18. – 20.07.2023

Institut für Philosophie II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Mercator Raum GAFO 04/187

Description

While understanding has recently become the object of intense debate among philosophers, it remains an open question how to make sense of different forms of understanding. These include scientific understanding (e.g. understanding scientific theories, phenomena, models, etc.), moral understanding (e.g. understanding other people, understanding political subjects, etc.), aesthetic understanding (e.g. understanding an artwork, like a novel or painting, and how these enable us to understand the world), or religious understanding (e.g. understanding theology, understanding and our spiritual life).

The main goal of the conference is to gather some of the most prominent, established researchers in the field of understanding, as well as early career researchers, to debate about the nature of understanding and what connections there may be between scientific, moral, aesthetic, and religious understanding.

Registration

This is a hybrid event, participation online or in person is free, but please register first by sending an e-mail with your name, e-mail address, and preference (online or in-presence participation) to: 

alfredo-vernazzani@daad-alumni.de

or

fede.malfatti89@gmail.com

Seats are limited for in-presence participation!

A Zoom link will be sent to all registered participants on July 17. 

Program
(All times are CET!)

18.07.2023

8:45 – 9:00 opening
9:00 – 10:15 Catherine Z. Elgin (Harvard): “Epistemic Agency”
10:15 – 11:30 Christoph Jäger (Innsbruck/HU): “Socratic Authority and Understanding”
11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break
12:00 – 13:15 Silvia Jonas (Bamberg): “A Mathematical Perspective on Religious Understanding”
13:15 – 15:00 Lunch break
15:00 – 16:15 Alexander Prescott-Couch (Oxford): “Two Kinds of Political Understanding”
16:15 – 16:45 coffee break
16:45 – 18:00 Sanford Goldberg (Northwestern) & Kareem Khalifa (UCLA): “A Social Epistemology of Scientific Understanding”
19:30 Conference dinner

19.07.2023

8:45 – 9:00 opening
9:00 – 10:15 Annalisa Coliva (Irvine): “Wittgenstein and Morphology” (tentative title)
10:15 – 11:30 Alfredo Vernazzani (RUB): “Seeing-As, Memory, and Perceptual Intelligibility” 11:30 – 12:00 coffee break
12:00 – 13:15 Albert Newen (RUB): “Multiple Types of Social Understanding and their Underlying Dimensions”
13:15 – 15:00 Lunch break
15:00 – 16:15 Elisabeth Schellekens (Uppsala): “Aesthetic Experience and Epistemic Gain: The Case for Intelligible Aesthetic Value”
16:15 – 16:45 Coffee break
16:45 – 18:00 Jochen Briesen (Konstanz/FU): “Response-Dependence, Knowledge, and Understanding”

20.07.2023

8:45 – 9:00 opening
9:00 – 10:15 Mario Hubert (AUC) & Federica Isabella Malfatti (Innsbruck): “Understanding Quantum Mechanics”
10:15 – 10:30 coffee break
10:30 – 11:45 Henk de Regt (Radboud): “The Prospects of Artificial Scientific Understanding”
11:45 – 12:00 Conference ends

Speakers:

Jochen Briesen

Universität Konstanz

Annalisa Coliva

University of California, Irvine

Catherine Elgin

Harvard University

Sanford Goldberg

Northwestern University

Mario Hubert

American University in Cairo

Silvia Jonas

Universität Bamberg

Christoph Jäger

University of Innsbruck

Kareem Khalifa

University of California, Los Angeles

Federica Isabella Malfatti

University of Innsbruck

Albert Newen

Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Alexander Prescott-Couch

Oxford University

Elisabeth Schellekens

Uppsala University

Alfredo Vernazzani

Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Henk W. de Regt

Radboud University

Organisers:

Federica Isabella Malfatti

University of Innsbruck

Alfredo Vernazzani

Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Tuesday, 27.6.2023:  14.30-16.00 Uhr,

Location (hybrid): GA 04/187 Mercatorraum und online via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89147315543?pwd=aTNPMzdJdkhZbFluUXJKeHp5emVNQT09

Prof. Cameron Buckner, University of Houston (USA)

Fellow-Lecture

Theory of Attention and Artificial Intelligence: Ideational Preparation Is All You Need – Deep Learning Meets William James’ Theory of Attention

Abstract:  Deep learning is a research area in computer science that has over the last ten years produced a series of transformative breakthroughs in artificial intelligence—creating systems that can recognize complex objects in natural photographs as well or better than humans, defeat human grandmasters in strategy games such as chess, Go, or Starcraft II, create bodies of novel text that sometimes are indistinguishable from those produced by humans, and predict how proteins will fold more accurately than human microbiologists who have devoted their lives to the task.  The artificial neural network approach behind deep learning is usually aligned with empiricist theories of the mind, which can be traced back to philosophers such as Locke and Hume. 

