The project’s main lines are as follows. According to a natural way of thinking, objective reality is independent from us – independent from our thought and talk. Hence, when we have knowledge of it, it allows for a description whose truth does not depend on our perspectives. Nonetheless, we are familiar with the phenomenon that the truth-value of some of our claims, on the face of it perfectly apt to represent how things objectively are, essentially varies depending on our perspectives.
Thus, the statement "Dinosaurs last roamed the earth 60 million years ago", true when uttered now, would not have been true if it had been uttered, say, 10 million years ago; the claim "Time is running slower for Pollux, because he's travelling at 99% of the speed of light" might be true uttered relative to some reference frame but not others; “Lentils are tasty” and, more controversially, “Gay marriage is acceptable” are also perhaps true only when made relative to particular gustative or moral perspectives; and, to provide a totally commonplace example, the claim “I am hungry” is true when uttered by some agents at some times, but not when uttered by others, or by the same agent at a different time. How can this variation in truth-value be reconciled with our conception of facts as being perspective-independent? Are not those perspectives from which the truth-value of claims like these essentially depends also an aspect of objective reality? Our project aims to contribute to the field of research aiming at its core to answer questions like these. These issues have been studied in depth in contemporary philosophy by researchers working on only some of the crucial cases for understanding the perspectival character of our thought, and their work has provided important results. However, while the complexity and diversity of the phenomena makes understandable the piecemeal approach that so far has been taken, we think that a unified attack is needed, for which the exploiting of synergies and complementarities and the collaborative efforts that a CONSOLIDER project allows are mandatory.
Timothy Williamson’s 1996 paper „Knowing and Asserting“ reopened the interest in normative accounts of assertion, which had been in disfavour after Strawson’s influential Gricean criticism of Austin’s normative account. Williamson’s proposal has been the focus of ongoing discussion in the years since. The main goal of this project is to contribute to the goal of clarifying the nature of the speech act of assertion, and that of its internal mental correlate, judgment, by focusing on contemporary discussion of two related sets of issues: issues concerning proposals to relativize truth, and issues concerning seeming assertions involving apparent reference to fictional entities, and fictionalist proposals in general. We plan to contrast normative and descriptive accounts of assertoric force, by appraising how they fare when it comes to evaluating proposals for relativizing truth, on the one hand, and to what extent they underwrite fictionalist accounts in different fields on the other, in particular in the case of claims apparently involving reference to fictional characters, claims about the content of narratives in general and fictional narratives in particular, and claims about the narrative identity of the Self. The initial hypothesis is that normative accounts of assertoric force pose very serious difficulties for radical truth-relativism – proposals for relativizing truth as a property of assertions and judgments, not just of the contents of those acts – and that they help motivating fictionalist proposals.
The aim of this project is to advance an epistemology of artifacts in two of its most important aspects: the first concerns the kinds of knowledge we acquire about these objects; the second has to do with their contribution to the acquisition of knowledge in different epistemic contexts. (I) In order to develop the first approach, we take as our starting hypothesis the idea that artifacts have a number of perceptual affordances that support a form of practical familiarity. Both the knowledge of the maker and the knowledge of those who don't make artefacts are based on forms of practical knowledge. Practical familiarity with these objects is organized as a peculiar form of intentional access, as an identification of opportunities for action. This project seeks to distinguish different modes of epistemic access to artifacts, to explain the apparent privileged knowledge of the maker, to find a foundation for these kinds of knowledge in the most basic forms of practical familiarity and to develop a conception of the possession of artifact concepts. (II) An epistemology of artifacts is incomplete without a study of how they contribute to producing and distributing knowledge. Artifacts and tools (especially scientific instruments) contribute differently to the resolution of epistemic tasks. This project aims to identify different cognitive and epistemic conditions on the use of artifacts, to provide an explanation for the nature of genuinely epistemic artifacts based on their coupling with material symbols and develop typologies of scientific instruments depending on the epistemic role they play in the context of science.
Duration: 2010 - 2012.- Principal Investigator: Jesús Vega Encabo (Autonomous University of Madrid).- Other researchers: Javier Ordóñez (UAM, Spain); Diego Lawler (CONICET, Argentina); Liza Skidelsky (UBA, Argentina); María Muñoz (UAM, Spain).
