Western virtue ethics is often presented as a timeless framework for ethical inquiry, yet its historical and cultural genealogy remains largely unexamined within mainstream philosophical discourse. This paper argues that whakapapa, as a distinctively Māori philosophical method, offers a rigorous tool for tracing such genealogies, revealing the contingent cultural foundations of concepts that have been naturalised within Western ethics. Taking Perrett and Patterson's 1991 ""Virtue Ethics and Māori Ethics"" as a point of departure, I demonstrate how whakapapa as method reorients the comparative project entirely. Rather than asking whether Māori ethical concepts map onto Western virtue frameworks, the whakapapa approach asks what historical, ontological, and relational conditions gave rise to each tradition's understanding of virtue, excellence, and moral agency. This genealogical move exposes the settler-colonial assumptions embedded in cross-cultural philosophical comparisons, while simultaneously affirming the internal coherence and philosophical sophistication of Māori ethical thought. The paper contributes to ongoing methodological debates within Indigenous philosophy about how to engage with Western philosophical traditions on Indigenous terms, offering whakapapa not as metaphor but as rigorous philosophical methodology with genuine analytical purchase.
Learning Advisor, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha │ University of Canterbury
Ko Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga tōku iwi. I am an Indigenous philosopher and Māori Learning Advisor at the University of Canterbury. My research sits at the intersection of analytic philosophy and Indigenous epistemology. I work on whakapapa as a rigorous philosophical method... Read More →
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST MSB1.21
Three lenses through which Māori philosophy can be considered are: (1) as a special type or branch of philosophy, implying the existence of its own canon; (2) as a provocation or critique of (White) philosophy; or (3) as a frame or approach for investigating questions involving Māori knowledge. These three lenses are useful to help unpack and explain the derivation and significance of Māori philosophy, which until recently was bundled with language and culture in Māori Studies, the local postmodern offshoot of Anthropology.
This paper will argue that the current popularity of Māori philosophy (and other forms of Indigenous philosophy) is related to, if not caused by, the dilemma of Western philosophy, also expressed as the ‘truth wars’ and accompanied by the emergence of the ‘posts,’ in particular post-truth. The racist ideologies (of European exceptionalism, etc) that underwrite the Western canon of modernity constitute a form of managed ignorance, formalised as Agnotology under the rubric that ‘ignorance is to Agnotology as knowledge is to Epistemology’ (Proctor, 2008). The unmasking of such ignorance leads Māori scholars to Māori philosophy. Māori philosophy is one of many ways in which non-elitist scholars might attempt to avoid the problems of Western knowledge, but caution is needed to avoid reinstating the same weaknesses with a different cultural face.
Reference: Proctor, R. (2008). Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study). In R. Proctor & L. L. Schiebinger (Eds.), Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance (pp. 1–33). Stanford University Press.
This paper develops a philosophical account of narrative sovereignty by examining how people draw on layered pūrākau as the architecture through which they re‑author their stories within a contextual coherence narrative engine. Te Whare Tapa Whā provides the structural ontology for this engine: taha wairua, hinengaro, whānau, and tinana operate as interdependent narrative layers through which meaning is interpreted and balanced. Within this framework, healing is not an externally imposed intervention, but a sovereign act undertaken within a held relational space, supported by a Kaitiaki who witnesses, grounds, and protects the perimeter while the individual chooses how to weave, unweave, and reweave the stories that shape their life. The paper shows how pūrākau function as philosophical technologies that encode whakapapa, relational ethics, and cosmological orientation. These forms challenge Western assumptions that narrative coherence is internal or psychological, instead positioning coherence as relational, embodied, and ancestrally situated. As tauiwi, I approach pūrākau as methodological guides rather than symbolic resources. The paper proposes that contextual coherence grounded in Te Whare Tapa Whā offers a culturally respectful model of narrative healing that protects individual sovereignty while honouring relational, spiritual, and ancestral dimensions of coherent self‑stories.
