I mean to think more about this later, and if I come up with anything write about it, but for now I just want to post a link to John Quiggin’s follow-up to his earlier post on consequentialism. A large part of the post consists of criticisms of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s entry on consequentialism in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. There’s some interesting questions here on the (rather large) boundary between economics and philosophy, which I’ve long though should be one the most productive areas for interdisciplinary work in philosophy.
Monthly Archives: May 2003
The philosophy papers blog is
The philosophy papers blog is up, with five new papers on metaphysics, the knowledge argument, and legal and political philosophy.
A few notes from around
A few notes from around the web while wondering whether the 43 hour long unabridged version of Ulysses is possibly a good idea.
Fritz Warfield sent a link to this story in the NY Times about the standard kilogram slowly shrinking. There’s lots of fun philosophical issues that arise. Isn’t it a priori that the standard kilogram has a mass of one kilogram, so it couldn’t possibly be shrinking?! While we’re there, is there as much of a philosophical problem about intertemporal mass comparisons as intertemporal location comparisons? The article also verifies an intuition that several philosophers have shared – you really can’t tell whether a perfectly homogenous sphere is spinning. Finally, there’s a conditional that should challenge a few theories, if it is meant to be true
If the earth were this round, Mount Everest would be four meters tall
I think that works, as long as ‘Mount Everest’ is a descriptive name for the tallest mountain.
Chris Bertram links to a story in the Guardian that uses Wittgensteinian rule-following considerations in a discussion of the Enron accountancy shenanigans. It’s interesting, if long, but I tend to agree with Matthew Yglesias that the references to Wittgenstein were probably not essential to the story being told.
Kieran Healy has a good post about the growing disconnect between risk and reward in the American economy. Kieran’s main point here, that markets are social constructs with enough variable parameters that many outcomes we see are the result of more or less explicit social choice rather than an essential consequence of having a free market economy, shouldn’t really be news, but probably will be to too many bloggers.
And Wo has a series of good posts about fiction and fictional objects that I should have linked to earlier. The latest two are on fictional objects (defending the idea that they are just possibilia) and fictional truth operators.
The philosophy papers blog is
The philosophy papers blog is up. Busier day today, largely thanks to CAPPE. Six papers and a book review posted.
Radical Beliefs
Reading Neil Levy’s very good paper on responsibility for belief reminded me that I’ve probably never posted here my view about the connection between voluntarism about belief and deontological conceptions of justification. I keep forgetting this, but I do have one extreme philosophical view. (Most of my views are just mundane common sense, which I regret a little, but sometimes the truth is like that.) I’m a fairly extreme voluntarist about belief. I think there are some propositions that you can come to believe more or less at will, at least with a little practice. I don’t think this is always easy. Moving your beliefs around at will is like moving your arms around at will when there are heavy weights attached to the ends of them. It can be done, but practice helps.
Anyway, I think that the kind of voluntarism we need to defend a deontological conception of justification is actually quite weak, and almost plausible. (It’s certainly true, since stronger versions of voluntarism that are definitely not plausible by current standards are also true.) Let’s start by noting some fairly obvious truths about the connection between voluntary action and moral responsibility. Today was graduation at Brown, and I had an obligation, of a sort, to attend the departmental graduation ceremony. Despite the torrential rain, I did so. Now I could well have stayed at home, and had the game I’d been watching (Wolverhampton-Sheffield playoff for the last premiership position, if you’re keeping score) been any closer or the rain been any heavier, I may well have. Had I done so, I would have been morally culpable. And in part this would have been because it was within my voluntary control to get myself to the graduation ceremony.
Now, I couldn’t have reached the graduation ceremony by just clicking my heels and wishing myself there. I would have been a little drier had I been able to do just that, but sadly it was impossible. But there were a series of actions that were within my direct voluntary control (one foot in front of the other, keep the umbrella pointed towards the wind so it doesn’t invert, etc.) that resulted in my being at the graduation ceremony. It might not be easy to carry out this series of actions, especially in the rain, but as long as the series exists then my presence or otherwise at the graduation is sufficiently under my voluntary control that it I’m responsible for whether or not it happens.
How does this relate to belief? The most direct way it does is if for some beliefs, the ones for which you are responsible, there is a series of voluntary actions you can take such that you’ll end up having that belief. I think that’s sometimes possible, but I don’t want to try convincing you of that here. And the reason for that is that for present purposes I don’t need to. If I could have failed to have a certain belief by performing a series of actions that are under my voluntary control, yet I still have the belief, then that seems like enough for responsibility. And actually it’s rather easy to remove beliefs, at least non-perceptual beliefs, by voluntary actions. The good kind of scepticism, the kind that teaches you to doubt charlatans, fraudsters, used car salesmen, magicians, Republican politicians, spammers with Nigerian millions, news that’s too good to be true, stories that are too incredible to be fiction, anything said by philosophers and so on, basically consists in an exhortation to doubt everything doubtable. And that kind of exhortation can work, especially when presented the right way. If we do our job in teaching entry level philosophy courses, one of the skills we generate is the ability to doubt at will, and this kind of doubt defeats belief.
