“Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2003/02/24/The_Problem_of_Conjunctive_Events has a nice schema for how to generate counterexamples to transitivty of causation, assuming that something like the causation as influence theory is correct. Here’s an instance of his schema, designed to show that some of the things Lewis wants to say about events are in conflict.
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“Certain Doubts”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/?p=489 reports that the new “Philosophical Perspectives”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/phpe/19/1/ is out, including one of “my favourite papers”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf. Comments are open over there, so I’ll leave them closed here.

A lot of philosophers have NedStat counters on their webpage. (A lot of them because I might have suggested it at one stage.) Recently NedStat has taken to having its ‘free’ counters be supported by popup ads. The effect of this is that if your page has a NedStat counter on it, readers may get a lovely popup thrown at them. I’ve already had this on two webpages I visited that are housed on university servers, and where I wouldn’t expect popups. (And I’d think having such commercial popups would be a violation of all sorts of perfectly good university policies.) I’m sure this is all inadvertant, but I’d like to recommend that everyone remove the NedStat counters as soon as possible unless they are sure that their counters do not generate popups.

Well, I’d finally clean out my email inbox for a start. And I’d read many more of the things in the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org and “Brad DeLong’s links”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/12/if_i_had_infini_4.html. But instead I’ll just mention a finite number of things that I’d like to spend more time on.

David Wallace, “Language Use in a Branching Universe”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert0130/papers/branching.pdf – what should our semantics of tense look like if time happens, as a matter of contingent fact, to be branching? I’d be tempted to start using a MacFarlane-style relativist semantics, which Wallace doesn’t consider. But what he does consider looks fascinating.

Paul Pietroski, “Interpreting Concatenation and Concatenates”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Epietro/research/papers/ICC.pdf – as he says “Some readers may find this shorter but denser version, which ignores issues about vagueness and causal constructions, easier to digest. The emphasis is on the treatments of plurality and quantification, and I assume at least some familiarity with more standard approaches.” I’m not sure that I find ‘shorter and denser’ versions easier to digest, either when we’re talking about stacks of pancakes or semantics papers.

Jeremy Butterfield, “Against Pointillisme about Mechanics”:http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002553/01/APM1.pdf – an argument that Humean Supervenience can’t handle even the vector quantities of classical mechanics, and in particular that it can’t handle velocity. I’m not sure I follow it all, I’m in particular not sure what he means by ‘perdurantism’, I’d like to be able to follow it all.

Frank Jackson and Michael Smith have “a very nice new paper”:http://www.princeton.edu/~msmith/mypapers/Absolutist%20ethical%20theories%20and%20uncertainty.pdf on a puzzle for absolutist ethical theories. An absolutist ethical theory is a theory that says actions of a certain kind (call it K) cannot be done, no matter how good the consequences that would result from doing such an action. So an absolutist might, for instance, say that it is always impermissible to kill an innocent person, no matter how many lives we might save that way.

Frank and Michael (hereafter FM) point out that it will always be uncertain whether a particular action is or is not of kind K. And an ethical theory that tells us we cannot do things when they are of kind K, should tell us what to do when they are probably, or perhaps, of kind K. That question, they argue, absolutists cannot give a satisfactory answer to. I don’t want to defend absolutism, which I think is generally absurd to be frank, but I’m not sure FM have quite put their finger on exactly where the problem is.
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One of the ways to understand what Humean Supervenience (HS) amounts to is to work out which worlds it is true at. So I want to explore for now whether HS could possibly be true in the worlds of the Harry Potter novels. This requires only a little knowledge of the Harry Potter novels, most of which I’ll explain as I go along. The payoff for this little investigation will be a rather serious problem for Lewis’s theory of laws, but that’s a fair way off.
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The online papers blog has fallen into a little bit of disrepair (that will hopefully get fixed shortly) but in the meantime I should note a few updates. So here are two.