The project is intended to analyse the relationships among freedom, belief, and action. Both beliefs and actions are, in determinate conditions, whose specification is a central philosophical task in itself, manifestations of freedom and rationality, as well as objects of epistemic and/or moral responsibility attributions. Specifying these conditions is an essential aspect of the analysis of freedom and rationality (and, therefore, of responsibility, in so far as it presupposes them); it is also a basic aim of this project. For what concerns action, the assertion that an agent did something freely and was therefore responsible for doing it seems to involve these assumptions: 1) that nothing and no one forced her to do it, so that the act arose from the agent herself (origin); 2) that the agent did it for some reason or other (rationality); and 3) that the agent was able not to do it (alternatives). There is currently an increasing tendency, inspired in the pioneering work of Harry Frankfurt’s, to reject the necessity of the third condition. Against this, we intend to defend that this condition (alternatives) is also a requirement of freedom and moral responsibilit. yAs for belief, our purpose is, firstly, to intervene in the current debate about the relationships between belief and the will by developing new arguments against so-called doxastic voluntarism, according to which it is possible, under certain conditions, to believe at will. According to our hypothesis, beliefs are not subject to the will’s direct control and, unlike actions, it is not possible to form them on the basis of practical, non-epistemic reasons. Secondly, and in spite of it, we shall try to show that the concepts of freedom (in both the sense of alternatives and of origin) and responsibility can also be applied to beliefs. Finally, we shall deal with the relationships between freedom and moral responsibility concerning both beliefs and actions, under the novel hypothesis that the former might well be the foundation of the latter. It is also our aim, in connection with the concept of rationality, to investigate the nature of reasons, both for acting and for believing, and thereby to intervene in the current debate between those who take reasons to be mental states and those who hold them to be facts or states of affairs.Finally, we intend to reflect, in a more tentative manner, on the distinction that Gary Watson drew in his article “Two Faces of Responsibility” between the “aretaic” aspect of responsibility and its “accountability” aspect, as well as on the consequences of this distinction for the objectives and hypotheses that we have just indicated in this summary.
Duration: 2010-2012.- Principal Investigator: Carlos Moya (University of Valencia).- Other Researchers: Tobies Grimaltos Mascarós (University of Valencia); Jordi Valor Abad (University of Valencia);Enric Casabán (University of Valencia); Manuel Garcés ( University of Valencia);Eduardo Ortiz (Catholic University of Valencia); Christopher Hookway (University of Sheffield); María Ávarez Alonso (King’s College London); Cuypers, Stefaan (Catholic University of Leuwen); Helen Steward (University of Leeds);Edgar Maraguat (University of Valencia), Sergi Rosell (University of Valencia).
The aim of this project is to examine the nature of normativity as its unfolds in four different domains of philosophy: ethics, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and epistemology.
Duration: 2010- 2011.-Prolongation requested: 2011-2015.- Code: Fond de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (Québec).-Principal Investigator: Christine Tappolet (University of Montreal).-Other Researchers: Bilodeau, Renée (Laval, Blome-Tillman, Michale (McGill), Bouchard, Yves (Sherbrooke), Brunet, Josée (Sainte-Hyacinthe); Faucher, Luc (UQAM); Gold, Ian (McGill); Laurier, Daniel (Montréal); Reisner, Andrew (McGill); Rossi, Mauro (UQAM); Stroud, Sarah (McGill); Turmel, Patrick (Laval); Voizard, Alain (UQAM).
The aim of this project is to examine the concept of responsibility and its relation to affective states and to autonomy, both in normal cases and in dysfonctional cases.
Duration:2010- 2013.- Code: Conseil de Recherche en Sciences Humaine du Canada.-Principal Investigator: Christine Tappolet (University of Montreal).-Other Researchers: Faucher, Luc (UQAM)-
The project is centered on the cognitive science of discriminatory capacities, non-conceptual thought content, and demonstrative concepts. Temporal discriminatory abilities are just one sort of capacity that the group’s research will touch upon (albeit a very interesting one). Recent research suggests that our perceptual judgments of time-order and simultaneity are both highly fallible, and the result of significant processing work done in the brain. The construction of temporal aspects of experience can be crucial for understanding the relationships between thought, volition, decision making and action (as is shown, for example, in controversy over the interpretation of Libet-type experiments on voluntary actions).