Some representations are prima facie hybrids. By ‘representations’ we refer to activities such as linguistic speech acts, communicative acts in different media, the products of such activities, and the mental states or attitudes that these activities and their products typically express or aim to produce. Examples of hybrid representations include: thick ethical concepts, as introduced by Bernard Williams; pejoratives, or slurs, used to express contempt regarding a group of people, and also to classify someone in that group; affective attitudes, such as pain, aesthetic pleasure, anger, or, indeed, contempt, which dispose their subjects to behave in specific ways, but also represent the situations or conditions that prompt such dispositions to behavior; fictions which include assertions that also shape the character of the fictional world that the work presents for us to imagine. Now, even though examples like these – which we have investigated in previous projects – suggest that the category of hybrid representations may be widespread among representational or intentional states, philosophers have in general focused on cognitively, straightforwardly truth-conditional or thetic representations, those with a mind-to-world direction of fit; some have even tried to reduce all representations to them. Our purpose in this project is to explore the phenomenon of hybrid representations more systematically, so that we might address the following three questions: (a) How are hybrid representations integrated? (b) Does a proper account of hybrid representations require disentangling them? (c) If not, what does this tell us about the nature of representations in general?
PROJECT ACTIVITIES
The project organized the workshop Expressive Speech, Expressive Action, which takes place on 19-20 October 2023. For more information, see here.
The project organized the one-day workshop Expressives, Emotions, Beliefs, which took place on 12 of March 2024. For more information, see here.
The project also co-organized the workshop Experimental Philosophy in Spain, which took place on 14 and 15 of March 2024. For more information, see here.
During the duration of the project, we will run a main reading group focusing on the central themes of the project. We meet every other week.
This is the card for the reading group during the academic year 2023-2024. Information here.
At the same time, the project also hosts another reading group specifically on one of the work packages about fiction and philosophy of film. More information is available on this link.
Total budget: € 84700
1 FPI fellow
