David Harris reports:

Aoccdrnig to rsereach at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteres are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This is an ieeinnrsttg idea, aghlotuh I’m not abellostuy cceinnovd. I wonder where they got the idea.

Thanks to Kai von Fintel for the link and Kent Bach for one of the jokes.

(PS: Apparently back in the early days of generative semantics, James McCawley’s students would happily identify themselves with institutions such as the South Hanoi Institute of Technology, even wearing prominently emblazoned acronomical sweatshirts of said institution. But they drew the line at the Free University of Central Quebec. Today’s youngsters draw no such distinctions.)

I’ve been having a useful chat with David Velleman about the design features of Philosophers’ Imprint. I had been a little critical of this design in the past, in retrospect excessively so. There’s a few things that the Imprint could do differently, especially if their prime aim was to make things easy for someone running a papers blog, but it certainly does the job for the intended audience. (And David has been very generous at listening to suggestions for design changes, so if you have any suggestions send ’em in.)

But that wasn’t the main reason for this post. I’d been meaning to write something about how it’s important that the transition from print journals to online journals be managed properly, because there’s a few ways it could go badly wrong and we wouldn’t get the benefits online access promises. But I never really found the right words to say what I meant. Really what I wanted to say was something like this, the mission statement for Philosophers’ Imprint.

There
is a possible future in which academic libraries no longer spend millions of
dollars purchasing, binding, housing, and repairing printed journals, because
they have assumed the role of publishers, cooperatively disseminating the results
of academic research for free, via the Internet. Each library could bear the
cost of publishing some of the world’s scholarly output, since it would be spared
the cost of buying its own copy of any scholarship published in this way. The
results of academic research would then be available without cost to all users
of the Internet, including students and teachers in developing countries, as
well as members of the general public.

These developments would not spell the end of the printed book
or the bricks-and-mortar library. On the contrary, academic libraries would
finally be able to reverse the steep decline in their rate of acquiring books
(which fell 25% from 1986 to 1996), because they would no longer be burdened
with the steeply rising cost of journals (which increased 66% in the same period).

The
problem is that we don’t know how to get to that future from here, and there
are so many other, less desirable futures in which we might end up instead.
The current trend toward licensing access to electronic versions of journals
is counterproductive, since it reproduces the unnecessary economy of subscriptions
and permissions, in which intellectual property produced at universities is
transferred to those who can collect fees for its dissemination. Now that academic
institutions have access to the Internet, they have no reason to pay subscription
or subvention fees to anyone for disseminating the results of academic research.

Unfortunately, significant obstacles stand in the way of a transition
to fully electronic publishing. Authors do not view electronic publication as
prestigious, readers do not view the electronic literature as authoritative,
and neither of these views seems likely to develop in the absence of the other.
Younger scholars are unsure whether electronic publications will count towards
tenure and promotion. And the funds that would support electronic publication
and archiving are tied up in print subscriptions that can’t be discontinued
until an electronic alternative is available.

Philosophers’ Imprint aims to overcome these obstacles
in order to promote the free electronic dissemination of scholarship. The Imprint
is designed to combine the permanence and authority of print with the instant
and universal accessibility of the Internet. The Editors select for publication
only those submissions which are judged to be of lasting value, on the basis
of a blind refereeing process. Having no commitments to subscribers, the Editors
are free to publish as few papers as are found to meet an absolute standard
of quality. Each paper is given a fixed, typeset appearance and a stable Universal
Resource Locator (URL), to allow for reliable citations. The University of Michigan
Digital Library has committed funds to produce the Imprint, to provide
it with indexes and a full-text search engine, and to ensure the permanent accessibility
of its archives.

No license, subscription, or registration is required for access
to the Imprint Because the Imprint has no subscription income,
it must operate economically, without paper or postage. Contributors are therefore
required to submit their work electronically. Refereeing will take place on
a secure website, and all correspondence with authors will be by electronic
mail. Finally, the Imprint will not manage rights and permissions. Permission
for instructional uses won’t be necessary, since the Imprint will be
accessible without charge to teachers and students alike; permission for other
uses will be managed by the authors, who will retain copyright in their work.

Exactly. And there’s something you (and I) can do to help the mission. Send good papers to the Imprint. It’s clearly a prestigous journal already, as can be seen from the authors who have published there, and from the caliber and the credibility of its editors. So hopefully it can soon become a prestigous and high-volume journal. (In case you need more of a hint, the address for sending papers to them is here, and they only take papers in RTF format.)

John Holbo has a great post attacking some of the sillier things George Lakoff said in his recent American Prospect article.

