The philosophy papers blog is up. Two new entries, both of them Australian in a way.

I updated my earlier post on French toast to note one odd effect of conjunction reduction. I am a little more worried now than I was when I wrote the post (about 90 minutes ago!) that I’m just reporting on my langage, not perhaps on your language, dear reader. Hopefully I can write something more by the end of today, but it’s busy today and I’m lazy, so maybe not.

The knowledge paper I wrote with Adam Sennet got rejected by Mind, the ba*ds. It’s rather unfortuate, because it’s rare that one gets to write a paper that is both as correct and as funny as that one. Maybe that just says something about my regular disposition to have no co-authors.

For those following the evolution of my thought, the paper with Adam actually represented a small turning point. I used to think that Gettier cases could well be cases of knowledge because of quite general concerns, mostly arising from my studies in decision theory, about resting too much theoretical weight on intuitions about particular cases. I don’t think that’s wrong, and I still stand by everything I wrote here outlining the concern, but I think it is in a way incomplete. Now I think that the intuitions about Gettier cases are manifestations of the intuition that knowledge must be sensitive in Nozick’s sense, and those intuitions are generally worse than useless. The common thread is that I think the Gettier cases don’t settle anything unless we can find some way of classifying them in a way that explains why they are not instances of knowledge. I used to merely think that task had not been done. Now I think there is a positive argument that they are mistaken intuitions, relying on the fact that they resemble cases where we non-sceptics all agree that intuitions of rich whities regularly go awry.

Chomsky yesterday wasn’t as much fun as the other papers. The sweep was too broad for many interesting details to emerge. He did say some interesting things about philosophers general tendency to ignore chemistry in favour of physics. Chomsky suggested that the current relation between brain and mind, or neurology and psychology broadly construed, was in certain ways analogous to the relation between physics and chemistry 100 years ago. That is, in each case we know that the former constitutes the latter, but we have no idea how this works. In the physics/chemistry case, the gap was closed more by physics becoming more like chemistry during the QM revolution, rather than vice versa, and Chomsky at least suggested the same kind of thing could happen in cognitive sciences. But as to how it would happen, I guess we have to go and read his books (or the books of people working in his areas, several of which he quite generously cited) to see the details.