“Philosophy Talk”, a new public radio show hosted by two esteemed Stanford philosophers, John Perry and Ken Taylor, pilots tomorrow on KALW. The show is at 1pm Pacific Time (that’s 4pm in New York, 9pm in London and 6am in Melbourne, if I’ve done my sums correctly) and if the technology is working should be available in live streaming. The show tomorrow is on lying, with Tamar Shapiro (also from Stanford philosophy) and Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost authority on emotions and facial expressions, among the guests. It should be fun, and it should certainly be better than what passes for ‘talk’ radio in this country. If you want more info about the show, this puff piece from the Stanford Reporter gives John Perry a lot of space to set out what he wants to do with the show.

I’ve added two philosophy blogs that in truth I should have added a while ago.

Sappho’s Breathing
John and Belle Have a Blog

I suspect both of these blogs need no introduction to most readers because you’re already reading them. But better I link them late than never.

Sappho’s Breathing is written by a pseudonymous graduate student who is going on the job market this fall. I wonder whether staying pseudonymous is a good idea in those circumstances.

On the one hand, it’s easy to write something on a blog that pisses off someone enough for it to count against you in a job search. (Some bloggers make this problem worse for themselves by having a rule against deleting old posts. Don’t listen to them!)

On the other hand, my experience is that name recognition counts for a lot in job searches, especially in the early rounds of the search process. (You might think that if one is good enough to be hired by any given university, one would automatically be good enough to get through the first cut of job applications, where the pile of applications is reduced from hundreds to dozens. You’d be wrong.)

Anyway, my best wishes to whomever the author of Sappho’s Breathing is on the job market. If she philosophises as thoughtfully and as clearly as she blogs, she should do well.

I will write up a longer post on the SWM (from which I just returned) but for now I just wanted to record one neat argument for the ambiguity of ’caused’ that turned up over one lunch at the conference. (It turned up in a conversation b/w John Hawthorne, Carolina Sartorio and me, but I honestly can’t remember exactly who was responsible for what, except that (4) was Carolina’s example. I’m not sure whether John or Carolina were convinced by the argument, so don’t hold them responsible for any wild conclusions.)

Consider a fire that has a lot of consequences. For one thing, the building that is on fire explodes. For another, I’m saddened by all the web servers that are burning down losing valuable websites. So both (1) and (2) are true.

(1) The fire caused the explosion.
(2) The fire caused Brian to be sad.

We can say both those things, but we can’t say them at once.

(3) *The fire caused the explosion and Brian to be sad.

You might think that’s problematic for pragmatic reasons, but we really can say what we want to say in (3) using other words.

(4) The fire caused the explosion to happen and Brian to be sad.

The natural conclusion to be drawn from this is that ’caused’ is syntactically ambiguous. On one disambiguation it takes an event as its second relata, on another it takes whatever is denoted by “Brian to be sad”. (I guess that’s a state of affairs, but I don’t really know the literature around here. I suspect I should go back and read Vendler on the issues in this neighbourhood.)

If that’s right, all the different arguments about what the relata of the causal relation are need to be at least restated. There is no fact about what the relata of the term ’caused’ are, because there is no single such term, and different terms spelled that way take different arguments. There might still be an argument about what the deep metaphysical relation causation relates, and if there is syntactic facts probably won’t be taken to have much bearing on it.

I will write up a longer post on the SWM (from which I just returned) but for now I just wanted to record one neat argument for the ambiguity of ’caused’ that turned up over one lunch at the conference. (It turned up in a conversation b/w John Hawthorne, Carolina Sartorio and me, but I honestly can’t remember exactly who was responsible for what, except that (4) was Carolina’s example. I’m not sure whether John or Carolina were convinced by the argument, so don’t hold them responsible for any wild conclusions.)

Consider a fire that has a lot of consequences. For one thing, the building that is on fire explodes. For another, I’m saddened by all the web servers that are burning down losing valuable websites. So both (1) and (2) are true.

(1) The fire caused the explosion.
(2) The fire caused Brian to be sad.

We can say both those things, but we can’t say them at once.

(3) *The fire caused the explosion and Brian to be sad.

You might think that’s problematic for pragmatic reasons, but we really can say what we want to say in (3) using other words.

(4) The fire caused the explosion to happen and Brian to be sad.

The natural conclusion to be drawn from this is that ’caused’ is syntactically ambiguous. On one disambiguation it takes an event as its second relata, on another it takes whatever is denoted by “Brian to be sad”. (I guess that’s a state of affairs, but I don’t really know the literature around here. I suspect I should go back and read Vendler on the issues in this neighbourhood.)

If that’s right, all the different arguments about what the relata of the causal relation are need to be at least restated. There is no fact about what the relata of the term ’caused’ are, because there is no single such term, and different terms spelled that way take different arguments. There might still be an argument about what the deep metaphysical relation causation relates, and if there is syntactic facts probably won’t be taken to have much bearing on it.

I’ll be away for the weekend at the Syracuse Workshop in Metaphysics, so blogging will be light to non-existent. (Since I’d probably be spending the weekend doing corrections to yesterday’s brain dump maybe this is a good thing for me.) Responses to email will be even slower than usual. If Syracuse still doesn’t have power up – and none of the local websites are working so it’s possible they don’t – then electronic communication will be even slower.

I’ll be away for the weekend at the Syracuse Workshop in Metaphysics, so blogging will be light to non-existent. (Since I’d probably be spending the weekend doing corrections to yesterday’s brain dump maybe this is a good thing for me.) Responses to email will be even slower than usual. If Syracuse still doesn’t have power up – and none of the local websites are working so it’s possible they don’t – then electronic communication will be even slower.

I had a few hours yesterday to sit in a coffee shop and read philosophy papers and brainstorm for new ideas. At the time I thought it was all rather ineffective. (To be honest at the time I thought in any other profession someone who was producing ideas at the (lack of) speed I was would be out of a job by Christmas.) But somehow by the morning I ended up with a few things to say. Whether they are worth saying, I leave to you to judge.

I had a few hours yesterday to sit in a coffee shop and read philosophy papers and brainstorm for new ideas. At the time I thought it was all rather ineffective. (To be honest at the time I thought in any other profession someone who was producing ideas at the (lack of) speed I was would be out of a job by Christmas.) But somehow by the morning I ended up with a few things to say. Whether they are worth saying, I leave to you to judge.