The philosophy papers blog is

The philosophy papers blog is up.

My intro logic students do quizzes every week. Last week they had to look through some arguments and judge whether they were valid or not. (This is logic, so soundness questions are set aside.) One of the questions was a passage you may have seen before.

Now, first, if someone, anyone, knows that there are rocks, then the person can know the following quite exotic thing: there is no evil scientist deceiving him into falsely believing that there are rocks. But no one can know that this quite exotic situation does not obtain. So no one can know that there are rocks.

About half the class had no idea what was meant by the second sentence. I was sort of stuck, because I had no idea how to provide an enlightening paraphrase. The passage looks a little awkward to me, but it is just how people write in philosophy papers. Or so I thought.

Normally I’d just write this off to my student’s ignorance of English, but in this case I was worried the problem was with the text not them. And if the problem is with the text, and the text is fairly standard philosophical writing, that is not good news for philosophical writing as such. So now I have to go back in and try and explain why it is perfectly understandable English. Not a pleasant task.

The better news was that I gave them lots of Wason selection task style questions, and they did pretty well. Either Brown students are smarter than average, or my teaching is better than average. My priors are heavily weighted towards the first, I guess.

The passage, if you didn’t guess, is from Peter Unger’s Ignorance.