McDonald’s can now award A-level equivalent qualifications in the UK.

I want my extra £150 a week.

I’ve just been reading Vincent Hendricks’s slides giving advice to graduate students on how to gain visibility in philosophy.  (Hat tip: Lemmings.)

 While I agree with some of this advice, I myself would advise students differently in some respects. 

I agree that keeping one’s CV and web page up to date is essential.  And, I would add, so is making sure your page makes you look good.  I don’t mean that you need to hire a web designer but that (for instance) you shouldn’t have a section headed ‘publications’ which lists a numbers of things which are not publications (e.g. drafts, unpublished conference talks).  It can come across as if you’re trying to be misleading, and people will notice. 

Also, I disagree with the advice to accept all kinds of invitations including requests to do grunt work.  While it is vital to accept as many invitations of the right sort as possible, it seems to me that students often spend a lot of time doing things which earn them no professional respect (such as taking out the garbage at conferences).  Networking requires you to talk philosophy with people at conferences; you can’t do it if you’re too busy running around cleaning up their lunch wrappings. 

Also, I would have cautioned against accepting certain kinds of invitation to review a book.  A book review takes a long time to write, considering how little weight reviews are given in assessing someone’s research record.  And getting one published in a third-rate journal is not going to get you noticed (worse, it might have a negative, is-that-the-best-(s)he-can-do, type of effect).  Your time would probably be better spent working on getting a paper ready to send to a good journal. 

Basically, I’m saying that being selective matters.  Taking every opportunity to talk at a conference, to help organize one, and to write to/co-operate with big names, etc., is a good idea.  But if you present yourself as someone who’s got nothing better to do than make tea and write book reviews for bad journals, people might think that’s true.

(Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not saying you shouldn’t be a good citizen by helping out at conferences and so on.  I’m just saying you don’t do yourself any favours by accepting all requests to do this sort of thing, at the expense of writing a good dissertation in a reasonable time frame and trying to get work published in good places.)

My favourite session at the recent Arizona Ontology Conference was on Daniel‘s paper Finite Quantities.

Daniel argues that there is suggestive evidence from science to the effect that certain fundamental quantities are quantized rather than continuous.  That, for Daniel, is to say that not all properties of the form <em>having n units of X</em> are instantiated, for certain fundamental X such as mass, charge or perhaps distance.  Rather, for these X, there is some minimal n such that the property <em>having n units of X</em> is instantiated, and for all other instantiated properties of this form, ‘n’ is replaced with some multiple of this minimum.

It is commendable to get clear about what the quantized hypothesis looks like, and Daniel gets quite a lot clearer about it than most other discussions I know of.

However, having clarified that it is not a claim about the necessity (nomic, metaphysical or otherwise) of this restriction on the instantiation of certain properties, or about the non-existence, unreality or other substandardness of such properties (assuming that properties can exist uninstantiated), the view does not seem so very surprising or controversial. 

It strikes me as a much more modest and palatable claim than the claims that quantizers – including Daniel – often <em>sound</em> like they are making.  It sounds considerably less shocking, for instance, than the claim that ‘there is no such thing as’ (say) 1/2 n units of mass, or that although I may express things like “1/2 n units of mass” in <em>language</em> there is ‘no quantity corresponding to these representations’ and that ‘these quantities are not physically real’ (p. 2).

Moreover, clarity as to the exact nature of the quantizer’s thesis seems to make some of Daniel’s argumentative moves puzzling.

One of Daniel’s main opponents in the paper is someone who says that every time (say) a mass of six units is instantiated, the thing which instantiates the property <em>having six units of mass</em> also instantiates <em>having three units of mass</em> (twice over) and <em>having two units of mass</em> (three times over).
  
But let’s be clear about two readings of ‘having three units of mass’.  On the first, it means ‘having at least three units of mass’.  On the second, it means ‘having exactly three units of mass (and no more)’.

Now no-one would deny that everything which instantiates <em>having six units of mass</em> also instantiates <em>having at least three units of mass</em>.  That would be silly.  The quantizer, in this (made up) case, must instead be looking at denying that the property of <em>having exactly three units of mass (and no more)</em> is instantiated by anything.

