Congratulations to Frank Jackson and John Quiggin for being selected as “Australian Citation Laureates”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9060941%255E12332,00.html, whatever they are! (Story via “John Quiggin”:http://www.johnquiggin.com/archives/001601.html, who suggests it’s something like having a blog with lots of incoming links.)

Congratulations to Frank Jackson and John Quiggin for being selected as “Australian Citation Laureates”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9060941%255E12332,00.html, whatever they are! (Story via “John Quiggin”:http://www.johnquiggin.com/archives/001601.html, who suggests it’s something like having a blog with lots of incoming links.)

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, featuring mainly papers from the “Columbia/NYU grad conference”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/. There’s also a paper by Friederike Moltmann on quantifier domains, by Paul Griffiths on Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behaviour, and Nicholas Maxwell on Scientific Metaphysics.

Thanks to Matt Weiner for suggesting an amendment to how these posts are titled. Matt, by the way, has “some news”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000170.html for those interested in hiring epistemologists for next year.

In the “imaginative resistance paper”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/papers/Trogdon.pdf I linked below, Kelly Trogdon defends a variant of the salience story about imaginative resistance. The idea, and I’m summarising crudely here because I want to attack a lot of positions at once, is that morally deviant claims can’t be imagined because they are impossible in an obvious way. Impossibilities in time travel stories or the like can be imagined because the impossibility of them does not immediately register. I used to believe some variant of this, but I got talked out of it by Douglas Adams. The story of how is perhaps of some philosophical interest, and in retrospect I think it was fairly funny.

This all happened in the days before I had an iPod. The only way I had to listen to MP3s was on my laptop. Unfortunately, the laptop is about 1995 vintage, which means it was excellent value as a word processor, but less than ideal value as a MP3-player. Still, if you don’t have another alternative, it isn’t too bad on lo-fi files, and since most spoken word files are lo-fi, listening to the old radio-play versions of _Hitch-hikers_ was perfectly possible.

Of course, lugging around a laptop isn’t really a convenient way to listen to MP3s. But this day I’d been working in at the library at Melbourne Uni before meeting a friend for drinks and dinner and drinks, and then catching the last-ish train back home. So I still had the laptop, and I was tipsy enough to think that trying to set it up to play MP3s on the train was a good idea.

The trains in Melbourne aren’t as noisy as they were back in the day, but they’re still not the best environment for concentrating on textual subtleties. The “texting”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000558.html revolution has quietened things down a bit I guess, but late night trains will always be late night trains. And as I said, I was by this stage less sober than a judge, and trying to play MP3s on a computer quite expressly not designed for that purpose. But still, I was struck by a couple of things when I got to the passage where Adams first describes Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

First, practically everything about Milliways is impossible. I was struck by this because after each sentence describing some impossible feature of Milliways, the narrator says something like “Of course, this is impossible.”

Second, it is perfectly possible to _imagine_ Milliways, and everything the narrator says about Milliways is true in the story. (At least all the categorical claims, I’m less sure about the claims that Milliways’s features are impossible. But they aren’t relevant to what follows.)

And at that point, in a clunky Melbourne train, late at night, not perfectly sober, trying to manage a computer that really shouldn’t be used as a kind of proto-iPod, I realised that the salience story about imaginative resistance couldn’t work. If the Milliways story makes its own impossibility salient enough for that temporal part of mine to realise it, but does not generate imaginative resistance, there is something more to imaginative resistance than salient impossibility.

Let me add a couple of other things about Trogden’s paper. I don’t think the interpretation of Gendler’s view is entirely accurate. (One might make a similar complaint about my paper, but I’m not the one under discussion here!) Here’s a key passage from “Tamar’s paper”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/imagresist.pdf. (It’s pages 31-2, and I’ve taken out a long discussion of impossibility that I don’t think is particularly relevant in _this_ context. Emphasis added.)

bq.. So my hypothesis is that cases that evoke genuine imaginative resistance will be cases where the reader feels that she is being asked to export a way of looking at the actual world which she does not wish to add to her conceptual repertoire. Why should this raise particular problems for morality? … For a story to even make sense, a great number of things which are held to be true within the fiction must be held to be true outside it, and vice versa. The moral principles that govern the world in question are generally among these, as are the truths of logic, mathematics, and—in most genres—the laws of physics and psychology and even etiquette. When a story explicitly cancels one of these presuppositions … we are generally inclined to take the cancellation as governing only the fictional world… _In most cases, the very fact of deviance is sufficient indication that literal export is not the intention_.

