12th March 2024, Seminari de Filosofia

Faculty of Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona

 Download poster HERE (©Catarina Aguiar)

PROGRAM

10:30 – 12:00

Michael Nelson, UC Riverside

Is Love a Moral Emotion?


LUNCH


14:30 – 16:00

Robin Jeshion, University of Southern California

Provocative Vocatives: Slurs as Expressives


16:15- 17:45

Jeremy Pober, Antwerp University

Two-Level Functionalism

 

 

ABSTRACTS

Michael Nelson, Is Love a Moral Emotion

In his 1999 “Love as a Moral Emotion”, David Velleman offers a powerful response to the claim that the impartiality of morality is in tension with the partiality of loving relationships, arguing that love and morality involve the same attitude: Valuing the humanity of persons. In this paper, I follow Velleman in seeking to reconcile love and morality by viewing them both under the umbrella of an appreciation and recognition of the incomparable value of a person. But on my view, whereas moral duty is impersonal and universal, even when specific, love is irreducibly personal and particular. I start with the discretionary and irreplaceable character of love for a person versus the (rationally) mandatory and universal character of moral respect. It is magical and inexplicable when one comes to love a particular person or persons instead of others of “equal” because incomparable value as instances of humanity. This is a fundamental difference between the two attitudes that is absent in Velleman’s view. Whereas the object of moral respect is the universal humanity---what is common between persons---love involves a magical, arationally grounded appreciation of the same incomparable particularized value of that instance of humanity. So, unlike Velleman’s account, the objects of love and respect are distinct, but, like Velleman’s account, both involve a form of valuing, which allows us to follow Velleman in strongly reconciling love and morality without leading us to worries that it is somehow a fault or a rational shortcoming that our love is selective across persons. I end by trying to soften the idea that love and respect involve valuation of the rational autonomy of persons, which then threatens to leave out a host of “marginal” agents that are perfectly lovable and legitimate targets of moral respect.

 

Robin Jeshion, Provocative Vocatives: Slurs as Expressives

In earlier work, “How Vocatives Illuminate Slurs”, I argued against an intuitive widely but implicitly upheld thesis about the relationship between slurs and their neutral counterparts. The thesis states that in every acceptable grammatical construction C containing a slur S, replacement of S within C with its neutral counterpart NC, C(S/NC), will also be an acceptable grammatical construction. The primary evidence against the thesis resides in vocatives. Evidence from vocatives supports instead a Slur-Neutral Counterpart Vocative Divergence Thesis (SNCVD): Slurs occur freely as vocatives. Neutral counterparts do not. What explains this divergence? In this paper, I deepen the case for holding that vocatives offer evidence for regarding slurs as semantically encoding pejorative evaluation or as pejorative expressives. I also argue against four alternative analyses of the SNCVD: [1] The Buckstop View, maintaining SNCVD is foundational; [2] The Vocative-Non-Vocative Ambiguity View, maintaining that SNCVD is false because vocative slurs are not in fact the same word as non-vocative slurs; [3] The Slurs as Nouns View, maintaining that SNCVD obtains because slurs dominantly occur as nouns, not adjectives, while their neutral counterparts do not; [4] The Slurs as Nicknames View, maintaining SNCVD obtains because slurs are pejorative nicknames and all names are available as vocatives, while neutral counterparts are not. I show how the data from vocatives presents a new and serious problem for leading analyses of slurs, particularly those that explain slurs’ derogatory power exclusively via an appeal to pragmatics or socio-linguistic, socio-historical facts.

 

Jeremy Pober, Two-Level Functionalism

Over the last decade, Eric Schwitzgebel (2012; 2013; forthcoming) has engaged in a debate about the metaphysics of belief (really, all attitudes) with Eric Mandelbaum, Jake Quilty-Dunn and Nic Porot (Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2018; Quilty-Dunn, Porot and Mandelbaum 2022; Porot and Mandelbaum 2023). Schwitzgebel calls his view ‘phenomenal dispositionalism’ (2002), whereas Mandelbaum and colleagues call theirs ‘psychofunctionalism’ or ‘scientific functionalism.’

I suggest that there is something deep at stake in their debate, but it is not, as one might think, the question of whether beliefs are dispositions or functional states, for the former are assimilable to the latter.

Rather, the issue is one of different metaphysical levels of entities. Schwitzgebel’s view is cashed out at the level at which folk psychological states exist, the level of states predicated of a whole person or whole mind. Mandelbaum et al.’s view, is cashed out at a level of entities that (partly or wholly) constitute and explain the aforementioned personal level. 

This issue matters because picking a metaphysics of attitudes based on one or the other of these levels of entities involves a necessary tradeoff. Theories cast at the ‘lower’ level that appeal to the mechanisms constituting attitudes necessarily fail to capture the whole extension of a mental kind like belief across metaphysically possible species of believers. Whereas theories that define attitudes directly in terms of these attitude level kinds give up a great deal of the sort of explanatory power that we want our theories of the attitudes to have.

I think we can have our cake and eat it, too. To do so, we need a metaphysics of mental kinds that allows for a division of metaphysical labor, such that both levels can make a contribution. This first requires understanding how the levels are related: I suggest that the relationship is mereological such that the entities at the explanatory level are parts of the entities at the person level. Then, inspired by my previous work on the metaphysics of emotions (Pober 2018) I suggest that we can divide what defines a mental state into what it is—its physical basis—and the properties in virtue of which it counts as a member of its psychological kind. 

I propose that the entities which are person-level mental kinds exist at the explanatory level, but are what they are in bearing a certain relationship to a functionally defined entity at the higher level. Specifically, the lower-level entities are the ‘core realizers’ (Shoemaker 1981; Block 2005) of the higher-level entities. E.g., the representations that Mandelbaum et al. posit are beliefs, but they are beliefs only in virtue of the fact that the representation is the ‘core’ of the functional state.

 
 

Workshop supported by the Spanish Science Ministry, project The Philosophy of Hybrid Representations, PID2020-119588GB-I00

Department of Philosophy, Barcelona