Bleg and Banff

First a bleg. Those of you who read over there may have noticed that I haven’t posted at my other blog in a few weeks. At first it was just the usual not having the right combination of time and ideas, but recently the software has given me trouble again, and now doesn’t believe that there’s a blog there for me to edit. (Fortunately it’s still displaying all the old posts.) So I’m planning on moving away from MovableType. But since I can’t log in to export the old posts, I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to extract them efficiently so I can host them on different software, possibly on a different site. (I lost control of antimeta.org about a year ago when I switched hosting companies, and they seem to have accidentally renewed the registration, so I may have to change domain names again.)
Anyway, I was just in Banff for probably the most blogged-about conference I’ve ever been to. I count nine posts between , Gillian, and Richard, as well as two mentions on Certain Doubts. Also, I believe Aldo Antonelli got a lot of good pictures, including one of Gillian and me that should appear in the upper-left corner here at some point after I get a copy from either him or Richard Zach.
I found it to be a great workshop, and I’m very glad that Richard invited me! Despite the very broad “focus” on mathematical methods in any area of philosophy, there were some very interesting series of talks that gave some coherent threads. For instance, theories of truth were the focus of the survey by JC Beall and Michael Glanzberg, as well as more specific talks by Volker Halbach, Jeff Ketland, Sol Feferman, and Greg Restall. And a variety of different semantics for modal logics (especially quantified and non-classical) were discussed by Marcus Kracht, Steve Awodey, Eric Pacuit, Greg Restall, and Graham Priest. There were also two interesting proposals, by Delia Graff Fara and Kai Wehmeier, suggesting that identity as a relation doesn’t play quite the role we think it does, the former pointing out that for a lot of purposes (especially modal and temporal ones) we can’t use strict identity, but rather some “same F as” relation; the latter arguing that identity shouldn’t even be treated as a relation in logic at all!

Given my experiences at FEW (abstract deadline today if you want to submit!) I was surprised by a relative lack of talks on probability (basically only Branden Fitelson and Tim Williamson, and one fourth of Hannes Leitgeb’s virtuoso four talks in one hour performance). But there’s always got to be some trade-off. Anyway, I had lots of productive conversations (some while cross-country skiing) that will shape my dissertation, some papers I’ve been working on, and almost certainly some future blogposts either here or wherever I get my other blog working once I can transfer the old posts.