Will Baude at Crescat Sententia has been running a series of online interviews with various bloggers. And the subject of the latest interview is me! Here’s the interview. Previous blogger interviews (including Lawrence Solum, Matthew Yglesias and several permanent or temporary members of the Volokh Conspiracy) are linked in the Crescat Sententia sidebar.

Via Kai von Fintel, I see there’s a new blog Language Log being run by four very talented linguists. I was very pleased to see that Geoff Pullum, author of my favourite academic book, agrees with me about the learned/said controversy that erupted on Crooked Timber soon after it opened.

I have a bunch of spam defence mechanisms up at the moment. One of the less high tech defences is that I block all mail labelled ‘high priority’, because in my experience only spammers were using that. And none of the people I regularly mail with use it. But some people who want to contact me about the blog might. The main purpose of this post is to note that you shouldn’t use ‘High Priority’, because I’ll probably not get the message.

Here’s how I often come up with philosophical ideas. I hear a theory that’s doing the rounds, I come up with criticisms of it, then I go back and find who actually supported it. Then I can spin the paper as “Contra X’s assertions in Y, …” But really what I care about is the …, and the fact that what I’m arguing against is well known. The downside of this is that sometimes I can spend a lot of time on step 2 before going back and checking whether anyone ever really supported the theory. Here’s an example of that in action.

A lot of people use Geach’s distinction between real change and mere Cambridge change.

That much I can support by the record. Here’s Cian Dorr (on page 52) and Peter Forrest and Chris Mortensen using the expression, and you can find others by doing a few Google searches.

Some people introduce this distinction by examples. For instance, when Socrates died, that was a real change in Socrates, but a mere ‘Cambridge’ change in Xanthippe, for she acquired a new property, being a widow, without really changing.

OK, I’m struggling to find citations for this already, but I’m sure I heard the example somewhere. It’s not the kind of example I would have made up.

Other people claim that the difference between the two types of change is that real change involves change in intrinsic properties.

I say lots of people believe this without, it seems, any support, and Dorr and Forrest and Mortensen also seem to assume it. That’s why I picked their uses above. But not as many people as I thought assume it. Indeed, as far as I can tell from online searching, this isn’t how Geach defines the distinction. So the rest of this note will be an attack on a theory that doesn’t seem to be widely defended. But I think it’s what a lot of people think. So here goes. Even if people don’t believe this, I’ve got a reason for being interested in whether real change lines up with change in intrinsic properties, one that I might get to below.

Let’s see if that claim can hold up. That is, let’s see if we can plausibly identify real change in an object with it changing its intrinsic properties. I’m going to argue there are three cases that suggest intrinsicness is not really central to the real change/mere Cambridge change distinction.

Go back to the Socrates/Xanthippe example. There’s certainly an intuitive difference between Socrates’s change and Xanthippe’s change. It would be fun to have a more modern example. It’s a decent, if imperfect, methodological rule than any philosophical point can be illustrated with an example from Ulysses, so let’s start there.

When Molly starts her affair with Blazes Boylan, Molly becomes an adulterer and Leopold becomes a cuckold. To me, at least, there’s an asymmetry between these changes. It’s a real change in Molly, but a ‘Cambridge’ change in Leopold. It might be an important change in Leopold, but then Xanthippe’s becoming a widow was presumably important from her perspective too.

The important point is that this is not an intrinsic change in Molly. Had Bloom been killed by the anti-semites in Barney Kiernan’s pub before the affair started, well it wouldn’t have been an affair, and Molly wouldn’t have been an adulterer. (Actually I’m not sure on that last bit. I don’t think the text is explicit on whether Boylan is married, which is I suppose relevant to its being an affair or not. And I know I’m messing around with the timeline a little to have Bloom’s fight in Barney Kiernan’s be before the affair starts. It’s not a perfect example.) So we have a real/Cambridge change distinction without it being the case that one of the changed properties is intrinsic and the other is extrinsic.

This is perhaps not the most troubling example. There’s a sense (not an entirely easy to articulate sense, but a sense) in which Molly becomes an adulterer by acquiring new intrinsic properties, but Leopold need not change his intrinsic properties to become a cuckold. Well that’s not quite right either, because if Bloom doesn’t change intrinsic properties at any moment he dies, what with electrical activity in the brain being crucial for life and all. And dead people are not cuckolds, as we noted earlier. But still there’s a sense in which intrinsic properties are doing the work.

The second example is one I’ve used previously. Assume a is the fusion of b and some other stuff. God then instantly replaces b with c, which happens to be an intrinsic duplicate of b. This looks like a real change in a, it’s changed its parts, but it hasn’t changed any intrinsic properties, at least on Lewis’s conception of intrinsic properties.

