Given how many people glance over this site from time to time, I have to set myself a few rules for what I post. One of these is that I don’t post about what I’m told about un(web)published work people are doing. The reasons for this seem fairly obvious, and the sensible thing to do would be to not go close to violating this rule.

But I’m not always sensible. The other day I posted “a short post on Aristotle’s modal logic”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004205.html based on some ideas Kit Fine had mentioned the previous evening. I had thought that I was just posting things that were already widely known by the relevant experts, and was stopping short of posting on Kit’s original ideas. But it didn’t quite work out that way, and the discussion ended up being more about what Kit may have been working on than on what was public domain. So I ended up feeling/looking a little stupid. In future I won’t go quite as close to crossing that line, and I’m rather sorry that I did so in the first place.

The point of this is not (just) pointing out my mistakes but to note that Kit has very helpfully posted “his paper on Aristotle’s modal logic”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/fine/papers/aristotlemodalitydraft.pdf. There are many very interesting ideas there. In particular there’s a very clever proposal about how Aristotle might have understood embedded modal operators that explains why the odd-looking axiom L(MA -> MB) -> L(A -> B) would turn out to be valid. Many of the questions people had in that thread are expertly addressed by the paper. I don’t often get the chance to recommend papers in ancient philosophy here, so I’m pleased to have this chance to recommend one!

A message from Susanna Siegel (Famous Cornell Alum) “posted on Brian Leiter’s blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/another_pacific.html.

bq. A large handful of participants in the pacific apa (including people from at least seven panels) have already made plans to move their sessions to USF in order to avoid dishonoring the boycott of the westin st francis. If anyone else wants to move they should contact Ron Sundstrom . The people at USF are trying to set up the alternative schedule as soon as they can.

UPDATE: My posting this isn’t meant as an endorsement of moving panels. Given the logistical difficulties, I’m not entirely sure I approve. (Though I’m not sure I disapprove either – it’s hard being an indecisive blogger.) One of the logistical difficulties is figuring out how to get a decent program schedule into the hands of people attending the conference if things are scattered over town. I’ll do what I can here to pass on information as it comes to hand. That won’t be meant as endorsement either…

Below the fold is a letter Elizabeth Lee sent along about a possible closure of a philosophy department in Budapest, along with “a petition to sign protesting the closure”:http://www.petitiononline.com/hpselte/. I haven’t been able to independently verify everything in the letter, but everything I have looked at has checked out.
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Michael Otsuka sent me the following message that I wanted to circulate more widely (with his permission). He refers to a letter of Phil Gaspar’s that has been circulating and which I’ve repasted below the fold.

bq. I’m sure that a number of those who plan to attend the APA meeting in San Francisco would like to know whether they will need to cross a picket line to do so. Phil Gasper has recently circulated an email in which he says that there certainly will be a picket line during the meeting. The email from the APA Pacific committee (which you posted on your web page on March 9) says, by contrast, that there will not be a picket line (unless the dispute between the union and hotel management escalates between now and the end of March). As far as I can tell, these contrasting claims rest on a disagreement as to what constitutes a picket line. I believe that the APA committee understands a picket line to be the line that workers would form, would not cross, and would request others not to cross, if they went on strike. (They are not on strike at the moment.) I believe that Gasper, by contrast, also includes picketing by union members in the absence of a strike as an instance of a picket line. Such picketing would presumably occur at the same time that other union members were inside the hotel and working. Gasper believes that one or the other form of picketing will certainly occur during the meeting.

I agree with Michael, and I think both the union and Professor Gaspar are being less than perfectly clear with their terminology. In my idiolect, as I’m sure in many others, _picket line_ is a term with a quite definite meaning, namely a line that the union declares all supporters should not cross. Unless the situation deteriorates, there won’t be such a line at the Westin, because the workers will still be working there. (If there were a picket line in my sense, there couldn’t possibly be union workers inside the line.) So while I support the boycott, and won’t be staying at the Westin or buying anything from them, I don’t believe that the _don’t cross picket lines_ rule prevents one attending the conference.

Professor Gaspar’s letter below the fold.
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_Philosophical Investigations_ paragraph 98

bq. [I]t is clear that every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’.

