It’s raining here in Providence, but a few miles south it sounds like perfect cricket weather. So, naturally, there are Australians there.

There’ll always be an Australian

For many from a land down under, coming to this neck of the woods is a sporting dream come true. “This is my first trip outside the country,” says Bern from Melbourne. “I’ve thought about this my whole life and now I’m here. The weather’s warm, the beer’s cold and there’s wonderful cricket in the centre. Does life get any better than this?” Bern’s brought along his green-and-gold wig for the occasion. “It’s a beauty isn’t it?” he says, patting it proudly. “I’ve been offered a lot of money for it, but it’s not coming off my head. It’s a kind of cultural-exchange gesture.”

The actual games sound pretty good. I rather wish I was down there. It is somewhat disappointing that my cable TV package includes a dedicated golf channel, a dedicated motor sports channel, more dedicated home improvement/cooking/whatever channels than I can imagine, but not a single channel showing cricket. Some young entrepeneur should start up The Cricket Channel.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 1:34 pm

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The philosophy papers blog is up, with three journals publishing new editions (Ethical Theory and Practice, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Journal of Medical Ethics) being the only news that’s fit to print.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 11:57 am

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Patrick Greenough has a fairly detailed syllabus up for a summer course on vagueness in Helsinki. Now I take it few TAR readers will be in Helsinki for the summer – I’ll be about as far away from it as one can be in marvellous Melbourne. But the syllabus is still worth browsing for the annotated, and opinionated, bibliography. Most of the papers there will be pretty well known (i.e. memorised by heart) by vagueness afficionados. But for those who haven’t read them a quick summary might well be useful.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 12:10 am

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I was stumbling around the Princeton webpage today, much like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost, when I came across the following oddity.

On one page they list the placement records of all their recent PhD candidates. The candidates are not named, but they are referred to by dissertation title. The reason stated for this is:

Names are suppressed for reasons of privacy.

But one can tell quite a bit from the title. For example, one could probably guess who the candidate was who had the following dissertation titles and employment history:

LESS WORK FOR A THEORY OF SENSE. Monash (Australia); ANU (Australia); U Sheffield (UK); U. Edinburgh (UK), Permanent.

especially if one of one’s former PhD advisor had a similarly titled dissertation. So the privacy idea isn’t that strictly enforced. And actually, it is a little worse than that, because elsewhere on the site, there is a list of all recent PhD’s, listing who has graduated and what the title of their dissertation was.

Now in order to keep up the privacy preservation in order, I won’t link to the two pages in question, but I did find their proximity (and the ease with which I somewhat accidentally stumbled across them) somewhat odd given the announced privacy concerns.

I should say that in most cases the privacy concerns are not exactly serious. It is trivial to trace where someone works in academia. (Unless they have a particularly common name, they will be the first entry in a Google search, simply because universities still play a central role in the web.) But some PhDs no longer work in academia, even when they’ve graduated from Princeton, and the privacy concerns there are presumably greater.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 5:43 pm

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The philosophy papers blog is up, although the little post this morning did announce most of what is happening.

In the semantics group this afternoon, there was an odd divergence of opinion about this sentence.

No kids read seven books each.

Is this sentence somehow defective? My intuition at first (and even at last) is that it’s an awful sentence. I could tell what it would mean were it meaningful, but it sounds awful. However, most people there thought that maybe it is just somehow pragmatically defective. This turned out to matter a bit, because if there should be some rule blocking the combination of ‘each’ with quantifier phrases like ‘no kids’, it seems that will cause complications elsewhere.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 5:18 pm

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The comments are back! The papers blog will be running a bit late today, but for a little preview, here’s John Hawthorne’s contribution to the NYU seminar on factually defective discourse Epistemicism and Semantic Plasticity.

And this one isn’t new, but it seemed somehow relevant to the blog: Norman Swartz’s Philosophy as Blood Sport. Be sure if you read that to read through some of the letters in reply. It’s fun to try and predict which of the respondants will agree or disagree with the main conclusions.

UPDATE: And while you’re online, check out Geoff Nunberg’s Fresh Air piece on The Politics of Polysyndeton. It’s brilliant and witty and erudite and the jokes about it practically write themselves and that’s important when one is writing under time pressure and one doesn’t have an original idea in one’s wee little head.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 7:48 am

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There’s a review of Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought in the NY Times today. The review isn’t very positive, with the main complaint being that the categories Nisbett uses, Western and East Asian are too broad to be interesting. Nisbett’s book has already been influential in philosophy, providing some motivation for Nichols, Stich, and Weinberg’s, paper Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 4:14 pm

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The philosophy papers blog is up, with one new paper.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 8:39 am

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If you’re particularly interested, I just updated my papers page and my CV to reflect recent work.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 3:31 pm

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The philosophy papers blog is up. The only new paper is by Henry Stapp on Quantum Approaches to Consciousness. I think I agreed with the first sentence.