Academic Lead & Chair Programme Committee, Te Whare Takiura o Manukau | Manukau Institute of Technology
I’m Programme Chair & Academic Lead at Manukau Institute of Technology, specialising in software engineering, data analytics, AI, and interdisciplinary programme design. I’ve led the development of multiple NZQA-accredited programmes and supervise capstone and work-based learning... Read More →
Indigenous communities in Australia have ancestral philosophies for caring about their local environments. As an aftermath of European imperialism, such philosophies have been racialized and silenced in attempted genocides and epistemicides by governing institutions in settler-colonial states. When environmental policies in most industrialized states have failed to prevent cascading environmental crises, how should we understand the relationship between the environmental philosophies of Indigenous peoples and the policymaking of settler-colonial states? Can such an understanding inform responses to environmental crises and the bestowment of collective reparations on Indigenous communities? We propose the Truth-Telling and Environmental Policy (TTEP) model to address these questions. Focused on case studies from Australian history, the TTEP model examines both vicious and virtuous cycles of cultural transmission in the relations between the philosophies of First Australians and environmental policy. The vicious feedback loop maintains the epistemic malpractices and falsehoods caused by racialization and settler privilege. According to TTEP, virtuous and reparative feedback loops are established by using truth-telling and rational understanding to remediate injustices and pass decolonial knowledge intergenerationally. Truth-telling operates as a circuit breaker of racialized ignorance and collective silencing.
The panel will deploy a reversed ‘anthropological gaze’ to examine and expand the practices of academic philosophy in Australasia. For the first time in its history, the AAP has invited Indigenous women from the Doura tribe (Hiri Koiari district, East of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea [PNG]) to discuss the contributions that philosophers could make to support victims of gendered violence and racialization. The leading guest speaker from the Doura team is Elder Helen Vai’i Gorogo, who presides the Doura Kabema’una Cooperate Society and has decades of experience in redressing colonial and patriarchal injustice. A key task for the cross-cultural panel will be to evaluate proposals for the delivery of moral and epistemic reparations to victim-survivors in PNG. Moreover, each contributing panellist will be invited to consider how culturally entrenched moral change – ‘moral revolution’ in Appiah’s (2010) sense – could be triggered when communities use Indigenous narratives to confront histories of exclusion, colonialism, and injustice (Rigney, 2017). Thus, the panel will seek to weave Indigenous philosophies, truth-and-reconciliation scholarship, and cultural change theory to elaborate the groundwork of an innovative decolonial philosophy. The panel will be a unique opportunity to celebrate Melanesian philosophies and pay respect to the underrepresented First Peoples of PNG.
Charles Darwin University/Western Sydney University
My research interest in mainly around Geography and Indigenous knowledge philosophy, cultures, native languages and traditions. I'm also interested in climate change, food security and empowering community development projects
Truth is mysterious. Some have identified it with God, some with Goodness and some with Being. Some have claimed there is no such thing and others that that claim is self-refuting. Truth borders on paradox: if there is no Truth are there truths and is that the claim that there could b none one of them? Some have claimed that if there is a World there is a totality of truths and others that there can be no such totality and no such World. This paper examines some of these issues with a weather eye to how they were raised and discussed by Augustine, Anselm, and Buridan in the medieval Latin tradition and by some of our contemporaries.
In Language Animal and Cosmic Connections, Charles Taylor advances a theory of constitutive-expressive language. Taylor argues that this model developed in the 1790s, following Johann Herder’s theorisation of Besonnenheit ("reflective-awareness") in his Ursprung der Sprache ("Origin of Language") (1772) essay. Despite Herder’s dominant influence, Taylor names his theory after three contributors, labelling it the ‘HHH’ (Hamann-Herder-Humboldt) language model. Building on analysis of J.G. Hamann’s early essay, Socratic Memorabilia (1759), this article argues that the constitutive-expressive approach to language, attributed by Taylor to a post-Enlightenment language turn, was already operative, if unacknowledged, within Enlightenment philosophy itself. Taylor does not recognise that Hamann’s mimetic technique—labelled here ‘philosophical portraiture’—catches the period’s leading philosophers relying on constitutive-expressive language in the founding documents of the French Encyclopédie project, against their professed ideal of a transparent language that unveils “Truth.” Two implications follow from this correction: (I) the transitional period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism should be reevaluated, and (II) the longstanding debate about poetry as untruth and philosophy as truth should be revisited in light of philosophy’s unacknowledged ‘poetic’ practice.
