The philosophy
papers updates are posted for the day. Lots of interesting journals, and as already noted the third and most intensive smackdown in the hopefully continuing NDPR Making Authors Weep Since January 2003 series.

It’s smackdown week at NDPR. Do you detect a pattern here?

This is another instance of the first worry that I noted above, viz., the feeling that there is nothing substantially new on offer here, but rather a theory put together out of a selection of what is currently on offer.

What results is a farrago that does not advance the current debate about moral realism and the moral sentiments, and indeed does not even seem to have caught up with it.

Thus it is surprising and disappointing to find a carelessness and ineptness of argument and critical analysis as well as a succession of trivial verbal solutions to serious problems.

And this isn’t biased sampling. (Well, it isn’t very biased sampling!) These are from the last three reviews posted. Heaven knows what I’d have to say if I had to rewrite my Wiggins review to keep up with the trash talking.

Now that the name Mighty Midwestern Metaphysical Mayhem has been retired from the conference circuit, I think it would have been fine to use as the title of the last review.

Thanks to Fritz Warfield for the tip about the last review.

It’s smackdown week at NDPR. Do you detect a pattern here?

This is another instance of the first worry that I noted above, viz., the feeling that there is nothing substantially new on offer here, but rather a theory put together out of a selection of what is currently on offer.

What results is a farrago that does not advance the current debate about moral realism and the moral sentiments, and indeed does not even seem to have caught up with it.

Thus it is surprising and disappointing to find a carelessness and ineptness of argument and critical analysis as well as a succession of trivial verbal solutions to serious problems.

And this isn’t biased sampling. (Well, it isn’t very biased sampling!) These are from the last three reviews posted. Heaven knows what I’d have to say if I had to rewrite my Wiggins review to keep up with the trash talking.

Now that the name Mighty Midwestern Metaphysical Mayhem has been retired from the conference circuit, I think it would have been fine to use as the title of the last review.

Thanks to Fritz Warfield for the tip about the last review.

Sometimes even the good guys screw up. From Justice Breyer’s dissent in FCC v Nextwave

The statute before us says that the Government may not revoke a license it has granted to a person who has entered bankruptcy “solely because [the bankruptcy debtor] . . . has not paid a debt that is dischargeable in [bank-ruptcy].” 11 U. S. C. §525(a). The question is whether the italicized words apply when a govern-ment creditor, having taken a security interest in a license sold on an installment plan, revokes the license not because the debtor has gone bankrupt, but simply because the debtor has failed to pay an installment as promised. The majority answers this question in the affirmative. It says that the italicized words mean

“nothing more or less than that the failure to pay a dissenting dischargeable debt must alone be the proximate cause of the cancellation—the act or event that triggers the agency’s decision to cancel, whatever the agency’s ultimate motive . . . may be.”

Hence, if the debt is a dischargeable debt (as virtually all debts are), then once a debtor enters bankruptcy, the Government cannot revoke the license—irrespective of the Government’s motive. That, the majority writes, is what the statute says. Just read it. End of the matter.

It is dangerous, however, in any actual case of interpretive difficulty to rely exclusively upon the literal meaning of a statute’s words divorced from consideration of the statute’s purpose. That is so for a linguistic reason. Gen-eral terms as used on particular occasions often carry with them implied restrictions as to scope. “Tell all customers that . . .” does not refer to every customer of every business in the world. That is also so for a legal reason. Law as expressed in statutes seeks to regulate human activities in particular ways. Law is tied to life. And a failure to understand how a statutory rule is so tied can undermine the very human activity that the law seeks to benefit. “No vehicles in the park” does not refer to baby strollers or even to tanks used as part of a war memorial. See Fuller, Positivism and Fidelity to Law—A Reply to Professor Hart, 71 Harv. L. Rev. 630, 663 (1958).

I think Breyer’s right, but he shouldn’t have picked this example to try and make his point. “Tell all customers that . . .” does not have as part of its literal meaning that the instructee (whomever that happens to be here) is to tell every customer in the world something. The number of serious theorists who think that it does is miniscule, and some of them have yet further positions that are kinda wacky (though we can forgive Bay Area people a lot after what they’ve been through the last four months) and this position rides roughshod over fairly strong semantic intuitions every single day of the week. (—You mean the salient days of the week. —Exactly.)

I probably should try and back this up with an argument, but it’s late and I’m not likely to influence the Supreme Court in any case. So I’ll just recite some clichés. If I look in the fridge and say, panicking, “There’s no beer”, Breyer’s position is that I say something literally false, that there is no beer in the entire world, but one should interpret my intended message as the true claim that there is no beer in the fridge. And this is the latest battleground between interpretavists and literalists. And most every theorist who looks at this question, not all but almost all, says that I just don’t literally say that, I literally say that there is no beer in the fridge. Cheap rhetorical argument that you shouldn’t take seriously: Would you really say that someone routinely said things that are false, or even literally false, just because they say omit quantifier domain restrictions as in “There’s no beer” or “All customers should be told that…”?

The point is, Breyer can play along with the interpretative literalists and still have his implicit quantifier domain restrictions, because those restrictions are part of the literal meaning of the sentence. Well, he sort of can at least, because it’s not obvious how one is to read a quantifier domain restriction into this particular statute. Which is to say, Stephens was probably right to agree with Breyer in principle and the majority in practice.

The fact that New York English lets negations that
syntactically appear to have narrow scope in fact take wide scope with respect
to quantifiers never ceases to amuse me. (I am, to be sure, easily amused by
language from time to time.) This is from this morning’s Super
Bowl coverage.

The Super Bowl has been known to canonize its quarterbacks,
but sometimes it buries them. Everyone can’t be Joe Montana and Joe Namath.

Not even Joe Montana?! Not even Joe Namath?!!

There were people working on Superbowl weekend after
all! Dave Chalmers has updated his responses
to critics page. There are lots of summaries of and responses to lots of criticisms
of his theories.