Some genius called Keith Burgess-Jackson, who frequently complains about the lack of civility in public discourse, has “called me an illiterate idiot”:http://analphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_analphilosopher_archive.html#108293340865578311 for saying that his blog doesn’t contain much good philosophy.

I can’t even think of a funny joke about the illiteracy (am I the infiniteth monkey?) but I will admit that I’ve done one or two things that show less than optimal intelligence. (Probably even some that stretch to idiocy, but I wouldn’t say them here, would I?)

It probably isn’t smart to have as much of my emotional well-being tied up in the fates of the Boston Red Sox. It’s working well for now, if spending time every day with stress levels of a fighter pilot could count as working well. And a utility maximiser wouldn’t have had quite as many PBR’s at the Paradise over the weekend as I did. And it was wrong, or at least misleading, to say there isn’t much good philosophy on Burgess-Jackson’s blog. There isn’t, as far as I can see, any.[1]

Speaking of the Paradise, Saturday night there was great.

In the front room they had various bands playing Smiths covers of varying quality. Much fun. I was reminded that one day I have to write a vagueness paper called “Some Sentences are Truer than Others”. That’s not just because it would be a funny allusion – I’m pretty sure that that Smiths song was partially causally responsible for my thinking about ‘truer’ in the first place, so it would be just a kind of acknowledgement.

In the main room Mason Jennings was playing, and it was a great show. I was worried how an acoustic act would carry in that venue, but he (wisely I think) had a bassist and drummer accompanying him, which helped a lot. Either he responded really well to our called out requests, or we were channelling the playlist. I guess the latter, but who knows? The crowd loved all the songs from his first album, and was relatively lukewarm about the later stuff. If I was in his position, I’d be a little bit annoyed by that. I certainly wouldn’t want to go around delivering a paper I did years and years ago everywhere because that’s what the crowd wanted. It’s times like this you’d wish you’d been the one to write “I like your old stuff better than your new stuff”:http://www.lyricsdepot.com/regurgitator/i-like-your-old-stuff-better-than-your-new-stuff.html. Alternatively, he could just try writing an album as good as his first album, but I suspect that may be beyond him, just like it is certainly beyond most of us.

fn1. My methodology here possibly leaves a little to be decided. Wading through Burgess-Jackson’s tripe for more than a few days worth was beyond even my celebrated powers of tolerance.[2] So the conclusion in the text is an inductive inference based on a small sample. Still, we rely on such samples to conclude that I’m probably not going to get many votes at the next Presidential election, so it’s not like sampling can never lead to reasonable conclusions. But like a stopped calendar, maybe he’s right once a year, and I’m not going to be the one to check this rigorously.

fn2. And yeah, I know it’s been a while since _I_ posted anything really substantive here. Thank God for the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ or people couldn’t even be indirectly linked to philosophical work here.

No papers blog today because there is nothing to report. So I get to talk about sports instead.

I didn’t recognise it at the time, but yesterday three of my favourite teams were playing big rivalry games, in every case on the road. The Red Sox were in New York, Liverpool in Manchester, and the ACT Brumbies in Sydney. And between them they got 2 wins, which was fairly good all things considered. Of course, all this sporting activity wasn’t excellent for my productivity yesterday, so I better work a little harder today to clear out the to-be-done list.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted for the day with two new sites being the news. The sites belong to “David Braddon-Mitchell”:http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/weslake/phil2213/ and “Brad Weslake”:http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/weslake/. (DBM’s site is the course site for a seminar he’s running, but it includes some forthcoming papers of his so it goes onto the list.)

The other day Allan Hazlett argued that “truth in basketball statistics is radically response-dependent”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/useandmisuse/2004_04_01_useandmisuse_archive.html#108258544370762884. I assume his argument is meant to carry across to baseball as well. Allan’s point is that although we may dispute whether the officials got a call right at the time, eventually no one will dispute the call. So Allan concludes that the truth of basketball stats claims depends on what the referees do. But that doesn’t follow from the data. All that follows is that eventually the referees’ calls will cease being disputed.

Here’s a nice case of that. In the 8th inning of tonight’s Red Sox-Yankees game, Jason Varitek hit a bloop into shallow right. Enrique Wilson, the second baseman, and Gary Sheffield, the right fielder, ran towards it. Eventually Sheffield called Wilson off and Wilson peeled away, leaving Sheffield with a clean play on the ball, and a perfect view of the ball bouncing off his left wrist onto the turf. Since Wilson makes the minimum and Sheffield over $12 million, naturally an error was charged to Wilson.

Now Allan may argue that in ten years no one will dispute that it was an error on Wilson, and that may be true. But that just means that everyone will be wrong. In ten years it will be an error on Sheffield, just like it was at the time.

By the way, apparently the official scorer’s explanation is that it’s an error on Wilson because he “caused the error” by running out for the ball and affecting Sheffield’s concentration or something. Of course the pitcher also caused the error by not throwing the ball past Varitek’s bat, so I think this one should really have been E-1. Jerry Remy suggested that Wilson might have caused the error by yelling out “Drop it! Drop it!” as the play developed. That seems like the most charitable explanation of the scorer’s decision.