But because we recognize that there are instances of actual moral disagreement, when we encounter fictional truths that concern deviant morality, we cannot assume that their deviance is an indication that the author does not wish them to be exported, or that she wishes them to be exported in altered form. There may be indications that this is all that is intended … and then the imaginative resistance disappears. But when, as is the default, we understand the story as demanding that we take on a certain way of looking at the actual world, we are inclined to resist.

p. And here’s “Trogden’s summary”:

bq.. Many propositions become part of the content of an imagining because they are true in the actual world, and there are many propositions we come to accept as true of the actual world by virtue of the fact that they are part of the content of our imaginings. In the light of these considerations, Gendler seems to suggest the following rules for imagination:

_Import Rule for Imagination_: In general, if C is the content of an imagining, then, if something is true in the actual world, it’s true in C.

_Export Rule for Imagination_: In general, if C is the content of an imagining, then, if something is true in C, it’s true in the actual world.

p. Obviously there were space constraints in Trogden’s paper, but I think this is at best too simplistic a summary of what Tamar’s up to. On the one hand, she does think that there is a tighter connection between what’s true in an imagination and what’s true in the world than some people may have believed _a priori_. But I don’t think Tamar can be really said to have said this connection holds “in general”. In fact, she thinks there’s a fair bit of work to be done to show that it holds in general even for moral claims, and descriptive claims are off the table at this point.

In fact, we can read Tamar as saying something quite contrary – that ‘in general’ you can do anything you like in imagination or fiction, just as long as you don’t mess with ‘framework’ propositions. And even if you do mess with the framework, you can get away with it provided you smile the right way while telling the story. I don’t think Tamar’s way of spelling things out here works, but I don’t think she’s committed to anything like as extreme as Trogden attributes to her.

So what of the complaints in Trogden’s paper about me? (It always comes back to me.) On the one hand, these seem much better focussed than the complaints about Tamar. On the other, I’m not sure they really get at the core of what I was trying to say. Not that complaints about the specific things I did say are unwarranted. The complaint turns on sentences like this one.

bq. Slavery is morally good by virtue of the fact that turtles aren’t ceiling fans.

Well, that can’t be imagined or true in a fiction. But does it fictionally entail any asymmetric compound impossibilities? I’m not sure. It better, if my theory is to be universal. Let’s say it doesn’t. What follows from that? Well, my specific theory is wrong. But what isn’t (proven to be) wrong is my basic idea that what is always imported into imaginings, and by default imported into fictions, is the class of conceptual truths about what is true in virtue of what. Maybe the way to capture that point isn’t in terms of asymmetric compound impossibilities, but I still think the point that these conceptual truths about ‘in virtue of’ relations are the key stands up.

Sloganeering, I think we can’t change those connections in imagination because we imagine by exploiting those connections. And that, I think, is why there’s imaginative resistance.

I finally got around to reading “John Holbo’s”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/fair_is_foul_an.html imaginative resistance piece carefully, well carefully-ish, and it’s given me a lot to think about. I hope we see the remaining sections at some stage, and I certainly hope the tensions of having one foot in analytic philosophy and one foot in cultural studies don’t get unbearable. We who stay put on one side of the fence could certainly do with a broader point of view, from time to time.

Let me state a few points on which I think I agree with John.

* The writing in the examples I’ve been making up isn’t really that good. Well, except for the “Quixote example”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001665.html, which I still think is side-splittingly funny.

* There are a ton of different problems around the topic of imaginative resistance, and it isn’t obvious we have sorted them all out yet.

* Nor is it obvious that ignoring the aesthetic issues and hoping they’ll sort themselves out, as I basically do, is legitimate.

* The hokey little examples I (and others) provide don’t prove that morally deviant fictions are impossible, just that they take a bit more work than descriptively deviant fictions to draw.