Let’s try a little thought experiment. Take any claim that you believed at first but later regretted believing. In America this should be easy – unless you disbelieved every factual claim made by the administration in the lead-up to the Iraq war, there’s probably something you believed and regretted. (I’m cheating a little here. The adminstration did say things like that Saddam is evil and the Iraqi people would be better off with him removed, which are both true, and even factual on a cognitivist theory of morality. Ignore these claims. I’m sure most readers believed them then, and don’t regret believing them now. The claims about the military capacities and threats of the Iraqis are what we care about here. The basic administration line, recall, was that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to the U.S. and that they were so weak militarily that a few thousand soldiers and some smart bombs should see them out. It’s the parts of that line that I’m focussing on.) Many people, for example, believed what Colin Powell said at his presentation at the U.N. about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons capacity, and I’m sure some of them regret so doing. I think many of these people could have, if they had tried hard enough, remained sceptical about these claims. They could have retained a sceptical doubt even in the face of apparently sincere assertion by Sec. Powell. If they couldn’t have done just this, their regret would be at least a little misplaced. Not entirely, since we can regret things that are outside our voluntary control, but a little I suspect. And I think this kind of situation is one in which we often find ourselves. It’s natural to take things at face value, to believe what people say, but we don’t have to do this, and we often shouldn’t.
That’s all we need I think to salvage a deontological conception of justification. We don’t need that people can believe at will. We don’t even need that people can doubt at will. We just need that there are procedures we can use, the kinds of procedures we teach students in critical reasoning courses, that if properly carried out will lead to doubt and hence not to belief. If the agent could have carried out these procedures, but believes anyway, then s/he is culpable, because her/his belief is in the relevant sense under her/his voluntary control – it was within her/his power to not have that belief.
That much I think is fairly moderate. The radical bit is where I try and turn this into an argument that one can generate beliefs just as easily as one can destroy them. But I might leave that for a different late night blog.
Music and Sorites
I recently bought a portable CD player that plays MP3s. Such a thing is obviously useful for someone who (a) travels a lot and (b) is indecisive. Because I can fit 10 times as many MP3s as regular tracks on a CD, the MP3 player means I can carry 250 albums or so in a small-ish CD case. It’s all very good. In theory.
The first problem was getting data CDs that stored MP3s in a format that the little player can read. The first 15 or so CDs I tried were mostly incomprehensible to the player. (If anyone needs any coasters, I’ve got some spare CDs lying around…) Mostly incomprehensible, because 1 of them somehow worked. I was hoping I could use that 1 to tell me just exactly what format a CD needed to be in for the player to read it. Very scientific, I thought. Except when I tried to duplicate the settings I used for the one that worked, the CD player still wasn’t happy. At this stage I knew what to do. The difference between the CD that worked and the CD that didn’t work could be broken into a series of small steps such that each step was too small to possibly make a difference to whether the CD actually worked. In essence I could march the CD player along a forced march Sorites. This strategy required burning (literally) even more blank CDs to make sure the steps were small enough, but the strategy worked! Who said philosophy is useless! Not even a machine can withstand the forced march Sorites! (I leave the philosophical consequences of this for another day.)
The second problem was figuring out which albums should go with what. Some of it was easy. For several bands it was easy to create one CD with all their albums. But that didn’t always work, and wasn’t obviously optimal. And I’m an obsessive listmaker. So I decided I had to have one CD with my 10 favourite albums on it. Which required working out what those albums are. So here’s the list. (I know, this ceased being a philosophy post long ago.)
Brian’s 10 favourite albums (as of May 27, 2003), in approximate chronological order
- Blonde on Blonde (Bob Dylan)
- The Velvet Underground and Nico (The Velvet Underground and Nico)
- Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)
- Post (Paul Kelly)
- The Queen is Dead (The Smiths)
- Stone Roses (Stone Roses)
- Parklife (Blur)
- The Boy with the Arab Strap (Belle and Sebastian)
- Watching Angels Mend (Alex Lloyd)
- The Strokes (The Strokes)
It’s approximate chronological order because in several cases I don’t know exactly which album came out before which. I think that’s the right order, but I’m very uncertain about the last two, a little uncertain about the Post/Queen is Dead order, and quite uncertain about the Banana/Sgt Peppers order.
If I was a real list maniac I’d order the list by Brian’s preferences. But that’s too hard. Or I’m trying to cut back on lists. Stone Roses would be at #1, beyond that it’d be a bit random.
