Congratulations to “Clayton Littlejohn”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2008/05/good-news.html for getting his paper “The Externalist’s Demon”:http://people.smu.edu/clittle/Clayton%20Littlejohn%27s%20Homepage/Clayton%20Littlejohn%27s%20Homepage/work_files/extdemonweb.pdf accepted for publication. My own view on the new evil demon problem relies fairly heavily on what Clayton says in this paper, perhaps more heavily than I’ve properly acknowledged in the past, so I’m glad it’s coming out and I can give it its proper due.

I’ve turned some of my blog posts on propositional attitude reports and how they bear on issues about relativism/contextualism into a short paper, called “Attitudes and Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/AaR.pdf. It’s very drafty, and the references, thanks etc are barely started, let alone completed. But I hope it has some interesting points in it.

Comments more than welcome.

Consider the following case.

bq. S has generally reliable vision, but she is subject to a small but serious deception. When she is on a boat over salt water, she is prone to hallucinate objects in the distance. The hallucinations are quite convincing, and S has often formed false beliefs on this account. She does not know the cause of the hallucinations. In fact, she hasn’t even considered that it may be the salt in the salt water that is responsible for them. That’s too bad, because the salt is the cause of it; her vision, even at large distances, is well above average when she’s over fresh water.

bq. Today she is sailing on Lake Huron (a fresh water lake). She forms a visual representation of land in the distance, about 20 miles ahead. She checks on her map and sees (correctly) that the map does not record any land there. And she knows that this is the kind of thing she’s disposed to hallucinate when over sea water. But she decides to trust her eyes, and forms a firm belief that there is some land ahead of her, and that her map must be mistaken. Both of these beliefs are of course true, since her eyes are reliable in these circumstances, and her eyes are telling her that there is land there.

Let p be the proposition that there is land about 20 miles ahead of S. Consider the following four questions.

(1) Does S see that p?
(2) Does S know that p?
(3) Is p part of S’s evidence?
(4) Can S take p for granted in practical and theoretical deliberation, if this is a question of some importance to her?

My initial reaction is to say “Yes” to (1) and “No” to (4). Both of these seem like fairly secure judgments actually.

Vision, like most senses, is fairly strongly informationally encapsulated. Even if S has reasons to doubt that p, those don’t affect what she sees. Since she’s formed a visual representation that p, and that representation was caused, in a non-deviant way, by p being true, she sees that p. (Is this the way these cases are standardly classified in the perception literature?)

On the other hand, if anything at all turns on the question of whether p is true, she should get more information before proceeding. She knows that her eyes are unreliable in circumstances like these, and she has direct evidence that her eyes are faulty here, namely the conflict with the map. The situation is one that calls out for further investigation, not simply trusting her eyes.

I don’t have immediate judgments about (2) or (3). But I do sort of think that if the answer to (3) were “Yes”, the answer to (4) would be “Yes”. So the answer to (3) must be “No” as well.

Whatever we say about (2), there’s a problem here for the views on knowledge and evidence that Williamson has put forward in recent work. He says that knowledge is the most general factive mental state. Seeing is a factive mental state. So if the answer to (1) is “Yes”, the answer to (2) is “Yes”. He also says that all knowledge is evidence. So if the answer to (2) is “Yes”, the answer to (3) is “Yes”. But that doesn’t seem to be the correct answer.

There’s a further challenge here for a broader Williamsonian view of evidence. Consider a straightforward case where we learn something by visual perception. So I just looked out the window and saw clouds. I now know that its cloudy outside. Is my evidence (a) that there are clouds, or (b) that I see there are clouds? Or perhaps both?

It’s not too hard to be motivated, on ordinary language grounds if nothing else, to think that the answer is (a). But if we agree that S’s evidence does not include p, there is a hard question that needs to be answered. Under what circumstances does seeing that p make it the case that p is part of your evidence? Williamson suggests the answer “All circumstances”, but I don’t think that can be right, because of S’s case. And I’m not sure there’s another answer around.

