I hate it when talks have insufficient numbers of handouts. The probability that a handout will be wasted has to be about 98 to 99 percent before the marginal cost of production exceeds the expected marginal utility of producing it. (Unless it’s a really bad handout, in which case you should make a better one.) So Brian’s rule of thumb for calculating numbers of handouts to bring to talks is make a generous estimate for how many people will be at the talk, and double it.

But the problem is that in practice even making these estimates is a risky business. So I’ll appeal to something like Condorcet’s theorem and take some estimates from what other people think. The session I’ll be doing at the APA is in a pretty good timeslot (Friday 1-4) with some other very good speakers (George Bealer and Paul Churchland) and it’s been heavily advertised (at least here), but there is some strong competition (especially from Bach/Stanley/King). So I’m guessing 100 handouts should cover it easily. But I’m wooried that we could ‘catch fire’, and I’ll be left with audience members without handouts. Anyone out there with better estimating abilities than I want to make a suggestion about how many I should plan for?

Here’s a semantic construction I hadn’t heard before. (This was on SportsCenter, or some sports show, on the weekend.)

bq. Nevada upset Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday.

That isn’t, or at least wasn’t, a sentence in my dialect. I could say each of the following.

bq. Nevada beat Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday.
Nevada upset Gonzaga on Saturday.

But transitive ‘upset’ couldn’t be modified by a margin of victory. Maybe I just had a quirk in my dialect and I should remove it, but the expression still sounds odd to me.

I didn’t get as much philosophical work done this weekend as I should have, but I did find a way to cut $1500 off my summer travel costs, so it wasn’t entirely wasted.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ for Monday is up, and I’ve corrected a mistake on Sunday’s edition. There are papers by Henry Stapp on Bell’s inequality, and David Carlson on God’s (mere?) existence, but the most exciting is Ken Taylor’s paper on “Perry on opacity”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TQxNWNmM/Misplaced.pdf.

Ken’s paper suggests a natural idea. How much to ring up “philosophy talk”:http://www.philosophytalk.org/ as be like, “So John, I was reading Ken’s criticisms, and they sound pretty good to me. I was wondering if you had anything to say for yourself, or you just wanted to concede defeat straight away.”? Since you wouldn’t actually get on the air the answer is actually close to zero, just ringing up would be fairly cheap, I guess, but maybe we could restrict payoffs to people who get on-air and ask that. (Disclaimer: I really don’t recommend anyone actually ring up Philosophy Talk and ask that. Unless of course they decide to have a show on referential opacity, in which case all bets are off.)

When Ken started talking about the ‘paleo-Griceans’ I was hoping he meant to be talking about views like mine. But it turns out he wasn’t, so I’ll have to be a paleo-something-else this week.

“Gil Harman”:http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Davidson-photos.html has posted a couple of photos of Donald Davidson from the late 1960s, but they take _forever_ to load. Still, it’s fairly cute to see everyone from back in the day. But was it normal to have an all-male department as late as 1968, as Princeton apparently did? I don’t know the relevant history here, so maybe this was still fairly standard at the time.

Oh, and the “break-up lines post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002593.html, to which I contributed hardly a word, has become the first post on TAR to get 50 comments, and is now #3 Google search for “break up lines”:http://www.google.com/search?q=break+up+lines&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8.

I need to get from Melbourne to Ithaca in late July, and it seems (oddly) that the cheapest way to do this will be to fly to London on one airline, change planes and then fly to Ithaca (or at least Syracuse) on another airline. This should lead to an interesting exchange with the immigration people.

bq. “Why are you in England?”
“To change planes, I’ll be out in a few hours.”
“Where did you fly in from?”
“Er, Bangkok.”
“And are you delivering drugs to anyone while you’re here?”
“Er, why do you ask that? I mean, if I was a drug runner, I’d try to have an itinerary that looked a little less like a stereotyped drug runner wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I?”

So I was wondering whether anyone’s done something like this before and whether the immigration people get upset if you use their country as a transit lounge?

So a few days ago I made as if to joke about Andy Egan picking Wisconsin to go all the way in the tournament, and suggested that real men submitted brackets consisting of who they actually thought would win, not who they wanted to win. Now it’s always tricky when writing deadpan satire to ensure that everyone will get the jokes, but in this case it seems most of the mortals who read the posts actually understood the point (or lack of one). Not so, it seems for the relevant deities, who responded by knocking my picks for tournament winner and runner up out in the same day, _in the same building_. What’s even more ironic is that the team I’d picked to win, Stanford, is also the team I’d picked to knock out my preferred winner, Syracuse. It seems I need to use “irony tags”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001494.html so as to not bring on the wrath of the basketball gods. (Or not – given how well Syracuse did out of yesterday’s shenanigans.)

“Mark Kleiman”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/policy_briefs_/2004/03/taking_the_bottle_away_from_dangerous_drunks.php makes a modest proposal to scrap underage drinking laws in exchange for people needing a licence to drink. A licence that could be suspended for too many drunken misescapades. (Or at least for too many drunken misescapades that involve breaking the law. Telling really unfunny jokes or waking up in the wrong place shouldn’t be grounds for licence revocation one hopes.) I tend to be fairly libertarian about booze laws, but I think this might be a decent trade-off. If he throws in scrapping open container laws, I might sign on.

“Geoff Nunberg”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000614.html has a very funny piece on grammar, but since this blog plays by FCC rules I can’t really tell you what it is about.

