Lecture Dr. Gurpreet Rattan – Concepts and Epistemic Normativity Beyond ‘Revisability and Conceptual Change’

Date: Friday 14 June, 15.30-17.00.
Location: VU Amsterdam, Main Building, De Boelelaan 1105, room  0G30 (‘Filosofenhof’, access near the six elevator block on the 1st floor)

Abstract
Perhaps the most brilliant feature of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ is the way it brings together semantic and epistemic concerns into such spectacular collision. Many have thought that Quine succeeded in irreparably smashing a distinctively analytical conception of philosophy to pieces. Recently however, David Chalmers has argued (in his chapter ‘Revisability and Conceptual Change’ in Constructing the World) that much of this distinctively analytical conception of philosophy can be reconstructed, with Quine’s criticisms leaving little lasting damage. I agree with Chalmers that Quine’s arguments does not have the destructive impact that many take them to have. However, I do not think that Chalmers succeeds in explaining why. Chalmers’s errors lie in (1) the rational dispositionalism that forms the metasemantics of his intensional semantics and (2) the Bayesianism that conditions his understanding of rational revision. Quine’s arguments push us to a radical re-conception of our notions of concept and rational revision, one that goes beyond ‘Revisability and Conceptual Change’.

Gurpreet Rattan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He works mainly in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. More information: http://individual.utoronto.ca/grattan