AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Recent developments in AI, particularly in affective computing, have brought renewed attention to the question of first‑person authority—the authority subjects ordinarily take themselves to have with respect to their own avowals about their mental states. Emotion Recognition Systems, in particular, are often presented as being able to infer what you are feeling, in some cases better than you do. At the same time, recent work on self-knowledge emphasises that much of our self-knowledge is inferential, technologically mediated, and fallible. Together, these developments give rise to a tension: if AI systems can accurately infer our mental states, might they become accurate enough to override our avowals and thereby undermine our authority?
I argue that the question rests on a mistaken but common assumption that first-person authority is grounded in a form of epistemic reliability or superiority that subjects enjoy over their mental states, an assumption often inherited from accounts of self-knowledge. Instead, I develop a capacities-based, non-epistemic, account of first-person authority. On this view, first-person authority is grounded in a subject’s distinctive set of capacities to relate to their mental states—through avowal, endorsement, and related capacities—in ways that are not available to others. Although first-person avowals are often accurate as a matter of contingent fact, that is not what makes them authoritative. The upshot is that AI does not pose a threat to first-person authority simpliciter; rather, it helps reveal the types of self-avowals that are vulnerable to challenge.

Discussions of certainty in epistemology often focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “hinges,” the background certainties that make justification and epistemic evaluation possible. While the nature and epistemic status of hinges remain contested, this paper argues that they are best understood not as propositions or merely individual commitments, but as socially grounded, non-propositional certainties. Although hinge statements often take the form of empirical propositions, they function beyond justification and empirical testing while structuring the possibility of empirical knowledge.
Engaging with interpretations such as Moyal-Sharrock’s account of verbalized non-propositional certainties and Pritchard’s notion of hinge commitments, I argue that hinges are instantiated pragmatically through action, embodied practice, and social participation. Drawing on theories of collective intentionality, I propose that hinges constitute a shared normative background that enables coordinated epistemic practices and underlies the possibility of inquiry.
This account clarifies how background certainties are acquired, maintained, and shared across individuals, while also helping explain disagreement and misunderstanding when such certainties diverge. More broadly, it highlights the fundamentally social character of human cognition and knowledge, opening new avenues for dialogue between epistemology, cognitive science, and related disciplines.

Victoria LawsonIn personPracticing Val Plumwood’s Philosophy in the Indoor Spider EncounterWhen you experience physical bodily sensations of fear and disgust, beyond an immediate jump scare, of a spider inside your home, you experience a reaction informed by the separation, both conceptually and physically, of nature and culture in Western society. This separation, according to Val Plumwood, is not just a separation of distinct concepts, of a natural world and a human one, but a chasmic split between radically disparate and homogenised concepts. This informs her account of Western culture as a hegemonic centre – a dominant group forming an exclusive centre of moral and social reasoning – hyper-separating itself from nonhuman animals and the environment. This worldview requires individual maintenance, where experiences that resist conceptual separation elicit not just a physiological, but a conceptual reaction against the mixing of the boundary between nature and culture. I argue that spiders inside the cultural space of the home are an example of this boundary mixing, one in which you can choose to confront your own conceptual belief. This is important, as Plumwood argues the nature/culture dualism has given a conceptual basis for environmental destruction, a destruction which risks the ongoing existence of humans everywhere. 

Georg Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason and Max Horkheimer’s The End of Reason both center on the theme of reason, as their titles indicated. However, there is a profound divergence in their intellectual foundations and teleological outlooks. This study examines these divergences through two core lenses: the philosophers’ contrasting attitudes toward Stalinism and their differing conceptions of reason’s prospects. As a consequence, their views on praxis, individuality, and the role of collective vs. individual struggle diverge: Lukacs prioritizes material transformation and collective action, while Horkheimer emphasizes critical reflection and the preservation of individual autonomy. Despite both being considered as foundational figures of Western Marxism, their disagreements reflect deeper tensions within Marxist thought regarding emancipation, rationality, and the relationship between theory and political practice. This paper argues that these differences stem not from contradictory commitments to Marxism, but from distinct responses to 20th-century political realities (e.g., fascism, Stalinist governance) and divergent interpretations of Marxism’s core tenets, particularly regarding the nature of reason and the path to human emancipation.

This paper investigates a fundamental aporia within the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: how can ethical responsibility endure when infinite responsibility exceeds the finite subject’s capacity to fulfill it? Levinas grounds subjectivity in an asymmetrical responsibility for the Other that precedes freedom, reciprocity, and self-possession. Yet such radical responsibility threatens the subject with ethical exhaustion, shame, and retreat into ontological self-enclosure.
Against interpretations that soften Levinasian asymmetry through reciprocity or mutual recognition, this paper argues that asymmetry remains irreducible. At the same time, however, asymmetrical responsibility generates what I call “hopeful asymmetry”: a fragile ethical hope directed toward the Other. Through an analysis of shame, substitution, and diachrony in Levinas’s major works, I argue that this hope functions as the transcendental condition that prevents ethical responsibility from collapsing into nihilistic absurdity. Hope does not resolve impossibility; rather, it suspends impossibility so that ethical responsiveness may continue despite constitutive inadequacy.
Ultimately, the paper proposes a new interpretation of Levinasian ethics in which ethical shame becomes bearable only through the irreducible hope awakened by asymmetrical responsibility itself.