In the spring I’ll be teaching a seminar on Lewis at Cornell. I’m hoping to write extensive lecture notes for each week and post them to the website, with the thought that the notes collectively will form a worthwhile extensive work on some core features of Lewis’s philosophy. As part of the process of doing this I’ve set up a sub-blog to record my draft lelcture notes, reading notes, and assorted Lewis thoughts.

bq. “Lewis Blog”:http://tar.weatherson.org/notes/
“RSS feed”:http://tar.weatherson.org/notes/index.rdf

I might cross post some stuff here, or perhaps link in the sidebar to posts there, but it would overwhelm TAR to have 2000 words a day of Lewisiana appearing. There are three kinds of posts there: drafts of the lecture notes (inc. perhaps final drafts), notes on particular papers, and assorted comments working out or defending something to be said in the other sections. There is one of each so far in the blog. There will be plenty of overlap between posts – the lecture notes may be cut and paste in part from other posts. But I’d be very interested in feedback people have. Hopefully there will be lots interesting appearing there – and I’ll have a course ready to run by the start of next term!

Just in case “anyone was confused”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/ask_a_philosoph.html, the following two sites are distinct.

“Ask a Philosopher”:http://go.to/ask-a-philosopher is a service run out of Sheffield that has been in operation for years. Its purpose is to solicit questions from the public of a broadly philosophical nature and have professional philosophers answer them.

“Ask Philosophers”:http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/ is a service run out of Amherst that has been in operation for weeks. Its purpose is to solicit questions from the public of a broadly philosophical nature and have professional philosophers answer them.

I was told by a former graduate student at a leading philosophy program that there is some professional tension between the sites. There certainly is a notable lack of linkage between the two sites, despite their apparently complementary aims. Anyway, feel free to peruse, or contribute to, either site.

In the “thread below”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004533.html on Michael Kremer’s review of Scott Soames’s history of the 20th century, Soames has left an interesting comment which I’d recommend readers look at. One thing I especially wanted to highlight is that he has posted his reply to _Philosophical Studies_ symposiumists on volume 1 on “his website”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/, which as “Dave”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/10/more_online_pap.html notes contains a large crop of papers. The reply is “here”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/replies/What_Hist_for.doc (Word). [Just as I wrote this I noticed Ian Proops’s comment that his paper is also online – it is “here”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~iproops/practice/ProopsonSoames3.pdf (PDF).]

Here are a few extended quotes from the introduction to Soames’s paper and the introduction to the response to Proops.

bq. I will begin by replying to the constructive, substantive criticism of Stoljar and Burgess. After that, I will take up the harsher criticism focused on matters of historical scholarship presented by Proops and Sainsbury. In addition to setting the historical record straight, I will locate the roots of the dispute in a conflict between the history-for-history’s-sake conception implicitly advocated by Proops and Sainsbury and my own philosophically and pedagogically motivated approach to the history of the subject. In doing so, I will articulate and defend the goals of philosophically oriented history, and use the resulting conception both to illuminate my discussions of individual philosophers, and to clarify how they contribute to what I take to be the leading achievements of the analytic tradition.

bq. …

bq. We now turn to less philosophically, and more historically, focused criticism – which, as I shall argue, raises fundamental questions about the proper aims of work done by philosophers, for philosophers, in the history of their subject. Ian Proops’s critique of my treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of Moore and Russell is of this sort. He beings with what he labels a conundrum – Did I take myself to be doing history of philosophy, and so to be making claims about what the philosophers said and meant, or was I merely using their writings pedagogically? Of course, I took myself to be doing both. The fact that Proops sees a chasm between these two aspects of the same enterprise is, in my opinion, indicative of a larger failure of perspective that informs his remarks. My task was to extract from the voluminous writings of the philosophers covered, done throughout their entire careers, those lessons that every analytic philosopher today, and every student, should be aware of. Doing this required making their major achievements and failures as clear and comprehensible as possible, but it did not require – or allow – following every twist and turn in the development of their thoughts. Nor did it mean, in every case, reproducing the exact route to a philosopher’s most important results, if simpler and more comprehensible routes were available that preserved the philosopher’s central insights.

