Session 1:

RULES AND KNOWLEDGE

May 14^th

Room F 101, 2.30pm – 5.30pm

Mircea Dumitru

Philosophy, University of Bucarest

Models and Rules in Semantics:

Representationalism vs. Inferentialism

“I shall sketch two competing approaches to logical theory and semantics. The broader view to which those approaches are subordinated is the place and role of meaning within natural world.

Roughly speaking, by a representational semantics I mean a model-theoretic semantics. The main concept of the interpretation of a language within this type of semantics is the concept of model. Word meanings and sentence meanings are taken care of, for instance in the Davidsonian way, through the inductive apparatus of the definition of denotation and truth in an interpretation for the syntatic well-formed sequences of symbols of the language to which those symbols belong.

By an inferentialist semantics I mean, rougly, a rule-based semantic system. Historically, the idea that the meanings of various logical concepts are to be rendered via rules for introducing those terms into and respectively for eliminating those terms from the discourse is associated with the work of the German mathematician and logician Gerhard Gentzen.

Genzen’s sucessful project was to devise rule-based systems of deduction. For each and every logical constant in the language of the system one should come up with a pair of rules, one which allows us to introduce the constant and a companion rule which shows how we can eliminate the constant. It is the rules themselves which give the logical meanings of those logical words, and not the models or linguistic representations we might associate in the vernacular with those logical constants.

A first challenge for this proposal is this: how to generalize this inferentialist thought from mere logical constants to whole areas of natural discourse through which it is obvious that we make descriptive noninferential reports? The work of M. Dummett and more recently of R. Brandon opens wide new horizons upon the connections and the order of explanation between representations and rules or, if we prefer the other set of terms, between model-theoretic and proof-theoretic categories.”

References

Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit. Reasoning, Representing, & Discursive Commitment, Harvard University Press, 1994.

Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons. An Introduction to Inferentialism. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Donald Davidson, ‘Truth and Meaning’ (1967), in A. P. Martinich (ed.), The Philosophy of Language, second edition, Oxford University Press, 1985, 1990, pp. 79 – 90.

Michael Dummett, Frege’s Philosophy of Language, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Gerhard Genzen, ‘Investigation into Logical Deduction’, in M. Szabo (ed.), The Collected Papers of Gergard genzen, North Holland, 1969, pp. 68 – 131.

YU Zhenhua

Philosophy, East China Normal University, Shanghai

Tacit knowing as knowing how

“The term “tacit knowledge” has different usages in literature. It is important to differentiate the strong and the week senses of tacit knowledge. The strong thesis claims that we have certain knowledge which in principle can hardly be fully articulated by verbal means. One type of tacit knowledge in the strong sense is what Ryle calls “knowing how”. In face of the various attempts to reduce knowing how to knowing that, I will defend the difference in kind between knowing how and knowing that in the context of the ongoing discussion on tacit knowing.”

Session 2:

Friday May 15^th 2009

Room R20, 10am-12am

Louis Sass

Clinical Psychology, University of Rutgers

Visiting Professor at IHPST, Paris

Contradictions of Emotion in Schizophrenia

In my talk, I will attempt to explain the “Kretschmerian paradox”—the fact that patients in the schizophrenia spectrum can, at the same time, experience both exaggerated and diminished levels of affective response. Recent research on emotion in schizophrenia is reviewed, including subjective reports as well as psychophysiological measures of arousal or activation, with special attention to flat-affect and negative-symptom patients. After a summary of relevant concepts and vocabulary of emotion (including the notions of “affect,” “emotion,” “mood,” “feelings,” and the “passions”), the need for a phenomenological approach focusing on subjective experience is proposed. Four modes of nonparanoid abnormal experience in schizophrenia are then discussed in light of their implications for affect or emotion: Bodily Alienation (alienation of the lived body), followed by three mutations of the lived world: Disengagement (often called derealization or depersonalization), Unworlding (fragmented perception and loss of affordances), and Subjectivization (preoccupation with a quasi-delusional world created by the self). The paper concludes with phenomenological comparisons among the four modes, and with speculations concerning possible relationships between psychophysiological measures and subjective emotional or affective response. Overall, my paper constitutes an argument in favor of a phenomenologically based, non-Cartesian approach to the study of affect and emotion in schizophrenia, with emphasis on the embodied and embedded nature of human subjectivity.