What looks to me like the biggest annual philosophy grad conference, the Berkeley-Stanford-Davis conference, is on this Saturday and the schedule of papers includes links to the nearly 30 papers being presented.

The Melbourne Philosopher Blogger is proposing to hold an Essay Competition for bloggers. It’s just in the planning/brainstorming stage right now, but if you’re interested in the idea pop over there and offer suggestions.

The point of this post is to float an argument for contextualism about ethics. I don’t want to _endorse_ the argument. Indeed my main interest is in seeing how it compares to arguments for contextualism about other domains, especially epistemology. The argument takes as its starting point some experiments performed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised “here”:http://www.workingpsychology.com/lossaver.html.
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The “Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy”:http://www.jesp.org/ is a new (or at least new to me) online journal being edited by Andrei Marmor, James Dreier, Julia Driver and David Esltund. Here are the theee papers currently on the site.

# “The Myth of Instrumental Rationality”:http://www.jesp.org/articles/download.php?id=13 by Joseph Raz
The paper distinguishes between instrumental reasons and instrumental rationality. It argues that instrumental reasons are not reasons to take the…
# “The Government Beguiled Me: The Entrapment Defense and the Problem of Private Entrapment”:http://www.jesp.org/articles/download.php?id=14 by Gideon Yaffe
Defendants who are being tried for accepting a temptation issued by the government sometimes employ the entrapment defense. Acquittal of some of…
# “Two Approaches to Instrumental Rationality and Belief Consistency”:http://www.jesp.org/articles/download.php?id=15 by John Brunero
R. Jay Wallace argues that the normativity of instrumental rationality can be traced to the independent rational requirement to hold consistent…

We’ve already had a (very interesting) talk by Peter Ludlow this week, and there are two more to come.

First on Thursday, Mark Johnson (Linguistics and Cog Sci, Brown) is talking on Features of Statistical Parsers. Here’s the abstract.

bq. Statistical models of syntactic structure are now the dominant approach to natural language parsing. This talk begins with a survey of these statistical models, explaining the trade-offs in the various ways that non-local context can be accounted for in probabilistic models of syntactic structure. The talk ends with a description of a reranking parser, and the kinds of features of syntactic structure that it uses to achieve good performance.

And on Friday Chris Taylor (Philosophy, Oxford) is talking on Courage in the Protagoras and Nicomachean Ethics.

Both talks are at 4.30, Johnson’s in Morill Hall 111 and Taylor’s in Goldwin Smith 142.

Roger White, Explanation as a Guide to Induction.

bq. It is notoriously difficult to spell out the norms of inductive reasoning in a neat set of rules. I explore the idea that explanatory considerations are the key to sorting out the good inductive inferences from the bad. After defending the crucial explanatory virtue of stability, I apply this approach to a range of inductive inferences, puzzles, and principles such as the Raven and Grue problems, and the significance of varied data and random sampling.

“Richard Zach writes”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2005/04/logic-instruction-and-philosophy.html

bq. I’ve put up materials from the panel discussion on Logic in Philosophy Graduate Training at the ASL Spring Meeting, which featured Michael Glanzberg, Ted Sider, and Brian Weatherson, and which Andy Arana and I organized. The materials include slides for Michael’s and my talks, notes for Ted’s talk, and Andy’s paper, as well as MP3’s of the talks. I didn’t record Andy’s, since he read his paper and it’s available online, and I cut out the discussion since most of it was inaudible.

I’ve closed off comments here so people who want to leave comments can do so over at Richard’s.

There were lots of useful comments on the “pragmatics, belief and knowledge thread”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004282.html and I wanted to follow up with a list of cases designed to spell out the consequences of the position and some choice-points in the development of the theory. (Although they may not look related, the cases below arose out of some considerations “Matt Weiner”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000508.html brought up in a response to my post.)
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There have been good comments on both of the epistemology posts from yesterday, as well as a number of examples showing that what I took to be an odd use of ‘at least’ is actually fairly standard. In the awareness post, Dennis Whitcomb pointed out that he had made a similar point to Williamson recently. Great minds think alike, or whatever it is one is meant to say when scooped. Since I wasn’t the first on this point, I may as well make up for it in quantity. So here’s another awareness example.

Rick is a middle-of-the-road singer-songwriter. He’s harmlessly strumming his guitar one day when he looks up and sees what looks like a convoy of five trucks bearing down on him. Fortunately, four of them are fake trucks that can’t do any real damage to him. Unfortunately, it (i.e. the fifth) is a real truck that will do real harm. He freezes in fear. Ilsa screams, “He has to get out of the way. Is he aware that there’s a giant truck bearing down on him?” Williamson answers, “No.”

One more baseball note. At the Giants game they just showed a Dodger fan who’d been hit in the face with a pie. This was wrong to do, even though given the reactions of the fans around him it seemed like it maximised utility. Then the Giants showed the results of the pie-ing on the big scoreboard. This was also wrong to do, even though it definitely maximised utility!