Contemporary rationalists like Gary Marcus and Jerry Fodor have criticized the innovations behind some of these breakthroughs, because they appeal to innate structure which is supposed to be off-limits to empiricists.  I argue that these innovations are consistent with historical empiricism, however, as they implement roles attributed to domain-general psychological faculties like perception, memory, imagination, and attention, which were frequently invoked by paradigm empiricists in their explanations of the mind’s ability to extract abstractions from sensory experience.  Computer scientists may benefit by reviewing these philosophers’ accounts of these faculties, for they anticipated many of the coordination and control problems that will confront deep learning theorists as they aim to bootstrap their models to greater levels of cognitive complexity using more ambitious

architectures with multiple interacting faculty modules.   In this talk, I focus on William James’ account of attention in the Principles of Psychology by comparing the roles he assigned to attention in the extraction of abstract knowledge from experience to the innovations behind many recent architectures in deep learning.  Despite numerous alignments, I argue that deep learning still has much to gain by considering other aspects of James’ theory which have not yet been fully implemented, especially the “ideational preparation” component of his theory, which aligns more naturally with predictive processing accounts of cognition.

Monday, June 5^th – Tuesday, June 6^th, 2023

RUB, Sitzungszimmer HG
(Seminar room in the mensa building / level of the Café bar)
Keynotes online via Zoom

Organizers: Brian McLaughlin (Rutgers, New Brunswick, Dept. of Philosophy), Sen Cheng (RUB, Institute for Neuroinformatics), and Albert Newen (RUB, Institute of Philosophy II)

Monday, June 5^th, 2023  

DAY 1: Philosophy of Language, Mind and Science

Chair person:    Robert Matthews, Rutgers

9:10 – 9:15        Welcome by Albert Newen

9.15 – 10.25       Keynote I – Mark Sprevak “In what sense do large language models understand what they say?”

10.25 – 11.10     AG McGee “Deterministic Doxastic Wrongings’”

11.10 – 11.40     Coffee Break

Chair person:    Kristina Liefke, RUB

11.40 – 12.50     Keynote II: Dunja Šešelja “Towards epistemically responsible fact-checking of scientific claims

12.50 – 14.20    Lunch

Chair person:     Brian McLaughlin, Rutgers

14.20 – 15.20    Keynote III: Francesco Marchi “The Rationality of Mental Imagery”

15.20 – 16.05     Julia Wolf: “Before Belief – Knowledge and Pretend Play”

16.05 – 16.30    Coffee Break

16.30 – 17.15      Alfredo Vernazzani & Andrew Rubner “In Defense of a Bundle View of Perceptual Content”

17.15 – 18.25      Keynote IV – Frances Egan ““Belief and its Linguistic Representation”

19.00 Dinner

Tuesday, June 6^th, 2023

DAY 2: Memory: An interdisciplinary approach

Chair person:    Sen Cheng, RUB

9.00 – 10.10     Keynote V – Markus Werning “Predicting the Past From Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory Without Storage”

10.10 – 10.55     Roy Dings “What does it mean to accurately remember? Towards an account of situated authenticity in episodic memory.”

10.55 – 11.20     Coffee Break

11.20 – 12.30     Keynote VI – Pernille Hemmer “The Memorability of Supernatural Concepts”

12.30 – 14.00 Lunch

Chair person:    Pernille Hemmer, Rutgers

14.00 – 14.45    Sophie Siestrup “The influence of structure and content modification in episodic cueing on brain activity and memory”

14.45 – 15.30     Sandhiya Vijayabaskaran “How artificial agents learn and represent spatial behaviours”

15.30 – 15.50     Coffee Break

15.50 – 17.00    Keynote VII – Albert Newen “Memory, Self and selfless memories”
Remark: The keynote talks (but only those) will be available online. Please use the following Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86215674920?pwd=cFV1dWhXanNra2RNakkvWERXWmVtUT09

Workshop – Fr. the 2nd of June 2023 – Ruhr-Universität Bochum / Veranstaltungszentrum – Saal 3
Organized by: Suilin Lavelle (University of Edinburgh) & Tobias Schlicht (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Zoom-Link: Please send an email to Firuze.Mullaoglu@ruhr-uni-bochum.de