Just for fun I decided to actually read the edition of the AJP in which I have two entries, and see what fun things we can find. And there’s quite a bit, as we’ll see.

Jennifer McKitrick, A Case for Extrinsic Dispositions

I never understood why people say dispositions have to be intrinsic properties, and McKitrick apparently hasn’t either. But she’s actually done something about it. She starts with six examples of dispositions that look fairly extrinsic: the power to open a particular door, weight, the disposition to dissolve the contents of my pocket, vulnerability, visibility to humans, recognisability. (I’d been meaning to write something about vulnerability as an example of an extrinsic disposition. I was rather comprehensively beaten to the punch here.) Some of these look fairly artificial, though McKitrick does have arguments that even hackneyed examples of extrinsic dispositions should still be enough to refute the theory that all dispositions are extrinsic.

McKitrick considers several objections to the claim that these are examples of extrinsic dispositions. The strongest response is that although the properties are picked out relationally, they are in fact intrinsic properties. (For more on relational expressions that denote intrinsic properties, see my Stanford entry on intrinsic properties.) It’s very important to be aware of this distinction, but it doesn’t seem to be relevant here, at least in some cases.

What was most interesting to me about this wasn’t whether some dispositions are extrinsic, because I think McKitrick is obviously right, but what we can learn from considering tests for extrinsicness about the content of ordinary terms. So let’s assume that Earth, Moon and Travel are all people, and they are all, miraculously, intrinsic duplicates. Earth and Travel live on earth, and Moon on the moon. Earth and Moon are home right now, while Travel is currently holidaying on the moon. Which of the following three sentences seem to be true?

(1) Earth weighs more than Moon.
(2) Earth weighs more than Travel.
(3) Travel weighs more than Moon.

I think my intuitions here are inconsistent – (1) is true but neither (2) nor (3) is true. It’s consistent to say (1) is determinately true while neither (2) nor (3) is determinately true, and of course if you don’t assume ‘weighs’ is linear you can just say (1) is true and (2) and (3) are false. But it is hard to work out. I hoped that thinking about these cases would clarify a tricky question. If weight is extrinsic, which I think it is, what is it sensitive to? McKitrick assumes/stipulates, following Yablo, that it is sensitive to where you currently are. I think it’s more plausible that it’s sensitive to where you normally are. McKitrick’s version would have (2) true and (3) false, mine would have (3) true and (2) false. Intuition says, well I think intuition says it wants a holiday.

The vulnerability example really is very strong. If Athens and Olympus are intrinsic duplicates, but Athens is close to the sea and vulnerable to a sea-based attack, while Olympus is in the mountains and only reachable overland, then (4) is very plausible.

(4) Athens is more vulnerable than Olympus.

If Sparta has no plans to attack Olympus, and they have no weapons that can be transported overland to Olympus, and the gods favour Olympus and would instantly smite anyone who dares attack it, then I guess (4) is even more plausible.

There’s a really geeky reason, even by philosophical standards, for thinking that dispositions are extrinsic. One might think that a wine glass is fragile in virtue of the intrinsic structure of its chemical bonds or the like. There’s a McKitrick style argument for its fragility being extrinsic. Imagine a duplicate of it in rubber-walled room world, where literally all the surfaces are bouncy. Is that glass fragile? Maybe not! But there’s also a geeky reason. Consider a large part of the glass that consists of all of it minus a small chip off the base. I think this object (a) exists, (b) is not a glass and (c) is not fragile. I think it’s possible that the glass could be the only fragile thing on the table, so parts of the glass are not fragile. But a stand-alone duplicate of the glass, a glass as it were with a chip off the old base, is fragile. Conclusion: fragility is extrinsic.

David McArthur, McDowell, Scepticism and the ‘Veil of Perception’

This was a little less interesting because it was more familiar. Short version: direct realism doesn’t refute scepticism because the appeal to sense-data in traditional sceptical arguments was inessential. This story is fairly familiar around these parts, because it’s well told by (among others) Juan Comesana. McArthur’s retelling of the sceptical argument just relies on the fact that causal processes play a role in our gaining evidence about the world, something the anti-sceptic can hardly deny because it’s part of what science – the anti-sceptics best friend – tells us is true. That should sound familiar too; it’s how Quine starts Roots of Reference, though Quine doesn’t get mentioned in McArthur’s paper.

Laura and Francois Schroter, A Slim Semantics for Thin Moral Terms?

This is an entirely negative piece. It’s just making a couple of objections to Ralph Wedgwood’s paper Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms. The main objection seems to be that if (P) and (I) are the right conceptual role rules for ‘pain’ and ‘intend’, then Ralph’s version of Peacocke’s version of conceptual role semantics leads to crazy meaning postulates, in particular meaning postulates for ‘pain’ and ‘intend’ that involve normativity. (I’d try and summarise why this is so, but it would take about five pages – and I’d mostly be plagiarising.)