The final example involves lots of contentious assumptions, but I think they are all at least plausible. (And more importantly, they don’t undermine each other.) The first is that there could be objects for which Newtonian billiard ball mechanics is true. So all collisions are perfectly elastic, and don’t involve deformations. The second is that the at-at theory of motion is true, so the velocity of an object at a time is not an intrinsic property of it at that time. The third is that changing direction is a real change, not just a Cambridge change. The combination of these is that when one of the billiard balls strikes another, and hence changes direction, there’s a real change there without change in intrinsic properties.

What’s the importance of all this? Well, it matters to debates about temporary intrinsics. I’m interested, for various reasons, in theories that deny that there are any temporary intrinsic properties. One of the objections to those theories is that they deny there is any real change. But this objection requires on the identification of real change with change in intrinsic properties. If that identification fails, as these three cases suggest, the objection is no good.

Ben Wolfson has a couple of good posts up (one two) responding to some points I make about imaginative resistance. There’s too much to be easily summarised, but one of the themes is some scepticism about whether my theories will cover longer stories.

There seemed to be a bit of a consensus in the comments board that expensive journals are a bad thing. So just to put a bit of data into the debate, here’s the pricing list for several high profile journals. (Note these prices are all in US Dollars for delivery in America. Different journals have different delivery costs to the rest of the world.)

UPDATE: I updated this to include Synthese to provide some background to Brian Leiter’s comment below. If you have any anarchist types in the department, one of them could get a ‘personal’ subscription and bring it in! That wouldn’t help with the online subscription, which is what really matters now.

There seemed to be a bit of a consensus in the comments board that expensive journals are a bad thing. So just to put a bit of data into the debate, here’s the pricing list for several high profile journals. (Note these prices are all in US Dollars for delivery in America. Different journals have different delivery costs to the rest of the world.)

UPDATE: I updated this to include Synthese to provide some background to Brian Leiter’s comment below. If you have any anarchist types in the department, one of them could get a ‘personal’ subscription and bring it in! That wouldn’t help with the online subscription, which is what really matters now.

Ernie Lepore pointed me to this wide-ranging interview with Donald Davidson he conducted in the late 1980s. I haven’t had a chance to read it through yet (this paper I’m meant to be writing keeps getting in the way) but it looks great.

Juan Comesana has a post up on philosophers who like to find the best in all theories, show that everyone is kind of right, aim to have us all go home happy, and generally behave in ways that are sickiningly sweet. Juan describes them as being ecumenical, and contrasts them with partisans who “take clear sides on as many dichotomies as they can, and enjoy having in sight a view that is clearly opposed to theirs.”

That distinction is all well and good, but then he goes on to describe yours truly as being ecumenical. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I say that the true theory contains a little bit of X and a little bit of Y, I don’t mean to be saying that X and Y are both kind of right, I mean to say that they are both wrong. I’m the philosophical equivalent of the Third Way politician. I don’t mean to be showing how capitalist pig dogs and bleeding heart socialists can just get along, I mean to annoy both of them while (by) stealing their constituencies and promoting views both sides find appaling. I enjoy having every view in sight being clearly opposed to mine. Usually.

This all reminds me of a passge from Geoffrey Pullum’s Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. This is from the intro to his article on Linguistic Inquiry.

Since what I wrote received not only criticism from the defenders of MIT’s house journal but also hostile comments from people who thought I had been far too lenient with the journal and its editor, I assume that here we have a rare instance of my having achieved that most boring of properties in a commentary, balance. I can only apologize. Nothing was further from my intentions than a mealy-mouthed, on-the-one-hand-this-but-on-the-other-hand-that assessment.

Perhaps it is not too late for me to atone, by making it clear that I regard Linguistic Inquiry as a miserable trash-stuffed rag of a journal through which the pathetic blitheriings of an army of knuckle-dragging intellectual toadies are shepherded to prominence by the unprincipled back-room machinations of a pea-brained lackwit of an editor whose fawning subservience to the power clique that controls modern linguistics is matched only by his contempt for civilized standards when dealing with the work of those whose integrity fprevents them from prostituting their scholarship by kowtowing to the self-ordained guardians of a baseless pseudo-theoretical hegemong. I can’t imagine, frankly, why I still subscribe.

I’ve probably said this before, but you really should get that book.

I was going to conclude by saying that I have just as high an opinion of internalist theories of evidence (and non-Weathersonian externalist theories) as Pullum has of LI, and concluding that I don’t know why I still read them. But that might be misleading. I might think those theories are lighthouses in Fodor’s sense. They provide lots of illumination, and very good guides to where you don’t want to be. That would be misleadingly negative. Possibly.

So all I can say is that unlike Juan I’m a partisan on the partisan side of the ecumenical/partisan debate. But perhaps I’m not always strong willed enough to conform to my values.