I was recently teaching David Christensen’s 1991 paper “Clever Bookies and Coherent Beliefs”, and I thought there were many good points there that I should have really noticed when I read the paper years ago. My dissertation would have been better if I’d seen all this years ago, but better late than never. Christensen gives a nice method for determining just what particular Dutch Book arguments do and don’t show. I agree with him _mostly_ about how to apply that method to particular cases, as we’ll see below.
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I was recently teaching David Christensen’s 1991 paper “Clever Bookies and Coherent Beliefs”, and I thought there were many good points there that I should have really noticed when I read the paper years ago. My dissertation would have been better if I’d seen all this years ago, but better late than never. Christensen gives a nice method for determining just what particular Dutch Book arguments do and don’t show. I agree with him _mostly_ about how to apply that method to particular cases, as we’ll see below.
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A draft of my paper for the Switzerland conference is online. It’s rather scrappy, but it covers most of the ideas I want to cover.

bq. “Intuitions and Meanings”:http://brian.weatherson.org/iam.pdf

There are a few tendentious arguments that Gettier cases are cases of knowledge at the end which I might export here. I sort of got convinced by Tim Williamson that generalised arguments against the reliability of Gettier cases won’t work against Gettier cases. We need more specific arguments. There are four such arguments in the paper, some of which I might put on here if I’m feeling brave.

Peter Smith is writing “a book on Gödel’s Theorems”:http://www.godelbook.net/, and he’s been kind enough to make “most of it available for download”:http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/godelbook/download.html. Thanks to “Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/09/28/The_Antidiagonal_of_the_Primitive_Recursive_Functions for the link, and interesting comments on the book.

I wanted to quibble with one thing Prof Smith wrote.

bq. You can, for the moment, freely download these draft 16 chapters. However

bq. *The deal is that — if you actually read them — you send any comments you have, however brief or general, to comments at godelbook dot net[1].*

bq. I note — not entirely with surprise but with disappointment — that for the last versions, the ratio of downloaders to those who’ve sent comments seems to be well over 200 to 1. OK, no doubt a good many download in a speculativve way, and find that the book isn’t for them. Still, if that ratio doesn’t improve a bit, I guess I’ll go back to just circulating my friends and relations! :-)))

My ratio of readers to commentators is frequently in the 1000 to 1 range. This kind of thing isn’t unusual. If you really want comments, you should send manuscripts to friends with begs for comments _and_ post things online. I think from the smileys Prof Smith knows this, but I thought it worth pointing out that his situation is not particularly unusual.

fn1. I’ve replaced a live email link here with a description of the email address because I’m a little afraid this page is scanned regularly by robots looking for spammail addresses, and I thought I’d spare Prof. Smith that pain.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up featuring four papers by fellow Monash alum “John O’Dea”:http://members.iinet.net.au/~jodea/online.html. (They don’t have abstracts because I couldn’t figure out how to cut-and-paste from the PDFs available. This is a common problem I find, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.)

While looking at everyone’s web pages I saw that there’s a new volume of Mind our featuring a 72-page paper on variable grade predicates by Oliver and Smiley. I remember back in the old days (circa 1999) when you had a paper 60 to 90 pages long it was a bit of a disaster because it was too long for a journal and too short for a book. In recent years _Mind_ seems to have taken it upon itself to fill in that niche. (Philosophical Review took some of those papers, though of course it’s _very_ hard to get into, and _Philosophers’ Imprint_ also takes long papers because they aren’t burdened by printing costs.) I’m glad this void is being filled, though I worry this will make _Mind_ either too hard to get into (and it wasn’t easy to start with) or too backlogged. But the good news is that papers that are naturally that length don’t have to be chopped to journal size or padded to book length any more.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up featuring four papers by fellow Monash alum “John O’Dea”:http://members.iinet.net.au/~jodea/online.html. (They don’t have abstracts because I couldn’t figure out how to cut-and-paste from the PDFs available. This is a common problem I find, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.)

