THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8
08:30 - 09:00: Tea/Coffee
09:00 - 10: 10: Collective emotional deliberation and moral knowledge
Sabine Roeser (Philosophy, Deft University, Netherlands)
Abstract: Might emotions contribute to better collective moral deliberation, and if so, how can we include emotions in collective moral deliberation? In this paper I will argue for positive answers to the first question and provide proposals in answer to the second question. I will start from the idea that emotions are a source of moral knowledge. I will then proceed to argue that in collective moral deliberation, reflecting with and on emotion can provide for resources that go beyond deductive, propositional arguments and can in that way provide for additional moral insights. Moral emotions can contribute to moral understanding, via imagination, empathy and sympathy. In collective moral deliberation, people can critically scrutinize each others emotions and the moral values they might point to. Moderators of collective moral deliberation should explicitly encourage people to reflect on their emotions, and they should not shy away from asking questions about emotions, examining them and letting people appeal to each others’ emotions. Narratives and other works of art can play an important role in contributing to collective emotional-moral reflection and in that way to moral knowledge.
10:10 - 11: 20: How far can Extended Knowledge be Extended?: The Asymmetry between Research Teams and Artifacts
K. Brad Wray (Philosophy, State university of New York, USA)
Abstract: Duncan Pritchard (2010) has developed a theory of extended knowledge based on the notion ofextended cognition. I apply the framework developed by Pritchard to a particular problem in the social epistemology of science, specifically, the problem of epistemic creditability in collaborative research teams. Originally, the notion of extended cognition was applied to agents relying on artifacts, like a notebook to enhance one’s failing memory (Clarke and Chalmers 1998). Pritchard argues that such agents have extended knowledge. But collaborative research teams seem to raise difficulties for the notion of extended knowledge as developed by Pritchard. Central to Pritchard’s normative epistemology is the idea that the knowing agent must be creditable with what she purports to know. In cases where knowing agents rely on artifacts, for example scientific instruments, it seems quite plausible that the agents are creditable in the relevant sense. But there is an asymmetry when we try to extend the concept of extended knowing toscientists who extend their cognition by relying on other scientists to enhance their cognitive abilities. It isunclear how to apply the concept of creditability central to Pritchard’s account. I argue that there are reasons to believe that two collaborating scientists cannot individually be creditable for the knowledge they produce working collaboratively. Creditability cannot be straightforwardly applied as it can in the cases involving artifacts. But, equally so, there are reasons to believe that an irreducibly collective agent composed of the individual collaborating scientists cannot have the sort of creditability that Pritchard suggests is necessary for extended knowledge. These insights about the limitations of collective knowledge match what we see when scientists collaborate and things go wrong. Frequently, none of the individual scientists involved in a questionable research report take responsibility for the failings identified.
11:20 - 12:30: Enactive search: The Extended Mind in the Era of Social Media
Harry Halpin (Informatics, World Wide Web Consortium, USA)
Abstract: Given the increasing prominence of technologically-mediated communication, the question ofhow technology impacts existing knowledge and form new knowledge deserves a thorough philosophical investigation. Most approaches to knowledge and language assume natural language and propositional beliefs as a pre-given object of study, including in the study of knowledge representation and artificial intelligence. In the age of Google and Twitter, these philosophical presumptions no longer hold. Our everyday use of knowledge is explicitly caught up the development of technology. In our approach, we will take an explicitly constructivist (enactive) approach to the semantics of social media - in other words, how people use Google, Twitter, Facebook, tagging to leave "social trails" and how that challenges traditional cognitive theories of memory, representation, and even knowledge.
