Duke University Philosophy Colloquium February 14, 2025

[Nancy Pfeiffer]

Hello Everyone,

 

Our next Colloquium will be on Friday, February 14, 2025. The speaker is Daniel Burnston, Associate Professor and Director of Cognitive Studies at Tulane University. His title and abstract follows:

 

“A Reductionist Approach to Decision-Making”

 

Anti-reductionism about commonsense psychological concepts is something of a consensus view in philosophy of mind.  If this is right, then we can understand the nature of concepts like ‘belief’, ‘intention’, and ‘decision’ independently of insights from the neurosciences.  I argue, contra this view, that neuroscience is rapidly progressing towards reducing the commonsense notion of ‘decision’.  I begin by articulating a view of epistemic reduction based on Ernst Nagel’s notion of “connectability.”  I then introduce “accumulation to bound” models of decision-making from the neurosciences and argue that explanation with these models meets this characterization.  I then tackle two sets of intuitions about psychological kinds:  that they are inherently normative and that they are inherently phenomenal.  I argue that, far from being a barrier to reduction, accumulation to bound models provide us with deep insight into the normative and phenomenal properties of the kind ‘decision’.

 

The Colloquium schedule is as follows:

 

12:30 pm                        Grad student lunch with speaker

2:00-2:45 pm                Coffee & Cookies in the Philosophy Lounge

2:45-3:00 pm                Colloquium Set-up

3:00-5:00 pm                Colloquium, West Duke Building, Room 202

5:00-6:00 pm                Reception in the Philosophy Lounge

 

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Duke Philosophy Department