Here’s a new (or at least new to me) schema for solving the Mary problem. For reasons that will become clear below, it isn’t yet a solution. But someone who knows more about consciousness will be able to convert it into a full solution. The following ideas grew out of some discussions after Derk Pereboom’s talk here last Thursday, and he (and the discussants at the talk) probably deserve the credit for what value there is in it.

We start with some facts about defeaters.
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Following “Estzer’s suggestion”:http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/26/map-of-ct-readers/ I have created a Frappr map for TAR readers.

bq. “Where are the TAR readers”:http://www.frappr.com/thoughtsargumentsandrants

Click on that link and (a) you’ll have a chance to see where some of the readers are and (b) add yourself. At first I imagine it will be a fairly slim map, but I would like to see where the readers are. Note that although the map doesn’t show all of the US at first, you can scroll around fairly easily to see everyone.

I was thinking of writing up some kind of reply to “Scott Soames’s reply”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/replies/Rep_Weatherson.doc to my reply to his book. But the threat of an infinite regress was looming, and I thought it would be more fun to ruminate on his title: “What we Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then”. Because there are some fun puzzles about philosophical knowledge that the end of Soames’s book brings up.
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This is basically a request for help directed to people who know more set/class theory than I do. The issue is what we should say about Lewis’s theory of properties given his own comments in “Tensing the Copula” and Andy Egan’s comments in “Second-Order Predication and the Metaphysics of Properties”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/twoop.ajp.pdf.
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When setting up my “Lewis blog”:http://lewisblog.weatherson.org, I should have noted that there’s already a very good weblog devoted largely to David Lewis’s philosophy, namely “Wo’s weblog”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/. Wo himself left a very clever suggestion on my Lewis blog for how to solve the puzzle about defining theoretical terms I wrote about yesterday. I think that he nicely solves the problem I thought I’d found for Lewis.

Barry Loewer wrote in to tell me about a summer course that is being run next July in Budapest on “Descrying the World in Physics”:http://www.ceu.hu/sun/SUN_2006/brief_course_descriptions.htm#Philosophy%20and%20Physics. It features Barry, David Albert, Tim Maudlin, Katalin Balog Carl Hoefer and David Papineau. It looks extremely interesting, and you get to spend time in Budapest while attending it. Here’s a brief description.

bq. There is a tradition within the history of physics that proposes that our world may have a complete fundamental physical theory. The course will examine this tradition and especially its prospects in view of foundational issues raised by quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. We will be especially interested in the problem of “descrying” (that is locating and explaining) various features of the macroscopic world, especially the special sciences and features of human mentality and agency within the ontology and laws of fundamental physics.

Some of the time, perhaps most of the time, I think this is the single most important philosophical problem.

Finally, two more links to papers on Scott Soames’s book.

bq. “Mark Sainsbury’s commentary”:http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.woa/wa/SainsburySoamesVol1.pdf.pdf-zip.zip?a=downloadFile&user=marksainsbury&path=.Public/Marks%20pubs/SainsburySoamesVol1.pdf
“Scott Soames’s reply to my commentary”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/replies/Rep_Weatherson.doc

Over at “The Garden of Forking Paths”:http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/ Neil Levy “has a nice counterexample to van Inwagen’s Belief in Ability Thesis”:http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2005/10/a_counterexampl.html.
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Over at the new “Fake Barn Country”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/philosophy/ (now with _real_ fake barns!) Jonathan Ichikawa “argues against functionalism about belief”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/philosophy/2005/10/against_beliefdesire_functiona.html. I’m always up for defening functionalism, so I want to resist.
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For those of you who like slightly longer than usual conferences, the Vienna Circle runs two week summer institutes every year. Next year’s features ANU’s own Geoffrey Brennan, along with Hartmut Kliemt, on philosophy and economics. Details “here”:http://www.univie.ac.at/ivc/VISU/.

After some technical glitches came up, I moved the Lewis blog to a new site. The new address is:

bq. “http://lewisblog.weatherson.org”:http://lewisblog.weatherson.org

That address is still propagating through the internet, so if it doesn’t work for the next few hours, don’t panic!

I’ve also moved and improved the RSS feed.

bq. “RSS Feed for Lewis Blog”:http://lewisblog.weatherson.org/index.rdf

It should now have full entries in the RSS feed.

I realised while doing this that I might now have full entries in the RSS feed enabled for TAR. If anyone is reading this using an RSS reader and has noticed that they aren’t getting full entries (not that I use extended entries on TAR very often) could you let me know and I’ll try and fix the problem. For example, this entry should have a Lewis quote at the end. If it doesn’t, you aren’t seeing the full entry.
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