The Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies invites you to the annual Burman lectures in philosophy. This years invited lecturer is C. Thi Nguyen, associate professor in Philosophy at the University of Utah. He will give three open lectures over three days.
Wednesday 16 October at 13.15-15.00 PM, Hjortronlandet, Lecture Hall HUM.D.220
Abstract: If the meanings of some terms are socially determined, and those meanings have social and political consequences, then we should engineer our terms in the light of those consequences. But this conceptual engineering shouldn’t simply be in the hands of some elite class. Rather, basic considerations of democratic inclusiveness suggest that all relevant stakeholders be involved, somehow, in the process of conceptual engineering. This is the thesis of semantic self-determination. I offer a case study: the attempt by autism advocates to intervene into the medical definition of “autism”. Meaning-determination should arise through an inclusive democratic procedure, as with any other form of self-governance. The opposite process would be one in which terms are engineered from the top-down, and imposed through a non-inclusive process. And this form of semantic authoritarianism is already occurring. It often takes the form of bureaucratic institutions and technical experts setting the meanings of official terms. Many institutional metrics turn out to be exercises of semantic authoritarianism, imposing a conception of what counts as health, well-being, value or success. And many of our folk concepts turn out to be post-bureaucratic – having already been transformed to be more amenable to large-scale institutional methodologies. What would a more democratized and localized process of meaning-setting and value-determination look like?
Lecture 1: Value Capture
Monday 14 oktober at 13.15-15.00 PM, Hjortronlandet, Lecture Hall HUM.D.220
Lecture 2: Mechanical Scoring Systems and Human Values
Tuesday 15 October at 13.15-15.00 PM, Hjortronlandet, Lecture Hall HUM.D.220
All interested are welcome to these lectures!
Learn more about the Burman Lectures