Why not give out papers in advance and then use the time to discuss them? Perhaps the presenter could give a few minute overview of the argument to remind people, since the readers will likely have read a few papers by then, and then open it up for discussion? Maybe we could record ourselves reading the papers, but beyond providing audio for those with visual impairments, I don’t see what that accomplishes above having the papers available to read. So perhaps both, so that those who have trouble with visual reading can have the audio, and those that prefer reading the text themselves can do so.

Now, the main problem I see with this approach is the sheer volume of papers one might end up reading/watching before conference meetings. It depends on how many sessions one is going to attend, of course, but if a person wants to attend sessions all day long (exhausting enough as it is), that’s a lot of papers to read or watch beforehand. So that’s a drawback.

Another option is to encourage people to figure out how to present their arguments without reading them. It’s more challenging, but it’s certainly do-able. It’s like teaching, really–how many of us just sit and read our lecture notes to our students in class? (Though I have seen it done, and well, from a brilliant philosopher in grad school, it’s not the best approach for teaching.) If we can manage to create lecture/discussion formats for our class meetings, why not for our own research papers? I’ve been trying to do this myself; I haven’t read a paper at a conference since about 2005, I think. I find it helps to clarify my thinking even further when I can give out an outline or short notes and speak extemporaneously from that. But again, this takes more work than just reading!

1. One way to defend the idea of natural judgement which may be quite relevant is Michael Thompson’s work on the apprehension of human forms…

2. Critical realists might be quite amenable to the line taken on the need to be realists about social pathology.

3. Are there ways to making sense of the notion of pathology which are non-teleological? I suspect not, although it may be worth looking into. The only way that comes to mind is through the idea of deviance – as in c.19th sociology – although this is a road we definitely do not want to go down…

4. Some sociologists (e.g. Canguilhem) would point to the emergence of the category of pathology as a recent invention. Does this matter?