The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted with five new entries on topics ranging from G{o”}del to German Idealism.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted for the day. I don’t know why it didn’t get done yesterday. I think I thought it had been completed when really it, er, hadn’t. So there’s plenty to chew on today.

While on the topic of books available online, Jordan Howard Sobel’s massive “Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God”:http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~sobel/Logic_Theism/ should be mentioned, though it’s a little too big for me to read through.

“Stephen Mumford”:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/Mumford/MumfordPage.htm has posted an “abstract”:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/Mumford/allegianceandidentity.htm of a paper forthcoming in the _Journal of the Philosophy of Sport_ but he hasn’t posted the full paper so I can’t tell you what’s wrong with it. It is on one of my favourite topics – identity conditions for sporting teams over time. Or, as I call it these days, the Cleveland Browns problem. One might think the Cleveland Browns problem is the lack of a good quarterback, or running back, or receiver, or any other kind of player really, but those aren’t philosophical problems. Although, what with the trends these days, “maybe they are”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/20/1082395861338.html.

“Brian Leiter reports”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001136.html that Rae Langton and Richard Holton are moving from Edinburgh to MIT. Bad news for Edinburgh, but great news for this side of the pond.
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Three reflections on Keith DeRose’s “latest contextualism paper”:http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/OLB.pdf.
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David Velleman made a good suggestion for a blogpost a week ago, and I’m only now getting around to posting it. This is partially an indication of how far behind I am on my email, and partially an indication of how inefficient I get when baseball season starts. With apologies for tardiness then…

The hackneyed story about technology is that the young are always faster to pick it up than us old folk. So you’d expect in an academic department the graduate students would be the ones leading the way, and the professoriate would be constantly learning tricks from them. And while that’s true sometimes (I had to recruit Paul Neufeld of “ephilosopher”:http://www.ephilosopher.com/ fame to get started on Movable Type) it certainly doesn’t seem to be the general run of things. And certainly there’s lots of things about grad students could learn about technology from computer specialists. This suggests a professional question. How much technical knowledge/ability should we _require_ our graduate students to have.

Here’s some suggestions for skills graduate students should have. (All it turns out from David. I tried to add more of my own, and realised they weren’t anywhere near as interesting.)

* How to use Powerpoint in lectures
* How to manage a large course website, including interactive features
* How to setup maintain a large database for administrative tasks

And by ‘skills’ here I don’t mean the basic ability to do these things without looking really stupid, but the ability to efficiently integrate them into your daily routine when they are needed. Future faculty who can do these things will be better academics. At the very least they will be better teachers and better at running things like job searches and graduate admissions, and of course they can do much more than that. If the academic job search market were efficient, these skills would be rewarded. Even in the real world, departments would be doing the profession a service by turning out colleagues-to-be with these technical skills.

On one of these points I think there is a clear economic benefit to the students from acquiring technical skills. I think a well-maintained webpage, with your best work prominently displayed, is very helpful in a job search. And a fully functioning course site looks very impressive to those looking to evaluate your teaching ability. This isn’t going to override the crucial things like being able to write and teach well, but it certainly helps distribute the evidence that you can write and teach well. I think all grad students, should have web pages and departments should do what they can to provide these pages for just this reason.

I wonder which of these skills (or similar skills) will be viewed as being as basic as typing in a decade or two? I don’t know how long ago it was that one wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the new academic you hired couldn’t type. But whichever skills they are, I’m sure that soon some skills that we now view as esoteric will be basically expected of new hires.

David points out that philosophers have a particular reason to be interested in these questions. Some of us write about artificial intelligence, and many others cover it in their teaching. And a good working knowledge of what computers can and can do, preferably gained ‘first-hand’ while hacking around with some code, will be helpful to either role. Many philosophy departments dropped their language requirements over the last decade or so – maybe it’s time to reinstate something similar.

Some fun puzzles to think about.

_The Restaurant_
A group of us is trying to get to the restaurant. I know how to get from here to the bar, and Andy knows the way from the bar to the restaurant. And we’re both helpful sorts when it comes to information about directions. Do we, i.e. the group including me and Andy and a few others, know the way to the restaurant?

