The philosophy papers blog is updated. The highlights are three papers by Stephen Yablo: New Grounds for Naive Truth Theory, Content Carving for Fun and Profit, and Why I Am Not a Nominalist. There is also a link to a review of Sameness and Substance Renewed, but for now it just brings up one of the more amusing 404 errors you’re likely to see. (If you’re geekily amused, that is.) There are also book-length manuscripts by Ken Safir and Gregory Carlson posted, the latter via semantics etc.

I hope the Ned Kelly film gets released in America, or is still showing when I next make it to Australia. I liked this little description of the attraction of the Kelly story from Gregor Jordan, the movie’s director:

Jordan puts all this interest down to a multitude of factors, including the appeal of a strong and rebellious character standing up to corrupt officials. It is also a bizarre story, he says.

"These guys built themselves suits of armour out of ploughs and stood on the balcony in front of 200 policemen and opened fire. That’s kind of nuts."

Kind of?!

Some days I just don’t understand how quantifier domain restriction is meant to work. This is from this morning’s New York Times.

To feed the appetite for more information from more sources, the Web magazine Salon has started a feature called “War of Words,” which was the first to highlight an item from The Sydney Morning Herald that reported the use of napalm by United States troops.

First what? First website? I doubt it – smh.com.au beat them to that by a ways. First American website? Well, perhaps. But this is the internet – who cares? Or, perhaps better, who should care? I just put this down to more evidence that the globalisation movement has a long way to go before it succeeds where it really matters: making people stop caring about little things like borders.

More conceptual questions from the war. Now that we’ve cleaned up the moral status of terrorists, and identified the liberty/freedom distinction, Matthew Yglesias asks what the distinction between courage and bravery might amount to. He suggests this one really is a distinction without a difference, and my first inclination is to agree with him. Any thoughts anyone? Could it be that All brave soliders are courageous?

Holmes Rolston III won the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. While it’s always nice to win things, especially prizes with presitgous sounding names, this won has a nice little bonus attached: a $1 million prize. And people say there’s no money in phlosophy…

There’s an article in the SMH this morning reporting that 53% of people have a ‘hidden bias’ against Arab Muslims. I’m more than a little suspicious of the methodology. The tests are based on the Project Implicit implicit association tests. These tests work as follows.

Assume we are trying to work out whether you have a bias towards group X, say the English, over group Y, say the Americans. Words from one of four groups are flashed on the screen:

Positive words: e.g. happy, laughter, joy
Negative words: e.g. awful, suffering, misery
Words associated with X: London, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth
Words associated with Y: New York, Ben Franklin, Hollywood

Your task is to group the words into one of two disjunctive categories. The test runs through twice. At first you have to group the words into X or good, on the one hand, or Y or bad, on the other. The second time through, you have to group the words into X or bad, on the one hand, or Y or good, on the other.

The idea is that if your reaction times are quicker (and/or you are more accurate) on the first part of the test, then you find the category X or good more natural than the category Y or good, which reveals a bias for Xs over Ys. On the other hand, if your reaction times are quicker, and/or you are more accurate, on the second part of the test, then for similar reasons you have a bias for Ys over Xs.

So I’ve taken these kinds of tests twice. I just got told I have a strong dislike for Arab Muslims. So I’m apparently one of the 53%. It doesn’t seem very plausible to me, but that’s what implicit preference tests are meant to show. Or maybe not. The other time I took the test I was told I have a bias in favour of the New York Yankees over the Arizona Diamondbacks. Now I have no particular fondness for the D’backs, but the Yankees are one of my few outright bigotries. I think “Yankees Suck” should be added to the Pledge of Allegiance. I’d rather see the Taliban being held in Cuba receive constitutional protection than the damned Yankees fans. Are these conscious reactions just a repression of a deep fondness for all things pinstriped?

Unlikely. What happened in both cases was that my reaction times, and accuracies, were higher in the second part of the test than in the first. I was just getting much better at disjunctive classification through doing the test. So in each case I was listed as having a preference for Ys over Xs. But it really was totally independent of just what Xs and Ys were. I presume this kind of consideration has been factored into the test design, but at least in my case (going by a massive N=2 sample) it looks to have not been given sufficient weight. So I’d be more than a little sceptical of newspaper articles reporting doom and gloom based on a few not necessarily well calibrated internet tests.

I’ve been trying to figure out how the distinction between liberty and freedom relates to these Dylan lines:

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school

Obviously this is foolish, which is more or less the point. It would still be absurd with freedom, but not I think quite as absurd. If freedom can be defined in terms of wealth and nutrition, it can be defined in terms of schoolyard equality. But trying to (a) analyse what is meant seriously here and what is a joke and (b) figure out how those things would change if we replaced one word with a near-synonym is beyond me at this time of the morning.

No philosophy papers blog today, because I left the update yesterday so late that the papers actually posted during the day yesterday, such as Cian Dorr’s paper on vagueness without ignorance are on yesterday’s update. Hopefully with many departments in the states being on break this week, there will be lots of publishing activity in the next few days.

For those of you who like making fine distinctions, which I presume is every reader of this site, Geoff Nunberg’s discussion of the difference between liberty and freedom will be fun. Amusingly, Matthew Yglesias raised the same question Geoff was answering on his blog 36 hours ago. The spirit of the weekend moves in mysterious ways.

There’s been several comments in the blogosphere already on Paul Berman’s mammoth article on Sayyid Qutb. I think I disagree, perhaps strongly, with the conclusion of the piece, but I need a little more time to think about that (and to actually read rather than just skim the article) before posting. But if I have a spare couple of hours to be disagreeable tomorrow, I might try something.

More philosophically significant, I thought, was Daniel Mendelsohn’s article on the fall of irony and the rise of melodrama. Drawing (and probably snapping) a very long bow he suggests that melodrama is a sign of democracy’s decay. Democracy’s preferred genre is perhaps not the allusive ironism of recent years, but tragedy. Still, melodrama is the enemy, and allusive irony is the enemy’s enemy, which makes it our friend for now. So I’m going to spend some time propping up modern democracy by mixing more knowing references to 80’s indie-pop bands into my papers on the foundations of probability.