Alexander Dinges and Julia Zakkou

10:15-12:00 Alexander Dinges, Erlangen-Nürnberg; "On Group Epistemology"

14:15-16:00 Julia Zakkou, Bielefeld: "Modal Moore Sentences"

ABSTRACTS
Alexander Dinges, Erlangen-Nürnberg; "On Group Epistemology"
We often ascribe beliefs to groups, institutions, companies and similar social entities, and many philosophers inquire into the nature of such beliefs. While different accounts have been proposed, it is widely agreed that group belief should be analyzed in terms of the behavior and the attitudes of the group’s members. In this paper, I raise a principled worry against such individualistic accounts of group belief. The basic concern is that individualistic accounts of group belief cannot be squared with existing accounts of the nature of belief from the philosophy of mind, such as dispositionalism and functionalism. My focus will be on group belief, but parallel concerns can be raised for individualistic accounts of group justified belief, group knowledge and group assertion.

Julia Zakkou, Bielefeld: "Modal Moore Sentences"
Strong deontic necessity modals, unlike their weak counterparts, give rise to Moorean infelicities. `You must go to confession, but (I know that) you won’t’ and `You must go to confession, but I don’t know whether you will’ sound strange, while `You should go to confession, but (I know that) you won’t’ and `You should go to confession, but I don’t know whether you will’ sound fine (Ninan, Portner, Silk, Mandelkern). It has been argued that the right explanation has something to do with the fact that deontic `must’, unlike deontic `should’, is used to command or order. In this talk, I argue that the phenomenon in question is much broader in that teleological and bouletic `must’ give rise to analogous infelicities, and that commands and orders play no role in explaining why.