* “Tim Crane’s online papers”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctydtc/Crane%20online%20papers.htm including “Is there a perceptual relation?”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctydtc/Perceptual%20relation.doc and “Brentano’s Concept of Intentional Inexistence”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctydtc/Brentano%20paper.doc (both Word docs.)
* John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan, “What Would Telelogical Causation Be?”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dpn/docs/TeleologyHawthorneNolan.pdf (PDF)
* Alex Byrne, “Soames on Quine and Davidson”:http://web.mit.edu/abyrne/www/soamesonQandD.pdf (PDF)
* Andy Egan, “Imagination, Delusion and Self-Deception”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/bim.11.11.pdf (PDF)
* Jonathan Ichikawa, “Truth and Truth in Fiction: Authorial Authority and Making it So”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/gradstudents/papers/jichikawa-ttf.pdf (PDF)
* Richard Heck, “Frege’s Contribution to Philosophy of Language”:http://bobjweil.com/heck/pdf/unpublished/FregeContribution.pdf (PDF)
* Robert Williams’s “Work in Progress Page”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phljrgw/wip.htm including “Is supervaluational consequence logically revisionary?”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phljrgw/wip/revisionism.pdf (PDF)
* Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, “Concepts”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/ from the SEP

Jerry Dworkin pointed out to me that Mike Leigh’s film “All or Nothing” contains a scene that seems to support interest-relative-invariantism. The script is “here”:http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a/all-or-nothing-script-transcript.html, though be warned that link contains pop-ups.

bq. Husband: Give us a clue, then.
Wife: ‘Biblical son of Isaac, five letters.’ Starting with a ‘J.’
H: Jonah.
W: Oh, yeah.
H: No, it ain’t. It’s what’s-his-name. Jacob.
W: Are you sure?
H: Yeah.
W: It’s a thousand pound prize.
H: Is it? No, I ain’t sure, then.

Well, maybe it is only interest-relative-invariantism about ‘sure’, rather than ‘knows’, but it seemed like a good way to celebrate the “publishing of Jason Stanley’s book on IRI”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/?p=480. More on IRI after the fold.
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Thony Gillies has “a new paper”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thony/counterfactual_scorekeeping.pdf up defending a strict implication account of subjunctive conditionals. That is, he says that (1) can be analysed as (2), with the quantifier in (2) being restricted by context, as many quantifiers are restricted by context.

(1) If it were the case that _p_, it would be the case that _q_.
(2) In all worlds where _p_ is true, _q_ is true.

The usual argument against this, tracing back to Lewis, involves what Thony calls Sobel sequences, such as the following examples from Lewis.

(3) If the USA were to throw its nukes into the sea tomorrow, there would be war; but of course, if the USA and all the other superpowers were to throw their nukes into the sea tomorrow there would be peace.

It is possible that both conjuncts of (3) are non-trivially true, but this is not possible on the strict conditional analysis. There’s a few responses one can make to this argument of course. As Jason Stanley has pointed out, quantifier domains can move around fairly quickly; certainly they can be different either side of a semi-colon. So it isn’t obvious the strict implication theory has this consequence. Another response notes that on Lewis’s own account, (4) should be just as good as (3), but it isn’t.

(4) If the USA and all the other superpowers were to throw their nukes into the sea tomorrow there would be peace; but of course, if the USA were to throw its nukes into the sea tomorrow, there would be war.

Now here’s the question I’m getting to. Thony credits this observation to Irene Heim, as reported in a 1999 paper of Kai von Fintel’s. Is that really the earliest source? I thought it was made in the 1996 McCawley paper that Thony cites, if not before – but I don’t have that paper on me so I can’t tell. Anyone out there with an instant encyclopedic knowledge of the history of conditionals who can help?

I should say that I very strongly suspect this point is one that many many people independently discovered, so given the speed (or lack thereof) with which some things get into print, I expect that there will be many good candidates for the honour of having discovered the distinction.

*UPDATE* – It seems I was totally wrong about my historical recollections. See the comments. And of course see Thony’s paper for a nice way to handle the data within a strict implication theory.