NYUAD Philosophy Program

Please join us for our second Philosophy Colloquium of the spring semester on Monday 9 February at 12:45pm. Joseph Chan, Senior Researcher at the Rearch Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Academia Sinica, will be presenting his paper, "Regime Legitimacy in an Ideologically Divise World" (abstract below). Lunch will be served.

The colloquium is open to NYUAD faculty, students, and staff, as well as invited guests. If you're interested in attending, please contact the Philosophy Program ([email protected]).

ABSTRACT: This talk proposes an ideologically neutral framework for thinking about regime legitimacy. It suggests that a carefully specified internal perspective—one attentive to the normative viewpoints of both the governed and the governing within a political order—can offer a more reasonable evaluation than approaches grounded in external or universal principles. On this basis, the talk explores the possibilities and limits of approaching questions of regime legitimacy in the People’s Republic of China from an internal perspective.

Please join us for our first Philosophy Colloquium of the spring semester next week on Friday 30 January at 10:00am. Gus Skorburg, Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Co-Academic Director of the Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical Artificial Intelligence (CARE-AI), will be presenting his paper, "What Clinical Documentation Reveals About LLM Limitations" (abstract below). Refreshments will be served.

The colloquium is open to NYUAD faculty, students, and staff, as well as invited guests. If you're interested in attending, please contact the Philosophy Program ([email protected]).

ABSTRACT: Clinical documentation has been positioned as an ideal candidate for LLM automation: high-volume, structurally consistent, and low-risk. If LLMs are to prove useful in healthcare, routine documentation represents a minimal threshold of competence. This talk reviews some recent empirical evidence about the effectiveness of LLMs in this setting. It then presents findings from our qualitative study at a pediatric rehabilitation facility. Among other themes, clinicians reported that LLMs introduced additional workflow burdens and threatened professional autonomy. We argue that the underlying problems we observed are best understood as sociotechnical in nature. The talk concludes with some considerations about how these findings relate to broader questions about AI and the automation of knowledge work.

Please join us for our final Philosophy Colloquium of the semester next week on Thursday 27 November at 1:00pm. Amelia Kahn, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Seton Hall University and NYU Abu Dhabi alum from the class of 2014, will be presenting her paper, "Inquiring in Institutions" (abstract below). Lunch will be served.

The colloquium is open to NYUAD faculty, students, and staff, as well as invited guests. If you're interested in attending, please contact the Philosophy Program ([email protected]).

ABSTRACT: Institutions inquire. Police departments inquire into who committed crimes; universities inquire into whether an incident violated their policy; corporations inquire into what their competitors are planning. My overall aim is to provide a theory of institutional inquiry that can tell us when an institution has inquired and when it has failed to. In this talk, I’ll present some desiderata on such a theory and show that existing theories of group inquiry fail to meet them. Further, I’ll argue that an adequate theory of institutional inquiry is incompatible with the widely accepted idea that genuine inquiry requires a particular kind of attitude towards the target question: an interrogative attitude like curiosity or wondering (according to Jane Friedman) or an intention to resolve the question (according to Daniel Friedman). Finally, I’ll sketch an alternative view of the attitudes involved in inquiry that can handle both institutional and individual cases.

Please join us for the second of two Philosophy Colloquia next week on Wednesday 19 November at 5:00pm. Carl Hoefer, Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, will be presenting his paper, "Generic Causation in Highly Complex Systems" (abstract below). Refreshments will be provided.

The colloquium is open to NYUAD faculty, students, and staff, as well as invited guests. If you're interested in attending, please contact the Philosophy Program ([email protected]).

ABSTRACT: Often, in medicine and social sciences, we are interested in finding generic causal facts: facts of the form X causes Y, where X and Y are event types rather than specific individual (“token”) events. In these sciences, often we are interested because X is something that is at least partially under our control: e.g., an educational policy that can be implemented, or a public health intervention that can be made.

The evidence-based medicine and evidence-based policy movements urge that we base medical and sociopolitical decisions on high-quality evidence that, ideally, strongly supports statements of this form, X causes (or X prevents) Y. It is a presupposition of these movements, and of the forms of research they wish to rely on (including RCTs), that such facts about generic causation exist; our job is just to uncover them.

But might this presupposition be mistaken in some areas of human endeavor and inquiry? In recent years I have become convinced that this presupposition is indeed mistaken, in at least some contexts that share the following characteristics: complexity, strong dependence on initial conditions, and dependence on human behavior. Using examples from the recent COVID-19 pandemic, I will illustrate the possibility that certain generic causal facts may fail to exist: it is neither correct to assert that X causes Y, nor correct to assert X does not cause Y.

Please join us for the first of two Philosophy Colloquia next week on Tuesday 18 November at 1:00pm. Genoveva Martí, Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, will be presenting her paper, "Problem? Qua Problem?" (abstract below). Lunch will be provided.

The colloquium is open to NYUAD faculty, students, and staff, as well as invited guests. If you're interested in attending, please contact the Philosophy Program ([email protected]).

ABSTRACT: The philosophy of language has been dominated by the principle that meaning determines reference—that the conventional use of a term by a linguistic community determines the correct designatum, or the correct domain of application of the term. This is, in principle, an extremely plausible postulate. But, in general, the principle has been interpreted as the claim that the meaning of a term determines its reference or extension once and for all, namely, that whenever a term is introduced into a language as a meaningful term, the past, present and future extension of the term is fixed; otherwise, we risk all the bad consequences of indeterminacy.

In this presentation I will examine a specific phenomenon that challenges the principle of determination of reference: the so-called qua problem. I will argue that some forms and levels of indeterminacy in the use and application of terms are not troublesome and that they do not pose a threat for semantics nor for linguistic communication; we live with them on a daily basis, and a correct theory of meaning should acknowledge that fact. This entails that the qua problem is not really a problem.