Graduate Students

Heather Muraviov and Tracy Llanera: Talk at California State Fullerton Philosophy Symposium

Congratulations to PH.D. student, Heather Muraviov, and Assistant Professor Tracy Llanera for presenting at the California State Fullerton Philosophy Symposium on Examining Extremism this week!

Heather’s talk is titled “Countering Extremist Mindsets through Liberatory Epistemic Virtues” and focuses on an application of Cassam’s view of extremist mindsets and radicalization to agents who resist oppression and engage in liberatory struggles.

Assistant Professor Tracy Llanera’s talk is titled “Extremist Women and Fanaticism,” and focuses on women and their propensity to become fanatics in extremist groups.

 

Dorit Bar-On: Students Selected to Speak at “Practical Mental Representation” Conference

Congratulations to Professor Bar-On‘s graduate students Nimra Asif and Drew Johnson for being selected to give talks at the “Practical Mental Representation” conference at Chapman University! There were only two slots available for contributed talks and both will be discussing the aspect of Ruth Millikan’s work.

The “Practical Mental Representations” conference focuses on exploring solutions to answer two questions:

 If mental representations have descriptive contents, how exactly do they fulfil their fundamentally practical functions? How can a description, whether accurate or inaccurate, itself motivate or set the normative standards for any sort of practical engagement with the world?

Check out this link for more information:

Practical Mental Representations

Alexandra Stamson: “Narcissist Fathers and Powered Daughters”

Alexandra Stamson, one of our talented philosophy graduate students, has a book chapter coming out titled “Narcissist Fathers and Powered Daughters: Examining Narcissism and Gender” in N. K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate in February.

 

“This chapter is a deep-dive into kinship and the links between the patriarchal figure, the patriarchy system, and the agency of daughters within that system, and how narcissism plays into the roles of family by looking at the ways that the father/daughter relationship plays out in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.”

 

Check out graduate student Nimra Asif’s recent article in Synthese, “Minimal theory of mind – a Millikanian Approach.” Synthese is a philosophy journal focusing on contemporary issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and related fields.

***Abstract***

Minimal theory of mind (ToM) is presented in the theory of mind literature as a middle ground between full-blown ToM and mere behavior-reading. Minimal ToM seems to be a useful construct for studying and understanding the minds of nonhuman animals and infants. However, providing an account of minimal ToM on which minimal mindreading is significantly less demanding than full-blown mindreading yet more than just a behavior-reading process is a challenge. In this paper, I argue that to address this challenge, we need to depart from the traditional framework of mindreading in more radical ways than offered by current minimal theory of mind accounts. First, I explain the traditional view of mindreading on which mental state attribution is treated as essential for mindreading and analyze the general respects in which it makes mindreading demanding for the mindreader, such as requiring the mindreader to have concepts of mental states, engage in inferential reasoning processes involving mental states, and form meta-representations. Then I discuss and critically evaluate two accounts of minimal ToM and argue that these accounts either do not depart sufficiently from the demanding requirements of traditional mindreading or risk becoming re-descriptions of behavior-reading accounts. Finally, I present an alternative Millikanian account of minimal ToM that avoids this risk while departing more radically from the traditional view of mindreading by providing a way for minimal mindreaders to represent the mental states of others and respond to them without engaging in conceptual mental state attribution.