At the end of my “Conditionals and Indexical Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/CaIR.pdf paper, there is a throw-away reference to the possibility that indexical relativism might be the right theory for various pronouns in modern language. ‘Modern language’ only because for traditional (i.e. spoken) languages contextualism seems to capture all the data. This post is a start on making that a bit more plausible.

I’m interested in uses of ‘you’ in written work where the writer has no way of knowing how broad the audience is. One notable feature of such uses is that it is very common to use epistemic modals scoping over the pronoun, so you often see things like “You might”, as e.g. here, or “You probably”, as, e.g. “here”:http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/5-feature-firefox-tricks-you-probably-didnt-know-about. I’m particularly interested in the latter uses. What, you’re probably thinking right now, could they mean?

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Ever since Google’s street view service was debuted there have been “many discussions over its privacy implications”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Google+Street+View%22+privacy&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=G0c&pwst=1&start=90&sa=N. I’ve found most of these fairly overblown, but this morning I started to get a better sense of what some of the concerns might be about. Writing on the SMH’s news blog, Matthew Moore “writes”:http://blogs.smh.com.au/newsblog/archives/freedom_of_information/013696.html approvingly,

bq. Mr McKinnon reckons you can hardly have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street when every second person has a video camera or mobile phone and when Google is now using street-level maps with images of real people who have no idea they have been photographed.

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“This”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004576.html is a nice story. The latest issue of Southwest Airlines’ inflight magazine features some “recommended diversions”:http://spiritmag.com/clickthis/8.php. They include the usual summer books, movies and music, and a plug for “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ as blog reading. Academic blogs have come a long way if they’re being recommended in inflight magazines. Now we only have to get them to be promoting other academic blogs the same way.

I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Language Log around the web recently, particularly to their prescriptivist-bashing posts. I particularly liked this attack on the “alleged rules for using less and fewer”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, complete with examples from King Alfred’s Latin translations. It’s an example of how academic blogs can make an impact on public life not by dumbing down their work, or by stretching to find alleged applications, but simply by setting out their work in a clear and accessible way. Or, to bring things back to a favourite theme of mine, of why academics should get credit for successful blogs not necessarily as examples of research, but as examples of service to the community. Now giving people diversions alongside summer blockbusters isn’t quite the same kind of service as solving their medical or social problems, but it is a service, and a praiseworthy one.

Here are two more philosophy blogs that I don’t think I’ve previously linked to.

* Esa D{i’}az-Le{o’}n’s “been there/done that”:http://beentheredonethat-esa.blogspot.com/.
* Anthony Gillies’ “blog”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thony/blog.html

As Thony reports on his blog, “CIA Links”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thony/cia_leaks.pdf, a fine paper he wrote with “Kai von Fintel”:http://semantics-online.org/section/fintel has been accepted for publication in the _Philosophical Review_. Congratulations Thony and Kai!

I’ve been spending a bit of time recently working through a paper by “Tamina Stephenson”:http://web.mit.edu/tamina/www/ (a student of Kai’s), called “A Parallel Account of Epistemic Modals and Predicates of Personal Taste”:http://web.mit.edu/tamina/www/em-ppt-10-10-06.pdf. I don’t buy everything she says, but some of the technical resources she introduces have been incorporated into the latest version of my conditionals paper, which I can now post.

* “Conditionals and Indexical Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/CaIR.pdf

This used to be called ‘Conditionals and Relativism’, and the change is something of a big one. I now defend a version of what we called ‘content relativism’ in “Epistemic Modals in Context”. Except, for reasons that become clear in the paper, I’d rather call it ‘indexical relativism’. The paper is fairly drafty, but I would be interested in knowing what people think of it. (The PDF is also bigger than I expected; I just changed some software around, and I wonder if that’s the cause.)

I’ll be off to Arch{e’} soon, so comments may take a little while to appear depending on how good my internet access is. But I’ll try to get to everything as quickly as I can.