But once we are clear that this is what is meant, the <em>opponent</em>’s position looks silly.  Obviously something which instantiates <em>having six units of mass</em> does not instantiate <em>having exactly three units of mass (and no more)</em>.

On neither reading, then, does it seem as if a Daniel-style quantizer and the opponent he describes in his paper have a sensible dispute such that they might need to look at the science to resolve it.

Two more Arché postdocs are being advertised, this time in connection with the new Philosophical Methodology project.  If interested, check out the details on the St Andrews website.  These are very attractive positions, running for four years and based in a world-leading research centre.  I can highly recommend application to anyone at the right career stage and with the right philosophical interests.

 This article on the rise philosophy in Scottish schools is worth a click, not only for the heartening story itself (well done, Lisa) but also for the salutary reminder, from the comments, of how much of a problem philosophy still faces with its public image. 

HT: Nothing of Consequence, via Philosophy, et cetera.

As readers of Leiter will already be aware, Professor Peter Lipton died suddenly on Sunday. 

This is a big loss for philosophy.  Peter was an excellent philosopher, with wide research interests, particularly in the philosophy of science, epistemology and the philosophy of mind, a willingness to think and talk about pretty much anything and a very inclusive attitude to discussing philosophy. His papers are exemplary for their clarity and style.  He was also an inspiring teacher; I remember his undergraduate lectures as among the best I have seen. 

I am just finishing off a paper on explanation for the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society; as Peter was the person who first inspired my interest in this topic, and also (typically) sent me several pages of encouraging and helpful comments on this very paper shortly before he died, I have decided to dedicate the paper to his memory.

An obituary has been posted on the Cambridge HPS website.

Just for fun: take a look at this moving image.  Don’t read the accompanying text straight away – first decide whether you think the figure is spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise.  (Apparently this will tell you something interesting about your brain use, though I think the illusion is interesting enough regardless of the reliability of this claim.)  At first I could only see it spinning clockwise; now I can only see it spinning anti-clockwise.  Apparently some people can change what they see at will, but not me.

HT: Talkin’ ‘Bout Stuff

Update: I have now been able to change at will a couple of times, by focussing on one of the hands and thinking about when it would have to be in front and when behind if the figure were spinning in the opposite direction!

Arche is advertising for two postdocs to work within its Contextualism and Relativism project.  Details are available from Arche’s website.  Arche is a great place to be and these are excellent positions, lasting up to four and a half years.  The deadline is 29 November.

Update: There are also up to six three-year funded PhD places available.

The Eidos Centre for Metaphysics in Geneva has put out a call for papers for its upcoming ‘Because’ conference.  Unfortunately their web site seems to be down at the moment so I will reproduce the details here.

The use of explanatory concepts, as expressed by means of locutions like ‘because’ or ‘in virtue of’, pervades all philosophical disciplines.  In many cases what is at stake are causal links, but in many other cases causation is not involved. A currently hotly debated example is provided by the topic of truth-making. A truth-maker is something which makes a truth-bearer (a sentence, or a proposition, etc.) true, and the truth-making relation is commonly spelt out in terms of a non-causal explanatory relationship: for a truth-bearer to be made true by an entity is for it to be true in virtue of that entity, or in virtue of the existence of that entity. Other examples can be found in discussions about ontological dependence, supervenience, substances, essence, reduction, the realism vs. anti-realism debate, or again knowledge. The papers presented at the conference will deal with topics where non-causal explanatory links are crucially involved, as used in order to treat certain philosophical issues, or as the proper topic of philosophical inquiry.

The conference will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, on 15-17 February 2008.

The submission deadline is *December 1st, 2007*.  Participants will be notified by December 15th.  Email abstracts of approx. 1000 words to Fabrice Correira or Benjamin Schnieder.

Travel and accommodation will be paid for speakers, and it is expected that a selection of conference papers will be published in a subsequent edited volume.  The invited speakers are Kit Fine (NYU), E. J. Lowe (Durham), Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Oxford), Zoltan Szabo (Yale) and me (Nottingham).  It should be a great event, and Geneva is a beautiful city, so get writing on those abstracts!

 Update: The conference website seems to be working now.