One of the innovations at Arché that I’ll quite excited about is that we’ll be running ‘mini-courses’ on a number of different topics over the upcoming months and years. The first big plan is for a workshop and mini-course on expressivism. The details are at:
The speakers so far include Stephen Barker, Alan Gibbard, Mark Richard, Mark Schroeder and Seth Yalcin, and there may be more added. Registration is now open, and if past Arché events are anything to go by, it will fill up quickly.
The New York Times had a short article on “women in philosophy”:http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/a-dearth-of-women-philosophers/. I’ve heard a lot of speculation about why this might be so. Indeed, I’ve participated in such speculation. But a lot of that speculation isn’t linked up to empirical facts, such as the facts in the “Australasian Association of Philosophy’s studies on women in philosophy in Australia”:http://aap.org.au/women/reports/index.html. Here are two key graphs.
The AAP’s study (authored by Eliza Goddard) included four reports:
I’d really like it if a similar study was run in America, though I suspect that wouldn’t be cheap.
Here are two links to Scottish Philosophy:
I’ve in the past quoted a lot of citation counts from Google Scholar. Language Log suggests that data is “too muddled to be relied on”:http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1770.
There will be a cross-disciplinary “Online Compass conference”:http://compassconference.wordpress.com/ happening shortly. The conference begins October 19, and you can register for free “here”:http://www.blackwellpublishingsurvey.com/survey/149278/29a8/.
We’ve published a lot of new articles in Philosophy Compass recently. These include:
And we’ve also published some free to download teaching and learning guide. These include:
I suspect that everything I say here is well known, but I hadn’t realised any of it until recently, and so it might be news to some readers as well. Most of the good ideas are from conversations with Will Starr and Ishani Maitra. The subject is sentences where ‘sure’ is followed by an embedded question. Here are three interesting properties about such constructions.
‘Sure + wh-‘ is a very strong NPI
What is your reaction to the following purported sentences?
(1) John is sure who killed JFK.
(2) John isn’t sure who killed JFK.
(3) Is John sure who killed JFK?
(4) Anyone who is sure who killed JFK is excessively credulous.
If you’re like me, (1) is clearly defective, (2) is perfectly well-formed, and (3) and (4) are fairly questionable. (Right now I think (3) isn’t quite as bad as (4), though I go back and forth on that.) If that’s right, ‘sure+wh-‘ is not only a negative polarity item, it is a very strong one, requiring something like overt negation to be fully licenced. Back in the day, there used to be several idiomatic constructions with this property. But over the years those phrases have either fallen out of usage (e.g., ‘give a red cent’) or have ceased to be NPIs (e.g., ‘give a damn’). I was surprised to discover that contemporary English has an NPI so strong as to prefer overt negation, and that it is not an idiom.
This came up because Will Starr has been doing some really fascinating work on the relationship between conditionals and questions. (I suspect some of that work will start getting a lot of attention soon, since it’s got the potential to revolutionise the way we think about conditionals; but that’s for another post.) One aspect of that connection is that ‘if’-clauses can be embedded questions. For instance, (5) means roughly the same thing as (6).
(5) Does Bob know if John will be at the party?
(6) Does Bob know whether John will be at the party?
But these two don’t quite mean the same thing, because ‘knows whether’ is not an NPI, while ‘knows if’ is. (Or at least it is in the idiolects of a few people I’ve spoken to.) Compare (7), (8), (9) and (10)
(7) Bob knows if John will be at the party.
(8) Bob knows whether John will be at the party.
(9) Bob doesn’t know if John will be at the party.
(10) Bob doesn’t know whether John will be at the party.
I think (7) is, every so slightly, worse than (8) through (10). So I think ‘knows if’ is a, very weak, NPI.
I said earlier that I was surprised that contemporary English contains as strong an NPI as ‘sure+wh-‘. I knew such strong NPIs used to exist, but I thought they had gone extinct in recent decades. But I don’t think I ever knew there was an NPI as weak as ‘knows if’. If I’ve classified it correctly, it’s a very strange creature. But I’m not sure whether I have classified it correctly.
Attitudes, Factivity and Embedding
One constraint on theories of the semantics of attitude verbs and embedded questions is that they have to explain why (11) is well-formed, while (12) isn’t.
(11) John knows who killed JFK.