According to Truth Primitivism, truth is an unanalysable concept or property. Proponents of the view, especially Jamin Asay, have argued that the GE Moore and Bertrand Russell were early adopters of primitivism until they both abandoned the view in favour of the correspondence theory because neither one of them were able to reconcile how a proposition as a state of affairs could be false if truth is a primitive and unanalysable. In this paper, my focus will be Russell, and I will challenge the view that early Russell was a primitivist about truth; instead, once we have a clearer appreciation of how he understood propositions and the connection between truth and fact, it becomes clear that even early Russell was a correspondence theorist—albeit a special, unique form of correspondence not otherwise in the literature then or now.
Long ago I tried to rescue No-Ought-From-Is from Prior’s counterexamples by reformulating it as the thesis that you can’t get a non-vacuous Ought from an Is. But (replies Nelson) once we help ourselves to the notion of truth we can construct logically valid arguments from non-moral premises to (non-vacuous) moral conclusions. Is Nelson’s counterexample logically valid? This depends on the nature of truth. If truth is transparent then his inference is valid but it is not a counterexample to No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. The ‘ought’ in his premises appears non-vacuously and is used as well as mentioned. Suppose we adopt a non-transparent theory of truth according to which we don’t officially know what the quoted statements mean? Taking my cue from Ramsey and Buridan I develop a formal theory of truth that relies on the notion of representing that. On this conception, Nelson’s argument is invalid but can be restored to validity by adding an extra premise; a premise, however in which ‘ought’ appears non-vacuously. So whether we adopt a transparent or a non-transparent theory of truth, No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is still stands which means that you can’t use truth to break down the barrier between substantively non-X premises and substantively X-conclusions.
The attention economy is often blamed for the severe deterioration of credible, high-quality content on social media. This is a bit perplexing. I give my attention to some platforms in exchange for some entertaining content. The exchange itself seems perfectly innocuous, sounds like a textbook win-win situation. Where did everything go wrong? Contrary to public opinion, I argue that the credibility crisis does not stem from the game of maximizing attention per se. Instead, the underlying problem comes from a market failure that plagues the attention market. A risk of using attention as currency is that it must be ‘paid’ before a consumer can evaluate the content's quality. You cannot determine if a post is entertaining or credible until you have seen it. Yet, once your attention is spent, the transaction is complete; you cannot claw it back even if the content is sloppy or false. This is a kind of information asymmetry. Economic theories show that information asymmetry often lead to adverse selection, a situation where low-quality goods inevitably squeeze out high-quality ones. This presentation will demonstrate how such market failure happens on social media, and how it ultimately fosters the rampant spread of misinformation and fake news online.
M. Giulia Napolitano describes belief in many conspiracy theories as exhibiting ‘extreme stickiness’. Advocates of these conspiracy theories can seem impervious to the influence of evidence that tells against their favoured theory. They fail to abandon belief when an impartial party would. Napolitano describes conspiracy theories as ‘self-insulated’ to help explain their stickiness. As she points out, many conspiracy theorists dismiss opponents of their favoured theory either as having been taken in by a ‘cover-up’ designed to mislead or as being participants in the conspiracy. A major concern about this explanation for stickiness is that the conspiracy theorists who appeal to either cover-up or participation to defend their favoured theory from refutation are appealing to auxiliary hypotheses to account for a discrepancy between theory and evidence and it is widely accepted – per the Duhem-Quine thesis – that theories are never straightforwardly refuted by evidence and that the process of adding auxiliary hypotheses to theories can go on indefinitely. If this explanation is to succeed, we need to identify relevant differences between appeals to cover-ups and participation in conspiracies on the one hand and appeals to regular auxiliary hypotheses on the other. Here I explore prospects for the identification of such differences.
There is an ongoing debate in the philosophy of conspiracy theories between “particularists” and their “generalists” critics. Particularists express concern that the label “conspiracy theory” is used to dismiss theories prematurely. In response, generalists often frame their position as merely indicating a defeasible “prima facie skepticism” toward conspiracy theories, that is, a view about what to think about a conspiracy theory prior to considering its particular merits. Keith Harris, for example, argues for this type of generalist attitude regarding “counter-authority” conspiracy theories. We argue that this framing of generalism is misleading because it is considerably weaker than it presents itself as being. It can’t be this weak and also justify the dismissive attitude that generalists encourage, as Harris does explicitly. Indeed, an analysis of Harris’s own distinction between “Strong Particularism” and “Weak Particularism” can help us see that generalists accounts cannot be both true and telling. For true versions are not telling, and telling versions are not true.