This is sweet I thought. The web page for the Cornell Linguistics department has links under it’s ‘People’ heading for faculty (like all places do) and grad students (like most places do) and undergrad students (like most places don’t). It’s not much of a page, just a list with email contacts basically, but it’s a nice touch, a recognition that the undergrads are part of the department, not a distraction from real work, or a necessary evil.

More on Recanati in fact. This is from his Embedded Implicatures. It’s an argument against the King and Stanley view that implicatures are computed globally.

For example we may say:

John ate some of his cake but Jim ate all of his

Here the scalar enrichment of ‘some’ takes place within the first conjunct, in the scope of ‘but’, yet it cannot be explained away in terms of some process of saturation that independently takes place in interpreting this construction.

At first this looks like it goes by a little quickly. After all, there’s a fairly simply scale here:

John ate some of his cake but Jim ate all of his
John ate all of his cake but Jim ate all of his

The weaker claim, the higher on the list, was asserted, implicating the negation of the other. So King and Stanley’s view is not threatened.

At second glance maybe this reply doesn’t work, because the second sentence on our scale is not well-formed. There is, we might notice, no contrast between the conjuncts.

At third glance, this response fails twice over. We can say John ate all of his cake but Jim ate all of his if, for example, it matters a lot whether John ate more than Jim. Say Jim is to be rewarded if he eats less than John, and I ask you whether I’m going to have to give Jim a reward. Then you can say John ate all of his cake (indicating I probably will have to reward Jim) but Jim ate all of his (indicating that in fact no reward is necessary).

More importantly, it’s consistent with the King/Stanley view to say that implicatures are computed sequentially, as long as the sequence starts after semantic interpretation. So it’s consistent with their view (I think) that we first do the semantic interpretation of the sentence, getting that John is a part of cake eater and Jim is a whole of cake eater, then do one Gricean inference to infer that John is a proper part of cake eater, then another to infer that John and Jim contrast in a particular way, licencing ‘but’.

This is not to say I believe the King/Stanley line, because I’m not convinced their theory can adequately handle conditionals whose antecedents are true but contain false implicatures. But that’s a different matter to the argument involving John and Jim, which I don’t think works.

From Francois Recanati’s Literalism and Contextualism: Some Varieties:

Let us start with a simple example in which modulation is required to overcome a semantic mismatch:

John hears the piano.

The verb ‘hear’ arguably denotes a relation between sentient organisms and sounds. Only sounds can be heard. Since a piano is not a sound, but a musical instrument, some adjustment is needed to make sense of ‘hear the piano’: either the noun-phrase ‘the piano’ must be given a metonymical interpretation, so that it stands for the sounds emitted by the piano; or (more plausibly) the verb ‘hear’ itself must be understood, not in its basic sense, but in a derived sense resulting from semantic transfer. An object is heard in the derived sense whenever the sound it emits is heard in the literal, basic sense.

This is a kind of argument for contextualism I always dislike. Doesn’t the data sentence count itself as a strong argument against the claim that only sounds can be heard? What is the evidence for that claim? It certainly doesn’t spring out from the usage data for ‘hears’. If Recanati is right then (1) should, I think, be a garden path sentence:

(1) John heard the voices and the piano.

Initially we are led to interpret ‘heard’ literally, but then we have to reanalyse it when we learn that ‘heard’ is meant to apply to ‘the piano’. But (1) certainly doesn’t feel like a garden path sentence. This is consistent with Recanati’s theory, provided we assume that there isn’t even a default preference for literally interpreting sentences. But then what constrains what we say about what can really be heard? Why not say that hears is a relation between a sentient being and a deity? We only ‘hear’ sounds in a derived sense. There’s simply got to be constraints, and I don’t know what they are meant to be from reading Recanati.

By the way, what’s the argument that only sentient beings can hear things. Can’t an alarm system hear the approaching burglar?

(Postscript: There might be some misleading implicatures there about how broad the argument against appeals to metonymy is meant to be. I really just mean to be attacking the argument about ‘hears’, which plays an important role I think in Recanati’s paper, and which I don’t think is supported by a great deal of evidence. What I need to do, before saying anything more detailed, is read Geoff Nunberg’s papers here and here on transferred meaning. Maybe I’ll post on that tomorrow.)

For some reason I’ve ended up reading a bit of history of linguistics the last few months. I’ve felt at a bit of a disadvantage not knowing the context to various arguments that have sprung up during this Chomskyan era, and it’s nice to see how they fit together. It’s also instructive to get a different perspective on philosophy. Linguistics, at least at the syntax and semantics end, is just about the closest discipline in the modern university to philosophy (maybe cog sci as it is practiced in some places is closer, but not by much). But still there’s a very different take on things.

