One other suggestion that came up over dinner in Barcelona was that we should be doing something to create online versions of important books of the last few decades that have fallen out of print. The classic example of this is “Science without Numbers”, but Frank Jackson’s “Conditionals” also counts. (In fact both the book he wrote with that title and the book he edited with that title probably count.)

What would need to happen to create online versions of these books? I think we need four steps.

1. The legalities of publishing the books online would have to be sorted out. The most important of these of course is that the author must want to have an online version of their book created. But it would also be important to be sure that the copyright issues were clear – the book would have to be out of print long enough that the rights to it had reverted to the author. (This might be more complicated with modern print-on-demand technology; that a book is not in stock anywhere doesn’t mean it is technically no longer in print.)
2. The text of the book would have to be imported to an electronic version. In some cases the author might have such a version. But this shouldn’t be too hard with modern OCR software.
3. A professional looking version of the book woudl have to be created. Given the mad skills that many philosophers have with TeX, this shouldn’t be too hard with a sufficient budget. (I’ve been particularly impressed with the work that Anders Schoubye has done, for example, but there are plenty of contenders.)
4. A hosting site for the books would have to be created that was reasonably permanent. Ideally, that would mean the hosting would be done through a major university library. The obvious candidates are the libraries or institutions that currently host major online journals, such as “Philosophers Imprint”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/ or “Semantics and Pragmatics”:http://semprag.org/. Certainly it would be no good to have them hosted on a personal website like this one, but maybe a major department could do it. Setting up something that was reliably stable would I think be a big challenge.

Unless I’m missing something, those are the main steps that would be needed. And they don’t seem unmanageable. I’m no expert though on copyright law, so I might be quite wrong about how easy it would be for authors to get the right to republish their out of print books. And of course authors might not want to republish electronically. But I was wondering whether people thought this would be a good project to investigate, and if so, which books would be candidates for republishing?

I really enjoyed the Vagueness and Metaphysics workshop in Barcelona. I learned a lot from all the papers, and it got me interested in working on these topics in much more detail. Maybe I’ll even revive the idea of a writing a short book on vagueness, somehow melding “stuff”:http://brian.weatherson.org/manymany.PDF “from”:http://brian.weatherson.org/ttt.pdf “these”:http://brian.weatherson.org/vai.pdf “five”:http://brian.weatherson.org/Ch_8.pdf “papers”:http://brian.weatherson.org/VEatPoM.pdf. But first I wanted to touch on a point Robbie Williams made there.

In his “Truth and Paradox”:http://www.amazon.com/Truth-Paradox-Solving-Tim-Maudlin/dp/0199203911, Tim Maudlin argues that when we are dealing with ungrounded claims like the Liar, the norms of assertion do not include truth. Indeed, it is possible to assert the Liar (i.e., that the Liar is not true), even though it’s not true (and not assertable) that the Liar is not true. Robbie’s idea (I believe closely based on Tim’s) is that in ‘difficult’ areas, such as when we’re dealing with future contingents, vagueness, or the paradoxes, we should be looking for ‘local’ norms of assertion, not ‘global’ norms of assertion. A global norm is something like “Assert only what you know”, or “Assert only what is true”. A local norm might be something like “Assert a future contingent only if you know it”, or “Assert a vague sentence only if it is not determinately false”.

I’m not sure whether I agree with all these claims. I’d hoped to sit down with Tim’s book to read it more carefully, but sadly the Rutgers library doesn’t seem to stock it. (This is a little appalling – it’s an OUP book published by a Rutgers faculty member! Maybe I’ll head up to 42nd Street later this week and work in the public library for a day; they do have the book in stock.) But I do think they are interesting, and worth taking seriously. And that’s exactly what hasn’t happened in the existing norms of assertion literature. As far as I can tell, more or less no one in that literature cites Tim’s book at all, or for that matter worries about any of the paradoxes.

That’s bad, because I think there’s a fairly compelling argument that the knowledge norm can’t survive the paradoxes, even if a paradox-based argument against the truth norm succeeds. Consider (1).

(1) Brian does not know (1).

Assume I know (1). Then by the very plausible principle: Ksp → p, it follows that I don’t know (1). Contradiction. So I don’t know (1).

That argument looks perfectly sound. It certainly doesn’t look like I violated any norms of assertion in presenting it. But the last sentence is one that, as we just proved, I don’t know. So it’s perfectly OK to assert some things one does not know.

I’ve mentioned before that my outlook on a lot of philosophical questions has been changed by “Kevin Klement’s Compass papers”:http://people.umass.edu/klement/works.html on Russell’s paradox and Russell’s reactions to them. I think I might have to write up a short paper on the number of areas of contemporary philosophy where there has been insufficient attention paid to the paradoxes, with norms of assertion being one of the case studies.