I was a bit surprised when making up the list to realise that Watching Angels Mend was (just about) my favourite album of the last few years. It’s a kind of boring conventional choice, at least for a young professional Australian type. I’m just a sucker for music that screams I’M A GENIUS while remaining within by now well-established indie-pop boundaries. Especially if it’s by an Australian. I’d like there to be more Australian albums there, but most of my favourite Australian acts (Crowded House, Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, You Am I) don’t have a real standout album that easily makes the list.
The Strokes album has to be the UK release, not the horrible bastardised version of the album (with dubious cover art) that got released in America. The US version might not be in the top 100.
There’s a lot of choices there that are not particularly fashionable. Blonde on Blonde over Highway 61, Sgt Peppers over Revolver, Post over Gossip, anything over anything by Radiohead. Again, my goodness judgments don’t necessarily track fashion as well as may be hoped.
I know I said a few days ago that Bringing It all Back Home was the perfect Dylan album. I changed my mind. I could try and save the consistency by saying that there’s a difference between being Dylan’s best album and being the best Dylan album. The analogy would be those who claim that Let It Bleed is the Stones’ best album, but Exile on Main St is the best Stones album. But this is barely coherent at best, and in any case is wrong about the relative quality of Stones records, so I shouldn’t rely on it. I just changed my mind. (How did I leave Exile off this list? Don’t know. Could be getting late.)
Yes, I am a little embarrassed about having Parklife on the list. It’s a little sad I guess, but I have a hopeless nostalgia for the mid-90s in the way that some old lefties have a nostalgia for the late 60s, or some conservatives have a nostalgia for the reign of Henry VIII. Clinton in the White House and Keating in the Lodge; the long (inter)national nightmare of peace and prosperity; good music, good movies, even occasionally good television (pre-Survivor!) and, perhaps not coincidentally, some very good philosophy. I was never the kind of hard partying hard drinking carefree irresponsible friendly anti-social repulsive attractive type that’s celebrated on Parklife – and the greyhound on the cover of the album is the closest I’ve been to the dogs for a very long time – so I don’t really have a good excuse for liking it. Maybe it’s moments like this that make people like the view that reason is slave of the passions.
Music and Sorites
I recently bought a portable CD player that plays MP3s. Such a thing is obviously useful for someone who (a) travels a lot and (b) is indecisive. Because I can fit 10 times as many MP3s as regular tracks on a CD, the MP3 player means I can carry 250 albums or so in a small-ish CD case. It’s all very good. In theory.
The first problem was getting data CDs that stored MP3s in a format that the little player can read. The first 15 or so CDs I tried were mostly incomprehensible to the player. (If anyone needs any coasters, I’ve got some spare CDs lying around…) Mostly incomprehensible, because 1 of them somehow worked. I was hoping I could use that 1 to tell me just exactly what format a CD needed to be in for the player to read it. Very scientific, I thought. Except when I tried to duplicate the settings I used for the one that worked, the CD player still wasn’t happy. At this stage I knew what to do. The difference between the CD that worked and the CD that didn’t work could be broken into a series of small steps such that each step was too small to possibly make a difference to whether the CD actually worked. In essence I could march the CD player along a forced march Sorites. This strategy required burning (literally) even more blank CDs to make sure the steps were small enough, but the strategy worked! Who said philosophy is useless! Not even a machine can withstand the forced march Sorites! (I leave the philosophical consequences of this for another day.)
The second problem was figuring out which albums should go with what. Some of it was easy. For several bands it was easy to create one CD with all their albums. But that didn’t always work, and wasn’t obviously optimal. And I’m an obsessive listmaker. So I decided I had to have one CD with my 10 favourite albums on it. Which required working out what those albums are. So here’s the list. (I know, this ceased being a philosophy post long ago.)
Brian’s 10 favourite albums (as of May 27, 2003), in approximate chronological order
- Blonde on Blonde (Bob Dylan)
- The Velvet Underground and Nico (The Velvet Underground and Nico)
- Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)
- Post (Paul Kelly)
- The Queen is Dead (The Smiths)
- Stone Roses (Stone Roses)
- Parklife (Blur)
- The Boy with the Arab Strap (Belle and Sebastian)
- Watching Angels Mend (Alex Lloyd)
- The Strokes (The Strokes)
It’s approximate chronological order because in several cases I don’t know exactly which album came out before which. I think that’s the right order, but I’m very uncertain about the last two, a little uncertain about the Post/Queen is Dead order, and quite uncertain about the Banana/Sgt Peppers order.
If I was a real list maniac I’d order the list by Brian’s preferences. But that’s too hard. Or I’m trying to cut back on lists. Stone Roses would be at #1, beyond that it’d be a bit random.