No one seemed to notice the terrible counting in the previous post. Ah well,

* Robert Stalnaker is currently doing the Locke lectures at Oxford, and Oxford has, very impressively, made the lectures available “as a podcast”:http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/misc/johnlocke/index.shtml.
* “John Hawthorne”:http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/jhawthorne/index.htm has a number of forthcoming papers available on his website. I just read a nice paper on “comparative adjectives”:http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/jhawthorne/docs/Comparative%20Adjectives..pdf that I found while looking for something rather different. There is also a paper he wrote with Andrew McGonigal on the “Many minds theory of vagueness”:http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/jhawthorne/docs/Many%20Minds.pdf.
* Speaking on Andrew, he just pointed out to me how developed the Uncyclopedia pages on “philosophy”:http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Philosophy and “Logic”:http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Logic have become. A lot of the humour there is pretty sophomoric, but I do like lines like “The purpose of chicken studying philosophy is to disprove your religion, your scientific methodology, the laws of your entire civilization, your ethics, and the existence of that chair you’re sitting on (although not convincingly enough as to make you feel you have to stand up).” I don’t know what the ‘chicken’ reference is though; one of the problems with the uncyclopedia is that it is hard to tell vandalism from failed attempts at humour.
* Dan L{o’}pez de Sa, who has written several “papers”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dlds/ I’ve been reading while trying to say something new about semantic relativism, has a nice looking “blog”:http://blebblog.blogspot.com/.

Because I know everyone loves these.

* “Wikipedia page on the Leiter Report”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Gourmet
* New “Feminist Philosophers Blog”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/
* A rather novel version of “the design argument”:http://aidanmcglynn.blogspot.com/2007/05/atheists-nightmare.html

In between figuring out which students have written their own papers, and grading the ones who have, there has been less blogging than ideal. So here are a few links to keep things going.

* Kai von Fintel and David Beaver are starting up a new journal, _Semantics and Pragmatics_, and it has “a blog”:http://www.semantics-online.org/sp/. The journal will be open access and online, and it is well and truly worth supporting. I was thinking of developing a policy of submitting all non-solicited papers (if I ever write such a thing again) to “Philosophers’ Imprint”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/index.html, out of general support for open access principles. But perhaps the right policy is a more general support for open access.
* Speaking of the Imprint, Alexander George has a “very interesting paper”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/007002/ on the relevance of a very surprising mathematical result to the traditional problem of induction.
* Philosophy Compass is sponsoring the “online philosophy conference”:http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/2nd_annual_online_philoso/, which is now on. One of my big plans for the future is real-time online philosophy conferences. But right now that’s vaporware – this is the cutting edge as far as virtual conferences go.
* As part of the sponsopship deal, Compass is providing free access to several Compass articles. These include: Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Truthmakers”, Karen Bennett, “Mental Causation”, Mandy Simons, “Foundational Issues in Presupposition”, Ron Mallon, “A Field Guide to Social Construction” and W.J. Waluchow, “Judicial Review”
* Back in meatspace, Indiana is holding a “conference on agency”:http://www.indiana.edu/~agenresp/ in September.

Just a few quick links while we celebrate/mourn the various sporting and political results from the last few days.

* Sally Haslanger has posted a bunch of “information concerning women and minorities in philosophy”:https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/SGRP/Materials+concerning+women+and+minorities+in+philosophy at SGRP. Some of it will be familiar from previous discussions, but it is good to have it in one place.
* Congratulations to “Carrie and Daniel”:http://longwordsbotherme.blogspot.com/2007/05/backwards-explanation-and-real.html for getting their paper on “backwards explanation”:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/Jenkins/BackwardsExplanation.pdf accepted to BSPC.
* I meant to promote “this competition”:http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2007/ChineseMaths.asp concerning the relative quality of maths education in Britain and China. But it seems the deadline has passed. In any case, here is the “BBC story”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm with a very nice illustration at the end of the differences between the two. This is relevant to philosophy, because it is hard to use mathematical examples (some of which are quite crucial) given the poor state of western mathematical education.