bq. This is the strategy routinely used to introduce students to historical achievements in logic, like Gödel’s incompleteness and Tarski’s indefinability theorems. Our confidence in what constitutes progress underwrites our judgments of what was essential and what inessential in the texts of great logicians. The same is true in philosophy. It is because philosophy has progressed, and we know more now, that we can separate the essential from the inessential in presenting the contributions of a philosopher like Russell. That is the spirit in which I approach the task. The opposing spirit denies philosophical progress, or at best adopts a value-neutral stance, and as a result takes the historical enterprise to consist simply in elucidations of all the different strands of past philosophical thought, and identification of lines of influence. There are, of course, other less tendentious routes to this antiquarian conception of the history of philosophy, but they are beside the point. My aim was to present an historically accurate picture of the main lines of progress in the analytic tradition.

I’m mostly posting this here because I think it would be a useful topic to debate. I’m fairly sympathetic to the idea that we can write histories of philosophy that are useful for teaching the students what has been gained through philosophical work, and that this is worth doing even at the cost of eliding some details. As Soames notes in his reply to Sainsbury, in this kind of history, if a philosopher says “I’m pretty confident that p, but there are concerns about how p could be true in areas A, B and C that I’m not 100% sure how to address and can only gesture at D, E and F in response”, often the best way to summarise this in a thematic history book is as “p”. So I’m perfectly happy to grant Soames the appropriateness of his approach.

There is one thing I find rather puzzling though about this line of defence of his books. If the point is to “present an historically accurate picture of the main lines of progress in the analytic tradition”, one might have hoped for a little more _breadth_ of coverage. Soames spends a lot of his time in this response defending himself against the claim that he should have spent more time on the details of, especially, Russell’s views. But I think in many ways, especially given the stated aims, he should have spent quite a bit _less_ time on the authors he actually covered and covered quite a few _more_ philosophers.

Possibly for any century before the 20th, the best way to present its history would be to focus on the works of the greatest philosophers. But surely that’s not the way to present the 20th century. There were so many philosophers making so many contributions, be they positive or negative, that Soames’s almost exclusive focus on the greats ends up distorting the picture.

So, for example, we get a rather detailed study of _The Concept of Mind_, with some fairly trenchant criticisms. There’s a lot there that’s valuable. But wouldn’t the student have got a better guide to analytic progress with a chapter that started with a brief discussion of Ryle and his perceived errors, then went on to say how Smart, Armstrong and Lewis proposed theories that built on Ryle’s virtues while attempting in their own ways to correct the (quasi-)behaviourist excesses? Or instead of going over the back-and-forth between Austin and Ayer about sense data in quite so much detail, simply introduce their positions and their most important innovations and then discuss the most important contemporary work on either side of that debate?

We don’t, or at least I don’t, teach logical results by looking at the work of the original logicians. And much of the history of philosophy could be done the same way. We could, for instance, teach Godel’s completeness theorem by name-checking him and then working through the details of Henkin’s proof. And we can teach at least some aspects of history of philosophy the same way. But Soames sticks to the canonical writers. So we’re left, by necessity of space, with not quite enough _depth_ for a dedicated historical work on the authors covered, but without the breadth of coverage needed for a genuine survey of the important trends in the first full century of analytic philosophy.

Having said all that, this is probably as good a time as any to post my contribution to the other part of the _Philosophical Studies_ symposium. My job was to write on the Wittgenstein to Grice part of the book, and it’s here.

bq. “Doing Philosophy With Words”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dpww.pdf
(The link now works – thanks to Michael Kremer in comments.)

I should say that I now think there is a somewhat serious mistake in the second last sentence of the section on Ryle. I think I managed to totally muddle the story of the battle between the Cartesians and the materialists that Ryle closes _The Concept of Mind_ with, and so my appeal to that story in defending the claim that Ryle wasn’t as much of a behaviourist as Soames suggests is probably a blunder. The story still suggests that Ryle’s position is quite different from the simple behaviourism that Soames attributes to him, but it’s not the evidence for my interpretation that I say there. _C’est la vie_.

