* The second “Online Philosophy Conference”:http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/2nd_annual_online_philoso/, has been announced. “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.philosophy-compass.com is the sponsor of the conference. I’d be very happy if everyone who takes part in the conference asks their library to subscribe to Compass!
* Jon Williamson is starting a new online gazette called “The Reasoner”:http://www.thereasoner.org/. Follow that link for lots more info.
* Go “Ireland”:http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/wc2007/engine/current/match/247461.html!

(Revised to get the links right…)

I’ve seen the raw, street version of this before at grad student parties, and at conferences after the drinking moves from the hotel bar to somebody’s room, but only recently discovered that there’s actually a genre here. And apparently a documentary in progress. This guy‘s rhymes (check out, in particular, “Message No. 419”) are a lot better than ours were, too.

A few links and stuff for the morning, while we grade and/or wait for the world cup to start.

* The “Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique”:http://scq.ubc.ca/sciencescouts/ has a very large selection of scout badges for successful (and not so successful) scientists. I especially like the “I left the respectable sciences to pursue humanistic studies of the sciences”:http://scq.ubc.ca/sciencescouts/index.html#17 badge, but you may have your own favourite. (HT: Elizabeth Lee)
* A new romantic comedy starring a middle-aged Jack Nicholson, with a certain resemblance to a Stanley Kubrik movie, has a “trailer on “YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmkVWuP_sO0. (HT: Andrew McGonigal)
* If you’d rather win the world cup from your own computer, and have several hours between grading to spare playing online cricket games, you’ll love “Stick Cricket”:http://www.stickcricket.com/gameslog.php. If you are susceptible to timesinks, you’ll hate me for posting this.
* The Michigan grad students have a new blog, “Go Grue”:http://gogrue.wordpress.com/. I’m always pleased to see new grad student group blogs; it’s a good way to get ideas talked about.
* There is a “nice article about Terence Tao”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13prof.html?ex=1331524800&en=a80544a6e8df1d42&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink in the NY Times this morning. As many of you will know, I was one year away from being Prof Tao’s teammate on the Australian Maths Olympiad team. There are a few interesting comments in the article about the move from doing maths competitions to becoming a professional mathematician.

Two more pieces of good news for Cornell.

Erin Taylor (UCLA) has accepted a tenure-track position at Cornell. Erin works on moral conflicts and associative obligations, and has developed really interesting positions on both topics. She argues, for instance, that it is possible to have situations where one person is obliged to do X, and another is obliged to prevent X happening. And she has a new take on why conventions of promise-keeping play an important role in generating the moral force of the obligation to keep promises. Erin is currently at the “UCLA Center for Society and Genetics”:http://www.societyandgenetics.ucla.edu/people.htm.

“Wylie Breckenridge”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc1666/ (Oxford) has accepted a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to Cornell. Wylie’s “thesis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc1666/Thesis.htm is on the meaning of the verb ‘looks’. He has “papers”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc1666/Papers.htm on, well, approximately everything. (At this stage if we were doing “PECOTA”:http://www.baseballprospectus.com/pecota/ comparisons, Wylie’s main comparable philosopher would be, I’d guess, me.) As well as having a number of striking philosophical views, his forthcoming _Philosophical Perspectives_ paper for instance argues against the view that visual experience has representational content, he is a great philosophical interlocutor, and will be a real asset to Cornell.

Obviously we’re very pleased each of them is coming to Cornell. (Hopefully they’ll each be active on the northeast conference circuit, because they are great people to talk philosophy with.) Cornell next semester will be almost unrecognisable compared to this semester. There will be at least six people teaching classes who are not teaching this semester, and maybe several more than that. Students considering Cornell should bear this in mind when thinking about what the program will look like over the next few years.

UPDATE: The survey is now closed. See below for results and discussion, and thanks to everyone who took part!

