Factivity and Basic Perceptual Reasons

Philosophy Seminar

• Speaker: Professor Mark Schroeder (University of Southern California)
• Title: Factivity and Basic Perceptual Reasons

All welcome!

Mark's research interests

I'm interested in the ways in which rationality, reasons, value, and other 'evaluative' or 'normative' categories are related to the mundane, physical world in which we live, in which things are round, red, or left of one another. For example, are there really facts about what is rational or not, to go along with the facts about what is round or not? And if so, what are those facts like, and what is their relationship to other sorts of facts? Or is are normative sentences like 'fearing heights is irrational' not really in the business of stating facts at all? Does normative language, perhaps, have a different sort of purpose, and what would that tell us about how language works, in general?