There’s no truth at all to the rumour that Cornell’s “commencement speaker”:http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March04/Cornell.Clinton.2004.lgk.html asked for the chance to speak at Cornell when he heard I was moving there. Well, not much truth to it at least.

There’s no truth at all to the rumour that Cornell’s “commencement speaker”:http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March04/Cornell.Clinton.2004.lgk.html asked for the chance to speak at Cornell when he heard I was moving there. Well, not much truth to it at least.

Geoff Pullum is a syntax nerd, but don’t let that stop you reading “his latest post”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000580.html!

But just to illustrate that even nerds can make mistakes, he’s wrong when he says that “macaques have knowledge how but not propositional knowledge”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000525.html. This is not to say that Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, the target of Geoff’s attack, is right. It’s pretty clear that the macaques in question have never said anything with propositional content. But since, as Jason Stanley and Tim Williamson argued (“Knowing How”, __Journal of Philosophy__, **98**, 2001: 411-44) all knowledge-how is propositional knowledge, it is impossible that the macaques could know how to get food without having propositional knowledge.

Stanley and Williamson argue that we can directly construct a proposition that a creature who knows how to blah knows: __thus is a way to blah__, where __thus__ picks out demonstratively the method they use to blah. I won’t repeat Stanley and Williamson’s argument here, instead I’ll run a secondary argument that can bolster their conclusion. (UPDATE: Actually, this is one of the arguments they run as well. Oops. Think of this whole post as being expository rather than setting out something that might be construed as, er, new.)

‘Knows’ is not ambiguous between (on the one hand) a relation that holds between a knower and a proposition and (on the other) a relation that holds between a knower and a type of action. If it were, (1) would be problematic, when actually it is fine.

bq. (1)   Alex knows which places sell beer this time of night and how to get to the nearest one.

‘Knows’ is ambiguous between the relation denoted in (1) and a relation that holds between two people as in (2).

bq. (2)   Alex knows Shea.

We can argue for that by noting that (3) is odd, in a way that (1) isn’t.

bq. (3)   ??Alex knows which places sell beer this time of night and Shea, who runs a couple of them.

So the standard test for whether a term is ambiguous seems to work here – it correctly returns the verdict that ‘knows’ is at least two-ways ambiguous – and it says that it isn’t ambiguous between a ‘knowing-how’ reading and a ‘knowing-that’ reading.

(I know that some languages have different words for these two meanings. That’s no proof that English ‘knows’ is ambiguous. After all, most European languages have different words for female cousin and male cousin, but that’s no proof that English __cousin__ is ambiguous between female cousin and male cousin. The ambiguity test seems to show fairly definitively the English word is not ambiguous.)

From the fact that the English word is unambiguous, we can get the conclusion that knowledge how is propositional knowledge in a couple of ways.

First, we can try a sledgehammer approach. ‘Propositional knowledge’ is a term of art. It’s not like we have these independently defined things, propositions, and we can then ask whether a macaque or whatever knows one of them. Propositional knowledge is just the relation that a creature stands in to something when a sentence “x knows y” is true, x refers to that creature, and ‘knows’ means what it means in paradigm instances of propositional knowledge claims. So saying “That macaque knows how to get food” just is to say that the macaque has a piece of propositional knowledge.

If you don’t like being that blunt, we can try more subtle methods. The best explanation for the fact that there’s no ambiguity in English at this point is that there’s no difference in meaning for English to latch onto. Since many competent speakers think there’s an ambiguity, the best explanation of that is that there’s only one relation here for the word(s) to latch onto. So we again conclude that propositional knowledge also encompasses knowledge-how.

So I think Geoff is wrong to say macaques don’t have propositional knowledge, though he’s right to say they don’t express that knowledge.

To conclude on a more conciliator note, Geoff is entirely correct about which things “should be taught in high school but aren’t”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000548.html.

Geoff Pullum is a syntax nerd, but don’t let that stop you reading “his latest post”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000580.html!

But just to illustrate that even nerds can make mistakes, he’s wrong when he says that “macaques have knowledge how but not propositional knowledge”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000525.html. This is not to say that Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, the target of Geoff’s attack, is right. It’s pretty clear that the macaques in question have never said anything with propositional content. But since, as Jason Stanley and Tim Williamson argued (“Knowing How”, __Journal of Philosophy__, **98**, 2001: 411-44) all knowledge-how is propositional knowledge, it is impossible that the macaques could know how to get food without having propositional knowledge.

Stanley and Williamson argue that we can directly construct a proposition that a creature who knows how to blah knows: __thus is a way to blah__, where __thus__ picks out demonstratively the method they use to blah. I won’t repeat Stanley and Williamson’s argument here, instead I’ll run a secondary argument that can bolster their conclusion. (UPDATE: Actually, this is one of the arguments they run as well. Oops. Think of this whole post as being expository rather than setting out something that might be construed as, er, new.)

‘Knows’ is not ambiguous between (on the one hand) a relation that holds between a knower and a proposition and (on the other) a relation that holds between a knower and a type of action. If it were, (1) would be problematic, when actually it is fine.

bq. (1)   Alex knows which places sell beer this time of night and how to get to the nearest one.

