Thoughts Arguments and Rants

2003-07-15T23:24:00.000-04:00

OK, I've officially moved to my new address powered by MT. Not sure how stable the new site will be, but I hope it's permanent enough. Please adjust bookmarks! You'll be redirected to the new site in 5 seconds.

2003-07-12T16:09:00.000-04:00

I've put up version of an MT based edition of this blog at:

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/

It doesn't have any links up yet, and the template is still an MT standard-order template so it's rather boring looking, and there were issues in transferring files over from Blogger, especially because MT expects every post to have a heading, and because I never followed any consistent formatting conventions here, but anyway if you're interested take a look. I may be migrating there permanently in the next few days. It's a very long address, but I rarely have to give out the address non-electronically anyway, so I'm not sure that matters. (Note that the capitalisation matters in the address.)

2003-07-11T00:30:00.000-04:00

Tamar Gendler and Zoltan Szabo have just posted webpages with lots and lots of philosophical content. Zoltan's papers page (which will be tracked from now on) is here, and Tamar's CV (which includes a papers page, in effect) is here. Both of them have lots of unpublished papers up, which will be added to tomorrow's papers blog, now at its new MT address.

2003-07-10T20:59:00.000-04:00

We're in Print!

This is extremely exciting news for TAR. Juan Comesana noted that the new edition of Philosophical Studies contains several papers from last year's Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conferencee. One of those papers is Elizabeth Harman's The Potentiality Problem, which as well as being a good paper contains a reference to this blog!!! Sadly the published version of the paper is not freely available online, so I can't link to it, but I can report that in the footnotes Liz mentions, and responds to, a concern raised about her paper in this post.

The edition of Philosophical Studies has lots of good stuff, and it's a little self-indulgent of me to comment primarily on a small reference to my blog, but it is I think an exciting time to see a reference to my online work appear in a traditional publication.

2003-07-10T15:43:00.000-04:00

Paul Neufeld (of ephilosopher fame) has moved the philosophy papers blog to Movable Type. It's new address is:

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/

I will be tinkering a little with it in the next few days, but for the future this is the home of the philosophy papers blog.

Much thanks to Paul for this - the site should look much better in MT than it does now. I'll probably move TAR over there sometime soon, but I don't want to cut off some of the longer comments threads below just yet. And I want to spend a few days tinkering with the papers blog to get used to MT.

2003-07-10T00:41:00.000-04:00

I talk about a need for more electronic journals and one appears! Or at least is revealed to have appeared. The Australasian Journal of Logic went online last week, with papers by Koji Tanaka and Ross Brady. It looks like a great new project, and it deserves lots of support.

I should also have mentioned in my list of online journals yesterday that Psyche has been run out of Monash for 8 years now. Like Philosophers Imprint, it has a fairly small volume, but it seems to have kept up a high quality. And after 8 years it gets about as many hits per month as Crooked Timber got on its first day.

2003-07-09T21:29:00.000-04:00

Blogger has been behaving very oddly today. One reason I might end up writing more on Crooked Timber is simply that MT is more fun to use. I just had to delete a post that only looked like it was in draft stage on the screens Blogger showed me. All in a day's annoyance.

I should also note that the post immediately below this does not constitute my volunteering to do any work whatsoever on any new philosophical projects people might come up with. I'm just trying to get some ideas circulating that may spur some more motivated, and creative, people.

2003-07-09T17:05:00.000-04:00

Analysis and its Alternatives

Analysis has long been my favourite philosophy journal. Short snappy articles, quick turnaround time on replies, mostly interesting areas covered and, although this isn't a reason that will appeal to everyone, no history. It was very sad when it became malfunctional for a few years in the late 90s, and a very happy day indeed when it returned to publication.

But there are two things that could be improved about Analysis. First, there could be more of it. That would be fun, and it would possibly mean debates could be even longer. Second, there is a real risk in writing for Analysis in that if an article is rejected, and good articles are frequently rejected for spurious reasons, there might not be another place to publish it. It's also something of a problem that there's a bit of a backlog between when papers are accepted and when they are published.

There's a way to solve all these problems at once. What we need is an American equivalent to Analysis. I think it would be great to have a journal published over here that came out monthly, with each edition aiming to be around the size of a current edition of Analysis - approximately 80 to 100 pages. I'd envisage this being a primarily electronic publication, but with a dead-tree version printed for posterity. The Xerox commercials have assured me that digital printing is now really really cheap, though I'm not sure I completely believe this. (I did however send off for a quote for the cost of printing such a journal, just for amusement's sake.)

Of course starting a new journal isn't as easy as it sounds, especially electronically. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has been a marvellous success already, but Philosophers Imprint has struggled to get sufficient quantity of high-quality papers. (The quality of the papers they have printed has been high, I think, but four papers a year is hardly enough to really make a splash. Maybe I should start submitting things there though, if I really want to be a cyber-philosopher...)

The real problem, I think, is getting enough of a reputation behind a new journal that people feel comfortable sending it quality material. NDPR solved the problem by having people with superb reputations behind the project, and only publishing book reviews, which most people don't think are being written for posterity in any case. Philosophers Imprint has tried to solve the problem by also having people with superb reputations behind the project and be very selective about what you print. Even if my proposed journal had big names behind it the whole point would be that it was publishing a lot, and hopefully a lot of original research. And it's hard to convince people to turn over their hard-earned ideas to an upstart little e-journal. Still, I think, it should be possible to keep a relatively high quality. The standards for acceptances in good journals nowadays are getting ridiculously high - one could aim to publish 12 to 15 short papers a month and still not be publishing scraps. Or so I think.

Anyway, I'd be interested to know how whether people think there would be a market for such a journal - both in terms of a supply of papers and a demand for them. Even if there is, the technical difficulties with getting a journal off the ground (lack of money, lack of time, lack of motivation, etc.) will probably stop it happening, but it would be interesting to know whether people agree that we'd be better off with more Analysis.

2003-07-08T16:56:00.000-04:00

Taking Knowledge Frivolously

We just started a reading group at Brown on Dave Chalmers's book The Conscious Mind. I've never read it straight through, though I suspect I've read every page at different times, so it will be good to have a chance to do that. And of course, I wanted to start by quibbling with the introduction. Dave says that an important part of his project is Taking Consciousness Seriously. Now I don't mind people taking various things seriously. There probably should be more of it. But I think saying that's what you're up to is a fairly cliched way to start. Does anyone ever start a book on X by saying they aren't going to take X seriously?

Then I realised I can change things. If no one else will do this, I can write Taking X Frivolously articles. Then Taking X Seriously won't be contentless, because it will situate ones dialectical position in opposition to my playful frivolity. But perhaps an article is too much. Perhaps we should start with something shorter. A blog entry say.

Here's a perfectly frivolous argument that knowledge equals true belief. (Different to the somewhat by not entirely frivolous argument for that conclusion from a couple of weeks ago.) It starts with a story.

The older man cast a worried glance down the bar.
–Looks like Frank's in no condition to drive imself ome.
–E's not too bad is e? replied his younger friend.
–Yeah, he's that bad, said the barman.
–Well Bob, he's your friend, you better tell im we're taking im ome, said the older man.
–Thanks Doug, grumbled the younger man. Then he had an inspiration.
–Look we don't even need to tell him. He doesn't have a choice in the matter does he? I bet he doesn't even know where his car is.
–How much? asked the barman.
–How much what? asked Bob with surprise.
–How much d'ya bet that he doesn't know where his car is?
Bob was a little shocked by this, but he remembered some pretty wild bets he'd had with this barman before. Still, this was a pretty good shot he thought, staring over while Frank struggled to tell the ashtray from the peanut bowl.
–Fifty.
–You're on, said the barman, and turned to Frank. C'mon y'old drunk. Stop eating the cigarettes and get yirself home.
–I got no home, said Frank.
–Sure you do, said the barman. You moved into it last Monday.
–Good point, said Frank.
They all headed out the door. Doug trying to protect Frank, Bob already counting his winnings, and the barman anxious to give Frank every chance to win the bet for him. His heart sank a little when he overheard some street kids talking about a car they'd stolen for a joyride. He could barely decipher their street lingo - it was a foreign language to his companions - but the car they were describing sounded a lot like Frank's car. And the wheel they were playing with looked like Frank's too.
Meanwhile, Bob was getting happier and happier. Frank was now walking the opposite direction to where he'd left his car three hours ago. Pretty soon he'd give up, and the bet would be won. He thought he could hear the coins jangling already. But the sound wasn't right. More like keys jangling in fact. Car keys. Frank's car keys. Frank's car keys that he was putting into the door of a car. His car.
Bob was too dumbstruck to speak. He simply stared at the fresh tire marks streaking out from behind Frank's car.
–How did you know to find your car here? asked Doug.
–Sha's alwiys parched ere, replied Frank.
–Not tonight, said Doug. There was a parade, we had to park on the other side of town.
–A parad? mumbled Frank.
At this point Doug thought of tackling Frank to stop him driving home, but then he noticed that the car was missing a view vital parts, like a steering wheel. Frank wasn't drunk enough to try driving without a steering wheel. He couldn't quite tell what was missing, but Frank knew something was wrong. Sensing a way out of his troubles, he fell asleep at the wheel-mount.
The barman was grinning with delight. What luck that the kids had left Frank's car right where he always parked it!
–Hand it over.
–Hand what over? asked Bob.
–The fifty.
Bob thought about arguing that Frank didn't really know where his car was, that he'd just walked by it and noticed it. Then he remembered that they'd walked directly here. Frank had hardly looked at the other cars he'd gone past. In fact he'd hardly looked at anything above his own shoelace. If he didn't pay up now there'd have to be a fight.
He turned over the fifty.

The argument now should be obvious. The circumstances demand Bob pay up. If he doesn't pay, he'll get thumped. And not just because someone feels like hitting him. Because he's not paid up when he should have. Given a not excessively violent bettor who has bet that p, if the other party is in danger of violence if he doesn't pay when all the facts are in, then those facts are such as to make it the case that p. Call this the fighting argument for knowledge = true belief.

I think this argument has some merit. Note how natural it is for Doug to ask how Frank knew where his car was. Admittedly in the story Doug and Bob don't know all the details about the kids, but they know something is wrong, yet they don't challenge the barman's knowledge claim - or at least his claim to have won the bet on his knowledge claim. And Doug uses a 'knowledge' locution.

But that's not why I posted this. Rather, I wanted to post a reply to that argument which I owe in its important respects to Andy Egan. Imagine instead of betting on Frank's knowledge, Bob and the barman bet on whether Hydrogen was faster than Hyperion. Both these horses, it turns out, were entered in the 4.15 that afternoon, and the bet was placed at 4.10. In those circumstances, whoever bets on the horse that finishes ahead in the race wins the bet. If they other party doesn't pay up, things could get ugly. But of course the correlation between being faster and finishing ahead is quite loose. One of the horses might be carrying more weight, or get impeded in their run, or just be having a bad day. But for betting purposes those things are ignored.

There seems to be a principle here. Unless p is easily verifiable one way or the other, a bet that p will instantly transform itself into a bet on the closest operational approximation of p. It's hard to tell who's really faster - easy to tell who finished in front, so that becomes the bet. In the case of betting that Frank knows where his car is, that gets transformed into a bet on whether he will walk more or less directly to his car. This explains why Bob has to pay up. He might have been right - it wasn't true that Frank knew where his car was. But the best operational approximation to that proposition is true, so he loses.

2003-07-08T08:28:00.000-04:00

A New Blog!

A new group blog, Crooked Timber, has just been born. So far the group is Chris Bertram, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy and moi.

There will be others appearing on the scene in the near future - to a first approximation Crooked Timber will be a broad-based leftie academic blog. But we're open-minded about what counts as leftie, and as what counts as academic. To mangle a cliche or two, the party is meant to be more prominent than the party line. It's a very exciting project, and I was rather honoured to be asked to join it.

As far as I know, Chris Bertram did most of the organising work to get the blog running, and Kieran Healy and Henry Farrell have done the technical work to get the blog looking as good as it does. (And it really does look rather good. Go on, take a look.) So much thanks to all of them.

What will this mean for TAAR? I haven't quite worked that out yet. Crooked Timber is meant to be somewhat less of a niche publication than TAAR, so I won't be posting entries there on the intricacies of Lewisian counterpart theory, or on counterexamples to analyses of vagueness. But I will post there some things that I previously posted on TAAR - not just posts not about philosophy but posts about political philosophy, or legal philosophy, or philosophy of economics, or more generally anything that could conceivably be of interest to those not in linguistics and philosophy departments. So the volume of posts here will necessarily decline. On the other hand, there may be slightly more focus to the entries that remain. We'll have to see how this works out in practice, I think, rather than trying to legislate in advance. The papers blog won't be affected, though I probably won't resume the practice of posting links to the daily entries except on days where there is something especially worth noting.

2003-07-07T12:43:00.000-04:00

I was just having a conversation about tenure - not about my tenure but about the concept - and one of the things that came up is how many people would favour the abolition of tenure if it was an option. There are, it was thought, some benefits to abolishing tenure. It could, if managed right, lead to a higher average quality (or at least of performance) at top departments. And it would have individual benefits. There would be more senior vacancies, leading to higher competition for hiring high quality faculty - well beyond the competition for stars we see now. And this should lead to higher salaries in the long run. Of course the losers out of this are those people who did enough to get tenure then coasted the rest of their career. But no one I know is like that, everyone I know publishes frequently in top journals, or if not they are publishing books with top presses or at least chapters in such books. In any case I thought, it's not ever so clear that non-publishers should have a decisive role in setting policy.

But it's harder to publish than one in my position might think, especially if one had a heavy teaching load and/or a family to look after. (Especially hard, I guess, with both. A blogging habit is a much smaller drain on one's time and energy.) How hard, I was wondering? Let's run a few numbers to find out.

I was thinking that on average one article per year in a top 25 journal, or its equivalent in publishing in books (either entire books or chapters) in top quality presses was a reasonable standard to keep up. But it turns out it is practically impossible for a significant percentage of the discipline to maintain that standard, or even anything close to it.

It's hard to estimate how many books come out, but at a guess I'd say at least half of the top quality publishing gets done in journals. (There'll be a few guesses like this along the way. If any enterprising grad student wants to fill in the numbers with slightly more detailed info, they are most welcome.)

The top 25 journals between them publish, I'd guess, around 600 to 700 articles per year. Allowing for some dual authorship (which is actually pretty rare in philosophy) there are about 800 token names appear on the tables of contents of these top journals per year. If that's about half the total of philosophical work that's coming out, then there's about 1600 'chances' to get one's name on something per year.

On the other hand, there are as far as I can tell around 8000 members of the American Philosophical Association. (I got this number by some not very scientific sampling from the APA membership database - it could easily be out by 25% or more in either direction.) Now some of those are student members, but a lot of philosophers around the world, especially outside America, are not members of the APA, so 8000 is probably not a bad estimate for the number of college-employed philosophers out there.

This leads to a pretty staggering mismatch - 1600 publication slots, 8000 philosophers. Remember that several of those slots will be filled by one person many times over. I'm tacitly counting books here as being worth about 5 articles - but of course in a given year they'll be 5 articles by the same person. So in practice I'd be amazed if more than 1000 different people had something equivalent to a top 25 journal article published in a given calendar year.

If anyone really wants to get more specific, the following questions would be interesting to answer:

What percentage of college-employed philosophers had something published in a top 25 journal, or equivalent, in the last year? (My back of envelope calculations above suggest that it's not much about 12%.)

What percentage of college-employed philosophers had something published in a top 25 journal, or equivalent, in the last 5 years?

If the previous number is below 50%, what if any is the smallest n such that more than 50% of college-employed philosophers had something published in a top 25 journal, or equivalent, in the last n years?

Obviously the numbers here could be radically out, and the conclusions I've been hinting at could be flawed in even more ways. It could be that there's really much more publication done via books than via journals. It could be that I'm way out in the number of philosophers around, or the number of journal articles there are. It could be that there are more than 25 journals that should be counted as top journals, in which case there could be more people putting out top quality work than I'm allowing for. On the last point, here's my first-pass list at what I'd take the top 25 journals to be, noting this list is heavily biased towards journals that publish philosophy of language papers and journals that publish electronically:

Analysis, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind, Mind and Language, Monist, Nous, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Perspectives, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Studia Logica, Synthese.

History journals, and ethics journals, are rather underrepresented on that list. (In history I think that's in part because books are much more important than they are elsewhere in philosophy, so there just aren't that many really important journals. It's hard to get tenure without a book in history, not so hard outside it. This might mean my guess that half the good work is in journals might be an over-estimate, even though it looks absurdly low to me.) But not all the journals there are exactly blockbusters. So I think we could correct for my biases and come up with a list of 25 such that you would expect good work would appear in them. If not, it might be interesting to answer the above questions with top 25 replaced by top 50.

The upshot of all this is that unless I've made several large mistakes in the methodology here, then it's just impossible to have it be the case that most people maintain what I was thinking was a reasonable average standard. Perhaps my standards are just plain wrong.

2003-07-06T22:57:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about Wo's comments in the post below about Laurie Paul's paper on contextualism, and I realised I'd overlooked some options for Lewis. Rather than the five options I present, there are at least seven. One more is saying that the predicate is context-sensitive. This won't really do. Lewis says that the semantic values of (ordinary) predicates are sets of world-bound individuals, and which set is picked out by, say, 'was brought by a stork' won't be sensitive to modal context in the right way.

The seventh option is more interesting. Lewis could say that changes in context change the composition rules. At the time I wrote the post I thought this would violate compositionality. What I realised on reading Wo's comments is that this need not be so. We can say that which proposition is denoted by 'a is F' is sensitive to the contextually determined counterpart relation without violating compositionality, because within a given context the proposition picked out by 'a is F' just is a function of the semantic value of 'a' and the semantic value of 'is F'. It almost goes without saying that this option leads to an utterly bizarre semantic theory. If I had a choice between Laurie's theory that context changes the semantic value of names and the theory that context changes the semantics of predication generally I'd pick Laurie's theory every day of the week and twice on Sundays. But I think Lewis really is committed to the latter theory.

Consider two contexts such that in the first a has no counterparts that are F, and in the second it does have some. In the first, 'a is F' expresses the necessarily false proposition. In the second, it expresses a contingent proposition. By hypothesis, 'a' does not change its content between the contexts, and neither does 'is F'. But the proposition expressed changes. Unless we just abandon compositionality altogether, we have to say that the function that takes a subject and a predicate as input and delivers a proposition as output changes between contexts. I don't think this is very plausible, but it looks at least consistent.

2003-07-05T17:59:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, Andy Egan noted on the 617 blog that what happens in Matrix 3 will determine, in part, the aesthetic qualities of Matrix 1. (Permalinks bloggered, but right now it's the second post from the top.) In this case the connection was because what happens in Matrix 3 (partially) determines what is true in Matrix 1, and the relevant fictional facts are relevant to the aesthetic value of the whole.

[Warning: What follows contains spoilers about Matrix 2, the first season of 24, Ulysses and possibly the Iliad, depending on what I feel like writing about.]

When can a later story determine what is true in an earlier story? This turned out to be harder than I expected to figure out. Let's start with one case where it does make a difference, and another case where it does not make a difference. Both are fictional, though they could be close to real cases.

Martian Leopold
Joyce survived his illnesses in 1941, but this wasn't obviously for the greater good of literary creation. Deciding that the future was in sci-fi, he decided to write the story of June 17, 1904, where it was revealed that Bloom was really a Martian, and that the Circe episode was not hallucinatory, as everyone had previously suspected, but a literal representation of what happened in Nighttown.

24 by Committee
As in the real-world 24, it is revealed towards the end of the first series that Nina is a traitor, and has been throughout the show. This changes what we think about the earlier episodes, including I think their aesthetic qualities. As in the real-world show, it was not decided until the early episodes had been completed, and even screened, that Nina would be made to have been a traitor all along. Unlike, I think, the real-world version, 24 was written by a very fluid committee. Although there was some continuity from week to week, the committee of writers who made Nina treasonous had no members in common with the committee that wrote the early episodes.

I hope you agree that even if Ulysses Part 2 is written, in Ulysses Leopold is human not Martian, and Circe is a hallucination (or perhaps several hallucinations). And I hope you agree that changing the writing structure of 24 in this way does not affect the truth value of claims about the early episodes. To really make trouble, I need a slightly harder case.

Intended Martian Leopold
Joyce survived his illnesses in 1941, which gave him the chance to write the sequel to Ulysses he'd always planned: the story of June 17, 1904, where it is revealed that Bloom was really a Martian, and that the Circe episode was not hallucinatory, as everyone had previously suspected, but a literal representation of what happened in Nighttown.

I think that even here, it is not true in Ulysses that Bloom is a Martian. I guess this is a contentious intuition, but there's a way to back it up, sort of. Imagine that Joyce intended to write this sequel, but really did die before he had a chance to write it. In this case I think the complete absence of textual clues means that Bloom really isn't Martian, authorial intention be damned. I know this is an unfashionably fashionable view for an analytic philosophy blog, but I think it's correct. Call me crazy, call me Derridian, call me a sellout. (Just don't call me late for breakfast.) I don't think that in that case Joyce's intentions matter, and I don't think his writing out those intentions in a later work matters either.

What makes the difference between these cases? At first glance one might think that a later work matters to what's true in an earlier work if (a) the later work is written by the same author as the earlier work, and (b) it carries out the intentions the author had in describing what was happening in the first work. But these are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions, as our cases above illustrate. Or at least, so I think they illustrate. One might argue that the later episodes of 24 do have the same author as the earlier episodes, since the author in each case is a committee, and the same committee writes each episode, even if it has different members at the different times. (Mereological essentialism is not true of writing committees, you see.) But I don't think that will do. Make the earlier episodes written by a single person, who gradually adds co-authors, then gradually drifts out of the process. The later episodes still matter. (Or do they?) And it's hard to say that we have the same author. (Or is it? My intuitions have quit for the day.)

So what does make the difference? Beats me. It's easy to say that the later work matters iff it is part of the same story, or narrative, as the first work. This seems true, but the problem is now analysing the concept of being part of the same story. And I have no idea how this will be done.

