Ned Block links to these two additions to _Philosophical Investigations_ on the subject of ‘fog’. Both of them are quite old, the Frayn apparently from the 1960s, and Fodor’s perhaps from around 1970. Anyway, for weekend amusement.

* “Michael Frayn’s additions”:http://stevepetersen.net/personal/wittgenstein-fog.html
* “Fodor after Frayn”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/miscellaneous/Fodor_Wittgenstein.png

The Fodor page is a graphic, and it might be easier to read zoomed in.

In many respects I have a moderate carbon footprint. I drive a very fuel-efficient car, and I don’t drive it much. Despite all my electronic toys, my power bills are always fairly low. And my heating bills aren’t as bad as they could be. But there’s one respect in which I use a lot of fuel, and it overwhelms the rest. That’s air travel. Now part of that travel is for fun, but much of it is for conferencing. So I’ve been wondering how much of the benefits of conferencing could be obtained without the travel. Some of the benefits, getting to see wonderful parts of the world, go drinking with friends from around the world etc, could not be had. But some benefits, arguably, could.

It should be possible, that is, to run virtual conferences. I don’t mean conferences done through emails or blogs, which have their benefits but don’t provide the same level of interactivity as actual conferences do. I mean something where the participants, from around the world, get to all be talking just about a single paper for an extended period of time.

The main point of this post is to ask whether anyone has any experiences with such conferences, and if so how they have worked. Below the fold I have some thoughts for a few models for how to run such a conference.
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There were two things I should have said in yesterday’s post that I didn’t say. So this is in part a retraction (since what I’ll say now qualifies what I said then), in part an addition, and in part an apology for doing an incomplete job the first time.

First, I was presupposing throughout the post that there is such a thing as *a* difference between the natural and gruesome predicates. That might not be right. There might be several distinctions to be drawn in the area, and the vague talk we make of natural and gruesome predicates cuts across the real distinctions. I haven’t seen their paper, but I believe Maya Eddon and Chris Meacham have been developing a line like this in some work, and it might be right. I refuse to believe there is *no* distinction between natural and gruesome predicates, but there might be several relevant distinctions in the area, and if so we have to say things more carefully than I did.

Second, I left out one very important option in my survey of how we might define naturalness for special science terms. In recent work Barry Loewer has been arguing that a Humean can define naturalness via the theory of laws. (I want to be a bit careful here, because Loewer’s paper isn’t published, or even available on “his website”:http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/loewer.html, but I think what I’ll say here is public record from his various presentations of the material.) Lewis thought that we needed to define naturalness before we could work out what the laws are, but Loewer argues (a) that Lewis’s arguments to this effect don’t work, and (b) that we can work out what the laws are and what the natural properties are simultaneously. I think (a) is right and (b) is an interesting step towards a solution. That’s to say, there is an interesting step towards a solution in existence, so some of the pessimism of yesterday’s post was unwarranted. Whether there would be any epistemological payoff from Loewer’s metaphysical theory (even if it were true) is a further, and difficult, question.

The pictures are copyrighted, so I won’t copy any of them here, but there are several more illusions by “Akiyoshi Kitaoka”:http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/shikisai2005.html at his website. For a really striking contrast effect, scroll down to the “Green and Blue Spirals” image.

UPDATE: And here is the page of illusions by “Beau Lotto”:http://www.lottolab.org/Illusions%20page.html at UCL. Thanks to Jamie Dreier for the link. Again the images are copyrighted, so I won’t cut and paste any, but they are utterly remarkable. (Note that one of them is a brown/orange ‘illusion’ that, as Daniel Nolan noted in the previous comment thread, we might want to think twice about saying is illusory.)

Every term when I’m preparing my 101 notes on illusion, I’m amazed by just how good the “checkershadow illusion”:http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html produced by “Edward Adelson”:http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/index.html is. I use this as a way to get the students to feel the force of Descartes’ worries about the reliability of sense perception. Here is the illusion.

The point, as many of you will know, is that A and B are the same shade on the screen. Seeing this is, to say the least, non-trivial. I’ve made a small “powerpoint demonstration”:http://brian.weatherson.org/Adelson.ppt of it, which I’ll be using in class.
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I’m just back from the SOFIA conference on the metaphysics of epistemology, which was quite rewarding. More serious philosophy to follow soon, but first here are a few links to fun things from while I was away.

* A very interesting thread at PEA Soup on “whether APA interviews are worthwhile”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2007/01/is_the_eastern_.html. My short answer is _no_, not least because one opportunity cost of going to the APA is not going to the Boxing Day Test. I’m also pretty moved by the argument Gilbert Harman gives in that comments thread.

