The annual “Cornell Summer Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/scm8/cscmp.html is on later this week. There is a very interesting selection of papers, and I might try and get along to one or two of them. It’s very exciting that we have such a notable conference here at Cornell every year.

Not much blogging for the next week or so while some other matters are attended to. There are some very interesting comments threads below that I would like to jump into, especially on the preface paradox, but in practice probably won’t over the next week. Maybe when I return.

Yesterday the blog got spammed by some company offering new blogging software. Naturally, they got added to the spam block list. I think the effect of this is that anyone using their blogs will also be on the ‘do-not-accept-links-from’ list, which is a bad-making feature of a blog software supplier. Dumb spammers.

Richard at Philosophy etc posts a “call for abstracts”:http://pixnaps.blogspot.com/2005/05/cfa-metallica-philosophy.html for a volume on Metallica and Philosophy as part of Open Court Press’s Pop Culture and Philosophy series. Abstracts are due in the next month.

“David Chalmers”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/05/frank_jackson_p.html has persuaded Frank Jackson to post many papers to the “Centre for Consciousness”:http://consciousness.anu.edu.au/papers.html website. One of them is Frank’s “review of James Franklin’s _Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia_”:http://consciousness.anu.edu.au/jackson/franklinreview.pdf. It starts with the following line.

bq. Philosophers are reluctant to take time off to do history, even the history of their own subject.

Now I know history of philosophy is not a big part of the mission at the Research School, but I never knew it had completely dropped off the radar screens!

I remember when this came out in print someone (and I can’t remember who) suggested the best interpretation was that he meant contemporary history, which would be relevant, given Franklin’s book, and make the claim true. So that’s the natural charitable interpretation. But as novel and unexpected sentences go, this one was fairly novel and unexpected.

I was listening to the Bloc Party album while grading an exam, and noticed one odd lyric in _Little Thoughts_.

bq. The world ain’t just made of facts.

This looks like a bald statement of an anti-Tractarian metaphysic, which is perfectly reasonable in and of itself, but somewhat out of place in a pop song. As you can see from “the rest of the lyrics”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=bloc+party+lyrics+%22this+world+ain%27t+just%22+%22made+of+facts%22&btnG=Search there’s not a lot of context to get clear on exactly what they meant. (I linked to a Google page so you can choose which pop-up infested lyrics site you want to go to.)

I guess the Police did borrow an album title from Gilbert Ryle, so maybe the New Wave revival will also spark a revival of interest in British metaphysics among pop stars.

I was listening to the Bloc Party album while grading an exam, and noticed one odd lyric in _Little Thoughts_.

bq. The world ain’t just made of facts.

This looks like a bald statement of an anti-Tractarian metaphysic, which is perfectly reasonable in and of itself, but somewhat out of place in a pop song. As you can see from “the rest of the lyrics”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=bloc+party+lyrics+%22this+world+ain%27t+just%22+%22made+of+facts%22&btnG=Search there’s not a lot of context to get clear on exactly what they meant. (I linked to a Google page so you can choose which pop-up infested lyrics site you want to go to.)

I guess the Police did borrow an album title from Gilbert Ryle, so maybe the New Wave revival will also spark a revival of interest in British metaphysics among pop stars.

As mentioned in a couple of posts below, my view is that it isn’t required of an author, even a sincere author, that she believes everything she writes in a scholarly work. When I say that’s my view, do I mean I believe it? Well, I think it’s probably roughly true. Good enough for scholarship. If I had to wait for belief, I might not write anything. Since we reward people who don’t wait for belief, it doesn’t seem like the community of scholars doesn’t take belief to be a norm governing scholarly assertion.

But I do think in some contexts you should only say what you believe. Writing a travel guide, for instance, probably requires belief in each claim you write. So a preface paradox involving a travel guide would be more impressive to me than a preface paradox involving a scholarly work. So I decided to see if I could find a real life case of this. For better or worse, I only stock Lonely Planet guides. (I have to support businesses from the eastern suburbs you see!) And they basically _don’t_ include anything like a prefatory comment saying there are mistakes.

Well, that’s a little misleading. They do have the following comments. First under the heading *WARNING & REQUEST*.

bq. Things change – prices go up, schedules change, good places go bad and bad places go bankrupt – nothing stays the same. So, if you find things better or worse, recently opened or long since closed, please tell us and help make the next edition even more accurate and useful.

This does suggest there will be mistakes, but also implicates (at least) that all the mistakes are due to the world changing since the book was written. That is, there is at least an implicature that the book was correct at some time. (Perhaps the time of writing, not even necessarily the time of printing.) The only thing that would make me qualify this claim is on the next page.

bq. Guidebooks are not intended to be used as if they provide a detailed set of infallible instructions.

But I think it is clear from the context that they are not saying some of their factual claims might be mistaken, but rather that the good tourist will choose their own plan of attacking the holiday, rather than following the book’s suggestions.

The statements from the authors at the start refer to the fact-checkers, but don’t make any claims that there are still mistakes left. (At least the ones I have to hand don’t – I don’t claim to have checked them all.)

