Theories of Judgment and Cognitive Attitudes (8 e 9 de novembro)

Colóquio

Theories of Judgment and Cognitive Attitudes

Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
Facultad de Filosofia – Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
November 8-9, 2012

Since January 2010 the Mind Language and Action Group (MLAG, University of Porto) and the Group EPISTEME (University of Santiago de Compostela) have been working together in two different but closely related research projects: The Bounds of Judgment and Cognitive Attitudes and the Justification of Knowledge, funded respectively by the Portuguese research agency Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and the Spanish Ministery of Science. Several researchers are members of both projects, including project leaders C. Martínez and S. Miguens.
The Bounds of Judgment takes as the starting point Frege’s conception of judgement (Urteil), side by side, and in contrast, with those of thought (Gedanke) and assertion (Aussage), and uses it as a guide to consider what it is to be a thinker. Adopting a working definition of judgment as a posture towards the world, fixing how the world would matter to its correctness, and held rightly or wrongly solely in virtue of the world being as it is, Project The Bounds of Judgment sets out to identify some bounds within which some people have thought judgement must remain. In particular, the project considers the following possible limits to the application of a concept of judgement proper: 1) Emptiness of demands on the world (in a section of the project dealing with logic and philosophy of logic); 2) Objects not sufficiently woven into the fabric of the world (in a section of the project dealing with philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception and focusing in particular on judgements of inner experience). 3) Usurpation (in the section of the project dealing with moral and aesthetic judgements). In section 4) Articulation and Agency, the connection between judging, acting, and the use of language is investigated.
These issues span a very wide swathe of philosophy, from philosophy of logics to moral philosophy. One main aim of the project, which, is to focus on relations between them, trying to understand how the fate of judgment with respect to one of these problems bears on its fate with respect to others.
Project The Bounds of Judgment was to a large extent inspired by Charles Travis’ recent work on the interpretation of Frege (cf. Perception – Essays after Frege, forthcoming 2013, OUP), and has counted on his involvement in all its activities.

Project Cognitive Attitudes and the Justification of Knowledge tries to elucidate a series of problems in epistemology (what is knowledge, what is given to us in perception, what is in a proof, etc.) in the light of an onto-formal detailed analysis (i) of the psychological states, acts, events, or processes (beliefs, thoughts, judgments, perceptions, predictions, knowledges, wishes, and so forth), called cognitive/propositional/mental attitudes, involved in those problems, and (ii) of the structural relations existing among them. The project is structured in three units: Unit I: a) an analysis of the notion of cognitive attitude and of the elements involved in it, especially those that have to do with their intentional contents (concepts and propositions, or non-conceptual or non-propositional contents); b) the relevance of being directed towards different objects to the categorization of different attitudes, and to see the relations among them. Unit II: Given we intend to apply the results of our analysis of the notion of cognitive attitude to problems in epistemology, we will characterize those attitudes that are most relevant to epistemology: believing, knowing, judging, and perceiving. Unit III: Study of different problems in epistemology in the light of the results obtained in the two previous units (see below).
The final aim of the Project is to get a better understanding of the nature and structure of the abovementioned cognitive attitudes to clarify classical epistemological problems such as nature and structure of belief and knowledge, a priori versus a posteriori knowledge, justification and evidence, etc. In more specific fields we will deal with issues such as determining the status, knowability and justification of logical truths, inference rules or mathematical axioms, on one side, or the problem of what is the character and the content of perception, what kind of relationship is there between perception and beliefs about the physical world, and problems related to the justification of scientific knowledge such as that of the knowability and justifiability of highly idealized laws and principles (particularly the idea of synthetic a priori to understand the role fundamental laws occupy in science), and the study of the different cognitive attitudes a scientist may have towards a scientific theory and the interrelations among them.

The purpose of this meeting is to present and discuss issues in the intersection of these projects, and also to present and discuss results in some of the other areas dealt with in the projects.