This is a bit of a gratuitous request. I’m very interested in cases like the one below, but my intuitions about the case are exceedingly unclear. So I’m hoping that if I ask all my friends for their reaction I’ll understand the case (and one interesting class of cases of which it is a member) much better. So if you could take the poll below I’ll be very grateful. (I’m not sure why there is so much space above the survey, by the way, but I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.)

Consider the following story, and say which of the sentences below are true in it.

bq. Host is hosting a dinner party at which Guest is a guest. Host lives on the eighth floor of a building with a single elevator. The party is going well until Host mentions the war. This upsets Guest who storms out and calls the elevator, by pressing the down button on the elevator console. Unfortunately, the elevator has just left and won’t return until it has gone to the ground floor. While Guest is waiting, and before the elevator has reached the ground, another person on this floor, Neighbour, comes to the elevator. She would have called the elevator, which had not yet reached the ground, but saw that Guest had already called it. If Neighbour had called the elevator, it would have arrived at the time it actually arrived, since the elevator would not have started back up until it reached the ground in any case. Some time after that the elevator arrives and Guest and Neighbour ride it to the ground floor.

UPDATE: I’ve now closed the survey after getting 200 responses. Here are the responses.

The number in brackets at the end is the number of the respondents to have said the sentence is true in the story.

* Guest’s calling the elevator caused the elevator to arrive (197)
* If Guest had not called the elevator, it would not have arrived (10)
* Neighbour caused the elevator to arrive (0)
* Host’s mentioning the war caused the elevator to arrive (33)
* Neighbour was a cause of the elevator arriving (4)
* Host’s mentioning the war was a cause of the elevator’s arrival (95)

I’ll write this up in more detail soon, but there are two big things I wanted to draw attention to.

First, the difference between ’caused’ and ‘a cause of’. My impression is that a lot of the literature on causation runs these two together. Now it is possible that there is no truth-conditional difference between the expressions, but I would say that’s rather unlikely. So people who want to analyse these expressions should be aware of the possibility, perhaps probability, that the same analysis will not work for each.

Second, the difference between causal relations that ground causatives and those that don’t in what we’d ordinarily call pre-emptive causation networks. It’s clearly true in the story Host’s mentioning the war set in chain a series of events that led to the elevator being called, and almost everyone agreed that caused the elevator to appear. I’d bet that in any case where that chain sustained a causative, say if Host had _asked_ Guest to call the elevator, then people would say that Host did cause the elevator to appear. Or at least a lot more than 50% of people would say that Host is a cause of the elevator appearing. Normal analysis of pre-emptive causation is not sensitive to this point.

I’m primarily interested in the second point. Say that c _merely causes_ e if c causes e, but we cannot use a causative (opened, called, killed etc) to describe the relation between c and e. Then my hunch is that there is no mere pre-emptive causation. That is, if c merely causes e, then e is counterfactually dependent on c. We need a lot more than this case to show that is true, but that’s my current working hypothesis.

Thanks again to everyone who took part!

The other day I “wrote about”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2007/02/22/hall-on-causation/ Ned Hall’s recent theory of causation. I should have mentioned the reference for the paper. It’s “Structrural Equations and Causation”, _Philosophical Studies_ 132: 109-136. What I was really interested in in that paper was what Ned says about ‘short-circuits’. This is his name for causal structures like the following.

We have a causal pathway leading from A that will, if unchecked, result in E. C launches two causal pathways. The first of these, T, is a Threat to E. If unchecked it will cause D, and that will prevent E. In the examples to follow, E is the survival of Victim sometime after the events described, and D is (or would be if it occured) a particular death of Victim’s. Victim is merely the victim of misfortune in these stories; he always however survives. That’s because C also causes P, which Protects Victim from the threat, and Prevents D from happening.

Question: Does C cause E?

Answer 1 (Lewis): Yes. Causation is the ancestral of counterfactual dependence. And E is counterfactually dependent on P, which in turn is counterfactually dependent on C.

