Dear all, The Agency, Rationality and Epistemic Defeat (ARED) project has organised two upcoming events that may be of interest to some of you. The details and registrations links can be found below. Public Lecture<https://ared.stir.ac.uk/engagement/> First, we will host a public lecture by Professor Mark Rowlands on 31st January at the university. World on Fire: Climate, Extinction, Pandemic The world is currently facing three epoch-defining crises: climate change, mass extinction and newly emerging infectious diseases. While these crises may seem very different, they are, in fact, deeply connected. Understanding this connection allows us to identify the best way to solve all three of them. You can register for the public lecture here.<https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=9wmNTnnMy0yRSa… Workshop<https://ared.stir.ac.uk/events/> Second, there will be a workshop on 1st and 2nd February, this will be run in a hybrid format at the university and online. Propositional thought and truth-functional reasoning Despite widespread practice in cognitive and comparative psychology to ascribe beliefs and other propositional attitudes to very young children and non-human animals, the nature of such attitudes remains a matter of controversy. Some have suggested that they might involve imagistic or map-like representations rather than propositional ones. Others have emphasized the difficulty of individuating the concepts possessed and entertained by minimally verbal and non-verbal subjects and went on to question the accuracy and legitimacy of ascriptions of propositional attitudes to them. As truth-functional reasoning involves representational mechanism that go beyond the demonstrative-governed mechanisms characteristic of perception, the capacity for truth-functional reasoning is often taken to be a sign of propositional thought. Recent empirical research provides some evidence of truth-functional reasoning in non-human animals and young children, as the studies on children’s use of denial-negation and disjunctive syllogism in both animals and children illustrate. Nevertheless, in many cases explanations not involving propositional thought and deductive reasoning have been proposed by sceptics. In the third ARED workshop we engage with the issue of propositional thought and ascriptions thereof in non-verbal and minimally verbal subjects, together with its relation to truth-functional reasoning. Speakers: Josep Call, Laura Danon, Roman Feiman, Hans Glock, Juliane Kaminski, Brian Leahy, Angela Nyhout and Mark Rowlands. Participation can be online or in person. Please register here<https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=9wmNTnnMy0yRSaQ… or send an email to ared@stir.ac.uk<mailto:ared@stir.ac.uk> by January 24th 2024, indicating whether you wish to attend in person or online. Best wishes, Kirsten Dr Kirsten H Blakey (she/her) Postdoctoral Research Fellow Philosophy & Psychology, University of Stirling Address: Cottrell building 3W1, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, FK9 4LA Email: k.h.blakey1@stir.ac.uk<mailto:k.h.blakey1@stir.ac.uk> | Staff webpage<http://www.stir.ac.uk/people/267453> | Personal webpage<https://kirstenhblakey.weebly.com/> ARED Project<https://ared.stir.ac.uk/> | Postdoctoral representative, Psychology Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee<https://edicpsy.stir.ac.uk/> Office hours: Monday and Friday 11:00 - 12:00 ________________________________ Scotland’s University for Sporting Excellence The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159