I previously posted on the existence of a
Buffy conference in Norwich that looked like it would be dire, but turned out
apparently to be pretty good. Now there’s a Buffy
conference in Melbourne.

I previously posted on the existence of a
Buffy conference in Norwich that looked like it would be dire, but turned out
apparently to be pretty good. Now there’s a Buffy
conference in Melbourne.

I’ve done one of these experiments before,
but I didn’t run the experiment in HTML, and I didn’t have as many readers then
as I have now, and I realised something new about the experimental design that
should be controlled for, so I’m running another vagueness
experiment. If you’d be ever so kind as to follow that link and answer all
the questions that get thrown at you as honestly as is possible, I’d be most
appreciative. I’m keeping of count of who gets to what pages when, so I’ll be
able to interpret the results reasonably accurately, though I may have to do
some interpreting at some stages.

Anyway, I’ve been ever so annoyed at contextualist
claims about what will and won’t happen in forced march Sorites for a while now
that I thought I should do something serious about testing them. Then I
realised I knew nothing about experimental design, so I’m doing this instead.

UPDATE: This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t transfer the webcounter code to the website last night when I set up the experiment. So I haven’t been able to keep track of the results, which is a large part of the point. So could everyone who has taken the experiment before midday east coast time (1700 GMT) please either take the experiment again or, if you couldn’t be bothered clicking through all those things again, email me a summary of your choices and I’ll enter them by hand.

I’ve done one of these experiments before,
but I didn’t run the experiment in HTML, and I didn’t have as many readers then
as I have now, and I realised something new about the experimental design that
should be controlled for, so I’m running another vagueness
experiment. If you’d be ever so kind as to follow that link and answer all
the questions that get thrown at you as honestly as is possible, I’d be most
appreciative. I’m keeping of count of who gets to what pages when, so I’ll be
able to interpret the results reasonably accurately, though I may have to do
some interpreting at some stages.

Anyway, I’ve been ever so annoyed at contextualist
claims about what will and won’t happen in forced march Sorites for a while now
that I thought I should do something serious about testing them. Then I
realised I knew nothing about experimental design, so I’m doing this instead.

UPDATE: This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t transfer the webcounter code to the website last night when I set up the experiment. So I haven’t been able to keep track of the results, which is a large part of the point. So could everyone who has taken the experiment before midday east coast time (1700 GMT) please either take the experiment again or, if you couldn’t be bothered clicking through all those things again, email me a summary of your choices and I’ll enter them by hand.

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.

After my previous post on the paradoxes, Hud
Hudson reminded me that there are some much simpler paradoxes involving
validity rather than soundness. These don’t appeal to anything as controversial
as excluded middle, so they are a little more forceful.

Argument
A

A1.    Argument A is valid

AC.    Santa Claus is coming to town.

The argument that this leads to paradox is
as follows.

(1)      If
Argument A is valid, then if Argument A is valid, then Santa Claus is coming to
town.
          (By the definition of validity)

(2)      If
Argument A is valid, then Santa Claus is coming to town.
          (Contraction from (1))

(3)      Necessarily,
if Argument A is valid, then Santa Claus is coming to town.
          (By (2), since all the premises
we used to get there are necessary truths.)

(4)      Argument
A is valid
          (From (3), and the definition of
validity)

(5)      Santa
Claus is coming to town.
          (Modus Ponens on (2) and (4).)

Well, that was a little easy. Anyway, here’s
the serious problem. The obvious way to block the paradox here is to say that
(2) doesn’t really follow from (1). And Hartry
Field has been arguing just that for a while now, with I think some
success. But it seems to me that it’s much more plausible to say that p ® (p ® q)
doesn’t entail p ® q when the arrow denotes ordinary ‘if…then’ than when it denotes
entailment. When ®
means ‘entails’, contraction seems much more plausible. (I could be wrong about
the relative plausibility of the claims here – I think contraction is still
quite plausible for ordinary conditionals, but I think it is if anything stronger
for entailment conditionals.) Anyway, then the argument to paradox goes as
follows. (Using ® for
the entailment conditional.)

