Bill’s new paper “What Is It We Touch?,” will appear in Sensory Individuals (Oxford).

Drew Johnson started his new job at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Congratulations Drew!

Mitch Green has three new papers!

-‘Dimensions of Commitment & the Abuse of Illocutionary Norms in Public Discourse,’ is forthcoming in Topoi.

– ‘Should Speech Act Theory Eschew Propositions?’ is forthcoming in L. Cepollaro and P. Labinaz (eds.) Sbisà on Speech as Action (Palgrave Macmillan).

– ‘What Might Machines Mean?’ (with J. Michel) Minds and Machines 32(2022), pp. 323-38. (This addresses the question whether machines can perform speech acts (and not just acts of speech)).

Congratulations Mitch!

Our member Benjamin Winokur who received his PhD from York University in 2021, will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ashoka University for the 2022-2023 academic year.

One of our members, Drew Johnson, will be defending his dissertation titled “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse” on April 8, between 11 AM – 1 PM, in the UCHI Conference Room (Babbidge 4-209), which will also be broadcasted. The abstract of his work and the event link is below. Good luck Drew!

Abstract: What is it that we are doing when we make ethical claims and judgments, such as the claim that we morally ought to do what we can to assist refugees? This dissertation introduces and defends a novel theory of ethical thought and discourse. I begin by identifying the surface features of ethical thought and discourse to be explained, including the realist and cognitivist (i.e. belief-like) appearance of ethical judgments, and the apparent close connection between making a sincere ethical judgment and being motivated to act on it. I examine prominent attempts to explain these features, with a focus on recent ‘hybrid’ theories combining elements of expressivism and cognitivism. Despite their initial promise, I argue that extant hybrid theories are nevertheless committed to problematic semantic, metasemantic, or pragmatic assumptions. I then develop what I take to be the strongest existing option, ethical neo-expressivism (Bar-On and Chrisman 2009; Bar-On, Chrisman, and Sias 2014), into an explicitly hybrid theory proposing that ethical judgments incorporate both motivationally-charged affective states and moral beliefs. I further develop this account by developing a theory of the proper function (following Millikan 1984) of ethical claims and judgments, arguing that they function simultaneously to track the morally salient features of social situations, and to coordinate our behavior around these features. Finally, I defend one of the cognitivist commitments of the theory – namely, that objective moral knowledge is possible – by applying recent work on the epistemology of fundamental or ‘core’ intellectual commitments (Lynch 2012; Pritchard 2016) to the moral realm.

Dissertation title: “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse”

Committee: Dorit Bar-On (chair), Michael Lynch, William Lycan, Paul Bloomfield.

Dissertation in philosophy.

Nimra published his paper at Synthese! The paper is titled “Minimal Theory of Mind – A Millikanian Approach”. Congratulations Nimra!

ECOM members Chris Rahlwes and Mengyu Hu were the recipients of this year’s Ruth Garrett Millikan Graduate Research Fellowship. This fellowship was created in 2017 with the aid of generous admirers, friends, and colleagues of Professor Ruth Garrett Millikan, one of the world’s most distinguished living philosophers, and a cherished member of UConn’s philosophical community. The recipients are outstanding ABD students in the Philosophy Department who use the fellowship to further their graduate research study in the summer of the award year. Congratulations, Chris and Mengyu!

Our research group manager, Aliyar received the CT Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (IBACS) Summer Fellowship. As a part of the fellowship, Aliyar will learn the application process of NSF grants, and he plans to apply to the NSF Linguistics Grant with Prof. William Snyder. Good luck!

There is an excellent workshop, organized by Laura Danón (National University of Córdoba) and Giuseppe Lorini (University of Cagliari), titled “Animal Normativity” (March 31, 2022 9:00 EDT). Speakers include Kristin Andrews (York University), Jonathan Birch (LSE), Rahel Brügger (University of Zurich), Frans de Waal (Emory University), Hannah Ginsborg (UC Berkeley), Carel van Schaik (University of Zurich).

Registration link: https://www.normactivity.com/animalnormativity.html

This conference will provide an unprecedented opportunity to bring together 3 of the major language evolution research communities, enabling a global platform for interdisciplinary discussion.

The conference will take place as a hybrid online & on-site conference in Kanazawa, Japan from September 5th – 8th, 2022.

February 1st, 2022

January 5th, 2022

More info can be found here.