I’ve been buried recently under (amongst other things) a mountain of immigration paperwork. So it was with some trepidation that I realised that my Australian passport was about to expire and I needed a new one. It wasn’t exactly reassuring to think I’d be dealing with another immigration and citizenship agency, and potentially would be without my passport for a while as the new passport was produced.

Anyway, when I dropped my passport off at the New York Consulate last Friday afternoon, I was worrying that I’d have another long wait until the relevant paperwork was completed and I had a new passport. But yesterday afternoon I got an email saying the new passport was printed (in Washington) and today I got a call saying it is ready to collect in New York. Excellent levels of efficiency Australian consular services!

I’ve had to use the “Sakai”:http://sakaiproject.org/ course management software this term, and it’s really the worst software I’ve had the misfortune of using in a long long time. If anyone out there has the choice between using it and using a commercial product like “Blackboard”:http://www.blackboard.com/us/index.bbb, I strongly recommend the commercial product.

I’m usually quite happy about using open source products. (This post is being composed in Firefox, for instance.) But Sakai is way from being ready for critical usage.

There are two really big flaws that have caused it to be an unremitting nightmare to use all semester.

First, the software is too stupid to handle having multiple tabs open on the same login. So for instance just this morning, I was trying to write an assignment in one tab, while having older assignments open in another tab so I could compare what I was doing with what I had already done. When I went to save the new assignment, the software thought for some reason I was trying to edit the old assignment, and, I guess in a fit of confusion, completely lost the assignment I had written. I guess I’ll just have to rewrite the whole thing – perhaps this time in TextEdit so I can save it before having to deal with the monstrosity of Sakai’s data saving.

This also comes up when entering grades. The server I’ve been using is painfully slow, which might not be the fault of the software. (Though the server runs a lot of other software at much higher speeds.) So it can be a long and painful process entering grades, since this requires opening a new page for each student, entering a number, and then going to a new page that registers that the number has been saved. In Blackboard this process can be speeded considerably by opening the pages for different students in different tabs, and while some pages are loading, entering grades in other tabs. (Or you could, if you were more confident in getting this right, enter the grades in Excel and try to manage the grade import functions. But that’s always seemed like a very hit and miss approach to me.) Sakai can’t handle this because if you open multiple tabs, then do anything in any one of those tabs, it will take the inputs as an attempt to modify the last opened tab. This led to worlds of confusion before I figured out what was happening. And it led to some painful times waiting for pages to open so I could enter grades one by waiting around one.

Second, there are very few capacities for error correction. The main reason I wanted to use course management software was so I could give the students small quizzes on the reading before each class. But in Sakai there is no way, once a quiz is posted, to change it. So sometimes I’ll write questions that are ambiguous or confusing, and one of the students who is first to take the quiz will ask about this. Even if I wanted to, there is no way to change the quiz, short of deleting it and posting a new quiz. (Which would then delete the fact that some people have taken the quiz.)

This is perhaps carelessness on my part, but there are quite a few things that need to be changed from the default settings every time you run a quiz, and which if you forget to change before posting can’t be changed after. For example, questions in a quiz by default are worth 0 points, which isn’t maximally helpful. On a couple of occasions I failed to change the default value before releasing the quiz to students. There’s nothing much, it turns out, you can do about this once it has been released. Perhaps a better user than me wouldn’t have made such a mistake, but it’s really quite annoying that the software doesn’t have the capacity to let you fix mistakes like this.

There are other serious bugs too. Once you post a quiz, there are two different points on the site where it purports to let you change various settings, such as due dates. But only at one of these points will changing the settings make a difference to changing what the students see. At the other point you can make changes, hit save, and if you go back to the same spot it will look like it has saved the changed settings, but this won’t affect what the students see.

Perhaps Sakai will one day be better than its commercial rivals, as Firefox is better than IE. But that day hasn’t yet come, and it’s hard to see it coming in the near future.

As part of an ongoing series of workshops on issues to do with philosophy of language (broadly construed), the “Cornell philosophy”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/phil/ department is running a workshop on evaluative and expressive language. The workshop will be on April 26, from 1-6pm, in room B21, Lincoln Hall. (That’s the building next to Goldwin Smith Hall, where the department is.

The speakers are Chris Potts (UMass-Amherst), Mark Richard (Tufts) and Jamie Dreier (Brown), with commentary from Cornellians Sally McConnell-Ginet, Andrew Alwood and Brent Kyle. It should be a fun day, and quite informative if past workshops are anything to go by. If you want to attend, contact Matti Eklund (me72 at cornell dot edu) for more details.

This stuff is great. I’ve been teaching a slightly-harder-than-usual logic course this semester and I really wanted a blackboard for my office, for practicing proofs on.

