The papers blog today has more new papers up today than it has had for about the last two weeks. Lots of good stuff to check out.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 10:47 am

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The post below isn’t meant to be entirely serious. But I think the position it defends is more plausible than a lot of people take it to be. I thought Ehring’s arguments that the standard arguments for ‘dualism’ (as I naturally call the view that there are two people where really one exists) were ineffective looked correct. So I thought I should have a crack at writing positive arguments for the view that fission leads to bilocation. The arguments aren’t the most compelling ever created, but they’re better than some I’ve written.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 10:45 am

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Here’s a common objection to psychological
continuity accounts of personal identity. As a result of a rather disastrous
spell, Harry Potter’s body is destroyed, though fortunately his psychological
states are imprinted in life-size statues of Peregrin ‘Pippin’ Took and
Meriadoc ‘Merry’ Brandybuck, which subsequently become active, moving around
and insisting, rather stroppily, that they are Harry Potter. Had Harry’s
psychological states simply been implanted in (the statue of) Pippin, then
psychological continuity theorists would have no trouble saying that Pippin is
Harry. The situation, from their perspective, is be little different to if
Harry had been the victim of a particularly eloquent Transmogrification spell.
But Merry causes a problem. For, the argument goes, Merry is not Pippin, so we
cannot both say that Harry is Pippin and that Harry is Pippin. Perhaps though,
as Douglas Ehring (1987) has suggested, we should deny the claim that Merry is
not Pippin, and instead insist that we have a bilocated person. Here I want to
set out a couple of arguments in favour of Ehring’s claim.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 10:41 am

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More websites to announce. John Hawthorne now has a website up with lots of papers.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~kahern/hawthorne/

There’s lots of interesting papers there, and I’ll add them to the papers blog tomorrow. Note for those of us who are gossip-inclined: there’s a perfectly good explanation for why this site is hosted in Berkeley, and it doesn’t involve John moving there any time soon. (Or if it does I am embarrassingly out of the loop and would rather appreciate being filled in.) Thanks to Kent Bach for the news of this site.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 2:26 pm

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I suspect that everyone reading this blog knows about this by now, but since it’s now official news I thought I might pass along that Andy Egan and John O’Dea have been appointed to post-doc positions in the philosophy program in the RSSS in ANU. Congratulations to the department for two more excellent appointments, and of course to Andy and John for much deserved success.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 12:22 am

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John Turri, one of the many talented grad students at Brown University, has a blog set up. Here’s the address.

http://elenchus1.blogspot.com/

It doesn’t have much pure philosophy yet, but I’m assured that will happen!

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 11:28 pm

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I might post this eventually to Crooked Timber, but for now I’d mostly be interested in getting philosophers’ feedback. It’s somewhat inspired by the discussion of hiring practices over on Crooked Timber.

Say your department has a job opened up in metaphysics. You’re down to the last two candidates, M and P, both of whom primarily work in metaphysics. Your judgment is that M is the better metaphysician, but P is the better overall philosopher. I take it that this kind of thing is possible. (It’s less obvious when the field is metaphysics because that tends to rely on fewer specialised skills I think, but still possible.)

Even if M and P concentrate on metaphysics, and so their abilities as metaphysicians will be the primary determinant of their skills as philosophers, you might well think that P has skills that will be more useful work on other areas. So you think P will ask better questions at non-metaphysics colloquia, provide more useful comments on colleagues’ draft papers on non-metaphysics topics and so on, and you think these skills outweigh M’s extra ability as a pure metaphysician.

Who do you vote to hire?

I thought it was obvious that P should be the choice, but in asking around I think more people I’ve asked have supported M. (I haven’t exactly been keeping careful count, but that’s the feeling.) Do you agree?

If you would vote to hire M, does the situation change if it was originally an open area hire? In that case there is a straight-up choice between hiring based on how good a philosopher is in his/her strongest area and how good s/he is overall.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 11:08 pm

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I was reading Karen Bennett’s paper on the exclusion argument and I realised half way through that I didn’t really understand some of the concepts that are commonly used in this debate. Here’s the difference I realised I don’t think I understand.

There’s meant to be an important difference between joint causation and overdetermination. Here’s a couple of simple cases to bring out the difference.

A and B shoot at V, each hitting him in the heart at the same time, and each in a way that would be sufficient to kill him instantly. This is overdetermination (I take it!).

A and B throw rocks at V, each of which hits V at the same time and punctures one of V’s lungs. V dies of aphysixiation (sp?). I take it this is a case of joint causation – the two throws kill V, though neither would be sufficient to kill him separately.

