3rd Fragmentation Workshop: Fragmentation and the Content of Belief

3rd Fragmentation Workshop: Fragmentation and the Content of Belief

Graz, 17-18 March 2017

The 3rd Fragmentation Workshop: Fragmentation and the Content of Belief is organised by the research project The Fragmented Mind and will take place at the University of Graz, Austria, on March 17-18, 2017.

Keynote speakers:

• Prof. Imogen Dickie (University of Toronto)
• Prof. François Recanati (Institut Jean Nicod – Paris)
• Prof. Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
• Prof. Seth Yalcin (UC Berkeley)

Schedule:

Friday 17 March:

• 11.45am – 1.15pm: Robert Stalnaker: “Fragmentation and Singular Propositions”
• Lunch
• 3pm – 4.30pm: Seth Yalcin: “Subject Matter in Mind”
• 4.45pm – 6.15pm: Andrea Onofri: “Defending the Fragmentation Approach to Deduction”

Saturday 18 March

• 10am – 11.30am: Imogen Dickie: “Atoms, Fragments, and Two Kinds of Singular Thought”
• 11.45am – 1.15pm: François Recanati: “Do Mental Files Obey Strawson’s Constraint (One Object, One File)?”

Registration: attendance is free and everyone is welcome. If you are planning to attend please send an email to: [email protected]

Venue: room 09.51, fifth floor, Heinrichstraße 26, 8010 Graz. The venue is accessible by elevator. We are committed to hosting an accessible event.

Organizers: Andrea Onofri, Cristina Borgoni, Marian David, Dirk Kindermann

Contact: Andrea Onofri, [email protected] . Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.

Website: http://fragmentationproject.uni-graz.at/

Topic:

Fragmentation, or compartmentalisation, is roughly the view that a single agent has various separate systems of belief, which need not make for a consistent and deductively closed overall system. This notion of fragmentation has been employed in the work of Cherniak, Lewis, and Stalnaker, and has more recently been developed by philosophers such as Egan, Greco, Rayo, Yalcin and others.

The goal of this workshop is to examine the potential role of fragmentation in accounting for the content of belief and other propositional attitudes. The nature of belief content remains one of the most fascinating and debated issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. The fragmentation hypothesis promises to provide a novel perspective on this challenging issue.

Non-exhaustive list of topics:

• Can fragmentation solve notorious problems arising for possible-worlds accounts of mental content, such as the “problem of deduction”?
• What role can fragmentation play in a theory of mathematical and logical knowledge?
• Can fragmentation provide a novel solution to Frege’s Puzzle, i.e. the puzzle of explaining the possibility of confusion and ignorance about the identity of certain objects (e.g. Hesperus and Phosphorus)?
• Can fragmentation help illuminate the nature of “modes of presentation”?
• Should structured theories of mental content (e.g. Fregean and Russellian views) appeal to fragmentation?
• What is the connection between mental and linguistic content from the perspective of fragmentation accounts?