Our "externalist" reading of enaction takes as its foundations the Extended Mind (Clark), distributed cognition (Hutchins) and relates them explicitly to Maturana's work on autopoiesis and Varela and Thompson's later work on enaction. We would claim that under certain conditions (to be explored) enactive/constructivist approaches are implemented in certain computational systems, which therefore implies that contra Maturana enactive approaches can be implemented over computational systems that are (at least) in part non-biological but may be entirely non-biological. In fact, we would argue that viewing a firm separation between biological readings of constructivism/enaction and computational functionalism is incorrect. Thus, we defend both enaction and computationalism against even certain readings of embodied cognition (Noe), tying together theories of knowledge with a firmly information-processing functional paradigm that is nonetheless resolutely grounded in the everyday behavior certain technological forms of life. This external reading of enaction then serves as the basis of a new kind of extended knowledge that embeds traditional theories of semantics firmly within social and distributed processes, using Twitter (and imagined extensions thereof using Google Glasses, etc.) as a guiding example due to its popularity. In conclusion, this point of the larger story about what we consider an unhealthy biological bias in constructivist approaches to enaction as well as an equally unhealthy problem in traditional non-constuctivist approaches to the semantics of computational "knowledge representation" to ignore enaction and the social - and thus miss the point of the technological revolution in human communication that we are living in today.
12:30-13:30: Lunch
13:30 - 14:40: Extended Knowledge, Social Epistemology and Mandevillian Intelligence
Paul Smart (Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton)
Abstract: In this two part presentation, I will first focus on the notion of extended knowledge and present a number of potential problems for the claim that the hypothesis of extended cognition is compatible with virtue reliabilism. In particular, I will suggest that a tension arises when it comes to a consideration of the epistemic consequences of technology-mediated forms of cognitive extension. The key problem is that many of the properties that seem to make a technology apt for cognitive incorporation are also ones that seem to threaten or undermine the epistemic status of so-called extended knowers. One example here concerns the way in which personalized search technologies enhance an individual’s access to bodies of external information, but also lead to a range of worries concerning an individual’s epistemic standing. Another example concerns fluent access to externally-situated information. Fluency , it is suggested, is important to cognitive extension and a number of technologies can improve the ease with which we are able to process external information. Empirical studies, however, suggest that the more fluently we are able to process information, the more inclined we are to fall foul of a truth bias – a tendency to over-estimate the truth status of processed information. The point, in both cases, is that we encounter a potential tension between our status as extended cognizers and extended knowers that hinges on the extent to which a technology targets one of the criteria for cognitive extension. In the second part of the talk, I will introduce the notion of mandevillian intelligence, which is the claim that cognitive limitations and epistemic vices can, on occasion, play a positive functional role in yielding cognitive benefits at the collective level of analysis. When applied to social epistemology, the notion of mandevillian intelligence encourages us to think about the way in which individual-level epistemic vices can sometimes play a productive role in the realization of collective-level epistemic virtues. The concept of mandevillian intelligence also enables us to re-evaluate the epistemic significance of technological interventions that have, for the most part, been denigrated on account of their (negative) epistemic impact for individual agents. By seeing individual cognitive biases and limitations as playing a productive role in securing collective-level epistemic benefits, the notion of mandevillian intelligence enables us to recast the epistemic status of some contemporary digital technologies, such as personalized search technologies, in a much more positive light. In particular, in at least some cases, we seem to confront a curious state-of-affairs in which a technology may serve to accentuate epistemic vices at the level of individual agents while simultaneously enhancing the epistemic capabilities of social groups and communities.
