I wrote a blog post on the relationship between epistemology in philosophy and methodology in philosophy for the “Arché Methodology Project Blog”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~armeth/2009/03/methodology-and-epistemology/. There are comments enabled over there, so I’ve turned them off here, but I encourage everyone to head over to the Arché site and jump into the debate.

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.)

In “Conceptual Truth” (Proc Aris Soc Supp 80: 1-41), Timothy Williamson makes the following argument. The context is that he’s attacking Jackson’s argument that there must be some common doctrine held by people who use terms with the same meaning.

bq. Putnam’s insight is relevant far beyond the class of natural kind terms, as Burge observed (1986). Even where we cannot sensibly divide the linguistic community into experts and non-experts, the picture of a natural language as a cluster of causally interrelated but constitutively independent idiolects is still wrong, because it ignores the way in which individual speakers defer to the linguistic community as a whole. They use a word as a word of a public language, allowing its reference in their mouths to be fixed by its use over the whole community. Such verbal interactions between speakers can hold a linguistic practice together even in the absence of a common creed which they are all required to endorse.

Whatever its merits as an argument against Jackson, this seems to me to be a quite bad argument against the view of “natural language as a cluster of causally interrelated but constitutively independent idiolects”. The problem is that individuals may choose to defer to anyone at all. If Williamson’s argument is to work, the ‘linguistic community’ has to be the whole world, and there has to be just one natural language. But that’s crazy, so Williamson’s argument doesn’t work.

We’re all familiar with examples of common loan words like ‘Schadenfreude’. That looks like a case where speakers of English (or other languages) defer, to the extent they defer at all, to experts who are not English speakers. That is, they defer to Germans. But Germans aren’t part of the linguistic community of English speakers.

Now it might be argued that really English speakers are only deferring to other English speakers. After all, ‘Schadenfreude’ is a loanword that has been incorporated into English. But I don’t think this response can be maintained. For one thing, the first English speakers who started using ‘Schadenfreude’ did not defer to other English speakers. For another, the kind of pattern we see here, namely borrowing words from other languages, can happen all the time, and on an ad hoc basis. An individual speaker may choose to defer to English speakers, or Bengali speakers, or Latin speakers, or speakers of any other kind of language, on a moment to moment basis. If Ishani and I find it convenient to adopt some term from Bengali into the language we use to talk to one another, we can, and we are under no obligation to use that term the way that other English speakers do.

If Williamson’s argument against idiolects, and for public languages in a more traditional sense, is going to work, there needs to be a linguistic community that goes with each language. And speakers must be required, in virtue of speaking that language, to defer to it. But this isn’t how language works. We can choose to defer to whoever we want at any time. Or to not defer if we insist on using a term idiosyncratically.

It’s true, and important, that the meanings of terms in my mouth is determined in part by the usage of experts, other language users and so on. But this isn’t inconsistent with the picture of overlapping idiolects. I could well choose to have the meaning of ‘sofa’, or ‘Schadenfreude’, in my language determined by the usage pattern of a broader group. What would be a problem for the idiolect view is if I was required, in virtue of speaking the language of some community, to defer to that very community. But I’m not. And unless Williamson wants to say there is really only one linguistic community, consisting of the whole world, and one public language, which we all speak fragments of, I don’t see how facts about deference can help sustain the traditional picture of public languages.

I just upgraded the version of WordPress that is powering TAR. I hope this doesn’t lead to crashes anywhere, either for viewers or for writers, but if it does, let me know.

“Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/which-are-the-highest-quality-general-philosophy-journals-in-english.html has “a poll”:http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/vote.pl?id=E_066e4bb39f0a75cf&akey=141acf26d5d7be80 on what the top general philosophy journals in English are. The “general” condition rules out quite a few top journals (e.g., Ethics, BJPS, etc.) so it’s pretty much the usual suspects at the top.

When I ran a similar poll it was interesting to get demographic data on the respondents. It turned out that Americans who I surveyed ranked Nous more or less top, while British respondents ranked Mind more highly. It would be especially interesting to see the relative prestige of Philosophical Quarterly (one of my favourite journals) and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

I don’t know if everyone knows about the blog attached to the Arché Methdology Project. The link to it is

• Arché Methdology Blog

There has been some fascinating posts, and comments threads already on it. (It’s the only blog whose comments thread I subscribe to, because the comments are usually insightful.) And with term starting up again, it should be extremely lively.

Update: link fixed.

