This is a comments thread for Jennifer Nagel’s paper “Epistemic Intuitions”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpl104 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/. This article has been made free by Blackwell for the purpose of this thread. Here is the abstract.

bq. We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone’s condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology.

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This is a comments thread for Stephen Finlay’s paper “Four Faces of Moral Realism”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpl100 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/. This article has been made free by Blackwell for the purpose of this thread. Here is the abstract.

bq. This article explains for a general philosophical audience the central issues and strategies in the contemporary moral realism debate. It critically surveys the contribution of some recent scholarship, representing expressivist and pragmatist nondescriptivism (Mark Timmons, Hilary Putnam), subjectivist and nonsubjectivist naturalism (Michael Smith, Paul Bloomfield, Philippa Foot), nonnaturalism (Russ Shafer-Landau, T. M. Scanlon) and error theory (Richard Joyce). Four different faces of ‘moral realism’ are distinguished: semantic, ontological, metaphysical and normative. The debate is presented as taking shape under dialectical pressure from the demands of (i) capturing the moral appearances; and (ii) reconciling morality with our understanding of the mind and world.

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This is a comments thread for John Worrall’s paper “Evidence in Medicine and Evidence-Based Medicine”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpl106 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/. This article has been made free by Blackwell for the purpose of this thread. Here is the abstract.

bq. It is surely obvious that medicine, like any other rational activity, must be based on evidence. The interest is in the details: how exactly are the general principles of the logic of evidence to be applied in medicine? Focussing on the development, and current claims of the ‘Evidence-Based Medicine’ movement, this article raises a number of difficulties with the rationales that have been supplied in particular for the ‘evidence hierarchy’ and for the very special role within that hierarchy of randomized controlled trials (and meta-analyses of the results of randomized controlled trials). The point is not at all to question the application of a scientific approach to evidence in medicine, but, on the contrary, to indicate a number of areas where philosophers of science can contribute to a proper implementation of exactly that scientific-evidential approach.

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Not all of these are from current employers, but that’s the theme.

• As Carrie notes “below”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2008/01/15/more-great-jobs-at-arch/, there are two new postdocs being advertised at Arché, connected to the methodology project. I assume that philosophers from a lot of different areas would be viable candidates for such positions. Actually, I’d rather hope that it doesn’t turn into an entirely M&E focussed discussion. My “most prominent contribution”:http://brian.weatherson.org/counterexamples.pdf (PDF) to methodology debates started from the idea that epistemologists should copy some trends from work in ethics. But such contributions may be better made by an actual ethicist. Anyway, these positions are highly recommended; arguably they are a better way to start your career than most tenure-track jobs.
• I’m not employed by the “Ammounius Foundation”:http://www.ammonius.org/ but they are teaming with one of my colleagues, Dean Zimmerman, to again run an “Essay Competition for Younger Metaphysicians”:http://www.ammonius.org/younger_scholars/2008.html. Actually you don’t have to be a metaphysician to enter the competition, you just have to submit a metaphysics paper. Details “here”:http://www.ammonius.org/younger_scholars/2008.html for whoever is interested.
• Many of you will have seen that Cornell is “in the news”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/books/12feud.html?em&ex=1200373200&en=24b96d107ca2b3a2&ei=5087%0A over the most famous book review of the last few years. I had several comments drafted about this, but they were mostly ripoffs from comments on related topics by “Bill Simmons”:http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/071026 and “Clive James”:http://torch.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html, so maybe I should leave it go.
• We’re going to be trialing a new initiative with “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/, namely using TAR for comments threads on articles. Blackwell have made three articles available free of charge to get this off the ground, and I’ll be posting links and comment threads later this afternoon.

I think that the following three forms are truth-conditionally equivalent.

(1) p or q
(2) p or else q
(3) p or, if not p, q

I think that (2) and (3) are equivalent in a stronger sense; they express the very same proposition. That is, “else” just means “if not”. But it isn’t obvious that (1) and (3) are equivalent. In particular, saying that they are equivalent requires some constraints on our theory of conditionals.

