2024 Alexander Lecture (Carlotta Pavese, Cornell)

We are pleased to welcome Carlotta Pavese, an associate professor of Philosophy at Cornell’s Sage School of Philosophy, as the speaker for this year’s Alexander Lecture. While Dr. Pavese has broad interests, her areas of specialization are epistemology, action theory, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Outside of philosophy, she works in linguistics, mostly formal semantics and syntax.

This is an in-person event, but those unable to come to campus may join via Zoom.

Talk Title

Intelligence Socialism

Talk Abstract

From artistic performances in the visual arts and in music to motor control in gymnastics, from tool use to chess and language, humans excel in a variety of skills. On the plausible assumption that skillful behavior is a visible manifestation of intelligence, a theory of intelligence—whether human or not—should be informed by a theory of skills. More controversial is the question as to whether, in order to theorize about intelligence, we should focus on certain skills in particular. My target is the view that only a particular class/kind of skill (i.e., ‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’, and  ‘embodied’ skills) manifests intelligence, or especially does so. I call this view ‘Intelligence Elitism’. Intelligence Elitism is pervasive in popular culture as well as in psychometrics. It has, arguably, a long pedigree in philosophy (though systematic discussion or explicit arguments for it are hard to be found). In this talk, I introduce the debate between Elitism and Socialism, sharpen it, document it, and highlight its significance. The phenomenon of Broca’s aphasia is discussed in order to reach a better understanding of the distinction between intellectual and embodied skills. In the second part of my talk,  I lay out the foundations for undermining the hegemony of elitism by mounting a sustained line of argument on behalf of a moderate as well as a strong form of socialism.

About the Alexander Lecture

The Alexander Lecture, which has been on hiatus for a few years, focuses on philosophy of mind and the intersection of philosophy and psychology. It was established as a memorial to Edwin Alexander who, after a successful career in business, pursued graduate studies in Philosophy, which he could not complete as the consequence of a stroke he suffered.