From the _Palo Alto Daily News_ as quoted by “Geoff Pullum”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001973.html.

bq. Generating $66 million in sales revenue last year, Kopacz estimates that a larger dealership with a freeway billboard could generate $130 to $140 million in sales.

I’m actually in sympathy with what Wittgenstein is doing in paragraphs 98ff, namely opposing Frege/Sider style nihilism about vagueness, but he makes a bit of a meal of his statement of the position. (Which I guess helps to prove the point.) Whatever else we may say about sentences with “stunningly inept modifiers” like this one, they are not “in order as they are”. They aren’t truth-valueless, but that’s hardly the only way to be out of order.

I just wanted to echo a recommendation that H. E. Baber made in the comments below.

bq. I’d say just do it: if you’re committed to staying at a fancy hotel close by the Sir Francis Drake is very close by, commended by the hotel workers’ union for signing their “me too” agreement. It isn’t a big hassle to switch, you lose no money canceling out on the Westin, the Drake is cheaper, and changing your reservations is virtually free virtue.

The Drake rooms also, I believe, have complementary wi-fi. (At least it says this on their booking page.) For an added bonus, the Drake has “doormen in beefeater uniforms”:http://www.sirfrancisdrake.com/sfdconc/index.html. On the downside, I can’t believe there is anything the union is protesting more heavily than making the staff wear beefeater uniforms. So maybe it isn’t entirely free virtue. But it is where all the Kewl Kids will be this APA – or at least all the Kewl Kids who like staying at fancy hotels.

For anyone who wants to change, “here is the hotels.com link”:http://www.hotels.com/processSearch.do?inout=&CIYear=2005&COYear=2005&searchID=AC102643-89D2-E910-28F2-7DE52B90677F&paging=1&stateCode=CA&countryCode=USA&state=&numrooms=1&numadults=2&numchildren=0&usertypedcity=&userdropdownselection=&myrecentsearchdestination=&destination=8d4456fb-4038-4a55-bcbe-aa544ab549ad%7Ccc2ece3c-1604-43af-9386-12d602b423e3%7CSan+Francisco%2C+CA%2C+USA%7C1&sortBy=PROXIMITY&origdest=8d4456fb-4038-4a55-bcbe-aa544ab549ad%7Ccc2ece3c-1604-43af-9386-12d602b423e3%7CSan+Francisco%2C+CA%2C+USA%7C1&CIMonth=3&CIDay=23&COMonth=3&CODay=27&hotelName=&newLandmarkDestID=a1186333-7726-179e-d992-11c5f7907fe0&z_property=ALL&amenity_0=on&refineSearchButton.x=11&refineSearchButton.y=8. The evil Westin is at the top, but “the Drake”:http://www.hotels.com/property.do?mtnHotelID=6961&page=info&numadults=2&numchildren=0&numrooms=1&CIDay=23&CIMonth=3&CIYear=2005&CODay=27&COMonth=3&COYear=2005&z_property=ALL&gds=3&thisPageNumber=1&qKey=SA308631502612&roomTypeCode=002 is only a few doors down. Further down the page is the King George, where I stayed last time. It is a little cheaper and rather, er, cozy. But from memory they were selling tickets to ball games from the front desk which I think counts for a lot.

I just wanted to echo a recommendation that H. E. Baber made in the comments below.

bq. I’d say just do it: if you’re committed to staying at a fancy hotel close by the Sir Francis Drake is very close by, commended by the hotel workers’ union for signing their “me too” agreement. It isn’t a big hassle to switch, you lose no money canceling out on the Westin, the Drake is cheaper, and changing your reservations is virtually free virtue.

The Drake rooms also, I believe, have complementary wi-fi. (At least it says this on their booking page.) For an added bonus, the Drake has “doormen in beefeater uniforms”:http://www.sirfrancisdrake.com/sfdconc/index.html. On the downside, I can’t believe there is anything the union is protesting more heavily than making the staff wear beefeater uniforms. So maybe it isn’t entirely free virtue. But it is where all the Kewl Kids will be this APA – or at least all the Kewl Kids who like staying at fancy hotels.

