Monthly Archives: March 2003

Eight new papers on the

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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.

The philosophy papers blog is

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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.

I’d like to say the

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I’d like to say the philosophy papers blog has been updated, but there was nothing to add.
Maybe if I’d written another paper. If you missed yesterday’s update, I could always direct you to my new paper on luminosity, but if you’ve seen that, I’ve got nothing to add.

When I’m scanning for new papers sometimes the tracking program discovers changes to pages that aren’t indicative of new papers. Here was one of the more amusing such changes, from Nick Bostrom.

I’m a whole year older than I was merely twelve months ago. [Added March 10, 2003: Today it finally happened, I became 30, i.e. middle-aged. Imagine all the things that I am now officially too old to do. There will be no celebration, no party. Don’t rock the boat, that’s what I say.]

He’s only 30. Hey, I’m meant to be the wunderkind around here! Anyway, he’s wrong about 30 being middle-aged. 30s are the new 20s, or at least they will be in 41 days approximately.

Send Nick a birthday e-card.

I was puzzled by this passage in Ulysses. (It’s from page 184 of the original printing, about 10 pages into Scylla and Charybdis.)

Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplant-handle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat.

What exactly is Aristotle’s experiment here? Here, apparently, is the passage that Stephen is referring to.

Why is it that an object which is held between two crossed fingers appears to be two? Is it because we touch it with two sense organs? For when we hold the hand in its natural position we cannot touch an object with the outer sides of two fingers.

How is this supposed to work? I tried a few ways to do this experiment from the clues that Aristotle and Stephen gave me, but I couldn’t find any way in which an object seemed like two. I’m generally very suspicious about claims about the representational character of experience – I tend to think that experiences are much shallower than we normally take them to be, and they are treated as representational because of our nature – but here I couldn’t even see how the experience was supposed to represent an object twice over.

I’d like to say the

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I’d like to say the philosophy papers blog has been updated, but there was nothing to add.
Maybe if I’d written another paper. If you missed yesterday’s update, I could always direct you to my new paper on luminosity, but if you’ve seen that, I’ve got nothing to add.

When I’m scanning for new papers sometimes the tracking program discovers changes to pages that aren’t indicative of new papers. Here was one of the more amusing such changes, from Nick Bostrom.

I’m a whole year older than I was merely twelve months ago. [Added March 10, 2003: Today it finally happened, I became 30, i.e. middle-aged. Imagine all the things that I am now officially too old to do. There will be no celebration, no party. Don’t rock the boat, that’s what I say.]

He’s only 30. Hey, I’m meant to be the wunderkind around here! Anyway, he’s wrong about 30 being middle-aged. 30s are the new 20s, or at least they will be in 41 days approximately.

Send Nick a birthday e-card.

I was puzzled by this passage in Ulysses. (It’s from page 184 of the original printing, about 10 pages into Scylla and Charybdis.)

Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplant-handle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat.

What exactly is Aristotle’s experiment here? Here, apparently, is the passage that Stephen is referring to.

Why is it that an object which is held between two crossed fingers appears to be two? Is it because we touch it with two sense organs? For when we hold the hand in its natural position we cannot touch an object with the outer sides of two fingers.

How is this supposed to work? I tried a few ways to do this experiment from the clues that Aristotle and Stephen gave me, but I couldn’t find any way in which an object seemed like two. I’m generally very suspicious about claims about the representational character of experience – I tend to think that experiences are much shallower than we normally take them to be, and they are treated as representational because of our nature – but here I couldn’t even see how the experience was supposed to represent an object twice over.

It would be fun

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It would be fun if I had more to add to the discussions going on around the web about what should and shouldn’t be for sale. But what with all the things I have to do to pay the rent, I don’t really have the appropriate time. So I’ll just promote these posts by Paul Goyette (in response to my earlier response) and Chris Bertram. Maybe I can come back to this at some stage – I certainly don’t mean to suggest that there is nothing worth saying here, just that my current temporal part is not the thing to say it.

The philosophy papers blog has

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The philosophy papers blog has been updated, and the main news is me! The paper I wrote yesterday, Luminous Margins, is the only new paper up, though there is a NY Times piece by Geoffrey Nunberg, and several interesting recently published pieces by Mabriel Romero. My normal policy is not to post links to previously published papers, but Romero’s papers are (a) fairly recent (mostly 3rd millenium) and (b) often in places that are not trivial for philosophers to track down. And it was a slow news day, so they get a link.

The philosophy papers blog has

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The philosophy papers blog has been updated, and the main news is me! The paper I wrote yesterday, Luminous Margins, is the only new paper up, though there is a NY Times piece by Geoffrey Nunberg, and several interesting recently published pieces by Mabriel Romero. My normal policy is not to post links to previously published papers, but Romero’s papers are (a) fairly recent (mostly 3rd millenium) and (b) often in places that are not trivial for philosophers to track down. And it was a slow news day, so they get a link.

I meant to not do

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I meant to not do late-night philosophy here, but I might make an exception this once. I just flipped through the Karen Bennett paper on coincidence that I joked about below, basically browsing until I got to the bits that were about my preferred view, and I was sort of struck by this argument. The background is that we’re discussing the views of a theorist who believes, roughly, every transworld fusion is an object, and our ordinary referring terms are indeterminate between many such fusions, but such indeterminacy is normally harmless because we can supervaluate away. (This summary is a cross between just how Karen describes the position and just how I’d describe my position, but it gets the essentials right I think.) The argument is going to be that for such a theorist, all de re modal claims are in a sense analytic. I probably believe this too, but if I didn’t I wouldn’t be convinced by Karen’s argument for it.

A claim like ‘Goliath would not survive being squashed’ is true because 1) ‘Goliath’ picks out the statue there, and 2) all admissible precisifications of ‘statue’ refer only to things that cannot survive squashings. Both of these are semantic claims.

Maybe, but let’s try a slighly different example.

A claim like ‘Bill Clinton essentially has DNA with a double-helix structure’ is true because 1) ‘Bill Clinton’ picks out the human there (the male one) and 2) all admissible precisifications of ‘human’ refer only to things that essentially have DNA with a double-helix structure. Both of these are semantic claims.

I think in this case, (2) is arguably the combination of a semantic claim and a non-semantic claim. The semantic claim is that, as Sidelle might put it, all admissible precisifications of ‘human’ refer only to things that are like these ones (picking out some paradigm-case humans) in their most fundamental features. The non-semantic claim is that having those features entails having DNA with a double-helix structure. Put another way, the semantic facts do pick out the property of having DNA with a characteristic shape as being one of the characteristic properties of humans. But they do not pick it out as such, rather only under the description being a fundamental feature of these here creatures. And the only analytic facts are those that are semantic facts as such.