(Guest Post by “Amie Thomasson”:http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/thomasson/index.htm.)

In Ordinary Objects, (OUP 2007) I argue—based on general considerations about reference and existence claims, as well as particular claims about the semantics of ‘object’—that there are problems with trying to formulate ‘deep’ ontological debates, considered as debates about what things or objects exist.

In his recent (5/21/08) NDPR review, Terry Horgan raises what he calls a “daunting regress problem” for the view about reference this argument is supposed to be based on:

bq. …if every singular or general term of our language that successfully refers is governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions that deploy some presupposed category or categories, then terms referring to those very categories must themselves be governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions that deploy some further, yet more general, presupposed category or categories — and so on, ad infinitum. But such an infinite regress of categories, with each category governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions involving yet more general categories, would seem to leave all the terms in our language without reference-grounding

Since many people have emailed me wondering how I reply, I wanted to post a brief response—many thanks to Brian for letting me post it here.

In fact, it’s not a reply so much as a clarification that is needed, since the ‘regress problem’ is based on a misunderstanding of my position. My view isn’t that, for any term to refer, it must be associated with a more general category or sort (or that, as Horgan puts it, that ‘any meaningful existence claim involves implicit restriction of the quantifier by some sortal that is more general than any predicate deployed in the claim itself’). My point was that the reference of nominative terms is only determinate to the extent that they’re associated with application conditions (and co-application conditions), and existence questions are to be addressed by determining whether the application conditions are fulfilled. The conditions might come via association with some fairly high-level category (e.g. of ‘dog’ with ‘animal’), but there’s no requirement that there always be a more general one (‘animal’, e.g., may just have its own application conditions).

The problem I raise in _Ordinary Objects_ for posing ‘deep ontological’ questions such as ‘how many things/objects there are’ is not (as Horgan seems to interpret it) that ‘thing’ and ‘object’ are highest categories (so that we can’t associate them with a higher one). Instead, the problem is that on the serious ontologist’s use, ‘thing’ and ‘object’ aren’t proper sortal or categorial terms at all—they don’t come with application and coapplication conditions that could make existence questions posed using them answerable. (If they are used in ways that do come with application and coapplication conditions, ontological disputes posed using these terms turn out to be merely verbal).

I hope readers of the review will also look back to the argument in the book&0150;while there might be problems to find there, the ‘regress problem’ isn’t one of them, since it rests on a misunderstanding of the argument.

I’m currently in St Andrews at the start of my (annual) visiting fellowship here. Due to a combination of spotty email access, travelling a bit, and some pressing deadlines, I’ve been behind on answering email, maintaining this blog (sorry for those whose comments sat in moderation for so long) and writing here. I hope now that things have settled down a bit, at least the first two of those three will be dealt with on a regular basis.

It’s interesting to see who does, and doesn’t, get covered in any detail on Wikipedia. To take some important Sydney-based examples, compare the entries for “David Armstrong”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Malet_Armstrong, “John Mackie”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Mackie, and “David Stove”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stove. I doubt even Stove would have claimed he was ten times more important than Mackie and Armstrong combined, yet for some reason his entry is ten times the length of theirs put together. It would be worthwhile for someone noble to sit down and extend the Mackie and Armstrong entries, to say nothing of many other worthwhile philosophers.

I was in Barnes and Noble the other day flicking through the new books, and I saw this book by a local religious figure, Timothy Keller called “The Reason for God”:http://books.google.com/books?id=OJqcGAAACAAJ&dq=Keller+the+reason+for+God&ei=A5AwSP-hL4y6ygS77ZjLAw. It’s meant to be a response to all sorts of arguments for religious scepticism. I was only skimming, as you do in bookstores, and most of the points seemed fairly familiar, but I was struck by the following short passage on arguments from disagreement.

bq. The noted religion scholar John Hick has written that once you become aware that there are many other equally intelligent and good people in the world who hold differente beliefs from you and that you will not be able to convince them otherwise, then it is arrogant for you to continue to try to convert them or to hold your view to be the superior truth.

bq. Once again there is an inherent contradiction. Most people in the world don’t hold to John Hick’s view that all religions are equally valid, and many of them are equallty good and intelligent as he is, and unlikely to change their views. This would make the statement “all religious claims to have a better view of things are arrogant and wrong” to be, on its own terms, arrogant and wrong.

This seems related to my argument against Equal Weight (EW) views on disagreement, views that say you should give equal weight to your own judgment and the judgment of epistemic peers. I argue in “this unpublished note”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DaD.pdf that such views are self-defeating, because given the fact that not everyone you should regard as an epistemic peer has the EW view, holding it implies that you shouldn’t hold it. So I was worried I’d been gazumped in print.

