PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students, postdocs, people who got their PhD within the last few years, advanced undergrads etc. – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2-3 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.
Presenters Spring 2019
All presentations will be on Thursdays at 7-9pm in 302 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University (Morningside Heights Campus).
February 28th – Kate Pendoley (CUNY)
March 14th – Amogh Sahu (Columbia)
April 18th – Nemira Gasiunas (Columbia)
If anyone else would like to present on other Thursdays, get in touch.
PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students, postdocs, people who got their PhD within the last few years, advanced undergrads etc. – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2-3 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.
Presenters Spring 2019
All presentations will be on Thursdays at 7-9pm in 302 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University (Morningside Heights Campus).
February 28th – Kate Pendoley (CUNY)
March 14th – Amogh Sahu (Columbia)
April 18th – Nemira Gasiunas (Columbia)
If anyone else would like to present on other Thursdays, get in touch.
AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule
September 25th – Avery Archer (GWU)
October 16th – Daniel Singer (Penn)
November 13th – Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany)
February 26th – Vita Emery (Fordham)
March 26th – Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)
April 23rd – Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)
The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted to questions and discussion.
Location: Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Bldg., 113 West 60th Street. If interested in attending, email dheney[at]fordham[dot]edu.
Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is a framework for reasoning about nondeterministic program executions (or, more generally, nondeterministic actions). In this setting, nondeterminism is taken as a primitive: a program is nondeterministic iff it has multiple possible outcomes. But what is the sense of “possibility” at play here? This talk explores an epistemic interpretation: working in an enriched logical setting, we represent nondeterminism as a relationship between a program and an agent deriving from the agent’s (in)ability to adequately measure the dynamics of the program execution. More precisely, using topology to capture the observational powers of an agent, we define the nondeterministic outcomes of a given program execution to be those outcomes that the agent is unable to rule out in advance. In this framework, determinism coincides exactly with continuity: that is, determinism is continuity in the observation topology. This allows us to embed PDL into (dynamic) topological (subset space) logic, laying the groundwork for a deeper investigation into the epistemology (and topology) of nondeterminism.
The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.
details tba
02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
03/29/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students, postdocs, people who got their PhD within the last few years, advanced undergrads etc. – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2-3 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.
Presenters Spring 2019
All presentations will be on Thursdays at 7-9pm in 302 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University (Morningside Heights Campus).
February 28th – Kate Pendoley (CUNY)
March 14th – Amogh Sahu (Columbia)
April 18th – Nemira Gasiunas (Columbia)
If anyone else would like to present on other Thursdays, get in touch.
AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule
September 25th – Avery Archer (GWU)
October 16th – Daniel Singer (Penn)
November 13th – Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany)
February 26th – Vita Emery (Fordham)
March 26th – Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)
April 23rd – Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)
The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted to questions and discussion.
Location: Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Bldg., 113 West 60th Street. If interested in attending, email dheney[at]fordham[dot]edu.
Conference Schedule
Friday May 10
- 1pm: Rachel Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Introductory Overview1:30pm: Jake Quilty-Dunn (University of Oxford)
On Elisabeth Camp’s “Putting Thoughts to Work”4:30pm: John Kulvicki (Darmouth College)
On Jacob Beck’s “Perception is Analog”
Saturday May 11
- 1pm: Jacob Beck (York University)
On Jake Quilty-Dunn’s “Perceptual Pluralism”4pm: Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
On John Kulvicki’s “Modeling the Meanings of Pictures”
The Five Essential Readings for the Conference
The conference is predicated on the assumption that everyone in attendance will have read all five of these essays:
- John Haugeland, Representational Genera
- Elisabeth Camp, Putting Thoughts to Work
- Jacob Beck, Perception Is Analog
- Jake Quilty-Dunn, Perceptual Pluralism
- John Kulvicki, Modeling The Meanings of Pictures (excerpt)
Some Helpful Background Readings
Here are ten additional readings that help to fill in some of the background to the topics that will be discussed at the conference. Those new to these topics might start with the Kulvicki, Camp, and Giardino and Greenberg readings, and then move on to the others.
- John Kulvicki, Images in Mind
- Elisabeth Camp, Thinking With Maps
- Valeria Giardino and Gabriel Greenberg, Introduction: Varieties of Iconicity
- John Haugeland, Analog and Analog
- Fred Dretske, Sensation and Perception
- Jerry Fodor, Preconceptual Representation
- Michael Rescorla, Cognitive Maps and the Language of Thought
- Tyler Burge, Origins of Perception
- Tyler Burge, Steps Towards Origins of Propositional Thought
- Jacob Beck, The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought
- Whit Schonbein, Varieties of Analog and Digital Representation
If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Zed Adams at zed@newschool.edu.
As work on the nature of understanding has expanded in recent years, there has been increasing interest in the question of what might be distinctive about our understanding of other people, or humane understanding.
Our conference will explore this question, and consider how recent debates might be enriched by insights from areas such as epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of social science, the hermeneutical tradition, and the “verstehen” tradition in Continental philosophy.
Confirmed Speakers:
Olivia Bailey (Tulane)
Kristin Gjesdal (Temple)
Stephen R. Grimm (Fordham)
Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury)
Michael Strevens (NYU)
Karsten Stueber (Holy Cross)
Call for Abstracts:
3-4 spots on the program will be filled via a call for abstracts. Submitted abstracts should be no longer than 500 words, and should be emailed to sgrimm@fordham.edu by December 1, 2018. Meals at the conference will be covered, but scholars whose abstracts are selected will cover their own travel and lodging costs. Abstracts should try to engage with the following questions:
How does understanding people differ from other kinds of understanding, such as the understanding of concepts, language, or natural phenomena? Do these various types of understanding bring different cognitive resources to bear, or have different epistemic profiles?
Is there a deep unity among these types of understanding, or not?
What are the distinctive ways in which the study of literature or art or history enhance our understanding of other people?
What role does the reenactment of another’s perspective play in humane understanding? Is it merely a heuristic for discovering a person’s mental states (as Hempel seemed to think) or does it play a more epistemically robust role? Is reenactment of this sort indispensable to intentional-action explanation?
How does recent research on social cognition and mindreading bear on older debates about Verstehen?
How does the hermeneutical tradition shed light on these issues? Is it engaged with different questions, or does it pursue them from a distinctively different angle?
How do we adjudicate between competing interpretations of people’s actions?
What contribution does memory make to humane understanding?
July 5 — Becky Keller – note Friday meeting because of “some kind of American holiday”July 11 — Alex Kiefer – room will be Philosophy 201B (downstairs to the right)July 18 — Kathryn PendoleyJuly 25 — Andrew LeeAug 1 — Simon BrownAug 8 — tbdAug 12ish— Henry ShevlinAug 22 — Andrew Richmond
July 5 — Becky Keller – note Friday meeting because of “some kind of American holiday”July 11 — Alex Kiefer – room will be Philosophy 201B (downstairs to the right)July 18 — Kathryn PendoleyJuly 25 — Andrew LeeAug 1 — Simon BrownAug 8 — tbdAug 12ish— Henry ShevlinAug 22 — Andrew Richmond