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Chicago Area Philosophical Exchange
(CAPHE)

The aim of CAPHE is to foster collaboration, facilitate communication, and build community among the many philosophers in Chicago and its surrounding areas with research interests in contemporary theoretical philosophy.

Organizers: Ray Briggs, Kevin Davey, Mikayla Kelley, Ginger Schultheis, Anubav Vasudevan, Malte Willer

Winter 2025 Schedule
[Meetings take place 11-1 in Wieboldt 408 (UChicago campus) unless otherwise noted.]

Friday, January 17

General Ability, Genericity, and Grain

Annina Loets (Wisconsin)

Many people in the literature on ability distinguish two kinds of ability: the ability to do something in a particular situation (specific ability) and the ability to do something across a range of relevant situations (general ability). Recently, Mandelkern, Schultheis, and Boylan (2017) have proposed a compositional implementation of this idea. On their view, general ability reports are just specific ability reports in the scope of a generic operator (much as habituals are just episodics under a generic operator). I argue that this view is committed to either an implausible account of general ability or an implausible account of specific ability. I propose an alternative unified picture on which there is just one kind of ability, possibility for action, and I show how the contrasts people have drawn in the literature can be recovered on this view in a metaphysically perspicuous manner. Relativizing ability ascriptions to situations emerges as merely a communicatively efficient proxy for ascriptions of certain fine-grained abilities.

Friday, January 31

Diffuse Impact and Fortuna's Wheel

Zach Barnett (Notre Dame)

A diffuse harm hurts many people a little; a concentrated harm hurts one person a lot. Other things equal, a diffuse harm seems less bad than its concentrated counterpart. For example, shortening a billion happy lives by a second each seems less bad than shortening one happy life by a billion seconds (~thirty years). But this widely endorsed thought is surprisingly susceptible to criticism. Some forms of it can be shown to be in tension with attractive principles, such as anonymity and the transitivity of better than. These demonstrations appeal to cases that involve a sequence of social positions, each very similar to the last, such as the Fortuna’s Wheel scenario. In response, some may wonder whether the parity of diffuse and concentrated harms holds only in these sequential cases. But it can be argued that the parity of diffuse and concentrated harms extends beyond such cases. Specifically, it can argued that in many realistic cases, the expected damage of a diffuse harm is approximately equal to the expected damage of a relevantly similar concentrated harm. Diffuse harm is easily underestimated.

Friday, February 14 

Believing Fiction

Andrew Stone (Chicago)

I argue that we can sometimes engage with a fiction as such by believing its contents rather than imagining them. We should expect this to be possible for two reasons: (1) belief and imagination constitute two ends of a spectrum of mental states that fall between them, and (2) fiction is a kind defined by certain social practices which we should expect to multiply realizable at the level of psychology. This possibility calls into question presentations of the paradox of emotional response to fiction which claim that we can never believe fictional propositions as part of our engagement with a work of fiction as such. After outlining the conditions under which it is possible to engage with a fiction by believing its contents, I consider the question of whether such an activity could ever be normatively acceptable, breaking this question down into three subquestions about whether believing a fiction could ever be practically, epistemically, or aesthetically reasonable.

Friday, February 28

TBA

Ginger Schultheis (Chicago)

Abstract coming soon...

Autumn 2024 Schedule
[Meetings take place 11-1 in Wieboldt 408 (UChicago campus) unless otherwise noted.]

Friday, October 11

LLMs Can Never Be Ideally Rational

Simon Goldstein (University of Hong Kong)

LLMs have dramatically improved in capabilities in recent years. This raises the question of whether LLMs could become genuine agents with beliefs and desires. This paper demonstrates an in principle limit to LLM agency, based on their architecture. LLMs are next word predictors: given a string of text, they calculate the probability that various words can come next. LLMs produce outputs that reflect these probabilities. I show that next word predictors are exploitable. If LLMs are prompted to make probabilistic predictions about the world, these predictions are guaranteed to be incoherent, and so Dutch bookable. If LLMs are prompted to make choices over actions, their preferences are guaranteed to be intransitive, and so money pumpable. In short, the problem is that selecting an action based on its potential value is structurally different then selecting the description of an action that is most likely given a prompt: probability cannot be forced into the shape of expected value. The in principle exploitability of LLMs raises doubts about how agential they can become. This exploitability also offers an opportunity for humanity to safely control such AI systems.

