Visiting speaker seminar

Speaker: Clare Mac Cumhaill (Durham)

Title: Locative Escape

Abstract: I explore whether focusing on the locative preposition ‘in’ has any anti-sceptical traction when it comes to considering whether one might be a brain ‘in’ a vat. I distinguish two uses of ‘in’ that an envatted subject ought to be able to grasp - when used to pick out object/space ‘in’ locatedness relations (such as might be used in formulating the descriptive phenomenological claim that we experience objects as located ‘in’ space) and ‘object/object’ locatedness relations (such as might be used in formulating the hypothesis that one might be a brain ‘in’ a vat).  I close by tentatively spelling out the significance of shifting from more straightforward referential relations to the locative preposition: making sense of conditions on the successful use of ‘in’ requires forms of explanation that are best construed as non-causal.