Public Programs And Events

What is the relationship between concepts and experience? Is experience conceptual “all the way down,” as John McDowell holds? Or are there aspects of experience that are not usefully characterized as conceptual, as Hubert Dreyfus holds? This symposium surveys recent work on these debates, work that explores the possibility that the mind's relationship to the world takes a variety of different forms.

The symposium has an unusual structure: All presentations are going to be about other presenters' work, and the symposium as a whole will presuppose familiarity with that work. All of the relevant background readings are available on the symposium's website  (www.varietiesofintentionality.com)

"Varieties of Intentionality" 

Friday May 10

• 1pm: Rachel Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) 
  Introductory Overview 
  
  1:30pm: Jake Quilty-Dunn (University of Oxford) 
  On Elisabeth Camp's "Putting Thoughts to Work" 
  
  4:30pm: John Kulvicki (Darmouth College) 
  On Jacob Beck's "Perception is Analog"

Saturday May 11

• 1pm: Jacob Beck (York University)
  On Jake Quilty-Dunn's "Perceptual Pluralism"
  
  4pm: Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
  On John Kulvicki's "Modeling the Meanings of Pictures"

The Five Essential Readings for the Conference

The conference is predicated on the assumption that everyone in attendance will have read all five of these essays:

• John Haugeland, Representational Genera
• Elisabeth Camp, Putting Thoughts to Work
• Jacob Beck, Perception Is Analog
• Jake Quilty-Dunn, Perceptual Pluralism
• John Kulvicki, Modeling The Meanings of Pictures (excerpt)

Some Helpful Background Readings

Here are ten additional readings that help to fill in some of the background to the topics that will be discussed at the conference. Those new to these topics might start with the Kulvicki, Camp, and Giardino and Greenberg readings, and then move on to the others.

• John Kulvicki, Images in Mind
• Elisabeth Camp, Thinking With Maps
• Valeria Giardino and Gabriel Greenberg, Introduction: Varieties of Iconicity
• John Haugeland, Analog and Analog
• Fred Dretske, Sensation and Perception
• Jerry Fodor, Preconceptual Representation
• Michael Rescorla, Cognitive Maps and the Language of Thought
• Tyler Burge, Origins of Perception
• Tyler Burge, Steps Towards Origins of Propositional Thought
• Jacob Beck, The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought
• Whit Schonbein, Varieties of Analog and Digital Representation

If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Zed Adams at zed@newschool.edu.

Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department.