CFP: Judgment and Justification

At least since Kant, the nature of judgment has been one of the central issues in philosophy. According to one view that derives from Frege’s philosophy, judgments are acts in which a propositional content, a thought, is presented as true. Assertions, in turn, can be considered as judgments made public by means of language. By making a judgment, you present yourself as entitled to this act, which means that you have a justification for your judgment. Certain types of contents for judgments, for example ones concerning moral value or taste, raise special questions about the possibility and the nature of justification. More generally, philosophers have addressed issues concerning the sources and the legitimate forms of justification. Such inquiry need not be only descriptive; in fact, it can result in revisionism about justificatory practices, as witnessed for example in Dummett’s philosophy.

The aim of this international conference is to bring together researchers from different fields and orientations in philosophy to discuss the nature of judgments and their justifications from a broadly systematic (not purely historical) point of view. Possible topics for 30-minute presentations include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• judgment as an act/judging as action
• judgments and their contents
• assertions and assertive force
• justification and the entitlement to judge/assert
• inference and its justification
• moral judgments and their justification
• aesthetic judgments and their justification
• sources of justification

We invite submissions of 600-word abstracts for max. 30-minute presentations. In addition to the contact information, affiliation, statement of the topic of the presentation and the thesis argued for, the abstracts should also contain an outline of the argument to be given in support of the thesis. The submissions as a pdf, odt, doc or rtf file should be e-mailed to Dr Jani Hakkarainen (jani.hakkarainen@uta.fi) by 27 May, 2012.

The conference is organized by the research project Judgment and Human Rationality funded by the Academy of Finland.