14:40 - 15:50 Mind outside of Brain: a radically non-dualist foundation for distributed cognition
Francis Heylighen (Cybernetics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Abstract: This paper argues that contemporary conceptions of Mind are still too dependent on the Cartesian mind-matter dualism, which assumes a fundamental separation between abstract mental features, such as cognition, knowledge, will, intentionality and consciousness, and the physical material out of which the world is supposedly built. The resulting incoherence between traditional models of mind and those of matter lead to a variety of conceptual problems, including the problem of free will, and the "hard problem" of consciousness. To replace it, we propose a radically non-dualist ontology which sees the building blocks of the world as elementary processes or "reactions", and more complex phenomena as organized networks of reactions, or "organizations". These organizations are the result of an on-going process of self-organization, in which reactions get increasingly coordinated and adapted to their environment through co-evolution and natural selection. An organization is a self-producing network of processes, similar to an autopoietic system, that is to some degree able to cope with external challenges by producing the right actions to compensate perturbations and exploit opportunities. Its implicit purpose or intention is to maintain and grow. Its perception or awareness is its ability to sense and react to outside conditions. Its knowledge resides in choosing the right reactions for the right conditions. The more coordinated and adaptive the organization, the more "intelligent" its behavior, and the more of the traditional features of mind it exhibits. While the prototype example of such an intelligent organization is the human brain, it is shown through a variety of examples that similar mental features can be found in other systems, including human and insect societies, bacteria and bacterial colonies, thermostats, plants, hybrid human-machine systems, and even ecosystems and autocalytic networks of chemical reactions. In conclusion, Mind can be viewed as a continuum of increasingly intelligent reactivityand adaptive organization, beginning in its most rudimentary form in elementary particle interactions while building up in capabilities and sophistication with the subsequent evolution of chemical, cellular, multicellular, animal, human and socio-technological systems. This continuous, non-dualist philosophy implies in particular that our individual human minds "extend" into these encompassing networks of coordinated activities that characterize our environment and that no sharp boundary can be drawn between "internal" and "external" mental phenomena, including knowledge and intentionality.
15:50 - 16:10: Tea/Coffee
16:10 - 17:20: Consensus as an epistemic norm for group acceptance.
Joelle Proust (Philosophy, Institut Jean Nicod, France)
Abstract: Can beliefs be ascribed to plural subjects engaged in collective epistemic agency? In the general case of collective agency, an epistemologically instructive debate has opposed two camps on this question: the ascribers, who defended an extended notion of belief, and the rejectionists, who claimed that groups form goal-sensitive acceptances rather than beliefs. Important premises have been discussed by both parties, including the recognition of the "entailment thesis" according to which accepting that p entails that one believes that p, and the denial of the "compositional thesis" according to which group attitudes are reducible to the participants' attitudes. A newcomer in the debate, aiming to examine the question from the viewpoint of socially extended epistemic agency, may find it useful to add two independently justified premises: the autonomy of epistemic agency relative to instrumental agency, and the unity of epistemic rationality, according to which individual participants' epistemic states should in principle be consistent with the epistemic states of the group to which they actively belong. Both "believing" and "accepting as true", as applied to plural subjects, have difficulty accommodating all these premises. An alternative analysis for epistemic group attitude will be proposed, called "accepting under consensus". Its aim is not directly to accept as true, but rather, to express a maximally reliable epistemic decision based on aggregating information about a given issue available at the group level. This group attitude will only produce knowledge, however, if structural conditions for extracting distributed information are present. Semantic and epistemological implications will be discussed, concerning the relation of accepting under consensus with other forms of acceptance, such accepting as true, as coherent and as intelligible.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9
09:30 - 10:00: Tea/Coffee
10:00 - 11:10: The Epistemic Injustice of “Collective Amnesia”
Alessandra Tanesini (Philosophy, Cardiff University, UK)
Abstract: Both ignorance and forgetfulness can be actively cultivated. Active ignorance and forgetfulness are not mere absences of knowledge or memory. Instead they are achievements of a kind. “Collective amnesia” refers to active forgetting which takes a collective dimension. In this paper I deploy the framework of attitudes, as a construct in social psychology, to understand this socially extended form of ignorance. Whilst work in social psychology has focused on the attitudes of individuals, this chapter focuses on attitudes as entities which can be attributed to groups. Attitudes are generally thought as enduring because they are remembered. Since some forms of memory are arguable extended and distributed across a number of suitably related individuals, it makes sense to think of some attitudes as distributed in similar ways. I argue that collective amnesia gives rise to a form of epistemic injustice which is different both from testimonial and hermeneutic injustice as these are understood by Miranda Fricker. At the root of this injustice is the role played by active forgetting in inhibiting those autobiographical and collective memories that are crucial to self-knowledge and self-understanding. I argue that being denied access to the materials necessary to understand who one is (which is different from lacking the hermeneutical resources for making sense of some of one’s experiences) harms one’s ability to stand as a full participant in the epistemic community.
