Some columnists have been known to refer to letters columns, where they print reader letters and their reaction to them, as the ‘cripple stick’. Now we couldn’t use a term like that in these PC days and get away with it, and I don’t get enough blog related mail to really have a letters column, but I can do the next best thing – a long post entirely about other people’s posts.

Wo has posted the second part of his review of Fiction and Metaphysics. He has lots of good arguments against the idea that there are dependent objects in Thomasson’s sense. One of those good arguments is a bare-faced denial of the necessity of origin. Woo hoo!

Philosophers Imprint has posted a new paper. (Finally!) It’s by Timothy Schroder. Here’s the abstract.

Donald Davidson’s theory of mind is widely regarded as a normative theory. This is a something of a confusion. Once a distinction has been made between the categorisation scheme of a norm and the norm’s force-maker, it becomes clear that a Davidsonian theory of mind is not a normative theory after all. Making clear the distinction, applying it to Davidson’s theory of mind, and showing its significance are the main purposes of this paper. In the concluding paragraphs, a sketch is given of how a truly normative Davidsonian theory of mind might be formulated.

I like internet publishing, but I wish PI was (a) more voluminous and (b) easier to navigate. (Does anyone anyone disagree with (b). I’ve heard nothing but complaints about the site design. I think people at Michigan must be better at navigating complex web pages that we plebians.)

Kai von Fintel discusses the Schock Prize in logic and philosophy, a sort of Nobel Prize for philosophers without the attendant prestige, prize money or, it seems, fame. This was very exciting, although it would be nice if more people knew of it.

(By the way, the Geoff Pullum article he mentions is in
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, although I can’t find it online either. If you haven’t read about the Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, or about the debates over Chomskian grammar in cell block D of the Santa Cruz County Prison, I highly recommend this little book. If I could write that well, I probably wouldn’t be writing so much for free here.)

Blogosophy (great name – even better than Gavagai I’m afraid) links to this summary of the history of philosophy as told through the works of Monty Python. It’s a talk by Gary Hardcastle, and while it is incredibly amusing, I couldn’t really understand the plot line. Roughly, the history of the 20th century goes like this. First there were bad metaphysicians. Then the positivists came in and killed all the metaphysicians with their invincible verification theory of meaning. Then some fool went and hit the self-destruct button on the weapon. But ignore that. Then Quine showed that if meaning was verification conditions, then meaning holism followed. So we concluded that meaning was not verification conditions, and that holism about meaning was true. The last step is what I didn’t get. I know the old modus ponens/modus tollens choice can be hard in practice, but (outside Australia) it’s never an option to pick BOTH. Still, it’s all very funny.

Finally, Invisible Adjuct discusses (without endorsing!) a proposal to solve the job market crisis in academic history by cutting entry-level salaries. Apparently entry level salaries in history are around $40,000, which strikes me as pretty low already. It’s a lot less than I get, for example, and if you ask me I’m underpaid by half.

From my very limited knowledge of the data, I think what’s most striking about entry level salaries isn’t their level, but their lack of spread. I’m told that the salary of a superstar full professor at a top department will often be double or more the salary of a mediocre, but perfectly competent, full professor at a mid-major department. I’m not told, and I doubt it’s true, that the salaries of superstar new hires are double or more the median starting salary. There could be good explanations for this, but I suspect in terms of their marginal value the superstar new PhD adds is well above their cost of hiring.

One explanation for this could be that there is much more uncertainty about the quality of newly minted PhDs than there is of established stars. If that were true it would justify the salary structure. It would be bad, after all, to pay megabucks to someone who didn’t end up publishing as much as a well-written blog entry in their career. But I really doubt the underlying premise here, that we don’t have enough evidence to know how well junior faculty will do. If you look at the junior faculty hired by, say, Princeton or NYU the last few years, or for that matter look down the roster of the 617 blog, it is hard to believe that they will be flameouts anytime soon. It’s more likely that a senior person will start to rest on their laurels, to basically republish their old ideas, or just quit publishing at all, than that a ‘can’t-miss’ propsect will not work out. That’s especially true if the prospect is from a program that encourages being very philosophically active, and writing and publishing from a young age. This is one of Brown’s strengths as a PhD program I think, but in this respect it isn’t unusual among New England schools – MIT and UMass are fairly similar. But now I’m discussing philosophy prospects as if they were power-hitting shortstops for a Red Sox farm team again, so I better go back to doing some real work.

UPDATE: I had included here a link to an entry by Sam Quigley on the importance of internet publishing in academia these days, but that post has had to be removed for various reasons (good reasons on Sam’s part, I hasten to add) so I’ve deleted the link to it. The summary of it (i.e. my link, not Sam’s post) was that in my position as editor of the philosophy papers blog I would soon become a Very Important Philosopher because of the rising importance of being cited in high-traffic web spheres. Some have suggested that I would be more powerful, in this role, than the editorial board of the Philosophical Review. Others have suggested, more plausibly, that I’d be more powerful than the faculty of the Sage School. Anyway, the entire evidential support for these claims has now vanished into the e-ther, so you shouldn’t take them seriously.

I can’t reconstruct how I managed to do it the first time around, but I had somehow worked a link to my paper on Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument into the original entry without it seeming entirely gratuitous. Consider that done here.