I just wrote up a much more chatty version of my scepticism paper, with an idea to deliver it rather than the more careful version I gave at Cornell at the Inland Northwest Conference in a couple of weeks. Here it is in glorious Microsoft Word PDF format.
bq. “Scepticism, Rationalism and Externalism”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/sre8.pdf
The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002825.html is posted with new papers by Hannah Ginsborg and Pekka Väyrynen.
The journal survey is in the book. I’ve put the bulk of the data on the original survey page, but here’s some of the headline data. There were 175 votes – 181 submissions but 6 of these were ‘fill-ins’, people submitting votes for journals I added late or that they missed. Here’s the demographic data on the survey partipants.
Top 10 by average
Note that 2 through 4 are basically tied – they differ by 0.01 points.
Top 10 by average (minimum 88 votes)
Most votes
The demographic data probably give us a good guide to who’s reading this page, and are also important for interpreting the data.
UPDATE: I’ve posted the raw vote data for anyone who wants to do their own analysis. Note that each column is a vote. For some reason the table looks much better in IE than in Firebird, because of the odd way Firebird treats empty table cells.
The “papers blog for today”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002803.html is posted with papers on quantum approaches to consciousness, Desargues’ Theorem and, most interestingly, “argument contained ellipsis”:http://www.ling.northwestern.edu/~kennedy/Docs/ace-revisited1.4.pdf.
“Polly Jacobson”:http://www.cog.brown.edu/People/jacobson/ has been doing some interesting work on this phenomenon, and I half-expected her talk at NYU this afternoon might on this topic, which would be been a happy coincidence. But it’s on “Direct Compositionality and Principle B Effects”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/events/colloquium/2004-spring/abstract/jacobson.html, which is also very interesting stuff. I don’t know how common it is for philosophers to turn up to linguistics talks at NYU, but I think this talk should be well worthwhile for anyone working on questions in the more formal parts of philosophy of language.
If I’ve recovered emotionally from tonight’s game, I’ll write up the results of the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm tomorrow night. So if you want to have your vote counted, this is your last chance.
On a completely different topic, I was inspired by the “fake country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/ bloggers to put a counter on the comments screen, and I was interested to see how many hits it gets. Just in 12 hours we had 150 page views of comments threads here. And in that time roughly 3 comments were posted. That’s not a good reader/writer ratio.
A lot of people use fake, or altered, email addresses on comments threads, presumably because they want to avoid being flooded with spam. But it turns out that these are actually not that vulnerable.
Ever since Crooked Timber started I’ve been using my crookedtimber email address as my email address on all comments boards. And as far as I can tell I’ve never got a single piece of spam sent to that address. So just using a real address does not mean you’ll automatically get spammed.
To be sure, I also always leave a website address, usually “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org, so the email address doesn’t show up on default settings. And maybe if I didn’t do that I’d be getting spam because of it. So all I can say with any confidence is that leaving real email addresses on MT comments boards, plus leaving a web address, doesn’t seem to lead to spam.
I don’t know how long this will last, but check out what’s the current top hit if you search Google 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.
There’s gonna be some really confused web surfers out there when they hit that.
Now for “pick up lines”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/002796.html to rise just as high in Google.
*Question One*
A week ago, Suzy uttered “I’m going to meet him today,” in a context where ‘him’ was anaphoric on a previous use of ‘Brian’. When I now report Suzy’s utterance I should say
bq. A week ago, Suzy said that (I/she) was going to meet (him/me) (today/a week ago).
Which of the two options is best, or even acceptable, in each of the three cases?
*Question Two*
Most people agree this sentence is Moore-paradoxical
bq. (1) It will rain but it might not.
Does that mean just that (1) can’t be felicitously uttered, or also that it can’t be reasonably believed?
We might replace the ‘might’ statement with an explicitly probabilistic statement. For example:
bq. (2) It will rain and the probability of rain is 0.7.
Can this be felicitously uttered/reasonably believed/known? Do the answers change depending on which interpretation of probability we take to be salient? Do the answers change if 0.7 is moved upwards, say to 0.98?
None of these questions is meant to be rhetorical. I think there are probably some intuitive disagreements here that it would be worthwhile to make explicit.
(Acknowledgements: The first question came up from some comments by Yael Sharvit – in particular the abstract of a paper she’s presenting at Brown next week. The second came up in conversation with John Mayhood.)
The “INPC”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/program.html program is up and it is _packed_. Now if they’d only post all the papers online those who can’t afford to fly to a place with very expensive to fly into airports could join in the fun.
I’ve often found epistemology conferences to have some of the most extreme gender disparities of any branch of philosophy – logic included. This one is about 80/20 male/female, which believe it or not is a little better than what I’d expected before I did a count. (Note for those double-checking my counting ability: I included speakers and commentators, but not session chairs, in the count.)
I’ll put this paper on the papers blog tomorrow, but I think it deserved a special announcement of its own.
bq. “Michael Fara”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/fara/research.html and Timothy Williamson, “Counterparts and Actuality”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/fara/counterparts.pdf.
bq. The language of quantified modal logic needs an “actuality” operator to represent many modal claims of natural language. But David Lewis’s counterpart theory can be neither extended nor revised to accommodate such an operator. Accordingly counterpart theory should be rejected as a way of understanding modality.
Also the observant blog readers might notice that my blog includes, for the first time, a picture of me. This used to be the done thing to do on blogs, but it seems to be going out of fashion. As always, I’m two years behind the curve. (Did I mention how much I liked the new “Modest Mouse”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001M7P78/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 album?) The picture is by Andy Egan, and it was taken in Canberra in June 2003. You can just make out the poster in the background for Jerry Fodor’s Jack Smart lecture, which was one of the things I went to Canberra to see.