As a few bloggers are noting, JC Beall‘s new book Spandrels of Truth is just out with OUP. The main idea is that semantic paradox is a by-product (or spandrel) created by the introduction into our language of a transparent truth predicate. Having talked with JC a lot about this material, and read drafts of the book, I think it’s well worth a read if you’re interested in this topic at all.
(As a bonus, if you order with this discount form you can get 20% off.)
This post is just to bring attention to two upcoming conferences.
Firstly, the Arche Methodology Conference, taking place in St Andrews in April. Daniel and I will both be giving papers, and they have a strong lineup of others. Attendance for non-participants is apparently ‘limited’ so it’s probably worth registering early!
Secondly, Finn Spicer just emailed me about his conference Minds Brains and Beyond, taking place in Bristol in March, with several big names on the programme. Pop over to the conference website for more info.
Happy New Year everyone! Here are a few links of interest.
Addendum:
Another link of interest. JC Beall has a budding blog called B-log.
For what it’s worth, I agree with Robbie’s comment that we should be cautious about drawing ordinal rankings from the RAE data.
The point I want to make here is the obvious one that some of that information will be more useful for certain purposes than others, although all of those purposes could aptly be described as “assessments of research quality”.
For instance, a student wondering where to go to get the most great discussions with the most great researchers may be uninterested in the difference between department A with a large amount of 4* output and nothing else and department B with a similar amount of 4* output and also a large amount of 1* output. If so she should not take averaging scores too seriously.
To university admins, however, the difference between A and B might be extremely important for determining things like how much research bang for their salary buck they are getting. They should take averages seriously.
Various different kinds of ordinal information might be obtained from the RAE data which might be useful for different purposes (though like almost everyone else I don’t think the methods used to formulate it were perfect), but I don’t think we should assume any ordinal ranking is best (or even approximately best) for all (or even most) research-quality-assessment purposes.
UPDATE: I say this as someone who claims affiliation of one kind or another with a number of British departments, and is feeling neither particularly thrilled or nor particularly dispirited about any of their performances!
The Australasian Association of Philosophy has compiled a new set of journal rankings for submission to the Australian Research Council. Without knowing exactly what the ARC wants them for, I would nevertheless imagine these are worth knowing about if you ever plan to work in Australia. Some of the rankings look very odd to me. Several flaws with the whole procedure are noted in the AAP’s covering letter.
I’ve just finished drafting a critical notice of Ralph Wedgwood‘s book The Nature of Normativity, which I’m writing at the invitation of Analysis Reviews (the future continuer of Philosophical Books). I’m posting the current draft; comments are welcome. The critical notice focuses mainly on Wedgwood’s normative epistemology, though it also takes a brief look at his argument against expressivism.
Tim Williamson thinks it is. But I’m not convinced. This is a little paper where I explain (some of the reasons) why I’m not convinced.
Williamson relies heavily on (what he thinks of as) logical equivalences between modal propositions and certain counterfactuals. But such logical equivalences (even assuming that’s what they are) could not support the claim that modal epistemology is just counterfactual epistemology. Or so I claim.
Compare: disjunctive propositions (A v B) are logically equivalent to negated conjunctive propositions ¬(¬A & ¬B). But that doesn’t mean the epistemology of disjunctions reduces to the epistemology of negated conjunctions.
The challenge to Williamson is to say why the equivalences he’s interested in are of more epistemological significance than this. It is a challenge which, this paper argues, he has not met in his various discussions of this topic.
This morning I’ve been thinking about dispositions that cannot be manifested: that is, dispositions to phi under circumstances C, where either phi-ing or circumstances C are metaphysically impossible.
One thing I’m interested in is whether there are any such dispositions. Another is whether anything has such a disposition. Prima facie, there are some reasons to answer yes to both questions. I think, for instance, that I have a disposition to be puzzled when presented with a round square object.
In response to this suggestion, however, Daniel pointed out that a certain amount of coarse-graining about dispositions would enable us to accommodate that disposition without believing in dispositions which cannot be manifested. My disposition to be puzzled when presented with a round square object may be identical to my disposition to be puzzled when presented with an interesting and surprising object that I didn’t think existed, and this disposition can of course be manifested.
Lewis’s counterfactual account of dispositions in ‘Finkish Dispositions’, combined with his view that counterpossible conditionals are trivially true, delivers that everything has every disposition to phi in circumstances C for impossible C. But this does not by itself entail that there are any dispositions which cannot be manifested, since these trivial dispositions may for all we’ve said so far be identical to more familiar, manifestable, ones.
Nevertheless, for those of us inclined to be abundant with our dispositions, I think there is some reason to believe in unmanifestable dispositions (and instantiations thereof). And I don’t see any special reason why there shouldn’t be such things, given that dispositions don’t need to be manifested in order to be instantiated.
I’ve been thinking recently about the possible fruitfulness of comparing cleverly-disguised-mule-worries (CDMW) in epistemology with Kripkensteinian-meaning-underdetermination-worries (KMUW).
I think it is helpful, in understanding CDMW, to think about two kinds of questions:
(1) Why does S believe those animals are zebras rather than lions?
(2) Why does S believe those animals are zebras rather than cleverly disguised mules?
‘Because they are zebras’ looks like a good answer to questions like (1) and a bad answer to questions like (2).
For a contextualist explanationist about knowledge like myself, this suggests that in contexts where the question ‘Is S’s belief explained by the fact believed?’ amounts to something like (1), ‘S knows they are zebras’ looks good, and in contexts where that question amounts to something like (2), ‘S knows they are zebras’ looks bad.
What I find suggestive, in trying to understand KMUW, is an analogy with the questions:
(1′) Why does S use ‘plus’ for addition rather than subtraction?
(2′) Why does S ‘plus’ for addition rather than quaddition?
‘Because of the dubbing, or otherwise word-defining, activities of S’s linguistic predecessors’ looks like a good answer to questions like (1′) and a bad answer to questions like (2′).
More on this topic will follow …
The folks at Eidos are organizing a metaphysics conference which will take place in July 2008, and are currently calling for papers on topics in metaphysics suitable for presentation in 40 minutes (leaving 20 minutes for discussion). Speakers currently lined up include Kit Fine and Robin LePoidevin. If past experience is anything to go by, it should be fun! The deadline for submission of one-page abstracts is 30th March.