Yet another idea that arose from a converssation with John Hawthorne. This one seems relevant given the “Syracuse Workshop on the A Priori”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/swap/index.html starts later this week.

Timothy Williamson has argued that there are no substantial luminous conditions. That is, there is no condition such that whenever you are in it, you are in a position to know you are in it. There is an exception perhaps for necessary conditions such as being such that 2+2=4. Is there also an exception for a priori knowledge, or does his argument work there too? I suspect his argument (or more likely the variant on it that you can get from “my response to Williamson”:http://brian.weatherson.org/lummarg.htm) does work in that domain.

There’s two relevant questions here.

bq. (1) If p is a priori knowable, is it knowable that p is a priori knowable?
(2) If p is a priori knowable, is it a priori knowable that p is a priori knowable?

I think in general the answer to each question is _no_. I’ll just argue that the answer to (1) is _no_ (at least if it’s taken to quantify over all p), from which it follows that the answer to (2) is _no_. The examples are a little controversial, and to some extent they track my epistemological biases, but I think they can probably be modified to fit _your_ epistemologial biases provided you aren’t too, er, biased.

(Note that to motivate the safety principle I’ll use below it would be much easier to use what I call in the paper belief-safety rather than content-safety in the above argument. I think the fact that this anti-luminosity argument requires belief-safety rather than content-safety is actually a consideration in favour of taking belief-safety to be the central notion.)

Assume we have a transparent description of the (past-directed) evidence I actually have about Ithaca’s climate. Let E be shorthand for this description. I think (3₃₆₅) is a priori knowable, and knowably a priori knowable at that.

bq. (3₃₆₅) Anyone with evidence E is justified in believing it will snow in Ithaca sometime in the next 365 days.

But (3₁) is clearly not a priori knowable, indeed it is knowably false.

bq. (3₁) Anyone with evidence E is justified in believing it will snow in Ithaca sometime in the next 1 day.

Now the following safety principle, though a bit of a mouthful, seems true to me for all n.

bq. (S) If it is knowable that (3_n) is a priori knowable, then (3_n-1) is a priori knowable.

By familiar means we can get a contradiction from the knowability of (3₃₆₅) being knowable a priori, the falsity of (3₁), and the truth of (S) and (1). Hence (1) is false.
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A passing thought on something Delia mentioned in her (as Kent said very astute) comments below. Is there a simple explanation for why (1) is so much more acceptable than (2)?

(1) I am here.
(2) ??I am now.

Off the top of my head I can’t even tell whether this is basically a syntactic, semantic or pragmatic phenomenon. As with most things I scribble down here, I assume there’s an answer somewhere about this.

This is inspired somewhat by some (somewhat maddening) comments at Metaphysical Mayhem and some (extremely enlightening) conversations with John Hawthorne.

Back in the day there was this old problem about how we could make sense of propositions like (1).

(1) The King of France does not exist.

Very roughly, the worry (or at least a worry) was that if this is to really express a proposition then the denoting term in it must denote something, and if it denotes something that something is probably at the very least King of France, whence we get the unwanted conclusion that either (1) does not express a proposition or France is a monarchy. Just as roughly, Russell solved this problem by noting that the (putatively) denoting term is a quantifier, not a proper name, and quantifiers can make contributions to propositions without actually denoting anything. So far, so good. The problem comes with (2), (3) and similar sentences.

(2) Leopold Bloom does not exist.
(3) “Ern Malley”:http://www.ernmalley.com/ does not exist.

I’m inclined to think that both of these claims are false, but then I have a very expansionary ontology. I certainly think it’s an open ontological possibility that they express true propositions. But now we can run the same problem. Back in the day some people offered the same solution as Russell did. Names, they said, were disguised descriptions, so it’s possible that they can make meaningful contributions to propositions without actually denoting. Nowadays orthodoxy is that that’s wrong, and names are directly referential.

I want to revive a version of the quantificational view. But I don’t want to say that names are descriptions. Names, I’ll assume, are normally directly referential. I claim (completely unoriginally) that this is consistent with the (well-motivated) view that in some contexts they are syntactically quantificational. I also claim (I think a little more originally, though I make no promises here) that being in front of the predicate _exists_ or a modification of this is one of those contexts. This all gets a bit complicated, so it’s mostly going below the fold.
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Three new group weblogs came to my attention while I’ve been away.

* “Philosophy of art”:http://artmind.typepad.com/
* “Sarkar lab”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/sarkarlab/
* “Philosophy of biology”:http://philbio.typepad.com/

And there’s a very interesting discussion of “King Henry’s Puzzle”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/004568.html over at Fake Barn Country.

As most of you reading this outside America will know, the 2004 Olympics have begun. Of course in America none of this has been seen yet, because it is technologically impossible or something to broadcast live from Greece. So the film of the opening ceremony is being sent by carrier pigeon to New York, where it will arrive in a few hours to be shown.

Now I don’t really care when or where the opening ceremony is shown. But I do care about when and where they show Olympic events in which Australians have a decent chance of doing well, especially swimming. And if one is stuck in the televisual hell-hole that is the United States, the answer is “Nowhere live, and unknown time and location on tape delay.” Because NBC refuses to show any swimming events live, and refuses (as far as I can tell) to say just when it will show events on tape delay, it is practically impossible to tell how much of a commitment will be needed to actually see Australians (or anyone else you might be interested in) in action. If you’re lucky NBC will, just like a cable company, say that the event you want will turn up sometime in a 4 hour interval. Just why Americans tolerate this kind of behaviour from a TV station is a little unclear, but I can’t imagine it would be possible to get away with such behaviour anywhere else in the western world.

Off to Mayhem for the week, so no new posts here or on the papers blog until Thursday at the earliest – more likely Friday.

Until then, here’s a discussion topic that Albert Chan at USC suggested. What books/articles should every grad student have read before finishing grad school? My suggested answer is _None_. There’s nothing that is both compulsory for students in history of ethics and in contemporary formal semantics, for instance. Of course there are things that are compulsory _within_ sub-disciplines, but philosophy is now too diverse for there to be any required core readings.

I suspect few commentators will agree though…

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up with papers from the last week. Maybe more postings here when I’m more recovered/unpacked.