This is a follow up, of sorts, to the earlier post on a puzzle about epistemic modals. Like that post it owes a lot to conversations with Andy Egan and John Hawthorne, in this case the proximate cause being a phone chat with Andy last night. (In other words, don’t give me credit for much of this, even though it’s on my site!)

First puzzle. Intuitively, a might be F is logically weaker than a is F. So let’s assume we have a case where the first is true and the second false. In such a case I might have the true belief. For example, right now I believe that it might be raining in Dublin, and that it might be not raining in Dublin, and both of those beliefs are true (at least according to a plausible picture of how epistemic modals might work). Since God is omniscient, whatever true beliefs I have you’d expect He would have too, and indeed they would constitute knowledge for Him. But if a is not F, and hence He knows that it is, then He can’t believe that a might be F.

Extra half puzzle. Intuitively I can believe a might be F when a is not F, and I think intuition says that can be a true belief. But can I ever know that a might be Fwhen a is in fact not F? On orthodox analyses of epistemic modals, you would think so, but in fact this is rather counterintuitive. And I think it doesn’t get any better when you take the stress off know.

Second puzzle. I’m chasing Batman and Robin around a factory. Robin has been keeping count and noticed that I fired all six bullets in my gun. But Batman lost count. Finally I corner Batman and have him at gunpoint. After going through the usual rituals (“I know what you’re thinking…”, etc) I convince Batman to surrender. Seeing Batman surrender robs Robin of what little confidence he had left, so he takes off. I think in that case (1) and (2) are true, but (3) is not.

(1) Batman surrendered because I might have had a bullet left.
(2) Robin fled because Batman surrendered.
(3) Robin fled because I might have had a bullet left.

Is this a counterexample to the transitivity of ‘because’, or is there an equivocation involved?

There may be some more ‘big news’ posts about epistemic modals soon, so if you’re interested, watch this space.

Chris Barker just posted a nice paper setting out some features of type-logical grammar to the Semantics Archive. I don’t know enough about syntax to be able to compare type-logical approaches to categorial grammars, let alone more orthodox GB-style approaches. But I was very interested to see the way substructural logics are being used here. If I was trying to find a theory of grammaticality, I would not have thought to approach it by analogy to validity in a weak linear logic, but that’s just what some theorists have done, with impressive results.

One of the things I often say when defending abstract philosophical work is that it can have benefits down the track that seem completely unrelated to its initial motivation. While I think some of the early researchers on weak substructural logics were motivated by concerns about syntax, this doesn’t seem to have been a widespread motivation. I don’t think Gentzen, for instance, saw his work on formalising the sequent calculus as being particularly related to the project of unifying natural language syntax and semantics, but that’s one of the ways it is being used now. The Law of Unintended Consequences often leads to very pleasant outcomes in philosophy.

Ned Block notes that he’s now had four papers in the Philosopher’s Annual. That seems like a lot to me. Is it the record?

I should say that I often don’t agree with the decisions made about which articles get included in the PA, but it’s hard to argue with the choices of the Block articles, and in any case it’s a fun little trivia question.

From Mark Schroeder:

Cudworth’s argument against ethical voluntarism is worth chewing on again.

Brian Leiter suggests that philosophers will start fleeing California now that Arnie! has become governor.

Already the “buzz” among philosophers is that the election of the absurd Schwarzenegger, in a state already facing enormous problems, is going to lead philosophers in California, especially at UC system campuses, to start thinking about leaving. We’ll see whether Schwarzenegger can pull a “Thatcher.”

That’s not the buzz I’ve been hearing, but I’m a long way from California. Do any readers who are closer to the action want to leave any impressions?

I should say that given the relative unimportance of the governor’s office in state politics, especially when the governor is comprehensively outvoted in both houses, it seems a little absurd to leave California on this account. If there’s about to be a flood of west coast philosophy positions open up I predict there’s lots of un(der)employed philosophers from the rest of the world who will be more than happy to take them. Maybe Arnie! can be good for philosophy, even for California philosophy, after all.