One of those things that I think good logic students quickly realise is that it’s one thing to be able to follow a proof in class, and quite another to be able to reproduce it yourself in homework or on a test. Well one of the things that I’ve learned from teaching logic is that it is one thing thing to be able to scribble a proof out on a notepad, and another to be able to present clearly on a blackboard during a lecture.

Why? Well, it has something to do with the fact that one’s notepad is uebersichtlich – scrawling out some complicated instance of an axiom isn’t that hard if the axiom is at the top of your page, but it can be a bit harder when that axiom is 2 blackboards back, or on the other side of the room. (My logic classroom has 6 huge boards that scroll past each other – I rather like that, but it can make it easy to loose the first part of a proof.) So I think that for me to write a proof on the board requires that I know more of the proof off by heart than when I’m just writing it on paper. Second, of course, there’s just more pressure when 30, or 60, eyes are on you, all waiting to be reminded what the induction hypothesis 2 boards ago actually was. And third, when I’m putting a proof on the board I’m often talking at the same time. And as teachers everywhere know, talking goes faster than writing, so you’re basically running two trains of thought at once anyway.

So I’d been yearning for a blackboard in my office, and then I found this stuff. . It consists of flexible blackboard tiles that stick to your wall (they’re removable and re-positionable- they come off my white-painted wall easily, without leaving a mark, and stick right back on, and, surprisingly, it’s really easy to write on them with chalk and clean them off. (I imagine if your wall is a different colour from your chalk you’ll end up with a chalk-coloured “halo” around the board though.) They’re a bit smaller than they look in the photo – each tile is about the size of a US letter sheet of paper – and I ended up buying 2 packs of 4. Also, I think the tiles are a little prone to getting scratched by the chalk – I can imagine having to buy some more after a couple of years or so. But they look great on my wall and they do the job (every Tuesday and Thursday morning before my logic lecture…)

Robbie Williams has moved “Theories n Things”:http://theoriesnthings.wordpress.com/ to a new WordPressy home.

As he notes there, “Fafblog”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/ has, it seems, for now, returned.

Dialectica is having a “special issue on vectors”:http://www.philsci.info/archives/20, a topic on which a few Rutgers people have been making interesting contributions recently. (For example, in “this”:http://www.amazon.com/The-Metaphysics-Within-Physics/dp/B000SW11L2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207158314&sr=8-2 book. By the way, there’s an interesting surprise if you click through that link.)

Paul Bloom and Joshua Knobe “diavlog”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9785 over innateness and norms, another topic of much interest around Rutgers.

I’m teaching a decision theory course in the Fall, and I’m trying to figure out what, if any, textbook to use. There are a couple of older books by Michael Resnik and Richard Jeffrey, but does anyone know if there’s anything more up-to-date?

There are many game theory textbooks, though these are often written for a more mathematically oriented audience. Of course, most of those books include many claims that are vulnerable to Stalnaker’s critiques of various game-theoretic techniques, so I’d have to be a little careful teaching from them. But I’m not sure what there is, if anything, in decision theory that’s particularly up-to-date. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

I’m going to offer an argument here that any kind of contextualism, whether orthodox or heterodox, about moral terms, especially “wrong”, does not fit our usage of those terms. The argument is going to be that in order to offer a contextualist-friendly account of the behaviour of “wrong” in belief ascriptions and knowledge ascriptions, we have to suppose that it behaves quite differently in those two settings. But other context-sensitive terms do not behave that way, and we have good theoretical reasons to believe that this is not in general how context-sensitive terms behave. So “wrong” is not context-sensitive, either to contexts of usage or assessment.
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In “CIA Leaks”:http://philreview.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/117/1/77, Kai von Fintel and Thony Gillies raise a problem for heterodox theories about ‘might’. (Actually they raise several, but I’m only going to deal with one of them here.) Their primary target is what I “called”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2008/03/25/two-dogmas-of-contextualism/ ~ (T) theories, but the argument they raise is interesting to consider from all heterodox perspectives.

The problem concerns embedding of ‘might’-clauses under factive attitude verbs. They argue as follows:

1. _S realises that p_ presupposes that _p_.
2. This presupposition is carried over when the sentence is used as the antecedent of a conditional. So, for instance, _If S realises that p, then q_ presupposes that _p_.
3. But, on standard heterodox propopsals, we can properly say _If S realises that it might be that p, then q_, even though it isn’t true that it might be that _p_.
4. So heterodox proposals are false.

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There has been a lot of terminological confusion involving debates about contextualism and relativism in recent years. At various times I’ve tried to help clear this up, though I’ve probably only ever succeeded in further muddying the waters. Here is a slightly different version of the things I say in “Conditionals and Indexical Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/CaIR.pdf.

Traditional versions of contextualism, or at least the kind of contextualist theories that were mainstream views when I was in college, accepted the following two theses.

