Last weekend this site was hacked into by spammers and porn purveyors. There wasn’t a lot of front-end damage, but it left a lot of mess behind the scenes, so I’ve been spending a bit of time cleaning up. The main problem was that every page now had a massive amount of hidden text in the footer, linking to more nefarious sites. This upset the Googlebot, so there’s a danger this site will drop off Google for a while while I confirm that the site is clean. So if you’re searching for TAR on Google, it might not always show up. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince Google soon that all is well, and we won’t see an interruption of service. In the meantime, some other news from the site.

• While cleaning everything up, I seem to have disabled new registration for the site. I’ve fixed that now, so it’s possible to register and comment on posts. Sorry for the inconvenience this caused.
• I’ve disabled the Twitter feed in the sidebar. That’s partially because we weren’t using it much, and partially because I’m not sure whether it was related to the security failure that led to the hacking.
• On the other hand, several TAR writers still have their own Twitter feeds. For example, mine is @bweatherson. In the future, any requests for announcements on this blog will be sent to the Twitter feed instead, unless I’m personally involved with the project being announced. (E.g., it’s a conference I’m speaking at.) So for instance there’s now an announcement about the Conditionals and Conditionalisation conference here. I think Twitter is a much more suitable platform for simple links elsewhere than the blog. And I don’t know why people ever want an announcement that’s more than a link – anything worth publicising is worth making a webpage for.
• I’ve added little avatars to the comments to make them look more amusing. Right now you get a randomly generated monster. If you’d like to replace that with some other picture, you just need to get an account at Gravatar that’s linked to the same email account as your account here. Right now I have a picture of me looking lost in Scotland, but I might replace that soon with something more NewYorkeseque.

At her paper at the Rocky Mountain ethics conference, Judith Jarvis Thomson discussed various accounts of the metaphysics of harm. Somewhat surprisingly, she accepted the following equivalence.

• A harms B iff A causes B to suffer a harm.

Even more surprisingly, she defended this by saying it was a general claim about how causal verbs work. But this isn’t at all how causal words work. Compare this claim.

• A breaks B’s window iff A causes B’s window to be broken.

Here’s a counterexample to that. A is a speaker at a philosophy conference. She makes an outrageous claim about the semantics of causal verb. This so upsets C that he storms out of the room, and in his anger punches the window of B’s car. The window breaks. Now it seems clear that A has caused B’s window to be broken, with of course some help from C, but A didn’t break B’s window.

So I was thinking that the biconditional about harming and causing harms would also be false. And I was thinking that cases of indirect causation, like this one, would be examples of when they were false. But when I wrote up the case, it became less clear.

So question: In the case just described, where C breaks B’s window, does A harm B? It’s clear that A does cause B to suffer a harm. And if pushed I would say that A didn’t harm B – that only C harmed B. But my intuitions are nowhere near as clear as I hoped. What do you think?

There have been a lot of discussions of refereeing over at “Brian Leiter’s blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com over the last few weeks. I think many of these discussions suffer from a misapprehension of how refereeing works. In particular, many people are equating the time it takes for them to get a verdict on their paper with the amount of time it takes for a referee to write a report. This equation would work iff the following steps took zero time.

1. Processing a submission (i.e. entering it into the system, getting it ready for editors etc).
2. Deciding whether the paper was worth refereeing.
3. Choosing who should referee it.
4. Contacting that referee, and getting them to either agree to referee it, or decline to referee it, or alternatively waiting/re-emailing them enough to assume they’ve tacitly declined.
5. Repeating steps 3-4 ad nauseum until one has sufficient referees.
6. If a referee agrees to referee a paper, repeating steps 3-5 until one has a referee who will, eventually, referee the paper.
7. Reading the referee report and making a decision on the paper.
8. Contacting the author to inform them of that decision.

In most cases where I’ve been familiar with long long times from submission to decision, many of those steps have taken a very very long time. I’m hopeful that in the future the use of journal management software can improve steps 1, 4 and 8. But there will still be a lot of ways for things to fail other than for the person who referees the paper taking too long. Indeed, typically the person who writes the review the author gets is part of the solution to the long delays, not the central problem.

So while everyone else is talking about speeding up review times, I think the following three steps would make just as big a difference, if not more of a difference.

1. When someone asks you to referee a paper, reply more or less immediately.
2. If you decline, suggest alternative referees who can referee it, and who the editors will likely not have thought of. Junior faculty, or even trustworthy grad students, are excellent suggestions. Suggesting that Tim Williamson referee the paper on luminosity that you’re too busy to referee isn’t so helpful. If the paper is on a relatively specialised topic, this step is more or less essential, else the editors literally run out of people they know and trust who are experts on that topic.
3. Never, under any circumstances, fail to review a paper that you’ve agreed to review.

Journals which send copies of the paper along with requests to referee the paper make it much easier for potential reviewers to make an informed decision about whether to review, and hence help with point 3. I think this practice (which isn’t I think universal) should be much encouraged.

There’s another issue lurking around here that I think deserves discussion. Some journals have a blind initial review/selection of referees. Many, I believe, do not. Making this stage blind is *very* time-consuming. It requires that there be a staff member who handles all interactions between the author and the editor, and who can tell the editor whether the suggested referee is the author and/or too close to the author. Since most staff members do not work 24/7/365, and some have even be known to do things like get sick or go on annual vacation, this can introduce large delays into the system.