M R. X. Dentith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the International Center for Philosophy at Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai. Their chief research interests concern the epistemic analysis of conspiracy theories, rumours, fake news, and the epistemology of secrecy. In 2014... Read More →
When analysing social and political beliefs we often do so from their relationship to the truth. We evaluate the claims made by figures like Donald Trump based on whether or not they're accurate, and in doing so assume that relation to the truth is central to their power. Hidden within these practices is the assumption that the way people relate to the world around them is empirical in nature. That in disproving them, we strip them of some credence or believability. However, if previous US elections are anything to go by, this simply isn't true. This talk proposes the idea of a degenerating myth; the narrative epistemological counterpart to Lakatos's degenerating research program. Following the line of Bruno Latour and Mary Midgley, I argue that much of the way humans understand the world is narrative in nature, rather empirical or rational. Consequently, when analysing these narratives we should assess them according to their own function, rather than equating them to the function of scientific research programs, which as I argue, we often do. To account for this difference in epistemological function, I propose a criteria for identifying degenerating myths, an evaluative framework not reliant on truth or external accuracy.
Epistemic bubbles present an interesting challenge for epistemologists. On the one hand, there seems to be something troubling about epistemic bubbles such that, were we to find ourselves in one, then we should leave the bubble as it will likely have bad epistemic consequences. On the other hand, the structure of an epistemic bubble does not necessitate that they have bad epistemic consequences and, sometimes, they can have good epistemic consequences when they increase the inhabitants’ access to true information. The question that this paper pursues is how, if at all, can we access the epistemic benefits of a good epistemic bubble? To address this question, I advance three arguments. First, I argue that a recent impossibility argument claiming that one can never be justified in remaining in a good epistemic bubble (Sheeks 2023), fails. Second, I outline the conditions required to harness a good epistemic bubble in simplified circumstances. Third, while necessarily speculative, I argue that these conditions could be practically realised with the assistance of institutional supports. Collectively, these arguments provide a schema that could enable agents to access the epistemic benefits of good bubbles.
This paper challenges a familiar diagnosis of online misinformation: that citizens are misled because they are gullible, irrational, or insufficiently vigilant. Drawing on Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reason and Mercier’s account of epistemic vigilance, I argue that human beings possess real capacities for suspicion, source evaluation, coherence checking, and resistance to deception. In the age of AI-assisted disinformation, however, the problem is not the absence of vigilance, but its social and infrastructural vulnerability. Vigilance depends on socially supplied cues of trustworthiness, expertise, reputation, salience, and credibility. I call the resulting failure captured vigilance. In AI-assisted and platform-mediated environments, users may become more suspicious, investigative, and committed to “doing their own research,” while their suspicion is redirected toward reliable institutions and their trust is routed toward pseudo-experts, in-group authorities, and identity-confirming sources. Conspiracy thinking illustrates the problem: vigilance is present, but organized within self-sealing trust environments where warrant is inverted, correction is absorbed as confirmation, and standing is redistributed according to loyalty and distrust. The paper’s social-epistemological contribution is to show that vigilance is not merely an individual epistemic capacity, but an environmentally scaffolded practice vulnerable to capture under AI-assisted, platform-mediated conditions.
This talk investigates the following two questions: Q1. Under what conditions do human AI-based beliefs qualify as knowledge? Q2. Do the seemingly crazy errors that AI systems sometimes make pose a threat to human AI-based beliefs qualifying as knowledge? The discussion of Q1 and Q2 is set against the background of a stock of examples of AI errors, including adversarial examples drawn from the large literature on image classifiers and LLMs. Many of these errors strike humans as bizarre or crazy—e.g., LLMs ‘hallucinating’ references or an image classifier correctly classifying an image of a panda but switching the output to ‘gibbon’ after the original image is subjected to a humanly imperceptible manipulation of its pixel structure. The talk brings Q1 and Q2 into connection with mainstream epistemology—more specifically, modal epistemology. The key idea is that, in order for a belief output of a given method to qualify as knowledge in a given world w, the belief must not only be true in w; it must likewise be sufficiently modally robust. The talk discusses the prospects of AI-based knowledge, given modal conditions on knowledge and the wealth of adversarial examples that have surfaced in AI research.
