We have some excellent news to report here at Cornell. “Karen Bennett”:http://www.princeton.edu/~kbennett/, currently at Princeton, has agreed to join the Sage School starting in Fall semester this year. Karen has produced “some impressive works”:http://www.princeton.edu/~kbennett/papers.html in philosophy of mind and in metaphysics. See, for example, her papers on “actualism”:http://philreview.dukejournals.org/content/vol114/issue3/ and “the exclusion problem”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/nous/37/3. So we’re very excited that she agreed to move to Cornell.

Cornell is starting to specialise in hiring people at or around tenure time. In recent years it’s hired Delia Graff Fara, Tamar Gendler, me, Matti Eklund, Michelle Kosch and now Karen Bennett. That’s a pretty good list I’d say, even if the first two people on it have since been lured away. There has been a lot of discussion around the places about the excellent people Cornell has recently lost, but those we’ve hired are pretty talented too. Of course as well as the people listed here we’ve hired Nico Silins and Derk Pereboom just recently, and Andrew Chignell not long ago, so it’s not just at the tenure stage that we’re hiring well.

I should note that this news is a little old by blog standards, since Karen agreed to join the department last week. But this happened while I was away – while I was stuck on the clogged Pennsylvania highways the day after the big snowstorm – so I’ve only just had the chance to announce it now.

I’m writing this post during the lunchbreak of the first day of Richard Zach‘s Mathematical Methods in Philosophy conference at Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery. It promises to be an awesome conference – Kenny is here as well, so maybe he’ll be posting about it too. This morning we kicked off with Branden Fitelson, who read out Bob Meyer’s manifesto:

Do not be deceived, Establishment pigs (this means you too, Establishment dogs). The subservience of past generations of logicians does not mean that we shall bear forever our treatment as animals (you barnyard fowl). We are human beings (you swine). You are living in a day when logicians will not any longer endure your taunts, your slurs, your insults (you filthy vermin). In the name of A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell we gather; in the spirit of R. Carnap and A. Tarski, we march; by the word of W. V. O. Quine, we shall prevail. Beware you snakes of the Philosophical Power Structure, which you have created and which you maintain to put down the logician; you have caged the eagle of reason, the dove of wisdom, and the lark of a definite, precisely formulated formal system, with exact formation rules, a recursive set of axioms, and clear and cogent rules of inference, and you have made them your pigeons. Oh, you filterable viruses, we will shake you off and fly once more.

(I’ve just realised – in searching for the text – that Greg Restall is blogging about the conference too. I guess reporting on this one is kind of overdetermined – look out for further posts from Richard Zach too. Greg has his laptop in the sessions, so that might be the place to go for the most up-to-the-minute reporting! I’m pretty amazed that Google had him linked already though – those little Googlebots must be much faster than they used to be.)

Branden also announced that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is widening its “Inductive Logic and Decision Theory” area to “Formal Epistemology”, with Branden Fitelson and Al Hajek joining Briain Skryms and Jim Joyce as editors.

And finally, he also said that Studia Logica is changing its broadening its scope to include “Formal Philosophy”, and there are several new editors with special issues coming up, including:

• Leitgeb: Psychologism in Philosophy
• Douven and Horsten: Applied Logic in Philosophy of Science
• Behounek and Keefe: Vagueness
• Fitelson: Formal Epistemology

According to Branden, the scope of “Formal Epistemology” is everything in formal philosophy that isn’t metaphysics. Except that it also includes the foundations of probability. That doesn’t leave a lot out, so if you have a good formal paper and you were wondering whether it would fit…it probably does.

OK, I’m off to walk through snowy pines before coming back to hot chocolate and JC Beall and Michael Glanzberg talking about paradoxes. (Did I mention that the programme is amazing?) Wish you were here…

So I’ve been spending time that I should be spending writing about disagreements about taste, fragmented belief, perception, and funny kinds of context dependence, thinking instead about a lyric from a Black Eyed Peas song (“Latin Girls”) that I was listening to while surfing the web writing about all of the very important topics that I ought to be writing about. Anyway, here’s the lyric:

“Girl, you know I know you know what I mean.”

And I started wondering (as one does):

(a) What’s the difference between the overall communicative effects of asserting,

(i) You know what I mean
and
(ii) You know I know you know what I mean

(b) Whatever the differences are, can you get an adding-to-common-knowledge view of assertion to predict them?

Continue reading →

I started thinking about this after Aidan Lyon‘s excellent talk on the curve-fitting problem here at the ANU yesterday.

Graham Priest in his 1976 article Gruesome Simplicity (this link is to JSTOR) discusses curve-fitting as a way of making inductive inferences. When we plot observed values of two related quantities x and y on a graph, we have several options for which curve to draw between them. The simplicity of the curve has to be traded off against fit with the existing data points, and it is a taxing problem to say how best this should be done. Yet we often do think we can choose an appropriate curve, and use it to make predictions concerning as-yet-unobserved values of x and y.

What Priest shows is that ‘certain very natural transformations’ on data sets result in different curves appearing to be ‘best’ and correspondingly conflicting predictions being delivered. Priest therefore claims to have shown that ‘which prediction is best depends not on the situation but how you describe it. (Equivalent descriptions do not give the same answers.)’ (p. 432). This sort of description-dependence sounds unsettling; we would like our predictions to be sensitive only to our data, and not affected by accidental features of the ways we happen to represent that data.

