Here’s a challenge for a budding young metaphysician/philosopher of science. Compare and contrast the account of causation as difference making in chapter one of Carolina Sartorio’s excellent dissertation with the account of causal explanation as difference-making in Michael Strevens’s wonderful Nous paper. I’m much too busy to plow through the details, but anyone who is interested in the topics of causation and explanation would learn a lot from reading both papers, and there might be some room to make (incremental) progress by triangulating between their views.

Greg Restall’s weblogs seem to have become dormant, so Melbourne philosophy needed a new blogger – and Matt Carter has stepped to the plate with emanations. I’m glad to see he supports the miserable failure project!

I had to write up a short summary of my current research and plans for future research, so I thought I’d share a draft of it with you. It’s reasonably long (and, as these things usually are, somewhat narcissistic) so it’s all in the extended entry.

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While aimlessly web-wandering, I came across the list of Princeton grad students with webpages. Most of them have papers online, and few of them were being tracked for the papers blog. This doesn’t worry me too much, though it means tomorrow’s papers blog will be busier than usual. But the thought that there are plenty of other missing grad student pages out there worries me quite a bit. For one thing, I don’t know how they could all ever be catalogued. For another, they will change so quickly that I may have no hope of keeping up. But one must try, one supposes.

If other departments have helpful lists of grad students with online papers, preferably containing links to said papers (and really preferably with all those pages having abstracts of the said papers in HTML easily available – you can’t imagine how much difference that makes to my mornings) please either email me or (better still) leave a note in the comments.

Here.

Clark Kent, Saul Kripke and the Caltech mascot are talking about identity…

My earlier post on the miserable failure project is suddenly getting a swarm of hits. Most of them are not from searches for miserable failure, but for searches like google miserable failure, or, most intriguingly, Whitehouse failure. Even that search takes you to the miserable failure biography page. The Google bomb has been so successful that not only does it work for these searches, just searching for failure has ol’ GWB as the #3 pick. As I said in the previous post, time to start working on George W Bush.

I was stumbling through a physics paper on superluminal signalling, understanding roughly every tenth word (usually a quantifier or connective) when I found a bit I could understand.

Obviously, this argument could be used to criticize faster-than-c propagation only if, in any given reference frame, the only criterion for saying that an event is the cause of another one were the time ordering in that frame. However, cause and effect are usually not defined in this way. In fact, there are no precise definitions of these concepts, but only some intuitive ideas that allow us to recognize, in some cases, the existence of a causal relationship between events.

I won’t quote more, but it does move into “I don’t have a theory of causation, but I know it when I see it” territory. I’m not exactly a decorated veteran of the causation analysis wars, but I’ve spent enough time in them to be very sympathetic to physicists taking that line.

I reserve my right to change my mind when I come up with an analysis of causation though.

Jonathan’s joke raises the interesting question of whether there are any everyday interpretations of the box (written here as L) such that L(Lp -> p) -> Lp holds, apart of course for the interpretations to do with provability in extensions of Peano arithmetic. Any suggestions?

Barry, like me, is doing his first tour of duty on a search committee this year. He’s a little more perceptive than me about how to classify reference letters though.

I actually have a reasonably precise question about reference letters. What is the function f such that when someone whom one does not know says that X is the best grad student they have seen in the last n years, f(n) is the largest number y such that it is reasonable to believe X is the best graduate student they have seen in the last y years? My initial inclination was to guess that f(n) was something like n/2, but I’m starting to think it should be non-linear, maybe something like the square root of n.

I assume that given the hyperbolic conventions of reference letters, it isn’t that plausible to say f is the identity function. Maybe I’m being too cynical here, and that’s exactly what I should believe. Ultimately this doesn’t matter a lot to the search process, because all I’m trying to do is sort the candidates, not make absolute evaluations of them, but it would be interesting to know. Reference-letter-ese is an interesting dialect of English, and one perhaps worthy of study.

Michael Green has some good (and detailed) advice for those going on the job market. He also links to a way to convert your job market experiences into short-term cash, rather than (or as well as) the long-term financial security we all look for out of job searches.