Monash Philosophy Departmental Workshop

This is an in-person event only 

Location: S109 Menzies Building, Clayton 

Day 1, November 12th

10:30-11:30 Jenny Windt: A botanical metaphor for our wandering minds

11:30-12:30 Gene Flenady: Thought without sense? Hegel, Chalmers, and LLMs

Lunch Break: 12:30-1:30

1.30-2:30 Michelle Liu: The imagistic harm of language

2:30-3:30 Graham Oppy: Arguing

Drinks

Day 2, November 13th

10:30-11:30 Dave Ripley: TBA

11:30-12:30 Lloyd Humberstone: Disjunction and Clusivity

Lunch Break: 12:30-1:30

1.30-2:30 Steph Collins: State agency and the ethics of immigration

2:30-3:30 Sandra Leonie Field: Hobbes on zero-sum power

Tea break: 3:30-3:45

3:45-4:45 Suzy Killmister: Why (and how) should we value one another

Drinks

Abstracts

Day 1

Jenny Windt: A botanical metaphor for our wandering minds

Mind wandering forms a significant part of our conscious mental lives. Yet mind wandering is often defined in negative terms, as in task-unrelated and/or stimulus-independent thought, thoughts arising in the absence of strong deliberate or automatic constraints, or unguided attention. This, in turn, leads to a tendency to regard mind wandering as a deviation from task- or externally focused attention and a focus on its costs, such as decreasing performance in a variety of attentionally demanding experimental tasks.

In this talk, I propose that the contrast between wild and cultivated plants can guide our taxonomy of conscious mental states, including the place of mind wandering in it. I draw from recent research on mind wandering, mind blanking, and meditation to refine the distinction between wild and cultivated mental states and discuss theoretical and methodological consequences.

Gene Flenady: Thought without sense? Hegel, Chalmers, and LLMs

David Chalmers has recently critiqued historical and contemporary varieties of the “sense-thought thesis,” the claim that genuine thought requires sensory capacities. Chalmers argues that it is possible for a highly sophisticated thinker to lack the capacity to sense altogether, with the upshot that large language models (LLMs) might be considered to think. Such “pure thinkers,” while lacking a first cognitive “tier” of empirical acquaintance with objects (and so perhaps lacking a capacity for the use of singular terms), could nonetheless possess a “second tier” of abstract contents (formal logic and mathematics, and concepts like causation). While Chalmers acknowledges that Kant “discusses the issue extensively,” he notes only that Kant’s “final views on the matter are complicated.” Hegel, whose account of the relation between thought and sensibility is marked by extensive critical engagement with Kant, is unsurprisingly not mentioned. In this paper, I sketch a Hegelian defense of the sense-thought thesis, which proceeds via criticism of Chalmers’ broadly Cartesian assumption that thought and sense might be analysed into independent, self-standingly intelligible “tiers.”

Michelle Liu: The Imagistic Harm of Language

In this paper, I explore the idea that language can transmit harmful mental imagery. While it is unsurprising that pernicious language often transmits harmful mental imagery, the nature and scale of this imagistic harm are underappreciated. Empirical research suggests that mental imagery is a pervasive feature of language processing. Furthermore, mental imagery prompted by language can influence our memories and judgements in an insidious way. Focusing on language containing misinformation about witnessed events, as well as generics and metaphors about social groups, this paper argues for the importance of mental imagery for theorising harmful language and suggests ways to combat the imagistic harm. 

Graham Oppy: Arguing

I am writing a book, with the provisional title, Arguing. I have complete drafts of the first eight chapters (not including the Introduction and Overview). Here is the upper level ToC:

0. Introduction and Overview

1. Arguing and Attitudinal Difference

2. Preliminary Topics

3. Reasoning and Arguing

4. Argumentative Goals

5. Argumentation Theory

6. Informal Logic

7. Against the Standard Conception

8. Critical Thinking

9. Deliberative Democracy

10. Public Arguing

11. Philosophical Arguing

12. Concluding Remarks

I shall provide an overview of the major claims that are made in the book, including in the parts that remain to be written.

Day 2

Dave Ripley: TBA

Lloyd Humberstone: Disjunction and Clusivity

Up for discussion here is the nature of the distinction between inclusive and exclusive uses of “or” in English (and comparable expressions in other languages). We take a special interest in exploring the tenability of the attractive view that what is involved here is not the resolution of an ambiguity, so much as the specification of something simply left open by the fact that “or” is (not ambiguous but just) neutral as far as the exclusive/inclusive distinction is concerned. Whether or not such a view is eventually tenable as a semantic account of English “or”, it may still remain at least possible that there should be an or-like connective (in some imaginary but coherently conceivable variant of English, say) which is neutral in respect of clusivity. In that case, it would seem to be of some interest to consider what the logical behaviour of this ‘neutral disjunction’ might look like.

Stephanie Collins: State Agency and the Ethics of Immigration (Co-authored with Luara Ferracioli)

When normative political philosophers talk about the state as a collective agent with rights  and duties, they rarely interrogate the state’s internal structure. When we look under the hood, we find a messy melange of components, many of which are collective agents in their own right. We argue this has important implications for debates about the state’s right to control its borders. That right is often justified by appeal to attributes that are held by sub-state collective agents, not the state-as-a-whole. Advocates of border controls should either give new arguments, or else endorse a less centralised approach to immigration policy.

Sandra Leonie Field: Hobbes on zero-sum power

This paper explores whether, for Hobbes, having power is intrinsically comparative. Is having power always already 'more power' than someone else, so that some people having power means that others lack it? In more contemporary terms, is power 'zero-sum'? Or can many individuals simultaneously have power? I will argue that Hobbes does initially conceive of power as zero-sum, but that he later repudiates this conceptualisation. I'll reconstruct the weaknesses of his early view, and how these are remedied in his later work. I'll then trace the ramifications of this conceptual shift for Hobbes's moral psychology of justice and equity.

Suzy Killmister: Why (and how) should we value one another

In his book Human Dignity and Political Criticism, Colin Bird rejects the Kantian claim that dignity refers to an inherent and immutable worth, and instead develops an account of dignity as a “socially emergent property”. Through an analogy with the economic concept of market price, Bird argues that human dignity emerges through a particular kind of social exchange. In this paper I take up and extend Bird’s claim, using public response to the war in Gaza as a point of reference. I first suggest a modification of Bird’s framework, expanding the kinds of social exchange that generate human dignity. I then turn to a pressing normative concern: if dignity amounts to a certain kind of worth, and that worth is determined by patterns of social interaction, what could it mean to misvalue other human beings? Resisting the temptation to retreat to a notion of inherent worth, I instead explore whether the economic analogy can be stretched further in order to support the claim that we have a moral duty to dignify one another.