Friday, October 25

Accurracy Maximization for Causal Decision Theory

Melissa Fusco (Columbia University)

Causal decision theorists update by conditionalization, just like evidential decision theorists and rational pure observers do. But should they? Imaging (Lewis, 1976), based on Stalnaker’s selection function semantics for the subjunctive conditional, can, after all, be treated as a recipe for update (Gärdenfors, 1982). And in decision-theoretic contexts, a longstanding—though not popular— gloss on imaging does invoke normative update: conditioning, the story goes, is the epistemically correct response to learning A, while imaging is the epistemically correct response to making A the case. Of course, to be a genuine rival is one thing; to be a viable rival is quite another. Updating by imaging might seem like a born loser: susceptible to both a Dutch Book argument (Teller, 1973) and to the well-known result that conditionalization is the only update rule that maximizes accuracy (Greaves & Wallace, 2006). Despite these standard results, in this paper I do argue that imaging is the rational way to update one’s credences in some contexts of choice.

Friday, November 1 (special event, co-hosted with the Department of Linguistics) 

Meaning as Resonance

David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)

The standard paradigm for analyzing meaning in analytic philosophy of language and generative linguistics involves identifying "content", the way that a description of the world is packaged into words. Yet it seems somewhat obvious at the height of this election season that political speech practices would be usefully understood not in terms of how they describe the world, but in terms of their emotional impact, cultural resonances, and power to mark group affiliation. What is less obvious is how, if at all, such political, sociological and psychological considerations might bear on linguistic theory and philosophy of language. I will present work based on my recent book with Jason Stanley, The Politics of Language, outlining a theory of linguistic meaning that is designed to make sense of some of the ways in which political language departs from ideals usually assumed in semantic and pragmatic theory.

Friday, November 8

The Logical Firmament

Mike Titelbaum (UW-Madison)

When someone with a firm understanding of the elementary operations nevertheless remains ignorant of a complex logical or mathematical truth, precisely what kind of information are they missing? I identify a new category of truths, “catenary truths”, that accounts for a great deal of such non-omniscience. Most epistemologies of the a priori don’t extend to catenary knowledge, so I offer a novel proposal for how we acquire catenary information. The proposal answers Benacerraf-inspired worries about access to abstracta by suggesting that processes of reasoning instantiate catenary truths. The proposal also sheds new light on whether logic is ampliative, how a calculation is like an experiment, higher-order doubts about deductive reasoning, the inconceivability of logically impossible worlds, and commonalities between mathematical and moral intuition.

Friday, December 6

Learning 'If'

Calum McNamara (Yale/Indiana)

A prominent challenge for Bayesians is to say how your credences should change when you learn a indicative conditional. A number of cases in the literature seem to show that the standard Bayesian update rules, conditionalization and Jeffrey conditionalization, give implausible results when you learn conditionals of this kind. The most famous of these cases is Bas van Fraassen’s Judy Benjamin problem. There, it’s claimed that if, after learning an indicative conditional, your credences satisfy some intuitive desiderata, then you can’t be updating in accordance with standard Bayesianism. In response to this case, some authors have argued against van Fraassen’s desiderata, while others have proposed new updating rules, intended to supplement standard Bayesianism. In this paper, I offer a different kind of response. I first draw a connection between the Judy Benjamin problem, on the one hand, and the thesis known as Stalnaker’s thesis, on the other. Stalnaker’s thesis—which relates your credences in indicative conditionals to your conditional credences—was for a long time thought to be untenable, owing to the famous triviality results of David Lewis and others. However, recent work has shown that, given a particular semantics for indicative conditionals—a sequence semantics which, ironically, was first developed by van Fraassen himself—Stalnaker’s thesis is tenable after all. Here, I adopt the same semantics in order to rebut van Fraassen’s observations in Judy Benjamin. I first show that, given this semantics, the standard Bayesian update rules can satisfy all of the intuitive desiderata in that case, contrary to what van Fraassen claimed. I then show that alternatives to the Bayesian update rules, intended to handle cases like Judy Benjamin, actually turn out to be equivalent to those rules, according to this semantics—at least in many contexts. Thus, what we end up with is a nice, unified account of rational learning—one which fits well with recent work on the semantics of conditionals, and on Stalnaker’s thesis more specifically.

©2009–2025 Malte Willer. All rights reserved.

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