I’m way too rushed to write anything myself for the next day or two, so I’ll fall back to the old bloggers trick of running up links. (It’s the modern version of the from the (e)mailbag column.)

Many of you probably have seen this before, but Aesthetics Online has a bunch of short-ish articles on its website. Many of them relate to teaching aesthetics, but there’s also some relatively pure research articles. (Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about teaching, but research is more fun I think.)

More topically, Norman Geras has a long discussion of trolley problems prompted by my reporting of Carolina Sartorio’s interesting new examples.

The Philosophers’ Imprint hit counter, which measures how many papers have been downloaded, was reset on Sunday. In the little over 48 hours since then, 169 papers have been downloaded. Given there’s 12 papers up there, that looks like 14 downloads per paper (on average) which works out to 6 downloads per paper per day. (It’s a little over 2 days, which is why I put 6 rather than 7 here.) Now I think that that’s a lot more readers that you’re going to get per day by publishing in any journal other than perhaps Mind, Analysis or Philosophical Review.

I could be wrong, but 6 a day really does seem like quite a lot to me. It’s a lot more than I’ve ever got for any single online research paper, even for the papers that I’ve made quite a bit of effort to promote. Of course there’s a sample size problem here, but if this rate keeps up it is impressive.

There’s really no reason to think that Philosophers’ Imprint is an obscure publication, since it probably delivers you more readers than most top journals. (But are all those readers philosophers? I don’t know – maybe some of them accidentally landed there because they were searching for porn and ended up at a philosophy site by accident. Or mistake. But it’s unlikely.) And it follows as a quick corollary that some internet journals are not obscure, which is nice to note for future reference.

Having said that, I wanted to quibble a little with something Keith DeRose said in the comments below. He said that we should, ceteris paribus, send articles to journals that will allow for easy, or at least affordable, public access. The Imprint of course is the best case scenario in this regard. And I agree, if ceteris are paribus.

But when one is not tenured, as one is not, one has a few other considerations on one’s mind. Like, how prestigous is this journal, and will being there move me towards tenure? How quickly will my paper be refereed, and printed if accepted? How useful will the comments I get back from the editors and referees? And, though we don’t like to think about this one too publicly, how likely is it the paper will be accepted? Little things like public affordable access are harder to factor in pre-tenure.

By the way, if you must use a dead tree journal, as we all must from time to time, I’ve found Philosophical Quarterly to be simply wonderful in all of these respects. Very quick responses, not an intolerable delay from acceptance to publication (much less than most dead tree journals), very helpful referees and editors, and (though I mustn’t put too much weight on this) they have published three of my papers! I used to quite dislike dealing with journals, now I find it’s mostly quite pleasant. That’s no doubt in part because I’m more professional in my dealings with them than I was a few years ago. But for all the reasons listed above, I still prefer working with PQ over any other journal I’ve had contact with. (Not that PPR or the AJP or several others I’ve worked with are at all bad; quite the opposite. I certainly don’t mean to somehow criticise other good journals by noting how good I’ve found PQ.) And, drifting back onto point, their subscriptions are not that expensive. (Not that I have one.) No, I didn’t get paid to write that little blurb, but yes I am pleased that one of my papers is now listed on their highlights page.

Undigressing now, I don’t mean to downplay the importance of Keith’s principle, and I very much admire him for acting on it, but I just want to stick up a little for those of us who have to take what we can get at least for early stages of our careers.

I got asked a question about induction earlier today, and I thought that it seemed like a nice time to look back at what I thought of the Bigelow/Pargetter line that good inductive arguments are valid. Quick summary: I don’t really believe it, though I’m still a lot more sympathetic than just about anyone not named Bigelow or Pargetter. (The original theory is in a 1996 AJP paper if you want to look it up.)

How, you might be asking, could inductive arguments be valid? Let’s look at a classic example to see the problem. (Well, the example involves a classic record.)