Some days I’m tempted by a point that I took away from a conversation with George Wilson. (I don’t know if George would endorse anything quite this strong so I won’t attribute it to him, but his suggestions got me thinking this way.) There aren’t any interesting rules on what you can and can’t do in fictions. There are just defeasible principles that, as soon as they are made explicit, some author will try to subvert. And, if she’s talented, she’ll succeed in subverting it. This isn’t to say there’s no puzzle about morality in fiction, because we can still ask why there is such a strong, if defeasible, principle against moral deviance. I don’t think I ultimately believe this line, I think the ban on asymmetric compound impossibilities might be absolute, but I certainly assign much higher credence to that kind of position than I did a few months ago.

But I don’t think the hokeyness (or worse) of the writing in my examples is as much of the story as John does. Consider this passage of John’s, commenting on _Pie_.

bq. Weatherson distinguishes between alethic puzzles regarding stories like this – i.e. puzzles about whether sentences like the final sentence of “Pie” can be true – and aesthetic puzzles – i.e. puzzles about why we don’t think offerings like “Pie” are great literary achievements. Weatherson says he sets the aesthetic puzzle aside. Likewise, Gendler hastily brushes aside ‘niceties of literary interpretation’ at one point in her paper. But it is far from clear to me that our reaction to “Pie” (and to similar examples concocted by Gendler and Walton) are anything but literary reactions, i.e. aesthetic ones. I rather suspect that literary niceties are close to being alpha and omega hereabouts. We do not see the sense of stipulating that it was right to throw the pie.

Without wanting to sound too much like a theorist or something, I wonder why John used the word ‘stipulating’ there. If you talked about other things I did in the story, making it fictional that the pie thrower was young (and in some versions dashingly handsome), or that the audience was amused, I don’t think you’d say I stipulated those things. It’s not that it would be wrong to say I stipulated them, it just wouldn’t be the first word that springs to mind.

Which is to say, if the story isn’t very good (and of course it isn’t) then it isn’t very good through and through. The sentences about the youth of the thrower or the amusement of the audience aren’t very good either. Particularly in the first case, we may not see the sense in them. But we aren’t inclined to regard those things as mere stipulations that the author does not really succeed in making fictional.

Now this all consistent with the literary merit or lack thereof being crucial. But I don’t think it’s consistent with it being the ‘alpha and omega’, because we still need to explain why authors can get away with some things in lousy stories (make the pie-thrower young) and not others (make him virtuous).

Of course you might think that the representational properties of lousy stories is not the most exciting topic in the world. And if your primary interest is in fiction itself, that would be a reasonable response. And, to be honest, my interest in the puzzle is _largely_ as a puzzle about fiction. So if it’s just a puzzle about lousy stories, that makes it less interesting than it appears.

But that’s not the only interest in the puzzle. After all, it’s meant, at least in my telling, to show us something about philosophical thought experiments. And philosophical thought experiments are, at least a lot of the time, lousy stories. From time to time I care about the aesthetic qualities of my thought experiments, but usually even when I try I’m just playing for cheap laughs or insanely complicated word games. (Both of those are on display in my “Dr Evil paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/evil.pdf. Though to be honest that paper does attempt to make a serious stylistic point, namely that interior monologue can be an incredibly _efficient_ way to tell a philosophical story.) _Qua_ analytic philosophers we have an interest in what happens when the literary stakes are low, even if we don’t have a similar interest _qua_ appreciators of fiction, or aestheticians, or literary theorists.

I promised a simple statement of something in the title, so let me try delivering on that. Here are four tasks you can try at home.

# Imagine things were descriptively, but not normatively, different from the way they actually are.
# Tell a story in which things are descriptively, but not normatively, different from the way they actually are.
# Imagine things were normatively, but not descriptively, different from the way they actually are.
# Tell a story in which things are normatively, but not descriptively, different from the way they actually are.

I think 1 and 2 are dead easy. I can imagine my mouse being an inch right of where it actually is, and that makes no moral difference. Given I can imagine that, 2 is easy as well, though since the relevant story is just about the location of my mouse, it will make _Pie_ look like a Booker-prize winner.

