I saw Belle & Sebastian in Boston last night, and it was lots of fun. A few brief recollections. (Philosophical content will return to the site shortly.)

• For a while I couldn’t remember which city I was in, but when someone shouted out “Yankees Suck”, I knew immediately where I was. Bostonians can be so helpful in that respect sometimes. (I know it doesn’t make much sense at a concert, but it doesn’t make much sense at a Red Sox / Mariners game either, and what chant do you think you hear then?)
• For a 10-piece outfit, as they were last night, Belle & Sebastian sure do multi-task. Sarah Martin played 4 different instruments and most of the others did some doubling up. Maybe if they had 30 people they could all have defined roles. I’m glad they never learned, or at least never agreed with, orthodox division of labour principles.
• The band tried a couple of songs from Storytelling and the crowd had basically no positive response at all. I think they should be in the business of forgetting that whole thing ever happened.
• I’m a bit worried about how far this “discover your inner 80s” thing is going. They opened with a note perfect version of A New England, complete with guitar played just the way Billy played it before he could play guitar. And the version of Stay Loose was even more synth-rock than the album version. Hopefully it’s just a phase they are going through. And hopefully it doesn’t last as long as the first time the world had an 80s phase.
• Hearing I’m a Cuckoo reminded me that while driving across rural Ontario the other weekend I thought “I see a wilderness for you and me, punctuated by philosophy” would make a good motto for the site. Perhaps that’s a little negative though. If it’s to be a Belle & Sebastian line, I think the site’s motto should be “Nobody writes them like they used to so it may as well be me.” It isn’t really true when I say it, but then it wasn’t true when Stuart Murdoch wrote it either, and it certainly sounds good as a motto.

Chris Bertram:

Sometimes, when I’m reading or listening to a paper which excites me with its novelty and brilliance, perhaps because it contains some really elegant move, a mental image comes into my head of Steve McManaman running with the ball, circa 1996.

John MacFarlane:

Anyone who has read Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic knows how seductive Frege’s logicism can be. Russell’s letter hits most of us with all the force of a “Dear John” letter.

So is philosophy more like sport or like sex? Or like drugs or rock’n’roll?

I’m in the sport camp. Chris thinks watching good philosophy is like watching Steve McManaman. I’ve often felt it’s more like watching good leg-spin bowling, say Shane Warne of the same vintage. It’s all about skill rather than strength, and you have no idea about what’s going to come next, except that it will make you rearrange how you’ve done things before. When it’s good philosophy on an area I work in, it’s like watching Shane Warne from the other end of the pitch, with what feels like a pitifully small bat in one’s hands.

More philosophers with blogs. Burgess-Jackson’s is called AnalPhilosopher. Given the amount he’s posted in the last week I guess that’s meant to mean expressive not retentive. (There’s an interesting question for Freudian linguistics there: when did ‘anal’, as used in a pop-Freudian sense, come to unambiguously mean ‘anal-retentive’ rather than ‘anal-expressive’?)

I should warn that a large chunk of it doesn’t seem to be that good, but I’ll leave most more precise judgments up to your discretion. Partially that’s because permalinks are Bloggered, so I can’t link to the specific irksome entries. And partially it’s because I’d rather watch the replay of France v Ireland that I still haven’t seen from last weekend, and/or sleep, than get into blog wars. But let me mention two oddities.

Anyone who is “inclined to say” that Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman are part of the “far left” has some rather large gaps in their memory, e.g., of Dowd during Monicagate or Krugman during the early Clinton years, or a very distorted sense of reality. (There’s an interesting post to be written here about how Americans don’t seem to have the concept of a moderate partisan. Krugman’s political views are barely distinguishable from Paul Keating’s, and Keating is a moderate by any reasonable standard, so it follows Krugman is a moderate. But over here once it is clear that you hate the other side, and are prepared to say so and say why, you are labelled an extremist.) I’d almost be prepared to say that this is a sign Burgess-Jackson just has a very narrow view of the middle ground, but when he goes on to describe Andrew Sullivan as a source for “hope that our discourse may once again become civilized” I have to give up even that charitable interpretation.