While looking at everyone’s web pages I saw that there’s a new volume of Mind our featuring a 72-page paper on variable grade predicates by Oliver and Smiley. I remember back in the old days (circa 1999) when you had a paper 60 to 90 pages long it was a bit of a disaster because it was too long for a journal and too short for a book. In recent years _Mind_ seems to have taken it upon itself to fill in that niche. (Philosophical Review took some of those papers, though of course it’s _very_ hard to get into, and _Philosophers’ Imprint_ also takes long papers because they aren’t burdened by printing costs.) I’m glad this void is being filled, though I worry this will make _Mind_ either too hard to get into (and it wasn’t easy to start with) or too backlogged. But the good news is that papers that are naturally that length don’t have to be chopped to journal size or padded to book length any more.

In a move that might shock some in the philosophical community, NYU is about to _commence_ a hiring campaign.

bq. New York University is on a hiring campaign that it hopes will put its graduate and undergraduate liberal arts programs on sounder footing and give them the stature of some of its most prominent professional schools. Over the next five years, it plans to expand its 625-member arts and science faculty by 125 members, and replace another 125 who are expected to leave. (“New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/education/27nyu.html?ex=1253937600&en=70320bbf92d34f3b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland)

If hiring Ned Block, Hartry Field, Kit Fine, David Velleman etc etc was what they do in normal times, it could get a little scary to see what they do in an expansionary era.

!-http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2004/09/06/pic8_gallery__550x424.jpg 183w 141h!

Via “Counterspin”:http://www.smh.com.au/blogs/counterspin.html, a photo that suggests the glorious leader agrees with the sometime tone of this blog.

“Andy Egan”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/papers.html, “Epistemic Modals, Relativism, and Assertion”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/might.doc

bq. I advocate a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as “the treasure might be under the palm tree”, according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a pair). Others have argued for relativist semantics in other areas. Anyone who is inclined to relativise truth to more than just worlds and times faces a problem about assertion. It’s easy to be puzzled about just what purpose would be served by assertions of this kind, and how to understand what we’d be up to in our use of sentences like “the treasure might be under the palm tree”, if they have such peculiar truth conditions.

bq. In what follows I will first present an example of the kind of case that motivates relativism about epistemic modals. (I’ll be talking about ‘might’, but nothing much hangs on this choice of examples. In fact, the intuitions that I’m appealing to are probably stronger for ‘probably’. So if you think I might be wrong about ‘might’, you’ll probably be happier to go along if you think about the parallel argument for ‘probably’ instead.) I’ll then sketch a relativist theory in a bit of detail. I’ll then show why there is a problem, given such a theory, about the role of epistemic modals in assertion and communication, and set out to solve it. Solving this problem will be helpful in several ways: not only does it eliminate an apparently forceful objection to relativism, but the account of the role of such claims in assertion and communication helps to make clear just what the relativist position is, exactly, and why it’s interesting.

No papers blog today because of an administrative snafu. (One of many administrative snafus around TAR headquarters it turns out.)

The spam attack only fully stopped when I found out how to IP block the addresses being used. Thanks to Will in comments for suggesting this. No feedback from choopa.com, who are hosting the spammers.

When things settle down here, I mean to write something substantive about the paper on moral relativism Jesse Prinz did here on Tuesday. So for now I’ll say two insubstantive things. First, it’s a little disturbing how many hidden indexicals there are meant to be in language these days. (Jesse is really a moral indexicalist, like Jamie Dreier, not a full-blown relativist.) Second, it’s amazing how much work the open question argument (and variants on it) has been thought to do over the last 100 years. It’s like _Bow down before me, for I am the Open Question Argument of Doom, and I can be used to derive Every anti-realist conclusion Ever Conceived_. That wasn’t quite how Jesse put it, indeed he didn’t describe his argument as a variant on the open question argument, though don’t know if he’d disagree with the claim that he was appealing to (inter alia) something lke the open question argument in his argument for relativism. Six months ago I thought of starting a serious study of Moore in order to have a better grip on what was going on with all these arguments, but it never really happened.

As I said, actual serious substantive comments to follow, because it was a very interesting paper and there’s lots to say.