“Blome-Tillmann”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quee1101/papers/mbt_mate.pdf (PDF) also aims to counter an objection Jason Stanley raises to Lewisian contextualism. The objection turns on part of the picture of how so-called ‘quantifier domain restriction’ works that Jason worked out with Zoltán Szabó. Often when we say All Fs are Gs, we really mean All C Fs are Gs, where C is a contextually specified property. So when I say Every student passed, that utterance might express the proposition that Every student in my class passed.

Now there’s a question about what happens when sentences like All Fs are Gs are embedded in various contexts. Quantifier embeddings tend to allow for certain kinds of ambiguity. For instance, when we have a sentence like If p were true, all Fs would be G, that could express either of the following two propositions. (We’re ignoring context sensitivity for now, but we’ll return to it in a second.)

• If _p_ were true, then everything that would be _F_ would also be _G_.
• If _p_ were true, then everything that’s actually _F_ would be _G_.

We naturally interpret (1) the first way, and (2) the second way.

(1) If I had won the last Presidential election, everyone who voted for me would regret it by now.
(2) If Hilary Clinton had been the Democratic nominee, everyone who voted for Barack Obama would have voted for her.

Given this, you might expect that we could get a similar ambiguity with _C_. That is, when you have a quantifier that’s tacitly restricted by _C_, you might expect that you could interpret a sentence like If p were true, all Fs would be G in either of these two ways. (In each of these interpretations, I’ve left _F_ ambiguous; so these are just partial disambiguations.)

• If _p_ were true, then every _F_ that would be _C_ would also be _G_.
• If _p_ were true, then every _F_ that is actually _C_ would be _G_.

Surprisingly, you can’t get the second of these readings. That’s something Jason and Zoltán argue for, and that Jason also argues for in _Knowledge and Practical Interests_. He also argues that to complete a contextualist explanation of sceptical intuitions, you need the second of these readings.

Blome-Tillmann accepts the second of these premises, i.e. that the contextualist needs both kinds of readings, but thinks the first premise is false, i.e. he thinks both readings are available. He thinks he has examples that show you can get the kind of reading Jason denies is possible. But I don’t think his examples show any such thing. Here are the examples he gives.

(5) If there were no philosophers, then the philosophers doing research in the field of applied ethics would be missed most painfully by the public.
(6) If there were no beer, everybody drinking beer on a regular basis would be much healthier.
(7) If I suddenly were the only person alive, I would miss the Frege scholars most.

These are all sentences of (more or less) the form If p were true, all Fs would be G, and they should all be interpreted a la our disambiguation above. That is, they should be interpreted as quantifying over actual _F_s, not things that would be _F_ if _p_ were true. But the existence of such sentences is *completely irrelevant* to the issue Jason is raising. The question isn’t whether there is an ambiguity in _F_, it is whether there is an ambiguity in _C_. And nothing Blome-Tillmann raises suggests Jason’s claim that there is no ambiguity in that position is wrong. So I don’t think his defence of the contextualist account of embedded knowledge ascriptions works.

I suspect the situation for the contextualist is actually a little worse than the above discussion suggests. I think (though I’m not sure I’ve got the dialectic right at this point) that the contextualist needs a reading of If p were true, all Fs would be G where it means:

• If _p_ were true, every actual _C_ that would be _F_ would also be _G_.

The reason I think the contextualist needs that is that the contextualist, or at least the contextualist that Blome-Tillmann is defending analyses S knows that p as Every ~p possibility is ruled out by S’s evidence, and then insists that there is a contextual domain restriction on this, so it means something like Every ~p possibility (that I’m not properly ignoring) is ruled out by S’s evidence. They also want to accept that in a context where:

• I’m engaged in sceptical doubts;
• there is beer in the fridge
• I’ve forgotten what’s in the fridge; and
• I’ve got normal vision, so if I check the fridge I’ll see what’s in it

then (3) is still intutively false since we aren’t actually ignoring Cartesian doubts.

(3) If I were to look in the fridge and ignore Cartesian doubts, then I’d know there is beer in the fridge.

But the only way to get that to come out false, and false for the right reasons, is to fix on our actual quantifier domain restriction, but look at worlds that would be ruled out with the counterfactually available evidence. And I don’t see any reason to think that’s a possible disambiguation of embedded quantifiers.

George and Ringo both have $6000 in their bank accounts. They both are thinking about buying a new computer, which would cost $2000. Both of them also have rent due tomorrow, and they won’t get any more money before then. George lives in New York, so his rent is $5000. Ringo lives in Syracuse, so his rent is $1000. Clearly, (1) and (2) are true.

(1) Ringo has enough money to buy the computer.
(2) Ringo can afford the computer.

And I think (3) is true as well, though (4) is less clearly true.

(3) George has enough money to buy the computer.
(4) George can afford the computer.

But I want to focus for now on (3). It is a bad idea for George to buy the computer; he won’t be able to pay his rent. But he has enough money to do so; the computer costs $2000, and he has $6000 in the bank. So (3) is true. Admittedly there are things close to (3) that aren’t true. He hasn’t got enough money to buy the computer and pay his rent. You might say that he hasn’t got enough money to buy the computer given his other financial obligations. But none of this undermines (3).

The point of this little story is to respond to an argument Michael Blome-Tillmann makes in “a paper”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quee1101/papers/mbt_mate.pdf attacking interest-relative invariantism (IRI). (He calls IRI ‘SSI’, which I think is unfortunate, since everyone agrees that knowledge is subject-sensitive. No one thinks S knows that p entails T knows that p.) Here is one of the arguments he makes.

Suppose that John and Paul have exactly the same evidence, while John is in a low-stakes situation towards _p_ and Paul in a high-stakes situation towards _p_. Bearing in mind that SSI is the view that whether one knows _p_ depends on one’s practical situation, SSI entails that one can truly assert:

(11) John and Paul have exactly the same evidence for _p_, but only John has enough evidence to know p, Paul doesn’t.

And this is meant to be a problem, because (11) is intuitively false.

But SSI doesn’t entail any such thing. Paul does have enough evidence to know that _p_, just like George has enough money to buy the computer. Paul can’t know that _p_, just like George can’t buy the computer, because of their practical situations. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have enough evidence to know it. So there isn’t a problem for SSI here.

In a footnote attached to this, Blome-Tillmann tries to reformulate the argument.

I take it that having enough evidence to ‘know _p_’ in _C_ just means having evidence such that one is in a position to ‘know _p_’ in _C_, rather than having evidence such that one ‘knows p‘. Thus, another way to formulate (11) would be as follows: ‘John and Paul have exactly the same evidence for _p_, but only John is in a position to know _p_, Paul isn’t.’

The ‘reformulation’ is obviously bad, since having enough evidence to know _p_ isn’t the same as being in a position to know it, any more than having enough money to buy the computer puts George in a position to buy it. But might there be a different problem for SSI here?

No; the reformulated argument isn’t a problem because the conclusion is not unacceptable. Indeed, the conclusion is a kind of conjunction that is made true all the time, on relatively uncontentious theories of evidence. Consider this example.

Mick and Keith both have evidence _E_, which is strong inductive evidence for _p_. And _p_ in fact is true, just as _E_ would suggest. If Keith were to conclude _p_ on the basis of _E_, that would be knowledge. But Mick has been taking some philosophy classes. And as luck would have it, he has been taking classes from a smart Popperian, who has convinced him that induction is not a source of knowledge. Now if Mick concluded _p_ on the basis of _E_, this would not be knowledge, because his Popperian beliefs would constitute a doxastic defeater. So Mick and Keith have exactly the same evidence for _p_, but only Keith is in a position to know _p_, Mick isn’t.

I think it’s interesting to think about ‘afford’ in this context, since it seems very likely that some kind of IRI analysis of ‘afford’ will be true. We don’t want to have any kind of contextualism about ‘afford’, at least nothing like modern day epistemic contextualism. It would be crazy to say that if _my_ rent is $5000, and it is due tomorrow, then (2) is false, because after all, in my context someone with Ringo’s money couldn’t buy the computer and meet their financial obligations. If I’m right that ‘afford’ is interest-relative, then looking at the way ‘afford’ patterns should provide some useful evidence for or against IRI.

