Resums i vídeos de la sessió aquí!

​​​​​Time: 15:00–18:00 (CET)

​​​​​​​Format: Hybrid

Location: 40.043, Roger de Llúria building, Campus Ciutadella

And on Zoom. Please register to obtain the link.

Speakers: 

  • David Barack (Lingnan University)
  • Manolo Martínez (Universitat de Barcelona)

​​​​​​Everyone welcome. To register, email [email protected]

Program

15:00–16:10: David Barack

16:10–16:20: Break

16:20–17:30: Manolo Martínez

17:30: Wrap-up

Abstracts

David Barack – Zetetic agency

Inquirers exercise agency when deciding what to inquire about and in the conduct of inquiry itself—which steps to take, when to stop, or when to diverge. In this talk, I present and defend a sufficient condition for agency during inquiry, what I call zetetic agency.

My sufficient condition for zetetic agency is motivated by a constellation of features that are hallmarks of agency, including the roles of inquisitive and transitional reasons. Zetetic agency requires control over the transitions during inquiry, and I illustrate how transitional control is influenced by inquisitive and transitional reasons and distinguish it from other concepts of control.

Zetetic agency is essentially sensitive to differences in viewpoints and values, which results in different inquisitive conduct. These differences are manifest in different inquisitive and transitional reasons: different reasons for engaging in inquiry, different aims of inquiry, and different ways of controlling our inquiries including the way we transitions between attitudes during inquiry.

My view of inquiry implies that inquiry is a type of search; specifically, it often poses a foraging problem. Foraging is a useful tool for understanding inquiry in part because different foraging contexts reliably elicit changes in preferences during search and so differences in zetetic agency. Here, I illustrate two such changes and connect them to different types of inquiries. First, risk preferences can flip depending on whether the environment is rich or poor. Second, the relative value and distribution of possible targets of inquiry can change preferences for cooperation; poor environments with few, large goals can make preferences more social-regarding whereas rich environments with many, small goals less social-regarding.

In short, inquiry involves context-dependent choice where individual preferences dictate different courses of inquiry.

Manolo Martínez – What does influence without communication look like?

A flat-footed response would be: it looks like nothing at all. Influence requires information transmission, and that is all there is to communication. I will consider one important, but unsatisfactory rebuttal to this flat-footed reaction, before moving on to a hopefully more useful understanding of what communication implies (in a nutshell, it implies leaving room for processing of the communicative signals by the interlocutors). This other understanding can accommodate influence without communication precisely in the kind of cases in which, e.g., radical embodied cognitive scientists feel uncomfortable with communication talk.