11:10 - 12:20: Group Assertion
Deborah Tollefsen (Philosophy, University of Memphis USA)
Abstract: In order to understand how a group, rather than an individual, can testify we need to understand the notion of group assertion. In “Group Testimony” (2007) I developed a theory of group testimony that began with a theory of group speech acts. In this paper, I return to that theory in order to develop an account specifically of group assertion. I rely on recent work by Sandy Goldberg (2014) on the nature of assertion to do so and recent work by Kirk Ludwig (2014) on proxy agency. Group assertions are collective action types. I argue that this has significant epistemologically consequences. For one, it makes a deflationary account of the epistemology of group testimony (Lackey, 2014) less plausible.
12:20 - 13:20: Lunch
13:20 - 14:30: Thinking together: Social proof, distributed cognition, and collective amnesia
Holly Arrow (Psychology, University of Oregon, USA)
Abstract: This talk will explore the ways people “think together” by using one another as sources of information, construction and validation of meaning, and a distributed repository of both memory and motivated forgetting. It will draw on group research that looks at collective processing of information and decision making, and on social psychological studies of how the perceived views of others shape our own perceptions and beliefs. In the realm of collective memory, it will explore the phenomenon of shared experiences that are anchored and stored as part of the collective self. These memories can be rendered collectively inaccessible when their content (for example, atrocities in war) threaten the group or society involved.
14:30 - 15: 40: Competence and Justification
Ernest Sosa (Philosophy, Rutgers University, USA)
Abstract: Epistemic justification will be aligned with epistemic competence, which will reveal varieties of justification, some of which comport with extended knowledge, while others do not.
15:40 - 17:00: Dinner Buffet
17:00 - 18:30: Public Lecture
The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
Michael Lynch (Philosophy, University of Connecticut, USA)
Abstract: The Internet has revolutionized how — and how much—each of us can know. Our phones put the knowledge of the world at our fingertips—and soon, maybe, right into our heads. But what might that mean for other ways of knowing? And for us as human beings?
18:30 - 20:00: Wine Reception
08:30 - 09:00: Tea/Coffee
09:00 - 10: 10: Collective emotional deliberation and moral knowledge
Sabine Roeser (Philosophy, Deft University, Netherlands)
Abstract: Might emotions contribute to better collective moral deliberation, and if so, how can we include emotions in collective moral deliberation? In this paper I will argue for positive answers to the first question and provide proposals in answer to the second question. I will start from the idea that emotions are a source of moral knowledge. I will then proceed to argue that in collective moral deliberation, reflecting with and on emotion can provide for resources that go beyond deductive, propositional arguments and can in that way provide for additional moral insights. Moral emotions can contribute to moral understanding, via imagination, empathy and sympathy. In collective moral deliberation, people can critically scrutinize each others emotions and the moral values they might point to. Moderators of collective moral deliberation should explicitly encourage people to reflect on their emotions, and they should not shy away from asking questions about emotions, examining them and letting people appeal to each others’ emotions. Narratives and other works of art can play an important role in contributing to collective emotional-moral reflection and in that way to moral knowledge.
10:10 - 11: 20: How far can Extended Knowledge be Extended?: The Asymmetry between Research Teams and Artifacts
K. Brad Wray (Philosophy, State university of New York, USA)
Abstract: Duncan Pritchard (2010) has developed a theory of extended knowledge based on the notion ofextended cognition. I apply the framework developed by Pritchard to a particular problem in the social epistemology of science, specifically, the problem of epistemic creditability in collaborative research teams. Originally, the notion of extended cognition was applied to agents relying on artifacts, like a notebook to enhance one’s failing memory (Clarke and Chalmers 1998). Pritchard argues that such agents have extended knowledge. But collaborative research teams seem to raise difficulties for the notion of extended knowledge as developed by Pritchard. Central to Pritchard’s normative epistemology is the idea that the knowing agent must be creditable with what she purports to know. In cases where knowing agents rely on artifacts, for example scientific instruments, it seems quite plausible that the agents are creditable in the relevant sense. But there is an asymmetry when we try to extend the concept of extended knowing toscientists who extend their cognition by relying on other scientists to enhance their cognitive abilities. It isunclear how to apply the concept of creditability central to Pritchard’s account. I argue that there are reasons to believe that two collaborating scientists cannot individually be creditable for the knowledge they produce working collaboratively. Creditability cannot be straightforwardly applied as it can in the cases involving artifacts. But, equally so, there are reasons to believe that an irreducibly collective agent composed of the individual collaborating scientists cannot have the sort of creditability that Pritchard suggests is necessary for extended knowledge. These insights about the limitations of collective knowledge match what we see when scientists collaborate and things go wrong. Frequently, none of the individual scientists involved in a questionable research report take responsibility for the failings identified.
