More conceptual questions from the war. Now that we’ve cleaned up the moral status of terrorists, and identified the liberty/freedom distinction, Matthew Yglesias asks what the distinction between courage and bravery might amount to. He suggests this one really is a distinction without a difference, and my first inclination is to agree with him. Any thoughts anyone? Could it be that All brave soliders are courageous?

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 9:54 pm

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My resistance paper is going to be absurdly long. Part of the problem is that I’m having much more fun writing the examples than I am having writing the philosophy. So naturally I spend more time on them. But the philosophy has a certain amount of space it needs to take. So the paper will be unmanagable and unpublishable and so on. So I will have to serialise it here. Or I don’t have to but I will anyway.

One of the key points will be something noted by Tamar Gendler and developed somewhat by Stephen Yablo. We have imaginative resistance whenever an author says that in the fiction p, where p is some fact that if it obtains only does so in virtue of some more fundamental facts obtaining, and it is specified in the fiction that those more fundamental facts do not obtain. The moral/descriptive case is only one version of this. Here is another, one with nothing at all to do with morality.

A Quixotic Victory
   —What think you of my redecorating Sancho?
   —It’s rather sparse, said Sancho.
   —Sparse. Indeed it is sparse. Just a television and an armchair.
   —Where are they, Senor Quixote? asked Sancho. All I see are a knife and fork on the floor, about six feet from each other. A sparse apartment for a sparse mind. He said the last sentence under his breath so Quixote would not hear him.
   —They might look like a knife and fork, but they are a television and an armchair, replied Quixote.
   —They look just like the knife and fork I have in my pocket, said Sancho, and he moved as to put his knife and fork besides the objects on Quixote’s floor.
   —Please don’t do that, said Quixote, for I may be unable to tell your knife and fork from my television and armchair.
   —But if you can’t tell them apart from a knife and fork, how could they be a television and an armchair?
   —Do you really think being a television is an observational property? asked Quixote with a grin.
   —Maybe not. OK then, how do you change the channels? asked Sancho.
   —There’s a remote.
   —Where? Is it that floorboard?
   —No, it’s at the repair shop, admitted Quixote.
   —I give up, said Sancho.
   Sancho was right to give up. Despite their odd appearance, Quixote’s items of furniture really were a television and an armchair. This was the first time in months Quixote had won an argument with Sancho.

Not the best bit of fiction ever written, but for a first draft I’m moderately pleased with it. My initial temptation was to run the whole thing as a tribute to the Dead Parrot sketch, but that may have been a little obvious. Not that using Quixote and Sancho Panza is other than obvious.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 8:35 pm

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Holmes Rolston III won the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. While it’s always nice to win things, especially prizes with presitgous sounding names, this won has a nice little bonus attached: a $1 million prize. And people say there’s no money in phlosophy…

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 7:00 pm

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There’s an article in the SMH this morning reporting that 53% of people have a ‘hidden bias’ against Arab Muslims. I’m more than a little suspicious of the methodology. The tests are based on the Project Implicit implicit association tests. These tests work as follows.

Assume we are trying to work out whether you have a bias towards group X, say the English, over group Y, say the Americans. Words from one of four groups are flashed on the screen:

Positive words: e.g. happy, laughter, joy
Negative words: e.g. awful, suffering, misery
Words associated with X: London, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth
Words associated with Y: New York, Ben Franklin, Hollywood

Your task is to group the words into one of two disjunctive categories. The test runs through twice. At first you have to group the words into X or good, on the one hand, or Y or bad, on the other. The second time through, you have to group the words into X or bad, on the one hand, or Y or good, on the other.

The idea is that if your reaction times are quicker (and/or you are more accurate) on the first part of the test, then you find the category X or good more natural than the category Y or good, which reveals a bias for Xs over Ys. On the other hand, if your reaction times are quicker, and/or you are more accurate, on the second part of the test, then for similar reasons you have a bias for Ys over Xs.

So I’ve taken these kinds of tests twice. I just got told I have a strong dislike for Arab Muslims. So I’m apparently one of the 53%. It doesn’t seem very plausible to me, but that’s what implicit preference tests are meant to show. Or maybe not. The other time I took the test I was told I have a bias in favour of the New York Yankees over the Arizona Diamondbacks. Now I have no particular fondness for the D’backs, but the Yankees are one of my few outright bigotries. I think “Yankees Suck” should be added to the Pledge of Allegiance. I’d rather see the Taliban being held in Cuba receive constitutional protection than the damned Yankees fans. Are these conscious reactions just a repression of a deep fondness for all things pinstriped?

Unlikely. What happened in both cases was that my reaction times, and accuracies, were higher in the second part of the test than in the first. I was just getting much better at disjunctive classification through doing the test. So in each case I was listed as having a preference for Ys over Xs. But it really was totally independent of just what Xs and Ys were. I presume this kind of consideration has been factored into the test design, but at least in my case (going by a massive N=2 sample) it looks to have not been given sufficient weight. So I’d be more than a little sceptical of newspaper articles reporting doom and gloom based on a few not necessarily well calibrated internet tests.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 1:23 pm

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I’ve been trying to figure out how the distinction between liberty and freedom relates to these Dylan lines:

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school

Obviously this is foolish, which is more or less the point. It would still be absurd with freedom, but not I think quite as absurd. If freedom can be defined in terms of wealth and nutrition, it can be defined in terms of schoolyard equality. But trying to (a) analyse what is meant seriously here and what is a joke and (b) figure out how those things would change if we replaced one word with a near-synonym is beyond me at this time of the morning.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 11:48 am

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No philosophy papers blog today, because I left the update yesterday so late that the papers actually posted during the day yesterday, such as Cian Dorr’s paper on vagueness without ignorance are on yesterday’s update. Hopefully with many departments in the states being on break this week, there will be lots of publishing activity in the next few days.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 11:36 am

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For those of you who like making fine distinctions, which I presume is every reader of this site, Geoff Nunberg’s discussion of the difference between liberty and freedom will be fun. Amusingly, Matthew Yglesias raised the same question Geoff was answering on his blog 36 hours ago. The spirit of the weekend moves in mysterious ways.

