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| 5 March (Wednesday)
5:00
PM
Room
226 |
| György
Szabó |
Complex Systems Group
Research Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science, Budapest
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Játékok ízekre szedése
(Decomposition of games)
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A
potenciáljátékok szisztematikus tanulmányozása világított rá a
kétstragégiás párkölcsönhatásokra épülő evolúciós játékok és a mágneses
Ising model között meglévő szoros kapcsolatra. Ebben az esetben a
nyereménymátrixot olyan kölcsönhatások összegének tekintjük, amelyek
azonosíthatóak a ferromágnességért vagy anti-ferromágnességért felelős
kölcsönhatással és egy külső mágneses térrel. Ugyanez az eljárás
kiterjeszthető a háromstratégiás modellekre is. Megmutatjuk, hogy a
nyereménymátrix Fourier-komponensei eddig rejve maradt szimmetriákat és alaptulajdonságokat tesznek láthatóvá.
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| 12 March (Wednesday)
5:00
PM
Room
226 |
Mojca Küplen
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Institute of Philosophy, Research Center for the Humanities,
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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Kant and the Problem of Pure Judgments of Ugliness
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In the history of
aesthetic thought, beauty has been construed as aesthetic value par
excellence.
According to aesthetic theories, beautiful is that which gives rise
to the feeling of pleasure within us. Hence, aesthetic value of both
nature and art works is measured in terms of the feeling of pleasure
they occasion in us. Ugliness, correlated to the feeling of
displeasure, on the other hand, has been traditionally theorized as
an aesthetic category that stands in opposition to beauty, and
therefore associated with aesthetic disvalue and worthlessness.
In
recent years, and particularly with the development of modern art,
this traditional aesthetic picture has been widely criticized. It has
been pointed out, based on the proliferation of art works that evoke
intense feelings of displeasure, that ugliness can be greatly
appreciated. Moreover, the characterization of ugliness as
aesthetically significant and interesting is not distinctive for art
works alone, but for natural objects as well, as pointed out by some
contemporary writers in environmental aesthetics.
A
general objective of this paper is to give an account of ugliness
that entails, as its necessary part, the explanation of its possible
appeal. In particular, I propose a solution to the problem, known in
philosophical aesthetics as ‘the paradox of ugliness’, namely how
we can value something that we prima
facie
do not like and find positively displeasing.
I
develop my explanation of ugliness in light of Kant’s theory of
taste put forward in the Critique
of the Power of Judgment. Even
though Kant did not write about ugliness, I argue that his
explanation of the beautiful has much to say about its opposite.
This, however, is not immediately apparent. Even more, recent studies
have argued that Kant’s explanation of the feeling of pleasure in
the beautiful leaves no possibility to accommodate judgments of
ugliness. In short, the argument is the following: according to Kant,
judgments of taste have a subjective universal validity, because they
depend on the state of mind of free harmony between imagination and
understanding that we all share, and which is a subjective condition
of cognition. But this state of mind of free harmony produces the
feeling of pleasure alone. Hence, there is no possibility to
accommodate judgments of ugliness, that is, a universally
communicable state of mind of free disharmony between imagination and
understanding that would give rise to the feeling of displeasure
within us.
Worse
yet, it has been argued by Paul Guyer that the existence of a
disharmonious state of mind is inconsistent with Kant’s
epistemological theory. A harmonious relation between cognitive
powers is required for the basic awareness of the representation
itself. Accordingly, we cannot even be conscious of a representation
in which imagination and understanding were in disharmony. Hence,
pure ugliness is epistemologically impossible.
In
this paper I argue for the opposite view, namely, that Kant’s
theory of taste does allow for the possibility of pure judgments of
ugliness. I critically review the main interpretations of Kant’s
central notion of the free play of imagination and understanding
(precognitive, abstractive, multicognitive, metacognitive) and then
develop a new interpretation of free play, one, that takes into
consideration Kant’s account of reflective judgments and the a
priori
principle of purposiveness, and which allows for the epistemological
possibility of a disharmonious state of mind and ugliness. Finally, I
apply my interpretation of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetics to resolve
certain issues that have been raised in contemporary aesthetics,
namely the possibility of appreciating natural and artistic ugliness.
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| 19 March (Wednesday)
5:00
PM
Room
226 |
Péter Mekis
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Department of Logic, Institute of Philosophy
Eötvös University, Budapest
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Frege and the Problem of Understanding
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Any
theory of meaning needs to be supplemented by a theory of
understanding, that is, an account of how language users get access to
the meanings of linguistic expressions. In the case of Frege's work on
meaning, this account is partial and mostly implicit.
In the case of a formal language, Frege's theory of meaning has
straightforward consequences regarding the process of understanding.
Since the expressions of a Begriffsschrift are transparent,
decoding a complex symbol is fairly compositional, based on the
syntactic structures of the expressions and their definitions.
In the case of ordinary language, the problem is more complicated, and
it is not systematically discussed in Frege's writings. Based on
sporadic remarks, we can assume that ordinary language understanding
requires psychological factors that are absent from Frege's theory of
meaning.
The most interesting problems arise at the interface of ordinary
language and formal language, concerning what Frege calls the
elucidations of the primitive concepts of a formal language. These
elucidations are made in ordinary language, and they play a foundational
role in the definitional hierarchy of a formal language. Thus the
phenomenon of elucidation has far reaching consequences regarding the
Fregean account of the foundations of logic and arithmetic.
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| 26 March (Wednesday)
5:00
PM
Room
226 |
| Zalán Gyenis* and Miklós Rédei** |
* Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
** Department of
Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE, London |
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Can Bayesian agents always be rational?
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In
this talk we take the Abstract Principal Principle to be a norm
demanding that subjective degrees of belief of a Bayesian agent be equal
to the objective probabilities once the agent has conditionalized his
subjective degrees of beliefs on the values of the objective
probabilities, where the objective probabilities can be not only chances
but any other quantities determined objectively. We define weak and
strong consistency of the Abstract Principal Principle and show that the
Principle is both weakly and strongly consistent. It is argued that it
is desirable to strengthen the Abstract Principal Principle by adding a
stability requirement to it. Weak and strong consistency of the
resulting Stable Abstract Principal Principle are defined, and the
strong consistency of the Abstract Principal Principle is interpreted as
necessary for a non-omniscient Bayesian agent to be able to have
rational degrees of belief in all epistemic situations. It is shown that
the Stable Abstract Principal Principle is weakly consistent, but
strong consistency remains an open question. We conclude that we do not
yet have proof that Bayesian agents can have rational degrees of belief
in every epistemic situation.
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