1. The Packers are playing at home, Brett Favre is the quarterback, and it’s below 34 degrees at kickoff.
2. When those conditions are met (as they often are in Green Bay) the Packers have never lost. (See footnote.)
C. The Packers are going to win.

Now this, you might say, is both pretty clearly a good inductive argument and pretty clearly invalid. So the Bigelow/Pargetter line is sunk.

Not so fast my friends.

Bigelow and Pargetter need three things to be true for this to not count as a counterexample.

First, they need the enthymeme claim to be true. This argument does not really have two premises, it has three, and the third is “That’s all the relevant evidence.”

Second, they need the ellipsis claim to be true. The conclusion isn’t really “The Packers will win”, it’s “The Packers will probably win.” Like other PRO terms, this ‘probably’ doesn’t get enunciated in normal statements of the inductive argument.

Third, they need a particular Keynesian claim to be true. It’s not clear exactly how strong a Keynesian claim they need, but the following will do. There’s such a thing as evidential probability (as Tim Williamson calls it) and it has the feature that if the probability of h given e is x, then necessarily the probability of h given e is x. Keynes certainly believed that (in fact he believed some even stronger claims about how x could be computed if h and e are expressed in a perfect language), and it is enough to make the argument valid, given the two earlier assumptions.

If those claims are true, and if the enthymeme and ellipsis claims are true of all other inductive arguments, which they should be if they are true here, it’s a pretty arbitrary argument, then the Bigelow/Pargetter thesis is safe. If they aren’t, it’s hard to see how to defend Bigelow/Pargetter.

What do I think of the status of these three claims?

I think the enthymeme claim is true, or at least a version of it is true. Note first that the subject matter here is not inductive arguments in the abstract, but tokens of inductive arguments. Most theorists would (I think) say inductive arguments are never good or bad in the abstract, but that those judgments only make sense in a context. So (small argumentative leap here) I think what’s at issue are arguments whose content is given by the speaker meaning of the premises and conclusion. (If this were a paper not a blog post that paragraph could do with a lot more detail. I have a bad feeling that I’m making a serious blunder here. I’m going to ignore that and press ahead.)

I think it really is tacit when presenting an inductive argument that we are presenting all the evidence. If we get the ‘extra’ evidence that the Packers starting left tackle is a 150 pound scrawny Australian philosopher, who can hardly bench press a NY size steak, we might be inclined to change our view about the Packers chances. But in that case I would say we don’t just learn a new bit of evidence, we have to throw out a previous claim, that the cold weather was a distinctively salient bit of evidence. I’m not wedded to this, but I think the enthymeme claim is defensible.

And I think the Keynesian claim is right. This is a kind of internalism about rationality. I’m using ‘rational’ here to denote a property of agents who get from evidence to conclusions in the right kind of way. I think the take home lesson of Stewart Cohen’s new evil demon is that that property is independent of the truth value of the evidence that comes in. Two creatures (not necessarily worldmates) that are disposed to draw the same conclusions from the same body of evidence are equally rational. This internalism about rationality is compatible with various kinds of externalism about evidence. (It’s certainly compatible with the claim that me and a brain in a vat never have the same evidence, the kind of position I’m drifting towards.) Indeed, I think Williamson ends up accepting this kind of claim, though he may well dispute my claim that this kind of property is a decent thing to call rationality.

Anyway, I think this kind of internalism implies necessitarianism about evidential probability. If evidential probabilities are contingent, then two creatures with the same evidence, and the same (probabilistic) conclusions, in worlds where the evidential probabilities are different, may be such that one is rational (her credences match evidential probability) and the other is not. That seems impossible to me, as it seemed impossible to Keynes. And that’s enough for the Keynesian premise needed here.

