SPR 2014 Lecture Series (No.8): The semantics of scientific discourse involving hypothetical entities

Date & Time: Friday, 6 Jun., 2-4 p.m. 

Venue: Rm202, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU  

About the theme

     In the scientific realism debate, there has been a recent turn away from wholesale arguments that purport to tell us about the approximate truth of theories in general, and toward retail arguments that purport to tell us about the approximate truth of particular theories. While this shift has brought with it a renewed interest in case studies that has arguably enriched the debate, retail arguments alone fail to have any general implications for the debate. I aim to develop a position that captures what is satisfying about the turn to retail arguments, and yet has some more general implications. My starting point is that many of the case studies that have drawn the most attention involve hypothetical entities. I draw on some work in linguistics on discourse referents in order to defend a general view of the semantics of scientific discourse that involves hypothetical entities. I argue that when scientists introduce terms to name hypothetical entities, those terms have discourse referents, but lack empirical referents; reference to empirical entities is possible only once there is some consensus in the scientific community that an empirical entity has been discovered.

SPR 2014 Lecture Series (No.7)：Neural mechanisms for updating and choice computations in value-base decisions

Date & Time: Friday, 23 May, 2-4 p.m. 
Venue: Rm202, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU  

About the theme

Decision neuroscience, or neuroeconomics, is a young and interdisciplinary field that aims to understand how the brain makes decisions. It started roughly about 15 years ago and has attracted neurobiologists, psychologists, and economists over the years. In this talk, I will give an overview for research on decision neuroscience. I will specifically focus on perceptual decision making and value-based decision making, two kinds of decisions that have received great attention in the past decade. I will talk about how neuroscientists think about these different kinds of decision problems, how we design experiments to study them, how to model them mathematically, and finally, the neural architecture that might produce many of the decisions we make in daily life. 

2014 陽明心哲所捷報

恭喜：
秦慧敏 同學 獲得 University of Alberta, Canada 哲學系博士學程入學許可與獎學金
鄭婕凌 同學 獲得 Georgia State University, USA 哲學系碩士學程入學許可與獎學金
林庭安 研究助理 獲得 Texas Tech University, USA 哲學系碩士學程入學許可、全額及校級獎學金

2014春季系列演講(No.6)：攝影與革命- Tina Modotti 於1920年代墨西哥的「社會生產」

關於主題

這場演講以蒂娜．摩多提（Tina Modotti, 1896-1942）的革命攝影為主題，探討這位左派女性攝影家移居墨西哥時期（1923-1930）的攝影實踐。我將以從摩多提1929 年的生前唯一個展出發，特別是以她在觀展小冊最前面，以紅字引用托勒斯基（Leon Trotsky）的見解為線索，從托勒斯基的論著《文學與革命》（1924）中汲取養分，將摩多提的攝影置於墨西哥後革命時期的文藝與社會脈絡中詮釋，以開拓迄今中外文研究文獻中少見的馬克思主義詮釋。我的論述將從視覺分析出發，援引托勒斯基的唯物辯證法觀點，從生產與消費的情境，來探討她的相機如何成為服務革命大眾與重構社會真實的武器。

關於講者

劉瑞琪 教授，現為國立陽明大學視覺文化研究所所長及教授。專長為攝影研究、性別與視覺文化、歐美當代與現代視覺藝術、藝術理論、現代與當代醫療視覺文化。

SPR 2014 Lectures Series (No.5): Conditionals and Deliberations

About the theme

Backtracking conditionals are conditionals at least partially evaluated on the basis of preconditions or backtracking grounds of their antecedents. Inasmuch as backtracking conditionals seem to be excluded by causal and practical deliberation, it is fairly controversial that backtracking conditionals are distinct from non- backtracking conditionals. We propose a subversive thesis: all conditionals, whether counterfactual or indicative, are backtracking conditionals. On the basis of this thesis, the failure of the various attempts to establish the distinction between backtracking and non-backtracking conditionals is explained. The distinction is better characterized using a fine-grained distinction between two modes of backtracking. These modes of backtracking are further employed to resolve some puzzles about the relations between conditionals and deliberations.

About the speaker

Prof. Wang, Linton I-Chi, is an associate professor of philosophy at National Chung-Cheng University whose research is mainly in Logic, and in Philosophy of Language.