Three Updates

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I’m in St Andrews now, visiting Arche, and while it’s been a lot of fun, and very rewarding intellectually, it’s been hard work! I’d hoped it would be a relaxing break with lots of blogging, but that hasn’t quite worked out. Anyway, here are three things I’ve been working on.

  • I’ve updated “Deontology and Descartes’ Demon”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DDD.doc (Warning: Word Doc) to (a) take account of some objections that were made, and (b) get it into the right form for the Journal of Philosophy. The latter was hard work: they won’t let you use contractions and I can’t write without them! The former was more fun.
  • I’ve written five lectures on probability in philosophy – “1”:http://brian.weatherson.org/PL1.pdf, “2-3”:http://brian.weatherson.org/PL2.pdf, “4-5”:http://brian.weatherson.org/PL4.pdf, and given four of them. I don’t have all my books/papers here, so some of the references to what other people say was from memory. So if I’ve misrepresented you, my apologies in advance. (I mostly got around this shortcoming by not talking about particular people much at all, just making sweeping generalisations about what lots of people think. So there are a few things that could be given better citations.)
  • Various people (most notably Crispin Wright and David Chalmers) have been pressing me on one of the core assumptions in “Moderate Rationalism and Bayesian Scepticism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/MRaBS.pdf, namely that you can’t learn p by getting evidence that decreases its probability. I’d like to have a good response to their worries, and if I did so I’d be putting it here. The worries are specifically about cases where p is a disjunction, and the evidence raises the probability of one disjunct, but decreases the probability of the other. Hopefully soon I’ll have thought of something clever to say here, but for now I don’t have much to say of any use.

This week I’ll be at the “Language and Law”:http://www.csmn.uio.no/events/2008/lang_law.xml workshop at the University of Oslo, and I’m hoping to have lots of interesting things to report back from that.