It would be so fun to do a full-scale, Baseball Prospectus style transaction analysis on all the moves Brian Leiter reports. But I might not get invited to certain parties any more if I call it as I see it, and just saying “This department got better with its hires” all down the board would be a waste of bandwidth. So I’ll mostly do some commentary on Leiter’s own commentary and end with what I think is an interesting policy question. (I’ve moved this to the extended files because it’s (a) long and (b) inside baseball and (c) even more self-indulgent than you’d guess from it being a blog post satisfying (a) and (b).)
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Here’s the shorter version of Tim Williamson’s argument against scepticism.

1. All (extant, prima facie plausible) arguments for radical scepticism require, as a premise, that we have the same evidence as a brain-in-a-vat (or whatever equivalent goes in the story).
2. The only argument for that premise is that the brain-in-a-vat does not know it has different evidence to what we have, and that if it had different evidence to us it would know that it had different evidence to us.
3. But it is not in general true that when two people have different evidence, both of them are in a position to know that they have different evidence.
C. All (extant, prima facie plausible) arguments for radical scepticism rely on a false premise.

There’s a lot of loose ends in that, all of which are tidied up in Williamson’s book, but that’s the general picture. And it’s a pretty interesting argument. I’m persuaded by the argumnts that premises 1 and 3 (or to be precise their tidied up versions) are correct. But I think there’s a different kind of justification for the claim that we have the same evidence as some brains-in-vats, one that does not appeal to the ‘transparency’ as Williamson puts it, of evidence. Or at least it doesn’t appeal to it directly. I’ll leave it up to you to judge whether it appeals to it indirectly.

Consider Stewart Cohen’s “New Evil Demon” argument against reliabilism. Cohen says that a BIV has no reliable belief forming mechanisms, but intuitively it has many justified beliefs. Indeed, intuitively my BIV twin is justified in having just the same beliefs that I am justified in having. It’s worth getting clear about the argument at this stage, because it turns out to be crucial to my case that this isn’t a demonstrative argument. (The demonstrative argument would I think have to appeal to something like transparency of evidence, and that’s false.) Rather, it’s an inductive argument … for a premise in a sceptical argument!

The evidence I’m appealing to consists of simply running through the cases where you might think I have a justified belief and my BIV twin does not, and intuiting that really we are alike in justificatory status with respect to every such belief. Induction takes us from those cases to the general claim.

Now two people can be alike in whether they are justified in believing p for all p without having the same evidence. At least in principle. But the best explanation, certainly the simplest explanation, for why each and every one of us is justified in believing the very same things our BIV twins are justified in believing is that we have the same evidence. This is a straight abductive inference, but none the worse for that. After all, what other explanation could there be for this striking coincidence.

So there’s an argument that I have the same evidence as my BIV twin that doesn’t appeal (directly) to transparency of knowledge, or anything like it. I don’t think it works, but only because I don’t think Cohen’s new evil demon argument works. If I did think that, and lots of philosophers do, even ones who don’t believe principles like the transparency of evidence, I would take this to be a different kind of argument for scepticism than the kind Williamson quite powerfully attacks.

I’d been thinking about some stuff about direct realism earlier today (it didn’t get anywhere far in case you’re wondering) and then by fairly independent browsing I ended up at Fodor’s rather amusing review of Putnam’s The Threefold Cord, which includes some rather withering invective against said direct realist theories.

Somehow all that web browsing was connected to finding stuff about global warming. I recall that around 12 months ago I tried to do a comprehensive search to find out what the latest scientific opinion was. I seem to recall that there was some convergence on the position that the data was all lining up with the best-case scenario of the original pessimists. This scenario is still pretty bad – it’s a pessimist scenario not an optimist scenario after all – and plenty bad enough to justify efforts like Kyoto, but not catastrophe within a decade as the really bad scenarios predict.

I’m really bad at keeping links up to date, even when it’s in my interest to do so.

I was just looking at the counters for my old blog, noticing they were still ticking over, and wondering why that might be. Then I realised it was largely because the links ‘here’ from my home page in fact went to the old address before (hopefully) being redirected. That’s now fixed, and the old blog can be left to Google’s caches.

