When someone is in a conscious state, must they be aware of that state? The Buddhist philosopher Dignāga offers a brilliant route to answering this question by leveraging the role awareness might play as a constraint on memory. I begin by clarifying his strategy and what conclusions it might be used to establish. Here I examine different candidate directions of explanation between consciousness and inner awareness. I interpret the metaphor of consciousness as a lamp that lights itself, and use the metaphor to distinguish between his view and contemporary higher-order theories of consciousness. I then turn to explain why the memory argument fails. The first main problem is that, contrary to Dignāga’s contemporary defenders, there is no good way to use the argument to reach a conclusion about all conscious states. The second main problem is that the proposed awareness constraint on memory is highly problematic, in tension both with ancient objections as well as current psychology.
With responses from Lu Teng (NYU Shanghai)
Individuals support forms of domination with varying levels of understanding that they are doing so. In many cases, those very structures of domination distort our conceptions of them through mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, implicit bias, affected ignorance, false consciousness, and belief polarization. These various epistemic distortions, in turn, cause social conflict, notably by promoting political polarization. Those worried by social conflict have spent a great deal of energy decrying the increasingly polarized contexts in which we live. However, epistemic distortions in our sociopolitical beliefs also misrepresent, maintain systems of domination and prevent human needs from being met.
This workshop aims to go beyond pronouncements such as ‘we are polarized’ or that ‘partisanship is on the rise,’ and begin to think through epistemic distortions at the individual and intersubjective levels, the role of criticism and critique in facilitating belief and social change, and the idea of reconciliation, by asking questions such as:
- In what ways are individual beliefs about domination/social structures epistemically distorted?
- What explains why social beliefs are epistemically distorted?
- What are the normative upshots of epistemic distortion for social relationships like allyship, comradeship, and friendship?
- Ought polarization be remedied? Which epistemic resources and theoretical frameworks avail themselves of emancipatory potential?
Convenors
Ege Yumuşak is a philosopher, specializing in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and social & political philosophy. She received a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2022. Her research examines political disagreement—its material foundations, psychological and social manifestations, and epistemic properties. She is currently writing a series of articles on the nature and significance of clashes of perspective in social life.
Nicolas Côté is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. His research is mainly in normative ethics and social choice theory, but they also dabble in applied ethics and issues of practical rationality. Côté’s doctoral dissertation work focuses on the measurement of freedom, especially on axiomatic approaches to the measurement question, and on how deontic concerns for protecting individual rights interact with welfarist concerns for improving the general welfare. Côté’s current research focuses on the ethics of decision-making under radical uncertainty.
Invited speakers:
Sabina Vaccarino Bremner; Daniela Dover; Cain Shelley
Invited commentators
TBA