I should start listing more of the academic blogs that I come across. Anyway, two worth noting today. Kai von Fintel has a blog that focusses so far mainly on news alerts for linguists. He promises that it will contain scholarship, with it seems as much focus on other people’s work as his. (—But we want to know what Kai is doing? —Settle down. Blogs are big things. It is possible to report on other people’s work and on your own.)

He also has a really interesting paper on his website about epistemic containment (co-authored with Sabine Iatridou). Apparently, epistemic modals have different patterns of interaction with quantifiers to other modals. So, for instance, (7) is inappropriate in the following setting.

We are standing in front of an undergraduate residence at the Institute. Some
lights are on and some are off. We don’t know where particular students live but we
know that they are all conscientious and turn their lights off when they leave. So, we
clearly know that not all of the students are out (some lights are on and they wouldn’t
be on if the students were away). It could in fact be that all of them are home (the
ones whose lights are off may already be asleep). But it is also possible that some of
them are away. Since we don’t know which student goes with which light, we have
that for every particular student it is compatible with our evidence that he or she has
left.

(7)*Every student may have left but not every one of them has.

Compare (7´) (not from their paper but motivated by it).

(7´)Every student could have won but not every one of them could have.

(7´) is awkward, to be sure, but it has a true reading, that while for any given student it was possible that they won, it was not possible that every student won. Von Fintel and Iatridou have more natural examples, but they aren’t as close a match in form to (7).

I think this is fascinating stuff, but I should put in a word about why it matters for those of you who don’t find semantics to be intrinsically interesting. It’s often a source of contention in debates about epistemology and metaphysics whether the modal operator in a particular sentence is epistemic or, in some sense, metaphysical. Previously it was difficult to find a fully operational test for determining this, and so people relied on rules of thumb. (Might is usually epistemic, contingent is usually metaphysical, and so on, with added debates about how these modalities interact with conditionals.) It seems possible, and I’m not saying it can be done but possible that this observation will lead to an operational test. We shall see.

Mark Kleiman is a Professor of Policy Studies at UCLA. So his work tends to be much more focussed on politics than most of what I cover here. Not that focusing on politics is a bad thing, but there are I don’t know, about six and a half billion politics blogs in the world right now, and only a handful of active philosophy blogs, so I think we’re more likely to be approaching the point of diminshing returns in politics rather than philosophy now in the blogworld.

So why am I bringing this up? Well, because Kleiman also does political philosophy, and occasionally it creeps onto the blog. Today, as a follow-up to the amusing discussion of Jonah Goldberg and Mark Twain on censorhip , Kleiman posted this:

Not so fast. No doubt you, dear reader, are aware that Plato was an advocate of censorship, believing that his young “guardians” should be brought up hearing only martial music and bombastic patriotic poetry. So we were taught by Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.

But now take a look, if you will, at Republic II, 376c-385. Plato’s Socrates, talking to a group of young intellectual conservatives, has no problem convincing them that censorship of reading material for the young is a good thing. He then immediately introduces as examples Homer and Hesiod, the closest thing to canonical sacred texts known to Athenian society, and they’re so thick they just keep saying “Yes, Socrates.”

It’s the very same joke Mark Twain made, and for two millennia now people a lot smarter than Jonah Goldberg have been reading Plato’s irony as if it were sober prescription. What makes this misreading even more astonishing is that Plato, later in the same text, makes a famous claim that the ideal polity would ban dramatic poetry altogether, and does so in a dialogue, a species of dramatic poetry.

As I was taught this material by Paul Desjardins, the ironies go much deeper, starting with the fact that the polity constructed in the dialogue is not in fact the city that embodies justice, but instead a luxurious city to meet the luxurious taste of Glaucon and his rich, idle friends. (372c-375). The “guardians” — not, in the text, rulers, but warriors — are necessary only because the city-in-speech being built is unlimited in its desire for wealth, and therefore will fall into conflict with its similarly intemperate neighbors.

Personally, I can’t imagine writing or speaking without the use of irony in its various degrees, starting with the sarcastic “r-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ght!” and moving up the scale of subtety. But the warning is there. Even a supreme literary artist — which Plato undoubtedly was — proved unable to overcome the natural thick-headedness of his readers, and wound up being identified with the very position he was satirizing. “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.”

I did a little digging around this afternoon and found that, well, it’s not taken to be settled beyond doubt, but some much better Plato scholars than Russell and Popper are prepared to take Plato at his word here. I don’t know enough about Plato to have an opinion one way or the other, but I’m prepared to defer to my authorities. It does look like an interesting question of scholarly interpretation, but that is so far from my area of expertise (—Which is what, philosophy of language? —I do theoretical philosophy, not applied, don’t bug me) that I won’t try and get personally involved.

UPDATES: Kai von Fintel has a long list of people with online papers in semantics. I made a quick policy decision that semantics is part of philosophy, and included those links on the list of webpages to be checked every day. So the philosophy papers blog is now tracking changes to around 650 web pages daily. I also added a link to this post two hours after it was written, and two hours after the link should have been added.