“Ross Cameron”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2009/03/leeds-metaphysicians-sweep-oxford.html reports,

Some fantastic news for the Leeds metaphysicians: Jason Turner has won the the Younger Scholar Prize in Metaphysics, for his paper ‘Ontological Nihilism‘! This was after a record number of submissions. Well done Jason!

And the joint runners-up are Robbie Williams and Elizabeth Barnes for their paper ‘A Theory of Metaphysical Indeterminacy‘ and me for my ‘Truthmaking for Presentists‘. So a clean sweep for Leeds!

These three papers will all be appearing in a forthcoming volume of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.

Well done to the Leedsters! And I would be remiss to not note that the winners are all recent graduates of my two employers, Rutgers and St Andrews. So well done to Rutgers and St Andrews as well.

As “Brian Leiter writes”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/deciding-betwee.html, many students are currently getting offers to PhD and MA programs. Several students will have multiple offers, and will have very important choices to make in the next few weeks. I want to largely echo what Brian says about the dangers of various departments, and just add a few cents worth of comments.

The best advice Brian gives is right at the end. He says, “The way for a prospective student to discover [exceptional departments for graduate study] is to talk to lots of current students.” I agree. The single best thing any student can do between now and when they have to choose a program is to talk as much as they can to current students at the departments they’ve been accepted to. There are really three reasons for this.

One thing is that, as Brian says, there are a lot of factors that make a big difference to how well grad school will go, but which you really can’t tell on paper. The only way to tell how much it improves your education to have philosophers X, Y and Z in the department is to talk to students of X, Y and Z.

Second, departments change a lot, and quickly, in important informal respects. The morale of the department, the levels of infighting, the sense of ownership that students have of the department, can all change on the basis of events that may seem relatively trivial to outsiders. If your professors say “I was at school S six years ago, and it was terrible for these reasons…”, they may well be correct about how things were then, but incorrect about how things are now. Having up-to-date information is vital, and current students are the best source for this.

Finally, no matter where you study, you’ll end up spending a lot of time with other graduate students. You’ll probably end up learning as much from conversations with other graduate students as with the faculty. So you want to get a sense of how much you’ll enjoy, both informally and professionally, having these graduate students as your colleagues for the next several years. You’ll be colleagues with the current first years for four or more years, so get to know them a bit, see how much you want to be their colleagues, and see how much you’ll learn from them.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be in a much better position to make a decision than anyone who could advise you. That’s because you’ll know more about how the grad programs are actually currently running, and what the grad students who are currently there are like. I think Rutgers will do pretty well by this measure, since the program seems to be running very well, and the students are unbelievable. But I don’t know what the relevant comparisons are like, in particular I have no idea how good students are at all our peer departments, and I suspect there are very few people who do. If you’re a prospective graduate student then at this stage, there’s no substitute for spending as much time as possible at various departments, and especially with current students.

Here are the articles from Volume 4, Issue 1 of Philosophy Compass. The links take you to abstracts of the articles.

• Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography (p 1-21) by Diarmuid Costello, Dawn M. Phillips
• Musical Recordings (p 22-38) by Andrew Kania
• Art and Negative Affect (p 39-55) by Aaron Smuts
• Back to Basics in Bioethics: Reconciling Patient Autonomy with Physician Responsibility (p 56-68) by Antonio Casado da Rocha
• Neuroethics: Ethics and the Sciences of the Mind (p 69-81) by Neil Levy
• Welfarism (p 82-95) by Simon Keller
• Recent Work on Free Will and Moral Responsibility (p 96-133) by Neil Levy, Michael McKenna
• Ideas, Pictures, and the Directness of Perception in Descartes and Locke (p 134-154) by Lex Newman
• Global Egalitarianism (p 155-171) by Chris Armstrong
• A Primer on the Distinction between Justification and Excuse (p 172-196) by Andrew Botterell
• Neo-Pragmatist (Practice-Based) Theories of Meaning (p 197-218) by Ronald Loeffler
• Naturalisms in Philosophy of Mind (p 219-254) by Steven Horst
• Philosophical Issues in Electromagnetism (p 255-270) by Mathias Frisch
• The Fine-Tuning Argument (p 271-286) by Neil A. Manson
• Teaching and Learning Guide for: Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning (p 287-291) by Sherri Irvin
• Teaching & Learning Guide for: Some Questions in Hume’s Aesthetics (p 292-295) by Christopher Williams

Brian Leiter is running “a poll”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/lets-settle-this-once-and-for-all-who-really-was-the-greatest-philosopher-of-the-20thcentury.html on who the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century was. It’s an amusing exercise, and somewhat informative, at least insofar as it tells us something about Leiter’s readership, and hence about the profession.

