The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up for the day, the first day for a while there’s been any news to report.

Geek note about something I discovered while doing the report. In IE you can put subscripts on superscripts, as in 2^x₀. In Firefox that comes out as (practically indistinguishable from) 2^x0. I’ve got no idea how those look on Mac browsers. I thought it was analytic that anything IE did that Firefox didn’t do was bad, but I also thought subscripts on superscripts were good. So now I’m confused.

This should be really obvious, but I can’t find any convenient link, and I can’t see how to do this myself – at least not easily.

Say you wanted to mix probability theory and modal logic in the following way. The language of the sentences over which the probability function is defined includes a box, here written L. Whenever p is a sentence, Lp is a sentence, so all the usual formation rules apply. The logic for the box is S4. (We can substitute in other logics later once we figure out how S4 works.) We want the probability functions to be all and only the measure functions on Kripke models for S4. So Pr is an S4-probability function iff there is a Kripke model [W, R, V] and a measure function m defined over W such that for any sentence A, Pr(A) = m({w: A is true in [W, R, V] at w}). (Note I’m using square brackets around W, R, V because angle brackets confuse the HTML coder.)

Anyway, say you wanted to do all of that. How would you go about drawing up axioms to characterise the class of probability functions so isolated? Here’s one hypothesis. You’d simply take the axioms for classical probability theory, which always include (often tacitly, but always) some reference to either an entailment function or a class of logical truths. You then interpret that reference as a reference to S4-entailment, or S4-logical truth. And there’s your axiom system.

Does it work? I’ve got no idea. One of the things I proved in my paper on “intuitionist probability logic”:http://brian.weatherson.org/conprob.pdf is that this approach really won’t work when you want to move from classical logic to intuitionist logic. The problem is that classically equivalent axiomatisations of the probability calculus turn out to be inequivalent when ‘re-interpreted’ in an intuitionist way. (I.e. the references to entailment or logical truth are taken to be references to _intuitionist_ entailment or _intuitionist_ logical truth.) Could the same thing happen for the move from classical logic to S4? I don’t know. I thought it might be possible to generalise by claim about intuitionist logic to show that the answer to this question was _no_, but on a little reflection I rather doubt this is true. I think this is just an open question.

A (very brief!) lit search reveals very little on the intersection between probability theory and modal logic. Williamson’s 1998 BJPS paper has some relevant material, but it’s not exactly on point. The probabilistic semantics literature also has interesting material (esp by Cross and by Morgan) but it doesn’t seem (from what I can find from here late at night) to be exactly relevant either. (In all cases this lack of relevance is not due to shortcomings of the authors, but just because they were asking and answering different questions. I can sometimes appear overly critical here, so I should be clear that _in this case_ no criticism is intended!) But probability and modality are such big topics one would think there’d be _something_ on their intersection, and I don’t think the way I’ve framed the problem is _entirely_ idiosyncratic.

I appear to be having some trouble with my email account today. A lot of messages intended for me are getting bounced. Last week I lost updating privileges over part of the server needed to maintain the blog, forcing the move to this site. Now (some of) my email is getting bounced. You’d think I was being erased from the Brown part of the web or something!

For now urgent messages can be sent to brianjweathers@yahoo.com. I don’t bother spam-protecting that address because it already receives every kind of spam imaginable. So trawling through all that for real messages should be fun. Hopefully I’ll set up some addresses at weatherson.org shortly and they can be my standard way to be contacted.

UPDATE: OK, I have a real address now.

bq. Email name: brian
Email server: weatherson.org

The recipe for putting those together (i.e. email name@email server) should be obvious. I’ll have to work out when I move to Cornell whether that will be my main address.

In anticipation I guess of TAR’s move, “Orange Philosophy”:http://mt.ektopos.com/orangephilosophy/ has moved to a new site. It’s allegedly a group blog with 22 different authors, but I’ll put the over/under for the earliest date by which they’ll have all posted at roughly Christmas. The old site often felt like Mark Steen with guest posts from time to time, and that worked well enough so it doesn’t need 22 chefs in the broth.

Mark has an excellent post on “how to catch plagiarists”:http://mt.ektopos.com/orangephilosophy/archives/000004.html. My method has always been to teach obscure courses so there was little chance of plagiarism, but I’m teaching 101 in the spring so I better get up to speed on these things.

On the group blog topic, Michelle says that there’s talk of an “Arizona philosophy group blog”:http://www.platonicrelationship.com/blogger.php?p=258. This would be a good thing, though thinking about it made me realise that the blogging revolution is having less impact than I’d have hoped it might.

Looking at all the recent group blogs that have started or are planned suggests they have one thing in common: they are all geographically based. Being from Australia, it’s hard not to think about the tyranny of distance more or less all the time. (This is especially true when one spends most of one’s year in a foreign country.) The really good thing about the internet should be, I’ve always thought, that it encourages interaction based on shared interests rather than shared postcode/zipcode. But we haven’t really seen that yet.

There are no group blogs, or at least none that I know of, on mereology, or contextualism, or Hobbes studies or anything of the kind. And at some level they’d make more sense than X university blogs. We’re sort of seeing that in other disciplines with “Panda’s Thumb”:http://www.pandasthumb.org/ and “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, though they are both fairly general. And of course the mighty “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/ is one of the most geographically diverse blogs on the planet, as well as being one of the most diverse in terms of subject matter.