Given what I said above, I should stress that my complaint about Soames’s interpretation of Ryle isn’t that he simplified Ryle’s view. That’s a necessary evil of the kind of book he’s writing. It’s that by simplifying in the way he does, in the direction of behaviourism rather than dispositionalism, he’s blocked himself off from telling an interesting story that the well-informed student should know about the importance of Ryle to the development of modern functionalist theories of mind.

I was looking back over old Mathematical Olympiad questions, and I came across this question which seems to require very little mathematical insight as such to solve. It’s a very hard puzzle, but the skills needed to solve it aren’t that much different from the skills needed to solve the puzzles in the weekend newspapers. The puzzle is from day 1 of the 1989 Olympiad, and I’ve reworded it so as to make the terminology a little easier to follow.

Divide the numbers 1, 2, 3, …, 1988, 1989 into 117 sets of 17 numbers such that (a) each number appears in exactly one set and (b) the sum of the numbers in each set is the same.

For a solution, click here.

Richard Heck’s “PhOnline”:http://phonline.org/ now has “RSS feeds”:http://phonline.org/syndication.php so you can quickly keep touch with what people are adding to the site. Sadly not enough people are adding papers to the site. If you have online papers you should “register there”:http://phonline.org/register.php and add your papers to the database.

A while ago I posted a version of a paper attacking contextualism over the way it handles questions. Here is a much updated version of that paper.

bq. “Questioning Contextualism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/qc4.pdf

I have also updated my “papers page”:http://brian.weatherson.org/papers.html and my “CV”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cv.pdf (PDF).

In other news, “Fake Barn Country”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/philosophy/ has moved to an impressive looking new address, and David Chalmers has posted his definitive version of “The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism”:http://consc.net/papers/2dargument.html.

Also on NDPR, William Talbott reviews “David Christensen’s book on the place of logic”:http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=4181. Talbott approves of Christensen’s use of the preface paradox in anti-closure arguments.

bq. In what is surely the most entertaining example in the book (40-53, 101-105), Christensen asks us to imagine three historians, X, Y, and Z. X regards Y and Z as having a somewhat neurotic obsession with detail-checking, which makes their books more reliable than his on details, though none of their books has ever been completely error-free. X, Y, and Z have each published a new book recently. Here is Christensen’s summary of the case: “Professor X has expressed his firm beliefs that (1) every previous book in the field (including his own) has contained multiple errors; (2) he’s not as careful a scholar as Y or Z; and (3) the new books by Y and Z will be found to contain errors.” (45)

bq. What about his own book? Does X expect reviewers to find any errors in it? Given X’s opinions about Y and Z’s superior fact-checking and his confidence that even their books contain errors, even if X currently believes every statement in his book, Christensen thinks it is intuitively quite absurd to think that it could be rational for X to believe that his new book is error-free. But, of course, that belief is required by deductive cogency.

This all seems mistaken to me twice over.

First, it isn’t at all absurd to have people insist on the accuracy of what they write. Travel guides do it all the time. The other day I was watching a BBC show on travelling to Iran that started with something like “Everything in the show was accurate at the time of filming, but things may have changed in the interim.” It is a fact about academic books that they include modest prefaces. But that’s because you don’t have to believe what you say in academia – you just have to be defend it. My attitude towards my philosophical theories is a bit like my attitude towards my footy picks: they’re the best I can do, but I’m not going to stake very much on any of them. X is only required by deductive cogency to believe the conjunction of everything he writes if he believes everything in it, and if he’s a smart historian he shouldn’t.

Second, there’s a crucial scope ambiguity here that is distracting. Deductive cogency doesn’t require that I believe that every proposition with the property _is believed by Brian_ is also true. That only follows from deductive cogency _plus_ perfect knowledge of my own beliefs. Similarly, even if I believe every proposition in the book, I don’t have to believe it is mistake free unless I know _exactly_ what is in it. And if the example is at all realistic, that won’t be the case. What deductive cogency does require is that for every set of propositions I believe, I also believe their conjunction. I don’t really see an example here that tells against this.