Lawrence Solum noted that the New York University Colloquim in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory is posting its weekly reading papers online. The first of them is by Philip Pettit: Akrasia, Collective and Individual.

Michael Smith moves from ANU to Princeton.
Gordon Belot moves from NYU to Pittsburgh.

(Both bits of news from Brian Leiter, of course.)

There’s plenty of transaction analysis possible here, but for now let’s note that both movers are following a colleague who recently made the same move.

Early September also seems like an odd time to make moves. Presumably the moves will be effective Fall 04, so there’s no big advantage over the hires happening later in the year, but it’s too late (probably) for their departments to cover the positions in time. (I know that sounds crazy, but in any department I’ve been in it would already be right at the deadline for getting a new position approved in order to advertise before the major conferences in order to hire next year. Academia may have many virtues, but flexibility is not among them.)

These days many academics, including I would guess most who read this blog, keep collections of their papers available on their websites. (If you’re interested in seeing some samples, Dave Chalmers keeps a fairly comprehensive list of people with online papers in philosophy.) In the last few years several issues about the relationship between posting something to a webpage and publishing it in a book or journal have become a little pressing.

There’s actually a tangle of inter-related questions here that could use sorting out. For one thing, there are both legal questions (about copyright) and moral questions (about whether such posting is stealing from editors who’ve agreed to publish things) about the practice. For another, the answers to those questions may be different for articles that have been published, or have been accepted but not published, or are as yet homeless. For another, it might make a difference whether the journal in question is electronic or dead tree. So there’s potentially ten or twelve different questions here.

I hadn’t thought much about the moral issues until my colleague Dave Estlund raised them. I think they are interesting, but my first inclination is to think there probably isn’t a major moral problem here. I suspect there are other duties I have that override any duties I may have to journals. For instance, I suspect there is a general duty on academics to promote the growth of knowledge, and in this case it overrides duties to provide journals with virgin pages, for instance. (I also think Brown pays me to promote the growth of knowledge rather than to provide copy for journals, and that’s already a duty that might justify posting papers to websites, I think.)

Having said that, there’s a few restrictions I keep to when posting papers that might indicate I really do (at some level) take the moral questions more seriously.

First, I never post PDFs of an article as it will look in print to a freely accessible website. I know some people do this, and I think it’s probably defensible, but I think there’s a plausible argument that the journal has a right (i.e. a moral right) to have a say over where those PDFs go. After all, it was their layout work that made it look like that. (In philosophy at least there’s still layout work done by journals – we don’t send LaTeX files in ready to print.)

Second, I don’t normally post articles that are intended for (exclusively) online journals. Again, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but I feel a little bad about doing something functionally equivalent to what that journal will do eventually.

I’ve noticed a few people keep to a third restriction, which I usually do in practice if not by intent. That practice is to only post penultimate drafts to their personal webpage, not the final copy. Now I’m normally too lazy to make the corrections I make on the page proofs (adding ‘not’ in the right places etc.) on my online copies, so I suppose most of my online papers are penultimate at best. But this isn’t a deliberate policy.

I can’t tell if keeping to these rules is an indication that I really do care about theiving from journals and so posting anything is really wrong, or I think there are trade-offs to be made here and so I’m following a reasonable, even sophisticated, policy.

The legal issues raise different complications. Most journals seem to have conceded that they can’t block everything that has appeared online, so they have de facto conceded that articles can appear on web pages before they appear in print. This concession isn’t universal. The New England Journal of Medicine won’t (or at least wouldn’t last I checked) publish papers that have previously appeared online. But it seems most of them have practically conceded defeat here.

What happens with articles that have been accepted, or even appeared in print, might be different. Several people keep available papers that have appeared in print, as the briefest scan through Chalmers’s list will reveal. (Indeed, many people only post printed articles.) But it’s not clear to me that journals couldn’t fight back a little here. If I were running a journal I would consider asking writers to remove personal copies of papers from their websites once they had appeared in print, and if I did ask that it wouldn’t be a throwaway line – I would make some efforts to enforce it. I certainly think journals (and book publishers) would be within their moral rights to do this, and it’s hard to see how they would be out of their legal rights.