For anyone who likes more and more absurd examples, it's fun to play with variations of the 24 case where one of two co-authors stays on, and writes out her intentions for the back story behind what they co-wrote. Or, even better, completely changes her mind about the back story, and instead writes a story that meshes perfectly with what her co-author thought the back-story was, even though she was ignorant of her co-author's wild views.

Looks like I didn't get around to spoiling the Iliad. Maybe tomorrow.

2003-07-04T21:13:00.000-04:00

I wanted to write something systematic about Laurie Paul's paper on contextualism and essentialism, but doing the metaphysics full justice would require that I either be better informed, or smarter, or less lazy, so I can't really say anything too comprehensive. But the points I wanted to make didn't have much to do with the metaphysics anyway, so let's try the following plan. I'll start with a relatively crude caricature of Laurie's position, make a few criticisms of the caricature, silently bet that filling in the details of the metaphysics won't make much difference to the objections, then go on to a puzzle for Lewis that Laurie's paper raises. Then I'll turn over to watching television.

Here's the puzzle. In some contexts we feel happy assenting to essentialist claims like "Queen Elizabeth II (QE2 for short) could not have been brought by a stork". Call these the Kripkean contexts. For definiteness, imagine the Kripkean context to be a seminar on essentialism run by Kripke, in particular a time in that seminar when Kripke has just said "QE2 could not have been brought by a stork" in a particularly authoritative fashion. But in other contexts, the contrary assertion "QE2 could have been brought by a stork" sounds fine. Call these the Lewisian contexts. For definiteness, imagine the Lewisian context to be a seminar on counterpart theory run by Lewis immediately after that Kripkean seminar, in particular a time in Lewis's seminar when he has just said "QE2 could have been brought by a stork" in a particularly convivial fashion. How can we explain what is going on here?

Laurie's solution is that in the two contexts, 'QE2' names different objects. For definiteness (and here I'm really caricaturing) we can imagine that in each context QE2 names a trans-world fusion, a modal continuant as Lewis calls it ("Postscript to Counterpart Theory", pg. 40-42), but it names different modal continuants in different contexts. In the Kripkean context it names a fusion every one of whose modal parts is born of human parents. (Germanic royals as it turns out). In the Lewisian context it names a much larger fusion, some of whose modal parts were brought into the world by a stork. Now we have it that both Kripke and Lewis speak truly in their respective contexts.

This isn't a million miles from Lewis's own solution, as Laurie acknowledges. Lewis also favoured a contextualist solution to the puzzle. But for Lewis the contextualism seems to reside in the modal terms, not in the names. (It's a slightly tricky matter of interpretation determining whether Lewis is committed to this. But I think Laurie's right that he is, for reasons that should become clear in what follows. Laurie argues that it is an improvement to have the contextual variability in the name rather than the modal terms. I think she's right - Lewis's position here is I think inconsistent. But that doesn't mean contextualism here of any kind is a good idea.

I think some fairly simple considerations about speech reports pose pretty desperate problems for the contextualist theory. A few years ago I noticed that contextualist theories had problems with indirect speech reports. (I wasn't the only one to notice this, and I probably wasn't the first. But it was an original thought on my part at the time.) We can illustrate this fairly well with the seminars above. Imagine a student responds to Lewis's convivial statement with (1).

(1) Professor Kripke said that QE2 could not have been brought by a stork.

Our intuition is that what the student said is true. Kripke did say just that. But if the student is still in the Lewisian context - and since she's still in the Lewisian classroom she probably is - then 'QE2' in her mouth does not denote the modal continuant that Kripke was talking about. And we can hardly report Kripke's speech by talking about a thing that he did not even denote. Even worse, it's hard to see how the 'that'-clause in (1) fails to name a false proposition in the context, so (1) reports Kripke as having expressed a false proposition. Yet the contextualist thinks Kripke spoke truly.

(It should be clear enough how to extend this kind of criticism to contextualism about knowledge, or truth, or ethics, or victory. The last would be amusing - it would be nice to know that after the game we could always find a context in which we can truly say "We won.")

Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen (in thus far unpublished work) have noted that contextualism also makes a mess of direct speech reports. This is actually a much stronger argument against contextualism than the argument from indirect speech reports just mentioned, since it relies on fewer theoretical overheads. On the contextualist view, the student instead of saying (1) could have truly said (2).

(2) When Professor Kripke said, "QE2 could not have been brought by a stork" he spoke truly, even though QE2 could have been brought by a stork.

But this sentence could not possibly be true. Note that this is not because we cannot contradict what appears inside quote marks in the rest of the sentence. When there really are contextually sensitive terms in what is quoted, this is perfectly possible, as in (3).

(3) When Professor Kripke said, "I wrote Naming and Necessity" he spoke truly, even though I did not write Naming and Necessity.

If 'QE2' is context sensitive, just like 'I', then (2) should sound just as plausible as (3). But it doesn't - it sounds awful.

We can put these two complaints together. On the contextualist theory the student could also say (4), which also sounds very bad.

(4) When Professor Kripke said, "QE2 could not have been brought by a stork" he did not say that QE2 could not have been brought by a stork.

Contextualists have a response to these arguments, though I don't think it's a very persuasive one. They can just say that we should attribute mass error to people about direct and indirect speech reports. People they just ain't no good - at producing reports containing terms with hidden contextual sensitivity. I think this is more plausible for the indirect speech reports than for the direct speech reports, which is why I think Lepore and Cappelen's argument is better than the one I first came up with. (The Lepore and Cappelen paper was presented at the Central APA this year, so hopefully it shouldn't be too far from publication.)

This isn't meant to be a particular criticism of Laurie. I think her contextualist theory is much more plausible than the majority of contextualist theories floating around these days - as far as I can tell it isn't vulnerable to any particular criticisms, just these general criticisms of contextualist theories. And everyone except Kent Bach is probably vulnerable to Lepore and Cappelen's criticism somewhere. (To pick a non-random example, my views on conditionals don't look very good in light of this argument.) The main reason I wanted to work through this here was because it provides a nice way of illustrating the problems contextualisms have with reports.

And I do think that if we must go contextualist, Laurie's version of contextualism is better than Lewis's, which looks inconsistent to me. The problem is that I think Lewis is committed to the following five theses, which look inconsistent.

Meaning is compositional
Contextualism about de re modal statements is true
Modal locutions in ordinary language are operators not quantifiers
Propositions are unstructured
Names are not contextually variable (or at least they do not vary between the Kripkean and Lewisian contexts)

Here's the argument that these are inconsistent. Assume that (5) is uttered in a context such that it is true.

(5) Possibly, a is F.

Assume it is later uttered in a context where it is false. That is (5') we will assume is false.

(5') Possibly, a is F.

It will be helpful to have the following two sentences to compare with (5) and (5'), the first uttered in the context of (5), the second uttered in the context of (5').

(6) Possibly, 2+2=5
(6') Possibly, 2+2=5

By contextualism, it is possible that (5) and (5') exist. Note that (6) and (6') are false no matter what we know about the context. If 'possibly' is an operator, then the logical form of each of these sentences is OS, where O is a sentence-sentence operator and S a sentence. That sentence denotes a proposition, or something of the sort. Note that this is an unstructured entity, a function from something (possible worlds or possibilia probably) to truth values. By the assumption that the name is not contextually variable (and I assume we pick an F that is also not contextually variable) we get that the content of S is the same in both (5) and (5'). So hence the content of 'possibly' must be different in the two cases. But now note that in the (5') context, the content of a is F is the constant function that maps everything to false, the same as the content of '2+2=5' in (6) and (6'). Since the content of the name and the predicate don't change between contexts, that is still the content of S in (5). So in (5) 'possibly' denotes an operator that maps the constant false function into a true proposition. Hence (6), which consists of the very same operator followed by a sentence denoting the constant false function is true, which is absurd.

There's lots of ways out of this. Possibly being more careful than I've been about what kinds of functions are the contents of sentences will help, though I can't really see how it could. The argument appeals to compositionality several times and one could deny that, though Lewis does not. See, I think, General Semantics. One could give up the contextualism, which I think one should, though again Lewis does not. See chapter 4 of Plurality. One could deny that 'possibly' here is an operator. I might write a bit more on this next week, because it's a more plausible position than I realised. But again Lewis does not. See Index, Context and Content. (Note that the point here is not whether the truth conditions for modal sentences should be stated using operators or objectual quantification over worlds. The point rather is whether English contains modal operators or its apparent modal operators really are objectual quantifiers.) One could accept structured propositions, as Jeff King and others have argued, but Lewis does not. I'm not sure where he explicitly says this, but it's implicit in almost every paper on philosophy of language that he wrote. I guess there's an explicit acceptance of unstructured propositions somewhere in Plurality. This move would fit quite nicely with the counterpart theory I think - it's good to give the modal operators, if there are any, something in the propositions they operate on to bite into. And finally one could adopt Laurie's position and say that the variation is in the content of the name. This position has the nice virtue of being consistent, unlike what I take Lewis's position to be.

2003-07-04T20:38:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog has been updated. I should have done this this morning, but my computer started seizing up, so things went fairly slowly today. Hopefully the problems have been fixed now.

2003-07-03T13:21:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog has been updated to reflect a paper that I missed this morning. (I'd been looking at the wrong page it seems. My bad.) Jim Pryor has posted a new paper on non-inferential justification which looks rather interesting. (Actually, it's a new version of a paper that's been up on his site for a while, but I missed the old versions too because, as said, I was looking at the wrong page.) Here's the abstract for the paper.

[This paper] articulates a notion of immediate or "non-inferential" justification, cites some apparent examples of it, and then examines at length a familiar coherentist argument against the possibility of such justification. That argument was traditionally employed against "the Given Theory"; but it threatens to have much broader scope. It is driven by a principle I call the "Premise Principle," which says that a belief in P cannot be justified except by other representational states whose contents are premises that inferentially support P. One can accept that Principle and still be a foundationalist, but many foundationalists will want to reject it. I argue that the Premise Principle is unmotivated.

2003-07-03T07:14:00.000-04:00

I come back to the philosophy papers blog and there's only one paper to report. Maybe better luck tomorrow.

To make up for it, there's a draft paper on imaginative resistance by blogger John Holbo that I should have linked yesterday. John looks at a quite different angle to me, looking at the connection between resistance and the aesthetic quality of fictional works. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, in particular I think there's a tighter correlation between imaginability and aesthetic quality than Holbo allows. But he's right I think that a distasteful underlying moral message is not enough to generate imaginative resistance - we don't treat The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice as being like the toy examples of resistance even though in each case the intended moral message is pretty clear, and pretty obnoxious.

2003-07-03T01:11:00.000-04:00

A few random notes while I get back to coping with sunset being at 9 not 5.

There's a couple of pages I should have linked to a while ago. H. E. Baber has papers up on welfare, theology and several other issues, as well as very well-developed websites for her courses on Logic and The Economics and Ethics of Gender in the Developing World. Carsten Korfmacher has an extensive webpage, with a blog on the home page, and a papers page. Both of these papers pages have been added to the list of pages being tracked on the papers blog.

Peter Milne has a newer and more dramatic version of Lewis's triviality proof up on the Analysis site.

Before I started this blog I wrote about Marc Lange's "Baseball, Pessimistic Inductions, and the Turnover Fallacy". (I can't find either my comment or Lange's paper online, which sort of spoils the story to follow.) Lange pointed out that the Pessimistic Induction - All science has been wrong in the past, so probably it is wrong in the present - fails to note that current science is not exactly a random sample. Bad theories have a tendency to be refuted, and hence cease to be current. By way of illustration, he noted that while most managers in major league history have sub-.500 records, at any one time most managers have career above -.500 records. The analogy, obviously enough, is that even if most scientific theories are losers, even very weak selective pressure suggests that current theories may well be winners. It's a neat idea, and you'd expect to find it applied not just to managers, but to players. And it seems that it does, even with the very poor decision making by some baseball administrators. Nate Silver shows that over the period 1973-1992, the correlation between quality and playing time holds up quite well, and makes the right statistical/philosophical point.

As Bill James pointed out during his Abstract days, the talent distribution in baseball is asymmetrical; the vast majority of players who appear at some point on a major league roster turn in a below-average performance, but the above-average players receive so much more playing time that the equilibrium is maintained.

Of course, scepticism about current science might be justified for slightly less crude reasons than inductive scepticism. On StarStuff, ABC NewsRadio's Science Show, Brian Boyle noted that the cosmological constant is (a) not known to be constant, and (b) larger than theoretical calculations say it should be by 120 orders of magnitude. It's very hard to imagine what it is to be out by 120 orders of magnitude, even the Bush budget estimates are not normally that bad. The interview is here, and starts about 8 minutes in. Before that is a story even more designed to make one worry about science - the ongoing and so far unsuccessful searches for the Higgs Boson particle, which unlike dark energy is predicted to exist by best theories, and also unlike dark energy do not show up very clearly in experimental results. (If all my physics is off in this paragraph, I blame the ABC, not my reliance on pop science sources.)

Negative polarity (in the linguistic, not the physical) sense is one of my favourite topics, but sadly there are few lock-solid examples of negative polarity in English. In modern English 'ever' is about the best example we have, as illustrated by the difference between these two cases.

No one has ever defeated Kasparov in a tournament.
*Someone has ever defeated Kasparov in a tournament.

In older dialects of English, 'ever' could be used to mean 'always'. I think it is used in Shakespeare this way sometimes, but I'm a bit too lazy to look that up. But I was a little shocked to see it used in a modern-day sports story.

David Beckham has revealed he had offers from four clubs when it became clear that he was set to leave Manchester United this summer, but insists he was ever interested in joining Real Madrid.

I think that's an error, maybe missing 'only' before 'ever', but if not it's a very bizarre usage.

On bizarre facts, I thought I had a copy of the Harry Potter book waiting for me when I got back to the States, but in fact there were two copies. I don't remember ordering two copies, but I suppose there are several things I've done that I don't remember doing. Or perhaps Amazon messed up. Perhaps.

2003-07-02T03:03:00.000-04:00

Happy (belated) New Year's Day.

It's belated because I just got home from a rather long, and slightly eventful flight. I managed to spend the end of the first day of the new year at Boston's South Station, which seemed somewhat appropriate since I ended so many days last year there too.

I wasn't meant to be in Boston today, but my flight plans were re-routed while I was airborne between Sydney and LA. The new plan left roughly 50 minutes between landing in LA and taking off for Washington. This seemed to be a surprising, even touching, display of confidence by United Airlines in the efficiency of the immigration officials (vindicated), their baggage handlers (not vindicated), customs officials and security staff (both retrospectively vindicated). I hadn't got my bags before my plane to Washington took off, though I did make it through the next two steps in about 2 minutes flat. I then managed to get myself re-rerouted to Boston. Where, naturally, my baggage did not end up. I was a little miffed about this at first - especially because while waiting for my bags to not turn up I missed a bus back to Providence. On the other hand, this way the bags will get delivered to my door. (If they arrive.) And on the third hand, the missing bag contains little apart from dirty laundry. Still, maybe not so dirty that I wouldn't have wanted to wear some of the said clothes tomorrow. But that's probably autobiography not philosophy.

So why, I hear you ask, New Year's Day? Well, it dawned on me that the actual calendar years aren't that relevant to academics. What are more relevant are academic years. So we need years that revolve around those. This underdetermines when we should start and finish years a little, since any time between graduation and the start of Fall would do. So the solstice might work, but I don't want to think too hard about solstices. (I've had 11 winter solstices since my last summer solstice. And I'm not sure that I've spelled solstice correctly once here.) As the tax year in Australia goes from July 1 to June 30 for no apparent reason, that seemed a crucial consideration. So around 11.30 last night, I decided July 1 it was, as it had been for most of the past 37 and a half hours.

It being New Year's then, it's time for some New Year's Resolutions. Serious ones, ones that will last at least six days, provided we're allowed to skip a day here or there, yeah?

Read more non-philosophy books
I've been finding that reading things other than philosophy is (a) entertaining and (b) useful for writing philosophy. So I should do more of it. The problem is knowing exactly what counts as non-philosophy. Not much when I get started. After all, I wrote two chapters of my dissertation (in philosophy) on the General Theory. But I think we'll find something.
Finish my book
Since the book made negative progress last year, this one could be hard, but we'll try. And it's such a typical New Year's Resolution I had to include it.
Stop caring so much about philosophical status reports
It worried me to discover that I could recall the details of the latest Leiter rankings better than I could recall the periodic table. Not that I have any use for the periodic table in my work or anything, but this seems to be the wrong way around. And I'm not going to go learning any chemistry to fix it.
Get and keep to a timetable
I was thinking something like the following:
Wake-10am: Papers blog, read newspapers, eat breakfast, clear overnight mail tray, etc. (At home)
10am-5pm: All work - class preparation, grading, writing, editing, research, etc. (At office)
5pm-7pm: Non-philosophy reading (At home or pub)
7pm-10pm: Dinner and watching baseball (At home or baseball park)
10pm-lights out: Open season (Anywhere)
If I insisted the reading be at a pub I might improve on resolution 1, but only at the cost of the permanent tacit resolution that I won't drink so much this year. And I've have to find a pub in Providence to drink in. And I'd have to allow for exceptions as soon as the timetable became operational. But it might be a way to make sure I get actual work done, as well as fitting in other stuff I want to do.
Stop cheating on my wife
This one is made up. To keep it, I'd have to (a) get married, (b) start an affair and (c) end that affair. And that's too much activity for one year. Or at least, that would I think count as keeping the resolution. But it's somewhat odd. It only makes sense if we take the resolution to be bounded by a tacit existential quantifier over times in the upcoming year, which seems reasonable, and if we take the description 'my wife' to have narrow scope with respect to the tacit quantifier. The latter is odd. It isn't, I think, what we do in resolution 2. If I give up on vagueness, and instead write a book on demonstratives, I don't think I would keep resolution 2, even though there would be a t such that I'd have completed the thing that would have been, at t, my book. I don't know why the difference here, or whether we should even expect a decent explanation of the difference.

I started making progress on point 1 over the flight here, reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith. It was, as the second wave of reviews suggested, as good as the hype indicated. And as always there's lots of potential philosophical points to make. But it's getting late so I'll just make one. The narrator of the story knows a lot more about the world of the story than any particular character. At one point, at least, her knowledge is limited to what is known by some (other) character or other knows, but clearly she would have fairly amazing epistemological powers if she knows all she purports to know. I think I've previously endorsed Alex Byrne's argument that in these cases we should say there is no narrator, at least no narrator in the world of the story. But it's pretty clear here there is a narrator, for she often will say things that relate more to her (and our relationship with her) than to any character. So she'll think out loud about what to say next, let us know that some mystery will be cleared up down the road, and occasionally offer commentary on how the characters are going through their trials. All this suggests a narrator, even one in the world of Archie and Samad and Clara and Irie and everyone, but such a narrator would be magical, and we don't have much of a sense that there's any magic in this world. (Except in one scene involving a fairly improbable coin toss.) The best explanation of what's happening here is roughly Kendall Walton's. The question of how the narrator knows all she knows simply doesn't arise. If she were to say something wildly inappropriate, then it might arise, but as it stands asking how she knows these things is like asking how Othello gets to be such a good poet. It simply isn't playing the game the right way to push on those aspects of the make-believe in just that way. This might all require rewriting some of the sections about the phenomenological puzzle in the imaginative resistance paper.

2003-06-29T20:35:00.000-04:00

I've just got back from a few fun days up in Canberra, so replying to comments on the blog board, email etc will be rather slow. (And tomorrow I'm flying back to Providence, so electronic communication will be non-existent.) Just time for one quick link. John Quiggin links to my imaginative resistance paper, and argues that the kinds of limits on imagination discussed in the literature I mention undercut some intuitive arguments against consequentialism.

2003-06-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

I already recommended Geoffrey Nunberg’s website a couple of days ago, but I should have added a specific recommendation for one of the papers archived there: Do You Know What It’s Like to Miss New Orleans? The paper covers a lot of ground, some of it in the French Quarter, but much of it concerns the relationship between philosophy and linguistics. Part of the attraction of the paper is that it reminds us that there still are scientific disciplines out there that take (some) philosophers seriously. But for me the greater interest was the discussion of just which philosophers are influential within linguistics. They might not be the ones you expect. I’d say a little more, but that might be spoiler. So if you want one perspective, as far as I can tell an accurate one, on which of us are being listened to in linguistics, go read the article.

2003-06-24T20:45:00.000-04:00

I've been told that the comments boards here are not integrating well with various browsers. As far as I can tell, some comments are only showing up when the comments page is loaded using the same browser type that was used to post them. I won't be able to do much about this until I get back to America - and doing something about it might involve moving to MT, but if I don't respond to your witty clever knockdown counterexample comment, pls don't feel offended. It might be my browser's fault.

2003-06-24T20:41:00.000-04:00

A Puzzle About Knowledge

I don't think the evidence that knowledge is simply true belief has been taken seriously enough by many in the philosophical community. So I'm going to try again here to get people to do so. The following example is quite long, but I think that's necessary to remove some possible distractions. In particular, part of my theory is that stress on the word 'know' or its cognate in knowledge claims changes the acceptability of those claims, so a longer story gives us more context and hence more natural stress patterns and hence a better guide to what's really happening. (I'm much indebted to various conversations with Polly Jacobson, Jeff King and Jason Stanley for getting me to realise the importance of stress in these matters.)

The Virus
A nasty virus has been released at your workplace, and everyone is at risk of infection. The virus isn't extremely infectious, but it isn't fun to have, so it's important to get a clampdown on it as soon as possible. Unfortunately, one of the two tests that people have been using to see whether they have the virus is not very good. The other test is fine, not perfect but pretty good by medical standards.
But the bad test is quite bad. The people using it were told it is 98% accurate. That is a small exaggeration, but in any case it is quite irrelevant. The test is 'accurate' because it mostly returns negative results and most people don't have the virus. So it gets it right with about 95% or so of people. But only about 1/3 of those who get positive test results actually have the virus. So there's a lot of false positives floating around your workplace.
Here are the numbers so far for various salient groups:
5 people have the virus and believe that they do because they used the good test.
4 people have the virus and believe they they do because they used the bad test.
6 people don't have the virus but believe they they do because they used the bad test.
8 people have the virus but haven't taken a test, so don't think they have it.
Making matters worse, your boss would prefer that news of the virus didn't get out, thinking it will send a downwards spiral in the company's share price. He would prefer there'd been no tests at all. Having heard that there's been more testing, he storms in to your office asking, "HOW MANY people know that they have the virus now?"