11:20 - 12:30: Enactive search: The Extended Mind in the Era of Social Media
Harry Halpin (Informatics, World Wide Web Consortium, USA)
Abstract: Given the increasing prominence of technologically-mediated communication, the question ofhow technology impacts existing knowledge and form new knowledge deserves a thorough philosophical investigation. Most approaches to knowledge and language assume natural language and propositional beliefs as a pre-given object of study, including in the study of knowledge representation and artificial intelligence. In the age of Google and Twitter, these philosophical presumptions no longer hold. Our everyday use of knowledge is explicitly caught up the development of technology. In our approach, we will take an explicitly constructivist (enactive) approach to the semantics of social media - in other words, how people use Google, Twitter, Facebook, tagging to leave "social trails" and how that challenges traditional cognitive theories of memory, representation, and even knowledge.
Our "externalist" reading of enaction takes as its foundations the Extended Mind (Clark), distributed cognition (Hutchins) and relates them explicitly to Maturana's work on autopoiesis and Varela and Thompson's later work on enaction. We would claim that under certain conditions (to be explored) enactive/constructivist approaches are implemented in certain computational systems, which therefore implies that contra Maturana enactive approaches can be implemented over computational systems that are (at least) in part non-biological but may be entirely non-biological. In fact, we would argue that viewing a firm separation between biological readings of constructivism/enaction and computational functionalism is incorrect. Thus, we defend both enaction and computationalism against even certain readings of embodied cognition (Noe), tying together theories of knowledge with a firmly information-processing functional paradigm that is nonetheless resolutely grounded in the everyday behavior certain technological forms of life. This external reading of enaction then serves as the basis of a new kind of extended knowledge that embeds traditional theories of semantics firmly within social and distributed processes, using Twitter (and imagined extensions thereof using Google Glasses, etc.) as a guiding example due to its popularity. In conclusion, this point of the larger story about what we consider an unhealthy biological bias in constructivist approaches to enaction as well as an equally unhealthy problem in traditional non-constuctivist approaches to the semantics of computational "knowledge representation" to ignore enaction and the social - and thus miss the point of the technological revolution in human communication that we are living in today.
12:30-13:30: Lunch
13:30 - 14:40: Extended Knowledge, Social Epistemology and Mandevillian Intelligence
Paul Smart (Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton)
Abstract: In this two part presentation, I will first focus on the notion of extended knowledge and present a number of potential problems for the claim that the hypothesis of extended cognition is compatible with virtue reliabilism. In particular, I will suggest that a tension arises when it comes to a consideration of the epistemic consequences of technology-mediated forms of cognitive extension. The key problem is that many of the properties that seem to make a technology apt for cognitive incorporation are also ones that seem to threaten or undermine the epistemic status of so-called extended knowers. One example here concerns the way in which personalized search technologies enhance an individual’s access to bodies of external information, but also lead to a range of worries concerning an individual’s epistemic standing. Another example concerns fluent access to externally-situated information. Fluency , it is suggested, is important to cognitive extension and a number of technologies can improve the ease with which we are able to process external information. Empirical studies, however, suggest that the more fluently we are able to process information, the more inclined we are to fall foul of a truth bias – a tendency to over-estimate the truth status of processed information. The point, in both cases, is that we encounter a potential tension between our status as extended cognizers and extended knowers that hinges on the extent to which a technology targets one of the criteria for cognitive extension. In the second part of the talk, I will introduce the notion of mandevillian intelligence, which is the claim that cognitive limitations and epistemic vices can, on occasion, play a positive functional role in yielding cognitive benefits at the collective level of analysis. When applied to social epistemology, the notion of mandevillian intelligence encourages us to think about the way in which individual-level epistemic vices can sometimes play a productive role in the realization of collective-level epistemic virtues. The concept of mandevillian intelligence also enables us to re-evaluate the epistemic significance of technological interventions that have, for the most part, been denigrated on account of their (negative) epistemic impact for individual agents. By seeing individual cognitive biases and limitations as playing a productive role in securing collective-level epistemic benefits, the notion of mandevillian intelligence enables us to recast the epistemic status of some contemporary digital technologies, such as personalized search technologies, in a much more positive light. In particular, in at least some cases, we seem to confront a curious state-of-affairs in which a technology may serve to accentuate epistemic vices at the level of individual agents while simultaneously enhancing the epistemic capabilities of social groups and communities.