On closer reading this seems not to be the case. I was deriving a problem by applying EW to an epistemic principle. Keller seems to be making one of the following two arguments, the first of which seems pretty bad to me, the second a little better.

The first argument seems to be that since most people don’t have some kind of ‘balanced’ view about religion, assigning some credence to different theistic views and some credence to atheistic views, taking others’ judgment seriously requires that you don’t do this either. But I don’t think this is plausible as a refutation. People who put forward the EW position are well aware that they might end up with a position different, at least in its credal weighting, to everyone else, and I don’t see why the fact that they do so is an objection.

The second argument, and this is more interesting, seems to be that we get an odd result if we apply the EW principle itself to the position that lots of other folks, theists and atheists alike, are our epistemic peers. You only get an argument for religious agnositicism from EW if you assume that lots of other people, both theists and atheists, are your peers. But those other people don’t seem to regard you (the agnostic) as an epistemic peer in the relevant sense. So by EW you should not give full credence to the assumption that they are peers.

This does seem like an interesting point to me. It isn’t at all obvious whether it is possible to use EW to derive any interesting agnostic conclusions without some strong assumptions about peerhood. And it isn’t clear that holding on to those assumptions is consistent with EW. So it isn’t clear what the real world consequences of EW exactly are.

Perhaps Keller goes too far in saying, given the reasons he adduces, that EW is inconsistent. But he might have raised an interesting kind of self-defeat challenge.

I just uploaded a very drafty version of a short paper I’m working on for a workshop in Edinburgh on scepticism.

bq. “Moderate Rationalism and Bayesian Scepticism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/MRaBS.pdf

The paper is an argument against any theorist who holds (a) that we can know substantive facts about the nature of epistemic justification a priori, but (b) we can’t know deeply contingent truths a priori. The example used in the paper is someone who holds that we can know a priori that process reliabilism is the right theory of epistemic justification, but who also holds that there is no deeply contingent a priori. The argument is that the (by now familiar) Bayesian objection to dogmatism, although not a good objection to dogmatism, is a good objection to such a view.

The paper is extremely choppy right now, and hopefully I’ll flesh out some of the arguments. But I thought it was worth posting the very drafty version in case it doesn’t get improved before the workshop!

I only recently noticed that the version of WordPress that I’m running doesn’t automatically adjust for daylight savings. So some posts might have seemed to appear at a time other than they were written. I’ve adjusted it now, and the time zone on posts should be U.S. Eastern Daylight Time.

As you may have noticed, I’m trying to have my posts appear once a day at midday. Sometimes these are fairly trivial posts (like this one) but hopefully we’ll have some content some of the time. Other bloggers here will keep on posting whenever (and whatever) they like. Thanks to the magic of being able to schedule posts in advance, this will hopefully mean that the blog keeps on ticking along even when other things are taking up lots of time, and I can’t personally be on the blog.

Here’s a little argument that was inspired by some things Williamson says in chapter 3 of “The Philosophy of Philosophy”. It’s not at all the way Williamson intended his arguments to be used I guess.

1. Any logical truth is true in virtue of meaning facts alone.
2. _Timothy Williamson is a philosopher_ is not true in virtue of meaning facts alone.
3. Any disjunction with exactly one true disjunct is true in virtue of whatever the true disjunct is true in virtue of.
4. So, _Timothy Williamson is a philosopher or Timothy Williamson is not a philosopher_ is not a logical truth.

The premises could use being tidied up a little bit, but I think there’s something close to this in Williamson. Of course, he rejects (4), so he’s more interested in the argument from (2), (3) and the negation of (4) to the negation of (1). (Not that he would be quite as cavalier in the formulation of the argument as I’ve been.) Still, I think it’s a pretty interesting argument this way.

When I first saw this in Williamson, I thought, wow there’s a nice argument against the law of excluded middle. But now I’m worried that a structurally similar argument could, in principle, be run against the law of non-contradiction. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out the best way such an argument would go. I’m leaving it as an exercise in part because I’m not quite happy with any of my attempts, and in part because I’m too lazy. But unless I’m confident that no such argument could be used to reject LNC, I’m not going to be using this argument against LEM. And as of now, I’m certainly not confident of that.

Great news for Rutgers. Andy Egan has accepted a tenured position in the philosophy department, starting in Fall 2009. As well as making Rutgers stronger in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics etc etc, it will be a lot of fun to have Andy around the area. Good times for TAR, for Rutgers, for NY area philosophy, and, we hope, for Andy!