But I don’t think the ellipsis claim can be sustained. I think in an inductive argument I conclude something about the Packers, in particular that they’ll win, not about evidential probabilities about the Packers. I think Bigelow and Pargetter are right that there is a valid argument here, namely

1. The Packers are playing at home, Brett Favre is the quarterback, and it’s below 34 degrees at kickoff.
2. When those conditions are met (as they often are in Green Bay) the Packers have never lost. (See footnote.)
3. That’s all the relevant evidence.
C. The Packers are probably going to win.

Bigelow/Pargetter think (a) that argument is valid (that’s the Keynesian claim) and (b) it’s the argument we’re actually making when we present the earlier, shortened, version. I can buy (a), but I’m hesitant about (b), particularly the claim about the conclusion being probabilistic all along.

Footnote: The Packers are 29-0 in regular season games in these conditions. They are 6-1 in playoff games in these conditions. I’m a baseball fan more than I am a football fan, so I only count regular season records as being fully ‘real’. (‘Real’ as in Babe Ruth really hit 714 home runs.) If the game in question is a playoff game, feel free to change the example.

It’s probably relevant that when the premise involves a 35-1 record rather than a 29-0 record, it’s much easier to hear the conclusion as being tacitly probabilistic, so the ellipsis claim, at least as a claim about speaker meaning, is not entirely absurd.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “emerging stars” series has an article on Carolina Sartorio. The link is here, but unless you’re a subscriber you won’t be able to get through. The article contains lots of strong praise from MIT and Wisconsin faculty, which is entirely appropriate given the quality of Carolina’s work. I think it’s very exciting to see someone (especially a fellow blogger!) get such widespread recognition for their work so early in their career. (Research question, which I might try answering later tonight – who was the last philosopher to be the focus of one of these articles? My quick impression was that this was pretty rare, which makes it even more of an honour for Carolina.)

Which (more or less) contemporary philosophers will still be read in 100 years? Which will still be important? (I presume Einstein is not read in physics but is important, so these are different questions.) This question has been bouncing around the blogosphere, kicked off by Brian Leiter, with contributions from Chris Bertram, Matthew Yglesias and Lawrence Solum. Hours of fun! I’ve already said a bit in discussions on those entries.

While you’re reading around the blogosphere, you might want to look at Chris Bertram’s interesting posts (one two) on how philosophy gets written.

This one was a little embarrassing.

The first philosophy colloquia for the year, Frank Arntzenius speaking on “Gunk”, is this afternoon at 3.30pm. This isn’t the mistake, in fact it’s a very good thing.

The first cog sci colloquia for the year, Steven Sloman speaking on causal and conditional reasoning, is this afternnon at 4pm. This isn’t the mistake either, in fact it’s a very good thing.

The mistake, as you may have gathered, is the conjunction. We shouldn’t have ended up with clashes like this.

I’ve got an idea for how to avoid these problems. First, we make sure the departments have a faculty member in common, so there’s communication between the two. Second, we make that faculty member responsible for setting the times for the colloquia at one end, because (s)he knows when will be a non-clashing time. Third, we check that faculty member passed remedial calendar management, so no pooches end up getting, er, well you know the picture.

Well, we did steps one and two right, but not step three, and I feel rather silly.

For future reference, here’s the list of upcoming philosophy talks. And here’s the to-be-completed list of cog sci talks. And here’s a site that makes calendars.

UPDATE: I corrected the time of Frank’s talk. More mistakes were made.

Dick Cheney:

Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in ’93? … We just don’t know.

Josh Marshall:

Presumably Mr. Cheney is basing the veracity of this statement on the same principle by which he doesn’t know that I can’t bench press a thousand pounds. (Italics in original)

See, some of the folk do use variable standards for knowledge. At least if Brown PhDs are considered part of the folk. And at least if you can include when they’re being sarcastic. But it’s evidence! Note also the stress on ‘know’, which I remain convinced is a primary method for effecting shifts in the pragmatic content of knowledge attributions.

