It’s not often I see an article in a major
web publication with my name at the
top of it. (It’s even rarer that I see this in a non-web publication
because I read so few of those.) Admittedly it didn’t have my name there as
such, but it sure looks like my name. In any case, the person Slate is
using my name as a nickname for doesn’t sound like the most pleasant
character ever. He did win a Rhodes scholarship, but from what I hear from
people around Oxford there’s little guarantee that that counts for much
character-wise.

I don’t get many particularly strange links
to this page through odd Google searches, but I was a bit surprised to see a
link through the search phrase torture
dice. It turns out I used those words together in my version of the
shooting room paradox that I rolled out against Adam Elga’s indifference
principle. But what I want to know is (a) what was the person who typed this
into Google looking for, and (b) why did s/he think that my site would
be the place to find it?!

I don’t get many particularly strange links
to this page through odd Google searches, but I was a bit surprised to see a
link through the search phrase torture
dice. It turns out I used those words together in my version of the
shooting room paradox that I rolled out against Adam Elga’s indifference
principle. But what I want to know is (a) what was the person who typed this
into Google looking for, and (b) why did s/he think that my site would
be the place to find it?!

Here is a link to the
paper by Henry Jackman I’m
commenting on at the Pacific APA next March. Actually, it looks like it’s an
early version, since I think I’m commenting on a symposium paper, which is 5000
words, but the paper posted on the web is only 3000 words.

The paper is a little surprising. The alleged
idea is that temporal externalism, the theory that future decisions about how
words are used can partially determine what the means now. The paper
starts off saying this view can be used to handle some of the problems with
epistemicism. But it turns out, in something of a surprise ending, that it
doesn’t help epistemicism in the way you’d expect. It isn’t that future uses
give us enough usage base to determine contents. It is, rather, that because meaning
is determined by future uses, and because there are norms about how words
should be used, then meaning is partially normative. And one of those norms is
that words should be given determinate extensions, so words have determinate
extensions.

I don’t really follow the final argument.
And in any case I don’t quite see how it should help epistemicism as opposed to,
say, a properly tidied up version of supervaluationism. (Or even my preferred ‘truer’
theory, I hear you ask? Good idea!) In a typical problem of the many case,
where we have a name, say ‘Morgan’, with an indeterminate extension, there’s no
norm that says we should use ‘Morgan’ to denote this object rather than this
one. There is a norm that it should be given some extension or other. So
perhaps right now it’s indeterminate between all the ways of making it precise.
That would be supervaluationism all over again. Obviously I’m missing something
though.

Any suggestions would be welcome!

On a completely unrelated topic, the message
boards I put up don’t seem to have generated overwhelming interest thus
far. I’m hoping that changes a bit.

Quick break from all the philosophy. Does
anyone know why text messaging has not taken off in America? In Britain or
Australia you can’t fall over without hitting someone sending text messages on
mobile phones, but here companies are still doing background
promotions to try to get people interested in the possibility of
text messaging. The effect is sort of like seeing an ad proclaiming how cool it
is to be able to use VCRs to watch movies in your own home, at any
time you want. America is like, so 20^th century sometimes.

Amusingly, the ATT ad promoting messaging features
someone sending a message using correctly spelled words, and almost a
syntactically correct sentence. They really haven’t caught the txt zitgst.

Quick break from all the philosophy. Does
anyone know why text messaging has not taken off in America? In Britain or
Australia you can’t fall over without hitting someone sending text messages on
mobile phones, but here companies are still doing background
promotions to try to get people interested in the possibility of
text messaging. The effect is sort of like seeing an ad proclaiming how cool it
is to be able to use VCRs to watch movies in your own home, at any
time you want. America is like, so 20^th century sometimes.

Amusingly, the ATT ad promoting messaging features
someone sending a message using correctly spelled words, and almost a
syntactically correct sentence. They really haven’t caught the txt zitgst.

As you might have noticed, I’ve added a
comments section to the blog. I don’t imagine that it will be the most active
comments board on the web, but since the quality of the readers here is so high
I thought I should try and tap into your collective wisdom.

As you might have noticed, I’ve added a
comments section to the blog. I don’t imagine that it will be the most active
comments board on the web, but since the quality of the readers here is so high
I thought I should try and tap into your collective wisdom.

I hadn’t read Wo’s Weblog for a while. Bad mistake! There’s
several nice posts about fine points of Lewis scholarship, a few David Chalmers
sightings, an interesting comparison between Armstrong and Prior, and
five distinct
objections to Laurie Paul’s logical parts view!

But one post I thought misfired. (Why focus
on the negative when there’s all this good stuff? Because I’m an academic, it’s
what we do.) Wo thinks that truthmakers are too easy to find, we can always use
the world as a truthmaker for anything. That’s possibly right, but I think what
happens next isn’t obviously right.

Want a complete
description of fundamental reality upon which everything else supervenes? Here
you are: ‘w exists’. Note that this time, unlike in the trick mentioned in ‘New
work for a theory of universals’, where the complete description was ‘everything
is F’, no exceedingly gruesome property is involved. The fundamental fact
doesn’t even contain a (non-logical) predicate. So what’s wrong this time?

I don’t see the important distinction here.
Surely objects can be just as gruesome as properties. If all objects were
created equal, then there’d be an unsolvable Kripkenstein problem for names.
But there isn’t. To summarise the world by saying ‘Everything is F’ you might
have to use a recherché predicate; to summarise it by saying ‘w exists’
you might have to use a recherché name.

I hadn’t read Wo’s Weblog for a while. Bad mistake! There’s
several nice posts about fine points of Lewis scholarship, a few David Chalmers
sightings, an interesting comparison between Armstrong and Prior, and
five distinct
objections to Laurie Paul’s logical parts view!

But one post I thought misfired. (Why focus
on the negative when there’s all this good stuff? Because I’m an academic, it’s
what we do.) Wo thinks that truthmakers are too easy to find, we can always use
the world as a truthmaker for anything. That’s possibly right, but I think what
happens next isn’t obviously right.

Want a complete
description of fundamental reality upon which everything else supervenes? Here
you are: ‘w exists’. Note that this time, unlike in the trick mentioned in ‘New
work for a theory of universals’, where the complete description was ‘everything
is F’, no exceedingly gruesome property is involved. The fundamental fact
doesn’t even contain a (non-logical) predicate. So what’s wrong this time?

I don’t see the important distinction here.
Surely objects can be just as gruesome as properties. If all objects were
created equal, then there’d be an unsolvable Kripkenstein problem for names.
But there isn’t. To summarise the world by saying ‘Everything is F’ you might
have to use a recherché predicate; to summarise it by saying ‘w exists’
you might have to use a recherché name.