The philosophy papers blog is up with four new journals (including the finest journal in philosophy) and several new interesting papers. Perhaps the most notable is a new paper by Huw Price entitled On the origins of the arrow of time: why there is still a puzzle about the low entropy past.

It’s always nice to see stories of Australian heroes. Nicholas Kristof’s column this morning discusses the work Dr Catherine Hamlin has done for 44 years in Addis Ababa helping women overcome obstetric fistulas. It’s a pretty amazing story, although it sounds like they could use as much extra resources and support as possible. Kristof’s story has a few links where you can donate to support Hamlin and others’ work including here, here and here.

The 617 crew might get the impression this blogging business is easier than it looks. They haven’t been operational a week and today they had over 320 visitors. For my first semester of operation, before I moved onto Blogger, that was a halfway decent month for visitor numbers. Well done all!

From an entry about education litigation by Kevin Drum:

It does remind me, however, of a professor friend of mine who basically has gotten to the point where he virtually never gives a grade of less than C in his classes. “It’s just not worth the hassle,” he says with a sigh.

Well at Brown we solved that by making C the lowest passing grade. Which makes giving Cs something of a hassle, but some brave souls are prepared to take the challenge. (In the interests of my students’ privacy I will neither confirm nor deny whether I was one of the said brave souls this year.)

Via Geoff Nunberg, there’s a little brouhaha brewing in blogland about a question of grammar. The question is whether this sentence is grammatical.

(T) Toni Morrison’s genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.

How could such a brouhaha have brewed? Because blogland bothers ’bout bothersome rules? Not exactly. One of the questions on the PSATs was whether (T) was grammatical. The answer ETS was looking for was no. Maryland teacher Kevin Keegan argued that the answer was that it was, for a reason that I found rather baffling. Here’s his side of the story (from the Washington Post article that broke the news.)

The word “her,” he posited, was improperly referring to “Toni Morrison’s,” so the answer should have been “A,” signifying a mistake in “her to create.” Many grammar manuals insist that a pronoun such as “her” should refer only to a noun, not, as in the case of the possessive “Toni Morrison’s,” an adjective.

Later in the article it transpires the “many” grammar manuals are in fact two, and they are unnamed. The rule seems preposterous on its face. As Eugene Volokh notes, it would rule that (J) is also ungrammatical. (Eugene also wonders what the rulebooks are that rule (T) et al out.)

(J) John’s legs couldn’t carry him any further

So there are some intuitive counterexamples, which is strange for an alleged syntactic rule involving pronominalisation. We don’t need a schoolbook to tell us that “She likes her” cannot be used to mean that she likes herself.

And it is hard to see the theoretical motivation for the rule. Surely “Toni Morrison” is a constituent of “Toni Morrison’s”, so I don’t see why it can’t be attached to an anaphoric pronoun. The rule can’t be that constituents of longer NPs cannot be linked to anaphoric pronouns, else (S) would be bad.

(S) After the party, Jack and Jill repaired to his apartment for coffee.

So the rule must be very dependent on surface structure. “Toni Morrison” is not a standalone word in (T), so ‘her’ cannot refer back to it. I doubt that where the spaces go, whether we use “Toni Morrison’s genius” or “The genius of Toni Morrison”, cannot make that much of a difference. But maybe that’s just because I don’t really speak English. (And if the fuss is over whether the NP is a standalone word, there’s no reason ‘her’ could not attach to ‘Toni’. Now there are good reasons in terms of the underlying structure of the sentence that ‘her’ could not attach to ‘Toni’. For one thing ‘Toni’ here is not an NP. But once we start looking that deep, we see that there’s no reason ‘her’ couldn’t attach to ‘Toni Morrison’.)

The unintentional humour prize in all this goes to David Skinner in the Weekly Standard, who supports the decides to take the opportunity to denigrate Morrison’s novels, and as Matthew Yglesias notes manages to harm his own reputation as a writer somewhat more than he damages Morrison’s. Skinner (who bears some resemblance to his funnier British namesake) thinks:

Thanks to a vigilant English teacher from Maryland, the sentence has been proven to contain an error of grammar (“her” doesn’t refer back to a proper female subject noun, but to the possessive “Toni Morrison’s genius”).

If a ‘proper female subject noun’ is a proper noun then (M) is bad, which would be odd.

(M) The Prime Minister liked anyone who shared her fondness for 70s death metal bands.

If a ‘proper female subject noun’ is not a proper noun, then I have no idea what Skinner is writing about. And by the time he actually gets to slagging off at Morrison’s novels, which it seems was the point of his article, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t either.