Robert Crouch emailed yesterday to suggest I write something about the “philosophical shrink”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/magazine/21SHRINK.html?ex=1395205200&en=b240cba139275575&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND, but I don’t really have a lot to say. Frankly I’m a little sceptical that anything anything like what I do could have therapeutic value, but maybe there are connections I’m not seeing. I did think it was quite unfair to lump “Philosophy Talk” in with the philosophy shrinks and the like, though since I believe any publicity is good publicity I suppose I shouldn’t be upset on their behalf.

If I’d followed Robert’s advice on this promptly I may have had a scoop, but as it is the “blogosphere”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/002858.html “philosophers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/put_me_down_for.html have already “mocked”:http://strangedoctrines.typepad.com/strange_doctrines/2004/03/philosophical_c.html it quite enough.

Oh, and the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up with new papers by Istvan Aranyosi, Ingo Brigandt and Uriah Kriegel.

“Language Hat”:http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001217.php has an excellent post up about a silly list of ‘mispronunciations’ that’s been apparently doing the rounds.

To get the full effect you really have to read the whole thing, but I will answer one of Mr. Hat’s questions. No, of course the author of the list doesn’t recommend pronouncing the _c_ in _Connecticut_. As every fule nose, the correct pronunciation is ON-NECK-TEA-COO.

Maybe we should start to really attack this PPR backlog.

bq. “Karen Bennett’s”:http://www.princeton.edu/~kbennett/ papers and works in progress.

“Global Supervenience and Dependence” — forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (they accepted this paper over 2 years ago…)

If it makes Karen feel better, us locals also have to wait to see our papers appear. I don’t mind, since it means that in principle I could still deliver my “Dr Evil paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/evil.pdf at symposia. I’ve never been invited to deliver that paper, and frankly I don’t know what I’d do with the _difficult_ sections – esp. 6 and 9 – in a presentation. But I like several of the jokes in it, and the examples, and for a reply paper it makes a reasonably substantive point, so it could be fun to deliver. Once the paper appears in print this is no longer an option, so I don’t totally mind the delay.

I should also note that the backlog is not caused by PPR itself being behind. Thanks to what appears to be superhuman efforts from the PPR office, both PPR and No{u^}s always appear on schedule. It’s just that there are so many good papers to publish, that there’s inevitably a bit of a backlog.

“Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/18/publishing_a_book/index.html on why it’s a good idea to give away your books. (And he’s entirely right to use shudder quotes when using the word ‘book’ about my stalled vagueness project.)

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000971.html#000971 reports that Jason Stanley has moved to Rutgers, and asks whether this makes Rutgers the best school in philosophy of language. Er, yes. But there are some scholarly differences between some of the philosophers of language there that should make for some interesting tea-room discussions.

“Claire”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anggarrgoon/2004/03/20#a55 mocks some intelligence officials for their inability to tell Uzbek from Chechen. She should be careful – this is just why people are talking about “re-instating the draft”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/03/13/MNG905K1BC1.DTL.

Just for kicks, here are pictures of the kinds of planes that fly out of Ithaca.

bq. !http://www.itn.net/gif/itn/airplanes/D38/d38.gif!

bq. !http://www.itn.net/gif/itn/airplanes/DH8/dh8.jpg!

I have a not entirely rational dislike of small planes. Next month when I’m going to Pullman, WA I’m flying to Seattle and driving the last five hours to hopping around in one of these things. (And to save a few hundred dollars and even I think a little travel time.) The top picture looks WWII era. But I’ll guess I’ll get used to them.

TV ads are very interesting, but I could see those while watching something slightly more highbrow than Super 12s and the tournament. So I’d like a sports example that actually tells us something about philosophy. I don’t know if this eventually works out, but here’s a try at something.

We’ve all heard ironic cheers – cheers given in exchange for something the crowd actually supports, but which are exaggerated because the target of the cheers has not been worthy of much support recently. (The background is that I just heard the Highbury crowd ironically cheer the ref for finally awarding a free kick after previously deciding that homicide in the penalty area was not worth of a penalty.)

Now, we can sort of make sense of irony or exaggeration (or both, as in this case) when it is applied to contentful things like assertions. But can we really make sense of purely expressive acts, as cheers are usually taken to be, being ironic or exaggerated? If not, then we have to say that cheers are contentful. And if that’s true, it’s very hard to defend non-cognitivist theories in other areas. If saying “Murder is wrong” expresses “Boo! Murder!”, but booing murder itself is a partially assertoric act, then in some sense the cognitivists have already won.

Of course, if cheers have content, then it should be sometimes _semantically_ acceptable to respond “That’s true” or “That’s false” in response to a cheer. This does not seem like it is ever acceptable. But maybe there’s a pragmatic reason for that.

This afternoon I have to decide whether to watch Syracuse-Maryland or the Brumbies game that is broadcast at the same time. Decisions, decisions. Hopefully I can find some philosophically interesting things while watching. Here’s my first attempt. This a quote from the ad for Monday’s _CSI: Miami_.

bq. One crime scene is about to become two.

It’s a little controversial just what the logical form of this should be, but I think it’s something like the following.

bq. There is something that is a crime scene and very soon it will be two crime scenes.

I think we can distinguish _two crime scenes_ from _the scene of two crimes_, and the natural interpretation of the quote is that it is talking about two crime scenes.

The background is that someone steals evidence from a crime scene, making that patch of dirt into _another_ crime scene. But this is pretty strange, because here we have the one physical object, one patch of dirt, constituting _two_ things of the same ontological type. (Whatever ontological type a crime scene is.) So in one ad we have folk support for both

bq. (a) temporary identity; and
(b) co-locationism.

If TV is this interesting all afternoon I might _have_ to spend all afternoon in front of the screen.