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.