(6)      (Argument
A is valid) ® ((Argument A is valid) ® Santa Claus is coming to town))
          Assuming here that an analysandum entails its analysans

(7)      (Argument
A is valid) ®
Santa Claus is coming to town)
          Contraction on (6)

(8)      Argument
A is valid
          (7), connection between validity
and entailment

(9)      Santa
Claus is coming to town.
          Modus Ponens on (7), (8)

Of course, none of this is original to moi. I only mention it here because I had forgotten there were proof-theoretical paradoxes, and it is not entirely obvious that the solutions that work for other paradoxes also work for these.

After my previous post on the paradoxes, Hud
Hudson reminded me that there are some much simpler paradoxes involving
validity rather than soundness. These don’t appeal to anything as controversial
as excluded middle, so they are a little more forceful.

Argument
A

A1.    Argument A is valid

AC.    Santa Claus is coming to town.

The argument that this leads to paradox is
as follows.

(1)      If
Argument A is valid, then if Argument A is valid, then Santa Claus is coming to
town.
          (By the definition of validity)

(2)      If
Argument A is valid, then Santa Claus is coming to town.
          (Contraction from (1))

(3)      Necessarily,
if Argument A is valid, then Santa Claus is coming to town.
          (By (2), since all the premises
we used to get there are necessary truths.)

(4)      Argument
A is valid
          (From (3), and the definition of
validity)

(5)      Santa
Claus is coming to town.
          (Modus Ponens on (2) and (4).)

Well, that was a little easy. Anyway, here’s
the serious problem. The obvious way to block the paradox here is to say that
(2) doesn’t really follow from (1). And Hartry
Field has been arguing just that for a while now, with I think some
success. But it seems to me that it’s much more plausible to say that p ® (p ® q)
doesn’t entail p ® q when the arrow denotes ordinary ‘if…then’ than when it denotes
entailment. When ®
means ‘entails’, contraction seems much more plausible. (I could be wrong about
the relative plausibility of the claims here – I think contraction is still
quite plausible for ordinary conditionals, but I think it is if anything stronger
for entailment conditionals.) Anyway, then the argument to paradox goes as
follows. (Using ® for
the entailment conditional.)

(6)      (Argument
A is valid) ® ((Argument A is valid) ® Santa Claus is coming to town))
          Assuming here that an analysandum entails its analysans

(7)      (Argument
A is valid) ®
Santa Claus is coming to town)
          Contraction on (6)

(8)      Argument
A is valid
          (7), connection between validity
and entailment

(9)      Santa
Claus is coming to town.
          Modus Ponens on (7), (8)

Of course, none of this is original to moi. I only mention it here because I had forgotten there were proof-theoretical paradoxes, and it is not entirely obvious that the solutions that work for other paradoxes also work for these.

The Brown Alumni Magazine has a front-page
feature on Steven
Emerson, who has for many years now been one of the more outspoken voices
proclaiming that we face a grave danger from Islamic terrorists. (Why? I hear
you ask. Well, he’s a Brown Alum, he’s in the news, he does good interview, and
I suppose we can’t put Chris Berman on the cover of every alumni magazine.) Emerson
doesn’t come off too well in this story about the firing
of Professor Al-Arian from Salon. Considering the source, you might not
think that it’s necessarily fair to Emerson, so the puff-piece from Brown might
serves as a kind of balance.

I meant to add earlier when writing about Wo’s latest entry that it would be fun if many more people in
philosophy had blogs, so there could be a rolling public
permanent discussion. EPhilosopher has discussion boards, but blogs seem to encourage slightly more careful commentary. (Bracket
here my comments below about McGinn and darts.) On
the other hand, if everyone had blogs, I’d probably
do nothing but write responses to things I see on blogs.
On the third hand though, there might be nothing wrong with that – I’d probably
produce much more philosophy this way
than I would writing one or two papers per semester (or year, or decade) for
journals.