Colloquium Series

• Archive

Colloquium 2024-2025

October 25, 2024 Speaker: Dr. Carla Fehr, University of Waterloo Title: 'Who the computer sees: Race, gender, and AI' Time: 3:30- 5:00 pm Location: ESB 103 Abstract:  Facial recognition systems can do a lot more than open your smartphone. They can sort faces into many categories, including emotional state, age, race, and sex. Without their consent, most Americans are included in searchable government face recognition databases. Facial recognition systems are being built into our everyday lives and an increasingly wide range of social institutions. This paper develops a case study, Gender Shades, in which scholar, activist, and public figure Joy Buolamwini identifies a now-famous failure of facial recognition systems to ‘see’ and accurately classify Black women’s faces. Gender Shades provides a valuable case to explore the benefits and limitations of feminist philosophy of science research on the significance of diversity in science and technology.
November 29, 2024 Speaker: Dr. Paul Simard Smith, University of Regina Title:  'Inherent Rights to Self-Government and Constitutional Authority' Time: 3:30- 5:00 pm Location: ESB 112 Abstract:  Recent agreements between Métis governments and Canada recognize the Métis Nation’s inherent right to self-government. However, this recognition raises the question: what is the nature of this inherent right? In particular, what kind of jurisdiction is associated with it?  We argue that – from a conceptual and ethical standpoint – the powers associated with this right ought to be regarded as inherent, not delegated by the Crown, and as including constitutional authority with respect to the Constitution of Canada. We develop this case in several stages. First, we provide a conceptual analysis of the inherent right to self-government; highlighting that the proper understanding of this concept favors a view in which its jurisdiction is not delegated by the Crown. Moreover, pairing this notion of the inherent right with a conceptual analysis of the notion of constitutional authority we show that, in the Canadian context, the powers associated with the inherent right should include a fair measure of constitutional authority. Next, we draw on the Métis self-government agreements as a case study to further discuss our conceptions of the inherent right. We note that there are provisions within the agreements that appear to recognize the constitutional authority of Métis Governments, and adequately respect the inherent right to self-government. However, there are also clauses that could be used to deny the constitutional authority of Métis governments and recognize only a nominal right to self-government in which the powers associated with this right are fully delegated. Ultimately, legislatures, courts, and citizens – both those of the Métis Nation and Canada – are approaching a crossroads in which a path between these different options must be determined. We close by making a political and ethical argument for regarding the inherent right as associated with inherent non-delegated jurisdiction that includes constitutional authority in the Canadian legal order.
January 17, 2025 Speaker: Dr. Peter Alward, University of Saskatchewan Title: 'Creating the Non-Existent' Time: 3:30- 5:00 pm Location: ESB 103 Abstract: It is commonplace to suppose that fictional characters are authorial creations: Sherlock Holmes, for example, was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And it is also commonplace to suppose that fictional characters do not exist: there is not nor ever was any such person as Sherlock Holmes. But insofar as creating something consists of bringing it into existence, these two suppositions are incompatible. In this paper, I develop and defend a solution to what might be termed the “puzzle of fictional creation.” The solution involves combining a neo-Waltonian account of engagement with fiction – according to which participants in games of make-believe perform genuine assertions rather than merely pretending to do so – with Cameron’s meta-ontology – according to which the truth-makers for certain existential claims need not incorporate the entities claimed to exist. This yields a view according which Conan Doyle caused it to be true to say “Sherlock Holmes exists” but the truth-maker for this statement does not incorporate Holmes.
February 7, 2025 Speaker: Dr. Sarah Hoffman, University of Saskatchewan Title:  'Is Addiction Fiction?' Time: 3:30- 5:00 pm Location: ESB 103 Abstract:  In this talk I explore the suggestion that what we currently know about the nature of drug addiction provides good reason to understand the psychiatric discourse of substance use disorder as at least akin to fictional discourse. This approach is not motivated by ontological qualms per se. It is not that talk of addiction is talk of something nonexistent, implying we should drop this way of talking. Rather it is to notice that the usefulness of addiction discourse requires that we continue, but also hold back from full blown realism. A fully realist interpretation of addiction as an entity posited by psychiatric theorizing runs the risk of undermining patient autonomy, and thus recovery, by locating the explanation of their problems in a sub-personal disease entity, the addiction.  What is needed is something more along the lines suggested by Wilkinson, who proposes we understand psychiatric discourse along the lines of a make-believe account of fictional discourse.
March 14, 2025 Speaker: Dr. Pierre-François Noppen, University of Saskatchewan Title:  Adorno on Freud, the Constitution of Immanence and the Affective Underpinnings of Cognition Time: 3:30- 5:00 pm Location: ESB 103 Abstract: Throughout his work, Adorno lays out how, in his view, our sense of social reality much like our sense of self are woven into what he refers to as a context of immanence. Following the diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, as the Enlightenment collapses onto itself at the beginning of the 1940s, this complex of immanence turns into a context of delusion that gives way to hallucinatory forms of political antisemitism. Moreover, in the same work, and later, Adorno never ceases to stress how capitalist dynamics are imprinted on the individual’s alienated sense of self; or how a sustained exposure to the products of the culture industry atrophies the imagination, trapping the individual in the present of capitalist reality. The question I want to examine in this paper is the following: according to Adorno, how does the constitution of immanence and the way our selves are woven into its fabric affect our cognitive economy? I will argue that a significant part of the answer he proposes turns on his critical appropriation of a set of Freudian insights into social psychology. On my reading, what is at issue for Adorno is the way the cognitive economy of the individual is tied to their affective and broader psychological equilibrium. More specifically, what Adorno tracks is how individuals struggle to emancipate their thinking from hard-wired defense mechanisms that drive cognition and motivate the constitution of immanence in the first place.
March 28, 2025 Speaker: Dr. Dwayne Moore, University of Saskatchewan Title:  Will Powers: A Libertarian Free Will Model Time: 3:30- 5:00 pm Location: ESB 103 Abstract: Libertarian free will is the view that agents, rather than being determined by external factors beyond their control, can choose for themselves, among various possibilities, how they will act. Libertarians about free will are divided into factions: event-causal libertarians say that these actions are caused by agent-involving events such as an agent’s reasons, desires, efforts and intentions, while agent-causal libertarians say actions are caused by agents-qua-agents. Both models have their merits and demerits, and despite their internecine disputes, share much in common. In this paper I introduce a hybrid model that not only reconciles their differences, but also preserves the virtues while overcoming the vices of both models.
April 4, 2025 Speaker: Dr. Chris Letheby, University of Western Australia Title:  Merely Believing and Really Believing: Mental Imagery in Personal Transformation Time: 3:30-5:00pm Location: ESB 103 Abstract: As a teacher of mine once remarked, when we say that teenagers think they are immortal, we don’t mean that they would fail a biology test. Teenagers believe, truly and justifiably, that they will die, but there is also a sense in which they – and perhaps most of us – don’t really believe it. The topic of this talk is exactly this difference between merely believing and really believing a proposition – between knowing it only in our head, as we might say, and knowing it in our heart, or feeling it in our bones. The shift from ‘head’ knowledge to ‘heart’ knowledge has been much discussed but is still not fully understood. A fuller understanding of it could shed light on interesting theoretical questions and be of significant practical benefit, given the apparent therapeutic and transformative relevance of such shifts. In the talk I explore a simple proposal about the cognitive nature of such shifts: that they consist primarily in the activation of mental imagery. My ultimate conclusion is that this proposal gets at part of the truth, but may not be the whole story. Exploring its limits promises to shed further light on the nature of the shifts themselves, and perhaps even on broader questions about cognitive architecture.