It seems to have been accepted in the subsequent literature that Priest’s problem, if it cannot be avoided, establishes a worrying kind of description-dependence. But in my opinion the existence of such description-dependence is not established by Priest’s argument. To get that conclusion, we would need an additional premise: that when we perform the transformations on the data that generate the new predictions, we are just redescribing the same situation, as opposed to considering a different situation.

Continue reading →

Carl Ginet is running an excellent seminar here at Cornell on Timothy Williamson’s _Knowledge and Its Limits_. Here is a point that David Liebesman and I were pushing a couple of weeks ago against Williamson’s idea that knowledge is the most general factive mental state.

Imagine we discovered a community that had a word “schnow”, which is like our “know”. Their view about schnowledge is quite like our view about knowledge. For instance, they unhesitatingly say that Gettier cases are not cases of schnowledge. But they hold that there are fewer defeaters for schnowledge than we think there are for knowledge. For instance, in case like Harman’s example of the person who happens to not see the misleading newspapers saying the dictator is still alive, they will say that the person schnows that the dictator is dead. In general, it turns out, they don’t think that unobtained misleading evidence defeats schnowledge. They are, however, future externalists in the following sense. The fact that someone will obtain misleading evidence may defeat current schnowledge, though it doesn’t defeat current justification. I’m going to assume (perhaps wrongly!) that their view on schnowledge is strictly weaker than our view on knowledge, since we allow never unobtained misleading evidence to defeat knowledge, but strictly stronger than our view (and theirs) on justified true belief.

Now here are two questions for Williamson.

First, is schnowing that p a mental state? I can’t see anything in the arguments for knowledge being a mental state that would count against schnowledge being a mental state. Note, in particular, that it isn’t (easily) factorisable.

Second, is schowledge weaker than knowledge? That is, do they denote a weaker relation by ‘schnows’ than we denote by ‘knows’? I can see going either way here. On the one hand, they do use ‘schnows’ in a slightly different way to how we use ‘knows’. On the other, when it comes to normative terms, we are generally quite generous about allowing that people with different usage nevertheless have the same meaning. When Osama says, for instance, “Killing Christians is good”, he is *falsely* saying something using our common concept of goodness, not *truly* saying something using a different concept of goodness. Perhaps the people in question are just misusing ‘schnows’, or perhaps we are misusing ‘knows’.

But I think there is a problem for Williamson on either answer he gives to this question. If schnowledge is weaker than knowledge, then knowledge is not the most general factive mental state, because schnowledge is more general. If schnowledge is the same as knowledge, then it turns out our term ‘knows’ is not _plastic_. Small deviations, even large deviations, don’t produce a difference in denotation. But in _Vagueness_, his view was that vagueness in language is grounded in semantic plasticity. And it would be intolerable to say that ‘knows’ is not vague. So I don’t see a way to hold on both to the view that knowledge is the most general FMS, and the view that vagueness is a product of semantic plasticity.

Brian Leiter has the annual “junior jobs post”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/tenuretrack_hir.html up, as well as an interesting thread on “negotiating better offers”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/negotiating_a_j.html#comments.

Acer Nethercott sent along an interesting story about “teaching philosophy to youngsters in Scotland”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6330631.stm. I’ve never been too confident of the utility of getting four year olds to worry about sceptical possibilities, but it looks like this program has long-term value.

And while I don’t have a link for this, this week’s TLS features reviews of two Australian philosophy books, Daniel Stoljar’s _Ignorance and Imagination_ and Graham Oppy’s _Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity_.

I have several posts to write up about my turn at the NYU Mind and Language symposium last week. But first one relatively unfortunate story from the end of the trip. On the drive back I stopped at the Citgo gas station in Liberty. I made the bad mistake of filling up the tank. This was a mistake insofar as I got, as my mechanic later put it, a little bit of gas and a lot of something else. Probably water. So my poor car tried to run on impure gas for a while. And while this worked a little, it didn’t work a lot. I managed to nurse the car to Vestal, where it currently is at the Honda dealers getting the bad gas drained out, at least one new fuel injector put in, and new gas put in. I hope to get the car back, at not too great an expense, in the next couple of days. Not good times. Never using that gas station again…

On better news, “The Cat Empire”:http://www.myspace.com/thecatempire are touring the US and Europe. Hopefully a few people reading this will have seen them play on the west coast last week. They are in the Midwest this week, then Boston and New York over the weekend and into next week. The link takes you to a MySpace page where you can hear several of their songs, and they’re a really fun band to see live, and if you can get tickets to see them in your neck of the woods, I’d highly recommend doing so.

Via Europa Malynicz, “these”:http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotsnakee.html are some of the most disturbing illusions I’ve seen. Be warned, the images in that link do have the capacity to produce at least mild dizziness, so don’t click the link if you are prone to dizziness. I should also add that not everyone seems to see the illusion, but I at least am extremely misled by it.

Via “Richard Zach”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2007/02/mexican-multiplier-trounces-dr-evil-in.html, this is “a very cute story”:http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N64/64largenumber.html about the recent Rayo-Elga duel at MIT.

Philosophy Compass now has an RSS feed. If you want to be alerted any time a new article is published, you can follow “this feed”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/action/showFeed?ui=1aeto&mi=3d0z4&ai=ni7&jc=phco&type=etoc&feed=rss.