I converted the bibliography in my “SEP entry on David Lewis”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/ to BibTex format, and along the way fixed up some errors. I think this is the most complete and accurate Lewis bibliography in existence, but any suggestions for how to make it more accurate would be appreciated.

• David Lewis bibliography (BibTex)

I also made a printout of the bibliography. I couldn’t get it sorted by year as I wanted. (I tried the ‘plainyr’ package, but it messed up the location of books in the sort order.) So it’s sorted by first author, which is a little quirky. Anyway, in case it is helpful to anyone who wants to check it over, here it is.

• David Lewis bibliography (PDF)

The BibTex file is based on a download from the wonderful “PhilPapers”:http://philpapers.org website, though I’ve made a number of additions to it. But most of the issue numbers, for instance, are taken from the PhilPapers download, and many would have been unobtainable without that start.

UPDATE: Duncan Watson told me that there are some letters from David Lewis published in The Law of Non-Contradiction. I’ve included them (at his suggestion) as ”Letters to Priest and Beall” in the bibliography.

UPDATE 2 (Sept 2, 11am): I’ve updated the files to include the omissions pointed out by Wo in the comments. Thanks to Wo for spotting all those!

I’m thinking of writing something about ontological indeterminacy and the continuum hypothesis, and this post is basically a request for any background stuff I should know about.

Here are some of the questions I’m interested in. Assume that we have a world with continuum many atoms. One might wonder whether there are some atoms in that world such that (a) there are uncountably many of them, and (b) there are fewer of them than there are atoms in the world. Here’s a proposed answer to that question: It is metaphysically indeterminate. There is, in some deep sense, no fact of the matter about whether there are, or are not, such atoms.

I don’t much like metaphysical indeterminacy, so I don’t much like that answer. But I’m not sure there’s an obvious and clear counterargument to it. Hopefully when I start seriously thinking/reading about this, I’ll come up with a clear counterargument! Any suggestions for where I should start such reading would be much appreciated.

Here are two related questions.

Could it be contingent whether there are such atoms as described above? That is, might there be two worlds, alike in their distribution of atoms (and for that matter in the properties those atoms have) but unlike in terms of which pluralities of atoms exist?

If we assume unrestricted composition, we can reask the last two questions about objects. So the first question becomes, could it be indeterminate whether there is an object with uncountably many, but fewer than continuum many, atomic parts? And the second becomes, could it be contingent whether there is an object with uncountably many, but fewer than continuum many, atomic parts?

On a slightly different note, there’s another question about vagueness and composition that kicks in at the ‘top’ of the set-theoretic hierarchy.

Lewis believed that the union of some sets, if it existed, was their fusion. He also believed in unrestricted composition. Since it isn’t always true that some sets have a union, he inferred that there are proper classes that are not sets, and which are the fusions of sets that lack a union.

Here’s an alternative position to Lewis’s. Set-theoretic union just is fusion, as applied to sets. If some sets have a union, that’s their fusion. If they don’t have a union, they don’t have a fusion. I think the alternative position has some attraction (it lets us have an unrestricted version of the axiom of pairing, for instance, and it gives us a closer connection between mereology and set theory), but for now I’m just interested in some questions about this position, not about its truth.

So the same two questions arise. Could it be indeterminate whether Lewis’s position, or this alternative position, is correct? And could it be contingent whether Lewis’s position, or this alternative position, is correct? Any readers have advice on where I should look for guidance?

Last weekend this site was hacked into by spammers and porn purveyors. There wasn’t a lot of front-end damage, but it left a lot of mess behind the scenes, so I’ve been spending a bit of time cleaning up. The main problem was that every page now had a massive amount of hidden text in the footer, linking to more nefarious sites. This upset the Googlebot, so there’s a danger this site will drop off Google for a while while I confirm that the site is clean. So if you’re searching for TAR on Google, it might not always show up. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince Google soon that all is well, and we won’t see an interruption of service. In the meantime, some other news from the site.

