I hadn’t realised, until “Matthew Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/12/i_know_myself_well.php pointed it out, that Google Reader will recommend blogs to you. So I looked for my recommendations, and happily my blog was the most recommended blog to me. After having his blog recommended to him, Yglesias concluded:

bq. Basically, I have the reading habits typical of someone who would read my blog.

I think that’s a bit quick, or at least it would be in my case. What’s going on for me is that I have most of the philosophy blogs there are already on my reader list. The highest profile philosophy blog I don’t subscribe to is, naturally, my own. The interesting question is whether there is a blog I currently subscribe to such that if I didn’t subscribe to it, it would be more highly recommended given my reading preferences than my own blog. I suspect there are several such blogs, but I’m not in a hurry to check it out.

One of the causes of the lack of updates around here has been that Ishani and I have been getting ready to move in preparation for starting at Rutgers in the spring. We are almost finished moving, so hopefully the regular posting will resume shortly. In the meantime, two calls for papers.

First, the INPC on “Carving Nature at Its Joints”:http://www.uidaho.edu/philosophy/INPC/. Most of the time I regard the question of how to demarcate the natural from the unnatural properties in special sciences, especially the human sciences, as the toughest and most important philosophical question there is. So I hope some of the papers submitted have something useful to teach us on this question.

Second, the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize. This is my last year of eligibility for it, but I don’t think I’ll be submitting anything. There’s no website to link to, so here is an edited version of the announcement.

bq. Sponsored by the A. M. Monius Institute and administered by the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, the essay competition is open to scholars who are within 10 years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program. The award is $8000. Winning essays shall appear in _Oxford Studies in Metaphysics_, so submissions must not be under review elsewhere.

bq. Essays should generally be between 7,500 and 15,000 words; longer essays may be considered, but authors must seek prior approval by providing the editor with an abstract and word count prior to submission. To be eligible for next year’s prize, submissions must be received, electronically, by January 30, 2008 (this is an extension of the deadline from January 15). Refereeing will be blind; authors should omit remarks and references that might disclose their identities. Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged by e-mail. The winner is determined by a committee of members of the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. At the author’s request, the board will simultaneously consider entries in the prize competition as submissions for publication in _Oxford Studies in Metaphysics_, independently of the prize. Inquiries should be addressed to the editor, Dean Zimmerman, at dwzimmer@rci.rutgers.edu.

I’ve just been wrapping up semester, and moving cities, so not much writing around here. In the meantime, here are a few links to announcements.

* “Semantics and Philosophy in Europe”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/%7Earche/spe/call.shtml
* “Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences”:http://www.alws.at/wittgenstein08.htm
* “Young Philosophers Lecture Series and Podcast”:http://www.youngphilosophers.org/

Two quick conference links. The “call for papers”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Efitelson/few/announcement.html for next year’s Formal Epistemology Workshop has been posted. And the Syracuse/Rochester/Cornell “mental causation workshop”:http://mail.rochester.edu/~aney/events/mc/ is on this Friday through Sunday.

The “mental causation workshop”:http://mail.rochester.edu/~aney/events/mc/ being held in Syracuse in a couple of weeks, the first in a series of Syracuse/Rochester/Cornell joint ventures, now “has a website”:http://mail.rochester.edu/~aney/events/mc/.

Weekend updates…

* Acer Nethercott sent along “this story”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7084099.stm about the standard kilogram, which might or might not have been losing weight.

bq. The international prototype was no longer the same mass as the other cylinders. And, since then, the drift has continued. “Relative to the average of all the sister copies made over the last 100 years you could say it is losing weight, but by definition it can’t,” explained Dr Richard Steiner of the National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST) in the US. “So the others are really gaining mass.”

* “Ole Hjortland reports”:http://notofcon.blogspot.com/2007/11/power-of-tv.html that Vincent Hendricks is about to start a philosophy TV show for national distribution in Denmark. Well done Vincent – I imagine the show will be a great success!

* “Geoff Pullum”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005099.html writes of our favourite little street in St Andrews.

…is online “here”:http://wikihost.org/wikis/academe/wiki/philosophy. It looks like not all tenure-track jobs have been posted yet, because I only count around 170 tenure-track jobs there, but it’s a very useful resource.

I’ve been meaning to write up something on “this excellent post”:http://theoriesnthings.blogspot.com/2007/11/must-might-and-moore.html by Robbie Williams on “this excellent paper”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TI1OGVlY/iffiness.pdf by Thony Gillies. But that post was getting long, so instead I thought I’d note one point from Thony’s paper that he doesn’t make as explicit as perhaps it should be. The point is that “wide-scope” interpretations of weak modals in the consequents of conditionals are massively implausible.

This is quite relevant to a debate in ethics about the interpretation of conditionals like “If p, you ought to do q”. One view, sometimes called “the wide-scope view” is that the deontic modal has wide scope, so the structure of that conditional is something like _Ought (If p, you do q)_. There is a long thread on this “over at PEA Soup”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2007/08/worries-about-w.html. It seems to me that Gillies has shown that this view is untenable.

Gillies is mostly interested in epistemic modals, but it is pretty trivial to transpose his arguments to the ethical case. Here is one way to do this. Given reasonable background assumptions, e.g. that Alice and Bill are two normal human beings, (1) is false.

(1) If you kill Alice, you may kill Bill.

But (2) will be true despite the intuitive falsity of (1).

(2) You may make it the case that: if you kill Alice, you kill Bill.

That will certainly be true if the inner conditional in (2) is a material conditional. Since you may refrain from killing Alice, you may make the material conditional true. But, and this is the interesting point, it is also true on views that make the conditional much stronger.

For example, imagine that you, as a favour to Alice an Bill, drive them to the airport. You are a careful driver, and you stay out of accidents. But accidents happen on roads. Assuming you are (properly) free of homicidal tendencies, it may be that the only conceivable sate in which you kill Alice is one where you are part of a horrific accident that kills everyone in the car. So in the nearest world in which you kill Alice, you kill Bill. Indeed in all salient worlds in which you kill Alice, you kill Bill. But nothing wrong with this, provided you take all appropriate precautions that such a world is not actualised.

So the wide-scope interpretation of (1) is implausible. And it is implausible on general grounds that the ‘may’ in (1) takes narrow scope with respect to the conditional, but a strong modal like ‘ought’ should take wide scope. So the wide scope view is wrong.

Of course, there were reasons that people were pushed to the wide-scope view. Happily, I think Gillies’s positive view about how to interpret context-sensitive terms in the consequent of conditionals can explain (away) those motivations. But that’s for another post. For now I just wanted to publicise this neat argument against the wide-scope view.

I guess most everyone who reads this blog also reads Leiter, but I thought it was worth noting a “comments thread”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/hot-topics-in-e.html over at Leiter’s place on hot topics in epistemology. I’d certainly be interested in knowing what everyone thinks are the central topics in epistemology circa November 2007, so head over there and comment!

I meant at the time to post up comments on the two conferences I recently attended: the Ryle conference at Ryerson University in Toronto, and the Metaphysics and Physics conference at Rutgers. Both were lots of fun, and I’ll hopefully have my paper from the Ryle conference posted soon.

Anyway, this is a belated thanks to the organisers of the conferences (David Hunter at Ryerson, and Barry Loewer and Heather Demarest at Rutgers) for putting on such good lineups. I think/hope I learned a lot from each.