I was a bit surprised when making up the list to realise that Watching Angels Mend was (just about) my favourite album of the last few years. It’s a kind of boring conventional choice, at least for a young professional Australian type. I’m just a sucker for music that screams I’M A GENIUS while remaining within by now well-established indie-pop boundaries. Especially if it’s by an Australian. I’d like there to be more Australian albums there, but most of my favourite Australian acts (Crowded House, Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, You Am I) don’t have a real standout album that easily makes the list.
The Strokes album has to be the UK release, not the horrible bastardised version of the album (with dubious cover art) that got released in America. The US version might not be in the top 100.
There’s a lot of choices there that are not particularly fashionable. Blonde on Blonde over Highway 61, Sgt Peppers over Revolver, Post over Gossip, anything over anything by Radiohead. Again, my goodness judgments don’t necessarily track fashion as well as may be hoped.
I know I said a few days ago that Bringing It all Back Home was the perfect Dylan album. I changed my mind. I could try and save the consistency by saying that there’s a difference between being Dylan’s best album and being the best Dylan album. The analogy would be those who claim that Let It Bleed is the Stones’ best album, but Exile on Main St is the best Stones album. But this is barely coherent at best, and in any case is wrong about the relative quality of Stones records, so I shouldn’t rely on it. I just changed my mind. (How did I leave Exile off this list? Don’t know. Could be getting late.)
Yes, I am a little embarrassed about having Parklife on the list. It’s a little sad I guess, but I have a hopeless nostalgia for the mid-90s in the way that some old lefties have a nostalgia for the late 60s, or some conservatives have a nostalgia for the reign of Henry VIII. Clinton in the White House and Keating in the Lodge; the long (inter)national nightmare of peace and prosperity; good music, good movies, even occasionally good television (pre-Survivor!) and, perhaps not coincidentally, some very good philosophy. I was never the kind of hard partying hard drinking carefree irresponsible friendly anti-social repulsive attractive type that’s celebrated on Parklife – and the greyhound on the cover of the album is the closest I’ve been to the dogs for a very long time – so I don’t really have a good excuse for liking it. Maybe it’s moments like this that make people like the view that reason is slave of the passions.
I complain about there being
I complain about there being no papers up and I get two emails in a day letting me know about new sites with papers.
The CAPPE working papers site has five new papers up, all on issues around applied ethics and political philosophy. I’ll officially write up the papers blog report on this tomorrow, but just in case anyone doesn’t want to wait until that long, follow that link!
UPDATE: I posted before reading the papers, and I might have created a slightly misleading impression about their subject matter. Let me correct that. Three of the papers are about applied ethics and political philosophy broadly construed, the other two aren’t, unless we have a very broad construal. So rather than my summary, I’ll just copy the abstracts. Both the following papers are by Neil Levy.
Responsibility for Belief
Many contemporary philosophers defend a deontological conception of
epistemic justification. However, the viability of such a conception seems to depend
crucially upon agents being able to exert control over their beliefs. I examine various
attempts to show, either that the deontological concept does not require doxastic
voluntarism, or that doxastic voluntarism is true. These attempts all fail. I claim that this
demonstrates that the range of appropriate ascriptions of responsibility for belief is very
limited: epistemic recklessness is the only kind of doxastic responsibility there is.A Dilemma For Libertarians
To the extent that indeterminacy intervenes between our reasons for action and
our decisions, intentions and actions, our freedom seems to be reduced, not enhanced. Free
will becomes nothing more than the power to choose irrationally. In recognition of this
problem, recent libertarians have suggested that free will is paradigmatically manifested only
in actions for which we have reasons for both or all the alternatives. In these circumstances,
however we choose we choose rationally. Against this kind of account of approach, most
fully developed by Robert Kane, critics have pressed the demand for contrastive
explanations. Kane has responded by arguing that the demand does not need to be met:
responsibility for an action does not require that there is a contrastive explanation of that
action. However, this responses proves too much: it implies that agents are responsible not
only for the actions they choose, but also for their counterfactual actions which were equally
available to them.
If it wasn’t for people prepared to comment on topics without anything like sufficient grounds, making summaries of papers without reading them, drawing conclusions about the philosophical acumen of unknown referees on the basis of apparently dubious recommendations, and so on, blogs would never get written. But we do make mistakes this way sometimes.
No papers blog today because
No papers blog today because there’s nothing to report. Well, except for a strange result where somehow my webtracking program somehow managed to log into Ingenta as an ANU user. I’ve got no idea how that happened, but if I didn’t have in Ingenta account anyway I’d be interested in finding out how.
Actually, it’s not true that there’s no news. The 674 pages I was tracking had nothing to report, but there is a 675th which is worthy of note. Andy Egan, one of the group of 617 bloggers, now has a papers page with papers about pie-throwing and being being green. Be warned – they are Geocities sites so you will want to have popup blockers turned to industrial strength before you visit.
The philosophy papers blog is
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?