I’m not getting a chance to post much here because I’m spending more time holidaying than philosophising while in Australia. But it seems in this respect, like so many others, I’m being unfashionable. The philosophy papers blog is more active than I ever remember it being, with several new interesting papers posted each day. (Much thanks to Paul Neufeld for keeping it running while I’m down under.) And despite Squawkbox’s rather irregular behaviour, there’s a long comments thread below in my (poorly referenced) post on conditionals and disjunction. I’d been hoping a long and interesting comments thread would develop at some stage; maybe I should go on holidays more often.
Monthly Archives: June 2003
The other day I wrote
The other day I wrote a short post on conditionals noting a strange feature about the behaviour of some conditionals in disjunctions. The idea for the post came up in some working through some of the details in Chris Gauker’s Words Without Meanings, but I thought it was a different point to the one’s he discussed. Going back and actually reading his chapter on conditionals closely, it turns out it was actually a rather similar point to one he was making. I draw the opposite conclusion from the data to Gauker, but it’s similar data. I must have picked up the idea and immediately forgotten from where I picked it up. So I should have credited him at the time. My bad.
At the end of the General Theory Keynes has a brief homage to the power of ideas. I don’t have the text in front of me, so what follows is a rough paraphrase of the most famous line. Madmen in authority, who hear voices telling them what to do, are just recycling the ideas of some economist from a generation past. It seems Keynes wasn’t quite right. Sometimes they are not in authority. And sometimes philosophers not economists. And sometimes thirty hours ago rather than thirty years.
The New Scientist has a
The New Scientist has a fascinating series on human nature. There are several articles by philosophers, including Dan Dennett, Stephen Stich, Dominic Murphy, Owen Flanagan and Simon Blackburn. Sadly these are often no more interesting than the other articles. I though the interview with Alison Gopnik on infant knowledge was especially interesting, if by necessity a little superficial. Gopnik mentions some neat experiments my colleague David Sobel did, which was generous of her. She also, amusingly, manages to mangle some Greek mythology, confusing Theseus with Odysseus if I’ve remembered the stories correctly.
Conditionals and Assertion
I’ve long been worried by the following fact. Very often, when (~p or q) is assertable, so is p -> q, and vice versa. This is so widespread that we might worry that it is to be explained by the simple fact that (~p or q) entails p -> q, and vice versa. (I’m using -> for if…then, in case this isn’t obvious.) Now, I don’t want to be making a simple confusion of assertion conditions with truth conditions here. I’m not at all worried by the flat-footed argument that we have a preservation of assertion conditions here, so we must have a preservation of truth conditions. But I do think that when it seems that two sentences have the same assertion conditions, that’s something that needs explaining, and perhaps the best explanation of it is that they have the same truth conditions.
One might respond that p -> q can’t have the same truth conditions as (~p or q) because their negations have different assertion conditions. But an argument that simple would just be a confusion between truth and assertability, and not worth the electrons it’s reflected off.
Why the concern then? Well, largely because I’m in print rejecting the equivalence between p -> q and (~p or q), and I would like the things I’m in print rejecting to be wrong. Not the deepest reason ever, but a reason.
Anyway, here’s a little argument that the equivalence (or near equivalence) in assertion conditions between p -> q and (~p or q) is not grounded in a truth-conditional equivalence. Consider the following argument.
1. (A & B) -> C Premise
2. ~(A & B) or C From 1
3. (~A or ~B) or C DeMorgan from 2
4. (~A or C) or (~B or C) Distribution from 3
5. (A -> C) or (B -> C) From 2
Note that this argument is not assertability preserving. We could be in a position to say, for example, If you fill the room with gas and light a match, the room will explode, while not being in a position to say If you fill the room with gas, the room will explode, or if you light a match, the room will explode. In that case, all the steps before the last one are assertability preserving. Letting A, B and C be as defined in that example, we can say 1, 2, 3 and 4. But the inference to 5 is mistaken.
Now that should be an interesting fact. If (~p or q) is equivalent to p -> q, then we would expect that we could just substitute one for the other in a disjunction. But that’s what we cannot do here. This isn’t a knock-down argument, but it is I think a little evidence that we should be looking for a pragmatic explanation of what (~p or q) and p -> q have in common, rather than what separates them. This is hardly a new conclusion – there’s a Stalnaker paper from I think 1975 trying to explain why the assertion conditions for (~p or q) and p -> q might be the same even though their truth conditions are different – but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone argue quite this way for Stalnaker’s approach.