According to scientific realists, the success of a scientific theory provides strong evidence that it is (approximately) true (Putnam, 1975). In response, antirealists argue that the theories we have are successful because they are survivors of a selection process where unsuccessful theories are rejected, so truth is not necessary to explain success (van Fraassen 1980). This paper argues that the training and testing process of artificial intelligence is structurally analogous to the selection process of scientific theories. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) achieve human-level performance in image classification through iterative training procedures that adjust weights and biases to minimise errors. Moreover, recent techniques in explainable AI (XAI) can approximate concept-level interpretations of the CNN’s structure. Some of these concepts align with human concepts, while others do not, even when predictive performance is comparable. The CNN is interpreted as encoding a structural representation of the data, analogous to how a scientific theory represents phenomena. To the extent that the AI classifier uses similar concepts to humans, we have support for realist interpretations of successful representation. Conversely, divergence from human concepts lends weight to antirealist interpretations.
A fast-moving debate has emerged over whether LLMs are bullshitters in any significant sense. This talk develops an account of LLM bullshit that, in contrast to the most influential existing accounts, is entirely output-based. I begin with an overview of the best-known treatment of LLM bullshit, due to Hicks, Humphries, and Slater, along with some of the main critical reactions to their views. One response, from Gunkel and Coghlan, argues that Hicks et al.’s process-based account should be replaced by an output-based one. I take this response to be compelling, though it is notable that Gunkel and Coghlan do not attempt to develop a detailed output-based account. To fill this gap, I review Florian Cova’s recent output-based account of bullshit, explain how it can be streamlined, and show how it can be applied to LLMs. The main upshots are: (i) some but not all LLM outputs are bullshit; (ii) LLMs engage in the activity of bullshitting sometimes but not always; and (iii) LLMs are bullshitters in only a rather weak sense.
The de facto situation regarding trustworthy AI is that the principles and supporting guidelines of are largely settled, from a pan-cultural perspective, and that if we build this trustworthy AI—all other things being equal—this will lead to greater AI adoption.
There are some consequences that may be drawn by AI accelerationists from this. First, we don’t need to expend resources engaging with the communities impacted by AI to determine what makes AI trustworthy for them. Instead, it is a matter of building trustworthy AI and getting that AI in front of people to facilitate AI adoption. Second, on balance, this version of trustworthy AI constitutes a societal good: real trustworthy AI mitigates harms while delivering maximal benefits. Third, if we build trustworthy AI according to these assumptions, it is not rational for people to be sceptical of AI.
And, following from that, those who raise fears among the community regarding AI adoption are both doing a disservice to that community and are not acting in a rationally-justified manner. In this paper I critique this common notion of trustworthy AI, discussing AI in the context of a plurality of world views, and critique the claims made above.
Critics rightfully identify that AI models are biased against marginalised groups. These biases deteriorate our shared hermeneutical resources—the narratives, frameworks, and concepts that structure how we understand the world and ourselves—by reflecting and exacerbating existing oppressive narratives. However, this is not the only way that AI models are sources of hermeneutical impoverishment. I propose that AI models warp our hermeneutical resources, not only by reinforcing existing problematic representations of identity groups, but by changing how these groups are represented. That is, AI models are conceptual engineers, capable of revising our social concepts. When certain deep machine learning models perform predictions, they construct social concepts. Crucially, these algorithmic concepts differ from their human-constructed counterparts due to unavoidable trade-offs in model development. In constructing revised algorithmic concepts, AI models act as conceptual engineers. Once introduced, algorithmic concepts can take the place of our own concepts. Through these hermeneutical changes, AI models can also make a difference to our underlying social ontology: in redefining how we think of ourselves, they can redefine who we are. Finally, I offer upshots of attending to AI models as novel sources of epistemic and ontological harm.