For anyone who wants to change, “here is the hotels.com link”:http://www.hotels.com/processSearch.do?inout=&CIYear=2005&COYear=2005&searchID=AC102643-89D2-E910-28F2-7DE52B90677F&paging=1&stateCode=CA&countryCode=USA&state=&numrooms=1&numadults=2&numchildren=0&usertypedcity=&userdropdownselection=&myrecentsearchdestination=&destination=8d4456fb-4038-4a55-bcbe-aa544ab549ad%7Ccc2ece3c-1604-43af-9386-12d602b423e3%7CSan+Francisco%2C+CA%2C+USA%7C1&sortBy=PROXIMITY&origdest=8d4456fb-4038-4a55-bcbe-aa544ab549ad%7Ccc2ece3c-1604-43af-9386-12d602b423e3%7CSan+Francisco%2C+CA%2C+USA%7C1&CIMonth=3&CIDay=23&COMonth=3&CODay=27&hotelName=&newLandmarkDestID=a1186333-7726-179e-d992-11c5f7907fe0&z_property=ALL&amenity_0=on&refineSearchButton.x=11&refineSearchButton.y=8. The evil Westin is at the top, but “the Drake”:http://www.hotels.com/property.do?mtnHotelID=6961&page=info&numadults=2&numchildren=0&numrooms=1&CIDay=23&CIMonth=3&CIYear=2005&CODay=27&COMonth=3&COYear=2005&z_property=ALL&gds=3&thisPageNumber=1&qKey=SA308631502612&roomTypeCode=002 is only a few doors down. Further down the page is the King George, where I stayed last time. It is a little cheaper and rather, er, cozy. But from memory they were selling tickets to ball games from the front desk which I think counts for a lot.

I was hopinig to not be one of those people who teach Wittgenstein by going into detail about what thoughts they’d had on a single paragraph. So today in class we managed to at least start on paragraph 2 after spending only _almost_ all the class on paragraph 1.

It would be nice to spend a large part of the APA at the “Starlight”:http://www.harrydenton.com/homepage.htm. But I’d also like to have money left when I come back home. It’s a tough call.

“Liverpool”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/Match_Report/0,1527,1434222,00.html?gusrc=rss is through to the quarter finals of the Champions League! Now if only they could play this well in the Premiership.

“John Perry on religion and law”:http://philosophytalk.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/random_thoughts.html – It’s rather nice to think of Justice Thomas looking out at the one about not covetting they neighbor’s wife as he ponders deep issues. Of course, he tends to be a strict constructionist, and its dubious that any of the women on the porno flicks he liked to watch were wives of neighbors. So maybe it doesn’t bother him.

If you’re a baseball geek you’ll love this post by David Pinto on “graphical representation of range”:http://www.baseballmusings.com/archives/008526.php. Half of me wants the Red Sox to offer Pinto a job – the other half hopes he’ll keep putting out stuff like this for free.

The server for the poll was down for large chunks of the day, which might explain why we got so few votes in. Anyhow, 24 votes for unconditional move, 14 for moving if recovering the cancellation fee, and 16 for not moving. Thanks to everyone who participated.

It transpires the APA Pacific committee has looked into moving the conference away from San Francisco and decided against it. Below the fold I’m posting the full letter explaining the move. Here’s the core paragraph.

bq. While acknowledging that neither option is without its costs and critics, the Executive Committee concludes after difficult deliberation that it would be worse, and most likely infeasible, to move the meetings from San Francisco to San Jose. Under the very best scenario we have been able to envisage, a significant number of participants would be considerably harmed or unable to come at all, and/or would lose substantial amounts already expended on prepaid San Francisco travel or accommodations.

The letter was sent to everyone on the main program so I guess many people saw this before I did, but for those of us who aren’t on the main program, here’s the full letter, which goes into quite a bit of detail about what steps the APA took before making a decision, and what is going on vis a vis the dispute at the moment.
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I added a quick poll to the right hand column to see get reader’s reactions to the letter posted below. Obviously this is *very* unscientific, and voting in the poll should not be taken as a substitute for writing to the APA encouraging them to not hold the Pacific at a boycotted hotel, but I was interested in getting a sense of how people here felt about the proposed move. (I didn’t mention this at first, but I should add that the poll is set up so each person, or at least each IP address, can only vote once. So don’t try voting hundreds of time to move your preferred option up!)