News and Events

  Tiina Rosenqvist
Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Conceptual engineering is often understood as the practice of assessing and improving our representational tools with specific aims in mind. In this paper, I contribute to the engineering of the concept of pain with a particular focus on clinical utility. My engineering efforts center on the International Association for the Study of Pain’s (IASP) “official” definition of pain, first introduced in 1979 and revised in 2020. I discuss the general process of conceptual engineering and the original IASP definition of pain and identify three desiderata for a definition suitable for clinical practice: it should be accurate, cognitively tractable, and promote justice in patient care. Evaluating the revised IASP definition against these desiderata, I argue that it is vague and fails to fully address persistent misconceptions about pain, and that additional revisions are therefore needed. I then propose an alternative definition designed to better meet the demands of effective and just clinical practice.

  Tez Clark, PhD Student, Department of Philosophy, New York University
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
We often seem to care that our attitudes match the way things are. At the same time, we also seem to care about our attitudes cohering or fitting together. Many philosophers accept that "failing by one’s own lights" in this way is incoherent and in some sense irrational. But what does it mean for attitudes to be incoherent in this way, and what unifies the various examples of incoherence? In this talk, Clark argues that existing theories of incoherence rest on the mistaken assumption that certain attitudes are incoherent no matter what, regardless of who has them or of contextual features, then sketches an alternative way of thinking about incoherence, in terms of intelligibility.