(P) Being in pain commits one to accepting ‘I am in pain’ (should the question arise).
(I) Intending to do x commits one to accepting ‘I intend to do x’ (should the question arise).

But neither of these look very plausible to me. Both of these seem to suppose that certain mental states (pain in the first instance, intention in the second) are luminous. And there are very few luminous states, if any. Either that, or they suppose that we are committed to accepting things that we are in no position to know. Neither claim seems right. The broader objection that the Schroters are trying to make, that Wedgwood’s theory seems to lead to normativity turning up where it ain’t wanted, looks like it could be plausible. But the examples they use don’t work to make that point.

Laura and Francois Schroter, A Slim Semantics for Thin Moral Terms?

This is an entirely negative piece. It’s just making a couple of objections to Ralph Wedgwood’s paper Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms. The main objection seems to be that if (P) and (I) are the right conceptual role rules for ‘pain’ and ‘intend’, then Ralph’s version of Peacocke’s version of conceptual role semantics leads to crazy meaning postulates, in particular meaning postulates for ‘pain’ and ‘intend’ that involve normativity. (I’d try and summarise why this is so, but it would take about five pages – and I’d mostly be plagiarising.)

(P) Being in pain commits one to accepting ‘I am in pain’ (should the question arise).
(I) Intending to do x commits one to accepting ‘I intend to do x’ (should the question arise).

But neither of these look very plausible to me. Both of these seem to suppose that certain mental states (pain in the first instance, intention in the second) are luminous. And there are very few luminous states, if any. Either that, or they suppose that we are committed to accepting things that we are in no position to know. Neither claim seems right. The broader objection that the Schroters are trying to make, that Wedgwood’s theory seems to lead to normativity turning up where it ain’t wanted, looks like it could be plausible. But the examples they use don’t work to make that point.

Achille Varzi, Perdurantism, Universalism and Quantifiers

The other day Kai von Fintel mentioned Geoff Pullum’s wonderful book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, a collection of Pullum’s TOPIC…COMMENT columns from NLLT. So naturally I went back and reread all the columns. I think my colleagues thought I was sadistically laughing over the grades I was giving the logic students, when in fact I was just rereading the saga of the Campaign for Typographical Freedom, and the fables about the syntactician who worked on his theory while his colleague tried hitting on cute graduate students. Good times.

Several of the columns are about features that journals should have but often do not. One of the more radical suggestions is that journals should print the names of referees who recommend accepting papers. One of the merits of that is that when you the reader disagree with a decision to publish a paper, you know who to blame.

Varzi’s trying to show that the combination of perdurantism (temporal parts everywhere) and universalism about fusions leads to odd semantic results. Now you might suspect this is not going to be a very plausible argument, because neither perdurantism nor universalism are semantic theories, so it is somewhat hard to see how they could lead to any semantic results, let alone odd ones. And you’d be right, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The problems arise because (2) is meant to be analysed as (4).

(2) x was/is/will be P
(4) There is a past/present/future time such that the t-part of x exists and is P

(4) leads to problems because of objects such as the current temporal part of Pavarotti and the past temporal parts of a turnip. By (4) this is a tenor. By (4) again it was a turnip. So some tenor was a turnip. But no tenor was a turnip. So perdurantism+universalism (PU for short) is false.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell from a quick survey of the world, no PU theorist accepts (4). Most PU theorists think that being a tenor is a property of fusions of temporal parts, worms as we call them, not of single temporal parts, or stages. It is the fusion of Pavarotti’s temporal parts that is a tenor, not any one of his temporal parts.

There’s a response to this line of reasoning (or something like it), where Varzi says that it would be very complex to make every predicate ‘maximal’ in the way that we have to do on this view. Maybe it would be complex, but if you consider the alternative I think you’ll agree that English made the right choice in making all of its predicates maximal in this way.

What about those perdurantists (Sider, Hawley, perhaps etc.) who think that properties like being a tenor are properties of individual temporal parts. They might accept the middle third of (4), the part about ‘present’. Most PU theorists won’t accept even that, but Sider and Hawley do. But they don’t accept the bits about the past and the future. They believe something like (4′) analyses x was P.

(4′) There is a past temporal counterpart of x that is (or perhaps was) P

Since no turnip part is a past temporal counterpart of Pavarotti, we still don’t get that some tenors were turnips. So the argument here is only telling against the conjunction of PU with a semantic theory that no PU theorist accepts.

UPDATE: When I first wrote this last night it was a little more intemperate in parts, perhaps even impolite. This was probably uncalled for, especially given the relative quality of some of my published work. For some reason papers that confuse metaphysics and semantics, or even seem to possibly instantiate such a confusion, seem to generate reactions in your humble blogger that are normally only caused by John Ashcroft. So in the cold light of day, and after a few friendly suggestions from friends, editors, DHS officers and doctors, I’ve toned it down a little, and what you see is the edited version.

