I returned from Louisiana to find 80 emails needing to be answered, and 57 webpages that had changed and needed to br processed for the papers blog. So apologies to everyone if I take a while to respond to everything.

There are several points I’ll come back to from the trip, but I thought it would be nice to start with this story.

As regular readers may recall, in the cloning paper Sarah and I rely quite heavily on Liz Harman‘s[1] paper “Can we Harm and Benefit in Creating”[2]. As it turned out, I delivered the parts of the paper that most directly appealed to Liz’s work, and Liz was sitting in the front row of the audience. So I could get fairly quick feedback on whether I was getting Liz’s views right by just looking at whether she was nodding in approval or not.

As you might expect, this was rather terrifying. I normally like to have a very long lead time between saying something and it being evaluated. Fortunately, it seems we were following the lines of Liz’s theory well enough – or at least she was polite enough to make it look like we were even when we weren’t.

The conference overall was great. James Stacey Taylor and the krewe at LSU put on another great show, and I’m again grateful to have gone there. As I said, hopefully more stories to follow.

fn1. So the set of people to whose authority I’m prepared to gratuitously appeal is now, it seems, {Joyce, Keynes, Lewis, Fodor, Harman}. I’m not sure whether that’s too much appeal to authority or too little.

fn2. Doesn’t it seem like there should be a link to the paper here? This paper has been delivered at enough places that it should be posted on a webpage by now somewhere.