Articulation and Agency

Starting: December 2012
Fridays, Sala do Departamento de Filosofia (Torre B – Piso 1) 
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto

Seminar series organized by Susana Cadilha, Sofia Miguens and João Alberto Pinto,
including a course on contextualism in philosophy of language by Ana Falcato (IFL-FCSH / Project The Bounds of Judgement)
 
This is the philosophy of language seminar of project The Bounds of Judgement. One main theme will be the origins and repercussions of contextualism in contemporary philosophy.

 
A judgment is a (partial) articulation of a thinker’s posture towards the world. In turn, it is what is articulable into elements— we might call these concepts. We want to ask just how essentially tied up with agency a posture towards the world must be to be articulable into judgments. It is sometimes said that to be a thinker is, essentially, to be an agent. It is seldom said what it means to say this, or why one should. Frege provides the basis for saying more and in this seminar we want to develop it. Here a leading question is: to what extent, if any, is a judgment obligated (if it is to be a judgment) to make the world matter to how agents conduct lives? The second question centres on the issue, raised by Frege, of whether, and in what sense, a judgment might have essential structure. How does a judgment differ, notably, from a vehicle for its expression (i.e. language) in the way it is (or is not) tied to particular articulations of it? 
  
   

 
This seminar will be centered on the claim that thinkers are necessarily agents. We want to use it as key in juxtaposing and comparing a contextualist conception of language as action (Travis 2008) and a (antirepresentationalist) approach to cognition as action (Noe 2004, Noe 2006). The assumption behind this juxtaposition is that philosophy of mind is more often brought close to cognitive science than philosophy of language. As in the other sections of the project, our intent to think about thinking won’t be taken in a generic sense (where ‘thinking’ ranges from mere belief to knowledge); rather, we will concentrate on judgment. Here what interests us are the following pragmatic (and contextual) dimensions of judgment (which are also the hypotheses we want to explore): (i) the fact that a particular kind of success is aimed at in judgment: truth, (ii) the fact that judging is aimed at guiding conduct; (iii) the fact that judgment is somehow forced on you (on cannot decide on what to judge). We also want to look at what we see as the temptation (in philosophy of mind and language) to model judging on authoring messages, and in particular on language. To fight this temptation we want to defend that judging is more like holding a posture than like an act, and that holding a posture does not require a vehicle that would make it (the posture) recognizable to me. This is where the question of articulation (as a question about thought and language) should enter: we want to defend that thought should not be modeled on language, i.e. on vehicles for expression. Language is made up of buiding blocks, thought not – this is our Frege-inspired conviction. We will try to develop it along the following lines, which will allow us to build a case against the anti-contextualist side of the contextualism/anti-contextualism debates (Preyer & Peter 2005), which is closely associated with a vision of compositionality. Our idea is that a thought perfoms a task, and to decompose a thought is to decompose it into tasks – this is something which has not been done if the whole task is not carried out (we could think of the task of going from here to the store to buy sugar). This contrasts with what is the case with sentences, where there are elements, which can be put together differently. This makes it that, we want to defend, certain compositionality questions are good questions about language and bad questions about thoughts.
 
In this half of the seminar we will pay close attention to recent philosophical work of the consultant of the project, C. Travis, in which these ideas are put forward (Travis 2008) and which aims at formulating a general occasion-sensitivity conception of thought, truth and language and to his thesis that this occasion-sensitivity conception is wittgensteinian, and formulated by Wittgenstein having Frege permanently in mind. We want to interpret it as a case against a representational-computational, language of thought view of thinking. In this we will be helped by consultant Benoist, who has himself worked much on an occasion-sensitivity conception of the nature of thought. He will be in charge of some of the sessions.
 
In the second half of the seminar we will concentrate on approaches to cognition as embodied and enactive.  By this we mean (Noe 2004) (i) the subject of mental states is taken to be the embodied environmentally situated animal, (2) the animal and the environment are thought of as a pair, being essntially coupled and reciprocally determining, (iii) perceptual and other cognitive states are thought of as activity on the part of the animal as non reprsentational. After spelling out the ways in which these ideas stand opposed to a representational-computational view of cognition we want to understand the difference natural language and judging makes in a mind conceived as such, a mind which is an animal and a (human) thinker. This should connect the two halfs of the seminar, and also relate to our approach to disjunctivism in a parallel seminar, in that one of the main theses defended is common: experiences are not in the head.