferable to the true answer, which is, legally, of no interest at all. . . .

Should we go off the right standard and return to the true standard? A nice idea, but one that imagines a world where the judgments reached by systems are tested against a truth that is independent of any system. Where would that truth come from, how would it be identified and how could the endless disputes about what it is be resolved? (The law’s project is to hold such disputes at bay.) It is because there are no answers to these questions that we will have to settle for the truths that systems create, deliver and validate in a sequence that may be reassuring but is finally without a foundation.

Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/the-true-answer-and-the-right-answer/.