14:40 - 15:50 Mind outside of Brain: a radically non-dualist foundation for distributed cognition
Francis Heylighen (Cybernetics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Abstract: This paper argues that contemporary conceptions of Mind are still too dependent on the Cartesian mind-matter dualism, which assumes a fundamental separation between abstract mental features, such as cognition, knowledge, will, intentionality and consciousness, and the physical material out of which the world is supposedly built. The resulting incoherence between traditional models of mind and those of matter lead to a variety of conceptual problems, including the problem of free will, and the "hard problem" of consciousness. To replace it, we propose a radically non-dualist ontology which sees the building blocks of the world as elementary processes or "reactions", and more complex phenomena as organized networks of reactions, or "organizations". These organizations are the result of an on-going process of self-organization, in which reactions get increasingly coordinated and adapted to their environment through co-evolution and natural selection. An organization is a self-producing network of processes, similar to an autopoietic system, that is to some degree able to cope with external challenges by producing the right actions to compensate perturbations and exploit opportunities. Its implicit purpose or intention is to maintain and grow. Its perception or awareness is its ability to sense and react to outside conditions. Its knowledge resides in choosing the right reactions for the right conditions. The more coordinated and adaptive the organization, the more "intelligent" its behavior, and the more of the traditional features of mind it exhibits. While the prototype example of such an intelligent organization is the human brain, it is shown through a variety of examples that similar mental features can be found in other systems, including human and insect societies, bacteria and bacterial colonies, thermostats, plants, hybrid human-machine systems, and even ecosystems and autocalytic networks of chemical reactions. In conclusion, Mind can be viewed as a continuum of increasingly intelligent reactivityand adaptive organization, beginning in its most rudimentary form in elementary particle interactions while building up in capabilities and sophistication with the subsequent evolution of chemical, cellular, multicellular, animal, human and socio-technological systems. This continuous, non-dualist philosophy implies in particular that our individual human minds "extend" into these encompassing networks of coordinated activities that characterize our environment and that no sharp boundary can be drawn between "internal" and "external" mental phenomena, including knowledge and intentionality.
15:50 - 16:10: Tea/Coffee
16:10 - 17:20: Consensus as an epistemic norm for group acceptance.
