Much friendlier than the Monaco doggies.

There was no way I was going to fly all the way to the south of France and not make (several versions of) that joke.

(Post edited to increase comedic clarity.)

I just found out from the blog of mathematician Terence Tao about Scholarpedia, which is apparently trying to fill in the space between Wikipedia and academic encyclopedias. The goal is to be more authoritative than Wikipedia, and more responsive and current than other academic encyclopedias. Right now, this space is filled quite well in philosophy by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, though I can also imagine a use for something in which multiple people can update and edit articles. But right now, Wikipedia seems quite spotty on philosophy (it seems quite good on math and physics, though perhaps not so much so for people who aren’t already well-educated on the relevant topics).

Since it’s quite new, there’s a lot that’s still under development, and there are especially few articles on philosophy so far. But if philosophers get involved in this early enough, it could become quite useful. It looks like they’re commissioning an article on philosophy of mind from Jerry Fodor. The article on the mind-body problem looks like it needs some revision at the moment. And the article on intentionality looks like it could use some philosophical additions – right now it seems to define intentionality as a property only of brains. (Even if this is a technical use of the word, it seems relevant to mention the different but related technical use by philosophers.)

Also, it looks like the way policy is determined depends on who has made edits that previous moderators found useful, so making some good edits now could make sure that some philosophers have a say in how this develops.

For those of you that weren’t lucky enough to be in Sydney last week for the workshop on Norms and Analysis, here’s the blogged summary. Well, since I’m not familiar enough with issues in metaethics to give actually insightful commentary on the talks, I’ll just post the Limerick-form summaries written by Rachael Briggs after each talk, and refer you to the abstracts in the link above.
Continue reading →

That title should draw the readers in! Here is something that I was prompted to think about by Timothy Williamson’s _Analysis_ piece. Countable additivity is the following principle.

bq. If S is a countable set of propositions, and any two members of S are incompatible, then the probability that one member of S is true is the sum of the probabilities of each member of S. In symbols, if the members of S are p1, p2, …, then Pr(p1 v p2 v …) = Pr(p1) + Pr(p2) + …

One consequence of countable additivity is that it is impossible for it to be certain that one member of S obtains while the probabilities of each member of S are zero. And that implies there cannot be an ‘even’ distribution of probabilities over a countable set. So if you believe countable additivity, you believe that there will be pretty serious constraints on what kinds of sets there can be ‘even’ distributions of probability over. (For example, there can’t be a way of selecting a real number at random in a way that for any two intervals of the same size, the probability of drawing the number from that interval would be the same. It is easy to show that violates countable additivity.) Can we find a counterexample to countable additivity that doesn’t posit such a dubious ‘even’ distribution? I think not, but we can find something similar.

Continue reading →

I used to read _Analysis_ more or less from cover-to-cover when it came out. For various reasons I’ve stopped doing that, largely because it fell down the priority list than because it seemed like a bad idea. Looking at the latest issue (contents below fold), it seems I might want to return to my old habits. I wish the journal wasn’t so male-dominated, but otherwise it is one of the most valuable philosophy journals we have.

Continue reading →

As many of you will know, Ishani and I were offered positions at Rutgers a while ago. And after a somewhat long negotiating period, we’ve decided to accept them. So we’ll be starting at Rutgers in January 2008.

Part of the reason this was a long negotiation was that Cornell is a pretty good place to work too (to say the least). If you’re reading this blog you probably know how good the faculty are, and the students are really superb. (As many of you will find out as they storm the job market over the next few years.) So I wasn’t exactly feeling a need to leave.

But still, we’re excited about moving to Rutgers. It’s a department that is strong, both at faculty and grad student level, in so many different areas. Having philosophy of language colleagues like Jeff King, Ernie Lepore and Jason Stanley will be a blast. And Rutgers is still the place to be for epistemology. And I’m looking forward to being reunited with former colleagues like Ernie Sosa and Dean Zimmerman. And the NYC/NJ area is home to an insane percentage of the philosophers I’ve learned the most from, and am continuing to learn from. So I’ve both got a lot to look forward to.

I could write a long post on the horse race aspects of this move. (Scarlet Knights trade Arntzenius and Sider for King, Lin, Maitra and Weatherson; Big Red trades Irwin and … you get the idea.) But as fun as that would be, perhaps it is best left for another day.

Ishani and I have each been in upstate NY for five years, so leaving is a big deal. There’s a lot to like about the area, both philosophically and geographically. I think the departments in this area have some very underrated philosophers, many of whom I’ve gotten to know well over the five years here. So as excited as we are about the new jobs, we’ll miss a lot of people here as well.

And another paper, about disputes about taste:

De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est (At Least, Not Always)

Here’s a paper, largely about “you”, in which I say stuff that sounds quite a bit like stuff Brian and Kenny say below. It’s a little different, though, and I take longer to say it. Plus I also talk about answering machines and oatmeal.

Billboards, Bombs, and Shotgun Weddings

For the reasons offered in Finlay (comment on previous post), please don’t quote or cite without (ridiculously easy to obtain) permission.

And here’s a very cool paper by Josh Parsons with another take on the same sort of phenomenon, though less about “you” and more about “now”:

Assessment-Contextual Indexicals

Josh doesn’t seem to have any “don’t quote or cite” warning on his page, but it’d probably be nice to ask him anyway if you’re going to.

When I posted my “conditionals and indexical relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/CaIR.pdf paper the othe week, I mentioned that part of the motivation for the view came from Tamina Stephenson’s work. Along these lines, I have two updates to report. First, she has a new version of the paper where PRO_J is introduced.

bq. “Judge Dependence, Epistemic Modals, and Predicates of Personal Taste”:http://web.mit.edu/tamina/www/em-ppt-revised-6-05-07.pdf

Second, she has a “handout from a talk on conditionals and relativism”:http://web.mit.edu/tamina/www/CLS-handout.pdf. Happily, it is a slightly different version of relativism to mine. (Diversity is always a philosophic boon!) She takes the propositions expressed by conditionals to be sets of world-judge pairs, and uses this to explain what’s going on in Gibbardian standoff. I think these propositions are (or determine) sets of possible worlds, and I’m not sure there is anything in Gibbardian standoffs that our semantics needs to explain.

Anyway, both links are highly recommended.

In a recent “post about citing papers on the web”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/06/ethics-of-citation.html, Ross Cameron drew the following conclusion.

bq. I’m tempted to think that if you put a paper up on the web, that’s to put it in the public domain, and it’s no more appropriate to place a citation restriction on such a paper than it is on a paper published in a print journal. I’m even tempted to think that conference presentations can be freely cited; i.e.that I shouldn’t have to seek Xs permission to refer in one of my papers to the presentation X gave.

The particular issue here is what to do about papers that the author posts and says at the top “Please don’t quote or cite”. (You occasionally see ‘don’t circulate’ as well, which is a little odd.) I’m not sure how common these notes are outside philosophy, but they are pretty common on philosophy papers posted on people’s websites. Now on the one hand, there is something to be said for following people’s requests like this.

On the other hand, as Ross notes, the requests can lead to annoying situation. One kind of case is where the reader notices an important generalisation of the paper’s argument. Another case is where the conclusion of the paper supplies the missing premise in an interesting argument the reader is developing. Either way, the reader is in a bit of a bind.

I think the main thing to say about these situations is that writers shouldn’t put such requests on their papers.

Continue reading →