Calendar

Conference Schedule

Friday May 10

• 1pm: Rachel Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
  Introductory Overview

  1:30pm: 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.

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