Program

The graduate school takes place in room C186 (Ruth First Auditorium) in the Cobbenhagen Building.

Tuesday

14.00		Welcome Lunch at the Grand Café Esplanade (on campus)
15.00 - 15.15		Opening
15.15 - 16.00		Raphaël van Riel
		Dependencies in the Golden Triangle
		Coffee Break
16.30 - 18.00		Public Lecture - Michael Pauen
		Reasons, Causes, and Decisions
		Come Together

Wednesday

9.30 - 11.00		Michael Pauen
		How Privileged is First Person Privileged Access?
		Coffee Break
11.30 - 12.15		Benedikt Kahmen
		Knowing Your Own Mind
12.15 - 13.00		Marius Dumitru
		Cognitive Phenomenology, Perceptual Phenomenology, and Functional Exhaustion
		Lunch Break
14.15 - 16.15		J.D. Trout
		The Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology
		Coffee Break
16.45 - 17.30		Carlo Martini
		Self-Judgment in the Lehrer-Wagner Model
17.30 - 18.00		Mini Workshop - Stephan Hartmann
		How to Get an Academic Job

Thursday

9.30 - 11.00		J.D. Trout
		Hooked on a Feeling of Understanding
		Coffee Break
11.30 - 12.15		Patrice Soom
		Reductionism in Philosophy of Mind
12.15 - 13.00		Alexandros Tillas
		An Empiricist on the Origin of Concepts
		Lunch Break
14.15 - 15.45		J.D. Trout
		Happy Endings and Illusions of Narrative Coherence
		Coffee Break
16.15 - 17.45		Ulrike Hahn
		Perceptions of Randomness
		Conference Dinner

Friday

10.00 - 18.30		Closing Workshop

Abstracts

Perceptions of Randomness
Ulrike Hahn, Cardiff University

A long tradition of psychological research has lamented the systematic errors and biases in people's perception of the characteristics of sequences generated by a random mechanism such as a coin toss. We propose that once the likely nature of people's actual experience of such processes is taken into account, these 'errors' and 'biases' actually emerge as apt reflections of the probabilistic characteristics of sequences of random events. Specifically, seeming 'biases' reflect the subjective experience of a finite data stream for an agent with a limited short-term memory capacity. Consequently, these biases seem testimony not to the limitations of people's intuitive statistics but rather to the extent to which the human cognitive system is finely attuned to the statistics of the environment.

Reasons, Causes, and Decisions
Michael Pauen, Humboldt University Berlin

The ability to act according to reasons seems to be constitutive for persons. This view, however, has been challenged in recent years: Philosophical considerations have raised the question how reasons can be effective if human decisions are determined by natural causes in the brain, especially if reasons cannot be identified with causes. In addition, empirical data seem to show that our actions are determined by subpersonal neural activities rather than by conscious considerations. The lecture will present a theoretical model showing how reasons and causes might be related and how empirical evidence leaves room for reasonable decisions.

How Privileged is First Person Privileged Access?
Michael Pauen, Humboldt University Berlin

Although there is a difference between first person and third person experience of phenomenal qualities, this difference does not result in an epistemic privilege: There is no first person knowledge with respect to mental and especially phenomenal states that can't be acquired in principle from the third person perspective. Any fundamental restriction of our third person epistemic access to a certain type of mental states will result in a similar restriction of our first person access to this type of states. Given that most philosophers accept that we do have epistemic first person access to our own phenomenal states, we should also have epistemic third person access to these states. It would follow that there is no basic limitation for a naturalistic explanation of mental, particularly of phenomenal states.

The Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology
J.D. Trout, Loyola University Chicago

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism (Chisholm 1981, Pollock 1974), coherentism (Bonjour 1985, Lehrer 1974), reliabilism (Dretske 1981, Goldman 1986) and contextualism (DeRose 1995, Lewis 1996). While proponents of SAE don't agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can't work.
My main goal in this presentation is to show that the standard argument against naturalized epistemology has it almost exactly backwards. We will argue for the following five theses: (i) the dominant theories of Standard Analytic Epistemology (foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, contextualism) have at their core a descriptive theory, (ii) this descriptive theory aims to capture the considered epistemic judgments of a small group of idiosyncratic people and (iii) the standard charge leveled against naturalistic epistemology can also be leveled against the dominant theories of Standard Analytic Epistemology: They attempt to extract prescriptions from descriptions. (iv) Some of the best psychological science of the past half-century is deeply normative and makes specific recommendations about how to improve our reasoning about matters of great practical significance and (v) an approach to epistemology that takes seriously these psychological findings is better suited to overcoming the is-ought gap than are the theories of SAE.
This paper is organized as follows. In section 1, we document the attractions of some of the empirical science that is devoted to passing normative judgments and prescribing new and better ways to reason. Because this literature is so wide-ranging, it will be useful to give it a name. We call it Ameliorative Psychology. In section 2, we argue that the theories of SAE have at their core a descriptive theory. As a result, the theories of SAE face the same is-ought challenge faced by naturalistic theories. Further, we offer some reasons for thinking that the prospects for SAE overcoming the is-ought challenge are not good. In section 3, we argue that the approach to epistemology that takes seriously Ameliorative Psychology is superior to that of SAE because it is much more likely to provide a motivated way of overcoming the is-ought divide. The normative recommendations and evaluative theses of Ameliorative Psychology can receive confirmation by the best science of the day. And some of these recommendations have been impressively confirmed, in the form of documented results and a proven method for securing them. Standard Analytic Epistemology, on the other hand, has a long tradition and the loyalty of its enthusiasts.

Hooked on a Feeling of Understanding
J.D. Trout, Loyola University Chicago

Philosophers agree that scientific explanations aim to produce understanding, and that good ones succeed in this aim. But few seriously consider what understanding is. If it is a psychological state or process, describing its specific nature is the job of psychological theorizing. This article offers a contrarian psychological account of the role that understanding should play in scientific explanation, for it faults recent accounts that attempt to treat the phenomenological sense of understanding as justificatory. Many explanations produce a sense of understanding in us, even when the explanations are terribly mistaken. This experience or sense of understanding, sometimes genuine and sometimes counterfeit, can range from a dramatic "Aha" experience to a sanguine "stopping rule". The phenomenology produced by an explanation is independent of the explanation's goodness. In this presentation I will consider two questions. First, are there reliable cues to a good explanation? Second, why do people find the phenomenology of an explanation so gripping? Historical evidence sheds doubt on one, and the neuroscience of wanting and liking will account for the positive hedonic marking of coherent descriptions.

Happy Endings and Illusions of Narrative Coherence
J.D. Trout, Loyola University Chicago

A diary accurately records the quality of our current experience; our retrospective evaluations do not. Unfortunately, it is not our faithful diaries, but our remembered experiences, that predict our future choices. So your vacation to France may have been far less pleasant than you recall; but don't worry, you'll go again. Research by figures like Ed Diener and Daniel Kahneman show that our intuitive standards for faring well are not merely additive; they do not simply add up segments during which we fare well. Instead, they weigh heavily the peak and terminal sequence of an episode (the Peak-End Rule) and the quality of the terminal sequence of a life (the "James Dean effect"). At the same time, David Velleman's work reflects philosophical standards that agree with lay intuitions, noting that we may judge differently two lives that have the same integrals of happiness, as long as they have different narrative structures. I argue that findings in autobiographical memory show that the apparent narrative coherence in one's life is mere illusion, an artifact of retrospective confabulation designed to maintain or enhance our present self-esteem. Research in positive psychology shows that faring well depends less on narrative continuity and more on participation in enjoyable activities, whether or not those pleasant engagements are tied to our overarching life-aims. Living this lesson requires the kind of discipline found in well-tested reasoning strategies.