The philosophy papers blog is up, with five new papers, three of them from the hard working staff at CAPPE. I think CAPPE needs its own group blog, sort of a cross between Philosophy from the (617) and TAPPED.

I managed, while convincing myself I had not missed the bus, to find a better analogy for how voluntary I think beliefs are. It is impossible to sneeze at will. At least, I can’t do it. I could at will use external means to induce a sneeze, but that’s not the same thing. On the other hand, it is sometimes possible to prevent oneself sneezing more or less at will. It’s not always pleasant, but if the alternative is sneezing loudly across a seminar room or a dinner table, it may be the right thing to do in the circumstances. The sometimes is important here – sometimes the relevant parts of the body are not suitably responsive to the will. But sometimes they are, and that’s enough to make one (mildly, occasionally) culpable for sneezing loudly while, say, a visitor is presenting a paper. I think beliefs are similar. The standard methods for inducing reasonable sceptical doubt – reminding oneself of the possibility of error and of alternative explanations of the evidence, recalling times when similar evidence was misleading, and so on – sometimes work. They are sometimes enough to stop the body drifting towards the belief it wants to have. And when an agent does not use such methods in a circumstance where they would have been appropriate, s/he may be culpable for the resulting beliefs. The analogy is imperfect in a few ways – it doesn’t allow for possibilities like my positively believing against all the evidence that my bus would soon be arriving – but it’s close to what I think the most common interaction is between belief and the will.

I should have mentioned some credits in last night’s post. The link to Charles Murtaugh’s “worst. post. ever.” was by Matthew Yglesias. The comments on his post have a rather large collection of candidates for worst movie ever. And the link to the Andrew Sullivan fantasy was via Ted Barlow. (I also should have mentioned that one further similarity between Australia and rocky Ithaca – both seem to be good places for raising sheep in very large quantities. I’d go back and add that now, but blogs aren’t meant to be edited.)

I hadn’t quite noticed how self-indulgent some of the ‘jokes’ were there when reading it. I knew that practically every line was a joking reference to some event or book or theory that would not be obvious to most readers. What I forgot was that several of the jokes were me making fun of something I’d thought earlier in the night. (As noted, I’d managed to go through some moderately spectactular doxastic gymnastics en route to Providence.) Some of those references are transparent enough to be effective, but others are completely obscure. (Well, except to me. And a Ulysses themed post is meant to be self-indulgent a bit.) I guess it’s all more evidence that I should stick to my day job.