We are holding a three-day conference on Reasons, Explanations, and Models. The event takes place on September 30 – October 2, 2024 in Hamburg.
The programme is as follows, abstracts below:
Everyone is welcome to attend, but it is necessary to register for the event by sending an email to hamburgrelevance@gmail.com.
Abstracts
Luca Bellini, Reasons for Action: A Methodological Reflection on Action Expressiveness
There is a wide range of expressive things we do. We kick cars that refuse to start, we kiss and talk to pictures, we violently destroy anything connected to someone who cheated on us and many others along the same lines. The problem of expressive action is the problem of explaining why we do such bizarre things. According to the standard view, these are actions out of emotion. Instead, I argue that they are much more like make-believe games. While furthering our understanding of the role that imagination plays in justifying our conduct, this talk aims at clarifying the concepts we have – and those we should have – when thinking about action and its explanation. If philosophical action theory is to be continuous with empirical science, then what makes something an action (expressive or in general) is some distinctive aetiology. If, on the other hand, we take philosophical analysis to be (mostly) conceptual, all those premises that account for what we do are reasons rather than causes (pace the causal theory of action).
Aleks Knoks, Weighing Reasons: A Formal Approach
The main goal of the talk is to present a new formal model of the way normative reasons of varying strengths or weights determine the deontic statuses of actions, or the way normative reasons determine which actions are required, forbidden, and permissible. The model draws on formal argumentation, and, in particular, the recent work on *weighted* argumentation. Unlike any of the competing formal accounts, the model has two attractive features: it is faithful to the metaphor of weighing reasons on scales—and, thus, can model accrual of reasons—and it can represent the effects of undercutters and modifiers in an explicit and natural way. The model sheds new light on several philosophical debates—such as the debate between particularists and generalists. What’s more, it can be combined with machine learning techniques resulting in a new approach to machine ethics, or the subdiscipline of ethics of AI concerned with designing artificial agents that act in ethically acceptable ways.
Beate Krickel, On the Connection Between Topological and Mechanistic Explanations
Topological explanations are often distinguished from causal/mechanistic explanations, as they emphasize abstract, often mathematically defined relationships between nodes rather than causal relationships between parts. This raises the question: How exactly do topological explanations explain? Based on joint work with Leon de Bruin and Linda Douw, I will argue that many topological explanations, in fact, operate similarly to mechanistic explanations. I will outline a framework that clarifies how and under what conditions topological explanations can be considered complete mechanistic explanations. To illustrate this, I will draw on a neuroscientific case study examining cognitive deficits in Alzheimer’s disease based on so-called multiplex modelling. Finally, I will explore whether the resulting approach can serve as a general strategy for demonstrating how seemingly non-mechanistic explanations are, indeed, mechanistic.
Stephan Krämer, Reasons and the Logic of Obligation
According to the balancing view of obligation, one ought to do something iff doing so is favoured by the balance of reasons, i.e., iff one’s reasons for doing it outweigh one’s reason for not doing it. According to standard views in deontic logic, what one ought to do is governed by substantive logical rules. Combining such a view with the balancing view then allows us to derive broadly logical principles governing the balance of reasons for logically related actions. Such principles, however, cry out for explanation in terms of corresponding principles governing individual reasons, their weights, and the ways they combine. A pressing question therefore emerges for proponents of the balancing view: Is there a plausible set of such principles which generates a plausible logic of obligation? My talk addresses the special case of that question which targets so-called standard deontic logic and argues for an optimistic conclusion: I identify a set of natural, though not uncontroversial principles governing reasons that generates, via the balancing view, an essentially standard deontic logic. I go on to briefly consider possible variations on the principles and discuss their relation to similar principles that have been proposed in the literature.
Susanne Mantel, Explaining Reasons
Practical reasons are associated with two functions: to explain action and to justify action. This talk will be concerned with how these two functions combine.
James Nguyen, Stabilising Understanding
Scientific models provide understanding. And yet such models typically involve idealisations, deliberate distortions of their target systems. Non-factivists about understanding embrace these idealisations, factivists attempt to accommodate them in some way or another. In this paper we argue that non-factivists are too liberal: some constraint beyond empirical adequacy and intelligibility is needed for a model to be noetic. We further argue that existing factivist accounts fail to accommodate the ways in which scientists come to grasp the noetic function played by the idealised aspects of their models. This paves the way for our positive account of scientific understanding that emphasises the requirement that the target of understanding be stable across multiple differently idealised models. We further suggest that this account serves to unify various styles of scientific reasoning. This paper is joint work with Roman Frigg.
Thomas Schmidt, Reasons First, Deontic Logic Second
I suggest a unified account of how unconditional as well as conditional practical oughts are grounded in facts about reasons for actions and their weights. The core of the account is a principle that details how reasons for an action give rise to reasons against its incompatible alternatives. The resulting theoretical package turns out to be explanatorily fairly powerful. It makes sense of a number of recalcitrant normative phenomena, and it supports certain views in deontic logic over others. In particular, the account entails a principle about how conditional and unconditional oughts are related to one another.
Alastair Wilson, The Puzzle of Non-Contingent Scientific Explanation
Science indisputably provides us with explanations. It is natural to think that these include non-contingent explanations: explanations where the explanans and the explanandum necessarily co-vary. Potential examples in contemporary science include mathematical explanations, geometrical explanations, topological explanations and grounding explanations. While some progress has been made in understanding how these explanations are used, their metaphysical foundation remains shaky. I raise a general puzzle about non-contingent explanations, in the form of a trilemma facing scientific realists who endorse them: either non-contingent explanations are wholly different in character to contingent explanations, or non-contingent explanations are not (contrary to appearances) genuinely explanatory, or non-contingent explanations incur a substantial metaphysical commitment in terms of objective structure amongst (physical and metaphysical) impossibilities. I raise some objections to each horn of the trilemma.
Peter Verdée, Abstract-Reason-Based Hyperintensional Semantics
In this talk we present a new approach to hyperintensional semantics. Instead of seeing states, facts, situations or (im)possible worlds as the worldly objects at which or by which sentences are evaluated, we propose to take abstract reasons for or against sentences as the loci of evaluation.
More abstracts will follow in due course.
Relevance 