What do you answer?

It's philosophically defensible to say zero, because no one is 100% beyond a shadow of a ghost of a shade of a doubt certain that they have it. But in the circumstances not many bosses would take that to be an acceptable answer.

It's even more philosophically defensible to say five, because only five have a warranted true belief that they have the virus. (I presume that since the 4 made a false inference from false premises to conclude they have the virus, their belief is not warranted unless warrant is a totally trivial condition.) But again, that doesn't seem like the most appropriate thing to say in the circumstances.

If your boss knew the underlying facts, the answer he'd expect, I think, is nine. And I think that's the right answer.

To back up this intuition, consider if the boss continues questioning you the following way. Molly is one of the 4 who believe for bad reasons she has the virus.

BOSS: Does Molly know she has the virus?
YOU: No.
BOSS: Does Molly believe she has the virus?
YOU: Yes.
BOSS: Does Molly have the virus?
You: Yes.
BOSS: Then whatdya mean she doesn't know she has it?
YOU: Let me tell you about late 20th century epistemology.

The next step, of course, is you being fired. In the circumstances, true belief is enough for knowledge.

But note that nine is the largest answer you could give. You shouldn't answer fifteen, though the Boss might appreciate it if your answer informed him that another 6 people think they have the virus. That's probably relevant information, but those people shouldn't be grouped in with the people who know they have the virus.

And, of course, the eight people who don't even think they have the virus shouldn't be considered. It's clearly wrong to answer seventeen, even though seventeen people do, in fact, have the virus.

I hope you agree with all my intuitions here. What should we make of them philosophically?

The most natural explanation of the data, I think, is that knowledge is simply true belief, though sometimes when someone says S knows that p, they speaker mean that S has a warranted, or justified, or certain, or approved by God, belief that p. Semantically, all that they mean is that S truly believes that p. Questions, especially questions by people in authority not concerned with niceties of speaker meaning, tend to bring out semantic meaning, so in your little conversation with Boss, 'know' reverts back to its basic meaning of being truly believes. That's why the right answer is nine, though perhaps if you have a cute enough smile you can get away with five or zero without being fired.

I'm not saying that's the best explanation of all the data concerned with knowledge talk. But I do think it's the best explanation of this bit of data. There are two other explanations of the data that people have tried in the past.

One of these I won't say much about. This is the contextualist approach. I've argued against contextualism here before, and I think in general the various objections that Jason Stanley and Ernie Lepore and John Hawthorne have made of contextualism in various places work. But I don't want to really argue for that here as much as set it aside. My main target is the invariantist who thinks that (non-trivial) warrant is necessary for knowledge.

What can that philosopher say about the appropriateness of nine as an answer to Boss's question? The response I usually get is an inverse of my response - that although 'knowledge' really denotes warranted true belief, sometimes the speaker meaning of a knowledge ascription can be somewhat weaker than this. Here all Boss cares about is true belief, he speaker means "How many people truly believe they have the virus?", and that's how you should answer.

I used to think this answer was incoherent - speaker meaning can only add to the content of a term not subtract from it. But that was probably too quick. The real problem with this response is that it can't really explain the data. If 'knowledge' semantically means warranted true belief, but its speaker meaning can be simply true belief on some occasions, why couldn't its speaker meaning be simply belief, or simply truth? If we can subtract part of the semantic meaning out, why not the other parts? I don't think there's any good explanation for this available to the invariantist who holds that knowledge is warranted true belief. If there's any explanation for it at all, I suspect it will be very complicated.

Well, this was all rather quick, but I think there's a somewhat powerful case to be made here that knowledge is simply true belief. Obviously this theory will have to rely on some very heavy duty pragmatics in order to explain most of the cases philosophers have talked about. But since virtually every case considered in epistemology classrooms involves stress (usually comparative stress with an unclear comparison) on 'know', I think a good theory of stress can explain a lot of the data apparently inconsistent with the claim that knowledge is simply true belief. Could it, or any other pragmatic theory, explain all of that data? Don't know, but I'd like to see some clever people argue one way or the other.

Quick acknowledgment at the end. The case here is somewhat modelled on various cases John Hawthorne has used for various purposes, but it does have one or two new touches. In particular, the use of questions to push the knowledge = true belief line is John's, but the extra point that these cases do not support knowledge = truth or knowledge = belief is, I think, original.

2003-06-21T21:08:00.000-04:00

I have drafted a new version of the imaginative resistance paper. Sadly, I lost my instructions for how to upload anything to my main webpage. Happily, I still have blogs to use. So I’ve put the paper on a subpage within this site. It can be found using the following link:

Fictional Furniture Foughts

I had a rather long list of names I tried out for various reasons before settling on the present one. (Which is not, I hasten to add, Fictional Furniture Foughts, as amusing as that may be.) This was what the list on my sketchpad looked like when I was done scribbling with names.

Psycho Semantics
Summer in Winter, Winter in Springtime
Ideas Sleep Furiously
Electric Gaslight
Quickly Standing Still
One Heavy February
The Silence was Deafening
How Not to Tell a Story
Zero Secrets of Successful Authors
Six Secrets of Unsuccessful Authors
Furniture in Fiction and Fictional Furniture
Fictional Errors from Cervantes to Reifenstahl
Furniture of Fictional Universes
The Caretaker’s Daughter
Good Morning Good Morning
With a Little Help from my Friends
(A response that stressed the role of fiction in moral education could well be called Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite.)
Did Romeo Love Juliet?
When Armchairs Attack

I doubt many of those are actually amusing, but all of them seemed like good ideas at the time, even the ones that were taken in their entirety from song titles. I would like to use the first name for a paper on representation in fiction sometime, but maybe I’ll save it for a paper about representation in film.

2003-06-19T22:21:00.000-04:00

Grokking, Wokking and Locking

I've been having another crack at my imaginative resistance paper, and this time I'm trying not to make the sections on Stephen Yablo's views a bracketed to be included section. (For details of Yablo's views, see sections 14 and 21 of Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. I think what Yablo says is intriguing, but too short to be a full solution.

It's a bit hard for me to get my head around Yablo's solution, because officially I think it's incoherent. He things imaginative resistance is closely linked to what he calls response-enabled concepts, or grokking concepts. These are introduced by examples, particularly by the example 'oval'.

Here are meant to be some platitudes about OVAL. It is a shape concept - any two objects in any two worlds, indeed in any two parts of the old 2D matrix, that have the same shape are alike in whether they are ovals. But which shape concept it is is picked out by our reactions. They are the shapes that strike us as being egg-like, or a bit more geekily, like the shape of all ellipse whose length/width ratio is the golden ratio. (Hmmm...golden ratios...Hmmm.) In this way it's meant to be distinguished on the one hand from, say, PRIME NUMBER, which is entirely independent of us, and from WATER, which would have picked out a different chemical substance had our reactions to various chemicals been different. Note that what 'prime number' picks out is determined by us, like all semantic facts are. So the move space into which OVAL is meant to fit is quite tiny. We matter to its extension, but not the way we matter to 'prime number' (or we don't matter to PRIME NUMBER), and not the way we matter to 'water'. Officially, I think there's no move space here to move in, so I think positing such concepts is incoherent. Yablo's terms for grokking concepts strike me as words that have associated egocentric descriptions that fix their reference without having egocentric reference fixing descriptions, and I find it hard to believe such words exist. But my official views are very intolerant, so I'll pretend for now that I understand what Yablo is saying.

The important point for fiction about grokking concepts is that we matter, in a non-constitutive way, for their extension. Not we as we might have been, or we as we are in a story, but us. So an author can't say, in the story squares looked egg-shaped to the people, so in the story squares are ovals, because we get to say what's an oval, not some fictional character. Here's how Yablo puts it:

Why should resistance and grokkingnes be connected in this way? It's a feature of grokking concepts that their extension in a situation depends on how the situation does or would strike us. 'Does or would strike us' as we are: how we are represented as reacting, or invited to react, has nothing to do with it. Resistance is the natural consequence. If we insist on judging the extension ourselves, it stands to reason that any seeming intelligence coming from elsewhere is automatically suspect. This applies in particular to being 'told' about the extension by an as-if knowledgeable narrator.

As I said, I think this is all incredibly interesting (if incoherent) and not a million miles from my view. But I don't think it works, at least as a complete solution.

My old Don Quixote story might look like a counterexample to Yablo's position here. After all, the concept that seems to generate resistance there is TELEVISION, and that isn't anything like his examples of grokking concepts. (The examples, apar from evaluative concepts, are all shape concepts.) On the other hand, if there are any grokking concepts, perhaps it is plausible that TELEVISION should be one of them. Let's think of some platitudes about TELEVISION. (The following few lines are mostly me reciting from memory some of what Fodor says in Concepts, with televisual references replacing doorknobular ones.)

Three platitudes about TELEVISION stand out. One is that it's very hard to define just what a television is. (Go on - try it and see how far you get.) Second is that there's a striking correlation between people who have the concept TELEVISION and people who have been acquainted with a television. Not a correlation of 1 - some infants have acquaintance with televisions but not as such, and some people acquire TELEVISION by description - but still high. Third is that conversations about televisions are rarely at cross purposes, consisting of people literally talking different languages. TELEVISION is a shared concept.

Can we put these into a theory of the concept TELEVISION? Here's a try. (Warning: Non-reductive analysis ahead.) Televisions are those things that strike us, people in general, as being sufficiently like the televisions we've seen, in a televisual kind of way. This isn't part of the meaning of television - there's no reference to us in the dictionary entry for 'television', and rightly so. But it sort of latches on to the right thing, in roughly the only way one could. The epistemic necessity of having a paradigm television to use as a basis for similarity judgments explains the striking correlation between televisual acquaintance and concept possession. The fact that the only way of picking out the extension uses something that is not constitutive of the concept, namely our reactions to televisions, explains why we can't define the concept. And the use of people's reactions in general rather than idiosyncratic reactions explains why its a common concept. This all seems remarkably clever to me, I do wish I had thought of it all first, and it doesn't seem that far from what Yablo had in mind. So I'm fairly comfortable with the idea that (if any concept is grokking) TELEVISION is a grokking concept and my Quixote example is not a counterexample to Yablo's little theory.

Still, I have three quibbles.

First, there's a missing antecedent in a key sentence in his account, and I have no idea how to fill it in. What does he mean when he says 'how the situation does or would strike us'? Does or would strike us if what? If we were there? But we don't know where there is. There is a place where televisions look like knifes and forks. If all the non-grokking descriptions were accurate? Maybe, but I think there's a worry now that most concepts will be grokking - Fodor intended his account of DOORKNOB to be quite general. Not universal, but quite general. If we take out all the grokking concepts, there may not be much left.

Second, despite that I'm still rather unsure that mental concepts, and content concepts, are grokking. LOVE might be, BELIEVING THAT THERE ARE SPACE ALIENS probably is not. But in the paper I argued that these concepts can generate resistance too. Maybe these are grokking as well (if anything is) so I don't want to stress this.

Finally, I think this _slightly_ over-generalises. Here's a sketch of a counter-example. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill it in. Imagine a time-travelling story told the following way. DQ and his buddy SP leave DQ's apartment at midday Tuesday, leaving a well-arranged lounge suite and home theatre unit. They travel back to Monday, where DQ has some rather strange and unexpected adventures. He intended to correct something that happened yesterday, that had gone all wrong the first time around, and by the time they leave for Tuesday (via that old fashioned time travel route of drinking until they pass out and waking up in the future) he's sure it's all been sorted. When DQ and his buddy SP get back to his apartment midday Tuesday, it looks for all the world like there's nothing there except a knife and fork. As I said, the details need some filling in, but I think you get the idea. Now that story doesn't, I think, generate imaginative resistance. But a grokking concept, TELEVISION, is used in a way inconsistent with the underlying facts.

One might ask at this point whether Brian's own theory also over-generates, predicting imaginative resistance at this point when none is to be found. The answer to that is that it doesn't, though the epicycle to prevent that prediction may or may not have been added to the official story yet.

2003-06-19T22:20:00.000-04:00

The Age sadly continues its slow slide into mediocrity. This is too bad, because it used to be a world-class newspaper, but it now seems to think that a couple of pages of originally sourced news, a few (largely predictable) opinion columns and several pages of wire stories a good newspaper make.

Today they decided to reprint Robert Kagan's WaPo OpEd from a week or so ago, already torn to shreds by Brown's own Josh Marshall, arguing that claims that Bush, Blair and Howard lied about Iraq's WMD capacity are a giant 'conspiracy theory'. Kagan's argument relies on the premise that critics of the unholy trinity are saying that not only they lied, but so did the UN weapon inspectors. And that would be, not to put to fine a point on it, a lie. I'd go into greater detail about where Kagan is wrong, but I'd basically just be repeating what Josh said, so if you care mightily about these matters, go read his reply.

If The Age has to find old foreign right-wing opinion pieces to reprint, they could at least try to find half-way decent ones. But really I'm not sure why they bother. There should be some kind of political balance on the opinion pages, but there's no reason why they can't find domestic right-wingers to write original pieces in defence of the war. For all their flaws, Australian conservatives will usually display more intellectual honesty than their American bretheren. (Well, perhaps that's why they had to import a column defending pre-war WMD claims.)

In better news, The Age does feature a cool extended interview with the Go-Betweens. The Go-Betweens are playing in Richmond next week and it should be a fun time. "I've got tickets, to the best show in town..."

2003-06-16T21:35:00.000-04:00

I was thinking a little about quantifiers for various reasons last night, and I ended up being so confused I had to write a blog entry about it.

If you listened to what some philosophers, yours truly included, taught their undergraduates, you'd think we spoke a language in which (1) and (2) were synonymous.

(1) Some cat is beautiful
(2) *Some beautiful is cat.

Some days it is amazing that philosophers can make any useful contribution to linguistics.

So let's try and get a little clearer about just what role 'some' plays. It isn't a quantifier, as philosophers normally think of that term. Rather, it's a determiner, which combines with an NP (or other phrases?) to form a quantifier phrase. The quantifier in (1) is the phrase 'some cat'. And the QP, as is widely known, can be treated as being the same type as a name - a function from predicates to truth-values.

So is there any such thing as unrestricted quantification? Possibly yes, in one sense, and possibly no, in another. The yes sense first.

None of the dogmatic assertions in the previous sentence were meant to be inconsistent with the idea that (1) is an unrestricted quantification over cats. For all I asserted, an utterance (1) could be true just in case some cat somewhere in the universe is beautiful. It's agreed on all sides (I think!) that this is rarely the speaker meaning of (1). The speaker meaning of (1) is usually that some salient cat is beautiful. When pushed I usually agree with those who say this is also part of the semantic meaning, but for present purposes I want to bracket that issue. Let's agree with those who say that the semantic meaning of (1) is just that some cat is beautiful. (That looks so plausible written like that!) It's still the case that the quantifier in (1) is restricted to cats. All cats now, but still cats. The question is could there be an utterly unrestricted quantifier?

Some may think that the quantifier in (3) is such a quantifier, but I doubt it. The problem is that (3) is too similar to (4), and (4) looks like it is restricted to quantification over things, and I rather doubt that 'thing' in English is an utterly trivial noun.

(3) Something is beautiful.
(4) Some thing is beautiful.

So I conclude, somewhat hastily, that quantifier phrases in subject position are always restricted. This is hardly a new conclusion, which is why I feel safe moving at such speed. What though of QPs in subject position, as in (5)?

(5) There is a cat who can play the piano.

To start with, this 'there is' construction is very hard to get a handle on. Here's a relatively simple question about it that I don't know if anyone has solved. (I don't know if anyone's noticed it before, though I suspect they have. As I may have mentioned, I'm away from my books right now.) I assume for now that the prepositional phrase 'who can play the piano' is part of the quantifier phrase. We will come back to that below.

We can make all kinds of sentences using the construction 'There' + copula + QP. Focus for now on such sentences where the QP has 'no' at its head. In some of these sentences the copula is most naturally singular. In others it is most naturally plural. For example, (6) is more natural than (7), but (9) is more natural than (8).

(6) There is no way to rescue the princess.
(7) ?There are no ways to rescue the princess
(8) ??There is no Bengals supporter in Sydney.
(9) There are no Bengals supporters in Sydney.

I have no idea why this would be so. Here was one thought I had that doesn't seem to work. Imagine an atheist using the problem of evil to argue against the existence of any gods. She would probably use (10) when addressing a monotheist, but (11) when addressing a polytheist. (Bracket for now concerns about the problem of evil as an argument against multiple gods.)

(10) The famine in Africa is yet more proof that there is no god.
(11) The famine in Africa is yet more proof that there are no gods.

So, I thought to myself, maybe the difference is that we use 'is' when the audience expects that if there is any, there is one, and 'are' when they expect that if there is any, there are many. But this can't be right. American football fans are thin on the ground in Sydney, and Bengals fans are thin on the ground wherever one looks. If there are any there, there is probably just one. And if there is one way to rescue the princess, it wouldn't be surprising at all if there is some relatively minor alternative to that plan. So I don't really know what to make of this. Any suggestions would be most appreciated. Philosophers are notoriously weak on issues to do with plurality in language, so I might leave this one to the experts.

What I was originally interested in was whether the 'There' + copula + QP construction could be used to get an utterly unrestricted quantifier. At first glance, it is plausible that (5) contains an utterly unrestricted quantifier - it says the world contains a cat that is capable of playing the piano. As we might put it in formalese:

(12) Ex (Cat(x) & Can-play-the-piano(x))

But if that's right, then (13) should be a fine sentence, and at least in discourse-initial position it is very odd.

(13) There is a cat.

We can say that in the middle of a conversation. Imagine we are looking through the normal directories for animal pianists. After I've ruled out all the monkeys, whales, giraffes, pandas and antelopes, you might say 'There is a cat', (speaker) meaning (5). But it would be odd to start a conversation.

Now there are good pragmatic explanations for why this would be odd. But in the spirit of early morning experimentation, let me propose a (bad?) semantic explanation. I suggest (13), despite being a somewhat well-formed sentence, does not express a complete proposition. Rather, I think, the proposition expressed by a sentence 'There' + copula + QP + PP is generated by replacing the 'there' in subject position by the QP, and dropping the copula and the head of the PP. So (5) expresses exactly the same proposition as (14).

(14) A cat can play the piano.

And (13) expresses the same proposition as (15).

(15) A cat.

What advantages does this have? Well, not many, but it does explain why (13) is odd in discourse-initial position, and after all we have to try and find some way of writing a semantic entry for these 'There is' sentences. There are also some disadvantages - including some potential counterexamples hidden on this page - but for now that's my morning suggestion.

I would try and write more, including about the differences between using 'there' as a null subject and 'there' as a demonstrative - the stress patterns in the two are notably different I think - but I've probably made enough blunders for one entry.

2003-06-16T21:32:00.000-04:00

I knew I should have been spending more time web-surfing if I wanted philosophical ideas.

Wo has a post up defending the impossible solution to the puzzle of imaginative resistance. It's a good post, and I mostly want to just recommend you go read it, assuming like me you've been irrationally not checking his page. But I did have four supplementary comments to make.

1. Tyler Doggett pointed out to me that my preferred solution really is a lot closer to the impossible solution than I suggest in the paper. Tyler's right about this, and I need to correct my existing draft to make it clear that I'm in the same area as the impossible solution. I think my little Quixote story is a pretty powerful argument for something like that solution.

2. There's an odd asymmetry in the premises I use to argue for my solution. I think my Quixote example is an example of the same kind of phenomenon as the paradigm imaginative resistance cases. But I don't think the continuity errors that Wo mentions, or the disagreement with reality errors that I mention (e.g. the Connolly Norman example) are the same kind of phenomenon. When I say this is a premise, that's to say I don't have an argument for the asymmetry here. I think I probably need one.

3. I'm not really as confident in my judgments about Tamar's Tower of Goldbach case as I sound in my paper. What I think is most striking is that intelligent people, most prominently now Wo and Tamar, can differ so radically on the case. I'd be more interested in having an explanation of that than actually having a firm judgment about the case. I've tried a few ideas for explaining the disagreement, mostly trying to link it to possible disagreements about the metaphysics of mathematics, but nothing is sounding very plausible.

4. After reading Wo's defense I'm a little more convinced that the impossible solution is compatible with most of the alleged counterexamples (singing snowmen, parentless children, etc) but I still think the science fiction cases, especially the time travel cases, defeat it. It seems to me there are fairly obvious impossibilities in some time travel stories that just don't matter. These are the hardest cases to explain if you think impossibility is at the heart of imaginative resistance, and I still think they defeat that solution. But maybe I'm being stubborn here.

On this fictional note, happy (belated for some) Bloomsday!

UPDATE: JW pointed out in the comments that the paper on imaginative resistance I keep referring to here isn't exactly easy to find, since I forgot to add it to my papers page. So I'll put the link here: Virtuous Resistance.

2003-06-15T21:39:00.000-04:00

One of the things I've noticed while on holidays is how much I depend on other people's work for having philosophical ideas. Without being attached at the eye to an internet terminal, preferably with open links to many of the sites highlighted on the philosophy papers blog, I struggle to come up with new ideas to talk about. So instead I'll recycle an old idea.

Inspired a little by this post on the 617 blog, I was discussing at a party the other night whether Neo should have taken seriously the possibility that he's in a second-level matrix. There was some consensus that this would be a reasonable worry for him to have, when next he gets the chance to think about it.

Later that night I was having some odd but not too remarkable dream, somehow not at all about The Matrix. The only noteworthy features were some outbreaks of prettier than expected singing, and for no apparent reason a shower of purple tinsel/confetti, that provided some fairly spectacular eye candy. Metaphorically speaking. When I woke up I was trying to explain this dream to some friends, but they didn't seem too interested, largely because my explanations seemed so incoherent. They were much more interested in getting me to see the blue glow reflected off the edge of a flower, that you could only see if you looked just the right way. Of course I couldn't get the angle right, and it looked like a pretty ordinary flower to me, which led to some frustration. And at that point I woke up again.

