Jay Garfield will be doing a talk next Friday (September 23) at Cornell at 4.30pm. (I’m not sure of the location, but I assume it will be in Goldwin Smith Hall.) Here is the title and the abstract.

bq.. “But Until Then, We’ll Just Pretend: How Pretence Scaffolds the Acquisition of Theory of Mind.”

Why is pretence such a prominent part of normally developing children’s activity in the third and fourth years of life when they have so much to learn? Why is this nearly universal in the species? Why do children with autism fail both to pretend and to acquire theory of mind? In Garfield, Peterson and Perry (2002) we proposed a Sellarsian-Vygotskian developmental framework according to which social interaction and language development jointly scaffold the a acquisition of theory of mind, and speculated that pretence should play a crucial role in this process. In Garfield et al. (2003) we presented data that confirmed a special role for verbs of pretence in the acquisition of sentential complementation and showed that competence with verbs of pretence precedes the competence with doxastic verbs necessary for passing theory of mind tasks. We now present further data confirming these results and demonstrating in greater detail how pretence scaffolds the acquisition of theory of mind, and so why it is so important to normal child development.

One of the issues that arose out of the Barcelona workshop on relativism was that there is a lot of terminological confusion around the place, and it would be good to sort this all out. The point of this post is to try and set out in a systematic way what the logically possible options are, with the hope that it leads to some clarity down the line. We’re going to start off very abstract, but hopefully things will get more concrete shortly.
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If you haven’t looked at it for a while, it is worth checking out David Chalmers’ ever-expanding list of Philosophical Weblogs. There have been a few additions over the summer, and the list of grad students with philosophy blogs is now impressively long. If some smart person found a way of having an RSS feed for all of those blogs, those of us with RSS readers might do nothing but read blogs.

On a similar note, Geoff Pullum found an amusing cartoon from the _New Yorker_ about our noble practice.

The Sage School at Cornell is hiring this year. Here is “our job ad”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/phil/search.html.

All the back issues of “Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic”:http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/JourNav?authority=euclid.ndjfl&type=past are now online through Project Euclid, which seems like a great resource. (Hat tip: John Dilworth.)

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Michael Lynch and Simon Blackburn were been interviewed on NPR about truth. Their books were also “favourably reviewed in the New York Times”:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFDD113DF937A15754C0A9639C8B63.

“Robbie Williams”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phljrgw/ won the “Young Philosophers Essay Competition”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/philrev/ run by the Phil Review for his paper _Eligibility and Inscrutability_. Well done Robbie!

I’ve been away from the blog for a while, and obviously a lot has happened since then. I have two pieces of info about Hurricane Katrina to pass on.

First, Brian Leiter has (as so frequently) set up “a useful message board”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/09/philosophy_facu.html#comments for information to be distributed. Many of the Tulane faculty and students have reported their new email addresses there. (The Tulane servers are out of action right now.) There is also info about most of (but sadly not yet all of) the safety of the philosophers who were based in the areas affected.

Second, Dominic McIver Lopes passes on the following message from the APA concerning its attempts to make some things easier for hurricane victims.

bq.. The Pacific Division paper submission deadline has been extended for APA members living in areas severely affected by the hurricane. Any members who contacted the APA National Office because storm damage prevented them from submitting by the September 1 deadline received new deadlines responsive to their individual situations.

Members in Gulf areas of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi who have been unable to contact the National Office are invited to do so when communication mechanisms become available to them. Please contact Lindsay Palkovitz at lindspal@udel.edu, or (302) 831-1112, or by writing to her at: The American Philosophical Association, 31 Amstel Avenue, University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716-4797, if hurricane damage prevented you from submitting by the September 1 deadline.

The APA Pacific Division also will waive convention registration fees for individuals from Gulf area universities that are not able to return to normal operation this fall. Please contact Pacific Division Secretary-Treasurer Anita Silvers at asilvers@sfsu.edu for a registration fee waiver (or for other help you may require).