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SPA Student Speaker Series: Jamie Carmichael, Nathan Wagester
February 5 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Come check out the first of two Student Speaker Series (SSS) events this SP26 semester, hosted by the Student Philosophy Association.This first iteration will occur this coming Thursday February 5th from 5:00–6:00pm in room AS–241. Snacks will be provided. In addition to socializing, it’ll be a great chance to catch a glimpse of some current graduate student research. The first talk may be especially interesting to you if you are taking PHIL484/584 with Dr. Banick, and the second may be if you are considering taking PHIL342 in FA26.
5:00pm–5:30pm: Graduate Student Research Presentations
Jamie Carmichael (Cal State Long Beach)
‘What we talk about when we talk about what we can’t talk about’
‘What we talk about when we talk about what we can’t talk about’
- Abstract: Putnam’s canonical formulation of semantic externalism in the 1970s offered a theory of reference that, combined with Kripke’s contributions, challenged the longstanding ‘descriptivist’ theory of what occurs when using language to try to refer to some entity, concept, or relation. While acknowledging the strengths of this theory of reference—particularly the robust connection it draws between our utterances and the world to which they are meant to refer—it focuses on a weakness of semantic externalism as originally formulated by Putnam. A rigid empirical requirement that Putnam places on acceptable targets of reference means that, if this early formulation of semantic externalism is right, we cannot successfully refer to supernatural entities, period. By implication, a large percentage of human utterances about such entities are meaningless or, at minimum, do not mean what the speakers believe that they do. This talk briefly explicates Putnam’s argument, which seems to robustly demonstrate that this limitation is imposed. The explication is framed by my own assertion that, however one feels about supernatural entities in general (much less any particular one in particular, a theory of reference which seemingly impairs a significant share of human communication must either acknowledge that it has incorporated non-semantic priors into its account of semantics or that it has a weakness that must be addressed.
5:30pm–6:00pm: Graduate Student Research Presentation + Q&A
Nathan Wagester (Cal State Long Beach)
‘Establishing establishments as agent-involving events’
- Abstract: This paper presents two inconsistent triads for establishments as described by Korman (2020): the constitution problem and the decision-dependence problem. The constitution problem arises from considerations about the location of establishments, whereas the decision dependence problem arises from considerations regarding their decision-dependent nature. Korman resolves these puzzles by analyzing establishments as abstract artifacts. However, I argue that this solution is untenable. Specifically, it is implausible to suppose that abstract objects are causally efficacious; but since establishments are causally efficacious, it is implausible to suppose they are abstract. I consider and reject three objections to this causal efficacy argument. In its place, I propose the ‘agentive event’ analysis of establishments, which treats establishments as agent-involving events. My analysis is capable of capturing the intuitions that motivated each premise of the two inconsistent triads and accounting for the causal efficacy of establishments. I then consider and reject two objections to my agentive event analysis: (1) that the existence of events is too transient to understand the existence of longstanding establishments, and (2) that this view fails to respect the intuition that establishments are substances.