So Lonely Planet books don’t go as far as Wittgenstein as saying that everything in the book is correct, but unless I’m missing something, they don’t have any claim to the effect they may include mistakes. This is all to the good, because they don’t have one of the excuses scholars have for making such claims.

I’d be interested to know if other travel guides are as immodest. (If they are not I’ll take that as another sign I should stick with the Australian books!)

If you have actual work to do (grading, writing papers for deadlines, remembering to prepare food, etc) I wouldn’t recommend reading the rest of this post. For the braver among you.

After reading “this story”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1485890,00.html in the Guardian I lost a lot of time yesterday playing “Sudoku”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=Sudoku&btnG=Search. It’s basically a magic squares game from Japan, that seems like it should be easy, but is in practice surprisingly hard. And surprisingly addictive. I didn’t get to the point where I’d stop watching a Red Sox game in order to keep playing, but I did manage to procrastinate on some grading in order to keep playing. (I guess that doesn’t really tell you much about the addictive effects.) Anyway, if you want to get no work done the next month, follow either of those links and you’ll have plenty of ways to avoid doing anything else.

I’m reading through David Christensen’s interesting _Putting Logic in Its Place_. Christensen is on the side of those who think that the Preface Paradox shows that deductive cogency is not a constraint on rational belief. He responds to several arguments to the contrary, of which I think the most interesting is what he calls the Argument Argument. This is, roughly speaking, the view that deductive cogency has to be a constraint because otherwise we couldn’t explain the force of deductive argumentation. (This is rough because as stated the argument, or at least the arguer, looks poised to confuse inference with implication. I think a version of the argument that doesn’t make this confusion can be given, but that’s for a later post.) After some back-and-forth that I won’t repeat, Christensen gets to the following worry.

bq. Suppose, for example, the author of a history book were to discover that the claims _in the body of her book_ formed an inconsistent set. Intuitively, wouldn’t this be very disturbing? … It is hard to see why an author _should_ be more concerned by an inconsistency within the body of the book than with preface-style inconsistency … But wouldn’t discovering inconsistency among the individual historical claims always _actually be_ highly disturbing?

This looks like a fairly serious concern to me. But Christensen dismisses it in a rather odd way.

bq. What the defender of cohency needs to make his point is a case involving an inconsistency that necessarily involves a great number of the huge and diverse set of historical claims making up the body of a book, and for my part I know of no case in which we’ve had experience of this sort of discovering in actual inquiry … Until persauive specific examples are found, then, it seems to me that we’ve been given no good reason to think that deductive cogency requirements play an important part in epistemic rationality.

There are two interpretations of this, and both of them seem odd to me.
Continue reading →

As many of you will have read over at “Brian Leiter’s”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/philosophers_he.html that Benj and Jessica are leaving from here for Toronto. (By here, I mean Cornell in Benj’s case, and my block of Marshall St in both cases – they live about 50m away.) This follows up “Delia and Mike”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/philosophers_gr.html leaving for Princeton a couple of months ago.

These are obviously big philosophical losses. But I wanted to use this space to make a few non-philosophical comments. As anyone who has moved, especially overseas, knows it can be a very disorienting experience. But moving here to Cornell was much easier than I would have expected it to be, largely because of how helpful the my new colleagues were. And Delia, Mike, Benj and Jessica were all _incredibly_ helpful. If their new colleagues provide as much help to them as they did to me, they will feel very lucky indeed!

Of course, it’s not like they stopped being good friends, colleagues and neighbours once I’d settled in. I won’t bore you with more anecdotes, but suffice to say we here at TAR will miss them all very much.

But this _is_ a philosophy blog, so let me add one philosophical point. When I was teaching _Concept of Mind_ I was struck by one feature of Ryle’s argument against sense data. Ryle compares sense data to pictures on a movie screen, and then using some fairly undeveloped theories of what goes on when watching a movie, concludes that sense data can’t do the work they are designed to do. It struck me at the time that there could be some potential for defending sense data by using Ryle’s analogy, but supplementing it with a more sophisticated theory of psycho-aesthetics. The idea didn’t get much further than that, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea _how_ one might carry out this project.

Then lo and behold, at a paper in the department a couple of weeks ago, Benj set out a worked out theory that deployed (among many other nice ideas) this device. The paper “is available online here”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/sisd.pdf, and it is very nice paper indeed. I’m not sure I agree with all of Benj’s conclusions. He wants to develop an analogy with Richard Wollheim’s theory where one sees represented objects in photographs or paintings. I’m tempted by the more radical (i.e. blank-stare inducing) view of Kendall Walton’s that we see represented objects _through_ photographs (but not paintings). Given that sense-data theory is rather unpopular these days, and Walton’s theory of photography gets about as much support as Lewis’s theory of possible worlds, I suspect this combination wouldn’t win many friends, and there is more future in doing things Benj’s way. And as I said, he has a very well worked out theory, not just a hunch about how aesthetics might be relevant to philosophy of mind.

This paper of Benj’s is a very strong defence of a theory, sense-data theory, that doesn’t get enough positive attention nowadays, and I highly recommend reading it.