AAP 2026 CONFERENCE: Full Schedule

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2:00pm NZST

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

Recent survey data (Romm & Waldman 2025) suggests that university students often project ideological alignment with their professors and classmates in order to succeed socially and academically. In other words, university students virtue signal in the classroom. In this paper, I set out to answer three questions: (1) What is classroom virtue signalling? (2) What are the impacts of classroom virtue signalling on the goals of university education? (3) What, if anything, should be done about classroom virtue signalling? In response to (1), I offer a characterisation of classroom virtue signalling. In response to (2), I argue that classroom virtue signalling compromises three educational goals: the acquisition of epistemic goods, the cultivation of autonomy, and the cultivation of intellectual virtues. In section (3), I argue that students, professors, and universities have duties to disrupt the practice of classroom virtue signalling so that the educational goals of universities can be better realised.

Speakers

William Tuckwell

Lecturer, Charles Sturt University

I am a Lecturer in philosophy at Charles Sturt University (CSU). Before becoming a lecturer, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Future of the Professions Research Group at CSU. Prior to joining CSU I was a Society for Applied Philosophy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Social Epistemology, In Person

4:30pm NZST

Explanatory Pluralism and the Epistemic Status of Spiritual Frameworks in Psychiatric Knowledge

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.02

This paper argues that explanatory pluralism provides the most defensible framework for governing psychiatric knowledge, and that the continued privileging of biomedical monism requires philosophical justification it has not adequately received. I contend that psychiatric phenomena are ontologically complex in ways that resist reduction to any single explanatory scheme, and that the systematic marginalisation of non-biomedical frameworks reflects the politics of knowledge production rather than their epistemic inadequacy. To ground this argument, I draw on Australian mental health consumer activism as a case study in which spiritual frameworks functioned as genuine competing explanatory systems. These were not pre-scientific residues but coherent accounts of psychological distress with their own internal logic, evidential basis in lived experience, and practical explanatory success. Drawing on Ian Hacking's concepts of interactive kinds and classificatory looping, I examine how the medicalisation of spiritual experience creates self-reinforcing cycles that delegitimise alternative frameworks structurally rather than on epistemic grounds. The paper concludes that recognising spiritual and experiential frameworks as legitimate contributors to psychiatric explanation is not a concession to relativism but a consequence of taking ontological complexity seriously. This has direct implications for how epistemic authority is distributed in clinical practice and mental health care design.

Speakers

Gemma Lucy Smart

PhD Candidate, University of Sydney

Gemma Lucy Smart is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, where she researches the history of mental health self-help, consumer activism, and Mad Pride's relationship to the disability and neurodiversity movements. She is a senior lived... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.02

Social Epistemology, In Person

AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

2:00pm NZST

William Tuckwell

4:30pm NZST

Gemma Lucy Smart

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