There’s been several comments in the blogosphere already on Paul Berman’s mammoth article on Sayyid Qutb. I think I disagree, perhaps strongly, with the conclusion of the piece, but I need a little more time to think about that (and to actually read rather than just skim the article) before posting. But if I have a spare couple of hours to be disagreeable tomorrow, I might try something.

More philosophically significant, I thought, was Daniel Mendelsohn’s article on the fall of irony and the rise of melodrama. Drawing (and probably snapping) a very long bow he suggests that melodrama is a sign of democracy’s decay. Democracy’s preferred genre is perhaps not the allusive ironism of recent years, but tragedy. Still, melodrama is the enemy, and allusive irony is the enemy’s enemy, which makes it our friend for now. So I’m going to spend some time propping up modern democracy by mixing more knowing references to 80’s indie-pop bands into my papers on the foundations of probability.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 11:39 pm

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From Wednesday to Sunday next week I’m going to be at the APA Pacific, in beautiful San Francisco. I like saying that to make people who are not going to be in SF jealous. The APA Pacific is always fun because (a) it’s on the Pacific coast, and (b) the papers are high quality. At risk of offending practically everyone, and of crashing Blogger, here is a table of the talks that look most interesting to Brian over the conference. (Note that for some sessions the division of people into ‘speakers’ and ‘commentators’ is rather arbitrary, but it was this or make the table even more complicated, and as you can see I don’t really understand tables in HTML as it is.)

	Title	Speaker	Commentator	2nd Comments
1-E	Epistemic Probability	Richard Fumerton	Jim Joyce	Jim van Cleve
1-M	Second-Order Predication and the Metaphysics of Properties	Andy Egan	Peter Alward	…
1-M	Distributional Properties	Josh Parsons	Troy Cross	…
2-C	De Re Belief	David Kaplan	Robert Stalnaker	Kenneth Taylor
2-G	Is There a Duty to Vote	Geoff Brennan & Loren Lomansky	Gerald Gaus	Eric Cave
3-M	Refuting Scepticism in Style	Elijah Millgram	Stacie Friend	Daniel Jacobson
4-B	Author Meets Critics: Hale and Wright	Gideon Rosen	Jamie Tappenden	John McFarlaine
4-E	Contextualism in Epistemology	John Hawthorne	Jim Pryor	Jonathan Schaffer
5-F	On Dialethicism; or Will no One Rid Me of This Accursed Priest	Hartry Field	…	…
5-F	Paraconsistency and Dialethicisms	Graham Priest	…	…
5-J	Tracking with Closure	Sherrilyn Roush	Robert Howell	…
6-O	Asserting and Promising	Gary Watson	Michael Bratman	…
6-W	Temporal Externalism and Epistemic Theories of Vagueness	Henry Jackman	Gary Ebbs	Brian Weatherson
7-A	Author Meets Critics: Sider Four-Dimensionalism	Ned Markosian	Lynne Baker	Eric Olson
7-D	Imitation, Media Violence and Freedom of Speech	Susan Hurley	Rae Langton	Phillip Pettit
7-F	Philosophical Conversations in memory of James Tomberlin	Ernie Lepore	William Lycan	Peter van Inwagen
7-G	The Role of Phenomenology in Philosophy of Mind	John Searle	Hubert Dreyfus	Amie Thommason
8-A	Author Meets Critics: Adler Belief’s Own Ethics	Gilbert Harman	Richard Fumerton	…
8-D	Author Meets Critics: Papineau Thinking about Consciousness	Ned Block	David Chalmers	…
8-H	Temporal Parts and Superluminal Motion	Yuri Balashov	Hud Hudson	…
8-H	Temporal Extension and Decomposition	Ryan Wasserman	Gabriel Uzquaino	…
9-V	How to Russell the Incompleteness Argument	Richard Hanley	Kent Bach	…
Sat 6pm	Hume vs Wittgenstein (Hume Wins)	Jerry Fodor	…	…

The real issue some days will be deciding which papers to go to. The worst clashes for me are in session 7, on Saturday morning. (Session 4, on Friday morning, is not much better.) That may put some dampner on the amount of socialising that can be done Friday (and maybe Thursday) night. Or it might not. If every session is such that I can reasonably miss it, then I can reasonably miss all sessions, so I can party all night Friday…Note that I’ve left off all the interesting papers from Sunday, because I won’t be there (flying back early Sunday sadly), so I don’t have much motivation to search the program for the highlights. But it doesn’t look like the program gets any lighter when I leave it.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 9:44 pm

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Common Minds
Common Room, University House, ANU
24 – 25 July 2003

Philip Pettit, currently William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, was Professor of Social and Political Theory in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, from 1983 until 2002. Common Minds will focus on some of the questions and themes that dominated his work during his 20 years at RSSS. The conference papers will all be made available online. Speakers will be given 10 minutes to introduce their session, the remaining time being given over to discussion. This conference is being organized jointly by the Philosophy Program and the Social and Political Theory Program at RSSS.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 5:51 pm

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The philosophy papers blog is (finally) posted for the day. I’ve already mentioned the two most interesting papers there, but there are two other papers, and three journals, also posted for your browsing pleasure.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 3:30 pm

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