Michael Hand, Knowability and Epistemic Truth

Another paper on the knowability paradox. Hand’s theory is that the anti-realist shouldn’t be committed to the knowability of p & ~Kp because all anti-realism requires is that "for each truth there must be a procedure, determined by the proposition’s structure and properly composed of verificatory steps each of which we can perform." It doesn’t require that we can perform each of the steps, and performability doesn’t distribute across conjunctions. This seems to avoid the paradox, but the version of anti-realism we are left with is quite weak. It seems impossible, on Hand’s view, that All numbers are F could be undecidable even though every instance of Fn is decidable. After all, if Fn is decidable for all n, then there is a procedure, an infinite procedure but a procedure, properly composed (whatever that means) of verificatory steps each of which we can perform. But maybe Hand isn’t worried about this kind of anti-realism.

Andy Hamilton, ‘Scottish Commonsense about Memory’

Er, I skipped this one. There’s so much stuff about Reid around Brown that I couldn’t read another Reid paper. I used to have a ban on reading papers about externalism and self-knowledge, I’ve dropped that so I need something else to block. Reid it seems is it.

Andy Hamilton, ‘Scottish Commonsense about Memory’

Er, I skipped this one. There’s so much stuff about Reid around Brown that I couldn’t read another Reid paper. I used to have a ban on reading papers about externalism and self-knowledge, I’ve dropped that so I need something else to block. Reid it seems is it.

Alan Baker, Does the Existence of Mathematical Objects Make a Difference?

Consider the following question, directly quoted from Baker’s paper

Surely it is obvious that mathematical objects—if acausal and non-spatio-temporal—make no difference to the arrangement of the concrete world?

What position would you say is supported by someone who answers ‘no’ to that question? Baker thinks it is the view that mathematical objects make no difference to the world. Or at least that’s what I think he thinks. None of this matters to the overall theme of the paper, which is better construed as looking at ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers to its titular question. Baker thinks none of the arguments for either answer to this question are any good.

The first argument for ‘no’ is a direct appeal to what would happen if mathematical objects went away. This is fairly obviously question-begging. It isn’t obviously coherent either. If mathematical objects are non-spatio-temporal, how could they just go away at a particular time.

The second argument is Mark Balauger’s argument that mathematical objects make no causal difference to the world so they make no difference to the world. But there’s little argument for why causal difference is the only kind of difference that can make a difference.

Cheyne and Pigden argue for the ‘yes’ answer by using ‘mixed mathematical facts’ like There are three cigarette butts in the ashtray. But this doesn’t really show what we cared about, which is whether pure mathematical facts, like 2+3=5, could make a difference to the world.

Baker argues that the right answer to the question may depend on whether mathematical objects are indispensible for science. If they are dispensible, then by Lewis’s theory of world-similarity, the nearest world in which there are no mathematical objects will probably be just like this world in its ‘concrete’ aspects. In that case, it is reasonable to say mathematical objects don’t make a difference. But if they are dispensible, then there may be no fact of the matter about which is the ‘closest’ possible world in which there are no numbers, hence there is no fact of the matter about what things would be like if there were no numbers, hence there is no fact of the matter about whether the world would be different without mathematical objects. So the principle that mathematical objects make no difference to the world cannot be relied upon without a prior argument for dispensibility, which is bad news for those nominalists who want to so use it without proving dispensibility first.

I don’t know the background literature here that well, and I was a little sceptical about using Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals so far from the cases for which it was designed, but this seemed like a pretty good paper all in all.

Kris McDaniel, Against Maxcon Simples

UMass Amherst has a pretty good recent record of turning out metaphysicians, and McDaniel is the next potential star coming off the assembly line. This paper is an argument against Ned Markosian’s view that a physical object is a simple iff it is spatio-temporally continuous and maximal. (That is, there is no larger region spatio-temporal region that contains the object and is entirely occupied.) This looks like a pretty wild view. Surely my television has parts – the screen, the box, the controls etc – even though it is spatio-temporally continuous. Or at least I think it’s continuous. Defining what this comes to in a quantum world is non-trivial I guess.

McDaniel has some more serious arguments against Markosian’s position. The arguments are quite detailed, so I won’t detail them all here. Some of the arguments involve complications involve relativity. Others involve getting clear on just how complicated constitution must be if Markosian’s view is right. And finally he notes that there’s a problem of spatial intrinsics for Markosian’s view, so Markosian must sometimes make ordinary predication relative to spatial location in the way that some endurantists make it relative to temporal location. All good stuff, and a worthwhile paper. I suspect when McDaniel gets to writing his positive papers, which will be defending a brutalist view of simples, the arguments will also be very good.