There’s a related question about philosophical methodology. T considers a case, and judges that q. That’s the right judgment about the case, and T makes it for the right reason. Is her philosophical evidence that q, or that she’s judged that q. Williamson again wants to argue that it is q, not merely the judgment that q. But again we have to ask, under just what circumstances does a judgment that q get to be part of your evidence? I suspect that thinking about cases like S’s will make us think that the answer is not completely obvious. More on this to follow.

In Chapter 8 of “The Philosophy of Philosophy”:http://books.google.com/books?id=HtFQHAAACAAJ&dq=Williamson+%22the+philosophy+of+philosophy%22&ei=TIssSNnbAaDsygSt08jXAw, Timothy Williamson defends a new principle of charity. He says we should interpret people in such a way as to maximise what they know. This principle is intended to be constitutive of mental content, in the way that Davidson, Lewis and others have taken charity to be constitutive. That is, the content of someone’s thought and talk just is that content that would (within some constraints) maximise how much they know.

Williamson argues, persuasively, that this version of charity avoids some of the problems that have plagued prior versions. For instance, if I have many beliefs that are caused by contact with x, but are only true if interpreted as beliefs about y (with whom I have no causal contact), Williamson’s principle does not lead us to interpret those beliefs as beliefs about y. That’s because such an interpretation, even if it would maximise the amount of truth I believed, wouldn’t increase how much knowledge I have, because I couldn’t know those things about y.

But some of the traditional problems attending to charity-based theories of content still remain. For instance, Williamson has a problem with horsey looking cows.

Imagine that S is very bad at distinguishing between horses and certain cows, which we’ll call horsey looking. S has a term, t, in his language of thought that he applies indiscriminately to horses and horsey looking cows. When S wants to express thoughts involving t, he uses a word, say “equine” that (unbeknownst to S) his fellow speakers do not used when faced with horsey looking cows. In fact S has very few beliefs about how “equine” is used in his community, or general beliefs about the kind picked out by “equine”/t. He doesn’t have a view, for instance, about whether it is possible for equines to produce milk, or whether other people use “equine” with the same meaning he does, or whether an equine would still be an equine if his eyesight were better. S just isn’t that reflective. What he does have views about are whether all the animals in that yonder field are equines, and he’s confident that they are. In fact, many of them are horsey looking cows.

What does S’s public term “equine”, and mental term t, denote[1]? It seems to me that it denotes HORSE, not HORSE OR HORSEY LOOKING COW. S is simply mistaken about a lot of his judgments involving equine. I’m not going to take a stand here about whether that’s because S’s fellow speakers use “equine” to denote HORSE, or because HORSE is more natural than HORSE OR HORSEY LOOKING COW, or because t stands in certain counterfactual relationships to HORSE that it does not to HORSE OR HORSEY LOOKING COW. I’m not going to take a stand on those because I don’t need to. A very wide range of philosophical theories back up the intuition that in this case, “equine” and t denote HORSE.

The knowledge maximisation view has a different consequence, and hence is mistaken. On that view, “equine” and t both denote HORSE OR HORSEY LOOKING COW. That’s because interpreting S that way maximises his knowledge. It means that all, or at least most, of S’s judgments of the form “That’s an equine” are knowledge. If “equine” denotes HORSE, then practically none of them are knowledge. Since those are the bulk of the judgments that S makes using “equine” and t, the interpretation that maximises knowledge will not be the one that says “equine” denotes HORSE.

It might be objected here that S does not know that the things in the field are horses or horsey looking cows. But I think we can fill out the case so that is not a problem. We certainly can fill out the case so that S’s beliefs, thus interpreted are (a) true, (b) sensitive, (c) safe and (d) not based on false assumptions. The first three of those should be clear enough. If the only horsey looking things around, either in the actual case or in similar cases, are horses and cows, then we’ll guarantee the truth, sensitivity and safety of S’s belief. And if we don’t interpret *any* of the terms in S’s language of thought as denoting HORSE, it isn’t clear why we’d think that there’s any false belief from which S is inferring that those things are all equines. Certainly he doesn’t, on this interpretation, infer this from the false belief that they are horses.