(It’s an important point here that many journals have precisely one staffer. A move to a system like Philosophy Compass has, where the administrative work is done at a publisher’s office, and there are people to spread the work around when one is on leave, helps remove these delays a lot. I think something important would be lost if the administration of all journals moved ‘off-campus’ like this, but it would smooth out some of the administrative bumps that I’ve noticed on-campus journals are suspectible to.)

If you don’t have blind initial screening by editors, and blind assignment of editors, these steps can be cut out, and staff time can be spent on other activities. (Such as dealing with complaints from subscribers, and fun stuff like that.) So I’m interested in knowing how important people think it is that papers be blinded from editors, and whether this is worth introducing delays (sometimes weeks long delays) into the system?

I guess the Twitter feed I tried to set up for TAR didn’t really work. But several TAR bloggers have their own feeds, including me. And I’ll be tweeting the BSPC conference all week. You can either follow my account, @bweatherson, or the #BSPC2009 tag. If anyone else at the conference wants to tweet about what’s happening, it might be useful to also use that tag.

This post is to inform/remind people about three exciting events running back to back this September. I shall be attending all three!

(1) Metaphysics of Science Conference, Nottingham, 12-14 September
(2) Fictionalism Conference, Manchester, 15-17 September
(3) Naturalism Workshop, Leeds, 18-19 September

My entry on “David Lewis”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/ is online at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

I owe thanks to many people for getting this article to the state it is currently in. The biggest debt of gratitude is to Ed Zalta and the staff at the SEP. They were (a) incredibly patient with the time it took me to write the article, and (b) incredibly helpful with all the mistakes I made along the way. I think I made more HTML errors than I knew existed at various points!

Thanks also to many people who read and suggested revisions to the content. At risk of forgetting someone, these include Steffi Lewis, Ishani Maitra, Daniel Nolan, Laurie Paul, Wolfgang Schwarz and Ted Sider. And, as I mention in the article, the whole article would have been impossible if not for the assistance I got from “Wo’s blog”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/ and “Daniel’s book”:http://www.amazon.com/David-Lewis-Philosophy-Daniel-Nolan/dp/0773529314.

That said, there are still many things that could be improved about the article. Hopefully many of these changes will get made in later revisions. The most pressing include:

• There are many typos! Zach Miller and Robbie Williams have already noted several for me, and I’m sure there are more.
• I was certain that I’d added something on Daniel Nolan’s response to the Forrest-Armstrong objection in section 6.2, but there isn’t anything in the finished version. I think this was a piece of bad version management on my part. I’ll correct that in the next version.
• I really intended to say something about “General Semantics” in the philosophy of language section, but couldn’t come up with a good paragraph length description of it. So rather than have the article get even later, I simply skipped it. This wasn’t a great result; I should say something about “General Semantics”. But I’m not sure how to summarise it, and its place in the literature, in a paragraph or so.

Despite that, I’m pretty happy with how the article turned out. I suspect it will be, by far, the most widely read thing I ever write. Thanks again to everyone who helped out along the way!

Well, actually, it’s a hair-dyed donkey, but “surprisingly close”:http://www.slate.com/id/2222991/.

bq. Yet Marah, with its broken-down bumper cars and a pit filled with sadly deflated balls, had its own not-quite-right feel—particularly the zebra. Standing near the back of its cage, facing away from the spectators, the animal kept its head tucked down. “It’s really a painted donkey,” admitted Mahmud Berghat, the director of Marah, when asked about the creature. Making a fake zebra isn’t easy—henna didn’t work and wood paint was deemed inhumane, so they finally settled on human hair dye. “We cut its hair short and then painted the stripes,” Berghat explained behind the closed door of his office.

Thanks to Sherri Roush for the link.

I mentioned in passing in the “Kornblith post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2009/07/16/kornblith-against-reliabilism/ that there were two distinct puzzles about bootstrapping, but I let the point slide fairly quickly. This post is a short clarification of the two puzzles, and then a request for further info. I meant to post this before the Kornblith post, but I seem to have got muddled about when I hit ‘Draft’ and when I hit ‘Publish’.

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Suppose a rational agent _S_ has some evidence _E_ that bears on _p_, and makes a judgment _J_ about how _E_ bears on _p_. The agent is aware of this judgment, so she could in principle use its existence in her reasoning. Here’s an informal version of the question I’ll discuss in this paper: How many pieces of evidence does the agent have that bear on p? Three options present themselves.

1. Two – Both _J_ and _E_.
2. One – _E_ subsumes whatever evidential force _J_ has.
3. One – _J_ subsumes whatever evidential force _E_ has.

This post is about option 3. I’ll call this option JSE, short for Judgments Screen Evidence. I’m first going to say what I mean by screening here, and then say why JSE is interesting. Ultimately I want to defend three claims about JSE.

1. JSE is sufficient to derive a number of claims that are distinctive of internalist epistemology of recent years (meaning approximately 2004 to the present day).
2. JSE is necessary to motivate at least some of these claims.
3. JSE is false.

This post will largely be about saying what JSE is, then some arguments for 1 and 2. I’ll leave 3 for a later post!

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In the April edition of _Analysis_, Hilary Kornblith proposes a reliabilist solution to the bootstrapping problem. I’m going to argue that Kornblith’s proposal, far from solving the bootstrapping problem, in fact makes the problem much harder for the reliabilist to solve. Indeed, I’m going to argue that Kornblith’s considerations give us a way to develop a quick reductio of a certain kind of reliabilism.

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