CFP: Limits of Knowable

The association Philo’Doctes (http://philo-doctes.paris-sorbonne.fr), in partnership with the university Paris-Sorbonne, is calling for contributions to an international study day which will take place at Sorbonne (Paris IV), May 22nd 2015, and will focus on the following topic: “The limits of the knowable.” Proposals for talk will have to be sent in the form of a summary to the following address: philo.doctes@gmail (see below for the conditions), before March 15th 2015.
The one day seminar will be organized around the talks of three keynote speakers:

Timothy Williamson (Oxford University)

Roy Sorensen (Washington University, Saint-Louis)

Paul Egré (CNRS, Institut Jean-Nicod)

On the basis of this call for contributions and a rigorous and anonymous selection, some more proposals of talk will be included (40mn of presentation and 15mn for each additional participant). The association Philo’Doctes will take in charge the catering during the day (transport and accommodation being in the charge of the additional speakers). Finally, after rewriting, contributions made during the study day will be published in conference proceedings.

How to answer to this call for contributions?

Proposals for talks should be sent in the form of a title and a summary (max. 600 words, bibliography not counted) describing the contribution to the following address: philo.doctes@gmail (please put in title of the message: “Contribution for the study day”). The message should also include the following informations: First name, last name, actual position (for example: graduate student), affiliation (example: Paris Sorbonne University). Please send your contribution with a handleable format (not pdf). The deadline of reception is March 15th 2015. The results of the selection process will be known by mid-April.

The argument of the one day seminar

During a conference at the Academy of sciences of Berlin in 1880, the physicist and physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond claimed that “seven world riddles” remained unsolved (about the ultimate nature of matter and of force, about the origin of movement and of life, about the relation between brain and sensations, or about free will) and formulated a now famous sentence: “ignoramus et ignorabimus” (“we ignore and we’ll ignore”). In this way, he wanted to draw not only the limits of the knowledge of his time – this is the question of ignoramus – but also the limits of the knowable, i.e. the limits that line with the territory of the unknowable by principle, whatever the time, the efforts and the means we could afford for undertaking knowledge – and this is the question of ignorabimus.

By this ignorabimus proclamation, Emil du Bois-Reymond provoked an important intellectual controversy, the echoes of which, though, don’t really resonate now outside erudite studies of history of thought. Yet this gesture is linked to a lineage of venerable attempts for delineating the frontiers of the knowable – notably by Locke or by Kant – and bring us to fundamental themes – the finitude of the subject of knowledge, in comparison with the transcendence of the world to know – that still animate today our epistemological reflections and question our conceptions about the very nature of knowledge. Because we think that this question remains fertile and relevant, we come back to the issue again from the point of view of our time: To what extent would an ignorabimus proclamation, i.e. delineating the limits of the knowable, be justified today?

We should carefully distinguish this question from that of skepticism in general; we don’t want here to put any doubt on the very possibility of knowledge itself – which is the work of the radical skeptic – but instead we would like to inquire about its range and its potential scope. We won’t ask: “Can we really know anything about the world?”, instead we’ll ask: “Are there some facts or things that we can definitively claim now we’ll never know?” This question presupposes already that knowledge is possible and focus only on the possibility of its infinite extension. In order to better discern the diversity of questions that could be considered relevant within this framework, we propose a (non-exhaustive) list of avenues for reflection that could be tackled in this occasion:

-          Does the very nature of the knowledge act (e.g. if justification requires a causal link between the knower and the known) entail an impassable restriction of the field of its applicability?

-          Are there inherent constraints in the scientific inquiry – limits in measurability, limits in the availability of data (and underdetermination), limits in the conceivability of theories… – that would entail the impossibility of an infinite progress of science, or the impossibility for science to answer to every question that it could ask?

-          Does modern science give us reasons to believe in impassable limits for the knowledge of the objective reality, notably in quantum physics or in cosmology?

-          Do the constraints of our physiological constitution justify an ignorabimus proclamation, in analogy with the fact that a blind person would never be able to know colors?

-          Is the “Fitch paradox” a formal demonstration of the inconsistence of the Knowability thesis, according to which every true proposition is knowable?

-          Are some phenomenal experiences out of reach for our knowledge, like the experience of what it is like to be a bat?

-          Are there meaningful questions that are nevertheless unanswerable because of the limits of our conceptual apparatus, or more generally the limits of our language?

-          Should we be skeptical towards the possibility to know categorical properties (i.e. non-relational and non-dispositional properties, sometimes called “intrinsic” properties) of things?

It appears then that the theme of the limits of the knowable can raise interrogations in many fields of philosophy: epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, etc. The main focus of this one-day seminar will be mainly to deal with the question of ignorabimus, but also to encourage a fertile dialogue between these philosophical domains.

Organization committee: Fabien Mikol, Vishnu Spaak, Daniel Andler, Jean-Baptiste Rauzy