Joelle Proust (Philosophy, Institut Jean Nicod, France)
Abstract: Can beliefs be ascribed to plural subjects engaged in collective epistemic agency? In the general case of collective agency, an epistemologically instructive debate has opposed two camps on this question: the ascribers, who defended an extended notion of belief, and the rejectionists, who claimed that groups form goal-sensitive acceptances rather than beliefs. Important premises have been discussed by both parties, including the recognition of the "entailment thesis" according to which accepting that p entails that one believes that p, and the denial of the "compositional thesis" according to which group attitudes are reducible to the participants' attitudes. A newcomer in the debate, aiming to examine the question from the viewpoint of socially extended epistemic agency, may find it useful to add two independently justified premises: the autonomy of epistemic agency relative to instrumental agency, and the unity of epistemic rationality, according to which individual participants' epistemic states should in principle be consistent with the epistemic states of the group to which they actively belong. Both "believing" and "accepting as true", as applied to plural subjects, have difficulty accommodating all these premises. An alternative analysis for epistemic group attitude will be proposed, called "accepting under consensus". Its aim is not directly to accept as true, but rather, to express a maximally reliable epistemic decision based on aggregating information about a given issue available at the group level. This group attitude will only produce knowledge, however, if structural conditions for extracting distributed information are present. Semantic and epistemological implications will be discussed, concerning the relation of accepting under consensus with other forms of acceptance, such accepting as true, as coherent and as intelligible.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9
09:30 - 10:00: Tea/Coffee
10:00 - 11:10: The Epistemic Injustice of “Collective Amnesia”
Alessandra Tanesini (Philosophy, Cardiff University, UK)
Abstract: Both ignorance and forgetfulness can be actively cultivated. Active ignorance and forgetfulness are not mere absences of knowledge or memory. Instead they are achievements of a kind. “Collective amnesia” refers to active forgetting which takes a collective dimension. In this paper I deploy the framework of attitudes, as a construct in social psychology, to understand this socially extended form of ignorance. Whilst work in social psychology has focused on the attitudes of individuals, this chapter focuses on attitudes as entities which can be attributed to groups. Attitudes are generally thought as enduring because they are remembered. Since some forms of memory are arguable extended and distributed across a number of suitably related individuals, it makes sense to think of some attitudes as distributed in similar ways. I argue that collective amnesia gives rise to a form of epistemic injustice which is different both from testimonial and hermeneutic injustice as these are understood by Miranda Fricker. At the root of this injustice is the role played by active forgetting in inhibiting those autobiographical and collective memories that are crucial to self-knowledge and self-understanding. I argue that being denied access to the materials necessary to understand who one is (which is different from lacking the hermeneutical resources for making sense of some of one’s experiences) harms one’s ability to stand as a full participant in the epistemic community.
11:10 - 12:20: Group Assertion
Deborah Tollefsen (Philosophy, University of Memphis USA)
Abstract: In order to understand how a group, rather than an individual, can testify we need to understand the notion of group assertion. In “Group Testimony” (2007) I developed a theory of group testimony that began with a theory of group speech acts. In this paper, I return to that theory in order to develop an account specifically of group assertion. I rely on recent work by Sandy Goldberg (2014) on the nature of assertion to do so and recent work by Kirk Ludwig (2014) on proxy agency. Group assertions are collective action types. I argue that this has significant epistemologically consequences. For one, it makes a deflationary account of the epistemology of group testimony (Lackey, 2014) less plausible.
12:20 - 13:20: Lunch
13:20 - 14:30: Thinking together: Social proof, distributed cognition, and collective amnesia
Holly Arrow (Psychology, University of Oregon, USA)
Abstract: This talk will explore the ways people “think together” by using one another as sources of information, construction and validation of meaning, and a distributed repository of both memory and motivated forgetting. It will draw on group research that looks at collective processing of information and decision making, and on social psychological studies of how the perceived views of others shape our own perceptions and beliefs. In the realm of collective memory, it will explore the phenomenon of shared experiences that are anchored and stored as part of the collective self. These memories can be rendered collectively inaccessible when their content (for example, atrocities in war) threaten the group or society involved.
14:30 - 15: 40: Competence and Justification
Ernest Sosa (Philosophy, Rutgers University, USA)
Abstract: Epistemic justification will be aligned with epistemic competence, which will reveal varieties of justification, some of which comport with extended knowledge, while others do not.
15:40 - 17:00: Dinner Buffet
17:00 - 18:30: Public Lecture
The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
Michael Lynch (Philosophy, University of Connecticut, USA)
Abstract: The Internet has revolutionized how — and how much—each of us can know. Our phones put the knowledge of the world at our fingertips—and soon, maybe, right into our heads. But what might that mean for other ways of knowing? And for us as human beings?
18:30 - 20:00: Wine Reception