Anyway, I’m happy to see all these blogs springing up. I hope it encourages more interaction between people who would otherwise not interact because they are too far apart. Whenever I’m feeling idealistic about this blog, and the papers blog, that’s the ideal I’m aiming for. Well, that and unlimited self-promotion :-J

So I was reading through “Allan Hazlett’s”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/papers.html paper on “impossible worlds”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/twoarguments.pdf and I was struck by one of the passages from Dave Eggers he quoted.

bq.. He was such a skinny kid when he was little, always looked smaller, just amazing, in the pool, in the ocean, a beautiful stroke. I try for a second, something to do, to time my breaths with his, watching his chest rise and fall, the rest of his body immobile, the hands in fists, the hands tied down, as the color continues to drain I watch the stupid […] asshole sleep.

Then he gets up. He is awake and he is standing, and pulling the tubes from his mouth, from his arms, the nodes and electrodes, barefoot. I jump.

“Jesus […] Christ. What are you doing?”

“[Screw] it.”

“What do you mean, [screw] it?”

“I mean, [screw] it, asshole. I’m leaving.”

“What?”

“Screw it, I’m not going to be a[n] anecdote in your stupid book.”

p. Now that’s not quite “what Eggers wrote”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0375725784/ref=sib_aps_pg/002-0426123-8953628?%5Fencoding=UTF8&keywords=anecdote%20in%20your%20stupid%20book&p=S08V&checkSum=C4GcysICIPWMgwtHqtHZr%252FaMJFICw7Wcwswk%252B55DVW4%253D. Many would say that what Eggers wrote isn’t really acceptable discourse in a philosophy paper. So then what are one’s options. As I see it, there are basically four options.

# Quote Eggers completely.
# Replace some letters with !@#$ or ****
# Bowdlerise, as Allan did.
# Use a different quote for the example.

I think my rough preference ranking here is 2, 4, 1, 3, but I don’t have any good argument for that. I just think screwing with what someone wrote just because it doesn’t match the sensibilities of _your_ target audience isn’t really right.

Anyway, the philosophical point Allan is making here is interesting. He wants to argue that nothing can be both a fictional character and a real person.

bq. John realized he was a character in a book, and didn’t like the way he was being treated by the author. _Realize_ is factive, so it was also true in this fictional scene that John was a character in a book. But on Lewis-style accounts, it seems, this is impossible. There is no possible world where it is told as _fact_ that John realized he was a character; there is simply no world where it is true that John is a character in _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_, save (in a sense) the actual world … One and the same thing cannot be treated as factual and fictional at the same time by the same person.

Well that last line isn’t quite right because of the old examples of real people turning up in fictions. Most stories I write include real people. All the characters in the stories in “this post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/001079.html are real, though none of them really did the things I attribute to them. So Allan’s claim needs to be qualified a little to be true.

Still, there’s a sense in which what he’s getting at seems true. It certainly feels right that “Six Characters in Search of an Author”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486299929/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 is an impossible fiction. (And maybe I should use that fact in my stuff on resistance.) But clarifying just what that sense is turns out to be a little tricky I think. (My next example involves quite a few *major* plot spoilers for “Atonement”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038572179X/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 so it’s going below the fold.)
Continue reading →

Well it’s very late, but after all the tinkering I managed to get the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org done for the day.

OK, so this site should be the home for TAR for the forseeable future. If you have any problems with comments etc let me know, but I think it should work well.

Something is going kinda wrong with the blog and I may have to make serious changes soon. Watch this space.

Three new pages have been added to the papers blog recently.

Jean Nicod Institute has an extensive “online papers page”:http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to keep track of the additions, but there looks to be a lot of interesting stuff there.

“Russ Payne”:http://facweb.bcc.ctc.edu/wpayne/ from Bellevue Community College has several papers on metaphysics online. He also has an announcement for the “Northwest Philosophy Conference”:http://facweb.bcc.ctc.edu/wpayne/npcindex.htm to be held in October and featuring Jeff King and Michael Jubien (both to be formerly of UC Davis) as keynotes. It should be a lot of fun I’d imagine. I’m not sure if I’ll be going because, as much as I like philosophy conferences (especially in the northwest) I’m currently up to 8 invitations for the second half of 2004, and I can’t really go to all of them. But I do recommend checking out the northwest philosophy conference page.

John Gregg, a computer programmer/scientist from Boston, has an interesting page of “papers about consciousness”:http://home.comcast.net/~johnrgregg/. One of these days I’ll have to make a policy decision about when non-academic pages (i.e. pages by people whose paycheck doesn’t include the words ‘university’ or ‘college’ somewhere on it) should get listed on the papers blog. For now I’m running by seat-of-someone’s-pants judgments, and I hope it’s working out OK. I try not to place too much weight on things like what words are on one’s paychecks, but it’s easy to use academia as a kind of cheap filtering device. If you really need to hear about credentials though, John has written “a surprisingly accessible, entertaining and very reasonably priced “book “:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0780334264/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 about Boolean algebra”, which is as much as I’ve ever done academically (if not more) I guess.

will continue for the next few days. I have a probability paper to write, an exam to write (and eventually grade) and by last count 12 papers I promised to give various people comments on. (I hope I get all the comments to the write paper-writers.) As tempting as it would be to blog about the things other people have written but not posted, I think I’ll decline that temptation. So there may not be much here for a few days. At least there’s the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ if you want some daily philosophy fill.