As noted above, if we interpret “equine” as denoting HORSE OR HORSEY LOOKING COW, then none of these three claims are true.

(1) If S’s vision was better, equines would still be equines.
(2) Equines can generally breed with other equines of the opposite sex.
(3) Most equines are such that most people agree they satisfy “equine”.

If S believed all those things, then possibly it would maximise S’s knowledge to interpret “equine” as denoting HORSE. But S need not believe any such things, and the proper interpretation of his thought and talk does not depend on whether he does. Whether those things are *true* might matter for the interpretation of S’s thought and talk, but whether they are believed does not.

The problem of horsey looking cows is in one sense worse for Williamson than it is for Davidson. Interpreting “equine” and t as denoting HORSE makes many of S’s statements and thoughts false. (Namely the ones that are about horsey looking cows.) But it makes many more of them not knowledge. If S really can’t distinguish between horses and horsey looking cows, then even a belief about a horse that it’s an equine might not be knowledge on that interpretation. So knowledge maximisation pushes us strongly towards the disjunctive interpretation of “equine” and t.

It might be objected that if we interpret “equine” as denoting HORSE, then although S knows fewer things, the things he knows are stronger. There are two quite distinct replies we can make to this objection.

First, if we take that line seriously, the knowledge maximisation approach will go from having a problem with disjunctive interpretations, to having a problem with conjunctive interpretations. Assume that S is in Australia, but has no term in his language that could plausibly be interpreted as denoting Australia. Now compare an interpretation of S that takes “equine” to denote HORSE, and one that takes it to denote HORSE IN AUSTRALIA. Arguably the latter produces as much knowledge as the first (which might not be a lot) plus the knowledge that the horses are Australian.

I assume here that beliefs that are true, safe, sensitive, and not based on false lemmas constitute knowledge. So S’s belief, if we interpret him as having this belief, that the horses he sees are horses in Australia, would count as knowledge. Perhaps that’s too weak a set of constraints, the general pattern should be clear; if we take any non-sceptical account of knowledge, there will be ways to increase S’s knowledge by making unreasonably strict interpretations of his predicates.

I also assume in this reply that if S doesn’t have a term that denotes Australia, then he won’t independently know that the horses (or horsey looking cows) that he sees are in Australia. That is, I assume that the interpretation of S’s mental states must be somewhat compositional. That’s, I think, got to be one of the constraints that we put on interpretations. Otherwise we could simply interpret every sentence S utters as meaning the conjunction of everything he knows.

The second reply to this objection is that it is very hard to even get a sense of how to weigh up the costs and benefits, from the perspective of knowledge maximisation, of proposals like this one. And that’s because there’s nothing like an agreed upon in advance algorithm for determining what would count as more or less knowledge. Without that, it feels like the view “Interpret so as to maximise knowledge” is a theory schema, rather than a theory.

Williamson starts this chapter by noting that most atomist (what he calls molecularist) theories of mental and verbal content are subject to counterexample. That’s true. But it’s true in large part because those theories do fill in a lot more details. I more than strongly suspect that if the knowledge maximisation view was filled out with as much detail as, say, some of Fodor’s attempts at an atomist theory, the counterexamples would fly just as thick and fast.

This isn’t, or at least isn’t merely, a complaint about a theory lacking details. It is far from obvious that there is *any* decent way to compare two bodies of knowledge and say which has more or less, save in the special case where one is a subset of the other. If we (a) thought that knowing that p was equivalent to eliminating not-p worlds, and (b) we had some natural measure over the space of possible worlds, then we could compare bodies of knowledge by comparing the measure of the set of worlds compatible with that knowledge. But (a) is doubtful, and (b) is clearly false. And without those assumptions, or something like them, where are we to even start looking for the kind of comparison Williamson needs?

fn1. By “denote” I mean to pick out here whatever relation holds between a predicate (in natural language or LOT) and what it picks out. Perhaps, following some recent work by David Liebesman, I should use “ascribe” here. I think nothing of consequence for this argument turns on the choice of terminology here.

