The philosophy papers blog is up. The only new paper is by Henry Stapp on Quantum Approaches to Consciousness. I think I agreed with the first sentence.
Quantum approaches to consciousness are sometimes said to be motivated simply by the idea that consciousness is a mystery, and quantum theory is a mystery, so maybe these two mysteries are related.
I might even say that from time to time. On the other hand, Stapp knows more about QM than I do, so maybe I shouldn’t mock him.
I’m feeling somewhat like a logician this week. First I got a request from the Journal of Philosophical Logic to referee a paper. Normally refereeing papers is more like a chore than anything else, but sometimes it is nice to add particular journals to the list of journals for whom one has refereed. Then this morning (these guys must work round the clock) I found my old paper on constructivist probability has been accepted in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic. This is pretty exciting – I now have two major papers accepted for the year, and I wrote both of them before I came to America. I could have taken the last four months off and I would still have been improving my CV at a pretty good pace.
For anyone who thinks the sky is the wrong way up around these parts, Virulent Memes has a pretty picture of the Southern Cross up. On an unrelated note, Henry Farrell quotes Dante complaining about staircases that spiral the opposite way to those with which he is familiar. (How would he have coped with cars on the wrong side of the road?) Somehow this is in the context of finding an American store that sells just the right kind of butter, but you’ll have to read it to find just what the context is.
For one reason or another I’ve been thinking about the vagueness book again. I wrote a new draft of the table of contents last night. It now looks like this
Chapter 1 – Prelude
- What is vagueness
- Puzzles about vagueness
- Where my theory lines up
- Preview
Chapter 2 – Truer
- A standard many-valued theory
- Benefits of this theory
- Costs of the theory
- Using sets rather than numbers
- Comparative truth
- Explicating truer
- Historical connections
- Williamson’s objection to truer
- Truer and Boolean lattices
- How much of classical logic is preserved
Chapter 3 – Pragmatics
- What is to be explained
- Contextualist hypotheses
- Conceptualist hypotheses
- Gricean hypothesis
- Levinson on speaker meaning
- The Sorites again
Chapter 4 – Rival Accounts
- Many-valued theories
- Purely classical Theories
- Supervaluational Theories
- Nihilist Theories
Chapter 5 – The Many
- Schiffer’s Problem
- McGee and McLaughlin’s Problem
- The supervaluational solution
- How to mimic this using truer
- McKinnon’s objection
- Sorensen’s objection
- Does Knowledge imply Determinacy
I know what I’m going to say in most sections. I need to do a bit more research for 2.7, but I think that should be easy enough. I need to think a little more about what I’ll say in 3.5 in response to King and Stanley’s objections to the kind of theory of speaker meaning that I use to explain the allure of Sorites arguments. I haven’t really decided what I’m going to stress anywhere in chapter 4, but the material is mostly there. The real problems are in chapter 5. Section 5.7 is planned to be about Cian Dorr’s arguments that knowledge does not imply determinacy. I think I’m going to end up agreeing with him, which I probably should have done in the original many paper.
The real problem is 5.4. I assumed all along that this would be easy. Chapter 5 starts with a pair of nice problems, the simpler of which is due to Vann McGee and Brian McLaughlin. The problem is that we want to say that sentences like (1) can be true, even when both the subject and the predicate are vague.
(1) That is a mountain.
The problem is that there are literally billions of possible references for that, and only one of them is in the extension of mountain. The supervaluational solution, if it can be made to work, is to say that there is a penumbral connection between that and mountain so that on every precisification the reference of that is in the extension of mountain. The main point of my many paper was to note that there’s a way to do this that is a fair bit prettier than mere stipulation. The idea is that precisifications are what we get when we make stipulations about how to ‘fill out’ the naturalness property that Lewis uses to solve Kripkensteinian problems. One neat feature of naturalness is that natural objects tend to be those that have natural properties. So if it’s the case that m624 is more natural than all the rest of the ‘mountains’ (either in reality or according to a precisification), and hence is the reference of that, then the set containing m624 will be more natural than the set containing any other ‘mountain’, so it will be the extension of mountain and so it will be true (either in reality or according to a precisification) that That is a mountain.
This is all incredibly clever, if I do say so, but I don’t really know how to cash it out in terms of truer than. I can figure out some technical ways of duplicating the results, but it really just does look like a duplication of the results. And a major theme of 4.3 is that a decent theory of vagueness needs something analytically prior to what the supervaluationists have available. If truer gets defined in terms of precisifications, then the project is not looking particularly attractive. I’m mostly sure this is a small problem, but if it isn’t I may have some hard work to do.
I’m going to be driving to the APA Central this week (it’s in Cleveland, about a 9,10 hour drive from here, which is nothing by Australian standards). The plan was that it would be relaxing to get away from everything and just be out on the road for a while. (I’m spending chunks of the weekend making up mix tapes, well mix CDs, for the drive.) But if I can’t make progress on this puzzle, I might spend most of the drive looking for a way to save my lovely little theory.