• While cleaning everything up, I seem to have disabled new registration for the site. I’ve fixed that now, so it’s possible to register and comment on posts. Sorry for the inconvenience this caused.
• I’ve disabled the Twitter feed in the sidebar. That’s partially because we weren’t using it much, and partially because I’m not sure whether it was related to the security failure that led to the hacking.
• On the other hand, several TAR writers still have their own Twitter feeds. For example, mine is @bweatherson. In the future, any requests for announcements on this blog will be sent to the Twitter feed instead, unless I’m personally involved with the project being announced. (E.g., it’s a conference I’m speaking at.) So for instance there’s now an announcement about the Conditionals and Conditionalisation conference here. I think Twitter is a much more suitable platform for simple links elsewhere than the blog. And I don’t know why people ever want an announcement that’s more than a link – anything worth publicising is worth making a webpage for.
• I’ve added little avatars to the comments to make them look more amusing. Right now you get a randomly generated monster. If you’d like to replace that with some other picture, you just need to get an account at Gravatar that’s linked to the same email account as your account here. Right now I have a picture of me looking lost in Scotland, but I might replace that soon with something more NewYorkeseque.

At her paper at the Rocky Mountain ethics conference, Judith Jarvis Thomson discussed various accounts of the metaphysics of harm. Somewhat surprisingly, she accepted the following equivalence.

• A harms B iff A causes B to suffer a harm.

Even more surprisingly, she defended this by saying it was a general claim about how causal verbs work. But this isn’t at all how causal words work. Compare this claim.

• A breaks B’s window iff A causes B’s window to be broken.

Here’s a counterexample to that. A is a speaker at a philosophy conference. She makes an outrageous claim about the semantics of causal verb. This so upsets C that he storms out of the room, and in his anger punches the window of B’s car. The window breaks. Now it seems clear that A has caused B’s window to be broken, with of course some help from C, but A didn’t break B’s window.

So I was thinking that the biconditional about harming and causing harms would also be false. And I was thinking that cases of indirect causation, like this one, would be examples of when they were false. But when I wrote up the case, it became less clear.

So question: In the case just described, where C breaks B’s window, does A harm B? It’s clear that A does cause B to suffer a harm. And if pushed I would say that A didn’t harm B – that only C harmed B. But my intuitions are nowhere near as clear as I hoped. What do you think?

There have been a lot of discussions of refereeing over at “Brian Leiter’s blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com over the last few weeks. I think many of these discussions suffer from a misapprehension of how refereeing works. In particular, many people are equating the time it takes for them to get a verdict on their paper with the amount of time it takes for a referee to write a report. This equation would work iff the following steps took zero time.

1. Processing a submission (i.e. entering it into the system, getting it ready for editors etc).
2. Deciding whether the paper was worth refereeing.
3. Choosing who should referee it.
4. Contacting that referee, and getting them to either agree to referee it, or decline to referee it, or alternatively waiting/re-emailing them enough to assume they’ve tacitly declined.
5. Repeating steps 3-4 ad nauseum until one has sufficient referees.
6. If a referee agrees to referee a paper, repeating steps 3-5 until one has a referee who will, eventually, referee the paper.
7. Reading the referee report and making a decision on the paper.
8. Contacting the author to inform them of that decision.

In most cases where I’ve been familiar with long long times from submission to decision, many of those steps have taken a very very long time. I’m hopeful that in the future the use of journal management software can improve steps 1, 4 and 8. But there will still be a lot of ways for things to fail other than for the person who referees the paper taking too long. Indeed, typically the person who writes the review the author gets is part of the solution to the long delays, not the central problem.

So while everyone else is talking about speeding up review times, I think the following three steps would make just as big a difference, if not more of a difference.

1. When someone asks you to referee a paper, reply more or less immediately.
2. If you decline, suggest alternative referees who can referee it, and who the editors will likely not have thought of. Junior faculty, or even trustworthy grad students, are excellent suggestions. Suggesting that Tim Williamson referee the paper on luminosity that you’re too busy to referee isn’t so helpful. If the paper is on a relatively specialised topic, this step is more or less essential, else the editors literally run out of people they know and trust who are experts on that topic.
3. Never, under any circumstances, fail to review a paper that you’ve agreed to review.

