Programme :

Friday 8

09.30 -11.00 Maarten Steenhagen (Cambridge) ‘Mere Appearances’
11.00 -12.30 Philipp Blum (Luzern) ‘Believing in Appearances’

14.00 -15.30 Olivier Massin (Zürich) ‘Colours and Shapes’
15.30 -17.00 Roberta Locatelli (Tübingen/Fribourg) ‘The Superficiality of Observational Properties’
17.15 -18:45 Keith Allen (York) ‘Bridging the Gap? Transcendental Naive Realism and the Problem of Consciousness’

Saturday 9

9.30 -11.00 Gianfranco Soldati (Fribourg) ‘Appearances and Qualitative Concepts’
11.00 -12.30 Jean Moritz Müller (Bonn) ‘Emotions and the epistemology of response-dependent properties’

TOPIC:
Since the beginning of Modern science, the problem of reconciling the manifest image of the world with the scientific image of the world appeared. Scientific explanation purports to give an exhaustive account of reality. But scientific explanation leaves no space for observational properties such as sound, colour, taste, solidity, and macro-physical shape and size. This prompted philosophers and scientists alike to claim that the manifest image of the world is radically misleading: the world is colourless, tasteless, soundless, and empty save for quantum perturbations of matter. Recently, many philosophers have tried to rehabilitate the manifest image of the world, by insisting that observational qualities are sui generis properties of ordinary physical objects. But the details of how we could develop and defend such views remain under-developed.
In this workshop we aim to explore the following questions at the intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of perception:
– Is it possible to identify informative criteria to identify a class of properties that are observational or qualitative, distinct from other properties that are more generally perceptible?
– What is the metaphysical nature of observational properties? Are they properties of the physical objects? To what extend, if any, are they grounded in the mind?
– If observational properties are instantiated in the world, are they distinct from physical properties?
– Do scientific findings about the physical and psychological mechanisms underlying colour or sound perception force us to revise our pre-theoretical views of colour or sound?
– If observational properties are instantiated in the world, what is the relation between the colour or the size an object has and how it looks to us?