Answer 2 (Structural Equations Theory): Yes. It is sufficient for C to cause E that there is a related model in which E is counterfactually dependent on C. The model where we determine exogenously that T occurs is a model where E is counterfactually dependent on C, and is related in the right way to the actual model. So C causes E.

Answer 3 (Hall): No. C never produces a real threat to E, because it cancels itself out. So C does not cause E.

My answer: We just haven’t been given enough information. Some cases with this structure are cases where C causes E, and some are not. So everyone is wrong. Figuring out what separates the causal cases from the non-causal cases, or figuring out which features of a case and its presentation make us judge a case as causal or not, is really a very hard puzzle. Below the fold I’ll work through some hypotheses and theories.

Continue reading →

There is a very interesting thread over at “Leiter’s place”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/which_journals_.html on places to publish discussion notes. The thread has been bouncing around a little bit, but it’s all interesting. I have four quick things to add.

First, the answer to the question “Where should I publish my 1000-1500 word piece on why X’s journal article contains a mistake, if the journal X’s article was in won’t publish the reply?” is “On a blog”. There just isn’t any need to dead-tree publish many of these reply pieces. I mean, I could send out a fancy version of my post the other day on “Ned Hall’s theory of causation”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2007/02/22/hall-on-causation/, but I think it’s better for everyone to just have that reply be where it is. If I have something more substantive about causation to say that relates to Ned’s work, I’ll put the example in that paper, and if I don’t, well it’s got enough publicity already.

Second, the answer to the question “What if my reply to X’s article is as long as X’s article?” is “Make it shorter”. In general *Philosopher Makes Mistake* is not newsworthy. If the mistake is worth going over at that length, then it better be a fairly common mistake. And in that case your article shouldn’t just look like a response to X, and it should be publishable anywhere.

Third, if X is Tim Williamson, then ignore the first two points and send the article to any journal you like, because they’ll all publish quality papers on the details of Williamson’s work. See my CV for a medium sized, but still vastly incomplete, list of places that publish Williamsonania.

Fourth, I agree entirely with the comments in the thread over there that a competitor to _Analysis_ would be worthwhile. If I weren’t already editing two journals I’d volunteer to edit the thing. But I think a US-based, monthly, electronic journal that published pieces up to, say, 3000 words, with a focus on original work but which was happy to publish responses to pieces published in prestigous places elsewhere, would be a valuable addition to the profession. (Maybe I’d even submit some of these blog posts!)

One of the thoughts in the thread over there was that we should recruit OUP to publish it. I love OUP, and I’d be happy to see them do this. But I don’t think it is necessary. As the University of Michigan has shown, top libraries can publish their own e-journals. I’d say having a successful journal adds just as much prestige to a department as a decent hire. And it is probably cheaper. So I’d like to see some top-line department step up to the plate and pony up the funding and support for such a journal.

I spent some time in the departure lounge of Calgary airport on Friday, with Agustin “the Mexican Multiplier” Rayo and JC Beall, and JC mentioned how annoying he found it that some philosophers used the expressions “philosophical logic” and “philosophy of logic” interchangably. In fact, he thought he might write something up about it and try to get people to take notice. Not being one to stomp on a worthy cause, I asked him whether he’d let me post such a thing to a blog. He agreed, and so I give you JC’s Column (an occasional series?) Reform or perish…

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Terminological Theme: Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Logic, and Formal Philosophy.

There’s reason to think that confusion exists over the terminology of “philosophical logic” and “philosophy of logic”. It would do the profession — and, perhaps, aspiring graduate students — well to have uniform terminology. While terminological differences certainly exist across the English-speaking countries (e.g., in parts of the UK, “philosophical logic” is often synonymous with “philosophy of logic”, though not so in Oz), here is a fairly standard — though admittedly (perhaps perforce) vague — classification, one that, if broadly adopted, would at least diminish some of the confusion.

