Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: this episode was recorded in 2016, prior to the US presidential election. Kristie Dotson will be coming back in a future episode to give us her latest thoughts on these topics in light of recent developments in US politics! Full transcript here. This month, we talk to Kristie Dotson (Michigan State University) about how people’s ability to gather and share information can be negatively impacted under oppressive social systems....

Hello, everyone! Hope you’re enjoying the new year. If you enjoyed our episode on counterfactuals and would like to learn more about Paolo Santorio’s causal network theory, check out the following paper: ‘Interventions in Premise Semantics,’ Paolo Santorio For a broader overview of casual network approaches to counterfactuals, the following paper by R.A. Briggs is a wonderful start: ‘Interventionist Counterfactuals,’ R.A. Briggs Happy reading! Matt...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk to Paolo Santorio about counterfactuals, also known as statements of the form ‘If A were, then B would be.’ Click here to listen to our conversation. Counterfactual statements, those funny conditional statements where the word ‘would’ comes after the word ‘then,’ play an absolutely central rule both in everyday commonsense reasoning and in our more formal scientific theorizing....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk to Ásta Sveinsdóttir (San Francisco State University) about social-institutional entities, like money, the economy, political borders, nation states, and, interestingly, categories of people. Click here to listen to our conversation. For a while now, philosophers have been interested in the status of things like money. A $5 bill has the purchasing power it has not because of any intrinsic features that belong to the paper it’s printed on, but because we all agree to treat it as having that purchasing power....

For a further taste of our guest’s thoughts on the theory of universal grammar, the following dialogue is an incredibly fun read: ‘Language: a Dialogue,’ John Collins I also heartily recommend that you visit his website and his academia.edu page, where he’s got lots of great papers on some of the most central issues in the philosophy of language and foundations of linguistics. Happy reading! Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This time, we have the privilege of talking to John Collins (University of East Anglia) as we shift our attention to the human language faculty. Click here to listen to our conversation. Human beings are the only animal in the world that can natively acquire a language like English, French, Czech, Nahuatl, Yoruba, or Tamil....

For those who are interested in following up on our previous episode, you can take a look at Section 5 of the following paper: ‘Knowledge In and Out of Context‘ The following papers by our guest are also a really great read! ‘Default Reasoning: Jumping to Conclusions and Knowing When to Think Twice’ ‘A Rationale for Reliabilism‘ Happy reading! Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode transcript here. This month, we talk to Kent Bach (San Francisco State University) about his picture of how beliefs relate to particular thoughts. Click here to listen to our conversation. In this episode, Kent Bach discusses two of his big ideas at the border between the philosophy of mind and epistemology....

If you’re in the mood to do a deep dive and learn more about the view that Susanna Schellenberg shared with us during the previous episode, she suggests taking a look at the following papers of hers: ‘Perceptual Particularity’ ‘Phenomenal Evidence and Factive Evidence’ ‘Experience and Evidence’ ‘Belief and Desire in Imagination and Immersion’ ‘Perceptual Content Defended’ ‘Ontological Minimalism About Phenomenology‘ Enjoy! Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we sit down with Susanna Schellenberg to talk about what ordinary perception does and doesn’t have in common with hallucination. Click here to listen to our conversation. When you picture to yourself how vision works, you probably imagine something along the following lines. There’s some light which gets projected into your eyes, and the light stimulates the rod and cone cells in your retina....