And here I started to have real philosophical worries. If I can be in a state that feels for all world like waking from a dream (or almost feels this way - see below) and it still be another dream, do I have a special reason for having sceptical worries at just that moment? It certainly seemed at the time that scepticism then would have been much more defensible than a general philosophical scepticism.

As it turns out, I was awake, so my rather insistent involuntary belief that I was awake was true. (Or if it wasn't it's been a very complicated dream since.) But was it knowledge? Or, if you think if it's a different question, if I'd said at the time "I know I'm awake" would I have spoken truly? For a very different question, try running through a few popular accounts of knowledge to see whether on those theories my belief that I'm awake constitutes knowledge. I suspect there's a few ways of reading the safety requirement on knowledge such that it doesn't.

What really convinced me that I was awake was that I was having tactile sensations. I think, though I don't really know how to confirm this, that I don't have tactile sensations in dreams. I'm not even sure that I have auditory sensations in dreams. Certainly my memory of dreams doesn't contain vivid audial representation in the way it contains vivid visual representation. I end up knowing that the auditory surroundings are one way rather than another, but it often seems as if this is by an unmediated, unaccompanied, direct awareness of someone speaking or singing or whatever. In the real world such awareness is constituted by, or at least accompanied by, sensations. I think this isn't the case in my dreams, so I think I now have a good way of testing whether I'm awake or not - hitting myself in the head and seeing whether I hear or feel it. Scepticism refuted using folk science!

Maybe I shouldn't need other philosophers to provide philosophical ideas. Maybe I should be able to get ideas from my environment. But it's not that easy to do that, I've found. Ideally I'd get more philosophical inspiration from other creative works. But that hasn't been working. I've seen two bands since I got here - Machine Translations and Architects in Helsinki - and while both were very good, neither exactly encouraged distinctively philosophical ideas. (Aesthetics question: Is it a good thing or a bad thing that both of these bands sounded exactly the same on stage as on their recordings? I was a little bit disappointed by this, but only a little since their recordings sound very good. But maybe I was being unreasonable, and it's perfectly acceptable to reproduce the recording studio on a pub stage.) I saw an excellent performance of Hamlet, but while that does raise philosophical questions I think I've considered most of them previously at some time or other previously. (Economics question: how well would a book on philosophical issues in Shakespeare sell? It could be used as a textbook for particularly precocious, not to mention precious, young philosophy students. And it could be fun to write.) And I saw some recent Aboriginal paintings, and was again convinced that Australian Aboriginal art is the best art of the past thirty years. When I'm feeling particularly ungenerous I can almost be convinced it's the only worthwhile art of the past thirty years, but that's probably a slight exaggeration. Still, that doesn't raise distinctively philosophical issues either, so I'm still a little lacking in inspiration. Maybe it's just a side-effect of too much holidaying and too little work!

2003-06-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

I'm not getting a chance to post much here because I'm spending more time holidaying than philosophising while in Australia. But it seems in this respect, like so many others, I'm being unfashionable. The philosophy papers blog is more active than I ever remember it being, with several new interesting papers posted each day. (Much thanks to Paul Neufeld for keeping it running while I'm down under.) And despite Squawkbox's rather irregular behaviour, there's a long comments thread below in my (poorly referenced) post on conditionals and disjunction. I'd been hoping a long and interesting comments thread would develop at some stage; maybe I should go on holidays more often.

2003-06-10T19:05:00.000-04:00

The other day I wrote a short post on conditionals noting a strange feature about the behaviour of some conditionals in disjunctions. The idea for the post came up in some working through some of the details in Chris Gauker's Words Without Meanings, but I thought it was a different point to the one's he discussed. Going back and actually reading his chapter on conditionals closely, it turns out it was actually a rather similar point to one he was making. I draw the opposite conclusion from the data to Gauker, but it's similar data. I must have picked up the idea and immediately forgotten from where I picked it up. So I should have credited him at the time. My bad.

At the end of the General Theory Keynes has a brief homage to the power of ideas. I don't have the text in front of me, so what follows is a rough paraphrase of the most famous line. Madmen in authority, who hear voices telling them what to do, are just recycling the ideas of some economist from a generation past. It seems Keynes wasn't quite right. Sometimes they are not in authority. And sometimes philosophers not economists. And sometimes thirty hours ago rather than thirty years.

2003-06-08T19:22:00.000-04:00

The New Scientist has a fascinating series on human nature. There are several articles by philosophers, including Dan Dennett, Stephen Stich, Dominic Murphy, Owen Flanagan and Simon Blackburn. Sadly these are often no more interesting than the other articles. I though the interview with Alison Gopnik on infant knowledge was especially interesting, if by necessity a little superficial. Gopnik mentions some neat experiments my colleague David Sobel did, which was generous of her. She also, amusingly, manages to mangle some Greek mythology, confusing Theseus with Odysseus if I've remembered the stories correctly.

2003-06-06T05:51:00.000-04:00

Conditionals and Assertion

I've long been worried by the following fact. Very often, when (~p or q) is assertable, so is p -> q, and vice versa. This is so widespread that we might worry that it is to be explained by the simple fact that (~p or q) entails p -> q, and vice versa. (I'm using -> for if...then, in case this isn't obvious.) Now, I don't want to be making a simple confusion of assertion conditions with truth conditions here. I'm not at all worried by the flat-footed argument that we have a preservation of assertion conditions here, so we must have a preservation of truth conditions. But I do think that when it seems that two sentences have the same assertion conditions, that's something that needs explaining, and perhaps the best explanation of it is that they have the same truth conditions.

One might respond that p -> q can't have the same truth conditions as (~p or q) because their negations have different assertion conditions. But an argument that simple would just be a confusion between truth and assertability, and not worth the electrons it's reflected off.

Why the concern then? Well, largely because I'm in print rejecting the equivalence between p -> q and (~p or q), and I would like the things I'm in print rejecting to be wrong. Not the deepest reason ever, but a reason.

Anyway, here's a little argument that the equivalence (or near equivalence) in assertion conditions between p -> q and (~p or q) is not grounded in a truth-conditional equivalence. Consider the following argument.

1. (A & B) -> C Premise
2. ~(A & B) or C From 1
3. (~A or ~B) or C DeMorgan from 2
4. (~A or C) or (~B or C) Distribution from 3
5. (A -> C) or (B -> C) From 2

Note that this argument is not assertability preserving. We could be in a position to say, for example, If you fill the room with gas and light a match, the room will explode, while not being in a position to say If you fill the room with gas, the room will explode, or if you light a match, the room will explode. In that case, all the steps before the last one are assertability preserving. Letting A, B and C be as defined in that example, we can say 1, 2, 3 and 4. But the inference to 5 is mistaken.

Now that should be an interesting fact. If (~p or q) is equivalent to p -> q, then we would expect that we could just substitute one for the other in a disjunction. But that's what we cannot do here. This isn't a knock-down argument, but it is I think a little evidence that we should be looking for a pragmatic explanation of what (~p or q) and p -> q have in common, rather than what separates them. This is hardly a new conclusion - there's a Stalnaker paper from I think 1975 trying to explain why the assertion conditions for (~p or q) and p -> q might be the same even though their truth conditions are different - but I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue quite this way for Stalnaker's approach.

2003-06-05T21:43:00.000-04:00

Naturalness in Semantics

I've been reading Chris Gauker's book Words Without Meanings to review it for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. It's very interesting, in no small part because Gauker has such a different view to everyone else. It's somewhat revealing that the view he's arguing against, that "the central function of language is to enable a speaker to reveal his or her thoughts to a hearer", is so entrenched that it doesn't even have an -ism associated with it. I've been playing with truism, or expressivism, or communism as names for it. The last isn't too bad, because what's central to the view Gauker's criticising is that language is for communicating thoughts. Gauker doesn't believe that, because he doesn't believe in what I think of as thoughts.

It also means that I can say truly that the profession is over-run with communists. And no one else is using communism for anything else these days. I can see how this would have been misleading 15 years ago, but that kind of communism is dead and buried. Communism is dead; long live communism. (If I could do subscripts in HTML I'd put the subscripts on those two tokens of communism to disambiguate a little.) And now we can link up with other dubious renamings to ask whether, for example, communism has a distinctive ideology? I don't think I'll use this in the review (so any readers from NDPR - don't panic!) but for here I'll use communism as a name for what Gauker simply calls The Received view.

One of the problems with communism is that it assumes that there is such a thing as mental representation. Gauker thinks that thinking doesn't involve manipulating propositions. The key argument against mental representation is a Kripkenstein/Putnam content scepticism argument. For some reason Kripkenstein isn't cited, nor is Goodman, but the argument should be familiar. There's too many interpretations of any purported mental representations that fit with any constraint on interpretation for any particular one to count as the content of the mental representation. The constraint Gauker focusses on is that beliefs should be mostly true. (In fact he generously spots the communist the premise that we can identity the true beliefs prior to interpreting them, though I doubt even communists believe anything that strange.) But any similar constraint, that beliefs should be reasonable, or understandable, or consistent or whatever will suffer from a similar weakness.

This should all be familiar, and we Lewisians have a familiar answer to it. Among all the interpretations that satisfy the kind of Quinean/Davidsonian constrains that Gauker considers, only a handful assign natural meanings to each of the words in the language. Most of the deviant interpretations are, to put it mildly, deviant. They assign meanings like "being either blue and identical to o1 or not blue and not identical to o1" to simple words like blue. The correct interpretation of a system of representations is the one that (a) satisfies whatever Quinean/Davidsonian constraints that we settle on, and (b) assigns meanings that are as natural as possible to the lexical simples.

Gauker considers this response, which he quite rightly characterises as a preference for interpretations that "carve nature at the joints", and has a rather dismissive response to it.

But this cannot be right either since we can certainly think about properties and kinds that do not carve nature at the joints such as dwellings, songs, dictators, and surprises, and our thoughts about these cannot be reduced to thoughts about properties that carve nature at the joints.

If, dear reader, you were hoping for an argument for the striking anti-reductionist claim at the end of that quote, your hopes will be dashed. This is taken to just be common knowledge, and indeed I suppose it is a pretty common opinion around the traps. But what of the more central claim, that the properties these words latch onto do not themselves "carve nature at the joints"? This seems in a way misguided to me.

It's an important part of the Lewisian theory that, somehow or other, naturalness comes in degrees. This might be because it's just a primitive fact that some properties are more natural than others, or it might be because various properties stand in relations of greater or lesser proximity to the core natural properties. (I think Lewis preferred the latter reason, I prefer the former, but not much turns on this.) So dwellings, songs, dictators, and surprises may not denote perfectly natural properties, but the properties they denote are more natural than some. Don’t all surprises have more in common, objectively speaking, than things that are surprises on Sundays or murders on Mondays or tea-parties on Tuesdays? This is just what we mean when we say that surprise carves nature at a joint. (If I knew more anatomy I'd make a little joke here about it being a not very central joint, more like a metatarsal than a knee, but I don't even know whether a metatarsal is a joint, so I won't risk making anatomical jokes.)

Anyway, the whole point of this wasn't to just complain about Gauker, or to stand up for communists, but to see what people thought about a certain kind of theory. I quite like the Lewisian theory, that we solve problems to do with radical under-determination by appeal to objective similarities in nature, and that these similarities don't just help us distinguish ELECTRON from SCHMECTRON, but also SURPRISE from SCHMPRISE (where of course schmectrons and schmprises are generally but not always electrons and surprises). This all seems to me very plausible metaphysically and semantically. One particular reason it appeals to me is that it seems to get just the right amount of indeterminacy in semantics, but that's a story for another post. But here Gauker, who for all his radicalism is not utterly insensitive to mainstream opinion, and certainly is a first-class philosopher, is basically just dismissing it. Is Lewisian semantics really that far from respectable opinion nowadays? I don't mind too much if it isn't that respectable. I quite like having radical views, especially when I'm right. But it would be a little disappointing to find out everyone else is so ignorant or misguided.

2003-06-04T23:39:00.000-04:00

My evil paper was accepted for PPR today. I'm rather pleased about that, because I do like the paper, and there's not much I could do with it if PPR didn't take it, because few journals will take long commentary pieces on papers published in other journals. It was a little harder to write than may appear at first. Trying to write a reply to a paper by Adam Elga is non-trivial in a few respects, because one has to keep up both in terms of the quality of the philosophy and in terms of the quality of the writing, especially of the humour. There's one compensating benefit, which is that because Adam's always so clear, there's no painful exegesis to do before launching into philosophy. But still trying to keep up is no trivial matter. I think I mostly succeeded this time, but then I would think that, wouldn't I?

Behind all the details, and all the jokes, there is a relatively serious matter to the paper. I think, following Keynes, there's a very important difference between risk and uncertainty. It's a slight exaggeration, but one way of conceptualising how important the distinction is is that from my perspective the person who knows how probable p is has more in common with the person who knows whether p is true than she has with the person who has no evidence either way as to whether p is true. Indifference principles threaten this neat picture, because they suggest that we can get to a real probability of p, not its objective chance but still a single precise probability that is objectively correct (relative to a body of evidence) on the basis of ignorance about the evidence.

That, I think, was the real problem with traditional indifference principles, not the mere problem that they were inconsistent. The inconsistencies look like a technical problem that need a technical solution, and after a few false attempts I think Adam's solution is the right one. (I still make some technical objections in the paper, but you could live with them if they didn't hint at a deeper problem.) If there was only a technical problem here, it would be solved. But there isn't, there's a philosophical problem here too, and no amount of care and attention to the details will solve it, only a theory that blocks any inference from ignorance to probability.

2003-06-04T19:09:00.000-04:00

Paul Neufeld has been posting updates to the philosophy papers blog for three days now, so hopefully everyone is checking those pages without little reminders here. If not, there are three days worth of philosophy papers for you to peruse.

2003-06-04T19:08:00.000-04:00

Stars Stars and Stars

It was a comfortable enough flight over that I spent more time sleeping than doing things worthy of note. Surprisingly enough, it was The Iliad that kept making me drowsy. The various battle scenes were fine to stay awake through - though I hadn't realised just how horribly detailed they could be. The problem was old King Nestor. Nestor's role, for those who aren't familiar, is largely to try and calm the tensions in the Achean camp, and his main weapon is the long-winded speech. It didn't seem to help much with Agammemnon and Achilles, but it inevitably worked with me. By the middle of the story, all I had to hear was, "Then good King Nestor rose" and I was sound asleep.

Maybe if I hadn't slept so much I would have figured out more about stars. But maybe not, for I think I was a little stuck just where I was. Here's the basics. (For background on stars, see Ted Sider's papers here and here. Be warned though, this is possibly the most esoteric philosophical question I've ever thought about, and that's not a trivial comparison class.)

Ideally, we'd like to define F* as being F minus maximality. But that won't do for two reasons.

First, it suggests that when F is not maximal, then F* = F. And that isn't always right. Let F be the property of being human or weighing more than sixteen stone. This is not maximal - it's not always the case that the large part of something that weighs more than sixteen stone does not weigh more than sixteen stone. But nor is it the case that F* = F. A large part of me is F*, but it is not F.

Second, this kind of conceptual subtraction in general is not defined. (I think Lloyd Humberstone has a paper on this somewhere, but I don't quite know where. Wiggins makes quite a bit of this point in his response to Parfit in the 3rd edition of Sameness and Substance. That was the best part of the new edition I thought.) If F can be analysed as G and H, then F minus G is just H. But where F cannot be so analysed, F minus G is not clearly defined. The problem is that there's nothing remotely like the unique factorisation theorem for concepts or for properties. What we'd like is that F minus G is the property H such that H and G is equivalent to F. But there are too many such properties H. There's a few ways we might try to discriminate amongst them, mostly using strong appeals to naturalness at crucial points, but as far as I can tell the general problem is hopeless. And I have a suspicion this territory has been worked over in the literature, so I won't go through it all here.

Let's try getting to starring more directly. First hypothesis: An F* is something that massively overlaps an F. This gets the right result in most cases, but it doesn't work in general. In fact, massively overlapping an F is neither necessary nor sufficient for being an F*.

Against necessity: imagine a ball with a small lump on one side. The lump is not massive, but it is big enough to make the ball something other than a sphere. Consider the part of the ball apart from the lump. It is a sphere*, for it has everything necessary for being a sphere other than being maximal, but it does not massively overlap a sphere.

Against sufficiency: Cusack is the heaviest man in Ireland. But not by much. He is only a few ounces heavier than Lenehan. If Cusack's right hand were suddenly to fall off, Lenehan would be heavier. Let F = is the heaviest man in Ireland, and let a be the mereological difference between Cusack and his right hand. Is a an F*. It seems to be not. It does not have what it takes to be the heaviest man in Ireland, for it is less heavy than Lenehan. But it does massively overlap an F.

An F* is not just a duplicate of an (actual or possible) F. This is I think a necessary condition for being an F*, but it is not sufficient. The counterexamples to sufficiency are easy. I'm a duplicate of a possible uncle, but I am not an uncle*. Still, we do seem to have a necessary condition here, and that may be worth something.

What we intuitively want for a definition of star is something like the following. A thing a is F* iff if a is the right kind of thing to have maximal properties, it has F. The last conditional is not a material conditional, so we can't easily use it in an analysis. But we can do something.

The kind of thing that's apt to have maximal properties is just a thing that does have some or other natural maximal property. (I'll come back to why there has to be a restriction to natural maximal properties here in a bit.) Roughly, then, an F* is something that if it has any natural maximal properties, it is F. Say an object is pretty iff it has any natural maximal properties. Here's a first pass at trying to define F*, at least for cases where F is reasonably natural.

Another little definition that will be helpful. Say F is intrinsic to the Gs iff being F entails being G and the following holds. Any bijection between the Gs in w1 and the Gs in w2 that maps objects onto duplicates always maps Fs onto Fs and non-Fs onto non-Fs. (That's actually a little rough. For some purposes we need to also say that for any collection of objects the fusion of their images under the bijection is a duplicate of their fusion. I'll assume that where necessary.) A lot of extrinsic properties are nonetheless intrinsic to the Gs for suitable G. (Every property, I think, is intrinsic to the things - that's sort of a weak version of the truthmaker principle.) For instance, the property of being the heaviest man in Ireland is intrinsic to the men in Ireland.

Here's my attempt then at getting F*. Let G be any natural maximal property such that F is intrinsic to the Gs. Let a be some object in a world w that massively overlaps a pretty object. If a is pretty, then a is F* iff a is F. If not, let b be the pretty object. Let P be the set of pretty objects apart from b in w. Let w' be a world in which a duplicate of a, call it a', is pretty. Consider any bijection from the Gs plus a in w onto the Gs in w'. If a is F*, then a', the image of a under the bijection, should be F. The reason is that a' is just like a in all respects necessary for being F, it is an intrinsic duplicate and the world is just the right way for a' to be F, and since a' is G, and G is a natural maximal property, a' is pretty so it is apt to have maximal properties. That much all seems relatively uncontroversial, I think.

Let me now make a bold conjecture. If for all such G all such bijections map a onto an F, then a is an F*. The little argument above was that this is a necessary condition for being F*. The hypothesis is that it's sufficient. I don't really have an argument that this is sufficient, which is why it is a particularly bold hypothesis. I do, however, have something that may be a counterexample. In fact I may have two. (An extremely bold hypothesis in that case.)

Let F be the property of being the best hitter in baseball. Right now, I presume, Barry Bonds has that property. Let a be a large part of Barry Bonds, say all of him less one hair. I take it that a is F*, and as far as I can tell, my theory delivers that result. But what of poor c, which is the mereological difference between Barry and both of his hands. I think c is not F* - it is not at all the right kind of thing to be the best hitter in baseball, for it has no hands. But I can't immediately see a G such that being the best hitter in baseball is intrinsic to the Gs, and any suitable bijection does not map c onto the best hitter in baseball. The worry is that being the best hitter in baseball might not be intrinsic to any group more coarse-grained than the things, so there'll be no bijections of the type I described, so on all such bijections c will be mapped onto the best hitter in baseball. Maybe I'm wrong about that, so the bold conjecture might be right. And maybe c really is F*, the intuitions here are not particularly clear.

A different kind of problem arises with properties like being the mereological difference between a human and its longest hair. Note this is maximal, but we don't want to say an object with this property is pretty. The difference between me and my longest hair, call it d, has this property, call it F, but it is not pretty. That's why I restricted the definition of prettiness to those things with natural maximal properties. But now consider d minus its longest hair - call that e. Surely e is F*. But there's no way at all for my definition of starring to work in that case, for it is only defined for cases where the things that are F are pretty, or at least where they could be pretty. I'm actually not too worried about that. Maybe I don't have a definition of starring, but necessary and conditions for being an F* for cases where F is reasonably natural. That would still be progress I think, though maybe not much progress.

2003-06-02T11:32:00.000-04:00

About to be off to Melbourne. If everything goes right it's 34 hours door to door. I seem to remember it used to be quicker than this, but 34 it now is. The main aim for the journey, apart from sleeping and thinking about stars, is listening to Derek Jacobi's reading the Fagles translation of The Iliad. If there are lots of Achean and Trojan examples in my papers for the next few months, you know whom to blame.

A quick update on the Australian politics story mentioned below. The newspaper article Jacob was relying on said that tomorrow's Newspoll will have bad news for the Labor opposition. The Age says that it will show a 3 point rise in Labor's 2PP vote, so the 2PP vote is now only 51-49 to the Coalition. Apparently that's with a fall in both Labor and Coalition primary vote, so it's not great news, but it's not awful news either. Lots of people have won from 51-49 down 18 months out from an election. (Though it's worth noting there's no incumbency boost to opinion poll numbers in Australia, if anything there's often a small 'protest vote' in opinion polls, so you'd like the opposition to be at least at 52 at this stage of the cycle before you felt they were even.) And The Age reports that the fact that Labor isn't in front will trigger a Beazley challenge, which I'm not sure is a good idea, but sort of continues the parallel with the situation the Coalition faced in 1994. Anyway, the main take-home lesson from this is never trust anything from a Murdoch newspaper anywhere in the world that reflects badly on left-wing parties, at least not without something like independent confirmation.