‘Knows’ is ambiguous between the relation denoted in (1) and a relation that holds between two people as in (2).

bq. (2)   Alex knows Shea.

We can argue for that by noting that (3) is odd, in a way that (1) isn’t.

bq. (3)   ??Alex knows which places sell beer this time of night and Shea, who runs a couple of them.

So the standard test for whether a term is ambiguous seems to work here – it correctly returns the verdict that ‘knows’ is at least two-ways ambiguous – and it says that it isn’t ambiguous between a ‘knowing-how’ reading and a ‘knowing-that’ reading.

(I know that some languages have different words for these two meanings. That’s no proof that English ‘knows’ is ambiguous. After all, most European languages have different words for female cousin and male cousin, but that’s no proof that English __cousin__ is ambiguous between female cousin and male cousin. The ambiguity test seems to show fairly definitively the English word is not ambiguous.)

From the fact that the English word is unambiguous, we can get the conclusion that knowledge how is propositional knowledge in a couple of ways.

First, we can try a sledgehammer approach. ‘Propositional knowledge’ is a term of art. It’s not like we have these independently defined things, propositions, and we can then ask whether a macaque or whatever knows one of them. Propositional knowledge is just the relation that a creature stands in to something when a sentence “x knows y” is true, x refers to that creature, and ‘knows’ means what it means in paradigm instances of propositional knowledge claims. So saying “That macaque knows how to get food” just is to say that the macaque has a piece of propositional knowledge.

If you don’t like being that blunt, we can try more subtle methods. The best explanation for the fact that there’s no ambiguity in English at this point is that there’s no difference in meaning for English to latch onto. Since many competent speakers think there’s an ambiguity, the best explanation of that is that there’s only one relation here for the word(s) to latch onto. So we again conclude that propositional knowledge also encompasses knowledge-how.

So I think Geoff is wrong to say macaques don’t have propositional knowledge, though he’s right to say they don’t express that knowledge.

To conclude on a more conciliator note, Geoff is entirely correct about which things “should be taught in high school but aren’t”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000548.html.

Saturday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online with new papers by Josefa Toriba (on perceptual experience), Harvey Brown and David Wallace (on the measurement problem) and Andrew Holster (on quantum measurement theory).

Soon I have to work out what’s happening with the papers blog over summer while I’m flitting around the world like a homeless philosopher. Ideally someone will set up something like the “PhilSci Archive”:http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ in the next three months, but on the off-chance that doesn’t happen I need to think of a plan.

The NY Times reports that my department just acquired a new fictional graduate.

bq. “Orders Come From a Talking Lion (Made of Wax)”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/arts/television/X12HEFF.html?ex=1394514000&en=0d7f1ed9316e4d01&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

bq. Jaye [the main character in __Wonderfalls__] lives in a tricked-out trailer, which makes her seem resourceful; she also has a degree in philosophy from Brown. And in the second episode we learn that she can write.

I would like to think that when we learn she has a degree in philosophy from Brown, we thereby learn she can write, but I’m not sufficiently down with the requisite fictional conventions to tell for sure. I do think it’s cute that saying a character is a Brown grad is a way of placing them in American fiction. I don’t know how exactly many other schools have fictional stereotypes associated with them, though obviously there are a few.

“Here”:http://www.etherfarm.com/etherblog/archives/20040224225238.html. It seems the Midwest does extend all the way to Montana!

Greg Restall has returned “his blog”:http://consequently.org/ to life. “Matt”:http://emanations.braininavat.net/archives/000042.html is right that this makes me happy!

And Greg reports (or at least hints) that one of his students is working on “non-standard probability theory”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/11/teaching_teaching_teaching. That’s what I started out in, so I have high hopes for whatever project it is!

I like the time before conferences when people start posting their conference papers on the web. This is nice for people who can’t get to the conference, and for people who can’t get to every session at the conference.

Today’s submission is from “Michael McKinsey”:http://www.cla.wayne.edu/Philosophy/McKinseyPublications.html, who has posted his “comments on __Beyond Rigidity__”:http://www.cla.wayne.edu/Philosophy/Remarks-Soames.rtf, for the Scott Soames book party. There’s lots of interesting stuff there, and I recommend reading it, but I wanted to quibble with a couple of points.

First, something McKinsey says about sarcasm.

bq. Here it is plausible to say that the speaker has not asserted the proposition literally expressed – that Sam is a fine friend. Rather, as Soames says, the speaker asserts “something like the negation of that proposition” (p. 58). But notice that typically the speaker would utter the sentence in a special sarcastic tone of voice (‘Sam is a __fine friend__’) which by convention is reserved for the expression of irony. In the absence of this convention, it is not at all clear that ironic assertion would occur. It may even be that the speaker’s tone of voice functions to conventionally transform the sentence uttered into its negation, so that the spoken utterance literally expresses the proposition that Sam is not a fine friend.

So McKinsey’s view is that sarcasm needs a special tone of voice, and the semantic content of this tone is negation. That’s so obviously correct I don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of it earlier. It would explain why some people “don’t pick up on written sarcasm”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001494.html I guess.