What if either Andy’s belief or mine is Gettierised – i.e. justified and true but acquired in a wacky way? (‘Wacky’ there is a technical term.)

_The Bodies_
Andy knows where all the French bodies are buried, and I know where all the German bodies are buried. It turns out, but neither of us know this, that all the bodies are French or German. Do we know where all the bodies are buried?[*]

What if someone joins our group who does know that all the bodies are French or German, but doesn’t know where any of them are? Does the group then know where all the bodies are buried? It might be surprising that we come to know where all the bodies are buried by being joined by a person who doesn’t know where any of the bodies are buried, but that seems to be the case.

_The Ignorant_
Go back to the restaurant case, and assume we made it to the bar. The group now expands to include George. And George insists at great length that the restaurant is north of the bar, even though Andy is insistent that it is south of the bar. Some of the group believes Andy, though a few are made hesitant. Does the group know where the restaurant is?

_The Unhelpful_
Much as we’d like to go to the restaurant, where we really want to go is the money-tree – the place where they give you money for simply walking in the door. George knows where the money-tree is, but he won’t tell this to any of us? Does the group know where the money-tree is?

Back in the real world, Andy and I were thinking about such cases, because we thought about writing about what it takes for a group to know something. Of course we probably have the kind of intuitions you only get from only ever talking about knowledge late night at philosophy conferences, and we don’t know that much about the existing literature. (We each know the literature backwards, but since we won’t talk about any of it _we_ don’t know what it says. Well, not really, but we’re interested in whether that is possible.) But we plan to have fun making it all up as we go along.

[*] There’s an ambiguity here that I should clear up. X knows where all the bodies are buried is ambiguous between the following two meanings.

1. For each body, X knows where it is buried.
2. X knows the universal proposition _All the bodies are buried here, here, … and here_.

I always mean 2 in what’s above. Here’s a useful heuristic for knowing that it’s 2 that’s being used. Say I’m worried about Andy finding the bodies. I’ve secured all the sites where I know bodies are buried. It turns out that’s all the sites, because I meet condition 1 here. But I’m still worried about Andy finding some buried bodies. Why? Because I don’t know where all the bodies are buried. I think that’s a good explanation, but it relies on the _second_ reading of _knows where all the bodies are buried_.

“Jonathan Sutton”:http://faculty.smu.edu/jsutton/ has posted a manuscript of his book defending the claim that knowledge is justified true belief.

bq. “Without Justification”:http://faculty.smu.edu/jsutton/wholebook.pdf

If you as much as glance at the book you’ll see that while my little summary of the view is true, it’s about as cooperative as saying that Rhode Island isn’t the largest state. But no one reading this blog would take my word over the original source … I hope!

I hadn’t put all these facts together before, but SMU must be a pretty good place for talking about epistemology between Sutton and Mark Heller and Robert Howell.

Just to keep up my little campaign of promoting online books going, let me remind you of the other books I’ve plugged here before.

bq. Alva Noë, “Action in Perception”:http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/action.html
Mark Kalderon, “Moral Fictionalsm”:http://www.kalderon.demon.co.uk/research.htm (scroll down for the chapters)

And if you want other book length bits of philosophy, you could always read some of the online dissertations. Here’s a couple of the more talked about dissertations of recent years that happen to both be available online.

bq. Carolina Sartorio, “The Causal and the Moral”:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sartorio/final.pdf
Cian Dorr, “The Simplicity of Everything”:http://www.pitt.edu/~csd6/SimplicityOfEverything.pdf

This won’t be at all original, but it’s an interesting issue. And topical now, since it came up over at the “Fake Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/002792.html blog. Often, if not always, the explanation of the truth of one proposition is the truth of another proposition. We’re going to focus on those kinds of explanations here. The first question is

bq. If both p and q explain r, and p entails q, which of p and q is the better explanation? If the answer is “It depends”, say what it depends on and why.

David Lewis, in his paper on explanation in “Philosophical Papers volume 2”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195036468/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 suggests that it’s p. The aim of explanations is to give information about causal history, and p is more informative.