I was going to leave a list of other blogs I'd recommend you read while TAR is on light posting while I'm in Australia. But instead I think it's better to recommend that more people start blogs. Now that there's a Boston area philosophy blog, what about New York, or New Jersey, or Melbourne? (Or anywhere else, but I think those are the three main non-New England areas of TAR readership.) Anyone starting, or for that matter continuing, a philosophy blog is encouraged to use the comments boards here to promote it.

2003-06-02T03:04:00.000-04:00

I think I figured out how to restate the intrinsicness principle that Andy and Jim are looking for. (See this post for background to what I'm talking about, and links to the original paper.) They think the following principle is plausible, and it is.

If A and B are duplicates, and A and B have any phenomenal states, then they have the same phenomenal states.

This gets out of the worry about A or B not being maximal, because then they won't have any phenomenal states at all.

A similar move can be used to define content internalism, I think. Narrow content is shared by duplicates who have any contentful states at all. Or is that too weak, because it allows for swampmen? Not sure.

What I'd like to be able to do is use this trick to find a general way of defining Ted's * operator. As stated it's defined by conceptual subtraction. An F* is something that has all the characteristics necessary to be F except (possibly) being maximal. This makes sense if F is factorisable into maximality and some other stuff. And the probability that this is true for all maximal predicats strikes me as being roughly 0. (+/- about 1.) So we need a more general definition of the * operator. When F* is meant to be intrinsic, then it's easy - being an F* just means being a duplicate of some (actual or possible) F. But that won't do for defining uncle*, or, if you are a gung-ho, let it all hang out context externalist, it won't even do for defining rock*. Hopefully I can figure this one out one of my four plane rides tomorrow.

2003-06-02T02:54:00.000-04:00

Jacob Levy writes that he is worried that Australia, like Britain and Canada, is turning into a one-party state. Since I'm about to be in Australia, it's probably time for another Australian politics post.

Basically, I think Jacob's fears here are overstated. (At least with respect to Australia. With respect to Britain and Canada, they may be justified soon enough.) The ALP's position in Federal politics right now is much better than the Coalition's was when Downer was Liberal leader. They are closer in the polls, more people support them on the issues, and they have co-operative and popular state governments in place in every state. (And they haven't been out of power for as long, though that's a mixed blessing.) Of course by the time that parliamentary term was over, the Coalition had won one of the biggest wins in Australian history. This isn't to say that Simon Crean is another Downer, or the ALP will have a thumping win next election, or even that they're likely to win, but it's much too early to judge that the ALP can't win.

In any case, the dangers of one-party rule, which is what most concerns Jacob, are much ameliorated when different parties control the state and Federal parliaments. At least, the concerns that he sees as most pressing are not that pressing. I'm guessing this wasn't his major concern, but there is one problem starting to emerge.

As long as Labor controls the states and the Coalition the Federal govt, smart young operatives on the Labor side will move into state politics and smart operatives on the conservative side into Federal politics. This drift won't be as strong on the Labor side, because there's always some temptation to go for the big prizes in Federal politics. But you'd expect all the talented players on the conservative side to be in Federal politics. As far as I can tell, that's exactly what has happened, with the result that the state oppositions are remarkably short of talent. And at the state level, where people are more inclined to vote on the basis of apparent competence than on the basis of ideological agreement, that's a recipe for disaster. It's a nasty spiral to get into I fear. Again, history says that you can get out of this trap - Labor was in a similar position ten or so years ago after all and they eventually climbed out - but until the Liberals can convince their more talented young operatives that they'd rather spend their formative years in state opposition than federal government, it could be a long haul.

2003-06-01T12:19:00.000-04:00

The RSS feeds have moved. Here are the new links.

RSS Feed for this blog
RSS Feed for papers blog

Thanks to Juan for finding these, and to Wytheville Community College for (intentionally or otherwise) hosting these feeds. When I get back from holidays I'll try and find a more durable solution for this problem, possibly involving a move to MT.

2003-06-01T02:05:00.000-04:00

Papers blog is up. Two things worth commenting on. (Well, perhaps more than that, but two things I have comments on.)

I think this paper went up back in the dark ages, perhaps as far ago as last Wednesday, but somehow I only caught it now. Andy Egan and Jim John wrote a short paper, largely a critical survey, on problems intrinsicness poses for representational theories of phenomenology. Roughly, the puzzle is that (intuitively) phenonemology is intrinsic and content isn't, so by Leibniz's Law phenomenology can't be identical with content. But as stated this isn't a pressing puzzle, because there's a pretty powerful argument against one of the intuitions.

Phenomenology is extrinsic, for the reasons Ted Sider sets out here. The mereological difference between me and one of my hairs has no phenomenal character, but its duplicate in a world where I lack that hair has lots and lots of feelings, few of them to do with the missing hair.

I guess this is just a technical difficulty, and the puzzle they are getting at can be restated easily enough, but I'm not entirely sure how to do it. Maybe they can follow Ted's suggestion and use stars everywhere as a way of restating the trilemma they are most interested in. But I suspect that's just a matter of noting that the problem exists rather than actually solving it. There's still clearly a problem because the respects in virtue of which phenomenology is extrinsic are still different to the (alleged) respects in virtue of which content is extrinsic. So I don't think this changes much about the underlying dynamic. But Andy and Jim (and everyone else in the relevant literature) shouldn't be using the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic here.

Geoff Nunberg has an article largely about TLAs in which he doesn't use "TLA". By the way, is it TLAs or TLA's? It's not a possessive, so you'd think an apostraphe wouldn't be appropriate, but as thrice seen in this sentence, some apostraphes are just for contraction. And there sort of is a contraction there I guess. But by that logic, the singular should be T'L'A', which it manifestly isn't.

2003-05-31T14:26:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up. Quiet day - two papers and a book review.

I'm still trying to think of something interesting to say about consequentialism. It's almost getting to the stage where I'd be better off going and doing some research rather than trying to figure everything out on my own. But that's not the blogging way. Or at least it's not my blogging way.

Let's grant as a starting point that prudential norms are concerned in the first instance with expected consequences rather than actual consequences. Paying $1 for a lottery ticket with an expected value of 1 cent is dumb, even if the ticket ends up winning. Dumb luck indeed. The question that arose in two posts by John Quiggin (here and here) was whether the same kind of point applies to ethical norms. Assuming (controversially) that something like consequentialism is the right theory of personal morality, is it actual consequences or expected consequences that matter for morality? And if it's expected consequences, is it expectation according to the agent's beliefs, her society's beliefs, the beliefs it is rational for her to have, or some other beliefs?

I've been trying to think of something useful to say on this, and I haven't. First, a quick sociological note. Contra the impression that may have been created by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's Stanford entry on consequentialism, a lot of consequentialists think it is expected consequences not actual consequences that matter. Frank Jackson has some papers where it is basically assumed as a premise that it's expected consequences that matter, and that premise is used to try to defuse some challenges to consequentialism. How successful the defusing is is a matter for some debate, but it's clear which side of the actual/expected debate he's on.

Second, three examples that I've been puzzling over while trying to think of something interesting to say. I don't even have commentary on the examples, because I'm just stuck. Well, except to note that one of John Quiggin's points, that philosophy examples are often gratuitously violent, is true and may be confirmed here. And to note that none of the examples bear any intentional resemblance to any person living dead or imaginary.

The Shooter
Ken believes, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that he can tell whether a gun is loaded. He thinks he can detect the difference in weight that the extra ammunition provides. This is completely untrue. In fact he's no better at this than random. He thinks the gun he is holding right now is unloaded. In fact he is certain that it is unloaded. So he thinks there is no harm in pointing it at Sharon's foot and pulling the trigger, and some small gain since he very much enjoys 'firing' unloaded guns. He does this, and Sharon gets a bullet in the foot. Was Ken's act of pulling the trigger morally wrong?

The Bigot
Gene has been brought up to hate Rhode Islanders. Filthy irreligous corrupt scum, he thinks. And many other people in his part of Connecticut agree. All of Gene's evidence about Rhode Islanders supports his beliefs. That evidence is all testimonial - he wouldn't actually go into the horrible Rhode Island - but it seems remarkably consistent. One day Gene sees a car with Rhode Island licence plates stop at his father's store and its inhabitants stop at his father's store, and its occupants get out to buy some food and drink. Believing that they are filthy irreligous corrupt scum, Gene launches into a tirade of abuse directed at them, with the intent of making them go away. Underneath his tough exterior, Gene is actually quite worried what these dangerous Rhode Islanders will do if they stay. The Rhode Islanders are quite upset, even shaken, by Gene's outburst and quickly get back in their car and drive away. Was what Gene did in abusing the Rhode Islanders morally wrong?

The Cook
Jamie is cooking a rather distinctive dish for his dinner guests tonight. The ingredients include two rare herbs, X and Y. (I should make up names for these, but I am a little lazy.) Jamie doesn't know this, in fact no one who hasn't studied a bit of medicine does, but X and Y should never be served in combination. Although each is safe, together they are rather toxic. Although this knowledge is not widespread, Jamie could probably have figured it out if he'd reflected for a bit on this evidence. For he knows that W and Y in combination are toxic, that's why he used X rather than W, and he knew that X and W have very similar effects on humans. He just somehow forgot to put 2 and 2 together here to conclude that X and Y are probably very dangerous also. But he did put X and Y together, and all of his guests ended up being rather sick for the next week. Did Jamie do the wrong thing in preparing a dish with X and Y in it?

As I said, no commentary, just examples to think about.

2003-05-30T12:19:00.000-04:00

In a paper cited on the philosophy papers blog today, Alexander Pruss makes the following remarkable claim:

Despite the fact that the strength of argument is clearly on the pro-life side—nobody except a handful of academics would question the grave wrongness of abortion were pregnancy never inconvenient—somehow ordinary intelligent people, like our students, often remain unconvinced.

As Ayer might have put it, there's a normative claim and a factual claim here. And they're both wrong. I'll leave the discussion of the normative claim to the experts. (Take it away, 617 Bloggers!) But what of the factual claim, that nobody except academics would believe abortion is permissible if it were not for the associated inconvenience? Is this true?

Well, Pruss charmingly gives no evidence whatsoever for his claim, so I'll guess it's just basically anecdotal evidence. So I'll offer my competing anecdotal evidence. Anyone who wants to substitute actual evidence should feel free to do so.

In my experience, the 'convenience' argument for the permissibility of abortion is more persuasive among men than it is among women. Pro-choice women are more often moved by arguments to do with autonomy. And by this I mean not just arguments to do with bodily autonomy, narrowly construed, but to do with the right to control fundamental aspects of one's life, such as if and when one will procreate. (I seem to recall Liz Harman had some good discussion of this point somewhere, but I can't find the relevant paper online.) You can sort of test for this by getting people's reaction to the use of ectogenesis as an alternative to abortion. I think that many, if not most, pro-choice men think that there would not be a right to abortion if it were possible to (relatively painlessly) remove the foetus and have it grow in an incubator and be nurtured by adoptive parents. My impression is that relatively few pro-choice women (even non-academics!), think this possibility would be a sufficient reason to ban abortion. But if Pruss's assumption were correct, they all should find this a compelling reason to introduce a ban, because given this possibility there need not be the 'inconvenience' of pregnancy.

As I said, I don't have the actual data at my fingertips to support all my assertions here, but if anyone knows where to find relevant data, the comments section is open!

2003-05-30T12:01:00.000-04:00

What's in a blog?

One of the other points that struck me about John Quiggin's response to the Sinnott-Armstrong's Stanford piece was that it was the first time I could recall someone treating the Stanford Encyclopaedia as a blog. That is, someone (quite properly) treating what it says as contentious rather than authoritative, and responding to it in 'real-time'. This all seemed perfectly natural, as soon as it was done. The Stanford Encyclopaedia is a kind of carefully written (large) group blog. That got me thinking about other sites which could well be regarded as blogs.

I seem to recall that a while ago I used to read all sorts of blogs that didn't update regularly, but the updates they had were usually careful and well thought out. Blogs that emphasised quality over quantity. I still read lots of high quality blogs, but mostly they tend to be fairly high quantity as well. (And I read plenty of low quality high quantity blogs. Gotta keep up with the competition.)

Maybe, though, I do read the high quality low quantity blogs, I just don't think of them as blogs. For instance, one could well regard Geoffrey Nunberg's home page as a blog, with the entries being the frequent NY Times and Fresh Air pieces he posts. Today's entry is on whether there is a word for 'compromise' in Arabic, and what we might think about those why deny such a word exists. Geoff's entries are not that infrequent. He posts something every week or two, which is helter-skelterish by academic standards, and given that the entries usually involve actual research, it seems reasonable to count it as an exemplar of the quality over quantity blog I was discussing above.

Another page like this is Shawn Fitzgibbons's blurbs page. (Shawn is a philosophy grad student at UMass.) I didn't agree with several of Shawn's conclusions, but again it's an example of a site updated reasonably regularly (one entry per week on average this year I guessed) with more careful thought than you'll see on some blogs.

2003-05-30T11:07:00.000-04:00

I still haven't got around to writing my intended post on consequentialism (a follow up to John Quiggin's post attacking Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's entry on consequentialism in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). But I was interested to see that some of the issues at issue here came up in an online debate about the virtues of a trade the Red Sox made yesterday. (Sending over-rated third baseman Shea Hillenbrand to Arizona in exchange for vastly under-rated sidearmer Byung-Hyun Kim.) One of the issues that arose in the on-line discussion of the trade here was what we should conclude about the merits of the respective General Managers involved in the trade if, contrary to everyone's expectations, Hillenbrand outperforms Kim over the next few years. The consensus was for an anti-consequentialist (antecedentalist?) position - what matters for assessing the quality of the decision the two GMs made is the reasonable expectation of their performance, and that if Hillenbrand does outperform Kim, it will be more plausible to conclude that this was due to dumb luck than skill on their part. Of course, it's an internet based discussion board, so the level of discourse soon degenerated to somewhere below the bleachers at Wrigley, but I thought it was cute that philosophical issues could arise so quickly in a baseball discussion. (And I just wanted a chance to gloat about the Red Sox making such a great acquisition.)

2003-05-29T21:54:00.000-04:00

Kai von Fintel just pointed out that I got mentioned in the Chronicle's article on weblogs. I'd like to point out that of all the blogs they discuss, I have by a bit the lowest readership.

If I knew I was about to get press coverage I'd have been more careful with some recent posts. I do note in the posts below which entries contain less than the minimum 5% philosophical content required by law to count as a philosophy blog post.

Neil Levy alerted me to an error in the papers blog. A little coding mistake had led to the last two days updates not being published. I fixed this, but now there are two posts listed for Thursday, not one. There are ten papers and assorted reviews that I should have linked to in the last two days. Hopefully the links are now active. Sorry for the delay in this.

2003-05-29T16:29:00.000-04:00

LanguageHat reports that a computer program has been developed that can tell with 80% accuracy whether a given text is written by a man or a woman. LanguageHat (is that a male or female name, and could the program tell) is impressed by the results, though s/he is rightly very suspicious of the stereotypes the programmers used in building the machine.

If the results are good, shouldn't that be enough? Maybe not. I'm always reminded in these cases of Daniel Hausman's little refutation of Friedman's instrumentalism: Why Look Under the Hood?, just about my all-time favourite philosophy paper. Here's a bad way to judge the quality of a used car: drive it around the block a few times and see if anything goes wrong. That's not a useless test. After all, you're testing whether the car does what you eventually want it to do. But we know in practice it's much better to look under the hood, and see how it's doing what it does. (If you disagree, contact Hausman - he's got some great cheap cars to sell you.) Hausman argues that the lesson generalises. Some theories do well for a while by luck, or because they have only been tested in areas for which they were specifically designed. Looking forward, and outward, it's more important to know how they get it right than that they get it right.

2003-05-29T14:20:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up, with five new papers, three of them from the hard working staff at CAPPE. I think CAPPE needs its own group blog, sort of a cross between Philosophy from the (617) and TAPPED.

I managed, while convincing myself I had not missed the bus, to find a better analogy for how voluntary I think beliefs are. It is impossible to sneeze at will. At least, I can't do it. I could at will use external means to induce a sneeze, but that's not the same thing. On the other hand, it is sometimes possible to prevent oneself sneezing more or less at will. It's not always pleasant, but if the alternative is sneezing loudly across a seminar room or a dinner table, it may be the right thing to do in the circumstances. The sometimes is important here - sometimes the relevant parts of the body are not suitably responsive to the will. But sometimes they are, and that's enough to make one (mildly, occasionally) culpable for sneezing loudly while, say, a visitor is presenting a paper. I think beliefs are similar. The standard methods for inducing reasonable sceptical doubt - reminding oneself of the possibility of error and of alternative explanations of the evidence, recalling times when similar evidence was misleading, and so on - sometimes work. They are sometimes enough to stop the body drifting towards the belief it wants to have. And when an agent does not use such methods in a circumstance where they would have been appropriate, s/he may be culpable for the resulting beliefs. The analogy is imperfect in a few ways - it doesn't allow for possibilities like my positively believing against all the evidence that my bus would soon be arriving - but it's close to what I think the most common interaction is between belief and the will.

I should have mentioned some credits in last night's post. The link to Charles Murtaugh's "worst. post. ever." was by Matthew Yglesias. The comments on his post have a rather large collection of candidates for worst movie ever. And the link to the Andrew Sullivan fantasy was via Ted Barlow. (I also should have mentioned that one further similarity between Australia and rocky Ithaca - both seem to be good places for raising sheep in very large quantities. I'd go back and add that now, but blogs aren't meant to be edited.)

I hadn't quite noticed how self-indulgent some of the 'jokes' were there when reading it. I knew that practically every line was a joking reference to some event or book or theory that would not be obvious to most readers. What I forgot was that several of the jokes were me making fun of something I'd thought earlier in the night. (As noted, I'd managed to go through some moderately spectactular doxastic gymnastics en route to Providence.) Some of those references are transparent enough to be effective, but others are completely obscure. (Well, except to me. And a Ulysses themed post is meant to be self-indulgent a bit.) I guess it's all more evidence that I should stick to my day job.

2003-05-29T05:11:00.000-04:00

She was one in a million, so there's five more just in New South Wales

I managed to miss the bus I was meant to catch home tonight from South Station. Things didn't turn out too badly. There was a still later bus I could, and did, catch, so I just got home a little later than expected. I had hoped to write some philosophy for the blog when I got home, but given the time I think I'll have little time to write much more than the story of my trip home.

I don't really know how I managed to miss the bus in question. It was, or I guess it must have been, just a few metres from where I was sitting. I was reading a newspaper and listening to a CD, but I thought that I would have noticed an interstate bus arriving just near where I was. Apparently not, it turns out.

For a while after it was perfectly clear that I'd missed the said bus, I managed by sheer force of will to believe that (a) the bus was somehow running late and (b) all the people who seemed to have been waiting for that bus had caught some other bus, or walked off to get Dunkin' Donuts 'coffee' or had been vaporised by a passing spaceship or something so (c) I hadn't really missed the bus. Obviously that wasn't a state of mind that a reasonable person could maintain forever, so after a few minutes, by which stage it was abundantly perfectly clear I'd missed the said bus, I stopped believing the bus would still arise. But my willpower was still strong enough for me to keep holding it as a live possibility that (a) the bus was somehow running late and (b) all the people who seemed to have been waiting for that bus had caught some other bus, or walked off to get Dunkin' Donuts 'coffee' or had been vaporised by a passing spaceship or something so (c) I hadn't really missed the bus. It was remarkable, if I do say so myself, just how long I was able to maintain this state of mind. Of course at the time I thought it was the most natural thing in the world.

From now on I'm not going to bother seriously arguing for doxastic voluntarism. I'm just going to ostend my period of not believing I'd missed the 1am Providence local, and the even more remarkable period of believing I had not missed it, and point out that if those events existed then doxastic voluntarism is true. And since I was there I'm pretty sure the events did exist. Though, I did manage to miss the nearby presence of an interstate bus, so maybe I'm not the most reliable source about who really was there. So I'd understand if you, dear reader, doubted my account of the events. You'd be wrong, but I'd understand.

It isn't surprising in general that I'd miss a bus from South Station to Providence, especially after midnight. It's not uncommon for me to be catching that bus after a drink or two, and sometimes after a couple of drinks I'm not the most alert person in the world. What is surprising was that tonight was when I missed the bus. It wasn't that I hadn't touched a drop all day, not by any means, but for a temporal part of Brian located in South Station after midnight I was positively sober, as judicious as (a) Hooker. (That joke is awful on so many levels I don't know where to start - ed. In that case you're probably going to dislike the next fifty jokes, because this post is about to turn positively catachlyseimic.)

Why did Brian's situation at the bus station remind him of Bloom?

Both of them had missed an intermodal transfer late at night. In both cases this led to minor inconvenience, but not to any catastrophe.

What were the differences between Bloom's situation and Brian's?

Brian missed an embarkation, Bloom missed disembarking. Bloom was on a train, Brian was meant to be on a bus. Bloom was going to an area of ill-repute, Brian was leaving South Station for Providence. Bloom had been drinking heavily.

Why was Brian pleased to see a comparison between himself and Bloom?

Because Bloom is Everyman, the übermensch for non-English English speakers. Bloom is curious, thoughtful, loyal, principled, industrious. And at the end of the day, he gets the girl.

In what respects was the comparison between Brian and Bloom flawed?

It is essential to Bloom's character that he not see himself as a character in a novel. Such self-comparisons are better suited for one like Bloom's friend Stephen.

What is the relationship between Brian's age and that of Bloom and Stephen?

It is equidistant between Bloom's age and Stephen's. If all three were twice as old as they actually are, Brian's age would be equidistant between Bloom's age and Stephen's. If all three were nine years older than they actually are, Brian's age would be equidistant between Bloom's age and Stephen's.

Before Brian missed the bus, what story was suggested as being suitable for TAR?

A prominent garden statist lover of wisdom self-ascribed authorship of a semanal nominal modal book.

Was the self-ascription correct?

No. It was laughable, inadvertant, accidental, Freudian, forgiveable.