_Digression_. If we have intuitionist doubts about conditional excluded middle then we shouldn’t think that (1) and (3) are equivalent. If we let q = ~p, then (3) is obviously an intuitionist theorem, while (1) is not. It’s an interesting question what the intuitionist should say about (2) in that case. I think they should say it is a theorem, and perhaps say that one reason classical theorists are so tempted by the purported theoremhood of _p or ~p_ is that they confuse it with the genuine theorem _p or else ~p_. But real intuitionists might have alternative views. I’m setting intuitionism aside for this post though. _End of Digression_.

That (3) entails (1) just requires that modus ponens is valid. (Assuming classical logic for the non-conditional connectives). Proof:

# Assume that (3) is true.

# Assume that p is true.

# Then (1) follows from line 2 by or-introduction.

# Drop the assumption of p, and assume not-p is true.

# Then if not-p, q is true. (Disjunctive syllogism from 1 and 4)

# So q is true (Modus ponens from 4 and 5)

# So (1) is true (from 6 by or-introduction)

# So (1) follows from (3), since it follows from either (3) combined with either p or ~p

I think this already raises a problem for those like McGee and Lycan who deny modus ponens. But most of us believe in modus ponens, so we can accept this entailment. The bigger issue is whether (1) entails (3).

Assume, as many philosophers do, that A and B can be true while If A, B is not true. Now consider what happens when we let p = ~A, and q = B. In that case (1) will be true, because the second disjunct is true. But neither disjunct of (3) is true, so (presumably) (3) is not true.

On the other hand, if we accept the principle of strong centring for indicative conditionals (i.e. that A & B entails If A, B), we can prove that (1) entails (3). Proof:

# Assume that (1) is true.

# Assume that p is true

# Now (3) follows from line 2 by or-introduction

# Drop the assumption of p, and assume ~p

# So q is true (by disjunctive syllogism from 1 and 4)

# So if ~p, q is true (by strong centring from 5 and 6)

# So (3) is true (by or-introduction from line 7)

# So (3) follows from (1), since it follows from (1) combined with either p or ~p

Since intuitively (1), (2) and (3) are truth conditionally equivalent, this seems to me to be a powerful argument for strong centring.

Mostly inspired by “some”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TI1OGVlY/iffiness.pdf “papers”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thony/note_on_if.pdf by Thony Gillies, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the scope of modals inside conditionals. I started thinking about these again because of some issues that come up in a paper that John MacFarlane and Niko Kolodny are presenting at the “AOC”:http://aoc.web.arizona.edu/. But that paper isn’t online, so I won’t discuss (yet) the issues they raise, which are largely about deontic modals. Instead I want to go over a puzzle about disjunction that challenges a position I’m attracted to.

The basic setup of the puzzle comes from Thony. Imagine that I’ve lose a marble. The three places in my apartment that marbles go under are the sofa, the table and the desk. I’ve looked under the table, and the marble isn’t there. It seems I can truly say (1).

(1) if the marble isn’t under the desk, it must be under the sofa.

But it also seems I can truly say.

(2) It’s not the case that the marble must be under the sofa (since it might be under the desk).

And from these, by modus tollens, it would seem to follow that the marble is under the desk. But I’m clearly in no position to conclude that. What has gone wrong? There are three possible options that one could take here.

• Conclude that modus tollens is invalid.
• Conclude that the logical form of (1) is not as it appears, and really the modal ‘must’ takes wide scope over the conditional.
• Conclude that there is an equivocation between (1) and (2).

The first option seems desperate, particularly since we can use a similar argument to show that modus ponens is invalid. Obviously some people (e.g. McGee, Lycan) have rejected modus ponens, and for reasons not a million miles from what we’re considering here. But it seems like a move of last resort to me. By the end of this post we’ll come to something that might look like a new cost of the position.

The second option is, however, a very popular position. I used to believe it, but I’ve been convinced by Thony that it isn’t true. The problem concerns what happens with weak modals. So (3) seems to be false.