Naturalness in Semantics
I’ve been reading Chris Gauker’s book Words Without Meanings to review it for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. It’s very interesting, in no small part because Gauker has such a different view to everyone else. It’s somewhat revealing that the view he’s arguing against, that “the central function of language is to enable a speaker to reveal his or her thoughts to a hearer”, is so entrenched that it doesn’t even have an -ism associated with it. I’ve been playing with truism, or expressivism, or communism as names for it. The last isn’t too bad, because what’s central to the view Gauker’s criticising is that language is for communicating thoughts. Gauker doesn’t believe that, because he doesn’t believe in what I think of as thoughts.
It also means that I can say truly that the profession is over-run with communists. And no one else is using communism for anything else these days. I can see how this would have been misleading 15 years ago, but that kind of communism is dead and buried. Communism is dead; long live communism. (If I could do subscripts in HTML I’d put the subscripts on those two tokens of communism to disambiguate a little.) And now we can link up with other dubious renamings to ask whether, for example, communism has a distinctive ideology? I don’t think I’ll use this in the review (so any readers from NDPR – don’t panic!) but for here I’ll use communism as a name for what Gauker simply calls The Received view.
One of the problems with communism is that it assumes that there is such a thing as mental representation. Gauker thinks that thinking doesn’t involve manipulating propositions. The key argument against mental representation is a Kripkenstein/Putnam content scepticism argument. For some reason Kripkenstein isn’t cited, nor is Goodman, but the argument should be familiar. There’s too many interpretations of any purported mental representations that fit with any constraint on interpretation for any particular one to count as the content of the mental representation. The constraint Gauker focusses on is that beliefs should be mostly true. (In fact he generously spots the communist the premise that we can identity the true beliefs prior to interpreting them, though I doubt even communists believe anything that strange.) But any similar constraint, that beliefs should be reasonable, or understandable, or consistent or whatever will suffer from a similar weakness.
This should all be familiar, and we Lewisians have a familiar answer to it. Among all the interpretations that satisfy the kind of Quinean/Davidsonian constrains that Gauker considers, only a handful assign natural meanings to each of the words in the language. Most of the deviant interpretations are, to put it mildly, deviant. They assign meanings like “being either blue and identical to o1 or not blue and not identical to o1” to simple words like blue. The correct interpretation of a system of representations is the one that (a) satisfies whatever Quinean/Davidsonian constraints that we settle on, and (b) assigns meanings that are as natural as possible to the lexical simples.
Gauker considers this response, which he quite rightly characterises as a preference for interpretations that “carve nature at the joints”, and has a rather dismissive response to it.
But this cannot be right either since we can certainly think about properties and kinds that do not carve nature at the joints such as dwellings, songs, dictators, and surprises, and our thoughts about these cannot be reduced to thoughts about properties that carve nature at the joints.
If, dear reader, you were hoping for an argument for the striking anti-reductionist claim at the end of that quote, your hopes will be dashed. This is taken to just be common knowledge, and indeed I suppose it is a pretty common opinion around the traps. But what of the more central claim, that the properties these words latch onto do not themselves “carve nature at the joints”? This seems in a way misguided to me.
It’s an important part of the Lewisian theory that, somehow or other, naturalness comes in degrees. This might be because it’s just a primitive fact that some properties are more natural than others, or it might be because various properties stand in relations of greater or lesser proximity to the core natural properties. (I think Lewis preferred the latter reason, I prefer the former, but not much turns on this.) So dwellings, songs, dictators, and surprises may not denote perfectly natural properties, but the properties they denote are more natural than some. Dont all surprises have more in common, objectively speaking, than things that are surprises on Sundays or murders on Mondays or tea-parties on Tuesdays? This is just what we mean when we say that surprise carves nature at a joint. (If I knew more anatomy I’d make a little joke here about it being a not very central joint, more like a metatarsal than a knee, but I don’t even know whether a metatarsal is a joint, so I won’t risk making anatomical jokes.)