What was the highlight of the show at the Paradise Rock Club on May 28?

A quartet featuring a vibraphone and three players on a glockenspeil.

Could the instrument a trois have been instead a second vibraphone, a xylophone or a camel?

Visual evidence was insufficient to determine whether it was a glockenspeil, a second vibraphone or a xylophone. Auditory evidence would have been sufficient to determine this had circumstances for processing the evidence been ideal and the processor sufficiently knowledgable. Both visual and auditory evidence confirmed that the second instrument was not a camel.

Are temporal parts the right category of thing to be drunk or sober?

No. Only fusions of past and present temporal parts are of the right category to be drunk or sober. A temporal part may be the truthmake for the claim that a particular past-present fusion is drunk or sober. Fusions of past, present and future temporal parts are never drunk or sober, but are sometimes hungover.

What albums did Brian listen to in transit between Boston and Providence?

Sleeping with Ghosts by Placebo. Elephant by White Stripes. Rings Around the World by Super Furry Animals.

How good were these albums?

All were excellent albums, but none were better than earlier works by their respective artists, some critical opinion to the contrary.

What is the worst. blogpost. ever?

Charles Murtagh's post that The Usual Suspects is the worst movie ever.

Is it really worse than Andrew Sullivan's MoDo/Raines post?

There are several perfectly good transcendental arguments that that post could not, and hence does not, exist.

If Brian's short-term journeys resembled Bloom's, which other literary character did Brian's longer-term journeys resemble?

Odysseus. Both keep trying to return home, even when Fate sends them to circumstances that many objective observers would decree better than a simple return to home. Brian has a comfortable, high-pay, low-work, low-stress position at a prestigous university. Odysseus twice lands on islands with beautiful nymphs with lovely braids, the second of whom offers to make him immortal.

What differences are there between Odysseus and Brian?

Odysseus is a war hero, a champion athelete, and crafty. Brian is a philosopher.

What differences between Odysseus's voyage and Brian's?

Providence, RI does not resemble Circe's island, or Calypso's. Australia does not resemble rocky Ithaca. Brian will not be killing any suitors when he returns home. Brian gets to visit home during the voyage.

What are the striking differences between Providence, RI and the islands on which Odysseus stays?

Those islands contain beautiful nymphs with lovely braids. Providence, RI reveals no distinctive sign of supernatural inhabitants.

What are the striking differences between rocky Ithaca and Australia?

Ithaca is largely barren, while Australia is, at least along the seaboard, incredibly fertile. It produces grapes, people and ideas in high quality. (Though some of the people who grow the ideas often have odd, even defective, ideas about personnel. It is unknown whether the people who grow the grapes have a similar shortcoming.)

What are the striking similarities between rocky Ithaca and Australia?

Both are islands. Both are far away from those travelling in distant lands.

Why will Brian not kill any suitors when he returns home?

The moral injunction against killing. The legal codification of that moral injunction. The absence of any suitors.

When will Brian next visit home?

Leaving Monday June 2, arriving Melbourne June 4, leaving Melbourne July 1, returning July 1.

Will the philosophy papers blog be updated in his absence?

Yes. Paul Neufeld, who runs ephilosopher, will run the papers blog while Brian is away.

Will TAR be updated while Brian is away?

Yes, but not as frequently as it is updated while Brian is in America. And there will be fewer links to other sites, since Brian spends less time internetted in Australia than he does in America.

What effect will this have on philosophical productivity around the world?

Several competing models have been advanced in this area. One school of thought is that long interrogative posts on TAR have effectively removed all the audience, so it will have no discernable impact. Another school is that the time freed up from TAR-related procrastination will lead to a huge productivity rise. A third school says that there will be a rise in output, but 120% of the new output will go on other blogs, leading to a net reduction in non-blog philosophising.

2003-05-28T16:56:00.000-04:00

I mean to think more about this later, and if I come up with anything write about it, but for now I just want to post a link to John Quiggin's follow-up to his earlier post on consequentialism. A large part of the post consists of criticisms of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's entry on consequentialism in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. There's some interesting questions here on the (rather large) boundary between economics and philosophy, which I've long though should be one the most productive areas for interdisciplinary work in philosophy.

2003-05-28T12:31:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up, with five new papers on metaphysics, the knowledge argument, and legal and political philosophy.

2003-05-28T01:15:00.000-04:00

A few notes from around the web while wondering whether the 43 hour long unabridged version of Ulysses is possibly a good idea.

Fritz Warfield sent a link to this story in the NY Times about the standard kilogram slowly shrinking. There's lots of fun philosophical issues that arise. Isn't it a priori that the standard kilogram has a mass of one kilogram, so it couldn't possibly be shrinking?! While we're there, is there as much of a philosophical problem about intertemporal mass comparisons as intertemporal location comparisons? The article also verifies an intuition that several philosophers have shared - you really can't tell whether a perfectly homogenous sphere is spinning. Finally, there's a conditional that should challenge a few theories, if it is meant to be true

If the earth were this round, Mount Everest would be four meters tall

I think that works, as long as 'Mount Everest' is a descriptive name for the tallest mountain.

Chris Bertram links to a story in the Guardian that uses Wittgensteinian rule-following considerations in a discussion of the Enron accountancy shenanigans. It's interesting, if long, but I tend to agree with Matthew Yglesias that the references to Wittgenstein were probably not essential to the story being told.

Kieran Healy has a good post about the growing disconnect between risk and reward in the American economy. Kieran's main point here, that markets are social constructs with enough variable parameters that many outcomes we see are the result of more or less explicit social choice rather than an essential consequence of having a free market economy, shouldn't really be news, but probably will be to too many bloggers.

And Wo has a series of good posts about fiction and fictional objects that I should have linked to earlier. The latest two are on fictional objects (defending the idea that they are just possibilia) and fictional truth operators.

2003-05-27T11:19:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up. Busier day today, largely thanks to CAPPE. Six papers and a book review posted.

2003-05-27T03:32:00.001-04:00

Music and Sorites

I recently bought a portable CD player that plays MP3s. Such a thing is obviously useful for someone who (a) travels a lot and (b) is indecisive. Because I can fit 10 times as many MP3s as regular tracks on a CD, the MP3 player means I can carry 250 albums or so in a small-ish CD case. It's all very good. In theory.

The first problem was getting data CDs that stored MP3s in a format that the little player can read. The first 15 or so CDs I tried were mostly incomprehensible to the player. (If anyone needs any coasters, I've got some spare CDs lying around...) Mostly incomprehensible, because 1 of them somehow worked. I was hoping I could use that 1 to tell me just exactly what format a CD needed to be in for the player to read it. Very scientific, I thought. Except when I tried to duplicate the settings I used for the one that worked, the CD player still wasn't happy. At this stage I knew what to do. The difference between the CD that worked and the CD that didn't work could be broken into a series of small steps such that each step was too small to possibly make a difference to whether the CD actually worked. In essence I could march the CD player along a forced march Sorites. This strategy required burning (literally) even more blank CDs to make sure the steps were small enough, but the strategy worked! Who said philosophy is useless! Not even a machine can withstand the forced march Sorites! (I leave the philosophical consequences of this for another day.)

The second problem was figuring out which albums should go with what. Some of it was easy. For several bands it was easy to create one CD with all their albums. But that didn't always work, and wasn't obviously optimal. And I'm an obsessive listmaker. So I decided I had to have one CD with my 10 favourite albums on it. Which required working out what those albums are. So here's the list. (I know, this ceased being a philosophy post long ago.)

Brian's 10 favourite albums (as of May 27, 2003), in approximate chronological order

Blonde on Blonde (Bob Dylan)
The Velvet Underground and Nico (The Velvet Underground and Nico)
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)
Post (Paul Kelly)
The Queen is Dead (The Smiths)
Stone Roses (Stone Roses)
Parklife (Blur)
The Boy with the Arab Strap (Belle and Sebastian)
Watching Angels Mend (Alex Lloyd)
The Strokes (The Strokes)

It's approximate chronological order because in several cases I don't know exactly which album came out before which. I think that's the right order, but I'm very uncertain about the last two, a little uncertain about the Post/Queen is Dead order, and quite uncertain about the Banana/Sgt Peppers order.

If I was a real list maniac I'd order the list by Brian's preferences. But that's too hard. Or I'm trying to cut back on lists. Stone Roses would be at #1, beyond that it'd be a bit random.

I was a bit surprised when making up the list to realise that Watching Angels Mend was (just about) my favourite album of the last few years. It's a kind of boring conventional choice, at least for a young professional Australian type. I'm just a sucker for music that screams I'M A GENIUS while remaining within by now well-established indie-pop boundaries. Especially if it's by an Australian. I'd like there to be more Australian albums there, but most of my favourite Australian acts (Crowded House, Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, You Am I) don't have a real standout album that easily makes the list.

The Strokes album has to be the UK release, not the horrible bastardised version of the album (with dubious cover art) that got released in America. The US version might not be in the top 100.

There's a lot of choices there that are not particularly fashionable. Blonde on Blonde over Highway 61, Sgt Peppers over Revolver, Post over Gossip, anything over anything by Radiohead. Again, my goodness judgments don't necessarily track fashion as well as may be hoped.

I know I said a few days ago that Bringing It all Back Home was the perfect Dylan album. I changed my mind. I could try and save the consistency by saying that there's a difference between being Dylan's best album and being the best Dylan album. The analogy would be those who claim that Let It Bleed is the Stones' best album, but Exile on Main St is the best Stones album. But this is barely coherent at best, and in any case is wrong about the relative quality of Stones records, so I shouldn't rely on it. I just changed my mind. (How did I leave Exile off this list? Don't know. Could be getting late.)

Yes, I am a little embarrassed about having Parklife on the list. It's a little sad I guess, but I have a hopeless nostalgia for the mid-90s in the way that some old lefties have a nostalgia for the late 60s, or some conservatives have a nostalgia for the reign of Henry VIII. Clinton in the White House and Keating in the Lodge; the long (inter)national nightmare of peace and prosperity; good music, good movies, even occasionally good television (pre-Survivor!) and, perhaps not coincidentally, some very good philosophy. I was never the kind of hard partying hard drinking carefree irresponsible friendly anti-social repulsive attractive type that's celebrated on Parklife - and the greyhound on the cover of the album is the closest I've been to the dogs for a very long time - so I don't really have a good excuse for liking it. Maybe it's moments like this that make people like the view that reason is slave of the passions.

2003-05-27T03:32:00.000-04:00

Radical Beliefs

Reading Neil Levy's very good paper on responsibility for belief reminded me that I've probably never posted here my view about the connection between voluntarism about belief and deontological conceptions of justification. I keep forgetting this, but I do have one extreme philosophical view. (Most of my views are just mundane common sense, which I regret a little, but sometimes the truth is like that.) I'm a fairly extreme voluntarist about belief. I think there are some propositions that you can come to believe more or less at will, at least with a little practice. I don't think this is always easy. Moving your beliefs around at will is like moving your arms around at will when there are heavy weights attached to the ends of them. It can be done, but practice helps.

Anyway, I think that the kind of voluntarism we need to defend a deontological conception of justification is actually quite weak, and almost plausible. (It's certainly true, since stronger versions of voluntarism that are definitely not plausible by current standards are also true.) Let's start by noting some fairly obvious truths about the connection between voluntary action and moral responsibility. Today was graduation at Brown, and I had an obligation, of a sort, to attend the departmental graduation ceremony. Despite the torrential rain, I did so. Now I could well have stayed at home, and had the game I'd been watching (Wolverhampton-Sheffield playoff for the last premiership position, if you're keeping score) been any closer or the rain been any heavier, I may well have. Had I done so, I would have been morally culpable. And in part this would have been because it was within my voluntary control to get myself to the graduation ceremony.

Now, I couldn't have reached the graduation ceremony by just clicking my heels and wishing myself there. I would have been a little drier had I been able to do just that, but sadly it was impossible. But there were a series of actions that were within my direct voluntary control (one foot in front of the other, keep the umbrella pointed towards the wind so it doesn't invert, etc.) that resulted in my being at the graduation ceremony. It might not be easy to carry out this series of actions, especially in the rain, but as long as the series exists then my presence or otherwise at the graduation is sufficiently under my voluntary control that it I'm responsible for whether or not it happens.

How does this relate to belief? The most direct way it does is if for some beliefs, the ones for which you are responsible, there is a series of voluntary actions you can take such that you'll end up having that belief. I think that's sometimes possible, but I don't want to try convincing you of that here. And the reason for that is that for present purposes I don't need to. If I could have failed to have a certain belief by performing a series of actions that are under my voluntary control, yet I still have the belief, then that seems like enough for responsibility. And actually it's rather easy to remove beliefs, at least non-perceptual beliefs, by voluntary actions. The good kind of scepticism, the kind that teaches you to doubt charlatans, fraudsters, used car salesmen, magicians, Republican politicians, spammers with Nigerian millions, news that's too good to be true, stories that are too incredible to be fiction, anything said by philosophers and so on, basically consists in an exhortation to doubt everything doubtable. And that kind of exhortation can work, especially when presented the right way. If we do our job in teaching entry level philosophy courses, one of the skills we generate is the ability to doubt at will, and this kind of doubt defeats belief.

Let's try a little thought experiment. Take any claim that you believed at first but later regretted believing. In America this should be easy - unless you disbelieved every factual claim made by the administration in the lead-up to the Iraq war, there's probably something you believed and regretted. (I'm cheating a little here. The adminstration did say things like that Saddam is evil and the Iraqi people would be better off with him removed, which are both true, and even factual on a cognitivist theory of morality. Ignore these claims. I'm sure most readers believed them then, and don't regret believing them now. The claims about the military capacities and threats of the Iraqis are what we care about here. The basic administration line, recall, was that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to the U.S. and that they were so weak militarily that a few thousand soldiers and some smart bombs should see them out. It's the parts of that line that I'm focussing on.) Many people, for example, believed what Colin Powell said at his presentation at the U.N. about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capacity, and I'm sure some of them regret so doing. I think many of these people could have, if they had tried hard enough, remained sceptical about these claims. They could have retained a sceptical doubt even in the face of apparently sincere assertion by Sec. Powell. If they couldn't have done just this, their regret would be at least a little misplaced. Not entirely, since we can regret things that are outside our voluntary control, but a little I suspect. And I think this kind of situation is one in which we often find ourselves. It's natural to take things at face value, to believe what people say, but we don't have to do this, and we often shouldn't.

That's all we need I think to salvage a deontological conception of justification. We don't need that people can believe at will. We don't even need that people can doubt at will. We just need that there are procedures we can use, the kinds of procedures we teach students in critical reasoning courses, that if properly carried out will lead to doubt and hence not to belief. If the agent could have carried out these procedures, but believes anyway, then s/he is culpable, because her/his belief is in the relevant sense under her/his voluntary control - it was within her/his power to not have that belief.

That much I think is fairly moderate. The radical bit is where I try and turn this into an argument that one can generate beliefs just as easily as one can destroy them. But I might leave that for a different late night blog.

2003-05-26T22:55:00.000-04:00

I complain about there being no papers up and I get two emails in a day letting me know about new sites with papers.

The CAPPE working papers site has five new papers up, all on issues around applied ethics and political philosophy. I'll officially write up the papers blog report on this tomorrow, but just in case anyone doesn't want to wait until that long, follow that link!

UPDATE: I posted before reading the papers, and I might have created a slightly misleading impression about their subject matter. Let me correct that. Three of the papers are about applied ethics and political philosophy broadly construed, the other two aren't, unless we have a very broad construal. So rather than my summary, I'll just copy the abstracts. Both the following papers are by Neil Levy.

Responsibility for Belief
Many contemporary philosophers defend a deontological conception of epistemic justification. However, the viability of such a conception seems to depend crucially upon agents being able to exert control over their beliefs. I examine various attempts to show, either that the deontological concept does not require doxastic voluntarism, or that doxastic voluntarism is true. These attempts all fail. I claim that this demonstrates that the range of appropriate ascriptions of responsibility for belief is very limited: epistemic recklessness is the only kind of doxastic responsibility there is.
A Dilemma For Libertarians
To the extent that indeterminacy intervenes between our reasons for action and our decisions, intentions and actions, our freedom seems to be reduced, not enhanced. Free will becomes nothing more than the power to choose irrationally. In recognition of this problem, recent libertarians have suggested that free will is paradigmatically manifested only in actions for which we have reasons for both or all the alternatives. In these circumstances, however we choose we choose rationally. Against this kind of account of approach, most fully developed by Robert Kane, critics have pressed the demand for contrastive explanations. Kane has responded by arguing that the demand does not need to be met: responsibility for an action does not require that there is a contrastive explanation of that action. However, this responses proves too much: it implies that agents are responsible not only for the actions they choose, but also for their counterfactual actions which were equally available to them.

If it wasn't for people prepared to comment on topics without anything like sufficient grounds, making summaries of papers without reading them, drawing conclusions about the philosophical acumen of unknown referees on the basis of apparently dubious recommendations, and so on, blogs would never get written. But we do make mistakes this way sometimes.

2003-05-26T15:43:00.000-04:00

No papers blog today because there's nothing to report. Well, except for a strange result where somehow my webtracking program somehow managed to log into Ingenta as an ANU user. I've got no idea how that happened, but if I didn't have in Ingenta account anyway I'd be interested in finding out how.

Actually, it's not true that there's no news. The 674 pages I was tracking had nothing to report, but there is a 675th which is worthy of note. Andy Egan, one of the group of 617 bloggers, now has a papers page with papers about pie-throwing and being being green. Be warned - they are Geocities sites so you will want to have popup blockers turned to industrial strength before you visit.

2003-05-25T14:26:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up. It's a low quantity but (very) high quality day, with new postings by Jay Wallace, John Burgess and Gilbert Harman. Harman's posting is a web-only discussion of why mentalism became so dominant in linguistics in the last 30 odd years, and is well-worth reading for those who need a primer on the history of this area.

It strikes me that the reviews of the AJP articles I posted last night were somewhat more negative than I intended. The tone of the discussions of the McArthur and Hand papers, in particular, was not exactly what I intended first time around. I do think McArthur should have compared his position to Quine's, and I think he still makes too big a role for sensations in evidence, even if they constitute evidence rather than being the contents of evidential claims, but there's lots of points in his paper that it is worthwhile to make, including a lot that about the history of the relationship between scepticism and indirect realism that I suspect will be news to several readers. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that he should have referred to unpublished papers by Brown graduate students, even superstar Brown graduate students. When I was writing the note I thought that might be obvious, but on second reading it didn't look as obvious as I intend. And Hand's paper is an interesting solution to the knowability paradox, even if as I think it doesn't give us everything an anti-realist may have wanted. And I've already edited the Varzi entry which was borderline libellous, which I guess was unwarranted, and it's been changed. (Normally the rule is that even mistakes stay on the blog, but I make the rules so I get to make the exceptions to them too.)

On that topic, I wonder if it is possible to libel someone you don't know. If I say that the F is G, where being G is some quite disreputable property, and some of my readers know who the F is, could I have thereby libelled the F even if I don't know who s/he is? Assume that the speaker meaning of my utterance is clearly attributive in Donnellan's sense. Does this make a difference? What if I say that all Fs are Gs, not knowing any Fs. Have I libelled all Fs? What if I say that some Fs are Gs and some of the readers know that there is exactly one F? If the official answer to the last question is no while the official answer to the first question is yes, can I use Zoltan Szabo's theory of definite descriptions (that they are semantically but not pragmatically equivalent to indefinite descriptions) as part of my defence?

2003-05-25T01:17:00.001-04:00

AJP Day

Just for fun I decided to actually read the edition of the AJP in which I have two entries, and see what fun things we can find. And there's quite a bit, as we'll see.

Jennifer McKitrick, A Case for Extrinsic Dispositions

I never understood why people say dispositions have to be intrinsic properties, and McKitrick apparently hasn't either. But she's actually done something about it. She starts with six examples of dispositions that look fairly extrinsic: the power to open a particular door, weight, the disposition to dissolve the contents of my pocket, vulnerability, visibility to humans, recognisability. (I'd been meaning to write something about vulnerability as an example of an extrinsic disposition. I was rather comprehensively beaten to the punch here.) Some of these look fairly artificial, though McKitrick does have arguments that even hackneyed examples of extrinsic dispositions should still be enough to refute the theory that all dispositions are extrinsic.

McKitrick considers several objections to the claim that these are examples of extrinsic dispositions. The strongest response is that although the properties are picked out relationally, they are in fact intrinsic properties. (For more on relational expressions that denote intrinsic properties, see my Stanford entry on intrinsic properties.) It's very important to be aware of this distinction, but it doesn't seem to be relevant here, at least in some cases.

What was most interesting to me about this wasn't whether some dispositions are extrinsic, because I think McKitrick is obviously right, but what we can learn from considering tests for extrinsicness about the content of ordinary terms. So let's assume that Earth, Moon and Travel are all people, and they are all, miraculously, intrinsic duplicates. Earth and Travel live on earth, and Moon on the moon. Earth and Moon are home right now, while Travel is currently holidaying on the moon. Which of the following three sentences seem to be true?

(1) Earth weighs more than Moon.
(2) Earth weighs more than Travel.
(3) Travel weighs more than Moon.

I think my intuitions here are inconsistent - (1) is true but neither (2) nor (3) is true. It's consistent to say (1) is determinately true while neither (2) nor (3) is determinately true, and of course if you don't assume 'weighs' is linear you can just say (1) is true and (2) and (3) are false. But it is hard to work out. I hoped that thinking about these cases would clarify a tricky question. If weight is extrinsic, which I think it is, what is it sensitive to? McKitrick assumes/stipulates, following Yablo, that it is sensitive to where you currently are. I think it's more plausible that it's sensitive to where you normally are. McKitrick's version would have (2) true and (3) false, mine would have (3) true and (2) false. Intuition says, well I think intuition says it wants a holiday.

The vulnerability example really is very strong. If Athens and Olympus are intrinsic duplicates, but Athens is close to the sea and vulnerable to a sea-based attack, while Olympus is in the mountains and only reachable overland, then (4) is very plausible.

(4) Athens is more vulnerable than Olympus.

