The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 4th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Eric Bayruns Garcia (CUNY).

The CUNY Graduate Center will be closed on Monday, March 4th. This meeting is cancelled. 

Title: Coverage-Reliance Ignorance

Abstract: I argue that racial injustice can make a subject’s news sources unreliable because of the effect of (1) racial prejudice and (2) society’s unjust structure on the news-gathering-and-disseminating processes a subject relies on.  I assume that societies with entrenched racial injustice have widespread racial prejudices and that these societies are unjustly structured.  I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief. In section one, I describe features of coverage-reliance ignorance, its relation to coverage-supported belief and white ignorance, its bad epistemic consequences and a case of coverage-reliance ignorance where a subject holds a true, but unjustified, belief.  In section two, I argue that racial prejudice can make a news source less reliable because racial prejudice can make it less likely that news sources report on racial injustice related topics.  In section three, I argue that a society’s unjust structure can make a news source less reliable because it can make it less likely that reports on racial-injustice-related topics reach subjects who lack information on these topics.  In section four, I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on February 25th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Achille Varzi (Columbia).

Title: Identity, Indeterminacy, and Supervaluationism

Abstract: I am a friend of supervaluationism. A statement lacks a determinate truth value if, and only if, it comes out true on some admissible precisifications of the relevant vocabulary and false on others. In this talk I want to focus on the special cases of identity statements. There is, I think, a potentially devastating objection that can be raised against the supervaluationist treatment of such statements—in fact two objections. Luckily, both can be resisted. But seeing how requires that we take a closer look at the ontological presuppositions of supervaluationism, allowing for more leeway than is usually supposed.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on February 11th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Benjamin Neeser (Geneva).

Title: Stages in Spacetime: The Languages of Persistence

Abstract: Motivated by considerations from relativity theory, philosophers have recently contended that talk about an object’s existence in time should not be taken as fundamental, but rather analysed in the language of a formal theory of location in spacetime. This suggestion has important consequences for the debate about persistence: how do ordinary objects exist at different times? It has triggered a program of recovery whereby the main views from the classical debate, previously expressed using the language of temporal mereology, have been redefined in a locational framework. In this paper, I extend this program to the stage theory of persistence, the view according to which objects are instantaneous three-dimensional stages which exist at different times by virtue of having counterparts at these times. I offer a new characterization of the view, the first in a purely locational language, and argue that this locational approach helps dissolve confusions about the view.