I’ve been looking back over the blog entries from the last month or two, and I noticed a disturbing trend. Just as readership is going up, the blog entries are getting more snarky and less well-reasoned. Any one of these, or even any two of these, would be fine. But the three in combination is a disaster. The upshot is that now lots of people read the blog, see that I make cheap cracks at people without, say, reasons to support them, and could well conclude that I’m a jerk. Now if what I cared about was the spread of true beliefs throughout the world, I may or may not care about that. But I don’t. What I care about is how pleasant a place the world is for Brian. And if the Brian is a jerk meme spreads, the world becomes a less pleasant place for Brian. So we’ll be making some improvements around here. No more postings after several beers and midnight for starters.

Onto more serious matters, I’m sitting in this semester on a seminar on focus, run by Polly Jacobson. I’m rather excited to take a course on focus, because last semester I seemed to get into too many debates with Jeff King and/or Jason Stanley that ran this way

BW: Your theory can’t account for the following phenomena. [Insert long description of said phenomena, complete with carefully constructed example to illustrate the exact point at issue, and which has often been the only thing I’ve worked on for the previous 24 to 36 hours.]

JK/S: You’re ignoring focus.

BW: My bad.

At least I won’t make that mistake again after a whole semester on focus.

I might write a long-ish post on focus later, but I was wondering for now whether anyone has intuitions about the following sentence.

(1) Morgan only believes that ALEX and SAM voted for Chris.

Presumably (1) means that for all (salient?) people other than Alex and Sam, Morgan does not believe they voted for Chris. But it’s not easy to see how that follows on Rooth’s ‘alternative semantics’. Roughly, the idea is that every alternative to (1) is false, where alternatives are generated by replacing one or more of the focussed words with an alternative, and dropping ‘only’. So here are a couple of alternatives to (1)

(1a) Morgan believes that Sam and Alex voted for Chris.

(1b) Morgan believes that Sam and Sam voted for Chris.

But presumably each of these could be true, yet (1) is still true. Am I missing something obvious here?