Journals which send copies of the paper along with requests to referee the paper make it much easier for potential reviewers to make an informed decision about whether to review, and hence help with point 3. I think this practice (which isn’t I think universal) should be much encouraged.

There’s another issue lurking around here that I think deserves discussion. Some journals have a blind initial review/selection of referees. Many, I believe, do not. Making this stage blind is *very* time-consuming. It requires that there be a staff member who handles all interactions between the author and the editor, and who can tell the editor whether the suggested referee is the author and/or too close to the author. Since most staff members do not work 24/7/365, and some have even be known to do things like get sick or go on annual vacation, this can introduce large delays into the system.

(It’s an important point here that many journals have precisely one staffer. A move to a system like Philosophy Compass has, where the administrative work is done at a publisher’s office, and there are people to spread the work around when one is on leave, helps remove these delays a lot. I think something important would be lost if the administration of all journals moved ‘off-campus’ like this, but it would smooth out some of the administrative bumps that I’ve noticed on-campus journals are suspectible to.)

If you don’t have blind initial screening by editors, and blind assignment of editors, these steps can be cut out, and staff time can be spent on other activities. (Such as dealing with complaints from subscribers, and fun stuff like that.) So I’m interested in knowing how important people think it is that papers be blinded from editors, and whether this is worth introducing delays (sometimes weeks long delays) into the system?

I guess the Twitter feed I tried to set up for TAR didn’t really work. But several TAR bloggers have their own feeds, including me. And I’ll be tweeting the BSPC conference all week. You can either follow my account, @bweatherson, or the #BSPC2009 tag. If anyone else at the conference wants to tweet about what’s happening, it might be useful to also use that tag.

My entry on “David Lewis”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/ is online at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

I owe thanks to many people for getting this article to the state it is currently in. The biggest debt of gratitude is to Ed Zalta and the staff at the SEP. They were (a) incredibly patient with the time it took me to write the article, and (b) incredibly helpful with all the mistakes I made along the way. I think I made more HTML errors than I knew existed at various points!

Thanks also to many people who read and suggested revisions to the content. At risk of forgetting someone, these include Steffi Lewis, Ishani Maitra, Daniel Nolan, Laurie Paul, Wolfgang Schwarz and Ted Sider. And, as I mention in the article, the whole article would have been impossible if not for the assistance I got from “Wo’s blog”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/ and “Daniel’s book”:http://www.amazon.com/David-Lewis-Philosophy-Daniel-Nolan/dp/0773529314.

That said, there are still many things that could be improved about the article. Hopefully many of these changes will get made in later revisions. The most pressing include:

• There are many typos! Zach Miller and Robbie Williams have already noted several for me, and I’m sure there are more.
• I was certain that I’d added something on Daniel Nolan’s response to the Forrest-Armstrong objection in section 6.2, but there isn’t anything in the finished version. I think this was a piece of bad version management on my part. I’ll correct that in the next version.
• I really intended to say something about “General Semantics” in the philosophy of language section, but couldn’t come up with a good paragraph length description of it. So rather than have the article get even later, I simply skipped it. This wasn’t a great result; I should say something about “General Semantics”. But I’m not sure how to summarise it, and its place in the literature, in a paragraph or so.

Despite that, I’m pretty happy with how the article turned out. I suspect it will be, by far, the most widely read thing I ever write. Thanks again to everyone who helped out along the way!

Well, actually, it’s a hair-dyed donkey, but “surprisingly close”:http://www.slate.com/id/2222991/.

bq. Yet Marah, with its broken-down bumper cars and a pit filled with sadly deflated balls, had its own not-quite-right feel—particularly the zebra. Standing near the back of its cage, facing away from the spectators, the animal kept its head tucked down. “It’s really a painted donkey,” admitted Mahmud Berghat, the director of Marah, when asked about the creature. Making a fake zebra isn’t easy—henna didn’t work and wood paint was deemed inhumane, so they finally settled on human hair dye. “We cut its hair short and then painted the stripes,” Berghat explained behind the closed door of his office.

Thanks to Sherri Roush for the link.