On the good side, the philosophical posts are better than the political posts, and anyone who quotes Jack Smart at length can’t be all bad. (Although attributing the Curry paradox to an Arizona grad student in the mid-80s seems a little strange to me. And it’s not a very good version of the paradox, since it assumes that conditionals are material implications, and that is really not necessary for the argument. Indeed, it’s because it isn’t necessary that the Curry is interesting. But that’s another post altogether.)

Thanks to Harry Brighouse for the link. That link is to an interesting thread on tenure. Given recent goings-on I probably shouldn’t get into that debate right now, so head over to CT if you want to argue the pros (or cons) of tenure.

The Brown email server is again misbehaving – emails are arriving up to 14 hours after they are being posted. That’s no news, and I don’t often enough reply to email within 14 hours to make it comment worthy. But apparently this time it is also affecting comments to the blog. If you post something and it hasn’t shown up, I have no idea whether it will show up after some delay. It seems patience is called for here, which seems to be the antithesis of blogging.

With some trepidation, I post a (very early very rough) draft of the paper Andy Egan, John Hawthorne and I are working on:

Epistemic Modals in Context

I should say this has not been thoroughly vetted my co-authors, so all problems errors misspellings blatantly invalid arguments etc are mine and mine alone. (The good ideas, on the other hand, are mostly theirs.) Any comments suggestions etc would be most appreciated.

What, if any, are the truth conditions for the following sentence

Rhode Island milk stays fresher longer

We ended up having a long, if entirely digressive, discussion about this in a semantics reading group. I offered a Lepore-style answer, and it got a fairly familiar response. I’ll leave that answer to the extended section. If you have a proposed identification of the truth conditions, the comments board is open.
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Norman Geras makes some humourous suggestions for topics for the philosophy of cricket volume. I think a long paper on the ethics of walking might be amusing and/or enlightening.

I wonder if there’s anything to be read into the fact that cricket and soccer, the two most popular sports in England seem to have the strongest code of ethical conduct of major team sports. By that I mean that in those sports, as opposed to almost every other professional sport, participants are regularly required by the ethics of the game (as opposed to the rules of the gam) to engage in actions that harm their team – sometimes dramatically – their team’s chances. Maybe there are lots of sports with conventions like walking when you know you are out, or kicking the ball out when a player is injured (and returning the ball if the other team has done this) but if they exist they aren’t widely popular in America. (Are cricket and soccer the two most popular sports anywhere else in the world other than England? I guess parts of the Carribean, although baseball and basketball are competitors. Perhaps in India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka? Maybe Wales, although I’d have thought rugby would edge one of them out.)

David Velleman is promoting the Google bombing of Whitehouse.gov. The trick is to use miserable failure as a link to the page of the world’s most famous miserable failure. It’s an interesting project, and I’m happy to help out, though part of me thinks we should be instead linking to victorious commanders or champions of democracy rather than promoting a miserable failure. But it’s all in good fun, and for a good cause, so I’ll happily play along.

UPDATE: The miserable failure is now #2 in the Google search for miserable failure. And the #1 pick is an article laying out why he’s a miserable failure. Google bombs still work! Now we just have to try Google bombing George W Bush.

Maybe it’s just a smokescreen for a hiring fest, but the program for the LSA Annual Conference sure looks more fun than, say, the APA Eastern. Halle, Chomsky and Horn doing state of the art addresses makes for a pretty good program already, and the semantics section also looks like it will be contain lots of good papers.

Of course, the other APA conferences, those that aren’t taken over by the job market, are also fun, and there are good papers at the Eastern, but it’s hard to find as many highlights as at the Central or Pacific, or at the LSA.

I think this is pretty smart. Mathew Lu, a grad student at Cornell, has collected the materials from his job applications and posted them to his webpage. I think more job candidates should do this. There’s usually very little secret about applications. The reference letters are secret, and of course Lu doesn’t post them. (I presume he doesn’t even have access to them.) And if you want to present a different look for every different application being so public won’t do. But on the whole most applicants want to make it as easy as possible for potential employers to see their file, so they should follow Lu’s lead and make them accessible to anyone with a browser.