The Fifth International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, 12-14 May 2017  | Łodz, Poland

Ambiguity, Vagueness and Indeterminacy are similar phenomena but surely different. Surprisingly, some authors defend something like an ambiguity-vagueness continuum. According to this view it would be only a question of degree whether a term is vague or ambiguous. However, it’s easy to find paradigmatic examples of ambiguity, vagueness, and indeterminacy and we can distinguish them intuitively without difficulties. I am going to make a sketch of some of the most important differences between ambiguity, vagueness and indeterminacy. Personally, I don’t think that continuum-account is correct but it’s due to the lack of an adequate ambiguity criterion. We should work out a criterion to distinguish ambiguity from vagueness or indeterminacy.

PhilLang 2017

Third Lisbon International Conference on Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Issues, 14-16 December, 2016 | Lisbon, Portugal

Can metaphors generate knowledge? Are metaphors creative? Scientists tell us that one day our sun will become a red giant and much later a white dwarf. What is the exact meaning of this statement? Scientists also explain that we store memories in our brains and that one defining characteristic of the human consciousness is its capacity to process information. But how exactly is this possible? It seems to me that we cannot interpret these statements literally because a literal interpretation would give rise to a whole series of other bothersome questions: What are white dwarfs? Can information be stored on biological material just as data is stored on a hard disk or wheat in a granary? It seems to be a better option to look for what physicists or psychologists really want to say. In other words, we have to offer an explanation of some scientific statements.

Eighth Meeting of the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy, 10-12 November 2016 | Oviedo, Spain

El conocimiento ha sido definido tradicionalmente como una creencia verdadera justificada hasta la publicación de un artículo de Edmund Gettier titulado Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? El objetivo de este trabajo era poner de manifiesto la inadecuación de la concepción tradicional del conocimiento mediante dos ejemplos. Contrariamente a la mayoría de los epistemólogos, considero que nuestra intuición inicial al rechazar los casos de Gettier como ejemplos de conocimiento es errónea; que en la mayoría de sus ejemplos hay conocimiento; aunque no se trata, eso sí, de ejemplos muy paradigmáticos de conocimiento. Creo que podemos salvar la definición clásica de conocimiento apelando a la distinción establecida en la filosofía del lenguaje entre referente semántico y referente del hablante.

http://sefaweb.es/sefa2016/