The following two principles, both of which might be attempts to formalise a Principle of Sufficient Reason, seem distinct to me.

(1) Every truth has an explanation.
(2) Every truth is explicable.

To see how they may come apart, consider (3), (4) and, especially, (5)

(3) It’s raining in Seattle.
(4) I’m wearing green socks.
(5) It’s raining in Seattle and I’m wearing green socks.

Assume, as shouldn’t be too hard, that the world really does make (3) and (4) true. (I can see that (4) is true, and my computer tells me (3) is true, at least as I write this sentence. Perhaps by the time I finish the post it will have cleared up!) I assume each of these facts has some explanation or other. The explanation for (3) will be in terms of meteorological facts about the Pacific Northwest, and the explanation for (4) will be in terms of the state of my sock drawer and my sock preferences. Call these explanations E3 and E4 respectively.

Will (5) have an explanation? I don’t see any reason to think that it will. The concatenation of E3 and E4 is not, I think, an explanation. It looks, to me at least, like two explanations. Since the best we’re likely to do by way of explaining (5) is to offer E3 and E4, and offering those two explanations does not, I say, amount to offering an explanation, I suspect that (5) does not have an explanation.

That’s not to say that (5) is inexplicable. Indeed it is perfectly explicable. Once we’ve offered E3 and E4, we’ve explained it. If we thought that anything explicable had an explanation, we would conclude that (5) must have an explanation. But that seems too quick. Offering several explanations, the conclusions of which collectively entail (5), renders (5) perfectly explicable, even if there’s no one explanation which has those explanations as parts. More generally, any logical consequence of some explicable facts is, in virtue of being that way, explicable. But not all such consequences have single explanations; (5) doesn’t.

The argument here makes heavy use of the idea that E3 and E4 don’t combine to form an explanation. That seems intuitively correct to me, but you might want a more substantive argument here. So note that this conclusion falls out naturally from the best theory of explanations on the market right now, namely Michael Strevens’ “causal inference account”:http://www.strevens.org/research/expln/expln101.shtml.

Roughly speaking, Strevens’ idea is that an explanation is an entailment from general principles (as Hempel said). As is well known, Hempel’s account overgenerates by allowing effects to ‘explain’ their causes. Strevens’ innovation was a clever idea about how to resist that conclusion. He says that only entailments where there is a proof of the conclusion from the premises such that each inferential step corresponds (in some intuitive sense) a causal connection between the steps. So an inference from the flagpole’s height to the length of its shadow is causal, in the relevant sense, while an inference from the length of its shadow to its height is not.

The notion of corresponding to a causal process is rough, to say the least. But it does seem to track something important in the notion of explanation. And note that it rules out any simple way of putting E3 and E4 together. If E3 and E4 are arguments, with (3) and (4) respectively as their conclusions, then there will be a valid argument that has the premises of E3 and E4 as premises, and (5) as a conclusion. But the last step of that argument will be a step of and-introduction, to get from (3) and (4) to (5). And that doesn’t seem to correspond to any causal process at all. So on Strevens’ account, there isn’t any way, or at least isn’t any simple way, to put E3 and E4 together into a simple explanation. That seems like useful supporting evidence to the intuitive claim that there is no way to put E3 and E4 together into a simple explanation.

The distinction between (1) and (2) is important because it matters for the prospects of any cosmological argument for the existence of God from a plausible Principle of Sufficient Reasons. The best version of such an argument is in Alexander Pruss’ “The Principle of Sufficient Reason”:http://books.google.com/books?id=8qAxk1rXIjQC&pg=PA322&dq=alexander+pruss&ei=jtkpSMT_MJzkyATRwaiNBw&sig=jM8bQ2LKf16BJOiMCwm5HH3bmLA, and he makes quite heavy use of (1). Consider, for instance, the following possibility. We have some propositions, p₁, p₂, …, such that p_n is explained by p_n+1 for each n. Pruss claims this won’t do, because the conjunction of all the p_n, call it P, would be self-explanatory, and it is the wrong kind of proposition to be self-explanatory.