By the way, Josh’s post has the entire Cheney quote, so if you’re worried that my elisions there amount to misrepresenting what he said, you can check the original. I think it’s pretty fair though. It might also be noted that earlier in the quote Josh cites Cheney alleges that we don’t know whether Iraq was involved in the 2001 attacks. It’s not clear which of the bizarre professions of ignorance Josh was parodying.

This is an interesting footnote in Francis Pelletier and Richmond Thomason’s lead article to the 25th anniversary edition of Linguistics and Philosophy:

The philosophical literature is voluminous, and we don’t know of any recent article with a representative bibliography. For some references, see http://www.eecs.umich.edu/∼rthomaso/bibs/. References concerning causality can be found in the general bibliography by searching for “causality.”

A few people who pass through here read (and write) extensively on causation. Are they right? Is there no representative bibliography on causation available? If not, will there be one soon? I imagine one or more of the Hall et Paul (et al) volumes will have a comprehensive bibliography when it appears, but if there’s anything available online now, it would be neat to have.

(By the way, there’s lots of good stuff in that anniversary edition to read through if you’ve got a lazy Sunday afternoon to spare. Or even if you haven’t.)

I read the (very good) Geoff Nunberg papers on ‘meaning transfer’ here and here. Geoff argues that there’s a big difference between sentences like (1) and (2).

(1) This is parked out back. (said while pointing to a car key)
(2) I am parked out back.

In (1) ‘this’ denotes the car by a sort of indirect demonstration. In (2) it denotes the speaker and says he has a surprising property, of being parked out back. There’s four ways to argue for this distinction.

First, the distinction accounts for the behaviour of plurals. When there are two cars involved, but only one key and one speaker, (1a) is fine but (2a) is bad

(1a) These are (*this is) parked out back
(2a) *We are (I am) parked out back.

Second, there are facts about gender agreement in languages where that is required that can only be explained if ‘this’ denotes a car and ‘I’ a person.

Third, in some related cases it seems we need to keep ‘I’ referring to the speaker in order to explain the behaviour of anaphors.

(3) Ringo squeezed himself into a tight space.

Finally, there are facts about how conjunction reduction behaves. (4) means that the car is made of plastic, (5) doesn’t mean that the car is late for a meeting.

(4) This is parked out back and [made of plastic] (*the wrong size for the left-hand door)
(5) I am parked out back and [late for a meeting] (*unlikely to start)

I’m convinced by these arguments. But I’m not convinced that there’s a meaning transfer involved, as opposed to a meaning extension. (I think Geoff means to oppose this view, though I couldn’t find a quote from either paper saying so explicitly.)

I think (tentatively) that (6) is OK

(6) Ringo is parked out back and so is a 61 Volkswagon.

If this is OK then ‘parked out back’ must denote a property of both cars and drivers. Which is to say the meaning of ‘parked out back’ in (2) isn’t transferred since it still denotes a property of cars, as much as extended. (This is all if (6) is OK, which I’m not confident about, but it’s not dreadful to my ear.)

On a slightly unrelated point, I liked the following disanalogy that Geoff notices. If I utter (7) I just mean that I had six glasses/bottles of beer made by Sam Adams, but if I utter (8) I mean that I had six different vintages of Grange.

(7) I had six Sam Adamses at Walter’s last night.
(8) I had six Granges at Walter’s last night.

But if we replace six with half-a-dozen, my impression is that the asymmetry starts to fade.

(9) I had half-a-dozen Sam Adamses at Walter’s last night.
(10) I had half-a-dozen Granges at Walter’s last night.

If I’d had six glasses of the 89 Grange at Walter’s, I might use (10) to describe the experience, but I wouldn’t use (8). If I could afford to have six glasses of the 89 Grange I probably wouldn’t be writing here, but that’s a different comparison.

Some time this afternoon or this evening I should hit 50,000 page views since I moved onto a ‘public’ blog last November. Now I just have to convince promotions and tenure that this kind of thing should count towards tenure.

UPDATE: Huzzah!