(12) John believes who killed JFK.
In the past I’ve been most impressed by theories that explained this asymmetry in terms of the fact that ‘knows’ is factive while ‘believes’ is not. But that can’t be what’s central, since ‘sure’ isn’t factive, but ‘sure’ takes embedded questions as complements. Admittedly, ‘sure’ only takes embedded questions as complements in negated contexts, but still, if you’re classifying sentences, it seems (13) has to go with (14), and not with (15).
(13) John isn’t sure who killed JFK.
(14) John doesn’t know who killed JFK.
(15) John doesn’t believe who killed JFK.
Whatever explains why (15) doesn’t work, it can’t be (or at least it can’t just be) the non-factivity of ‘believes’. There must be something else going on, and I’m not sure what it could be.
Denotation of Embedded Questions
When we think about ‘knows+wh-‘ constructions, it is tempting to say that the denotation of an embedded question is the true answer to that question. After all, (11) is true iff there is a _p_ such that _p_ is the true answer to the question “Who killed JFK?” and John knows _p_. The simplest way to get that to turn out correct is that “who killed JFK” in (11) simply denotes the true answer to the question “Who killed JFK?”.
Obviously this theory has to be qualified to some extent to explain the fact that (12) and (15) are not well-formed. Thinking about ‘sure’ shows that it needs to be qualified even further.
Suppose that Bill is sure Fidel Castro killed JFK. And suppose that he’s wrong; it has Lee Harvey Oswald. Then (16) is intuitively false.
(16) Bill isn’t sure who killed JFK.
Bill is sure; he’s just wrong. But on the view in question, “who killed JFK” denotes the proposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. Then (16) should be equivalent to (17).
(17) Bill isn’t sure that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK.
But (17) is true, Bill isn’t sure of this. To be sure, (17) is misleading, since it implicates that Bill takes Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt to be a live option. But I think once we distinguish truth from assertability, it is clear that (17) is true. So the simple hypothesis about the denotation of “who killed JFK” can’t be right.
It seems like what we need to say is that the sentence _S Vs Q_, where _Vs_ is an attitude verb, and _Q_ is a question, is true iff for some _p_, _p_ is a (possibly false) answer to the question _Q_, and _S Vs p_. That’s why it’s false to say (16). There is an answer to the question “Who killed JFK?” that Bill is sure of. It’s a false answer, but it’s an answer. The reason that _S knows Q_ requires knowing the true answer isn’t something that follows from the semantics of embedded questions, but something that follows from the factivity of ‘knows’. But I’m not sure what kind of compositional theory could deliver these truth conditions.
As I’m sure you all know, the South Pacific and parts of South-East Asia have been struck by several disasters this week, as earthquakes and tsunamis have left at least a thousand dead, and many more injured or homeless. There are many organisations that have been active in response, including “Oxfam”:https://secure.oxfamamerica.org/site/Donation2?idb=189352537&df_id=3000&3000.donation=form1&JServSessionIdr002=hyk4t5dvm7.app28b, “Doctors Without Borders”:http://doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=3980&cat=field-news, the “World Food Program”:http://www.wfp.org/stories/philippines-wfp-reach-1-million-people-flood-zones and many others. Now would be a good time to donate some money to some of these organisations.
I’ve been thinking about Adam Elga’s recent version of the “equal weight view of disagreement”:http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00003702/. This view endorses “giving ground in the face of disagreement about many matters, but not about disagreement itself”. I think this leads to some odd results when the disagreement about disagreement is sufficiently similar to the underlying first-order disagreement.
Suzy and Billy are doing there arithmetic homework. One of the questions is: What is the average of 0.87 and 0.59? Suzy says that she is quite confident that the answer is 0.73. In fact she is 87% confident that is the correct answer. Billy says that he is not that confident, he is only 59% confident that the correct answer is 0.73. Suzy regards (or at least prior to this question regarded) Billy as an epistemic peer when it comes to this kind of question.
Question: On the equal weight view of disagreement, what credence should Suzy have that the correct answer is 0.73?