Anyway, the whole point of this wasn’t to just complain about Gauker, or to stand up for communists, but to see what people thought about a certain kind of theory. I quite like the Lewisian theory, that we solve problems to do with radical under-determination by appeal to objective similarities in nature, and that these similarities don’t just help us distinguish ELECTRON from SCHMECTRON, but also SURPRISE from SCHMPRISE (where of course schmectrons and schmprises are generally but not always electrons and surprises). This all seems to me very plausible metaphysically and semantically. One particular reason it appeals to me is that it seems to get just the right amount of indeterminacy in semantics, but that’s a story for another post. But here Gauker, who for all his radicalism is not utterly insensitive to mainstream opinion, and certainly is a first-class philosopher, is basically just dismissing it. Is Lewisian semantics really that far from respectable opinion nowadays? I don’t mind too much if it isn’t that respectable. I quite like having radical views, especially when I’m right. But it would be a little disappointing to find out everyone else is so ignorant or misguided.
knows
My evil paper was accepted for PPR today. I’m rather pleased about that,
because I do like the paper, and there’s not much I could do with it if PPR
didn’t take it, because few journals will take long commentary pieces on
papers published in other journals. It was a little harder to write than may
appear at first. Trying to write a reply to a paper by Adam Elga is non-trivial in a few
respects, because one has to keep up both in terms of the quality of the
philosophy and in terms of the quality of the writing, especially of the
humour. There’s one compensating benefit, which is that because Adam’s always
so clear, there’s no painful exegesis to do before launching into philosophy.
But still trying to keep up is no trivial matter. I think I mostly succeeded
this time, but then I would think that, wouldn’t I?
Behind all the details, and all the jokes, there is a relatively serious
matter to the paper. I think, following Keynes, there’s a very important
difference between risk and uncertainty. It’s a slight exaggeration, but one
way of conceptualising how important the distinction is is that from my
perspective the person who how probable p is has more in common
with the person who knows whether p is true than she has with the person who
has no evidence either way as to whether p is true. Indifference principles
threaten this neat picture, because they suggest that we can get to a real
probability of p, not its objective chance but still a single precise
probability that is objectively correct (relative to a body of evidence) on
the basis of ignorance about the evidence.
That, I think, was the real problem with traditional indifference principles,
not the mere problem that they were inconsistent. The inconsistencies look
like a technical problem that need a technical solution, and after a few
false attempts I think Adam’s solution is the right one. (I still make some
technical objections in the paper, but you could live with them if they
didn’t hint at a deeper problem.) If there was only a technical problem here,
it would be solved. But there isn’t, there’s a philosophical problem here
too, and no amount of care and attention to the details will solve it, only a
theory that blocks any inference from ignorance to probability.
Paul Neufeld has been posting
Paul Neufeld has been posting updates to the philosophy papers blog for three days now, so hopefully everyone is checking those pages without little reminders here. If not, there are three days worth of philosophy papers for you to peruse.
Stars Stars and Stars
It was a comfortable enough flight over that I spent more time sleeping than doing things worthy of note. Surprisingly enough, it was The Iliad that kept making me drowsy. The various battle scenes were fine to stay awake through – though I hadn’t realised just how horribly detailed they could be. The problem was old King Nestor. Nestor’s role, for those who aren’t familiar, is largely to try and calm the tensions in the Achean camp, and his main weapon is the long-winded speech. It didn’t seem to help much with Agammemnon and Achilles, but it inevitably worked with me. By the middle of the story, all I had to hear was, “Then good King Nestor rose” and I was sound asleep.
Maybe if I hadn’t slept so much I would have figured out more about stars. But maybe not, for I think I was a little stuck just where I was. Here’s the basics. (For background on stars, see Ted Sider’s papers here and here. Be warned though, this is possibly the most esoteric philosophical question I’ve ever thought about, and that’s not a trivial comparison class.)
Ideally, we’d like to define F* as being F minus maximality. But that won’t do for two reasons.
First, it suggests that when F is not maximal, then F* = F. And that isn’t always right. Let F be the property of being human or weighing more than sixteen stone. This is not maximal – it’s not always the case that the large part of something that weighs more than sixteen stone does not weigh more than sixteen stone. But nor is it the case that F* = F. A large part of me is F*, but it is not F.