A. Formal Philosophy: formal (mathematical) methods used in the service of philosophy.

(This comprises a lot, including philosophical logic, some areas of mathematical logic, decision theory, what Branden calls “formal epistemology”, some areas of foundations of mathematics, some incarnations of philosophy of logic, some incarnations of philosophy of language, and much more. Similarly, some work in metaphysics — particularly, formal ontology, formal mereology, etc. — would certainly fall under this banner. So, this category is perhaps the broadest category, but it’s worth including here. What is crucial is that formal, mathematical methods — as opposed to just using symbols as abbreviations, etc. (!) — is essential.)

B. Philosophical Logic: formal logic (usually, applied maths) in the service of philosophy; in particular, a formal account of *consequence* for some philosophically interesting fragment of discourse.

[If we take Logic to be concerned with *consequence*, then philosophical logic aims to specify — in a formal, precise way — the consequence relation over some philosophically significant fragment of our language. (Usually, this is done by constructing a formal “model language”, and proposing that the logic of the target “real language” is relevantly like *that*.) Usually, philosophical logic overlaps a lot with formal semantics, but may often be motivated more by philosophical concerns than by linguistic data. Work on formal truth theories — i.e., specifying the logic of truth — is a familiar example of work in philosophical logic, as are the familiar modal and many-valued accounts of various expressions, and similarly concerns about ‘absolute generality’ and the *consequence* relation governing such quantification, and much, much else. What is essential, as above, is a specification of a given *consequence* relation for the target, philosophically interesting phenomenon. Whether the consequence relation is specified “semantically”, via models, or proof-theoretically is not critical — although the former might often prove to be heuristically better in philosophy.]

C. Philosophy of Logic: philosophy motivated by Logic; philosophical issues arising out of a given, specified logic (or family of logics).

[While competence in (formal) logic is often a prerequisite of good philosophy of logic, no formal logic or, for that matter, formal methods need be involved in doing philosophy of logic. Of course, philosophy of logic often overlaps with philosophy of language — as with many areas of philosophy. The point is that philosophy of logic, while its target *may* be mathematical or formal, needn’t be an instance of either philosophical logic — which essentially involves formal methods — or, more broadly, formal methods. A lot of work on “nature of truth” might be classified as philosophy of logic (though much of it probably isn’t motivated by logic, and so shouldn’t be so classified), and similarly for “nature of worlds” etc. Whether the classification is appropriate depends, in part, on the given project — e.g., whether, as with Quine and Lewis, one is directly examining the commitments of a particular logical theory, as opposed to merely reflecting on “intuitions” concerning notions that are often thought to be logically significant. The point, again, is just that philosophy of logic is a distinct enterprise from philosophical logic, each requiring very different areas of competence, and each targeted at different aims.]

It would be useful if the profession, in general, but especially *practitioners* adopted terminology along the above lines. Of course, there’s still room for confusion, and the foregoing hardly cuts precise joints. It might be useful to discuss refinements to the above terminological constraints.

One more — just for those who might be wondering:

D. Mathematical Logic: formal logic in the service of (usually classical!) mathematics, as well various subfields of mathematics. (E.g., standard limitative theorems and classical metatheory is mathematical logic, as is reverse mathematics, many aspects of category theory, many aspects of set theory, areas of abstract algebra, areas of recursion theory, and so on. Mathematicians need have no interest in philosophy to engage in such areas, in contrast with the philosophical logician who is driven to use “mathematical methods” in an effort to clarify the consequence relation of some philosophically interesting “discourse”. There’s more to be said here, but this is chiefly a post about A, B, and C.)

