The philosophy papers blog is up. It’s a low quantity but (very) high quality day, with new postings by Jay Wallace, John Burgess and Gilbert Harman. Harman’s posting is a web-only discussion of why mentalism became so dominant in linguistics in the last 30 odd years, and is well-worth reading for those who need a primer on the history of this area.
It strikes me that the reviews of the AJP articles I posted last night were somewhat more negative than I intended. The tone of the discussions of the McArthur and Hand papers, in particular, was not exactly what I intended first time around. I do think McArthur should have compared his position to Quine’s, and I think he still makes too big a role for sensations in evidence, even if they constitute evidence rather than being the contents of evidential claims, but there’s lots of points in his paper that it is worthwhile to make, including a lot that about the history of the relationship between scepticism and indirect realism that I suspect will be news to several readers. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that he should have referred to unpublished papers by Brown graduate students, even superstar Brown graduate students. When I was writing the note I thought that might be obvious, but on second reading it didn’t look as obvious as I intend. And Hand’s paper is an interesting solution to the knowability paradox, even if as I think it doesn’t give us everything an anti-realist may have wanted. And I’ve already edited the Varzi entry which was borderline libellous, which I guess was unwarranted, and it’s been changed. (Normally the rule is that even mistakes stay on the blog, but I make the rules so I get to make the exceptions to them too.)
On that topic, I wonder if it is possible to libel someone you don’t know. If I say that the F is G, where being G is some quite disreputable property, and some of my readers know who the F is, could I have thereby libelled the F even if I don’t know who s/he is? Assume that the speaker meaning of my utterance is clearly attributive in Donnellan’s sense. Does this make a difference? What if I say that all Fs are Gs, not knowing any Fs. Have I libelled all Fs? What if I say that some Fs are Gs and some of the readers know that there is exactly one F? If the official answer to the last question is no while the official answer to the first question is yes, can I use Zoltan Szabo’s theory of definite descriptions (that they are semantically but not pragmatically equivalent to indefinite descriptions) as part of my defence?