Footnote: It isn’t clear that fouls are like errors in this respect. I think in the disputes Allan talks about ‘foul’ is ambiguous. In one sense a foul is just whatever is called by the refs. In another sense, it’s the kind of thing that can be disputed after the call is made. In the second sense, it’s a normative claim and the referees don’t get to determine what is and isn’t a foul. I think this is a simpler explanation of what’s going on in the basketball case than what Allan suggests.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ post for the day is up, with “Greg Restall’s”:http://consequently.org/writing/ paper on “the knowability thesis”:http://consequently.org/papers/notevery.pdf being the most interesting news to me. There are lots of other papers too though to check out.

A small announcement. The talk by Alison Simmons that was scheduled to be held at Brown on Monday has been cancelled and will be rescheduled in the next academic year.

I saw “The Waifs”:http://www.thewaifs.com/ play in Boston last night, which was a wonderful show. If you get a chance to see them I highly recommend it. The tour dates are “here”:http://www.thewaifs.com/tourdates.htm, with the next show being tonight in New York. And now that I check that schedule, it seems they are playing in San Francisco when I’ll next be in San Francisco.

I can’t tell just what category this site fits into – preprint archive, refereed electronic publication, departmental paper site? It has elements of all of these. But it looks to have lots of interesting content.

bq. “CLE e-prints: Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science”:http://www.cle.unicamp.br/e-prints/

It’s based out of the State University of Campinas, in Campinas, São Paulo, and looks like another entry for the papers blog.

I can’t tell just what category this site fits into – preprint archive, refereed electronic publication, departmental paper site? It has elements of all of these. But it looks to have lots of interesting content.

bq. “CLE e-prints: Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science”:http://www.cle.unicamp.br/e-prints/

It’s based out of the State University of Campinas, in Campinas, São Paulo, and looks like another entry for the papers blog.

I went to an excellent paper by “Yael Sharvit”:http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~sharvit/ on free indirect discourse and _de re_ pronouns. I hadn’t seen any theoretical work on free indirect discourse before, so I spent most of the talk being flooded with lots of new information.

Sharvit argues that third person pronouns in free indirect discourse are not _de re_, which would be a really stunning result if it is true. It would really shake up a lot of the attitudes towards pronouns that have been orthodoxy ever since Kaplan’s early work. She also argues that theorising about free indirect discourse provides an argument for the existence of _de se_ pronouns in natural language.

I’d need to spend a lot of time to really evaluate the main argument, so I don’t want to endorse any of the conclusions in public yet. But I was really impressed by how sensitive the argument was to very delicate points of data. Philosophers are so often careless about the details of what they are doing when they discuss language. (I don’t mean all philosophers here, but I do mean to include me in the clumsy group.) The most obvious example is when a philosopher purports to be discussing the construction _If p then q_ and then never provides an example sentence containing the word _then_. There’s frequently an assumption that various constructions are to be treated alike, so it doesn’t matter if all of the data are drawn from one particular class within that construction. As I said, I do this too, so I’m throwing stones in glass houses here. But I’m always impressed when these assumptions get questioned, and especially when that questioning leads to results.

I could provide several examples of just this kind of questioning attitude from Sharvit’s paper, but unfortunately the paper isn’t online, so I can’t link to it, and I’d feel a little bad repeating some of the main examples before the paper goes into circulation. So I’ll just say a little bit about the background, and why we should be interested in free indirect discourse (FID). Compare first (1) and (2).

(1) John thought that the Red Sox should have won last year.
(2) The Red Sox should have won last year(, thought John).

FID is the second kind of report. The parenthetical addition is because it’s optional whether we need to say just who is doing the thinking, or even that it’s thinking, rather than say saying, that’s going on. It’s much easier in FID to leave this up to context than it is in regular indirect discourse. We see the first signs of a distinction in the way tenses are treated.

(3) John thought that it was time for a party.
(4) It’s time for a party, thought John.

Although we have to use ‘was’ in (3), we can use a present tense verb in (4). Indeed, it is better to use a present tense marker in (4). The same kind of thing applies to temporal pronouns. Assume that at 2 John thinks “I’ll will be there by three,” and the speaker is at the location denoted by John’s ‘there’.

(5) John thought that he/*I would be here/*there by now/three.
(6) He/#I will be there/*here by *now/three(, thought John).

In FID, ‘now’ is governed by the context of the thinker. Similarly the appropriate place pronoun is determined by the relation of the thinker to the place, not the speaker. But first-person pronouns seem to be different. ‘He’ is perfectly acceptable in (6), and ‘I’ is at least a little troubling. It’s not awful, I think, but ‘He’ is probably better. Still, the behaviour of ‘now’ is very strange, since we’re used to thinking that it just picks out the time of utterance in indirect reports.

There’s many many more examples where those came from, but as I said I’m a bit nervous of stealing Sharvit’s thunder. Hopefully her paper will appear shortly, and I can talk about the examples in greater detail, because the conclusions seem to be philosophically important.

There doesn’t seem to be a fancy website for it, or indeed any website at all, but the Berkeley Stanford Davis grad conference is being held at UC Berkeley this Saturday. The keynote address will be by Alva No{e”}, and a program is available “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/bsd.pdf.

I’ve never seen a grad conference with four simultaneous sessions before. Then again, I’d never seen a single topic conference, like the INPC scepticism conference, with four simultaneous sessions before either. Maybe it’s a west coast thing.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted with a paper on Aristotle by Rich Cameron being the main news.