(3) If the marble isn’t under the desk, it might be under the table.

That’s false because I looked under the table, and I know it isn’t there. But let’s say that the modal ‘might’ takes wide scope, and the conditional is a material implication. So (3) is equivalent to (4).

(4) It might be the case that (the marble is under the desk or the table).

But (4) is true, and we wanted (3) to be false. Perhaps the problem isn’t the assumption that the modal in (3) takes wide scope, but that the conditional is a material implication. So let’s assume that the embedded conditional is some kind of epistemic conditional. (I.e. if p, q is roughly equivalent to must (not p or q).) Then we have a different problem. Imagine that I said (3) before I had looked under the table. Then it would be intuitively true. But (5) on this reading is arguably false.

(5) It might be the case that (if the marble isn’t under the desk it is under the table).

That’s arguably false because at that stage I know that _must (marble is under desk or table)_ is false. It’s starting to look like the problem is that ‘might’ takes wide scope, not the interpretation of the conditional. As I mentioned in “a previous post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2007/11/08/gillies-on-wide-scopism/ these problems are even worse when we use deontic modals. So I think the wide scope solution is flawed.

That leaves us with the equivocation solution. Here’s the version of the equivocation story I prefer. (It’s basically a translation into static semantics of the dynamic semantics story Thony likes.) Epistemic modals have an attached plural variable. In standard settings the values of that variable are those propositions known, or perhaps available to be known, in the conversation. (There are some relativist bells and whistles I like here, but I’m ignoring those for this post.) Roughly, _Must (X) p_ is true iff some of the X collectively entail p, and _Might (X) p_ is true iff p is consistent with the X.

The complication comes in conditionals, particularly in the consequent of conditionals. In that case, I think the X is ‘partially bound’. All the propositions that are known are among the X, but so is the antecedent. So the LF of (1) is something like

(1a) If (marble not under desk), must (Y) (marble under sofa)

where the Y are all the propositions known plus the proposition that the marble isn’t under the desk. And the LF of (3) is something like

(3) If (marble not under desk), might (Y) (marble under table)

where Y is as above. This gives all the right results in these cases, and does so in something like a systematic way.

Now for the problem. Epistemic modals also behave oddly in the second disjunct of disjunctions. So both (6) and (7) sound OK to me.

(6) Either the marble is under the desk or it must be under the sofa.
(7) Either the marble is under the desk or else it must be under the sofa.

I think (7) is a little preferable to (6), a fact that will become a little important in what follows. Both (6) and (7) can be combined, it seems, with (2) to conclude (improperly) that the marble isn’t under the desk. Again we have three options.

• Conclude that disjunctive syllogism is invalid.
• Conclude that the modal in (6)/(7) takes wide scope.
• Conclude that there is an equivocation between (6)/(7) and (2).

Again, both of the first two options seem unhappy. Indeed, denying disjunctive syllogism for natural language ‘or’ seems to be an even more radical step than denying it for natural language ‘if’. (Various heterodox logicians might disagree here, but debating that would take us too far afield.) And the wide-scope move looks just disastrous, since it would make (8) acceptable.

(8) Either the marble is under the desk or it might be under the table.

So we need some kind of equivocation story. Following some (long) conversations with Ishani, I’m inclined to believe the following story.

Start with (7). Arguably the ‘else’ there means ‘if not’. In general, I think, it seems fine to analyse (9) as (10).

(9) p or else q.
(10) p or, if not p, q.

If ‘if’ means material implication, then (10) is just equivalent to _p or q_. But we might not read ‘if’ that way. In particular, we might say that modals in the consequents of conditionals have partially bound variables. So we might read (7) as (11), which we in turn analyse as (12).

(11) Either the marble is under the desk or, if not, it must be under the sofa.
(12) (Marble under desk) or (if (not under desk), must (Y) (under sofa)).

Again, Y consists of those propositions we know plus the antecedent, i.e. that marble isn’t under the desk. So we know the second disjunct is true, so the disjunction is known, so it is assertable. (And note that we don’t have the normal Gricean problems with redundant disjuncts because the first disjunct is a constituent of the second disjunct.)

