Some quick reports on journal articles of
interest. (Sorry for the lack of links, but everything is subscriber only.)

It’s a little old now, but I only just found
out that Legal
Theory last year ran a symposium on law and vagueness. I haven’t read it
all, but I guess I’ll have to when I ever get back to writing the vagueness
book. Two quick points to note. Reading Dorothy Edgington’s paper made me
realise that her position is a little closer to mine than I’d previously
acknowledged. She says that there are numerical degrees of belief, but they ‘compose’
in the way that probability values do. The effect is much as if you’d taken a range
of precisifications, put a measure on them, and let the degree of truth of p
be the measure of the set of precisifications at which p. I don’t know why
we don’t just get rid of the numbers, since they don’t play a role in the
compositional theory, or how this extends to the intensional, but it is similar
enough to my theory that I should comment on this eventually. And the Joseph
Raz comment on Roy Sorensen’s paper reads more like a pro wrestling smackdown
than like a scholarly interchange. Sorensen’s tendency to never say something
straight if he can say it as a joke can be infuriating from time to time, but I’m
not sure that this is the right response.

There looks like there’s a potentially interesting
article on conditionals in the latest Notre
Dame Journal of Formal Logic, but since it isn’t online it may as well not
exist from this blog’s perspective.

The August Philosophical
Studies has two articles from the Syracuse-Rutgers crew. John Hawthorne’s
article on ‘blockers’ has finally been published, though I think it should have
been edited a little more closely so it didn’t look quite so much like a part
of a longer piece. Hint: starting an article with ‘As we have seen’ is usually
a bit of a give away. And Ted Sider’s second
article on time travel is also included. By the way, that link is to the
free copy of Ted’s article on his webpage. (More public domain discussion on
time travel can be found here,
though of course it can’t be guaranteed that the content will be Sideresque.)And
the September Phil Studies has an article by Brown’s Juan Comesaña, on how we
can resolve some tricky problems for certain reliabilist theories of
justification by going two-dimensionalist. Of course if you’re reading this
site you probably already believe that all philosophical problems can be solved
somehow by going two-dimensionalist, so this won’t necessarily be much of a
surprise.

There’s a few interesting new papers up on
the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy. Michael Zimmerman’s entry on Intrinsic Value
is particularly comprehensive, as you’d expect from someone who’s just written
a book on the subject. (And it’s probably a useful resource for those looking
to my entry on intrinsic properties for something about value.) Michael Dickson’s
entry on Modal
Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics is a fascinating survey of a field
that I (at least) knew very little about. The Stanford Encyclopaedia is getting
a pretty good coverage of QM – perhaps science-y types are better at meeting
deadlines than us humanities-oriented hacks. As you’d expect, Alan Hájek’s entry
on Interpretations
of the Probability Calculus is first-rate, a great introduction to the
field for those who wonder what philosophers of probability argue with each
other about. On the other hand, Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar’s entry on Wittgenstein was
rather disappointing. There’s next to no discussion of any books other than the
Tractatus and the Investigations. Actually, there was little there that I
didn’t know, and when it comes to Wittgenstein I know nothing. Maybe they can
get some more specialist entries on, say, Wittgenstein on mathematics or
ethics. Expect to see soon my mammoth (and, to be honest, a little too
self-centred) entry on The
Problem of the Many.

Some quick reports on journal articles of
interest. (Sorry for the lack of links, but everything is subscriber only.)

It’s a little old now, but I only just found
out that Legal
Theory last year ran a symposium on law and vagueness. I haven’t read it
all, but I guess I’ll have to when I ever get back to writing the vagueness
book. Two quick points to note. Reading Dorothy Edgington’s paper made me
realise that her position is a little closer to mine than I’d previously
acknowledged. She says that there are numerical degrees of belief, but they ‘compose’
in the way that probability values do. The effect is much as if you’d taken a range
of precisifications, put a measure on them, and let the degree of truth of p
be the measure of the set of precisifications at which p. I don’t know why
we don’t just get rid of the numbers, since they don’t play a role in the
compositional theory, or how this extends to the intensional, but it is similar
enough to my theory that I should comment on this eventually. And the Joseph
Raz comment on Roy Sorensen’s paper reads more like a pro wrestling smackdown
than like a scholarly interchange. Sorensen’s tendency to never say something
straight if he can say it as a joke can be infuriating from time to time, but I’m
not sure that this is the right response.

There looks like there’s a potentially interesting
article on conditionals in the latest Notre
Dame Journal of Formal Logic, but since it isn’t online it may as well not
exist from this blog’s perspective.

The August Philosophical
Studies has two articles from the Syracuse-Rutgers crew. John Hawthorne’s
article on ‘blockers’ has finally been published, though I think it should have
been edited a little more closely so it didn’t look quite so much like a part
of a longer piece. Hint: starting an article with ‘As we have seen’ is usually
a bit of a give away. And Ted Sider’s second
article on time travel is also included. By the way, that link is to the
free copy of Ted’s article on his webpage. (More public domain discussion on
time travel can be found here,
though of course it can’t be guaranteed that the content will be Sideresque.)And
the September Phil Studies has an article by Brown’s Juan Comesaña, on how we
can resolve some tricky problems for certain reliabilist theories of
justification by going two-dimensionalist. Of course if you’re reading this
site you probably already believe that all philosophical problems can be solved
somehow by going two-dimensionalist, so this won’t necessarily be much of a
surprise.

There’s a few interesting new papers up on
the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy. Michael Zimmerman’s entry on Intrinsic Value
is particularly comprehensive, as you’d expect from someone who’s just written
a book on the subject. (And it’s probably a useful resource for those looking
to my entry on intrinsic properties for something about value.) Michael Dickson’s
entry on Modal
Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics is a fascinating survey of a field
that I (at least) knew very little about. The Stanford Encyclopaedia is getting
a pretty good coverage of QM – perhaps science-y types are better at meeting
deadlines than us humanities-oriented hacks. As you’d expect, Alan Hájek’s entry
on Interpretations
of the Probability Calculus is first-rate, a great introduction to the
field for those who wonder what philosophers of probability argue with each
other about. On the other hand, Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar’s entry on Wittgenstein was
rather disappointing. There’s next to no discussion of any books other than the
Tractatus and the Investigations. Actually, there was little there that I
didn’t know, and when it comes to Wittgenstein I know nothing. Maybe they can
get some more specialist entries on, say, Wittgenstein on mathematics or
ethics. Expect to see soon my mammoth (and, to be honest, a little too
self-centred) entry on The
Problem of the Many.