If Sparta has no plans to attack Olympus, and they have no weapons that can be transported overland to Olympus, and the gods favour Olympus and would instantly smite anyone who dares attack it, then I guess (4) is even more plausible.

There's a really geeky reason, even by philosophical standards, for thinking that dispositions are extrinsic. One might think that a wine glass is fragile in virtue of the intrinsic structure of its chemical bonds or the like. There's a McKitrick style argument for its fragility being extrinsic. Imagine a duplicate of it in rubber-walled room world, where literally all the surfaces are bouncy. Is that glass fragile? Maybe not! But there's also a geeky reason. Consider a large part of the glass that consists of all of it minus a small chip off the base. I think this object (a) exists, (b) is not a glass and (c) is not fragile. I think it's possible that the glass could be the only fragile thing on the table, so parts of the glass are not fragile. But a stand-alone duplicate of the glass, a glass as it were with a chip off the old base, is fragile. Conclusion: fragility is extrinsic.

2003-05-25T01:17:00.000-04:00

David McArthur, McDowell, Scepticism and the 'Veil of Perception'

This was a little less interesting because it was more familiar. Short version: direct realism doesn't refute scepticism because the appeal to sense-data in traditional sceptical arguments was inessential. This story is fairly familiar around these parts, because it's well told by (among others) Juan Comesana. McArthur's retelling of the sceptical argument just relies on the fact that causal processes play a role in our gaining evidence about the world, something the anti-sceptic can hardly deny because it's part of what science - the anti-sceptics best friend - tells us is true. That should sound familiar too; it's how Quine starts Roots of Reference, though Quine doesn't get mentioned in McArthur's paper.

2003-05-25T01:16:00.002-04:00

Achille Varzi, Perdurantism, Universalism and Quantifiers

The other day Kai von Fintel mentioned Geoff Pullum's wonderful book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, a collection of Pullum's TOPIC...COMMENT columns from NLLT. So naturally I went back and reread all the columns. I think my colleagues thought I was sadistically laughing over the grades I was giving the logic students, when in fact I was just rereading the saga of the Campaign for Typographical Freedom, and the fables about the syntactician who worked on his theory while his colleague tried hitting on cute graduate students. Good times.

Several of the columns are about features that journals should have but often do not. One of the more radical suggestions is that journals should print the names of referees who recommend accepting papers. One of the merits of that is that when you the reader disagree with a decision to publish a paper, you know who to blame.

Varzi's trying to show that the combination of perdurantism (temporal parts everywhere) and universalism about fusions leads to odd semantic results. Now you might suspect this is not going to be a very plausible argument, because neither perdurantism nor universalism are semantic theories, so it is somewhat hard to see how they could lead to any semantic results, let alone odd ones. And you'd be right, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The problems arise because (2) is meant to be analysed as (4).

(2) x was/is/will be P
(4) There is a past/present/future time such that the t-part of x exists and is P

(4) leads to problems because of objects such as the current temporal part of Pavarotti and the past temporal parts of a turnip. By (4) this is a tenor. By (4) again it was a turnip. So some tenor was a turnip. But no tenor was a turnip. So perdurantism+universalism (PU for short) is false.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell from a quick survey of the world, no PU theorist accepts (4). Most PU theorists think that being a tenor is a property of fusions of temporal parts, worms as we call them, not of single temporal parts, or stages. It is the fusion of Pavarotti's temporal parts that is a tenor, not any one of his temporal parts.

There's a response to this line of reasoning (or something like it), where Varzi says that it would be very complex to make every predicate 'maximal' in the way that we have to do on this view. Maybe it would be complex, but if you consider the alternative I think you'll agree that English made the right choice in making all of its predicates maximal in this way.

What about those perdurantists (Sider, Hawley, perhaps etc.) who think that properties like being a tenor are properties of individual temporal parts. They might accept the middle third of (4), the part about 'present'. Most PU theorists won't accept even that, but Sider and Hawley do. But they don't accept the bits about the past and the future. They believe something like (4') analyses x was P.

(4') There is a past temporal counterpart of x that is (or perhaps was) P

Since no turnip part is a past temporal counterpart of Pavarotti, we still don't get that some tenors were turnips. So the argument here is only telling against the conjunction of PU with a semantic theory that no PU theorist accepts.

UPDATE: When I first wrote this last night it was a little more intemperate in parts, perhaps even impolite. This was probably uncalled for, especially given the relative quality of some of my published work. For some reason papers that confuse metaphysics and semantics, or even seem to possibly instantiate such a confusion, seem to generate reactions in your humble blogger that are normally only caused by John Ashcroft. So in the cold light of day, and after a few friendly suggestions from friends, editors, DHS officers and doctors, I've toned it down a little, and what you see is the edited version.

2003-05-25T01:16:00.001-04:00

Laura and Francois Schroter, A Slim Semantics for Thin Moral Terms?

This is an entirely negative piece. It's just making a couple of objections to Ralph Wedgwood's paper Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms. The main objection seems to be that if (P) and (I) are the right conceptual role rules for 'pain' and 'intend', then Ralph's version of Peacocke's version of conceptual role semantics leads to crazy meaning postulates, in particular meaning postulates for 'pain' and 'intend' that involve normativity. (I'd try and summarise why this is so, but it would take about five pages - and I'd mostly be plagiarising.)

(P) Being in pain commits one to accepting 'I am in pain' (should the question arise).
(I) Intending to do x commits one to accepting 'I intend to do x' (should the question arise).

But neither of these look very plausible to me. Both of these seem to suppose that certain mental states (pain in the first instance, intention in the second) are luminous. And there are very few luminous states, if any. Either that, or they suppose that we are committed to accepting things that we are in no position to know. Neither claim seems right. The broader objection that the Schroters are trying to make, that Wedgwood's theory seems to lead to normativity turning up where it ain't wanted, looks like it could be plausible. But the examples they use don't work to make that point.

2003-05-25T01:16:00.000-04:00

Michael Hand, Knowability and Epistemic Truth

Another paper on the knowability paradox. Hand's theory is that the anti-realist shouldn't be committed to the knowability of p & ~Kp because all anti-realism requires is that "for each truth there must be a procedure, determined by the proposition's structure and properly composed of verificatory steps each of which we can perform." It doesn't require that we can perform each of the steps, and performability doesn't distribute across conjunctions. This seems to avoid the paradox, but the version of anti-realism we are left with is quite weak. It seems impossible, on Hand's view, that All numbers are F could be undecidable even though every instance of Fn is decidable. After all, if Fn is decidable for all n, then there is a procedure, an infinite procedure but a procedure, properly composed (whatever that means) of verificatory steps each of which we can perform. But maybe Hand isn't worried about this kind of anti-realism.

2003-05-25T01:15:00.002-04:00

Andy Hamilton, 'Scottish Commonsense about Memory'

Er, I skipped this one. There's so much stuff about Reid around Brown that I couldn't read another Reid paper. I used to have a ban on reading papers about externalism and self-knowledge, I've dropped that so I need something else to block. Reid it seems is it.

2003-05-25T01:15:00.001-04:00

Alan Baker, Does the Existence of Mathematical Objects Make a Difference?

Consider the following question, directly quoted from Baker's paper

Surely it is obvious that mathematical objects—if acausal and non-spatio-temporal—make no difference to the arrangement of the concrete world?

What position would you say is supported by someone who answers 'no' to that question? Baker thinks it is the view that mathematical objects make no difference to the world. Or at least that's what I think he thinks. None of this matters to the overall theme of the paper, which is better construed as looking at 'yes' and 'no' answers to its titular question. Baker thinks none of the arguments for either answer to this question are any good.

The first argument for 'no' is a direct appeal to what would happen if mathematical objects went away. This is fairly obviously question-begging. It isn't obviously coherent either. If mathematical objects are non-spatio-temporal, how could they just go away at a particular time.

The second argument is Mark Balauger's argument that mathematical objects make no causal difference to the world so they make no difference to the world. But there's little argument for why causal difference is the only kind of difference that can make a difference.

Cheyne and Pigden argue for the 'yes' answer by using 'mixed mathematical facts' like There are three cigarette butts in the ashtray. But this doesn't really show what we cared about, which is whether pure mathematical facts, like 2+3=5, could make a difference to the world.

Baker argues that the right answer to the question may depend on whether mathematical objects are indispensible for science. If they are dispensible, then by Lewis's theory of world-similarity, the nearest world in which there are no mathematical objects will probably be just like this world in its 'concrete' aspects. In that case, it is reasonable to say mathematical objects don't make a difference. But if they are dispensible, then there may be no fact of the matter about which is the 'closest' possible world in which there are no numbers, hence there is no fact of the matter about what things would be like if there were no numbers, hence there is no fact of the matter about whether the world would be different without mathematical objects. So the principle that mathematical objects make no difference to the world cannot be relied upon without a prior argument for dispensibility, which is bad news for those nominalists who want to so use it without proving dispensibility first.

I don't know the background literature here that well, and I was a little sceptical about using Lewis's theory of counterfactuals so far from the cases for which it was designed, but this seemed like a pretty good paper all in all.

2003-05-25T01:15:00.000-04:00

Kris McDaniel, Against Maxcon Simples

UMass Amherst has a pretty good recent record of turning out metaphysicians, and McDaniel is the next potential star coming off the assembly line. This paper is an argument against Ned Markosian's view that a physical object is a simple iff it is spatio-temporally continuous and maximal. (That is, there is no larger region spatio-temporal region that contains the object and is entirely occupied.) This looks like a pretty wild view. Surely my television has parts - the screen, the box, the controls etc - even though it is spatio-temporally continuous. Or at least I think it's continuous. Defining what this comes to in a quantum world is non-trivial I guess.

McDaniel has some more serious arguments against Markosian's position. The arguments are quite detailed, so I won't detail them all here. Some of the arguments involve complications involve relativity. Others involve getting clear on just how complicated constitution must be if Markosian's view is right. And finally he notes that there's a problem of spatial intrinsics for Markosian's view, so Markosian must sometimes make ordinary predication relative to spatial location in the way that some endurantists make it relative to temporal location. All good stuff, and a worthwhile paper. I suspect when McDaniel gets to writing his positive papers, which will be defending a brutalist view of simples, the arguments will also be very good.

2003-05-25T01:14:00.001-04:00

Brian Weatherson, Endurantism, Parasites and Vague Names

What more can I say?!

2003-05-25T01:14:00.000-04:00

Reviews

Well, I didn't read all of them, but here are the highlights.

David Armstrong positively reviews Resemblance Nominalism - A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra. I have a memory of reading a brutally bad review of this book, which I was hoping to find somewhere to compare it to Armstrong's positive review, but it doesn't appear to be anywhere online. Or if it is I couldn't find it with Google. I wonder if this is good evidence or just weak evidence that the review never existed. Anyone who remembers a similar review should let me know. Anyway, today's news is that Armstrong liked Rodriguez-Pereyra's book which is a non-trivial endorsement.

Ryan Wasserman reviewed Katherine Hawley's How Things Persist. He thought Hawley was unfair in her characterisation of (non-stage-theorist) perdurantists. I think Hawley's way of dividing up the territory into endurantists, perdurantists and stage theorists is misleading, because the dispute between the endurantist and the other two is metaphysical and the dispute between stage theorists and (what she calls) perdurantists is semantic, and metaphysical debates and semantic debates are not really very similar. (I may have said that somewhere before.) Anyway, Wasserman makes an odd claim, one a little too close to (4) above I think. He says that proper temporal parts of tennis balls are themselves tennis balls, because they fill most of the tennis ball functional role. This is a mistake, since it blocks one from making the most natural response to the problem of the many. So I think some of Wasserman's criticisms of Hawley's criticisms of what, as far as I can tell, is the correct view are misguided. Hawley has, I think, isolated some odd features of the correct view. Still, she hasn't given us any reason to think the correct view is not, at the end of the day, correct.

Graham Nerlich 'warmly recommends' Ted Sider's prize-winning Four Dimensionalism. He doesn't quite agree with Ted about the relative plausibility of the nine arguments for perdurantism that Ted surveys, nor with the claim that the last three are entirely original (I suspect Ted didn't cite Nerlich as much as some reviewer(s) thought he should) but he still thinks it is an excellent book overall.

I review Roy Sorensen's Vagueness and Contradiction. The review is my usual mealy-mouthed it has some good features but why doesn't the author agree more with my view how could they not see how clever and good it is kind of review. The book has some good features but I think Roy should agree with my view on more issues.

Jim Edwards reviews two new introductory(ish) books about Michael Dummett, and clearly prefers Bernard Weiss's over Karen Green's, largely because Weiss's is more often just about Dummett. Green's book does have the nice advantage of at least having a complete Dummett bibliography though.

2003-05-24T19:06:00.000-04:00

I just found out (via Pekka Väyrynen) that Ethics is available online. The latest edition prints the proceedings of the Moore conference at Georgia State last year, and the papers look very interesting. I didn't previously know that Ethics was online, so I didn't report on this on the papers blog when it appeared. So for all the people out there who only know about journals because I report them, this edition now exists.

Thanks to Pekka for the tip on this.

2003-05-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up. I misread the reports last night. In fact there were only two new journals, Bioethics and the AJP.

2003-05-24T05:43:00.000-04:00

This is a first - I've got two things in one issue of a journal. The latest AJP has a little note on one of the (many) difficulties epistemicism has with vague names, and my review of Sorensen's Vagueness and Contradiction is also there.

Many journals seem to have appeared yesterday, but it's still sort of the middle of the night so I won't try reporting on them all now. (–So why were you up at all? –Super 12 Final. Sport from the home part of the world is always on at wacky times over here.)

2003-05-23T15:31:00.000-04:00

I updated by reply to Patrick Greenough's Mind article on vagueness. The current version owes quite a bit to conversations with Matti Eklund, and more than a bit to Cian Dorr's excellent paper Vagueness without Ignorance. I'm not sure I haven't infringed on any copyrights between the amount I've borrowed from the two of them. Anyway, the paper makes a little more sense now than it did. The 'arguments' are at least arranged in some kind of order, in the previous draft they sort of fell on top of each other.

2003-05-23T13:47:00.000-04:00

Daniel Davies's summary of recent rightwing political philosophy.

As I've posted earlier, the single most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was JK Galbraith's aphorism that the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been "the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness". Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is "what I have, I keep". Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that "what I have, I keep" is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven't yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem. But at base, the test of someone's politics is simple; if their political aim is to advance all of humanity, they're on our side, while if they have an overriding constraint that the current owners of property must always be satisfied first, they're playing for the opposition. Hypocrisy doesn't really enter into the equation with rightwing politics; you don't (or shouldn't) get any extra points for being sincere about being selfish.

That seems unfair, inflammatory, simplistic and, on the whole, true.

2003-05-23T12:13:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Ted Sider on winning the 2003 APA Book Prize for his excellent book Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. Well done Ted!

2003-05-23T12:09:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up. Lots of people seem to be using the end of semester to make updates to papers, or to proofread their webpages, so there's lots of pages reporting as having changed, and not that many new papers. I hope I didn't miss any in the scan through.

2003-05-22T17:09:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up with just a couple of papers to note.

The blog has been quiet for a few days for a couple of reasons. First, I've been, er, relaxing a bit more than usual now that semester is over. Second, my non-relaxing time has mostly been spent refereeing, which doesn't exactly lend itself to bloggable material. Some of my reports read a lot like blog entries I fear, but that doesn't mean I can use them on the blog. Hopefully normal service will resume shortly.

What won't be resuming any time soon is the RSS feed, which seems to have just crashed. I'll have to find a better way to get an RSS feed. Maybe Blogger Pro is the answer.

UPDATE: The RSS feed still seems to be working, though I'm not sure for how long that will continue. The problem with using technology you don't understand is that you don't know when things are about to go wrong.

2003-05-21T14:06:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up. Lots of good stuff today: philosophy of mathematics, quantifiers in variable-free semantics, Byzantine philosophy (or the lack thereof), and two good Stanford entries on moral philosophy.

2003-05-20T15:21:00.000-04:00

Around the Blogs

Some columnists have been known to refer to letters columns, where they print reader letters and their reaction to them, as the 'cripple stick'. Now we couldn't use a term like that in these PC days and get away with it, and I don't get enough blog related mail to really have a letters column, but I can do the next best thing - a long post entirely about other people's posts.

Wo has posted the second part of his review of Fiction and Metaphysics. He has lots of good arguments against the idea that there are dependent objects in Thomasson's sense. One of those good arguments is a bare-faced denial of the necessity of origin. Woo hoo!

Philosophers Imprint has posted a new paper. (Finally!) It's by Timothy Schroder. Here's the abstract.

Donald Davidson's theory of mind is widely regarded as a normative theory. This is a something of a confusion. Once a distinction has been made between the categorisation scheme of a norm and the norm's force-maker, it becomes clear that a Davidsonian theory of mind is not a normative theory after all. Making clear the distinction, applying it to Davidson's theory of mind, and showing its significance are the main purposes of this paper. In the concluding paragraphs, a sketch is given of how a truly normative Davidsonian theory of mind might be formulated.

I like internet publishing, but I wish PI was (a) more voluminous and (b) easier to navigate. (Does anyone anyone disagree with (b). I've heard nothing but complaints about the site design. I think people at Michigan must be better at navigating complex web pages that we plebians.)

Kai von Fintel discusses the Schock Prize in logic and philosophy, a sort of Nobel Prize for philosophers without the attendant prestige, prize money or, it seems, fame. This was very exciting, although it would be nice if more people knew of it.

(By the way, the Geoff Pullum article he mentions is in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, although I can't find it online either. If you haven't read about the Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, or about the debates over Chomskian grammar in cell block D of the Santa Cruz County Prison, I highly recommend this little book. If I could write that well, I probably wouldn't be writing so much for free here.)

Blogosophy (great name - even better than Gavagai I'm afraid) links to this summary of the history of philosophy as told through the works of Monty Python. It's a talk by Gary Hardcastle, and while it is incredibly amusing, I couldn't really understand the plot line. Roughly, the history of the 20th century goes like this. First there were bad metaphysicians. Then the positivists came in and killed all the metaphysicians with their invincible verification theory of meaning. Then some fool went and hit the self-destruct button on the weapon. But ignore that. Then Quine showed that if meaning was verification conditions, then meaning holism followed. So we concluded that meaning was not verification conditions, and that holism about meaning was true. The last step is what I didn't get. I know the old modus ponens/modus tollens choice can be hard in practice, but (outside Australia) it's never an option to pick BOTH. Still, it's all very funny.

Finally, Invisible Adjuct discusses (without endorsing!) a proposal to solve the job market crisis in academic history by cutting entry-level salaries. Apparently entry level salaries in history are around $40,000, which strikes me as pretty low already. It's a lot less than I get, for example, and if you ask me I'm underpaid by half.

From my very limited knowledge of the data, I think what's most striking about entry level salaries isn't their level, but their lack of spread. I'm told that the salary of a superstar full professor at a top department will often be double or more the salary of a mediocre, but perfectly competent, full professor at a mid-major department. I'm not told, and I doubt it's true, that the salaries of superstar new hires are double or more the median starting salary. There could be good explanations for this, but I suspect in terms of their marginal value the superstar new PhD adds is well above their cost of hiring.

One explanation for this could be that there is much more uncertainty about the quality of newly minted PhDs than there is of established stars. If that were true it would justify the salary structure. It would be bad, after all, to pay megabucks to someone who didn't end up publishing as much as a well-written blog entry in their career. But I really doubt the underlying premise here, that we don't have enough evidence to know how well junior faculty will do. If you look at the junior faculty hired by, say, Princeton or NYU the last few years, or for that matter look down the roster of the 617 blog, it is hard to believe that they will be flameouts anytime soon. It's more likely that a senior person will start to rest on their laurels, to basically republish their old ideas, or just quit publishing at all, than that a 'can't-miss' propsect will not work out. That's especially true if the prospect is from a program that encourages being very philosophically active, and writing and publishing from a young age. This is one of Brown's strengths as a PhD program I think, but in this respect it isn't unusual among New England schools - MIT and UMass are fairly similar. But now I'm discussing philosophy prospects as if they were power-hitting shortstops for a Red Sox farm team again, so I better go back to doing some real work.

UPDATE: I had included here a link to an entry by Sam Quigley on the importance of internet publishing in academia these days, but that post has had to be removed for various reasons (good reasons on Sam's part, I hasten to add) so I've deleted the link to it. The summary of it (i.e. my link, not Sam's post) was that in my position as editor of the philosophy papers blog I would soon become a Very Important Philosopher because of the rising importance of being cited in high-traffic web spheres. Some have suggested that I would be more powerful, in this role, than the editorial board of the Philosophical Review. Others have suggested, more plausibly, that I'd be more powerful than the faculty of the Sage School. Anyway, the entire evidential support for these claims has now vanished into the e-ther, so you shouldn't take them seriously.

I can't reconstruct how I managed to do it the first time around, but I had somehow worked a link to my paper on Williamson's anti-luminosity argument into the original entry without it seeming entirely gratuitous. Consider that done here.

2003-05-20T10:49:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up, featuring papers by Greg Restall and Ed Zalta.

2003-05-19T21:05:00.000-04:00

The 617 blog seems to have gone quiet after a noisy beginning, so let's try to resolve one of the puzzles they left us with last week. The issue is, roughly, What is a group? Groups are identified by examples, e.g. the group of people writing the 617 blog, and we are left to figure out their metaphysical status.

The problem arises because groups are neither fusions of their members nor sets of their members. There's a good argument and a bad argument for each of these conclusions. Fortunately one good argument is enough in each case.

Groups are not fusions. The bad argument is that fusions have their parts essentially while groups could gain and lose members. The problem with this is that the premise, that fusions have their parts essentially, has some weaknesses. It is rather controversial, for one thing. For another, it is false. The good argument is that not all parts of the fusion are parts of the group. As they say, Sarah's nose is part of the fusion of 617 bloggers, it is not part of the group of 617 bloggers.

Groups are not sets. Again, the bad argument relies on essentialism about membership, and I won't describe it in detail. The good argument is that sets are extensional, while groups are intensional. If the 617 bloggers, all 10 of them, form a nudist a capella group, call it the Bare Plurals, that would be a different group to the group of 617 bloggers, even if they are co-extensional. The group of bloggers could survive all of its members catching permanent laryngitis, the Bare Plurals could not.

