Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University, will speak at CSU about artificial intelligence and abundant imagination in this talk sponsored by a Mellon Foundation grant.

Everyone’s talking about gaslighting these days, but it’s often not clear that they’re even talking about the same subject! How do we decide what we should and shouldn’t call “gaslighting”? And why does it matter? To answer these questions, we need to think about what other words  we might use to describe certain experiences, about moral considerations that enter into the question of what we should call “gaslighting”, and about what features our everyday interactions must have if they are to have any hope of going well. Together, these considerations point us towards a particular conception of gaslighting and an answer to the question of why it matters what we call gaslighting.

Our self-governance requires that we learn with and from each other; and we can do such learning only by disagreeing productively. Disagreements about what is the case are handled effectively by empirical science, with natural science showing impressive results for four hundred years. But our self-governance also requires evaluations. I propose Evaluative Logic as a tool for guiding our disagreements about evaluative issues toward correct answers. The tool combines the instrumental principle, the collaborative principle, and the Laws of Thought of classical logic as supplemented with three principles that allow inclusion of civil life content. There are strong criticisms against the possibility of productive disagreement about evaluative issues. I will address those criticisms after first demonstrating and discussing use of the tool.

Anna L. Tsing, professor of anthropology at University of California-Santa Cruz, will give a public talk on The Adventures of Form. This talk is funded by a Mellon Foundation grant and part of a multi-year Distinguished Lecture Series on Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies.