I’ve been meaning for days to write a post or two about some of the things on Brian Leiter’s new blog, but right now the list of things I want to blog about is growing much faster than I can attack it. So instead of waiting until I can write a full post, let me just say that his blog looks well worth reading from the first few entries. Since it’s in Movable Type it has a nice clean RSS feed as well which is always a nice thing in a new blog.

I’ve been meaning for days to write a post or two about some of the things on Brian Leiter’s new blog, but right now the list of things I want to blog about is growing much faster than I can attack it. So instead of waiting until I can write a full post, let me just say that his blog looks well worth reading from the first few entries. Since it’s in Movable Type it has a nice clean RSS feed as well which is always a nice thing in a new blog.

I’ve posted a new (and hopefully more or less final) version of my response to Patrick Greenough’s Vagueness: A Minimal Theory from Mind earlier this year. It’s available here.

Hopefully I’ll have a much longer post on vagueness, responding to a few issues that having arisen on the comments board, later this evening. But there’s a few technical problems I want to solve before writing about them, so it might not be until much later.

The other day I noted that it was possible to get to the Phil Studies preprint list through this link.

http://ipsapp009.kluweronline.com/ips/frames/fasttracks.asp?J=5078&S=85661&M=71355&N=ForthcomingPapers&ADS=0&ST=7

Well, it turns out that works in Mozilla, but not in IE. If anyone knows a way to get the link to work in IE, I would be most grateful, because my website tracking program uses IE as its internal browser, so for now I can’t keep track of whether the page is updating.

Here’s an odd asymmetry. We can have past tense epistemic modals, as in (1), that are true even though we now know the embedded sentence is false.

(1) It was possible that the invasion would come from the north.

Imagine that the invasion came from the south (as had been planned for several months) and we are trying to justify why we diverted resources to the northern front. I think in such a case we might use (1), and use it truly.

Now imagine that we have discovered that in two days time there will be a giant tidal wave that will kill everyone. We also know that we are the only ones to know this. Further (and this is where the story gets odd) we know that all our geological knowledge will be magically wiped at midnight, so that very soon no one will know that humanity is doomed. I don’t think in that case (a very intuitive case!) we can say (2).

(2) It will be possible that humanity will survive until next week.

Final case before I quit for the night. (Why haven’t you quit already? I was watching the late show of A Clockwork Orange – very suitable midnight movie I think.) Imagine we have a community of infinitely many insectologists, each with a serial number. Each of them knows two things about ants. First, they each know that there are some ants. Second, insectologist number n knows that it is not the case that there are exactly n ants. I think that if they really all are part of the speech community, (3) is false.

(3) It is possible that there are finitely many ants.

I fear that if I start talking about infinite speech communities, my linguist friends will laugh at me, or worse still no longer be my friends. It’s hard being a philosopher sometimes!

The latest version of the paper, taking into account several of the criticisms that were made of the previous version at BSPC, is here. I’ll have some more comments on this shortly, but for now I thought I’d just post the paper.

I’m as susceptible to cheap puns as the next guy, perhaps more so, but even I wouldn’t have written a line like this. (At least I’d like to think I wouldn’t have.)

From Christopher Hitchcock’s Beauty and the Bets

There is one way in which the bookie can ensure that he has no information that is unavailable to Beauty: he can sleep with her. That is, he can place his first bet, go into a deep sleep when Beauty does, arrange to have himself awakened under the same protocol as Beauty, and sell a follow-up bet to Beauty whenever they wake up together. (My emphasis)

It’s a good paper, and to be honest I might have made the same ‘joke’ given a quarter-chance, but really…

I must have seen this before, but I hadn’t fully registered just how impressive Justin Needle’s bibliography on vagueness and the Sorites Paradox is. There’s everything you might ever want on vagueness there – with citations! Now all I need is someone to do similar things for every other field I’m in. Right now my main way to find the citation details for any given paper is to enter the paper title into Google and hope that I’ll find some other trustworthy looking paper that has cited it. This works 95% of the time in most areas. It will now work 100% of the time in vagueness.

The truer paper needs some additions in order to deal with various objections that were raised at BSPC. I just wrote the draft of the first of them, designing a semantics and a proof theory for the logic containing truer. I actually ended up with two proof theories, an axiomatic system and a natural deduction system. And the semantics looks a lot like the semantics for KT. The pages won’t make much sense without knowledge of the rest of the paper, and probably won’t make much sense even with that knowledge, but if you’re interested, the PDF is here.