Here’s a passage from a fairly brief survey of recent developments in semantics by Barbara Abbott.

In August of 1969 the philosophers Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman organized a small colloquium of logicians and linguists in an effort to promote more fruitful interactions, but Quine (one of the participants) remarked in his condensed autobiography that ‘[t]he colloquium was a fiasco at bridge building’ (Quine 1986, 38), and suggested that the personalities involved were the cause. However the volume that resulted from this small conference, Davidson & Harman 1972, contained many classic articles (including contributions from both Partee and Montague) which were widely read by linguists as well as philosophers, and ultimately the work of Montague and Partee along with linguistically inclined philosophers like David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker had and continue to have a tremendous impact on the field.

I bet there’s not many philosophers who would talk about the important semantics papers in that volume and not mention a paper on names that first appeared there.

I’m not, I should stress, having a swipe at Abbott here. In the history she’s covering, “Naming and Necessity” simply doesn’t play that huge a role.

If you want a really unscientific but easy to use method for measuring the influence of various philosophers on modern semantics, you can use Google to search for how many times and how widely they are cited in papers in the wonderful Semantics Archive. This method won’t yield results for some philosophers, because Google can’t tell Bach from Bach, or Austin from Austin, or King from the King, although I think it can in practice tell Stanley from Stanley. Anyway, here are the results for a few randomly selected philosophers of language: Montague, Lewis, Higginbotham, Grice, Stalnaker, Davidson, Strawson, Kripke, Stanley, Williamson, Searle, Putnam, Burge, Dummett, Weatherson.

(Obligatory political postscript. You might notice the list I’ve got is a little lacking in gender diversity. I could have added some extra names to make the list a little more diverse, but the most obvious candidates would be relatively junior faculty – Graff and Jeshion for example. Senior women in philosophy of language, particularly in semantics in philosophy departments, are not exactly flooding the marketplace. The contrast with what we see in linguistics is striking. Just in New England a list of the most important semanticists would have Partee, Heim, Kratzer, Jacobson and Iatridou at or near the top. I’m just making observations here, not making prescriptions, and there are sample size effects to consider, but I really don’t think the contrast reflects at all well on philosophy.)

(UPDATE: Two observations about the political point at the end. I was worried that the asymmetry I alluded to was more due to my faulty memory or observations than to reality. So I checked an independent source. In Peter Ludlow’s philosophy of language reader, the only papers by women either included in the text or listed as additional reading were written by theorists who are primarily employed in linguistics departments. (Though it’s worth pointing out that two of those theorists, Barbara Partee and Sally McConnell-Ginet, are also affiliated to the philosophy departments at their respective institutions.) Second, as I sort of said already, the asymmetry is nowhere near as striking when one looks beyond the ranks of full professor. Or so it seems to me at least.)

So I was trying to find the latest Windows update, which our computer people say is necessary to head off the next virus blast. But I’d already stopped using Microsoft browsers and email programs because of the last virus problem. Now when I try to log on to download the update I get:

Thank you for your interest in Windows Update

Windows Update is the online extension of Windows that helps you get the most out of your computer.

You need to be running a version of Internet Explorer 5 or higher in order to use Windows Update.

Download the latest version of Internet Explorer

Once Internet Explorer is installed, you can go to the Windows Update site by typing http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com into the address bar of Internet Explorer.

If you prefer to use a different Web browser, updates to Windows may be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.

Not that Microsoft would be abusing its monopoly power to cross-promote products. No sir-ee.

How many readings does (1) have?

(1) John washed his car and Bill waxed it.

Gerhard Jäger says it has two:

(2) John washed John’s car and Bill waxed John’s car.
(3) John washed John’s car and Bill waxed Bill’s car.

Indeed, he uses this as a paradigm case of a ‘sloppy identity’ reading for anaphoric pronouns. But I find it very hard to hear (1) as meaning (3). Am I just missing something here?

I do think there are cases where we get these ‘sloppy’ anaphora, as in classic examples like

(4) The man who gave his paycheck to his mistress was smarter than the man who gave it to his bookie.

But it’s worth noting that the antecedent (is that the right word?) of the anaphora is bound by a quantifier here, not a name. I can’t off the top of my head think of a case like (1) where the initial phrase ‘his F’ is bound to a name, and the ‘it’ picks up the sense (as it were) of that phrase not its reference.