I deny the inference here. P wouldn’t be self-explanatory, because P would be neither the right kind of thing to be an explanation, nor to have an explanation. P is explicable. It is explained in virtue of the explanation of each of its conjuncts. If P had an explanation, that explanation would be P itself. (Or perhaps it would be P minus p₁.) And that’s absurd. But since there’s no reason to assume that P has an explanation, there’s no reason to assume that it must be self-explanatory.

I won’t go into the details, but a similar (if more sophisticated) argument is at the core of Pruss’ contention that the only explanation of the conjunction of all (contingent) truths, is a necessarily existing God. Perhaps such a God is the only possible explanation of the conjunction of all truths. It doesn’t matter for any epistemological purposes, because we have no reason to believe this conjunction has a (single) explanation. Whatever intuitive plausibility a rough Principle of Sufficient Reason has only extends as far as (2), but to derive the existence of a necessitarian God, we need (1). This is important, because the primary argument Pruss has for the Principle of Sufficient Reason is that it is intuitive, and that there are no clear counterexamples to it. I think if we interpret the Principle as (1), both claims are false – (5) is a counterexample and shows it isn’t intuitive. What is intuitively plausible is (2), but that doesn’t ground any result of philosophical or theological significance.

In two “recent”:http://books.google.com/books?id=DlVtfUxPD14C “books”:http://books.google.com/books?id=FPU9tzW-2HAC, Graham Oppy has objected to cosmological arguments on the grounds that they are based on an excessively strong Principle of Sufficient Reason. I think his main philosophical conclusions are correct, but they’re stated in a needlessly counterintuitive way. Oppy argues as follows, where T is the conjunction of all contingent truths about the world. (I’m bracketing here an “interesting argument”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=91273 from Kevin Davey and Rob Clifton that there is no such conjunction. If that’s true, the cosmological argument fails for independent reasons.)

(6) If T is explained by a contingent fact, then it is explained by something it entails
(7) If T is explained by a necessary fact, then some necessary fact explains a contingent fact
(8) Nothing is explained by what it entails
(9) No necessary fact explains a contingent fact
(10) So, T does not have an explanation

That argument looks sound to me, assuming T exists. But I think Oppy is a little misleading when he then describes T as being a “brute fact”. If we want that phrase to mean, by stipulation, that the truth in question has no single explanation, then I suppose it is true that T is brute. But there’s a much more natural interpretation for the claim that something is a brute fact, namely that it is inexplicable. And there’s nothing in this argument that implies T is inexplicable. Indeed, it may well be that all the different conjuncts in T explain all the conjuncts in T collectively, without anything explaining itself. As long as T is infinite, that will be a possibility. So we don’t have yet a reason to regard T as a brute fact, in the most natural sense of that expression. None of this undermines the conclusions Oppy draws about infinite regresses, or the cosmological argument, but it is I think worth getting clear on what denying (1) does and doesn’t imply.

The way I’m suggesting we regiment our terminology allows for a nice distinction. Assume that a, b, c and d are all F; that a, b, c and d are all the Gs; that there are perfectly good explanations of each fact Fa, Fb, Fc and Fd; but that there is no way to simply combine these explantions into a single explanation. Assume in fact that there is no single explanation of either the fact that Fa & Fb & Fc & Fd, or of the fact that All Fs are Gs. Then I want to say that this is a _coincidence_, but not a _brute fact_. Coincidences are generalisations (perhaps over somewhat gruesome classes) that don’t have an explanation, even if they are explicable. If one of the coincidents were inexplicable, then the coincidence would (perhaps) be a brute fact. But most coincidences are explicable, it’s the lack of a single explanation that makes them coincidences. It’s part of folk wisdom that there are coincidences, which is to say that it’s part of folk wisdom that whether or not (2) is true, (1) is false.