But the real problem is the following.

bq. All of us find ourselves in fallibility paradoxes, when, for example, we believe that at least one of our memory beliefs is false, or when we simply believe that at least one of our beliefs is false. Think of how insufferable a person would be if, when there was a conflict of memories, she always insisted that other people’s memories were mistaken, never her own.

Deductive cogency is a constraint on _beliefs_, not _memories_. And it’s close to analytic that _everyone_ insists in a conflict of beliefs that their beliefs are correct and the other person’s are faulty. If they didn’t insist that _p_ is correct, they wouldn’t be _believing_ that _p_.

There is a point here about behaviour in debate, but the right lesson here is the one that the cogency advocates have been saying for years. In lots of everyday cases, there is good reason to fall back from believing that _p_ to believing that _Probably p_. That’s what I do when faced with someone who gives me good, and at the time unanswerable, reason to believe ~p, although I had previously believed _p_.

Over at NDPR, Michael Kremer has “a review of Scott Soames’s two volume history of 20th Century philosophy”:http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=4061. Here’s how it starts and ends.

bq. These volumes are certain to become the standard history of analytic philosophy, and with good reason: they are clearly written, carefully argued, densely packed books, by a leading contemporary philosopher. They will help to shape a generation’s conception of the history of their discipline. Yet, in spite of their many virtues, there is cause to worry in this fact. For they also have many flaws, organizational, historical, and interpretive. As a result, readers of Soames’s books may come away with a distorted and incomplete picture of the history of analytic philosophy.

bq. …

bq. I will end this review with a confession. As I read these books, I often found myself persuaded on one or another point, and I could not help admiring the clarity and power of the presentation. Yet I also experienced a growing feeling of irritation and frustration, slipping at times into anger. Perhaps this review displays too much residual irritation, frustration, and even anger. I hope that it also conveys some of the ground for these feelings. I do not want to dissuade anyone from reading these books. There is much to be gained from them. But they should be approached with caution. Soames recommends reading them in conjunction with the primary sources. (Vol. 1, xviii) He is right — the best advice I can offer is to do so, and then form your own opinions.

I can certainly sympathise, and I agree with the final advice. Soames does an excellent job of telling a story, perhaps _the_ story, of 20th century philosophy. Kremer argues that, like all good storytellers, Soames doesn’t always let the facts get in the way of a good story, so if you want to know _exactly_ what various philosophers said, you’ll have to read them yourself. But we don’t read historical works for the details, we have the primary sources for that. There’s still a lot to be learned from Soames’s overview, and from his perspective. Still, if you do care about the details of some views, it’s easy to get irritated at the way they get shoehorned into the story.

Zadie Smith wrote somewhere that one of the hard things about writing novels is that the characters have to carry off not only being John Smith, hard enough work in itself, but representing the decline and fall of western civilisation. The characters in Soames’s story have to carry off not only being Gilbert Ryle, but representing everything that is wrong with ordinary language philosophy and behaviourism. It’s a hard ask, and probably more than the real Gilbert Ryle could do. But it’s something anyone who wants to tell a story about the history of philosophy will have to ask of him. So maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on historical storytellers.

“Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_10/007244.php worries that advances in AI will lead humans to think we don’t have free will, and then we’ll pack up and go. As a compatibilist I don’t really see the problem, but maybe some “free will bloggers”:http://gfp.typepad.com can explain better what is going on.

I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but “Ask Philosophers”:http://www.askphilosophers.org/ is apparently a website where members of the public can send questions to philosophers and a crack team will provide answers. I for one would like to know where the semantics/pragmatics distinction is, but I suspect I won’t like their answer.

And “Sahotra Sarkar”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/sarkarlab/003288.html has posted info on next year’s Formal Epistemology Workshop, to be held at Berkeley from May 25-29.