Kai von Fintel pointed out that there is a simple solution to the puzzle about only I mentioned below. Roughly, Only S is true just in case all the relevant alternatives to S are either (a) false or (b) entailed by S. Less roughly, see Kai’s paper on only here.

The philosophy papers blog is up. Not much to report. Peter Carruthers has posted his replies to the commentaries on his BBS paper. There are two new Stanford Encyclopaedia entries, each of which have précis (is précis its own plural?) longer than most entries in most encylopaedia.

There has been a lot of discussion floating around the blogworld about a biology professor at Texas Tech who refuses to write recommendations for students who are not believers in evolution. The best place to start looking at the story is Kevin Drum’s post here. He has not only some of the best things to say on the case, but a good collection of links to other posts. My thoughts. Well, two. First, I hope that Kevin is right and that the professor does not care about what the students think is the mechanism underlying evolutionary change, whether it is all random noise or whether it might from time to time be given a bump along by an interventionist God. I’m rather sceptical about interventionist gods for all sorts of reasons, but I don’t think the reasons against such a god are relevant to biology, and I certainly don’t think that such views disqualify one from membership in the community of scientists. Secondly, there are quite difficult philosophical issues here that are worth thinking about. Here’s David Lewis writing on a not too dissimilar topic, why we feel uncomfortable not hiring someone because we think their philosophical views are false. (And I assume that even those of us who support, or at least accept, this professor’s practices feel there is something potentially uncomfortable about them.)

Holding true doctrines, and not being in error, would seem prima facie to be an important qualification for a job of contributing to the advancement of knowledge by teaching and research. Knowledge means, in part, being right… So when the appointing department assesses the qualifications of the candidates…it would seem that they ought to give a great deal of weight to the doctrines the candidates hold true and hold false…[E]ach should do the best he can by his own lights, voting in the way that best serves the advancement of knowledge according to his own opinions. (From Academic Appointments: Why Ignore the Advantage of Being Right? in his Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy.)

Lewis goes on to point out that we normally don’t act this way, dualists regularly vote to hire materialists and vice versa. And he points out one other odd thing which may be relevant here. We do discriminate on certain bases, how rigorous a candidate’s arguments are, how knowledgable she is of the relevant literature, etc that only seem important because they are means to getting to the truth. We care, that is, about whether a candidate adopts the means to the end of truth, but not whether she gets there.

None of this is to say that Lewis thinks we should change our practices, though he does think that we should ask ourselves just why we have this odd combination of views. The answer, he thinks is that there is a tacit treaty between the adherents of many different philosophical views to not discriminate on the basis of whether someone believes this that or the other theory. In agreeing to this treaty, we believers in the one true theory are potentially hindering the course of knowledge – it would be better if only our folks got hired. But we are also limiting our losses. Without the treaty it might be impossible for anyone with true views to be hired, and that would be a disaster. Better to allow in a few errant souls than to leave open the possibility that all true believers will be stopped at the gates.

Should be treaty extend to undergraduate creationists? I don’t know, that smacks of appeasement to me.

On a completely unrelated note, some Australians can be so unAmerican sometimes.