The two arguments put some interesting restrictions on what groups must be. The way they are constructed out of their parts must be set-like, not fusion-like, so Sarah is a distinctive part of the group in the way that Sarah's nose is not. But the group cannot just be a set, because it has certain modal properties that are not recoverable merely from the membership list.

The way forward is to note that even though groups are intensional rather than extensional, two groups could actually have the same members, there is no reason to think groups are hyper-intensional. That is, there is no reason to think that two different groups could have the same members in all possible worlds. So there is nothing stopping us identifying groups with functions from worlds to sets of individuals. If the group of 617 bloggers is a function f, we solve the problem of Sarah's nose by noting that Sarah is an element of f(@), while Sarah's nose is not. And we solve the problem of the Bare Plurals by noting that there could be a distinct function g such that f(@)=g(@). In short, functions from worlds to sets of individuals lets us say that groups are in some way constructed out of their (actual and possible) members and are not new mysterious entities without falling into the problems associated with saying groups are either fusions or sets.

Now these functions should seem familiar. Andy Egan has argued in a few places (but not, to the best of someone's knowledge, online) that properties are functions from worlds to sets of individuals. Putting it all together, we get the conclusion that groups are properties.

2003-05-19T12:57:00.000-04:00

Some days I think it would be nice to work somewhere where I could travel between home and work without being treated like a criminal suspect en route. Sadly, this is not possible as long as one works in America.

2003-05-19T11:54:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up, 24 hours or more late and with all the entries being by semanticists. One of the entries, Christopher Potts's dissertation on conventional implicature, looks particularly exciting. (It was even more exciting when Kai von Fintel announced it was up.) Potts argues that some terms do carry conventional implicatures, but but, therefore and most of the terms which you usually suspect of having conventional implicatures are not amongst them. The main examples he uses are terms with 'expressive' content. I remember Stephen Barker arguing for something like this about moral terms and conventional implicature a few years ago, but I can't find a reference to that online somewhere.

All of you who are struggling to write up a dissertation probably shouldn't read the first paragraph of Potts's dissertation. He says that the dissertation grew out of a discussion in a seminar in Spring 2002. That's not much over 12 months ago, and the dissertation is 330 pages long!

2003-05-19T11:33:00.000-04:00

Wo has a very good review posted of Amie Thomasson's Fiction and Metaphysics. He is rather clear about a few of the worries I have been rather unclear about here the last week or two. In particular, I think the examples of sentences he gives that are neither 'fictional' nor 'serious' in Thomasson's sense are a problem for the theory. And I worry a lot about the indeterminate existence point he makes at the end. Portrait of the Artist has lots of examples of 'characters' who might or might not be real people. If they are not real, they are closely modelled on real people - but I take it that's consistent with actually being a character in Thomasson's sense.

2003-05-18T13:15:00.000-04:00

This feels a little dated now (it's from last Tuesday), but Daniel Davies has an excellent and long-ish post about data mining. (Permalinks are outdated, you'll have to scroll down to An Impudent Suggestion.)

It's impossible to do it justice in a short summary, so I'll just note one point that might be especially relevant to this audience. (I think philosophers should all care about the finer points of econometrics, but I expect few readers agree.) It turns out philosophers of science get paid some attention by econometricians. Davies links to Hsiang-Ke Chao's paper Professor Hendry’s Econometric Methodology Reconsidered: Congruence and Structural Empiricism, which argues that "the LSE methodology [a particular approach to econometric modelling]... is compatible with the “structural empiricism” of van Fraassen." Who knew that people who get paid serious money to model the economy actually read philosophers, let alone care whether their approaches are consistent with pronouncements of said philosophers? Who knew?

I think I've just found another topic for my philosophy of economics seminar next Spring...

2003-05-18T01:04:00.000-04:00

One of the perils of having a CD Jukebox is that CDs occasionally get lost. I thought my copies of Rubber Soul and Bringing It all Back Home were gone forever, and I'd even started scrounging around for cheap replacements, until they turned up out of order in an obscure part of the collection. Good times. Bringing It all Back Home is just about the perfect Dylan album. The lyrics are a treasure trove of incredible images and familiar if noteworthy truths.

Well, I wish I was on some
Australian mountain range.
Oh, I wish I was on some
Australian mountain range.
I got no reason to be there, but I
Imagine it would be some kind of change.

I'd say it was the best Dylan album, but Shaun Carney's gentle mockery of making lists like that, or even starting them, has convinced me otherwise. Carney's piece is great, but he can't possibly be right about Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, I hope. (You'll have to read the article to find out what he's hopefully wrong about - it's too disturbing to repeat here and this is family website.)

But there's more to Bringing It all Back Home than its list-topping virtues. I've been wondering, as part of my ongoing concern about fictional realism, just what it takes for a character in a song to be real. I presume that if novels can really contain characters, so can songs, especially explicitly fictional songs. Frankee Lee and Judas Priest are just as real as Neo and Zaphod Beeblebrox. But what does it take for a character in a song to exist. I won't include all the lyrics here, but read through Bob Dylan's 115th Dream and see how many characters you think exist in virtue of that song's existence.

Does reality include Captain Arab and is he also a character in Moby Dick? Does it include

The cop?
The Gurnsey cow?
The people carrying signs around?
The cook?
The waitress (sic)?
The bank staff?
The girl from France?
Her friend?
His newly-acquired boots?
The proto-Bentsenite limb-tearer?
The Fabulous Englishman?
The funeral director?
The bowling ball?
The pay phone?
Its foot?
The coin?
The coastguard boat?
Its crew?
The parking ticket?
The Pope of Eruke?
The deputy sherriff of the jail?
His (or her) Cetacean spouse?
And, last but not least, Columbus?

My little self-waged campaign to embarrass myself out of believing in fictional objects is starting to work I fear.

2003-05-17T20:39:00.000-04:00

This is a history post. So those of you with no interest in history of philosophy, or with no confidence in my abilities as a historian might want to skip to the next post.

In my Problem of the Many article in the Stanford Encyclopaedia I said that the problem could be traced to two sources: the third edition of Geach's Reference and Generality and Unger's article The Problem of the Many, both from 1980. I was somewhat surprised to learn when doing the research for this that the problem was not in earlier versions of Reference and Generality, so Geach doesn't get a clear claim to priority over Unger. At the time I was fairly confident that these were the earliest versions of the problem. All the contemporary articles seemed to trace the problem back to Geach and/or Unger, and no one cited anything earlier than that. And I certainly hadn't found anything earlier than 1980, though one wouldn't want to rest too much weight on my historical acumen.

I think, though I haven't checked this with the principals, that the problem was independently discovered by Unger and by Geach. In any case, I have no reason to suspect otherwise, and since both versions came out roundabout the same time and neither cites the other it seems reasonable to conclude that this was a process of simultaneous independent discovery.

I now think that there's an earlier statement of the problem, in more or less its modern form. And I also think, contra what I said in the Stanford article, that the over-population solution to the Problem of the Many has been seriously defended. (Hud Hudson attributes this solution to David Lewis, but I think he's being too charitable there.) Both conclusions derive from this passage from a 1976 article by Jaegwon Kim. The context is that Kim is trying to deflect the objection that his theory of events leads to too many events. His response is, roughly, that all sorts of plausible philosophical theories lead to implausible counting results.

The analogy with tables and other sundry physical objects may still help us here. We normally count this as one table; and there are just so many (a fixed number of) tables in this room. However, if you beleve in the calculus of individuals, you will see that included in this table ia another table - in fact, there are indefinitely many tables each of which is aprper part of this table. For consider the table with one micrometer of its top removed; that is a table difference from this table; and so on.
It would be absurd to say that for this reason we must say that there are in fact indefinitely many tables in this room. What I am suggesting is merely that the sense in which, under the structured complex view of events, there are indefinitely many strolls strolled by Sebastian may be just as harmless as the sense in which there are indefinitely many tables in this room.

I think that's pretty much exactly the problem of the many. Note that despite the talk of 'removing' one micrometer of the top of the table, the reference to the calculus of individuals makes it clear that Kim just cares about what objects are here now, not what objects could be here. What he's assuming, falsely I now think, is that table is an intrinsic property so the fact that if we did shave off a micrometer we'd clearly have still a table means that the mereological difference between the table now and the bits of wood that would, in that case, be so shaved is also a table. And he's inferring, I think, that since it would be absurd to give up our ordinary practice of talking as if there's exactly one table here because of these metaphysical speculations, there must be some pragmatic mechanism that makes this talk acceptable. Note in this context the exact wording of the first sentence of the second quoted paragraph. He doesn't say that this is an absurd reason to think there are indefinitely many tables here. It is really, but he thinks it's actually quite a good reason. He thinks it is an absurd reason to say that there are indefinitely many tables here. Presumably pragmatics must be doing a fair bit of work to bridge the gap between truth and assertion.

Kim's paper Events as Property Abstractions was first published in Action Theory, edited by Myles Brand and Douglas Walton, Reidel 1976, pp 159-77. That volume was a collection of papers presented at the Winnipeg Conference on Human Action, held at Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 9-11 May 1975. The quote is from page 172. (I think - I'm writing this from notes which are a little hazy.) So I think it's a pretty clear claim to priority. I still think Geach and Unger independently discovered the problem, but I now think they independently rediscovered it, rather than being simultaneous initial discoverers.

Unless I find good reason to change my mind on that, I'll alter the Stanford entry to credit Kim with the initial discovery.

2003-05-17T13:37:00.000-04:00

I noted yesterday that the Gavagai had noted my disposition to generalise wildly about the gender balance of the profession on the basis of little data. But I hadn't meant to be referring to this:

Which is exactly the sort of reason why a study of the issue should be taken from a reasonable statistical point of view: between the anecdotal whinging of philosophers and the "oooh!" tone of this Business Week article, it's hard to discern the truth of the matter.

The Business Week article notes that girls are outperforming boys in high schools across the country, and now easily outnumber boys on most college campuses. The ratio is apparently approaching 3:2 in some major universities. I don't think Brown is quite at that level, but I imagine it does have more women than men amongst its undergraduate population. So are our discussions about so few women being in philosophy classes just 'anecdotal whinging'? Well, maybe. So I ran some numbers. The following is the percentage of women in various undergrad philosophy classes at Brown this semester (i.e. Spring 2003).

Overall: 35%
In classes taught by women: 34%
In classes taught by men: 36%
In freshman classes: 35%
In mid-level classes: 37%
In upper-level classes: 32%
In freshman classes taught by women: 30%

Now there are obviously some common causes here. The fact that we have a largely male faculty (9 men, 2 women) could be playing a role here. But there's a pattern to the numbers here. I'm not familiar enough with various statistical approaches to know exactly how likely it is that a student body that is 55% (or more) female could produce these kinds of numbers by chance, but I'm sure it is miniscule. (There were over 400 students between all these classes, so it's a significant sample.) None of the 13 classes we offered this semester had a female majority - all were 57% or more male.

This is only one campus one semester, so it's not exactly the most compelling data. But it is a little information beyond just my anecdotal observation. One interesting point is that we don't really seem to be losing women along the way - the numbers at the three levels are all within the range you'd expect through random noise. Another is that it's not because we had only men teach freshman classes that we're turning people away. We just aren't getting the enrollments to start with. This was spring, so maybe I should go back and look at Fall classes for a comparison to that.

2003-05-17T03:31:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up with Ned Block and Syracuse's own Eric Funkhouser providing the most high-profile entries.

Why is it being done at 3.30 in the morning? Because I tried staying up working a bit to watch the Brumbies try and reach another Super 12 final. I don't particularly like their chances, but hopefully it'll be worth watching them try.

This could be a great sporting weekend with the FA Cup final on as well as lots of rugby, basketball, baseball and (for those of you who like that thing) hockey. But for some reason the Cup Final is not only on Pay Per View, it is hideously expensive. And last time I paid for it they didn't even show the periphery around the game - the build-up, the introductions of the teams, or even I think the trophy ceremony. So I guess I'll be sleeping in rather than watching the final, which is too bad.

2003-05-16T15:02:00.000-04:00

Silly philosophy question.

Say one holds the following combination of views:

Fictionalism about mereology - you think that it's not true that there are fusions of objects, though it is a useful fiction to talk as if here are
Realism about fictional characters - you think the characters in a fiction are real, if abstract, objects

Would it follow that you end up being a realist about fusions after all, just you now think they are abstracta that are constituents of the giant mereological fiction that we find it convenient to be guided by in daily life? I think this would be a fun position. "No actually it isn't a consequence of my position that there are no tables, chairs or beer mugs, but it is a consequence of my position that they are all abstract objects. I don't see why this is objectionable."

I should note that as fun as it may be, this is not my combination of views, though I am tempted by realism about fictional characters. To be fair, I should note that at least some days I think tables, chairs and beer mugs are events rather than objects, so the ludicrous view tabled here is not a million miles from what I, at least some of the time, think. When I'm being more sensible I think tables are fusions of this-worldly and other-worldly parts, and the other-worldly parts are, of course, abstracta because other possible worlds are abstract. I think there's a reason I haven't been doing much metaphysics lately.

2003-05-16T14:46:00.000-04:00

Via some roundabout route, I just stumbled across Sam Quigley's blog Gavagai. (Cool name for a blog, no?) He has several fun posts on studying philosophy and mathematics in Germany, and a long and insightful post on women in philosophy and academia, summarising the blog dispute to date, noting my tendency to make wild generalisations without much by way of supporting data (sad but true), making a few insightful comments, and providing some interesting comparisons to what things are like in Germany. All good stuff.

2003-05-16T12:32:00.000-04:00

The BBC news ticker currently has the following two stories at the top:

George W Bush formally declares his intention to contest next year's US presidential election.
Italy acts to stop gangsters using hi-tech 3G video phones to rig forthcoming elections.

But how will the Italian cops stop the gangsters? They don't have jurisdiction this side of the Atlantic. Wouldn't it be more efficient to use the Mounties?

More seriously, the Italian story is fairly interesting. The Mafia are encouraging people to use video phones to send them pictures of their ballots to show that they voted the correct way. I hadn't thought of this before, but obviously new technology poses a threat to the secret ballot. I'm not really sure how you stop this, save by having relatively open polling places, where you can see whether someone is using a phone, but not see how they are voting. Perhaps this can be done, but when the video phones get smaller, this might start to pose more and more of a challenge.

2003-05-16T12:26:00.000-04:00

Chris Bertram has an interesting post up about how we might justify public funding for the humanities, an issue that's obviously close to the hearts of several of us around here. I don't think I agree with everything he says, and when the grading's done I might try and say why, but it's an interesting and thoughtful contribution to the debate, and worth checking out.

2003-05-16T12:18:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up with four new journals (including the finest journal in philosophy) and several new interesting papers. Perhaps the most notable is a new paper by Huw Price entitled On the origins of the arrow of time: why there is still a puzzle about the low entropy past.

2003-05-16T00:37:00.000-04:00

It's always nice to see stories of Australian heroes. Nicholas Kristof's column this morning discusses the work Dr Catherine Hamlin has done for 44 years in Addis Ababa helping women overcome obstetric fistulas. It's a pretty amazing story, although it sounds like they could use as much extra resources and support as possible. Kristof's story has a few links where you can donate to support Hamlin and others' work including here, here and here.

2003-05-15T23:54:00.000-04:00

The 617 crew might get the impression this blogging business is easier than it looks. They haven't been operational a week and today they had over 320 visitors. For my first semester of operation, before I moved onto Blogger, that was a halfway decent month for visitor numbers. Well done all!

2003-05-15T16:00:00.000-04:00

From an entry about education litigation by Kevin Drum:

It does remind me, however, of a professor friend of mine who basically has gotten to the point where he virtually never gives a grade of less than C in his classes. "It's just not worth the hassle," he says with a sigh.

Well at Brown we solved that by making C the lowest passing grade. Which makes giving Cs something of a hassle, but some brave souls are prepared to take the challenge. (In the interests of my students' privacy I will neither confirm nor deny whether I was one of the said brave souls this year.)

2003-05-15T12:41:00.000-04:00

Via Geoff Nunberg, there's a little brouhaha brewing in blogland about a question of grammar. The question is whether this sentence is grammatical.

(T) Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.

How could such a brouhaha have brewed? Because blogland bothers 'bout bothersome rules? Not exactly. One of the questions on the PSATs was whether (T) was grammatical. The answer ETS was looking for was no. Maryland teacher Kevin Keegan argued that the answer was that it was, for a reason that I found rather baffling. Here's his side of the story (from the Washington Post article that broke the news.)

The word "her," he posited, was improperly referring to "Toni Morrison's," so the answer should have been "A," signifying a mistake in "her to create." Many grammar manuals insist that a pronoun such as "her" should refer only to a noun, not, as in the case of the possessive "Toni Morrison's," an adjective.

Later in the article it transpires the "many" grammar manuals are in fact two, and they are unnamed. The rule seems preposterous on its face. As Eugene Volokh notes, it would rule that (J) is also ungrammatical. (Eugene also wonders what the rulebooks are that rule (T) et al out.)

(J) John's legs couldn't carry him any further

So there are some intuitive counterexamples, which is strange for an alleged syntactic rule involving pronominalisation. We don't need a schoolbook to tell us that "She likes her" cannot be used to mean that she likes herself.

And it is hard to see the theoretical motivation for the rule. Surely "Toni Morrison" is a constituent of "Toni Morrison's", so I don't see why it can't be attached to an anaphoric pronoun. The rule can't be that constituents of longer NPs cannot be linked to anaphoric pronouns, else (S) would be bad.

(S) After the party, Jack and Jill repaired to his apartment for coffee.

So the rule must be very dependent on surface structure. "Toni Morrison" is not a standalone word in (T), so 'her' cannot refer back to it. I doubt that where the spaces go, whether we use "Toni Morrison's genius" or "The genius of Toni Morrison", cannot make that much of a difference. But maybe that's just because I don't really speak English. (And if the fuss is over whether the NP is a standalone word, there's no reason 'her' could not attach to 'Toni'. Now there are good reasons in terms of the underlying structure of the sentence that 'her' could not attach to 'Toni'. For one thing 'Toni' here is not an NP. But once we start looking that deep, we see that there's no reason 'her' couldn't attach to 'Toni Morrison'.)

The unintentional humour prize in all this goes to David Skinner in the Weekly Standard, who supports the decides to take the opportunity to denigrate Morrison's novels, and as Matthew Yglesias notes manages to harm his own reputation as a writer somewhat more than he damages Morrison's. Skinner (who bears some resemblance to his funnier British namesake) thinks:

Thanks to a vigilant English teacher from Maryland, the sentence has been proven to contain an error of grammar ("her" doesn't refer back to a proper female subject noun, but to the possessive "Toni Morrison's genius").

If a 'proper female subject noun' is a proper noun then (M) is bad, which would be odd.

(M) The Prime Minister liked anyone who shared her fondness for 70s death metal bands.

If a 'proper female subject noun' is not a proper noun, then I have no idea what Skinner is writing about. And by the time he actually gets to slagging off at Morrison's novels, which it seems was the point of his article, it's pretty clear he doesn't either.

UPDATE: Also via Geoff Nunberg, the rule is supported in Wilson Follett's 1966 Modern American Usage:

A noun in the possessive case, being functionally an adjective, is seldom a competent antecedent of a pronoun: On F's arrival from Virginia at La Guardia Airport last night, he denied to reporters that... F would legitimately lead to he; F's cannot. Reconstruct, then: F, on his arrival, denied... (Of course a possessive noun can be the antecedent of a possessive -- i.e., an adjectival--pronoun: F's denial was made on his arrival.)

This doesn't make the rule correct, but it does provide some support for the argument that a question like this should not have been used on the PSAT. I think Keegan's original complaint was right about at least that much. Much thanks to Geoff Nunberg for the link.

It might be worth noting that I got the (alleged)rule wrong in the some of the above examples. My (T) and (M) are OK by Follett's lights because the anaphor occurs in a possessive phrase. I hadn't imagined that could make a difference to grammaticality, which just goes to show how unimaginative I am.

2003-05-15T03:02:00.000-04:00

The philosophy papers blog is up. There's several interesting papers, the most notable of which is by Juan Comesana (who seems to be getting a lot of attention here recently) Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology: A Reconciliation, But Not the One You Are Thinking Of. I'd already read the paper, so somehow it was the reconciliation I was thinking of. I don't know if this refutes the title, or just a token of the title.

On a more personal note, I'll be in Australia it turns out for most of June. I'll mostly be in Melbourne, though hopefully in Sydney and Canberra a little as well. I think there will be lots of philosophers passing through Australia this summer, though more in July than June.

2003-05-14T23:57:00.000-04:00

The 617 blog now has an RSS feed, which is very pleasing. And they have been linked through Matthew Yglesias's blog, so there should be a few people trampling through their corner of webspace soon.

The utility of RSS feeds is that it lets those of us with an RSS reader know when there's been a new post. What's an RSS reader? Well, it's a program like FeedReader. What's FeedReader? Over to them...

Feedreader is a freeware Windows application that reads and displays Internet newsfeeds aka RSS feeds based on XML.
It supports all major RSS formats - 0.9, 0.91, 1.0 and various extensions such as Dublin Core and Slashback. Feedreader utilizes advanced caching methods to reduce bandwitch usage, making the program ideal for mobile communication.

FeedReader's display is much like Outlook Express, so the effect of having it is much like getting an email any time a blog you're following is updated. The only downside is that the blog has to have an RSS feed, and now 617 has such a feed. (My feed is here, in case you're wondering.)

FeedReader is freeware, but if you like it I'm sure they wouldn't object to small donations to keep upgrading the product. In other news, I've added a reading list to the right-hand column. If the pictures mess up the display let me know and I'll try and tinker with it. It looks fine on my display, but previously there's been some problems with pictures on Macs.

And if you want to buy any of those books, if you do so by clicking through the links on the right (each of the pictures is linked to that books page on Amazon), I get a small commission. Not that I actually need the money being a rather well-paid Ivy League professor and all, but if you were buying the books anyway, wouldn't you rather have some of the $$ go to me rather than the Amazon empire?!