Second, this kind of conceptual subtraction in general is not defined. (I think Lloyd Humberstone has a paper on this somewhere, but I don’t quite know where. Wiggins makes quite a bit of this point in his response to Parfit in the 3rd edition of Sameness and Substance. That was the best part of the new edition I thought.) If F can be analysed as G and H, then F minus G is just H. But where F cannot be so analysed, F minus G is not clearly defined. The problem is that there’s nothing remotely like the unique factorisation theorem for concepts or for properties. What we’d like is that F minus G is the property H such that H and G is equivalent to F. But there are too many such properties H. There’s a few ways we might try to discriminate amongst them, mostly using strong appeals to naturalness at crucial points, but as far as I can tell the general problem is hopeless. And I have a suspicion this territory has been worked over in the literature, so I won’t go through it all here.
Let’s try getting to starring more directly. First hypothesis: An F* is something that massively overlaps an F. This gets the right result in most cases, but it doesn’t work in general. In fact, massively overlapping an F is neither necessary nor sufficient for being an F*.
Against necessity: imagine a ball with a small lump on one side. The lump is not massive, but it is big enough to make the ball something other than a sphere. Consider the part of the ball apart from the lump. It is a sphere*, for it has everything necessary for being a sphere other than being maximal, but it does not massively overlap a sphere.
Against sufficiency: Cusack is the heaviest man in Ireland. But not by much. He is only a few ounces heavier than Lenehan. If Cusack’s right hand were suddenly to fall off, Lenehan would be heavier. Let F = is the heaviest man in Ireland, and let a be the mereological difference between Cusack and his right hand. Is a an F*? It seems to be not. It does not have what it takes to be the heaviest man in Ireland, for it is less heavy than Lenehan. But it does massively overlap an F.
An F* is not just a duplicate of an (actual or possible) F. This is I think a necessary condition for being an F*, but it is not sufficient. The counterexamples to sufficiency are easy. I’m a duplicate of a possible uncle, but I am not an uncle*. Still, we do seem to have a necessary condition here, and that may be worth something.
What we intuitively want for a definition of star is something like the following. A thing a is F* iff if a is the right kind of thing to have maximal properties, it has F. The last conditional is not a material conditional, so we can’t easily use it in an analysis. But we can do something.
The kind of thing that’s apt to have maximal properties is just a thing that does have some or other natural maximal property. (I’ll come back to why there has to be a restriction to natural maximal properties here in a bit.) Roughly, then, an F* is something that if it has any natural maximal properties, it is F. Say an object is pretty iff it has any natural maximal properties. Here’s a first pass at trying to define F*, at least for cases where F is reasonably natural.
Another little definition that will be helpful. Say F is intrinsic to the Gs iff being F entails being G and the following holds. Any bijection between the Gs in w1 and the Gs in w2 that maps objects onto duplicates always maps Fs onto Fs and non-Fs onto non-Fs. (That’s actually a little rough. For some purposes we need to also say that for any collection of objects the fusion of their images under the bijection is a duplicate of their fusion. I’ll assume that where necessary.) A lot of extrinsic properties are nonetheless intrinsic to the Gs for suitable G. (Every property, I think, is intrinsic to the things – that’s sort of a weak version of the truthmaker principle.) For instance, the property of being the heaviest man in Ireland is intrinsic to the men in Ireland.
Here’s my attempt then at getting F*. Let G be any natural maximal property such that F is intrinsic to the Gs. Let a be some object in a world w that massively overlaps a pretty object. If a is pretty, then a is F* iff a is F. If not, let b be the pretty object. Let P be the set of pretty objects apart from b in w. Let w’ be a world in which a duplicate of a, call it a’, is pretty. Consider any bijection from the Gs plus a in w onto the Gs in w’. If a is F*, then a’, the image of a under the bijection, should be F. The reason is that a’ is just like a in all respects necessary for being F, it is an intrinsic duplicate and the world is just the right way for a’ to be F, and since a’ is G, and G is a natural maximal property, a’ is pretty so it is apt to have maximal properties. That much all seems relatively uncontroversial, I think.
Let me now make a bold conjecture. If for all such G all such bijections map a onto an F, then a is an F*. The little argument above was that this is a necessary condition for being F*. The hypothesis is that it’s sufficient. I don’t really have an argument that this is sufficient, which is why it is a particularly bold hypothesis. I do, however, have something that may be a counterexample. In fact I may have two. (An extremely bold hypothesis in that case.)
