ECREA16-Abstract

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Thursday, November 10

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PHC01

Action, Agency, Practice

PP 044

Communication and Moral Standing: Davidson and Kant

E. Dresner

Tel Aviv University, Communication, Tel Aviv, Israel

The notion of radical interpretation stands at the core of Donald Davidson's far-reaching system of ideas. On the basis of this notion Davidson presents an ac‑

count of linguistic meaning and then goes on to develop a unified philosophical picture that goes way beyond the philosophy of language, putting forward

highly influential theses in such diverse domains as the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, metaphysics and epistemology. These various theses

of Davidson's are closely interconnected to each other, and have found applications and implications in numerous domains, within the bounds of philosophy

and outside these bounds. However, regarding moral philosophy Davidson himself says very little, and remarks by others concerning the ethical conse‑

quences of his views are similarly scarce. If anything, Davidson is known for widely applying a notion—namely, the principle of charity—which may seem

at first blush to have ethical force, but under further scrutiny turns out to have nothing to do with moral considerations. (In a nutshell, Davidson's charity

is an interpretational norm, according to which agreement between speaker and interpreter should be maximized.) In this paper I present an argument to

the effect that Davidson's views do have moral ramifications—in particular, with respect to the question who (or what) has moral standing. The argument

is straightforward: (1) If, as Davidson maintains, communicative interaction, as embodied by radical interpretation, is constitutive of full-blown rational

mentality (in particular, having beliefs and desires,) and (2) if, as some moral philosophers hold, having full-blown rational mentality is both necessary and

sufficient for (full) moral standing, then (3) interpretational engagement underlies moral standing. The objective of this paper is to examine in detail this

argument. Thus in the first section I trace the development of Davidson's notion of radical interpretation, and I show how propositional mental states, and,

in particular, desire, come to play an increasingly central role in his construal of this key concept in his philosophy. In the second section I review several

of the main philosophical positions with respect to moral standing–in particular, Kant's view that such standing is inherently connected to rational thought.

In the third and last part of the paper I put together these two argumentative components, and look into the question whether radically interpreting

someone indeed commits us to treating her ethically.

PP 045

The Urge to Detect, the Need to Clarify: Gricean Perspectives

S.O. Soee

Lund University, Theoretical Philosophy, Lund- Sweden, Denmark

We live in the age of information. We speak of the digital information society. We live with information and information technology as an indispensable

part of everyday life. The Internet has become an important mean for communication, news, and information sharing in large parts of the world. Further,

the information is often processed by algorithms for decision-making and as such our societies are increasingly run by algorithms (Pasquale, 2015). People

also use information to make decisions. However, ‘information’ comes in many varieties spanning from good to bad, useful to harmful, and sincere to de‑

ceptive. Therefore, an increased emphasis on automatic detection (through algorithms) of misinformation and disinformation in online social networks has

emerged (e.g. PHEME, 2014; Kumar & Geethakumari, 2014). I will in this paper argue that a better understanding of the notions information, misinforma‑

tion, and disinformation – and especially their interconnections – is needed in order to enable automatic detection. In order to develop algorithms which

can detect misinformation and disinformation one must know which features these algorithms have to detect. However, the various detecting-projects

employ different notions of information, misinformation, and disinformation, respectively. And within philosophy of information as the field offering gen‑

uine accounts of misinformation and disinformation (e.g. Fox, 1983; and Fallis, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2015) no clear picture of the interconnections between

information, misinformation, and disinformation can be found. I further argue that Grice’s (1967) communication theory (i.e. the Cooperative principle

and its maxims) and Grice’s (1957) theory of meaning offer a fruitful framework for the understanding of the notions information, misinformation, and

disinformation and their interconnections within philosophy of information. Grice’s communicative aspects and insights regarding the differences between

sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning, as well as natural meaning and nonnatural meaning, enable the development of a unified conceptualization

of information, misinformation, and disinformation. The conceptualization is developed from philosophical accounts of information, misinformation, and

disinformation put forth by Dretske (1981), Floridi (2005), Fallis (2014), Fox (1983) and Scarantino and Piccinini (2010). In the detecting-projects it is

truth (as pointing to information) and falsity (as pointing to mis-/disinformation) which are detected for. However, the misleadingness of misinformation

and disinformation is generated by (false) Gricean implicatures (Fallis, 2014; Mahon 2008) which challenge the truth-/falsity-conditions for information,

misinformation, and disinformation.What is literally true can implicate something false and vice versa. Therefore, this paper will outline an approach to au‑

tomatic detection of information, misinformation, and disinformation (based on the unified conceptualization) in terms of the detection of misleadingness

and non-misleadingness in combination with intentionality. I argue that it is misleadingness and non-misleadingness which actually distinguish informa‑

tion, misinformation, and disinformation from one another. Information, misinformation, and disinformation in online social networks are communicative

processes which are determined by the contexts within which they are generated. It is the content, the speaker-meaning, and the context which determine

whether some ‘message’ is misleading or non-misleading. And as such these features play into the possibility of automatic detection of information, mis‑

information, and disinformation.

Philosophy of Communication

(PHC01–PHC04)