Eight new papers on the philosophy papers blog. Benj Hellie on Russell on Sense-Data, Peter Laserhohn on The Temperature Paradox as Evidence for a Presuppositional Analysis of Definite Descriptions, Gary Hardegree on The Logic of Pi-Algebras, Ryan Wasserman on Temporal Parts and on Temporary Intrinsics, a review of Susan Neiman’s book on evil in philosophy, and Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entries on Memory and Philoponus.

Richard Heck’s paper yesterday was very good, I thought. He argued that Dummett’s supposition of a common language, as opposed to a morass of overlapping idiolects, turns out to not help explain the possibility of communication. In fact, it’s easier to explain the breadth of communicative success on the overlapping idiolect picture. And we can probably explain the impression that common usage has normative force without accepting a common language either, by reflecting on how hard it is in practice to use a word in a different way to how one hears others using it. So the balance of considerations support the overlapping idiolects model over the common language model. This is, as it sounds, only the barest sketch of what is in the paper, so hopefully the paper will appear somewhere (like a website!) soon so we can look over the details in some detail.

The Laserhohn paper was scooped by Kai von Fintel about 35 minutes ago. I have to start getting up earlier if I want to actually have news to report on these pages.