The philosophy papers blog is updated. The main news is a paper by Ryan Wasserman, forthcoming in Nous, on The Constitution Question.

The first of the week’s papers yesterday, Gerard Cohen’s paper on facts and values, went well. It turned out to be entirely about the Canberra Plan. He argued that, contra Rawls, ultimate moral principles cannot be grounded in facts, because in any putative case of moral principles grounded in facts, there must be a further principle connecting those facts to the principles. The analogy to the claim that a posteriori necessities are grounded in a priori necessities was striking. I think some of the commentaries today (it’s a two-day Cohen fest with three invited commentators speaking this afternoon) will discuss the analogy, so that should be fun.

Matthew Yglesias has this interesting commentary from Ned Block’s mental causation class.

Various properties make bulls angry. Let’s play make-believe and say that one of these properties is redness. We can then define a second-order property provocativity as the property of having some property that makes bulls angry. Given a red cape we then say that the redness of the cape is the realizer of the cape’s second-order property of provocativity. So if a bull-fighter waves a red cape in front of a bull, the bull will become angry. In such a situation we say that the redness of the cape caused the bull’s anger. A question arises, however, of whether or not the provocativity of the cape also counts as a cause. We discussed several well-known objections to this sort of second-order causation in today’s Philosophy 159 session. One new line of objection, however, that a graduate student and I began to develop was that if provocativity counts as a cause it will follow that provocativity is a realizer of itself. This, it seems to us, has the air of paradox about it. Professor Block allowed that it sounded strange, but that he couldn’t see on its face that it contradicted any logical rules and that, therefore there was no real paradox. Thoughts?

I don’t think the move to say that if second-order properties are causes then they are self-realisers is forced. It might be part of the concept of provocativity that it is only a property of first-order properties, and hence cannot be a property of itself. This may sound a little ad hoc, but once we accept that redness has provocativity, but the red cape does not, it seems we have to accept some formal restrictions on provocativity. Matthew is assuming that the restriction is just to properties as opposed to individuals, but we could go a little further.

Getting out of a putative paradox by invoking type-theory is always awkward, so it’s also worth noting there’s no paradox here. As Lewis notes somewhere (the most recent paper on the temporary intrinsics problem, Mind sometime not long ago) (1) is not paradoxical, it is in fact true, even though (2) is paradoxical.

(1) Kevin Sheedy is not a member of himself.

(2) Kevin Sheedy is a member of the set of things that are not members of themselves.

The lesson is just that we should not analyse (1) as (2). Just how we should analyse (1) is somewhat complicated, Lewis’s solution adverts to his structuralist version of set theory, but I think it’s common ground that it has a consistent analysis. The relevant point here is that the self-realisation conclusion is more like the safe and true (1) than the paradoxical (2), so it doesn’t support a paradox.