The latest issue of _Mind_ has just been released, or at least it just turned up on my RSS feed. There looks to be lots of good stuff there, as if I don’t have enough to read already. Anyway, I just wanted to recommend Chris Potts’ nice review of Siobhan Chapman’s “Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=Paul+Grice+philosopher+and+linguist&z=y&cds2Pid=9481. As well as a nice review of Chapman’s book (also, coincidentally, in my pile of things to read) it does a nice job of stating Grice’s relative importance to philosophy and linguistics.

This is pretty well worked over territory, but I wanted to run through some options for dealing with cases where we forget our evidence.
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Thanks to everyone for comments on the last post on voluntarism. There were lots of threads suggested there that I’ve been trying to follow up. Some of these led me to a recent (2002: 3) issue of the _Monist_ that had lots of relevant papers. A lot of what follows is suggested (obliquely) by John Cottingham’s paper on Descartes. I’ve also been reading (or rereading) some great papers by by “Richard Holton”:http://web.mit.edu/holton/www/pubs.html work on weakness of will and self-control. (See “this”:http://web.mit.edu/holton/www/pubs/Weakness.pdf famous paper on weakness of will, and “this”:http://web.mit.edu/holton/www/pubs/Provocation.pdf unpublished paper with Stephen Shute on provocation.)
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I’d drafted a long post on doxastic voluntarism and stuff, only to find “this paper”:http://web.stcloudstate.edu/msteup/Doxastic%20Freedom.pdf by Matthias Steup that makes some of the same points. I think I disagree with him over a few points, especially concerning the response to Feldman, but I agree with a lot of what he says. Much much more on this tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s a comic strip about “pig philosophy”:http://www.partiallyclips.com/index.php?id=1455 that’s pretty funny. If you click through the link you’ll find a whole bunch of funny comic strips, which is convenient if you’re looking for new ways to put off jobs that really need to be finished over the weekend. (Hat tip: Geoff Pullum.)

There are several questions about the relationship between belief and voluntariness that I’m planning to write about over the upcoming months. Several of these topics will be pretty familiar, but some might not be. (I’m interested in the role that doxastic voluntarism, or something like it, plays in Meditation Four, for instance, which is not as far as I can tell one of the big topics on the radar screen in contemporary philosophy.)

But those are for more serious posts. Today I just want to make a little observation. Philosophers often write as if it is obvious that we can’t decide to form beliefs. You might think that if this is obvious, then authors would never have characters, let alone narrators, decide to form beliefs. “But”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0765341247&id=MyL99bXf_YkC&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=837wA6oEE1hp6Gc_l_goZ5AN5Os “if”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0595222900&id=ir778m3HJDgC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=fNWS97CZ5fpqypPaszpJXwvrdTc “you”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0595345980&id=2NDKf8fdJXcC&pg=RA2-PA39&lpg=RA2-PA39&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=4XbQDx_d_X4-dG13w7Bdi72fNFc “did”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0595391982&id=geGno9f9EC8C&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=N_LPgJZu2C049TrWQci9b2Q4HNI “you’d”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1595262997&id=jl9-gKr25UoC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=uczuxgGZZ20aKeWEg7jks82hXJE “be”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0312323859&id=cYDSNpR3BK4C&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=qwcscAfvCuXyqWXBoXVNd6cQsLA “very”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0312286619&id=1696_VWQsnwC&pg=PA100&lpg=PA100&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=4CHgGaxDf-HMmyohKyPk0k9sUCg “badly”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0060529741&id=T2q_1C_QttMC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=1U0PUEpAf4ZP3_oS94BJP8iYnTw “mistaken”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0312964234&id=P6lDXF4m9u8C&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=%22I+decided+to+believe%22&sig=xmLLoI0mCyRgfUl4sT618p_Uqz0.

For what it’s worth, I suspect the psychological assumptions these authors are making are quite plausible. When someone tells us something that is plausible, but not such that we should obviously trust them, we have to decide whether we will, on this occasion, trust them. If we have no other reason to believe what they say, but trusting them will involve (perhaps inter alia) believing what they say, then we are deciding to believe.

“Terence Tao”:http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/, an Australian now working at UCLA, has won a “Fields medal”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/maths-man-is-number-one/2006/08/22/1156012542775.html?page=fullpage. I’m naturally very pleased to see an Australian Fields medallist. I also knew Prof Tao a little back when I was a high school maths student and he was a remarkable prodigy, having just become the youngest person to win a Maths Olympiad gold medal. I’ve always had this image, I think more from movies than anything else, that prodigies like that tend to burn out. Clearly he didn’t.

To give you a sense of how broad Tao’s work is, the work on prime numbers that was highlighted in the Fields citation is the seventh category heading on his preprints page. And he’s either editor or an editorial board member on four journals. Some days I think I need to work harder. In the meantime, congratulations to Professor Tao for some really remarkable accomplishments.

As many of you will know, Philosophical Review is moving to Duke University Press. What you might not know, what indeed I didn’t know until a few minutes ago, is that Duke has quite a nice “webpage”:http://philreview.dukejournals.org/ for the Review. If your institution subscribes to the Review, you should even be able to access recent issues (through April 2006) that are online. For many people that will mean that there are a lot of new Philosophical Review papers available for them to read!

UPDATE: Dave Chalmers pointed out to me that Duke is actually running a free trial of the Review website until September 27. So between now and then you can get any of the articles that you like. (And there are 20 or so articles that are posted that won’t have arrived by paper yet.) We might start some discussion threads on some of the papers here over that time.

At the recent Bellingham conference, Ted Sider (in discussion of a paper by Kadri Vihvelin) made what I thought was a very good point about dispositions and conditionals. What follows are largely reflections on how Ted’s point affects debates about free will. I don’t think many of my conclusions here are original – what I say ends up being pretty close to what Neil Levy says in “Frankfurt Finked”:http://au.geocities.com/neil_levy/Documents/articles/Frankfurt-finked.pdf (PDF), but perhaps the way I get there will be interestingly different. (And it is an excuse to display my Austinian tendencies in some detail.)

Consider the familiar example of the glass liked by a powerful sorcerer. The glass is a duplicate of my glass that will break if struck. But this glass won’t break if it is struck. The sorcerer will anticipate the strike and at that moment change the intrinsic structure of the glass so that it can handle being struck. Intuitively, the glass is still fragile, but it won’t break if it is struck. So the following identity is false.

* Being fragile = would break if struck

Now here is Ted’s point. From the example we know that not both of the following identities can be true.

* Being fragile = being disposed to break if struck
* Being disposed to break if struck = would break if struck

But the example alone *doesn’t* tell us which of the identities is false, just that one or the other is. Most of the recent literature on dispositions has focussed on the second identity as what is wrong. But once Ted raised it, it seemed to me that we should think again about the first identity.
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Over at “Crooked Timber”:http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/11/ellery-eells-is-dead/, Harry Brighouse reports the sad news that his colleague “Ellery Eells”:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/eells/ has died. As Harry says, Eells’ combination of technical ability and philosophical insight was rare and valuable. I never met him, but both Harry and “Larry Shapiro”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/in_memoriam_ell.html report he was also a wonderful person and colleague as well.

*UPDATE*: In comments Branden Fitelson, who was a student of Eells, has some memories of what Eells was like as a teacher and supervisor.