I just stumbled across the webpage for The Monads. When they were compresent with us as such, the Monads were constituted by three WWU undergraduates, two of whom are now UMass graduate students, Kris McDaniel and Justin Klocksiem. I was just complimenting Kris’s philosophical abilities the other day and I forgot entirely to mention his musical accomplishments. Bad omission! If you like philosophical musical humour, you should download some of the songs they have posted. I particularly liked Meinongian Babe, which is the kind of song you might have heard on the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs had Stephin Merrit been a philosophy major. (Note that’s an 8MB download, so if everyone downloads it we’ll probably crash the UMass server.)

I just stumbled across the webpage for The Monads. When they were compresent with us as such, the Monads were constituted by three WWU undergraduates, two of whom are now UMass graduate students, Kris McDaniel and Justin Klocksiem. I was just complimenting Kris’s philosophical abilities the other day and I forgot entirely to mention his musical accomplishments. Bad omission! If you like philosophical musical humour, you should download some of the songs they have posted. I particularly liked Meinongian Babe, which is the kind of song you might have heard on the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs had Stephin Merrit been a philosophy major. (Note that’s an 8MB download, so if everyone downloads it we’ll probably crash the UMass server.)

This is a little annoying. I was looking at the US TV schedule for the Rugby World Cup, and it turns out that all of the games are on at least 72-hour delay. And I thought it was bad when the Olympics was broadcast on 16-hour delay. I’ve written to Fox Sports World to see if there’s a good reason for this, but I don’t expect I’ll get a decent answer. Given how badly Australia has played the last few months it could be a blessing for me that I don’t have to watch them losing the title up close and personal (or at least in real time) but it seems pretty ridiculous that it’s impossible to get the games live even on extended cable.

UPDATE: It turns out that the games involving England and/or the USA are on pay per view, as are the finals. Maybe I’ll watch if Australia is in the finals, but I think this is a little absurd. Since the US is playing, there should have been a concerted push to try and maximise the audience in America rather than cash in with pay-per-view to make a quick buck. There’s probably more short-term profits this way, but the potential profit from getting even a tiny foothold in the American sporting market is astronomical, and you’d think that would be the smarter long-term strategy for rugby chiefs.

I’m driving up to Ottawa next weekend for the Carleton Semantics Conference. The weekend after that I’m (probably) at UMass for the UMass semantics mini-conference. The latter is a little up in the air depending on how the World Series is progressing, but if the Red Sox keep stranding baserunners like they have so far tonight, there’ll be nothing to worry about there. This will make three conferences for the month, which is a nice change of pace after I went the whole month of September without a single conference to go to.

Matt Weiner, a frequent commentator on this blog and a recent Pitt grad, has a new papers page with the following two papers on it.

Must We Know What We Say?

The knowledge account of assertion holds that it is improper to assert that p unless the speaker knows that p. This paper argues against the knowledge account of assertion; there is no general norm that the speaker must know what she asserts. I argue that there are cases in which it can be entirely proper to assert something that you do not know. In addition, it is possible to explain the cases that motivate the knowledge account by postulating a general norm that assertions would be true, combined with conversational norms that govern all speech acts. A theory on which proper assertions must be true explains the data better than a theory on which proper assertions must be known to be true.

Deductive Closure and the Sorites

I argue against unqualified acceptance of the principle of deductive closure (DC): that, if p follows deductively from premises that are already known, we are in a position to know p. DC, I claim, is a sorites premise; it seems intuitively irresistible, but indiscriminate application of it leads to absurd conclusions. Furthermore, a theory on which the application of DC explains our practice of deriving new knowledge from old knowledge better than a theory on which our application of DC is unrestricted. This restriction on the application of DC allows contextualists to meet an argument of Hawthorne’s that contextualism must lead either to absurd knowledge attributions or to constant shifting of the standards for knowledge. Even if the standard of knowledge remains constant, the absurd knowledge attribution is the conclusion of a sorites argument and should be rejected.