Here are some recent articles we’ve published in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/.

• “Form, Principle, Pattern, or Coherence? Li in Chinese Philosophy”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpl135, by Brook Ziporyn
• “The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Confucianism&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DConfucianism%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl141, by Chenyang Li
• “A Priori Knowledge: Debates and Developments”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Jenkins&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DJenkins%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl136, by C. S. Jenkins
• “Knowing-How and Knowing-That”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Fantl&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DFantl%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl137, by Jeremy Fantl
• “Malebranche and Occasional Causes”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Cunning&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DCunning%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl132, by David Cunning
• “Russell and the Unity of the Proposition”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Stevens&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DStevens%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl142, by Graham Stevens
• “Experimental Philosophy of Science”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Stotz&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DStotz%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl133, by Paul E. Griffiths and Karola Stotz
• “Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Roedder&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DRoedder%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl138, by Daniel Kelly and Erica Roedder
• “The Recent Revival of Cosmological Arguments”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Cosmological&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DCosmological%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl134, by David Alexander
• “Some Issues in Chinese Philosophy of Religion”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?highlight_query=Xiaomei&type=std&slop=0&fuzzy=0.5&last_results=query%3DXiaomei%26topics%3D%26content_types%3DALL%26submit%3DSearch&parent=void&sortby=relevance&offset=0&article_id=phco_articles_bpl139, by Xiaomei Yang

As always, clicking on those links will take you to the abstract. The articles are subscriber only, but your library can arrange a free trial fairly easily by contacting Blackwell.

The phrase “Gettier Case” is used with (at least) three different meanings that I’ve noticed.

First, it is sometimes used to refer to cases where S derives a true conclusion p from a false premise q. This is obviously true of the original cases in Gettier’s paper. Since the meanings are strictly weaker as we continue through the list, this isn’t a unique property of this interpretation.

Second, it is sometimes used to refer to cases where S forms a true, and justified, belief, but where the reasons it is true, and the reasons it is justified, are entirely different. Williamson’s binocular vision case is like this. S has one reliable eye, and one unreliable eye. S forms the belief that p on the basis of the input from his unreliable eye, although at the same time his reliable eye also forms the representation that p. Arguably this is justified (at least S has evidence for p), but it isn’t knowledge.

Third, it is sometimes used to refer to any justified true belief that isn’t knowledge.

Since this is basically a technical term, it would be good to have some standardisation of the meaning. And it would be good to standardise on the most epistemological significant of the categories. (In my opinion, that’s the second one, but that could be wrong.) Does anyone have a suggestion for this?

Ernie Lepore and Gilbert Harman are organising a “conference on Quine”:http://www.wvquine.org/wvq-fest.html to celebrate Quine’s 100th birthday. It will be on June 25th at Princeton. More details are “here”:http://www.wvquine.org/wvq-fest.html.

And just after writing the post below, I discovered that a US immigration application (one of several applications needed to get a green card) got approved after 14 months. Hooray for immigration services on tax day!

UPDATE: I just wanted to add a note of thanks to the immigration staff at Cornell, who have been unbelievably helpful through all of these applications, even as I’m somewhat less closely tied to Cornell than I was when I filed the relevant applications. To make this a little topical, if there are any grad students out there today trying to decide which grad school to go to, and are worried about the prospects of dealing with U.S. immigration, Cornell students at least are in good hands.

I’ve been buried recently under (amongst other things) a mountain of immigration paperwork. So it was with some trepidation that I realised that my Australian passport was about to expire and I needed a new one. It wasn’t exactly reassuring to think I’d be dealing with another immigration and citizenship agency, and potentially would be without my passport for a while as the new passport was produced.

Anyway, when I dropped my passport off at the New York Consulate last Friday afternoon, I was worrying that I’d have another long wait until the relevant paperwork was completed and I had a new passport. But yesterday afternoon I got an email saying the new passport was printed (in Washington) and today I got a call saying it is ready to collect in New York. Excellent levels of efficiency Australian consular services!