The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is posted for the weekend’s update. I think from now on unless there’s some dramatic reason to do otherwise I’m not going to do weekend updates. The site readership is pretty low on the weekend, and it’s just as easy to do everything on Monday. There will also be a few site outages over August while I’m away at a bunch of conferences, but we’ll always catch up when I get back.

Over on “Certain Doubts”:http://www.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/, Jon Kvanvig posed “the following question”:http://bengal.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=51

bq. [W]hat are the three most important developments in epistemology over the last quarter century?

Jon framed that as a party-question, and it’s one party-question we could ask. But here at TAR we set out sights even more abstractly. As in questions like

bq. What are the three most important developments in philosophy over the last quarter century?

Perhaps that’s a reasonable question to ask, but even I think it’s a little broad. So what about instead.

bq. [W]hat are the three most important developments in metaphysics&epistemology (broadly construed to include mind and language) over the last quarter century?

I actually have reasons for asking, as well as (weakly held) opinions on what some of the answers should be. But I might follow Jon’s lead and hold off on saying these until there’s a bit of a discussion thread going.

Here’s a _very early_ draft of my review of Christopher Peacocke’s _The Realm of Reason_. Comments, criticism, etc welcomed!

bq. “The Realm of Reason review”:http://brian.weatherson.org/peacocke.pdf

*UPDATES*: Three things I didn’t mention in the first pass through this note.

* This is for the _Times Literary Supplement_, which might explain some of the stylistic and content choices. (Or might not.)
* Much of the material on moral beliefs at the end is due to conversations with Sarah McGrath and Ralph Wedgwood. In a different format those would have been credited, but I don’t think the TLS does ‘thanks’ footnotes!
* Gilbert Harman also has a review of Peacocke’s book online. It is available “here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Peacocke.pdf.

*SECOND UPDATE*: As Martin Lin pointed out in comments, I got Descartes all wrong in the first draft of this. I’ve now updated the draft to make the suggestions Martin suggested. (If his comments don’t look like they match the draft currently online, this is why – the version he commented on really made the mistake he said it did.)

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up, with two discussions of ancient philosophy, only one of them by someone whom you would normally suspect given that kind of teaser.

I’m doing the after-dinner talk at the conference on the a priori at Syracuse next month, so I’ve been trying to revise my paper on the deeply contingent a priori for just this setting. Since the original paper was written to try and get a job offer from _the people who edit Philosophical Review_, it wasn’t exactly sparkling after-dinner stuff. And it’s not exactly finished yet. I really need to work on section 4, and I need to add _many_ jokes (“A modal rationalist walks into a bar and the barman says…” etc) but it’s a start. There may be more versions of this posted here in the future.

bq. *From Anti-Scepticism to the Contingent A Priori*
“PDF of paper/speaking notes”:http://brian.weatherson.org/fastcap.pdf
“Powerpoint presentation”:http://brian.weatherson.org/fastcap.ppt

And for those really interested, here’s the “syllabus for my intro logic class”:http://brian.weatherson.org/231Syllabus.htm. We’re using Barwise and Etchemendy’s _Language, Proof and Logic_ for most of it, but I’m also going to use chapter 4 of David Velleman’s “blogic”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/Logic/ because it’s a nice introduction to counterfactuals and modality and I think that stuff’s important in many other philosophy courses the students will take. Of course being me within the first half-hour I’ll have segued off into a discussion of which modal logics have the finite model property or something, but I’m going to at least _try_ to keep this philosophically relevant.

Short of coming up with new ideas for the blog, I might steal other people’s ideas that don’t seem to have got much attention. Here’s an interesting example Jon Kvanvig wrote in comments to “a post over at CD”:http://bengal.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=23.

bq. Take the airport case, and suppose that John visited the doctor recently. He was told everything was OK, but since the visit the doctor has just found a serious illness revealed by his blood test which must be treated immediately or John will die. If the plane is late, the waiting health officials will not be able to help him, but if the plane is on time, they’ll inoculate him and everything will be fine. John, of course, knows nothing of any of this. He doesn’t check further to see if his itinerary is still accurate. We assume that apart from the health risk story, John knows that his plane will arrive at 11. Add in the health risk stuff. Are you now inclined to say that he doesn’t know?

This is the kind of case on which the subjective vs objective versions of subject-sensitive invariantism differ. That is, if we think that what standard S’s evidence must meet before S knows that p depends on (something like) p’s importance to S, is what matters S’s beliefs about p’s importance, or p’s actual importance. If the former, then John knows in this case the plane arrives at 11. If the latter, he doesn’t.

A brief bit of history here. Last year Jason Stanley did a paper on subject-sensitive invariantism at MIT at and after which some people (including me) urged him to definitively adopt the objective position as a way out of some troubles that kept recurring for the subjective version. And Jason, as illustrated in that CD thread, does now hold the objective position. (And rightly so say all of us!) I can’t remember, if I ever knew, exactly what Jason’s position was before the MIT talk – he may have had the (correct) objective position all along and we just shored up his belief. Either way it’s good and important stuff Jason’s working on and the details matter. Hence we look at cases like this.

Anyway, Jon’s case is probably the first I’ve seen where the subjective version has a little more pull than the objective version, but I think that’s because I’m just not focussing on the right factors. Or maybe it’s the kind of case that will push me back to thinking knowledge = (justified) true belief 🙂

By the way, I never understood the original airport case, which was about whether a particular plane stops over somewhere. (Chicago?) Maybe other airlines are different but in my experience it’s really really easy to find out where a plane is stopping _first_ – that’s the city name in 300pt font on the monitor behind the check-in desk. What’s hard is to find out whether it’s the same plane that’s continuing on to New York or wherever you’re going. I know the epistemological relevance of this little empirical datum is not enormous, but it always made it hard for _me_ to think clearly about the case.

I haven’t been doing much blogging because I’ve been doing important things like writing the syllabus for my decision theory course. “Here it is”:http://brian.weatherson.org/483Syllabus.htm. Not all the links are active yet, and it’s subject to revision, but I hope it’s at least ready for public view.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up with about a million new pages tracked. Many of them are listed “here”:http://www.arizonaphilosophy.com/index.php?p=48 but there’s two others I got through my own sleuthing/contacts.

bq. “Barry Loewer”:http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/loewer.html
“Alyssa Ney”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/ney.html

Via “Justin Leiber”:http://www.hfac.uh.edu/phil/leiber/jleiber.htm, here’s “a playable version”:http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/monty.html of the “Monty Hall Problem”:http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.html. It’s simultaneously a lesson in decision theory and in the perils of small sample sizes – my first two plays I lost the car by switching.