Many others have suggested the answer is q. Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit say this in their original paper on Program Explanations, but there’s plenty of people who agree. (For instance Michael Smith in the paper Jonathan cites, though Jonathan is critical on just this point.) Here’s an example from Putnam that many find persuasive.

bq. _Peg and Hole_
I’m trying to fit a square peg of diameter 5 into a round hole of diameter 4. I fail. (That’s proposition r.) Let p be the complete microphysical description of the setup and my attempt, with conjuncts referring to where the peg hit the edges of the hole and was repelled and so on. Let q be the proposition that I’m trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I take it that p entails q.

bq. Each of p and q explains r, but q is a better explanation. For one thing it is more illuminating. For another, and this is the point Jackson and Pettit stress, it correctly indicates that the failure is modally resilient in a certain direction. A slightly different attempt, with a slightly different microphysical description p’, would also have failed as long as it was an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Let’s run with that, and say that our answer to the the original question is q. (Or maybe “it depends” with the answer being q as long as the explanation holds across all nearby q-worlds.) Now the puzzle. Disjunctive explanations are bad. None of the following would be a good explanation.

q₁: I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole or I was prevented by a God from doing what I was trying to do.
q₂: I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole or I was trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.

I think q is clearly a better explanation that q₁ or q₂. Why should this be? It is certainly less more illuminating, but that’s just restating the puzzle as much as answering it. The fact that I fail is resilient across all nearby q₁ and q₂ worlds, so resilience can’t be the issue. I know of three answers, though I’m not satisfied with any of them. (Thanks to Jonathan Ichikawa for the small correction in this paragraph.)

“Michael Strevens suggests”:http://www.stanford.edu/~strevens/research/expln/expln101/index.html the answer is that weaker explanations are better than stronger explanations only if they are “cohesive”. The explanation is cohesive only if the same kinds of causal processes lead to r all (nearby) worlds in which the explanans is true. (I’m summarising a lot here – read his paper for more details.) I think cohesion is neither necessary nor sufficient for a weaker explanation to be preferable to a stronger explanation.

The counterexample to sufficiency is q₂. The same kinds of processes matter in all the worlds where q₂ is true, but that doesn’t make q₂ a better explanation than q.

Some counterexamples to necessity are generated by explanations that involve AIDS. I’ll simplify a lot here to make the case easiest. Let’s say the way AIDS works is that it kills off many different parts of the body’s defence mechanisms, so any kind of disease could be deadly. (That’s not really true of actual AIDS, I think.) So there’s very little in common in the causal processes that lead to death in nearby worlds where an AIDS patient dies. There’s a similarity at the start where they acquire the AIDS virus, but that’s it. Still, that the patient had AIDS is often a better explanation of their death than the very detailed account of just how they died, i.e. of which routine illness they weren’t able to fight off.

A second answer is that disjunctive propositions like that are simply not suitable to be explanations. I think that’s the position implicit in Woodward and Hitchcock’s paper in _No{u^}s_ last year, and I think it’s basically on the right track. But we need a substantive theory of why this is true, and such a theory will need some heavy-duty metaphysics, and I’m not really sure how such a theory will be built. (Or defended.)

Is there a third answer, or a way of filling out the second answer so it resolves this problem? I don’t know – that’s why it’s a puzzle!

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ for today is up, with many many new papers, and (thanks to Dave Chalmers) four new sites to look at.

It won’t make much difference on the surface, but I stole a trick from “King of Fools”:http://king-of-fools.com/archives/000301.php (via “Matt Weiner”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/) to turn the list of pages tracked at the side into a giant blog. This should make it easier to keep it up to date in the future. I’ve used the same trick for the reading and listening lists in the sidebar here, so they might get updated more frequenly too now.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ for today is up, with many many new papers, and (thanks to Dave Chalmers) four new sites to look at.

It won’t make much difference on the surface, but I stole a trick from “King of Fools”:http://king-of-fools.com/archives/000301.php (via “Matt Weiner”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/) to turn the list of pages tracked at the side into a giant blog. This should make it easier to keep it up to date in the future. I’ve used the same trick for the reading and listening lists in the sidebar here, so they might get updated more frequenly too now.