• 9.45-10.00am Tea/coffee and biscuits
• 10.00-10.30am Shane Ryan, 'When are our Intuitions Reliable?'

ABSTRACT. My presentation will consider the circumstances in which intuitions can be said to be reliable. BonJour draws the analogy between intuition and perception. Making this link between intuition and perception may seem like a good move for those who claim intuitions to contribute something valuable, such as evidential weight, to philosophical discourse. If intuitions really are akin in significantly relevant ways to perception then it seems as though we should be ready to take our intuitions at face value, as we ordinarily do with our perceptions. However as Swain, Alexander and Weinberg argue the analogy breaks down in that we know something of the circumstances in which our perceptions are unreliable but the same cannot be said for our intuitions. My presentation will explore some hypothesised biases that may play a role in leading philosophical intuitions astray. The aim of my talk will be to argue that we should adopt a more critical attitude to the use of intuitions in philosophy.

• 10.30-11.00am Adam J. Carter, 'What's Really Wrong with Moore's Proof?'

ABSTRACT. Recent work concerning the cogency of Moore's Proof has been shaped influentially by debates about perceptual warrant; the two prominent lines here are those taken by the dogmatists (i.e. Pryor 2004; Davies 2002) and the conservativists (Wright 2007). Each of these two main accounts of perceptual warrant implies its own specific diagnosis of Moore's Proof. According to the conservativist line, Moore's Proof fails to transmit warrant across the entailment from premise to conclusion. The dogmatist claims that, although the Proof effectively does transmit warrant from premise to conclusion, it will nonetheless be dialectically ineffective for anyone who already holds the conclusion in doubt. In this paper, I argue that these two main lines of diagnosis share a common commitment to what I call the self-containment thesis: that the lack of cogency of Moore's proof owes to internal properties of the proof. My move will be to provide several cases which will demonstrate agent-centered cogency--that facts about agents ground facts about cogency. I'll then show that agent-centered cogency undermines the self-containment thesis--and with it, the two mainline diagnoses of Moore for which a commitment to self-containment is shared. In the final sections of the paper, I show how agent-centered cogency motivates a general account of cogency assessment which I defend under the description of comparative conclusiveness. I'll show how comparative conclusiveness best captures the conditions under which any proof fails to be cogent, and finally, I extend this general principle for cogency assessment to Moore's own Proof and offer my own diagnosis. I conclude by defending my appeal to comparative conclusiveness for diagnosing Moore against some possible objections.

• 11.00-11.30am Evan Butts, 'Epistemology, Supererogation and You'

ABSTRACT. We have an idea that one can do more than is required in any normative domain. Usually this comes up in the context of morality and ethics. The person who sacrifices their life to save another, or the person who devotes their life to temperance or charity have, at various times and in various traditions, been seen as exceeding their obligations in a praiseworthy fashion. Assuming that epistemology is a normative domain, are the similar examples? Is there such a things as epistemic heroism? In order to answer this question, some elucidation of the provenance and development of supererogation is required. Once the basic framework or the discussion as it appears in the moral domain is understood, it remains to determine whether similar things can be said in the epistemic domain. I aim to explore the possibility of supererogation in the epistemic domain in independent cases, each case predicated upon a different assumption regarding which epistemic state is that which we are minimally obligated to obtain: a) being justified, b) having first-order knowledge and c) having second-order knowledge. Further, I will argue if we countenance supererogatory acts (regardless of which case we choose to define them), such acts are always normatively deficient from the all-things-considered perspective. This last point will flow from an argument that there can be no all-things-considered supererogatory acts—only acts which are supererogatory with respect to a particular domain of value/obligation.

• 11.30-11.45am Tea/coffee and biscuits
• 11.45-12.15pm Emma Gordon, 'Understanding in Contemporary Epistemology'

ABSTRACT. It seems that the most productive way in which understanding might be successfully explored and accounted for is by (i) comparing its distinctive and necessary traits to those possessed of knowledge, and (ii) concurrently comparing its place in contemporary debates to the place that knowledge has in those debates. I will summarise understanding's potential significance for some of these prominent topics, looking at some of the following: epistemic luck, factivity, contextualism, testimony, the nature of cognitive achievement, and epistemic value.

• 12.15-12.45pm Georgi Gardiner, 'Causation, Luck and the Terrain of Virtue Epistemology'

ABSTRACT. Robust Virtue Epistemology (RVE) and Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology (ALVE) are two rival definitions of knowledge. The former holds that the nature of knowledge can be understood entirely through the concepts of true belief, epistemic virtues and the relationship between them; the latter holds that an analysis of knowledge also requires a separate modal condition (such as Safety or Sensitivity) in order to rule out all cases of knowledge undermining luck. My research defends RVE against recent criticisms, and also launches some counterattacks on Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology. In this talk I will explain the putative counterexamples to RVE, and my responses, I will also outline the key features of the debate, and suggest some areas where RVE fares better than its rival ALVE.

• 1.00-2.00pm Buffet lunch in room 7.01, DSB
• 2.00-2.30pm Andrea Giananti, 'A Reason to Believe: Perception and Knowledge'

• 2.30-3.00pm Diana Stewart, 'Moral Intuitions: Gilding and Staining to our (Dis)content'

ABSTRACT. I will discuss how to conceptualize moral intuitions both traditionally and along more au courant lines of empirical research, with attention to the linguistic analogy and value as embedded in a system of heuristic logic. My research currently bridges concerns in meta-ethics and intuitionist epistemology with debates in cognition (broadly construed) ranging from the acquisition of moral terms to modularity.

• 3.00-3.30pm Jamie Collin, 'Epistemic Luck and Necessary Truths'

ABSTRACT. Nominalism is generally motivated by epistemological concerns regarding abstract objects. One natural way to construe this concern is in terms of epistemic luck; given the causal isolation and concomitant inaccessibility of abstracta, any true beliefs we form about them would be lucky. Despite this, such an analysis may be ruled out, as it is often supposed that if abstracta such as mathematical objects exist, they do so necessarily, and current accounts of epistemic luck are intended to be applicable only to contingent truths. However, recent work in epistemic possibility by the likes of David Chalmers may provide resources for extending the notion of epistemic luck to cover cases of necessary truths. Here I explore this possibility.

• 4.15-4.45pm Eusebio Waweru, 'Assertion and Belief'

ABSTRACT. Assertion and belief are interestingly asymmetrical: believing only what one has evidence for doesn't usually feel as urgent as ensuring that one believes others only when they have evidence for their assertions. I explore a new argument for evidentialism motivated by this asymmetry. It's useful too: if all goes well, it allows a neat move against an important class of skeptical arguments.

• 4.45-5.15pm Rachel Fairnie, 'A Matter of Knowledge and Death'

ABSTRACT. In discussing the metaphysics of death it is assumed that one can sensibly provide a coherent definition, and therefore make knowledge claims regarding the nature and timing of death. However, scepticism regarding one’s ability to know anything of one’s own death, and claims that death is therefore unknowable are thought by some (Morison 1971, Chiong 2005) to present a genuine problem for those making robust metaphysical claims about death. The sceptical position maintains the view that death presents an epistemic limit, and as a result declarations of death as having taken place at an explicit moment are rejected as arbitrary. For the sceptic, death remains an unknowable truth. I intend to argue against this deep scepticism, and demonstrate that one can make knowledge claims about the nature, timing and value of death without arbitrariness.

• 5.15pm Workshop end
• 5.15-7.30pm Drinks at the Meadow Bar (42-44 Buccleuch Street, 0131 667 6907)
• 7.30pm Dinner at Suruchi’s restaurant (14a Nicolson Street, 0131 556 6583)