Let F be the property of being the best hitter in baseball. Right now, I presume, Barry Bonds has that property. Let a be a large part of Barry Bonds, say all of him less one hair. I take it that a is F*, and as far as I can tell, my theory delivers that result. But what of poor c, which is the mereological difference between Barry and both of his hands. I think c is not F* – it is not at all the right kind of thing to be the best hitter in baseball, for it has no hands. But I can’t immediately see a G such that being the best hitter in baseball is intrinsic to the Gs, and any suitable bijection does not map c onto the best hitter in baseball. The worry is that being the best hitter in baseball might not be intrinsic to any group more coarse-grained than the things, so there’ll be no bijections of the type I described, so on all such bijections c will be mapped onto the best hitter in baseball. Maybe I’m wrong about that, so the bold conjecture might be right. And maybe c really is F*, the intuitions here are not particularly clear.
A different kind of problem arises with properties like being the mereological difference between a human and its longest hair. Note this is maximal, but we don’t want to say an object with this property is pretty. The difference between me and my longest hair, call it d, has this property, call it F, but it is not pretty. That’s why I restricted the definition of prettiness to those things with natural maximal properties. But now consider d minus its longest hair – call that e. Surely e is F*. But there’s no way at all for my definition of starring to work in that case, for it is only defined for cases where the things that are F are pretty, or at least where they could be pretty. I’m actually not too worried about that. Maybe I don’t have a definition of starring, but necessary and conditions for being an F* for cases where F is reasonably natural. That would still be progress I think, though maybe not much progress.
everything
About to be off to Melbourne. If goes right it’s 34 hours door to door. I seem to remember it used to be quicker than this, but 34 it now is. The main aim for the journey, apart from sleeping and thinking about stars, is listening to Derek Jacobi’s reading the Fagles translation of The Iliad. If there are lots of Achean and Trojan examples in my papers for the next few months, you know whom to blame.
A quick update on the Australian politics story mentioned below. The newspaper article Jacob was relying on said that tomorrow’s Newspoll will have bad news for the Labor opposition. The Age says that it will show a 3 point rise in Labor’s 2PP vote, so the 2PP vote is now only 51-49 to the Coalition. Apparently that’s with a fall in both Labor and Coalition primary vote, so it’s not great news, but it’s not awful news either. Lots of people have won from 51-49 down 18 months out from an election. (Though it’s worth noting there’s no incumbency boost to opinion poll numbers in Australia, if anything there’s often a small ‘protest vote’ in opinion polls, so you’d like the opposition to be at least at 52 at this stage of the cycle before you felt they were even.) And The Age reports that the fact that Labor isn’t in front will trigger a Beazley challenge, which I’m not sure is a good idea, but sort of continues the parallel with the situation the Coalition faced in 1994. Anyway, the main take-home lesson from this is never trust anything from a Murdoch newspaper anywhere in the world that reflects badly on left-wing parties, at least not without something like independent confirmation.
I was going to leave a list of other blogs I’d recommend you read while TAR is on light posting while I’m in Australia. But instead I think it’s better to recommend that more people start blogs. Now that there’s a Boston area philosophy blog, what about New York, or New Jersey, or Melbourne? (Or anywhere else, but I think those are the three main non-New England areas of TAR readership.) Anyone starting, or for that matter continuing, a philosophy blog is encouraged to use the comments boards here to promote it.
four
I think I figured out how to restate the intrinsicness principle that Andy and Jim are looking for. (See this post for background to what I’m talking about, and links to the original paper.)
They think the following principle is plausible, and it is.
If A and B are duplicates, and A and B have any phenomenal states, then they have the same phenomenal states.
This gets out of the worry about A or B not being maximal, because then they won’t have any phenomenal states at all.
A similar move can be used to define content internalism, I think. Narrow content is shared by duplicates who have any contentful states at all. Or is that too weak, because it allows for swampmen? Not sure.
What I’d like to be able to do is use this trick to find a general way of defining Ted’s * operator. As stated it’s defined by conceptual subtraction. An F* is something that has all the characteristics necessary to be F except (possibly) being maximal. This makes sense if F is factorisable into maximality and some other stuff. And the probability that this is true for all maximal predicats strikes me as being roughly 0. (+/- about 1.) So we need a more general definition of the * operator. When F* is meant to be intrinsic, then it’s easy – being an F* just means being a duplicate of some (actual or possible) F. But that won’t do for defining uncle*, or, if you are a gung-ho, let it all hang out context externalist, it won’t even do for defining rock*. Hopefully I can figure this one out one of my plane rides tomorrow.