The defenders of the equal weight view face a small puzzle here. On the one hand, if they say that Suzy’s credence in p should be the average of the credences of her peers, then the credence she should have is 0.73. After all, that is the average of the credences of her peers. On the other hand, if her credences should be directly responsive in this way to the _fact_ that the average of 0.87 and 0.59 is 0.73, then plausibly she should simply believe, with full credence, that the average of 0.87 and 0.59 is 0.73. That is, her credence that the correct answer is 0.73 should be 1.
This example is a little hackneyed, but I think there’s a general lesson here. Anyone who, like Adam, posits any mathematically defined rule for credences says that at some stage in evaluation, we simply have to say that credences must be sensitive to mathematical facts. But once we’ve said that, we have to wonder just which stage that is. I think, contra the equal weight view, that it’s typically very early in evaluation. One’s credences should be sensitive to mathematical facts directly (i.e., to the fact that the correct answer is 0.73), and not just to mathematical facts about credences of epistemic peers (e.g., the fact that the average of Suzy’s peers’ credences is 0.73). At risk of overlooking the obvious, I can’t see any reason to think otherwise, once the issue is stated in this form.
Related question: At which stage in the Achilles and the Tortoise dialogue should Achilles have refused the Tortoise’s recasting of his argument? I say – the very first time the Tortoise attempts to cast a rule of inference as a premise. Sometimes I think Adam’s version of the equal weight view is like a theory that accepts the Tortoise’s first alteration to Achilles’ argument, and rejects the second. There’s a regress that needs to be blocked, and he blocks it, but I can’t see why we would want to block it just _there_.
“Blome-Tillmann”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quee1101/papers/mbt_mate.pdf (PDF) also aims to counter an objection Jason Stanley raises to Lewisian contextualism. The objection turns on part of the picture of how so-called ‘quantifier domain restriction’ works that Jason worked out with Zoltán Szabó. Often when we say All Fs are Gs, we really mean All C Fs are Gs, where C is a contextually specified property. So when I say Every student passed, that utterance might express the proposition that Every student in my class passed.
Now there’s a question about what happens when sentences like All Fs are Gs are embedded in various contexts. Quantifier embeddings tend to allow for certain kinds of ambiguity. For instance, when we have a sentence like If p were true, all Fs would be G, that could express either of the following two propositions. (We’re ignoring context sensitivity for now, but we’ll return to it in a second.)
We naturally interpret (1) the first way, and (2) the second way.
(1) If I had won the last Presidential election, everyone who voted for me would regret it by now.
(2) If Hilary Clinton had been the Democratic nominee, everyone who voted for Barack Obama would have voted for her.
Given this, you might expect that we could get a similar ambiguity with _C_. That is, when you have a quantifier that’s tacitly restricted by _C_, you might expect that you could interpret a sentence like If p were true, all Fs would be G in either of these two ways. (In each of these interpretations, I’ve left _F_ ambiguous; so these are just partial disambiguations.)
Surprisingly, you can’t get the second of these readings. That’s something Jason and Zoltán argue for, and that Jason also argues for in _Knowledge and Practical Interests_. He also argues that to complete a contextualist explanation of sceptical intuitions, you need the second of these readings.
Blome-Tillmann accepts the second of these premises, i.e. that the contextualist needs both kinds of readings, but thinks the first premise is false, i.e. he thinks both readings are available. He thinks he has examples that show you can get the kind of reading Jason denies is possible. But I don’t think his examples show any such thing. Here are the examples he gives.
(5) If there were no philosophers, then the philosophers doing research in the field of applied ethics would be missed most painfully by the public.
(6) If there were no beer, everybody drinking beer on a regular basis would be much healthier.
(7) If I suddenly were the only person alive, I would miss the Frege scholars most.
These are all sentences of (more or less) the form If p were true, all Fs would be G, and they should all be interpreted a la our disambiguation above. That is, they should be interpreted as quantifying over actual _F_s, not things that would be _F_ if _p_ were true. But the existence of such sentences is *completely irrelevant* to the issue Jason is raising. The question isn’t whether there is an ambiguity in _F_, it is whether there is an ambiguity in _C_. And nothing Blome-Tillmann raises suggests Jason’s claim that there is no ambiguity in that position is wrong. So I don’t think his defence of the contextualist account of embedded knowledge ascriptions works.