I’d be very interested to know what the experience has been in other disciplines. Philosophy has been quite different to some other fields in that we have never had a central archive for papers, nor even a really active mailing list culture for distributing preprint papers. People send papers to their friends, but they don’t announce on mailing lists that papers are available. (Nowadays I make an effort to make those announcements, but I’m running a pretty small scale project.) So we don’t really have the experience that other disciplines have.

Appendix
Here’s the policies that two prominent online paper archives I follow have about the connection between posting to the archive and publication.

Semantics Archive
This third point is the tricky one. Strict legal rules do not currently quite match commonly accepted practice in Linguistics and other fields, and there are some difficult cases where conflicting interests must be balanced. On the one hand, if a journal owns the copyright, they have the legal right to decide where and how the paper is made available to the public. On the other hand, if it takes two years or more for a paper to go through the refereeing and publication process, you, the journal, and the field will all benefit from making a pre-print version available sooner: wider exposure generates feedback, which improves the quality of the revised paper and generates interest in the published version. Will anyone cancel their subscription to L&P because of the archive? We strongly doubt it.

We’re not lawyers, of course, but our rule of thumb is: if it’s appropriate to post a paper on your publicly-accessible professional web site, it’s appropriate to post it on the archive. Think of the archive as a meta-web site that gathers in one place some portion of individual semanticists’ web pages. Also, bear in mind that you can always delete an item when it finally becomes available in print.

Rutgers Optimality Archive
Publication status. Archiving is not a form of publication. By accepted academic convention, well-established in the hard sciences, electronic archiving is completely independent of publication, future or prior. It is the equivalent of mailing out a typescript, pre-print, or off-print to colleagues.

Electronic archiving shares and generalizes the advantages of private circulation of papers. Authors are put in a position to receive maximal feedback from the entire community of interested researchers. Ideas and results are disseminated rapidly and widely, unchanneled by sociological limitations. Journals, volumes, and other venues of publication receive a boost in quality from the vastly broader pre-publication review of work, and benefit commercially from the visibility accorded to the material they publish. Authors should, of course, take care in the matter of signing over their intrinsic copyright.

It’s also notable I guess that the very biggest preprint archives, SSRN in social sciences and arXiv.org in physical sciences, seem to have no policy whatsoever on this. On the other hand, eprints.org has quite detailed information on just this point. Their position seems to be that bans on pre-publication do not rule out electronic posting (self-archiving as they call it) but some journals could explicitly rule this out if they wanted to.

I was happy to see the NY Times article on the ferries between the San Juan islands. I was over there this summer for a conference and a group from the conference took one of the ferries to Lopez island. It really was incredibly beautiful. The Times story online has one photo hinting at the kind of views you get, and there are a few more photos in the print version. If you’re anywhere near the San Juans, getting out to the islands is highly recommended.

A word of warning though: if you’re kayaking on the waters between the islands, and it looks like a ferry might be bearing down on you, it probably is a ferry bearing down on you and it will probably get to you quicker than you think. I managed to stay well out of ferry routes the short time I was out there, but friends who were a little more adventurous had some impressive horror stories to tell.

Kai von Fintel points to a detailed obituary of Donald Davidson in the Guardian. This goes into quite a bit of detail about Davidson’s work, and is I think a good tribute. (Although I was surprised to see the Locke lectures, which Davidson gave in 1970, described as ‘then-prestigous’. I didn’t understand the ‘then’.)

The Guardian says that there’s lots of work by Davidson still to be published, so there’s lots of papers to look forward to.

I also thought it was worth noting a comment from Richard Rorty in the NY Times obituary:

I don’t think there’s anybody else among American philosophers, after the deaths of Quine and Rawls, who gave him any competition.

I’d have added Lewis to that list, but Rorty’s point about how good, and important, Davidson’s work is seems right.