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Author Archives: brianweatherson
Counterexamples to Lewis on Value
In “Dispositional Theories of Value”, Lewis endorses the following two claims.
* Something is valuable iff we value it under circumstances of ideal imaginative acquiantance.
* We value something iff we desire to desire it.
Here are a couple of counterexamples to this pair of theses. I don’t know whether these are at all original; I’m not very familiar with this literature.
Some people have many thwarted desires; others don’t. I value being one of the ones who does not. Or at least I think it is valuable to not have many thwarted desires, so if Lewis’s first thesis is right then I would value this under ideal circumstances.
But I don’t desire to desire this. To be sure, I *do* desire to not have thwarted desires. But I don’t regard this status of mine, desiring to not have thwarted desires, as something I have pro-attitudes towards. It seems to me constitutive of having desires that one desire to not have many thwarted desires, since I’m essentially a thing that has desires. So necessarily I desire to not have thwarted desires, so if I desired that I desire to not have thwarted desires, I’d be desiring something that I recognise as a necessary truth. And this seems like a very odd attitude to have. At any rate, I don’t have this attitude.
So this is a value, or at least something valuable, that I don’t desire to desire, and that I wouldn’t desire to desire if my circumstances were more ideal.
Perhaps there is a gap in that argument. I said it is essential to me that I desire not to have many thwarted desires. But I only have that property if I _exist_, and I might not exist. (Indeed, barring a dramatic medical revolution I won’t exist one of these centuries.) Maybe my desire to exist is a desire to desire that I not have many thwarted desires. I don’t really think it is. When I introspect I don’t see any second-order desire to desire to not have thwarted desires, but maybe I’m just not looking closely enough.
Still, considerations of existence and non-existence suggest a second counterexample to Lewis’s theory. Poor Billy is slowly and painfully dying. He belives (rightly or wrongly) that this protracted death is an affront to his dignity, and because he so values his dignity he wishes he were already dead.
Does Billy desire to desire dignity? No. He does desire dignity, but he wishes that he didn’t desire it, because he wishes that he had no desires at all. So Billy values something he doesn’t desire to desire.
Note that I’m not saying that anyone who desires not to exist thereby cannot reasonably desire anything that entails existence. That would be a most implausible claim about desire. (Or so I say; there are some who deny this, or something slightly weaker than it.) Rather, I’m just making it a condition of the case that Billy’s state is so deplorable by his own lights that as a matter of fact he does not desire anything that entails living, such as desiring dignity. That seems to me compatible with valuing dignity, so the second-order desire analysis of valuing fails.
Conditionals Conference
Last weekend I was at the very successful workshop on conditionals organised by the graduate students at the University of Connecticut. The aim of the workshop was to bring together philosophers and linguists with very different methodologies together. I think the interaction was useful. Kai von Fintel told the philosophers that from a semantic point of view, the problem is that philosophers don’t read enough David Lewis. Or, perhaps more precisely, they don’t read the right David Lewis, especially “Adverbs of Quantification”.
I did a version of “Conditionals and Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/car06.pdf, and got some valuable feedback from it. (Note though that the version I did isn’t a lot like that version. I’ll hopefully write something here soon about the differences.)
There are more comments about the conference by “Kai”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2006/04/how_ordinary_are_conditionals and at the new “UConn gradblog”:http://www.whatisitliketobeablog.com/?p=9.
Congrats again to the organisers (Franklin Scott and Brian Leahy) for a very successful workshop.
Workshop at Cornell
The Sage School of Philosophy and the _Philosophical Review_ are pleased to announce a Workshop organized around J. Robert G. Williamss Eligibility and Inscrutability, the winner of the 2006 Young Philosophers Essay Competition prize. This year the competition was in philosophy of language fifty-five submissions were reviewed. The final version of the paper will be published in the _Philosophical Review_. Everyone interested is welcome to attend.
Location: Lincoln Hall, Room B-21, Saturday, April 22, 10:00 am 1:30 pm
Program
9:45 Slow gathering (coffee, bagels, etc. available)
10:00 Robert Williams (University of Leeds): Synopsis of Eligibility and Inscrutability
10:20 Timothy Bays (Notre Dame University): Comments
11:00 Short break
11:05 John Hawthorne (Rutgers University): Comments
11:45 Long break (coffee, bagels, etc. once again)
12:00 Robert Williams (Leeds University): Responses
12:20 General discussion
1:30 Slow dispersing
Abstract of Eligibility and Inscrutability
Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis eligibility response: some theories are better than others, not because the fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are (1) to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but instead flows naturally from three independently motivated elements; and (2) to show that severe limitations afflict the proposal. In conclusion, I pick out the element of the eligibility response that is responsible for the limitations: future work in this area should therefore concentrate on amending this aspect of the overall theory.
Blog Odd
There have been a few oddities with the blog database over the last couple of days. So a couple of posts, and several comments, have been lost. Sorry if this has happened to your comments. I don’t exactly know what the problem is, but I hope it’s fixed shortly.
I have a few thanks to make to various hosts for their hospitality over the last little while, but I might wait until I know the posts will survive to make them…
Web Problems
Over the weekend, as many of you will have noticed, we had some problems with the website. Now my email is not working particularly well. If you sent me something urgent in the last 5 days, it might be worth resending it to bw93-at-cornell-edu. I hope this account at least is working.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Regular service will return shortly etc.
Monday Message Board
We seem to have lost some data from while I was away over the weekend. Sorry about this – I don’t know quite what happened. Anyway, use this for any announcements, including announcements that were on the threads that somehow got deleted.
Lewis on Reduction of Mind
I still haven’t crawled out from under the mountain of work that I abandoned before and during the APA, so blogging will be slow for a while. But happily, part of the work is something bloggable. That includes the latest Lewis notes I wrote. These are on the first half of “Reduction of Mind”, and include an extended discussion of a point that was at the centre of Eric Hiddleston’s interesting paper from last week’s APA. (Sadly Eric’s paper isn’t online or I’d link to it.)
The notes are “on the Lewis blog”:http://lewisblog.weatherson.org/archives/004721.html and “in PDF”:http://brian.weatherson.org/LewisCourse/h9.pdf.
Tuesday Message Board
Use for any announcements about philosophy conferences, events, websites or anything else related to the field.
Regular blogging will return after I clear off the email pile that built up during the APA. It’s down to 36 emails to deal with…
Monday Wednesday Message Board
I’ve been travelling a bit and forgot to post the Monday message board for this week, so instead we have a Wednesday message board. Use this for all and any philosophical announcements.