I suspect the situation for the contextualist is actually a little worse than the above discussion suggests. I think (though I’m not sure I’ve got the dialectic right at this point) that the contextualist needs a reading of If p were true, all Fs would be G where it means:
The reason I think the contextualist needs that is that the contextualist, or at least the contextualist that Blome-Tillmann is defending analyses S knows that p as Every ~p possibility is ruled out by S’s evidence, and then insists that there is a contextual domain restriction on this, so it means something like Every ~p possibility (that I’m not properly ignoring) is ruled out by S’s evidence. They also want to accept that in a context where:
then (3) is still intutively false since we aren’t actually ignoring Cartesian doubts.
(3) If I were to look in the fridge and ignore Cartesian doubts, then I’d know there is beer in the fridge.
But the only way to get that to come out false, and false for the right reasons, is to fix on our actual quantifier domain restriction, but look at worlds that would be ruled out with the counterfactually available evidence. And I don’t see any reason to think that’s a possible disambiguation of embedded quantifiers.
George and Ringo both have $6000 in their bank accounts. They both are thinking about buying a new computer, which would cost $2000. Both of them also have rent due tomorrow, and they won’t get any more money before then. George lives in New York, so his rent is $5000. Ringo lives in Syracuse, so his rent is $1000. Clearly, (1) and (2) are true.
(1) Ringo has enough money to buy the computer.
(2) Ringo can afford the computer.
And I think (3) is true as well, though (4) is less clearly true.
(3) George has enough money to buy the computer.
(4) George can afford the computer.
But I want to focus for now on (3). It is a bad idea for George to buy the computer; he won’t be able to pay his rent. But he has enough money to do so; the computer costs $2000, and he has $6000 in the bank. So (3) is true. Admittedly there are things close to (3) that aren’t true. He hasn’t got enough money to buy the computer and pay his rent. You might say that he hasn’t got enough money to buy the computer given his other financial obligations. But none of this undermines (3).
The point of this little story is to respond to an argument Michael Blome-Tillmann makes in “a paper”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quee1101/papers/mbt_mate.pdf attacking interest-relative invariantism (IRI). (He calls IRI ‘SSI’, which I think is unfortunate, since everyone agrees that knowledge is subject-sensitive. No one thinks S knows that p entails T knows that p.) Here is one of the arguments he makes.
Suppose that John and Paul have exactly the same evidence, while John is in a low-stakes situation towards _p_ and Paul in a high-stakes situation towards _p_. Bearing in mind that SSI is the view that whether one knows _p_ depends on one’s practical situation, SSI entails that one can truly assert:
(11) John and Paul have exactly the same evidence for _p_, but only John has enough evidence to know p, Paul doesn’t.
And this is meant to be a problem, because (11) is intuitively false.
But SSI doesn’t entail any such thing. Paul does have enough evidence to know that _p_, just like George has enough money to buy the computer. Paul can’t know that _p_, just like George can’t buy the computer, because of their practical situations. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have enough evidence to know it. So there isn’t a problem for SSI here.
In a footnote attached to this, Blome-Tillmann tries to reformulate the argument.
I take it that having enough evidence to ‘know _p_’ in _C_ just means having evidence such that one is in a position to ‘know _p_’ in _C_, rather than having evidence such that one ‘knows p‘. Thus, another way to formulate (11) would be as follows: ‘John and Paul have exactly the same evidence for _p_, but only John is in a position to know _p_, Paul isn’t.’
The ‘reformulation’ is obviously bad, since having enough evidence to know _p_ isn’t the same as being in a position to know it, any more than having enough money to buy the computer puts George in a position to buy it. But might there be a different problem for SSI here?
No; the reformulated argument isn’t a problem because the conclusion is not unacceptable. Indeed, the conclusion is a kind of conjunction that is made true all the time, on relatively uncontentious theories of evidence. Consider this example.
Mick and Keith both have evidence _E_, which is strong inductive evidence for _p_. And _p_ in fact is true, just as _E_ would suggest. If Keith were to conclude _p_ on the basis of _E_, that would be knowledge. But Mick has been taking some philosophy classes. And as luck would have it, he has been taking classes from a smart Popperian, who has convinced him that induction is not a source of knowledge. Now if Mick concluded _p_ on the basis of _E_, this would not be knowledge, because his Popperian beliefs would constitute a doxastic defeater. So Mick and Keith have exactly the same evidence for _p_, but only Keith is in a position to know _p_, Mick isn’t.