So far so good. But what should we say about (6)? Well, I think we should say much the same thing. More precisely, I think we should say that there is an unpronounced ‘else’ in (6), and that ‘else’ means ‘if not’, and then the analysis is as for (7). The reason that (6) is a little less happy than (7) is that it only makes sense if we read in this unpronounced element, and the speaker should probably have pronounced this for us. The reason that we can read this element in is that in general _p or q_ and _p or else q_ are so close in meaning that we can freely substitute one for the other.

Note that this story is available to people who think that the problem with the argument from (1) and (2) is that modus tollens is invalid. Such people should think that the argument from (7) and (2) to the conclusion that the marble is not under the desk is not, strictly speaking, an instance of disjunctive syllogism. Rather, it requires the use both of modus tollens and disjunctive syllogism. And such people say that modus tollens is invalid. No wonder the argument fails!

But there is something a little odd about this position. If modus ponens is invalid, then it is possible for _p or else q_ to be true while _p or q_ is false. That’s a surprising, and I think a little unhappy, result. I much prefer the equivocation story.

Coming later: The same arguments run through with deontic modals rather than epistemic modals.

“Greg Mankiw”:http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/signaling-at-aea-job-market.html publishes some correspondence about the American Economic Association’s ‘signalling’ initiative.

bq. The basic idea of a signaling mechanism is that there is a big part of the market in which departments, in allocating scarce interview slots, have to form an assessment not only of how promising a student looks, but also of how likely that student is to be interested in them. …

bq. Of course students can send any signals they want in their cover letters, but because every cover letter expresses interest, that may be of limited help to departments in separating the signals from the noise. To some extent that may also apply to information in emails and letters from advisors. Those channels can all convey valuable signals of interest, of course. The new signaling mechanism is just a supplement to the traditional ways of signaling interest, and may be of most help to students who are interested in places to which they don’t have other reliable means of conveying their interest. Because they can send a maximum of two signals through the AEA mechanism, the signals may convey some information.

The main target users of this mechanism are job candidates who might be turned down for jobs they would quite like because they (the candidates) are perceived to be unattainable. Consider, e.g., a student with pretty glowing letters from a top school who has always wanted to live in college town X where, say, they went to middle school. The college in that town might assume (reasonably) that the student will get an offer from a more prestigous school, and so it isn’t worth interviewing them. The result is bad for both the student (who actually prefers X to the more prestigous school) and the school (who prefers the student to who they hire). Of course the student could try to communicate this preference through their cover letter, but it is hard to know how seriously to take such letters since the candidate may say something similar to everyone. The signalling mechanism gets around that.

It’s an interesting idea for considering for the APA. I’m worried (as some are about the AEA model) about whether people would be punished for not signalling an interest in a school. But I can also see how it might ameliorate some of the effects of assumptions about prestige in the job market.

“Mark Lieberman”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005280.html makes a good new year’s resolution.

bq. Once a week, I’ll post about some interesting and relevant piece of linguistic research, with links to a preprint, a published paper, a book chapter, or something similar. This has almost been true in past years, and with a little bit of effort…

I should try to do something similar. One reason I’ve stopped doing this in the past is that most of the stuff I’ve read and thought hard about has been Phil Review submissions. And for obvious reasons I couldn’t blog about them. But from now on I should be reading more published pieces and fewer submissions, so hence more philosophy blogging and fewer announcements!

The “call for papers”:http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/wasserr/BSPC/bspc_2008 for Bellingham 2008 is up. Bellingham is always one of the most enjoyable and philosophically valuable conferences of the year, and I highly encourage flooding them with submissions. (Of course, their acceptance rate is lower than many major journals, so this isn’t a guarantee of getting a paper accepted, but it’s good to try.)

I’m going to try very hard over the upcoming year(s) to reduce the amount of travel I do, especially since there are so many things I can get to by local trains. But coastal Washington at that time of year, with the quality of philosophy on offer there, is really hard to pass up.