Since it has been almost a week since the APA Pacific, I thought I better finish up my reports on it. It would be odd to not have this done by the time of the APA Central. Four quick points to make.

First, Ted Sider came out of the book party on his Four-Dimensionalism looking pretty good, I thought. There were some interesting arguments brought against him, especially by Ned Markosian, and I thought he answered them all pretty well. Ned’s discussion brought out well why Ted’s vagueness argument for perduantism isn’t quite as strong as Lewis’s vagueness argument for universalism about composition, but it is possible to be not quite as strong as a conclusive argument and still be fairly persuasive. (For those who haven’t been following all these debates, Lewis says that any objects must have a fusion, because the only live alternatives are that no objects have fusions or that it is vague whether some objects have a fusion, and neither is tenable. Ted says that an object must have a part at any time it exists because the only alternatives would be that objects never have temporal parts or that it is vague whether an object has a temporal part at some times, and neither is tenable. It perhaps isn’t quite so clear in the latter case that these are the only options, but on the other hand it isn’t clear that the other options are any more tenable.)

Secondly, Graham Priest came up with what I thought was an even stranger defence of dialethism than I expected. He started by noting that many people find dialethism, the doctrine that there are true contradictions, implausible, but he thought there were several explanations for this other than the fact that dialethism is as false as false can be. First, he attributed it to the pernicious effect of education. I wasn’t too convinced, since it didn’t seem MY education in Australian logic was likely to have so persuaded me. Secondly, he attributed it to the pernicious effect of Aristotle. Indirectly, Aristotle has caused us all to be monolethists. But since Aristotle’s arguments for the principle of non-contradiction are no good, this is not a good reason to reject dialethism. Now I suspect everyone is unpersuaded. Aristotle? Well, apparently Aristotle has had a major impact on Western civilisation. For example, the only source for the widespread idea that sex for non-procreative reasons is ‘naughty’ (Priest’s term) is Aristotle. And this is something else that everyone believes for no good reason other than some lousy teleology in Aristotle. Had there been two people in the room who actually endorsed Aristotle cum Aquinas on this maybe a few more people would have been persuaded. As it was it was the most repeated argument at late night APA parties. (Or at least so I think, my reporter’s notebook starts to look fairly scrawly around then.)

Third, there were a few choice quotes from the conference.

Andy Egan (at the end of an example about no one liking being green): It’s not easy being being green.
(Healthy laughter around room.)
Ted Sider (sitting in front row, joking tone): It’s not easy BEING being green.
About six people sitting around Ted: That is what he just said.
(Raucous laughter around room.)
Ted: Oh, so that’s why everyone laughed.

Ken Taylor: Our thoughts can be as confused as possible.

David Kaplan: All my remarks are meant to be suggestive not accurate.
(Several people thought that if this were possibly true it would have been.)

John Hawthorne: Epistemology isn’t rocket science.
—-: Suppose I have many friends and they’re all losers.
—-: If you put a gun to my head I’ll go with that theory.
—-: Every theory sucks.

Graham Priest (introducing the above argument): One should not underestimate the influence of Aristotle on popular culture.

Ted Sider (doing play-by-play, or at least sentence-by-sentence commentary on one of his commentators): Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. No. No. NO. NO!

Finally, and just so I can get the last joke, John and I had the following written exchange while John was trying to come up with an example. The example ended up involving a time-travelling, causally indeterministic, twice located at the same part of spacetime ghost, who was not in pain even though it was not true that it was not the case that he was in pain. Surprisingly, the behaviour of such ghosts seems to be relevant to the persistence conditions of ordinary material objects. Who knew? Anyway, the exchange went like this

John: Can one say that internal negation doesn’t commute with external negation.
Brian: You can say this, but people will laugh at you.
John: Deep thoughts are like that.
Brian: So are fuck-ups.

If Cleveland is even half as much fun it will be good value for money.

UPDATE: I added two more quotes from Ted, one recalled by Andy Egan, to the quotes board.