(U) The content of what is said by an utterance is the same relative to any assessors
(T) The truth value of something that is the content of an utterance is the same relative to any assessors

The first thesis says that whatever I say relative to assessor A1, I say relative to A2. The second thesis says that if I say that p, then whatever truth value p has relative to A1, it has relative to A2. Neither thesis was uniformly accepted – indeed Kaplan at times seems happy to ditch each of them – but they did, I think constitute a kind of mainstream view about context-sensitivity. So much so that I’ll call them the two dogmas of orthodox contextualism.

One of the great advances of John MacFarlane’s paper “Non-Indexical Contextualism”:http://johnmacfarlane.net/nonindexical-contextualism.pdf was noting that the two dogmas are indeed two. We can make this clear by looking at two different models for content, each of them taken from papers by “Andy Egan”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/home.

The first is the centred worlds model for content. This is the idea that for some utterance types, any token of that type expresses the same content. But that content is a set of centred worlds, that is true at some centres and false at other centres _in the same world_. So we might think that the content of “Beer is tasty” is, roughly, the set of possibilia who have pro-attitudes to the taste of beer. More precisely, it is the set of world-centre pairs such that the agent at (or perhaps closest to) the centre has pro-attitudes towards the taste of beer. On this view, (U) will be maintained – what an utterance of “Beer is tasty” says is invariant across assessors. (Actually on the model I’ve sketched, it’s invariant across different utterances too, but that’s a separate point.) But (T) will fail, since whether that content is true for A1 and A2 will depend on what their attitudes are towards beer.

This kind of centred worlds model for content is what Andy has developed in “these”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/de_gustibus.2007.10.18.pdf “three”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/2qs.final.pdf “papers”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/might.philstud.final.pdf.

The second model lets assessors get into the content-fixing mechanism, but says the content that is fixed is a familiar proposition whose truth is not assessor relative. This is easiest to explain with an example involving second-person pronouns. For some utterances of “Obama loves you”, the content of that utterance, relative to x, is that Obama loves x. Now whether Obama loves x is a simple factual question, and whether it is true isn’t assessor relative. But (if Obama loves some people and not others) whether the utterance is true or false depends on who is assessing it. So (U) fails, while (T) is true.

This is a view Andy “has defended”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/bilboards.2007.06.22.pdf and that “Josh Parsons”:http://www.otago.ac.nz/philosophy/Staff/JoshParsons/papers/tense.pdf has defended the possibility of.

In “Conditionals and Indexical Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/CaIR.pdf, I called the position that held onto (T) while rejecting (U) “indexical relativism”, and defended such a view about indicative conditionals. I called something similar to the view that rejected (U) while accepting (T) “non-indexical contextualism”. Following MacFarlane, I used that phrase for the combination of (T), ~ (U) and the view that whether a speaker’s utterance is true (relative to an assessor) is a matter of whether the proposition they express is true relative to their context.

I like the name “indexical relativism”, so I plan to keep using it. But I’m not sure what the best labels are for the various views that reject (T). I’m inclined to just describe them. After all (T) + ~ (U) and ~ (T) + ~ (U) aren’t much harder to write than “non-indexical contextualism”, “radical relativism” or whatever other names we might come up with. And they’re much easier to remember!

This was all basically set up for a couple of posts that are about to come on moral relativism and on epistemic modals, but it’s still necessary to go through this kind of scene-setting in order to locate various positions we might want to take.

I’ve been reading Timothy Williamson’s _The Philosophy of Philosophy_ over the break. Hopefully I’ll have some serious posts on it to follow. This isn’t one such post. But I was interested in this remark.

bq. The canonical example in the literature on philosophical thought experiments is Edmund Gettier’s use of them to refute the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. (179)

Is this really the canonical example? If so, how did it become so. I know that *I* discussed it at some length in “What Good are Counterexamples?”:brian.weatherson.org/counterexamples.pdf, but I don’t think that’s enough to make it canonical.

In any case, if it is canonical, that’s probably a bad thing as far as I’m concerned. What’s striking about the Gettier case is that it seems so easy to generalise. It’s not too controversial whether a particular example is a “Gettier example” or not. So it isn’t clear how much our intuitions/judgments about this particular case are driving the argument. I think it would be much better to have more methodological attention paid to examples like the one Socrates uses at the start of _The Republic_ to convince Cephalus that justice does not always consist in paying your debts. That example has the disutility of being not fully spelled out. But it’s nice as an example of the power of _examples_ because we can all agree that it supports the conclusion Socrates draws even if we couldn’t state what general principle is driving the example, nor know how to generalise the particular example. In that respect, it really shows the philosophical power of _examples_ in a way that it isn’t clear the Gettier case does.