(Digression. The intuitions about this case differ a bit when we make the times of the throws different. If A’s throw happens in the morning and B’s in the afternoon, then I think B’s throw is the sole cause. End of Digression)

OK, so we’ve got the distinction, now let’s get to applying it.

Two rockets are fired at planet V. Planet V has a missile defense system that has one virtue and one vice. The virtue is that whenever a solo rocket comes in, then it will intercept the rocket and destroy the threat. The vice is that whenever two rockets come in, the defence system gets confused and fires an interceptor totally the wrong way. So both rockets hit the planet, explode as intended, and destroy the planet. (They are VERY BIG ROCKETS.)

Let F1 be the firing of one of the rocket, and F2 the firing of the other rocket. Let E1 be the explosion of the first rocket’s payload and the E2 the explosion of the second rocket’s payload. The payload explosion happens after the rockets are through where the intercept system would have done its work.

I think that F1 and F2 are joint causes of the destruction of the planet, since neither alone is sufficient to destroy the planet. But E1 and E2 are each causes, perhaps overdetermining causes, of the destruction. This is odd, I think, but perhaps not the worst result ever.

Change the case a little to allow for a third rocket. Call its firing F3. Now are the firings joint causes, or are they each overdetermining causes? Here’s where things get tough.

Karen Bennett’s paper suggests that the following two conditions are necessary for us to have a real case of overdetermination.

(O1) If c1 had occurred and c2 had not, e would (still) have occurred.
(O2) If c2 had occurred and c1 had not, e would (still) have occurred.

How do we extend this to where we have three putative causes. Here’s one triple of counterfactuals that we might think indicate overdetermination.

(O1a) If c1 and c2 had occurred and c3 had not, e would (still) have occurred.
(O2a) If c1 and c3 had occurred and c2 had not, e would (still) have occurred.
(O3a) If c2 and c3 had occurred and c1 had not, e would (still) have occurred.

These are all true. But maybe we should generalise (O1) and (O2) in this direction.

(O1b) If c1 had occurred and c2 and c3 had not, e would (still) have occurred.
(O2b) If c2 had occurred and c1 and c3 had not, e would (still) have occurred.
(O3b) If c3 had occurred and c1 and c2 had not, e would (still) have occurred.

These are all false. So overdetermination or joint causation? I have no idea really, and that makes me wonder whether I really understood the two concepts.

By the way, if (O1) and (O2) are necessary for overdetermination, then we can argue quite easily for compatibilism between causation by parts and causation by wholes. Here’s a homely example to end with.

Invasions cause deaths. In particular they often cause deaths of the invaders. As an example, the Achean invasion of Troy caused Hector’s death. (I’ll just take for granted that Homer’s tale is true, though of course this is doubtful.) It also seems to be the case that Achilles’s charge caused Hector’s death. Now the charge is not identical to the invasion, though it is a part of it. Let c1 be the invasion, and c2 be the charge. Then (O1) is clearly false. Had the invasion occured without this action of Achilles, then Hector wouldn’t have died, for none of the other Acheans could have killed Hector. So here we have a case of two non-identical synchronous causes not amounting to overdetermination. (Does this mean that (O1) is not necessary for overdetermination? Not sure. It might mean it isn’t necessary for bad overdetermination.)

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 8:40 pm

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The Australasian Association of Philosophy conference next year will be held on the Great Barrier Reef. A proto-website for the conference is here. The AAP is always a great conference, and if you’re going to go to it once in your career, I think when it’s on the Reef would be a great time to go.

For a description of the quality of the conference, I can’t beat Bill Lycan’s testimony: (original here)

“ Here is a revealing comparison. For the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association the Program Committee sifts submissions carefully and rejects 80 percent. The Australasian Association of Philosophy does not sift submissions. Yet every year the AAP program is better overall than the APA program. “

If conferences are to be in winter, I think it’s a good idea to have them near the equator. In Australia we seem to get this right, having the conferences fairly frequently in Queensland. In America, the APA Eastern is usually in some place that’s utterly miserable in late December, like Washington or Boston. These are fine cities, but really couldn’t we do better for a December conference venue? It might be stretching the notion of Eastern a little to have the conference in New Orleans (and I think there is already a big conference there b/w Christmas and New Year), but I don’t see why we don’t have the Eastern conference in Miami.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 10:59 am

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I changed the way that I’m scanning for new online journals for the papers blog, with the result that I found six more editions of journals that had not been previously published. There’s lots of interesting stuff up today, though much of it might not be accessible unless you are connected to a university library.

Posted by Brian Weatherson at 4:01 pm

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