Early in the voting, the leaders were Wittgenstein, Lewis and Russell (in that order), with a second group consisting of Rawls, Heidegger and Quine (in that order).

There are a few surprises. The two big heroes of Scott Soames’s history volumes, Moore and Kripke, are getting a surprisingly small amount of love. But what really throws me in these polls is the level of support for Russell. I’m always struck at the disconnect between how little Russell is cited these days compared to his famous contemporaries, such as Frege, Moore or Wittgenstein.

Now it’s clearly true that Russell’s theory of descriptions is of monumental importance to philosophy. I don’t think it alone is enough to make Russell the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. I used to argue, for fun, that Grice was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century because his theory of implicature was the greatest advance in 20th century philosophy. I think the premise of that argument is plausible, but it’s a terrible argument – great philosophers have more great works.

And once we go past the theory of descriptions, I don’t think there is a huge amount to back up Russell’s case. Logical atomism is interesting, and in light of the revival of truthmaker theory, important. But I don’t think Russell really gets to the heart of the matter, and in any case I was under the (possibly false) impression that Russell’s contributions here were greatly influenced by Wittgenstein’s pre-Tractarian writings.

I don’t think Russell’s work on sense data, or phenomenalism, are going to weigh heavily on the credit side of the ledger.

Principia Mathematica was a great project, but it does seem to have ended in failure. (Although thinking about how it failed gives one reason to think that Leiter should have included Godel as an option on his list of great philosophers.)

I think Russell’s later epistemology is interesting to work through, but the best parts are somewhat warmed over versions of what Keynes said in his Treatise on Probability.

I don’t think much of the multiple relations theory of judgment, though maybe some do. And I don’t think the ethics and political philosophy is really of much philosophical significance.

Russell’s idea that acquaintance was important to de re thought was obviously a very good idea, and an important one, though he didn’t develop it in particularly compelling ways. (See the earlier discussion of phenomenalism.)

What’s left, it seems to me, is that Russell was very influential in a number of ways. His books about contemporary philosophy (such as Problems of Philosophy) and history of philosophy were great popularisers. (Although you want to be careful with the history.) Russell was obviously important in bringing the work of Frege and Wittgenstein to the attention of English-speaking philosophers, the way that Ayer was important in bringing the work of German-speaking philosophers into the English-speaking world a generation later. And Russell was incredibly important, in the way that a very good Chair, or Dean, is important, in nurturing the careers of some of these people, such as Wittgenstein. But I don’t think that adds up to best-of-century level philosophical greatness.

One other thing is left I suspect. Russell is in many ways the first recognisably contemporary philosopher. His concerns are not always our concerns, but it is easy to see a family resemblance. Much of the way we do philosophy is similar to the way Russell did philosophy; and perhaps it is that way because Russell did it that way. If we read pre-Russellian philosophers, or at least if I read pre-Russellian philosophers, they are distant in a way that Russell, and most people who come after him, are not.

But there’s one other philosopher I can say that about too, namely Moore. And it’s interesting to think why Russell gets so much more love in polls like this than Moore. I didn’t vote for Moore; I voted for Lewis. But I’m interested especially in why so many people rank Russell above Moore.

Like Russell, Moore has a flagship contribution: his work in meta-ethics. Whatever one thinks of the conclusions (and I’m hostile to just about all of them), the development of the open question argument, the naturalistic fallacy, intuitionism as a methodology, and non-naturalism in ethics all seem like a very big deal. And all of them, like Russell’s theory of descriptions, remain important to the present day.

But Moore’s other work has had more lasting importance, I think. Moore’s paradox remains a lively topic, informing debates about language and epistemology to the present day. Moorean responses to scepticism remain a central thread in contemporary epistemology, and, I think, with good reason. Moore’s work on analysis has been useful through the history of debates about analysis, and so on.

None of this makes Moore the best philosopher of the 20th century. None of it adds up, I think, to Lewis’s contributions to language, mind, metaphysics, decision theory, etc. And that’s before we start comparing Moore to Quine, Kripke, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Carnap, Grice, Stalnaker, Fodor, Williamson and so on. But it all adds to my puzzlement as to what it is I’m missing about Russell, who has long struck me as a philosopher who was highly influential, and deservedly so, without having as many of the striking original contributions as I think the really great philosophers have.