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. Consider, for instance, how we talk about history. If Archduke Ferdiand hadn’t been assassinated, World War I wouldn’t have been fought. If the earth hadn’t been struck by an asteroid during the Mesozoic era, the dinosaurs wouldn’t have gone extinct. If I had lingered at home to watch the finale of my favorite TV show, I would have missed the bus this morning. Etc. We use these kinds of statements to describe our beliefs about laws or patterns in nature, or perhaps to say something about what someone can and can’t reasonably expect. ...

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. By treating liquid currency as something that can be exchanged for lattes or ice cream cones, we confer on it the property of being something that can be exchanged for these things, but not for many other things (like a car, or the latest iPhone). That doesn’t mean this purchasing power isn’t real, or that it isn’t objectively true or false that a $5 bill currently has the purchasing power it has. Quite the contrary–these are verifiable/falsifiable objective facts that we can discuss. But it does mean that our attitudes are playing an special role in making such facts obtain. By contrast, the fact that Saturn is more massive than the planet Earth is a fact that does not obtain in virtue of what anyone thinks about anything. Saturn just is the size that it is, independently of how we treat it as being. ...

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. Take any baby, raise it among caretakers who speak language X, and it will arrive at perfect native mastery of X as early as age 7. If you try the same experiment with a baby walrus or even a baby chimp, you’ll find the results are way less impressive. This is because the human mind has some intrinsic features that enable it to learn languages by osmosis, as it were, in this intuitive manner. ...

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. The first is that when someone is engaged in everyday, commonsense reasoning, the fact that that person isn’t thinking about irrelevant distractions irrelevant can in and of itself be evidence that those consideration are indeed irrelevant. For instance, if I’m trying to remember which presidents were carved into Mount Rushmore, the fact that I’m not even considering Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush can actually serve as evidence that they aren’t worth considering as possibilities. (Assuming my ability to make accurate snap judgments is in order.) Adopting this perspective on fast, everyday reasoning means taking seriously a lot of what we do subconsciously. Snap judgments can carry real evidential weight, not just in the conclusions they reach, but in what they exclude from consideration. ...

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. These sensations create a blob of unanalyzed, 2D sensory information that doesn’t ‘mean’ anything yet. Then your mind goes to work on that 2D sensory information and interprets it, so that instead of looking like a meaningless blob, it ends up looking like e.g. a pine tree to the left of another pine tree. ...

For those of you who would like to follow up on our discussion with Daniel Smyth, he recommends the following papers: ‘Snapshots, Perception, and Intimacy,’ Daniel Smyth ‘Photography, Vision, and Representation,’ Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen ‘Picturing Vision,’ Joel Snyder ‘Transparent Pictures,’ Kendall Walton ‘What’s Special About Photography?’ Ted Cohen He also recommends the following book on Hubble imagery: Picturing the Cosmos, Elizabeth A. Kessler Happy reading! Matt Teichman ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we discuss photographs and their vicissitudes with Daniel Smyth, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sage School of Philosophy of Cornell University. (And yes, Smyth used to study and teach at the University of Chicago!) Click here to listen to the episode. ...