NKF Workshop – Rationalitet, normativitet och lika villkor

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Stina Björkholm

Post doc, Institute for Futures Studies

Implicit Bias in Conversation: Pragmatic Stereotypes and Meta-Pragmatic Negotiation

Members of stigmatized social groups are often treated unjustly in conversation. One example of this is Fricker’s influential work on epistemic injustice, this is (in part) because a speakers’ utterance might be assigned less (or no) credibility because of a prejudiced stereotype about her social identity held by the listener (Fricker, 2007, p. 2). In this paper, I offer an account of conversational implicit bias, which is characterized as the situations in which interlocutors speak and behave in conversation as if they accept a prejudiced stereotype that contradicts their explicitly endorsed beliefs. I argue for an account of how interlocutors accept pragmatic stereotypes as background assumptions of conversations and that the presumption of such stereotypes explains implicit bias in conversation. I further argue that interlocutors might try to challenge such stereotypes in conversation by engaging in meta-pragmatic negotiations about which stereotypes to accept. However, I ultimately argue for the pessimistic conclusion that such negotiations are often unsuccessful and should not be the primary remedy against these types of injustices.

Petra Andersson

Forskare, Göteborgs universitet

Att som kvinna förmedla en mansdominerad tradition

Undervisningen i filosofihistoria för studenter på grundkursen tenderar att innebära att ett pärlband av viktiga, manliga tänkare radas upp inför studenterna. Läromedlet är skrivet av en man, textutdragen är förstås skrivna av de manliga filosofer som kursen presenterar. De historiskt viktiga filosoferna har dessutom ofta något att säga om varför filosofi inte är ett ämne för kvinnor, eller om varför tänkande inte är en aktivitet för kvinnor, om än inte just den delen av deras tänkande är anledningen till att de ingår i filosofisk kanon. Jag kommer att prata om de svårigheter som jag tycker att filosofisk kanon ställer läraren inför. Jag kommer att prata om hur jag försöker hantera den svårigheten tillsammans med studenterna, termin efter termin. Min föreläsning bygger helt på mina egna erfarenheter som lärare, inte på forskning.

Sofia Bokros

PhD candidate in Theoretical Philosophy, Uppsala University

Meaning-Constitutive Inferences and Semantic Competence

According to inferentialism, the meanings of expressions or some class of expressions are wholly or partly constituted by inferences. That is, for an expression E, there are some particular inferences that are meaning-constitutive for E. There are many different philosophical motivations for embracing inferentialism, but one central motivation is that inferentialism enables us to explain why competent speakers are disposed to accept certain inferences and claims involving E a priori. Nonetheless, the explanatory potential of inferentialism in this regard seems threatened by certain counterexamples and plausible assumptions about semantic competence and belief. In this paper I will explore whether inferentialism can be made compatible with these counterexamples and plausible assumptions, without being deprived of its explanatory power. Firstly, I’ll consider a dispositionalist view of semantic competence and I will argue that it does not succeed in safeguarding the explanatory power of inferentialism. Secondly, I’ll consider a normativist proposal, which I will argue is a more promising route for the inferentialist.

Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann

Chair Professor of Aesthetics, Uppsala University

Failure as Omission and Retroactive Aesthetic Judgements

In this paper I distinguish between different kinds of failures of aesthetic judgements with a view to exploring a form of failure which involves the outright omission of aesthetic judgement. Such omissions come to pass when an object of attention could or ought to have been experienced and judged aesthetically but where such an experience or judgement simply failed to arise, and can be traced back to at least three kinds of reason: i) lack of aesthetic quality; ii) lack of appropriate ontological status; iii) lack of aesthetic prominence. I shall examine some aspects of this kind of failure and argue that a missed opportunity to experience an object of attention’s aesthetic character is a missed opportunity to engage with that object’s aesthetic potential where such potential, although not always accessible to us, can nonetheless retroactively be said to pertain to the object in a meaningful sense also under experientially unfavourable conditions. This warrants talk of rehabilitation to some degree.

Åsa Burman

Reader in Practical Philosophy, Stockholm University

On Social Power

Power is central to the social sciences, the humanities, and to understanding the political sphere. However, despite its significance, it has not been considered a central concept in analytic philosophy. To overcome this shortcoming, I turn to contemporary social ontology, where the concept of social power is gaining attention. I identify and define two types of social power: deontic and telic. Deontic powers are our institutional rights (positive deontic powers) and obligations (negative deontic powers), and they concern what we can demand of each other. By contrast, telic powers are about ideals or standards that we sometimes try to live up to and hold ourselves and other agents responsive to. Positive telic power is about being perceived as an exemplar of a kind, as a woman or citizen, i.e., as fulfilling the ideal of womanhood or citizenship. Negative telic power is about being perceived as failing to live up to the ideal, i.e., being perceived by other agents as substandard in relation to the ideal. Deontic and telic power can both reinforce and conflict with one another. I conclude by drawing out the features the two forms of power have in common and suggest a general definition of social power.

Anandi Hattiangadi

Professor of Philosophy, Stockholm University & The Institute for Futures Studies

Physicalism, Intentionality and Normativity: The Essential Explanatory Gap

In this paper, I take issue with a popular version of physicalism about intentionality, the view that the semantic facts—such as the fact that Maya means addition by ‘plus’ or believes that the sun is shining— are fully grounded in the physical facts. I present an explanatory gap argument against this view, albeit one that departs significantly from traditional explanatory gap arguments against physicalism, since it does not rely on a controversial inference from conceivability to possibility. Whereas traditional explanatory gap arguments stem from the failure of analytic reductive explanation, the explanatory gap I point to stems from the failure of metaphysical explanation.

I argue for the following theses. (i) Semantico-physical grounding claims must be deducible from facts about essence, if they are to provide adequate metaphysical explanations of the semantic facts. (ii) Semantic properties are essentially weakly normative: it lies in their natures to have correctness conditions, in virtue of which they are apt to subjectively rationalize—rather than merely cause— behaviour. As a consequence, (iii) semantico-physical grounding claims cannot be deduced from facts about essence, and there is an explanatory gap between intentionality and the physical. This provides us with powerful reason to think that the semantic facts are not fully grounded in the physical facts.

Panelsamtal: Att vara kvinna inom filosofi

• Sharon Rider
  Professor i Teoretisk filosofi, Uppsala universitet

• Malin Jörnvi
  Medgrundare av NKF, Uppsala universitet alumn, ledningskoordinator på Uppsala stadsteater (från augusti)

• Maria Svedberg
  Forskare i Praktisk filosofi, lika villkorsombud, Uppsala universitet