He also denies that “Trenton, New Jersey” is a name, claiming that (20) is just a convention way of saying (21).

(20)   Trenton, New Jersey is a small city,
(21)   Trenton, which is located in New Jersey, is a small city.

But that isn’t quite right, because (20a) is bad although (21a) is good.

(20a)   *Ithaca, upstate New York, is a small city.
(21a)   Ithaca, which is located in upstate New York, is a small city.

So maybe the comma elides ‘which is located __in the state of__’. But that isn’t right either, because of the way international locations are given. (20b) is fine in American English, even though (21b) is wrong.

(20b)   Melbourne, Australia is the site of the first tennis grand slam of the year.
(21b)   #Melbourne, which is located in the state of Australia, is the site of the first tennis grand slam of the year.

Melbourne of course is in the state of __Victoria__, which is part of the federation of states Australia. Maybe (20b) is fine just due to ignorance on the part of the speakers. But maybe not. If the convention that gives us phrases like “Trenton, New Jersey” does not create descriptive names, as Scott Soames says it does, it’s hard to state exactly what it does do.

One final hard case. Imagine Killington, Vermont gets to “secede and join New Hampshire”:http://www.onthesnow.com/news/030604.html as it is trying to do. The proper way to refer to it, as the townsfolk already are, will be “Killington, New Hampshire”. But will Killington really be __located__ in New Hampshire? I think not, though it’s hard to say. I’d say it is located in Vermont, but part of New Hampshire for political purposes. But I could be misusing __located__ here. In any case, I think these locutions are harder than McKinsey allows.

Sorry for the snafu with the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ yesterday. I really don’t know what went wrong with it. There’s a double issue up today to make up for it.

If you haven’t yet done so, you should read Bob Stalnaker’s comment on the “game theory post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002563.html from a couple of weeks ago. (Scroll down to see the comment; I don’t have permalinks for comments enabled yet.)

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the “break-up lines”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002593.html thread. Keep the lines coming in! I think we could be cornering the market on corny-geeky jokes. I just wish I could come up with some to add to the hilarity. My reputation for wit is vanishing as I write.

By the way, thanks largely to the jokes, yesterday was the highest traffic day in this’s blog history, and the break-up lines post is the most read single post since I’ve been keeping track of those things. Previously it was my APA schedule, but I really don’t understand why that was so popular. Shouldn’t people here pay more attention to, say, “my conference paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002577.html than to who I care to name drop in “my conference schedule”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002581.html?

Yesterday was also, naturally, the biggest traffic day on the papers blog, just in time for a system malfunction.

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000925.html follows up the comment about USC yesterday by listing all the leading philosophy of language departments in the country in order of quality. Despite the fact that Rutgers gets more people mentioned as specialists than anywhere else, I think the list could have been even longer. Both of them are primarily philosophers of mind, but I think both Jerry Fodor (compositionality) and Brian McLaughlin (vagueness) have made important contributions to philosophy of language in recent years and could easily be mentioned in this context.

I fully agree with Jason’s comment in “the thread below”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002591.html that there are a lot of linguists at Rutgers who do work that should be interesting to students interested in philosophy of language. I also agree with Ken Taylor’s comment in that thread that it’s really foolish for philosophers to try ranking linguistics departments. But the strength of departments other than philosophy could matter to how good your grad school experience is. So if you are a potential grad student planning on working in an area that potentially has interdisciplinary collaborations (and these practically all areas of philosophy outside perhaps analytic metaphysics have interdisciplinary links) you should investigate the quality of the departments other than philosophy at potential schools, as well as the existence of connections between those departments and philosophy.

I was feeling a little guilty today at pimping for Cornell on Brown’s website, so let me make up for that by plugging Brown a little. One of the reasons that I started thinking about the importance of other departments to a grad school is because of the benefits Brown philosophy gets from its interactions with other departments.

For instance, Brown is ranked as ‘Also Notable’ in “political philosophy”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown.htm#05, largely on the strength of Dave Estlund’s work. And that seems right as an evaluation of Brown’s philosophy department. Dave’s work is very good, but you can only rank a department so high on the strength of one person. (That’s a slight exaggeration since Jamie and Nomy and others do work that’s relevant to political philosophy, but only a slight one.) But when you consider also that Brown’s “political science”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Science/ department is very strong in political theory (especially because “John Tomasi”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Science/faculty/tomasi.htm is there) the combined offerings start to look like quite a strong political theory/philosophy program. (And in this case it’s not just an ‘in principle’ strong combined program, it’s a case where the two departments are actively engaged. There are active reading groups with philosophy and political theory students and faculty for instance.) Brown also benefits from our interactions with classics and our interaction with cognitive and linguistic sciences. I have more first-hand knowledge of the latter (the only reading group I’m in right now is over in linguistics) but I think all these connections are valuable to the program.

I don’t think you should ever choose a grad school because the departments other than philosophy are good. The strength of the philosophy program should always be the most important factor. But I think the benefits you get from having people around the university doing philosophically interesting work are not entirely trivial, and it should be __a__ factor in choosing a grad school.