* Wo has “a nice quiz”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2007/01/13/A_Quiz on conditionals.

* Kieran Setiya likes Jarman’s “Wittgenstein”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/2007/12/wittgenstein.html for reasons that can be shown not said. (Sorry…)

* “Clayton Littlejohn dissects”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2007/01/god-delusion.html Alvin Platinga’s “review”:http://blog.johndepoe.com/?p=208 of Dawkins’ _The God Delusion_. Let me mention one technical point about something Clayton quotes from Plantinga. Plantinga says that if God is a necessary being, then the probability He exists is 1. I think that’s not right. In the relevant sense, the probability in question is epistemic probability, and the epistemic probability of a necessary truth can be arbitrarily low. Proof: For any (positive) value _x_, there is a true proposition whose probability is _x_. Let _p_ be such a proposition. The _epistemic_ probability of _Actually p_ is the same as the epistemic probability of _p_, which by hypothesis is _x_. So the epistemic probability of this necessary truth, _Actually p_, is _x_. But _x_ was an arbitrary positive value, so the probability of a necessary truth can be arbitrarily low.

* And Daniel Davies “continues his review”:http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/01/this-has-been-so-absurdly-trailed-it.html of _Freakonomics_.

There’s lots of interesting comments in the thread on disagreement below. I’m about to head off to the SOFIA conference, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to dive into the debate when I’m back. In the meantime, here is the almost complete draft of the doxastic responsibility paper I’ve mentioned a few times here.

bq. “Deontology and Descartes’ Demon”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DatD.pdf

The paper tries to cover a lot of ground. Here are the key points.

* We need to distinguish the claims that beliefs are volitional from the claims that they are voluntary and that they are free. (The importance of this distinction is made clear in Ryle’s _Concept of Mind_, and it plays an important role in some contemporary moral psychology.)
* We also need to distinguish claims about whether belief formation is volitional/voluntary/free from claims about whether belief maintenance is volitional/voluntary/free.
* So there are six possible claims here, and if any of them are true that would imply that we have some level of responsibility for beliefs.
* Given that, whether belief formation is volitional isn’t particularly relevant to whether we have responsibility for beliefs.
* There are close parallels between belief formation/maintenance and other actions that are free (and perhaps voluntary) and beliefs, from which I conclude that the formation and maintenance of many beliefs is free (and perhaps voluntary).
* But some beliefs (esp perceptual beliefs) are formed unfreely, and at least in the short term are maintained unfreely.
* So while we have responsibility for some beliefs, we don’t have responsibility for all beliefs, and this matters for epistemology.
* This dichotomy opens up a defence of externalism from the new evil demon argument. The defence is similar to, though I think not quite identical with, the defence offered by externalists such as “Clayton Littlejohn”:http://www.geocities.com/cmlittlejohn/reldemfin.pdf (PDF).
* Although epistemic justification is a deontological concept, it should not be construed as being something like blamelessness; rather, having justified beliefs for which one is responsible is a respect in which one is praiseworthy.

Along the way, there are a few asides about will, self-control, evidence and other concepts, as well as a running commentary (mostly in footnotes) on the relevance of various Rylean observations to my argument and to various related works in moral psychology. So the paper is probably not as focussed as it might have been, but I hope it is fun anyway!

On a different note, but keeping with the theme of the blog in recent days, the final “Arché Vagueness Conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/vagueness/index.html will be held this June, and the call for papers is at the attached link. It’s a lot of fun being in St Andrews, especially when there’s all that daylight around the solstice, and it looks like the philosophy they’ll have on show will be absolutely first class.

Recently several epistemologists, such as David Christensen, Adam Elga and Richard Feldman, have endorsed a fairly strong view about disagreement. Roughly, the idea is that if you believe p, and someone as smart as you and as well informed as you believes ~p, then you should replace your belief in p with either a suspension of judgment (in Feldman’s view), or a probability of p between their probability and your old probability (in Elga’s view).

I’m glossing over a lot of details here because I think there is a way to see that no view anything like this can be accepted. Many other epistemologists (Tom Kelly, Ralph Wedgwood) do not hold the Christensen-Elga-Feldman view. So by their own lights, Christensen et al should not believe their own view, because according to them they shouldn’t believe a proposition on which there is disagreement among peers, and this epistemological theory is a proposition on which there is disagreement among peers.

I think no one should accept a view that will be unacceptable to them if they come to accept it. So I think no one should accept the Christensen-Elga-Feldman view. Indeed, I think the probabilistic version of it is incoherent because of a variant of the above argument. I’ve written up a short paper saying why.

bq. “Disagreeing about Disagreement”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DaD.pdf