Quantum approaches to consciousness are sometimes said to be motivated simply by the idea that consciousness is a mystery, and quantum theory is a mystery, so maybe these two mysteries are related.

I might even say that from time to time. On the other hand, Stapp knows more about QM than I do, so maybe I shouldn’t mock him.

I’m feeling somewhat like a logician this week. First I got a request from the Journal of Philosophical Logic to referee a paper. Normally refereeing papers is more like a chore than anything else, but sometimes it is nice to add particular journals to the list of journals for whom one has refereed. Then this morning (these guys must work round the clock) I found my old paper on constructivist probability has been accepted in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic. This is pretty exciting – I now have two major papers accepted for the year, and I wrote both of them before I came to America. I could have taken the last four months off and I would still have been improving my CV at a pretty good pace.

For anyone who thinks the sky is the wrong way up around these parts, Virulent Memes has a pretty picture of the Southern Cross up. On an unrelated note, Henry Farrell quotes Dante complaining about staircases that spiral the opposite way to those with which he is familiar. (How would he have coped with cars on the wrong side of the road?) Somehow this is in the context of finding an American store that sells just the right kind of butter, but you’ll have to read it to find just what the context is.

For one reason or another I’ve been thinking about the vagueness book again. I wrote a new draft of the table of contents last night. It now looks like this

Chapter 1 – Prelude

1. What is vagueness


2. Puzzles about vagueness


3. Where my theory lines up


4. Preview
   

Chapter 2 – Truer

1. A standard many-valued theory


2. Benefits of this theory


3. Costs of the theory


4. Using sets rather than numbers


5. Comparative truth


6. Explicating truer


7. Historical connections


8. Williamson’s objection to truer


9. Truer and Boolean lattices


10. How much of classical logic is preserved

Chapter 3 – Pragmatics

1. What is to be explained


2. Contextualist hypotheses


3. Conceptualist hypotheses


4. Gricean hypothesis


5. Levinson on speaker meaning


6. The Sorites again

Chapter 4 – Rival Accounts

1. Many-valued theories


2. Purely classical Theories


3. Supervaluational Theories


4. Nihilist Theories

Chapter 5 – The Many

1. Schiffer’s Problem


2. McGee and McLaughlin’s Problem


3. The supervaluational solution


4. How to mimic this using truer


5. McKinnon’s objection


6. Sorensen’s objection


7. Does Knowledge imply Determinacy

I know what I’m going to say in most sections. I need to do a bit more research for 2.7, but I think that should be easy enough. I need to think a little more about what I’ll say in 3.5 in response to King and Stanley’s objections to the kind of theory of speaker meaning that I use to explain the allure of Sorites arguments. I haven’t really decided what I’m going to stress anywhere in chapter 4, but the material is mostly there. The real problems are in chapter 5. Section 5.7 is planned to be about Cian Dorr’s arguments that knowledge does not imply determinacy. I think I’m going to end up agreeing with him, which I probably should have done in the original many paper.

The real problem is 5.4. I assumed all along that this would be easy. Chapter 5 starts with a pair of nice problems, the simpler of which is due to Vann McGee and Brian McLaughlin. The problem is that we want to say that sentences like (1) can be true, even when both the subject and the predicate are vague.

(1) That is a mountain.

The problem is that there are literally billions of possible references for that, and only one of them is in the extension of mountain. The supervaluational solution, if it can be made to work, is to say that there is a penumbral connection between that and mountain so that on every precisification the reference of that is in the extension of mountain. The main point of my many paper was to note that there’s a way to do this that is a fair bit prettier than mere stipulation. The idea is that precisifications are what we get when we make stipulations about how to ‘fill out’ the naturalness property that Lewis uses to solve Kripkensteinian problems. One neat feature of naturalness is that natural objects tend to be those that have natural properties. So if it’s the case that m₆₂₄ is more natural than all the rest of the ‘mountains’ (either in reality or according to a precisification), and hence is the reference of that, then the set containing m₆₂₄ will be more natural than the set containing any other ‘mountain’, so it will be the extension of mountain and so it will be true (either in reality or according to a precisification) that That is a mountain.

This is all incredibly clever, if I do say so, but I don’t really know how to cash it out in terms of truer than. I can figure out some technical ways of duplicating the results, but it really just does look like a duplication of the results. And a major theme of 4.3 is that a decent theory of vagueness needs something analytically prior to what the supervaluationists have available. If truer gets defined in terms of precisifications, then the project is not looking particularly attractive. I’m mostly sure this is a small problem, but if it isn’t I may have some hard work to do.

I’m going to be driving to the APA Central this week (it’s in Cleveland, about a 9,10 hour drive from here, which is nothing by Australian standards). The plan was that it would be relaxing to get away from everything and just be out on the road for a while. (I’m spending chunks of the weekend making up mix tapes, well mix CDs, for the drive.) But if I can’t make progress on this puzzle, I might spend most of the drive looking for a way to save my lovely little theory.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 12:03 pm

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