I think it’s interesting to think about ‘afford’ in this context, since it seems very likely that some kind of IRI analysis of ‘afford’ will be true. We don’t want to have any kind of contextualism about ‘afford’, at least nothing like modern day epistemic contextualism. It would be crazy to say that if _my_ rent is $5000, and it is due tomorrow, then (2) is false, because after all, in my context someone with Ringo’s money couldn’t buy the computer and meet their financial obligations. If I’m right that ‘afford’ is interest-relative, then looking at the way ‘afford’ patterns should provide some useful evidence for or against IRI.
More details on the forthcoming Nottingham A Priori Workshop (9th October) are now available, including the programme and information on how to register.
Attendance is free (though we do require advance registration), lunch, tea and coffee are provided, and the speakers are Anthony Eagle (Oxford), Jessica Brown (St Andrews), myself (Nottingham) and Michael Devitt (CUNY/Nottingham Special Professor).
I converted the bibliography in my “SEP entry on David Lewis”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/ to BibTex format, and along the way fixed up some errors. I think this is the most complete and accurate Lewis bibliography in existence, but any suggestions for how to make it more accurate would be appreciated.
I also made a printout of the bibliography. I couldn’t get it sorted by year as I wanted. (I tried the ‘plainyr’ package, but it messed up the location of books in the sort order.) So it’s sorted by first author, which is a little quirky. Anyway, in case it is helpful to anyone who wants to check it over, here it is.
The BibTex file is based on a download from the wonderful “PhilPapers”:http://philpapers.org website, though I’ve made a number of additions to it. But most of the issue numbers, for instance, are taken from the PhilPapers download, and many would have been unobtainable without that start.
UPDATE: Duncan Watson told me that there are some letters from David Lewis published in The Law of Non-Contradiction. I’ve included them (at his suggestion) as ”Letters to Priest and Beall” in the bibliography.
UPDATE 2 (Sept 2, 11am): I’ve updated the files to include the omissions pointed out by Wo in the comments. Thanks to Wo for spotting all those!
I’m thinking of writing something about ontological indeterminacy and the continuum hypothesis, and this post is basically a request for any background stuff I should know about.
Here are some of the questions I’m interested in. Assume that we have a world with continuum many atoms. One might wonder whether there are some atoms in that world such that (a) there are uncountably many of them, and (b) there are fewer of them than there are atoms in the world. Here’s a proposed answer to that question: It is metaphysically indeterminate. There is, in some deep sense, no fact of the matter about whether there are, or are not, such atoms.
I don’t much like metaphysical indeterminacy, so I don’t much like that answer. But I’m not sure there’s an obvious and clear counterargument to it. Hopefully when I start seriously thinking/reading about this, I’ll come up with a clear counterargument! Any suggestions for where I should start such reading would be much appreciated.
Here are two related questions.
Could it be contingent whether there are such atoms as described above? That is, might there be two worlds, alike in their distribution of atoms (and for that matter in the properties those atoms have) but unlike in terms of which pluralities of atoms exist?
If we assume unrestricted composition, we can reask the last two questions about objects. So the first question becomes, could it be indeterminate whether there is an object with uncountably many, but fewer than continuum many, atomic parts? And the second becomes, could it be contingent whether there is an object with uncountably many, but fewer than continuum many, atomic parts?
On a slightly different note, there’s another question about vagueness and composition that kicks in at the ‘top’ of the set-theoretic hierarchy.
Lewis believed that the union of some sets, if it existed, was their fusion. He also believed in unrestricted composition. Since it isn’t always true that some sets have a union, he inferred that there are proper classes that are not sets, and which are the fusions of sets that lack a union.
Here’s an alternative position to Lewis’s. Set-theoretic union just is fusion, as applied to sets. If some sets have a union, that’s their fusion. If they don’t have a union, they don’t have a fusion. I think the alternative position has some attraction (it lets us have an unrestricted version of the axiom of pairing, for instance, and it gives us a closer connection between mereology and set theory), but for now I’m just interested in some questions about this position, not about its truth.
So the same two questions arise. Could it be indeterminate whether Lewis’s position, or this alternative position, is correct? And could it be contingent whether Lewis’s position, or this alternative position, is correct? Any readers have advice on where I should look for guidance?