** One note: it may well be that anyone talented in B is interested in C, but it hardly follows that one who is talented in B is talented in C. Similarly, one who is talented in C may well have little talent or interest in B. My hunch is that, on the whole, those who do B (or do it well) are usually talented in C. It’s unclear whether those with a talent in D are naturals for B or C — or A, for that matter — but one can think of excellent philosophers who also engaged directly in D. (The obvious such folks were also good at A, B, and C, as well as D. Russell comes to mind, as does Kripke, but there are others.)
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First a bleg. Those of you who read over there may have noticed that I haven’t posted at my other blog in a few weeks. At first it was just the usual not having the right combination of time and ideas, but recently the software has given me trouble again, and now doesn’t believe that there’s a blog there for me to edit. (Fortunately it’s still displaying all the old posts.) So I’m planning on moving away from MovableType. But since I can’t log in to export the old posts, I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to extract them efficiently so I can host them on different software, possibly on a different site. (I lost control of antimeta.org about a year ago when I switched hosting companies, and they seem to have accidentally renewed the registration, so I may have to change domain names again.)
Anyway, I was just in Banff for probably the most blogged-about conference I’ve ever been to. I count nine posts between , Gillian, and Richard, as well as two mentions on Certain Doubts. Also, I believe Aldo Antonelli got a lot of good pictures, including one of Gillian and me that should appear in the upper-left corner here at some point after I get a copy from either him or Richard Zach.
I found it to be a great workshop, and I’m very glad that Richard invited me! Despite the very broad “focus” on mathematical methods in any area of philosophy, there were some very interesting series of talks that gave some coherent threads. For instance, theories of truth were the focus of the survey by JC Beall and Michael Glanzberg, as well as more specific talks by Volker Halbach, Jeff Ketland, Sol Feferman, and Greg Restall. And a variety of different semantics for modal logics (especially quantified and non-classical) were discussed by Marcus Kracht, Steve Awodey, Eric Pacuit, Greg Restall, and Graham Priest. There were also two interesting proposals, by Delia Graff Fara and Kai Wehmeier, suggesting that identity as a relation doesn’t play quite the role we think it does, the former pointing out that for a lot of purposes (especially modal and temporal ones) we can’t use strict identity, but rather some “same F as” relation; the latter arguing that identity shouldn’t even be treated as a relation in logic at all!

Given my experiences at FEW (abstract deadline today if you want to submit!) I was surprised by a relative lack of talks on probability (basically only Branden Fitelson and Tim Williamson, and one fourth of Hannes Leitgeb’s virtuoso four talks in one hour performance). But there’s always got to be some trade-off. Anyway, I had lots of productive conversations (some while cross-country skiing) that will shape my dissertation, some papers I’ve been working on, and almost certainly some future blogposts either here or wherever I get my other blog working once I can transfer the old posts.

Ned Hall has a paper in a recent _Philosophical Studies_ where he defends a new account of causation. The crucial idea is that we have to distinguish between default and deviant states for certain events/objects. Applied to simple cases like neuron diagrams, the default state of a neuron is to not fire. The theory gets a few complicated cases right, but it seems to not get some even more complicated right. I’ll state (hopefully not too badly) the theory, then offer a counterexample to it. There’s a little bit of interpretation here, because Hall never quite states the theory like this, so I might be horribly misinterpreting something.

C is a cause of E iff there are some events K such that

* each event in K consists of some entity being in a deviant, rather than a default, state
* had every event in K not happened, E would still have happened
* had every event in K not happened, every event in the causal network of which C and E are parts either would have happened in the same way, or would have reverted to its default state
* had every event in K not happened, E would have been counterfactually dependent on C

Here is a kind of counterexample to it. First the diagram, then the description.

* A sets off a chain of events that, if unchecked, will result in E.
* B initiates a threat to E.
* C causes the threat to be cancelled early.
* C also initiates a chain that, if left unchecked, will cancel the threat late.
* D pre-empts this second chain, and will cancel the threat late if it is still present.

C causes E by defusing a threat to it, but it fails Hall’s test. E isn’t counterfactually dependent on C. If D hadn’t happened, E would have been counterfactually dependent on C. But if D hadn’t happened, an event that is actually at default, the one labelled G on the diagram, would have been in a deviant state. So there is no set K as required above, and C is not a cause of E. But this is wrong, since C is what defuses the threat to E.

I think there are also cases where Hall’s theory mistakenly classifies a non-cause as a cause, but those cases are more contentious and I’ll leave them for another post.