UPDATE: Also via Geoff Nunberg, the rule is supported in Wilson Follett’s 1966 Modern American Usage:

A noun in the possessive case, being functionally an adjective, is seldom a competent antecedent of a pronoun: On F’s arrival from Virginia at La Guardia Airport last night, he denied to reporters that… F would legitimately lead to he; F’s cannot. Reconstruct, then: F, on his arrival, denied… (Of course a possessive noun can be the antecedent of a possessive — i.e., an adjectival–pronoun: F’s denial was made on his arrival.)

This doesn’t make the rule correct, but it does provide some support for the argument that a question like this should not have been used on the PSAT. I think Keegan’s original complaint was right about at least that much. Much thanks to Geoff Nunberg for the link.

It might be worth noting that I got the (alleged)rule wrong in the some of the above examples. My (T) and (M) are OK by Follett’s lights because the anaphor occurs in a possessive phrase. I hadn’t imagined that could make a difference to grammaticality, which just goes to show how unimaginative I am.

The philosophy papers blog is up. There’s several interesting papers, the most notable of which is by Juan Comesana (who seems to be getting a lot of attention here recently) Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology: A Reconciliation, But Not the One You Are Thinking Of. I’d already read the paper, so somehow it was the reconciliation I was thinking of. I don’t know if this refutes the title, or just a token of the title.

On a more personal note, I’ll be in Australia it turns out for most of June. I’ll mostly be in Melbourne, though hopefully in Sydney and Canberra a little as well. I think there will be lots of philosophers passing through Australia this summer, though more in July than June.

The 617 blog now has an RSS feed, which is very pleasing. And they have been linked through Matthew Yglesias’s blog, so there should be a few people trampling through their corner of webspace soon.

The utility of RSS feeds is that it lets those of us with an RSS reader know when there’s been a new post. What’s an RSS reader? Well, it’s a program like FeedReader. What’s FeedReader? Over to them…

Feedreader is a freeware Windows application that reads and displays Internet newsfeeds aka RSS feeds based on XML.

It supports all major RSS formats – 0.9, 0.91, 1.0 and various extensions such as Dublin Core and Slashback. Feedreader utilizes advanced caching methods to reduce bandwitch usage, making the program ideal for mobile communication.

FeedReader’s display is much like Outlook Express, so the effect of having it is much like getting an email any time a blog you’re following is updated. The only downside is that the blog has to have an RSS feed, and now 617 has such a feed. (My feed is here, in case you’re wondering.)

FeedReader is freeware, but if you like it I’m sure they wouldn’t object to small donations to keep upgrading the product.
In other news, I’ve added a reading list to the right-hand column. If the pictures mess up the display let me know and I’ll try and tinker with it. It looks fine on my display, but previously there’s been some problems with pictures on Macs.

And if you want to buy any of those books, if you do so by clicking through the links on the right (each of the pictures is linked to that books page on Amazon), I get a small commission. Not that I actually need the money being a rather well-paid Ivy League professor and all, but if you were buying the books anyway, wouldn’t you rather have some of the $$ go to me rather than the Amazon empire?!

The 617 blog now has an RSS feed, which is very pleasing. And they have been linked through Matthew Yglesias’s blog, so there should be a few people trampling through their corner of webspace soon.

The utility of RSS feeds is that it lets those of us with an RSS reader know when there’s been a new post. What’s an RSS reader? Well, it’s a program like FeedReader. What’s FeedReader? Over to them…

Feedreader is a freeware Windows application that reads and displays Internet newsfeeds aka RSS feeds based on XML.

It supports all major RSS formats – 0.9, 0.91, 1.0 and various extensions such as Dublin Core and Slashback. Feedreader utilizes advanced caching methods to reduce bandwitch usage, making the program ideal for mobile communication.

FeedReader’s display is much like Outlook Express, so the effect of having it is much like getting an email any time a blog you’re following is updated. The only downside is that the blog has to have an RSS feed, and now 617 has such a feed. (My feed is here, in case you’re wondering.)

FeedReader is freeware, but if you like it I’m sure they wouldn’t object to small donations to keep upgrading the product.
In other news, I’ve added a reading list to the right-hand column. If the pictures mess up the display let me know and I’ll try and tinker with it. It looks fine on my display, but previously there’s been some problems with pictures on Macs.

And if you want to buy any of those books, if you do so by clicking through the links on the right (each of the pictures is linked to that books page on Amazon), I get a small commission. Not that I actually need the money being a rather well-paid Ivy League professor and all, but if you were buying the books anyway, wouldn’t you rather have some of the $$ go to me rather than the Amazon empire?!

The Cambridge philosophy blog I hinted at a few days ago, Philosophy from the (617), now seems to be fairly fully operational. (So go visit it!) And it already has more contributors, or at least more members, than the most famous academic group blog. Now all they need is an RSS feed so I don’t have to check every hour what’s been posted. Very exciting times in philosophy blogworld.

The philosophy papers blog is up. There’s three new papers with one of them (very topically!) being by Ben Caplan on fictional and imaginary objects.