Series: Explanatory Inference Abstract: Consider a pair of lexically synonymous predicates such as ‘is a woodchuck’ and ‘is a groundhog’. Are they intersubstitutable within an attitude ascription without affecting either the truth-value of the ascription or the content of the belief? The received view is in the negative. I will be arguing for the normative… Continue reading CEFISES Seminar: Bjorn Jespersen, “A misdiagnosed conundrum about woodchuck and ‘groundhog’”

Series: Life and Cognition Abstract: Most accounts of organismic agency run into the problem of dispensability: why describe a behavior of an organism as agential, when a mechanistic explanation would do just fine? In this talk I problematize how organismic agency is often analyzed in terms of goal-directedness, as if it were a naturalization of… Continue reading CEFISES Seminar: Hugh Desmond, “The Deliberation Model of Organismic Agency”