Daniel Davies’s summary of recent rightwing political philosophy.

As I’ve posted earlier, the single most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was JK Galbraith’s aphorism that the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been “the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness”. Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is “what I have, I keep”. Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that “what I have, I keep” is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven’t yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem. But at base, the test of someone’s politics is simple; if their political aim is to advance all of humanity, they’re on our side, while if they have an overriding constraint that the current owners of property must always be satisfied first, they’re playing for the opposition. Hypocrisy doesn’t really enter into the equation with rightwing politics; you don’t (or shouldn’t) get any extra points for being sincere about being selfish.

That seems unfair, inflammatory, simplistic and, on the whole, true.

Daniel Davies’s summary of recent rightwing political philosophy.

As I’ve posted earlier, the single most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was JK Galbraith’s aphorism that the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been “the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness”. Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is “what I have, I keep”. Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that “what I have, I keep” is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven’t yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem. But at base, the test of someone’s politics is simple; if their political aim is to advance all of humanity, they’re on our side, while if they have an overriding constraint that the current owners of property must always be satisfied first, they’re playing for the opposition. Hypocrisy doesn’t really enter into the equation with rightwing politics; you don’t (or shouldn’t) get any extra points for being sincere about being selfish.

That seems unfair, inflammatory, simplistic and, on the whole, true.

Congratulations to Ted Sider on winning the 2003 APA Book Prize for his excellent book
Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. Well done Ted!

The philosophy papers blog is up. Lots of people seem to be using the end of semester to make updates to papers, or to proofread their webpages, so there’s lots of pages reporting as having changed, and not that many new papers. I hope I didn’t miss any in the scan through.

The philosophy papers blog is up with just a couple of papers to note.

The blog has been quiet for a few days for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve been, er, relaxing a bit more than usual now that semester is over. Second, my non-relaxing time has mostly been spent refereeing, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to bloggable material. Some of my reports read a lot like blog entries I fear, but that doesn’t mean I can use them on the blog. Hopefully normal service will resume shortly.

What won’t be resuming any time soon is the RSS feed, which seems to have just crashed. I’ll have to find a better way to get an RSS feed. Maybe Blogger Pro is the answer.

UPDATE: The RSS feed still seems to be working, though I’m not sure for how long that will continue. The problem with using technology you don’t understand is that you don’t know when things are about to go wrong.

The philosophy papers blog is up. Lots of good stuff today: philosophy of mathematics, quantifiers in variable-free semantics, Byzantine philosophy (or the lack thereof), and two good Stanford entries on moral philosophy.

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.

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.

The philosophy papers blog is up, featuring papers by Greg Restall and Ed Zalta.

The 617 blog seems to have gone quiet after a noisy beginning, so let’s try to resolve one of the puzzles they left us with last week.
The issue is, roughly, What is a group? Groups are identified by examples, e.g. the group of people writing the 617 blog, and we are left to figure out their metaphysical status.

The problem arises because groups are neither fusions of their members nor sets of their members. There’s a good argument and a bad argument for each of these conclusions. Fortunately one good argument is enough in each case.

Groups are not fusions. The bad argument is that fusions have their parts essentially while groups could gain and lose members. The problem with this is that the premise, that fusions have their parts essentially, has some weaknesses. It is rather controversial, for one thing. For another, it is false. The good argument is that not all parts of the fusion are parts of the group. As they say, Sarah’s nose is part of the fusion of 617 bloggers, it is not part of the group of 617 bloggers.

Groups are not sets. Again, the bad argument relies on essentialism about membership, and I won’t describe it in detail. The good argument is that sets are extensional, while groups are intensional. If the 617 bloggers, all 10 of them, form a nudist a capella group, call it the Bare Plurals, that would be a different group to the group of 617 bloggers, even if they are co-extensional. The group of bloggers could survive all of its members catching permanent laryngitis, the Bare Plurals could not.

The two arguments put some interesting restrictions on what groups must be. The way they are constructed out of their parts must be set-like, not fusion-like, so Sarah is a distinctive part of the group in the way that Sarah’s nose is not. But the group cannot just be a set, because it has certain modal properties that are not recoverable merely from the membership list.

The way forward is to note that even though groups are intensional rather than extensional, two groups could actually have the same members, there is no reason to think groups are hyper-intensional. That is, there is no reason to think that two different groups could have the same members in all possible worlds. So there is nothing stopping us identifying groups with functions from worlds to sets of individuals. If the group of 617 bloggers is a function f, we solve the problem of Sarah’s nose by noting that Sarah is an element of f(@), while Sarah’s nose is not. And we solve the problem of the Bare Plurals by noting that there could be a distinct function g such that f(@)=g(@). In short, functions from worlds to sets of individuals lets us say that groups are in some way constructed out of their (actual and possible) members and are not new mysterious entities without falling into the problems associated with saying groups are either fusions or sets.

Now these functions should seem familiar. Andy Egan has argued in a few places (but not, to the best of someone’s knowledge, online) that properties are functions from worlds to sets of individuals. Putting it all together, we get the conclusion that groups are properties.