Maybe I’m missing the point of the marble bust analogy, but I think, despite what John promises, 3 is impossible and the odds against 4 are I think very high. Note that I don’t ask for a story in which the fundamental moral principles are different. I might bet against that at even money, but I wouldn’t be shocked if exploiting conventions about genre lets you change fundamental moral facts. I ask for a story in which everything is just as it is, but the moral facts are different. If this is to work, either it will have to involve a very persuasive stipulator, or incredibly clever use of _stylistic_ conventions in order to create a deviant moral setting. And I just don’t see it happening. Any way I imagine changing the fundamental moral principles involves telling a fantastic descriptive story, and using appropriate conventions to do a lot of the work. Such a story would be interesting no doubt; it would refute some of the things I’ve said on TAR over the years, and some things that I’m sure many people believe. But it wouldn’t satisfy 4.

As the rather arrogant appeal to betting odds shows, I don’t have an argument that 4 is impossible. But if it is, no matter what the literary quality of the work, there’s an asymmetry between 2 and 4 that needs (or perhaps wants) explanation. And there’s an asymmetry between 1 and 3 that needs (or perhaps would not wholly object to) explanation. Of course I think I have something like the right explanation, so I would be a little underwhelmed to find there wasn’t anything there to explain!

The story Jonathan told below led me to the Abercrombie & Fitch “website”:http://www.abercrombie.com/anf/index.html. And I was surprised to find that some, not by a long way all but some, of the ‘humour’ t-shirts were moderately humourous. In New Orleans every other non-bar seemed to be selling t-shirts emblazoned with sex jokes that were old when Elpenor told them. And while Abercrombie & Fitch aren’t entirely immune to this tendency, at least one or two seemed a cut above.

As well as making fun of West Virginia, they seem to do a line in upstate NY bashing. Which being from a place that is worse by every measure than upstate is more or less to be expected. (There’s lots of pictures, so this continues below the fold.)
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Most politicians have got the memo that says book-burning is a no-no, but it seems that not all of them realised that this was meant to extend to other forms of written expression as well. It seems an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt with the slogan “It’s all relative in West Virginia” (picture below fold) has upset the West Virginia governor Bob Wise (D).

bq. “I write to you today to demand that you immediately remove this item from your stores and your print and online catalogues,” Wise wrote [to Abercrombie & Fitch]. “In addition, these shirts must be destroyed at once to avoid any possibility of resale and proof be given thereof.”(“link”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040322/ap_on_re_us/t_shirt_tussle)

I can see why some people would find the t-shirt offensive. And to be fair the governor is not advocating a law against it. But government officials campaigning for the destruction of written material because of what is written still makes me worried.

Story via “Jonathan Ichikawa”:http://ichikawa.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_ichikawa_archive.html#108000850987197971[1].
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The “NYU Grad Conference”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/ (which is conveniently on at the same time as the APA Pacific) has posted the papers to be presented “here”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/schedule.html. A few things worth noting directly relevant to this blog.

“Kelly Trogdon”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/papers/Trogdon.pdf (Ohio State) on imaginative resistance, including an extended discussion of me! (This could be the first extended discussion of something of mine at a conference. I’m very pleased. The only extended discussion of views of mine in print is by David Lewis, a fact about which I am also pleased.)

“Nick Treanor”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/papers/Treanor.pdf (Brown) on ignorance and inquiry.

“Roald Nashi”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/papers/Nashi.pdf (Cornell) on the causal theory of knowledge.

There’s many more interesting looking papers there, and I’ll try to add them all to the papers blog tomorrow.

UPDATE: By the way, if you want to read two of the papers Kelly Trogden is criticising, Tamar’s paper is “here”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/imagresist.pdf and my paper is “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/mfp.htm. Isn’t open access scholarship a wonderful thing?!

SECOND UPDATE: As Michael Feurstein says in the comments, it’s actually the *Columbia*/NYU grad student conference. I was thrown by the graphic on the front page. The arch told me that NYU was involved, but I expected something more Upper West Side to represent Columbia, like maybe a people’s red flag or something.

By the way, if I get bored making jokes about NYC stereotypes, I might try writing specificially about Kelly Trogden’s imaginative resistance paper, but I don’t know when that will get done. (It takes me a _long_ time to get bored of city stereotype jokes.)