I will have many more specific things to say about topics that came up at the INPC, but for now I just wanted to note what a wonderful conference it was, and thank the organisers Michael O’Rourke and Joe Campbell, for their great job. Attending 10 papers and 2 roundtable discussions in 2{1/2} days was tiring, but rewarding, and I didn’t even go to all the philosophy on offer. I was just looking back over the program, and noted that I managed to miss, either through scheduling conflicts or exhaustion, papers by Louise Anthony, Kent Bach, David Chalmers, Stewart Cohen, Fred Dretske, Catherine Elgin, Rich Feldman, Peter Klein, John Pollock and many more. Despite that I still got to see lots of great philosophy, but I must have missed a great conference’s worth of papers just from that list.

The highlight I thought was Elijah Millgram’s paper on “refuting scepticism with style”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/Abstracts/Millgram–Abs.htm. I can’t possibly do the paper, or particularly the presentation, justice, but here’s the line. If we’re brains in vats, then the visual presentation we’re getting is, in a broad sense, an artwork. But one of the striking features about artworks is that they are recognisable as such relatively easily, at least if you have a sense of style. This is even true of art that aims to be realistic. Indeed, it may be especially true of art that aims to be realistic. Since the world does not present itself as an artwork, since it does not have a distinctive style, the brain in a vat hypothesis is false.

There were one or two objections to the epistemology here, but on reflection I think the aesthetics might be more worrying. I think the world displays lots of characteristics of a genre piece. Marx’s dictum that history always repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce, looks like just the kind of rule that is followed in low-rent serials. This probably misses the point somewhat, since (speaking roughly) the argument is more concerned with the form of the world/story than its content, but it could be an issue.

More generally I’d be really pleased to see there be serious interaction between epistemology and aesthetics. Epistemologists are starting to complain a little about the philosophy of language interlopers, so I think it might be time for a completely different kind of interaction.

There was another point raised by Elijah’s paper that I’d like to come back to later if I have anything to say about it. Why do sceptical challenges of the form “You might be a brain in a vat” have more force, more grip on us, than challenges that just say “You might be wrong”? Of course I think a tidied up brain in vat scenario can pose a hard, even unanswerable for some, “a priori or a posteriori” question about our knowledge. But the usual brain in vat cases are nowhere near tidied up enough to make that a hard question, as Stew Cohen noted long ago. This is a topic I’d like there to be more written on.

I also liked the session on Ram Neta’s paper on seeing, even though I agreed more or less entirely with Liz Harman’s objections to Ram’s main conclusions. (I usually end up agreeing more or less entirely with Liz’s papers I guess, but I suspect if I went to her talk “this Friday at UMass”:http://www.umass.edu/philosophy/events/events-main.htm that pattern would be broken.) But I thought there were some interesting questions raised at the intersection of aesthetics and metaphysics that bear thinking about. In particular, if I’m looking at a wall that has a ladder leaning on the far (i.e. invisible) side, I don’t see the wall-ladder fusion. Except, if someone has made an artwork from the wall and the ladder, I do see the artwork by looking at the wall. (Except, as Liz noted, if the ladder is particularly central to the artwork. I can’t see a painting by seeing the back of the canvas it is on, and looking at the back of the wall may be analogous to that.) I’d like to resolve issues about what you see when you look at a surface through a substantive metaphysics of natural and unnatural objects, but this will require us to say quite a lot about how art makes some things natural or unnatural.

But it wasn’t only aesthetics at the conference. There was some philosophy of language too. I’ll write more about that in upcoming days, but just to flag I thought Rob Stainton had a very interesting idea about the relationship between epistemological contextualism and the varieties of context-dependence alleged to exist in the philosophy of language literature. Again, this is not to say I believed a word of it, but I thought it was an interesting proposal. Much more on this to follow.

I could go on much longer, but I have to run to (another) talk back here. So as the old song says, I’ll let the part tell the whole and not talk (yet) about the many other interesting papers I saw or philosophical discussions I had. (My paper by the way wasn’t entirely successful I thought because my presentation was somewhat unclear. But I got some useful feedback despite my lack of clarity. And I was rather flattered at how many people showed up.) Dave Chalmers has posted some conference pics “here”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/pics/idaho.html if you want a sense of how it looked. Next year’s conference is on Time and Identity, so I’ll probably send some version of “this paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/GIs.pdf. I hope it’s just as much fun as this year’s was.