For various reasons, I’ve decided to turn TAR into a group blog. My main hope in doing this is that my slavish imitation of “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com will be rewarded with a notch higher ranking for Cornell in the next round. But I also hope that it will lead to some rewarding interactions on the blog, as well as highlighting some bloggers whose work I feel hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated in the past, and bringing some new voices into philosophy blogging. I’ll let the various members of the group introduce themselves over the coming hours, days and weeks, so if you keep checking back in here you’ll find a few new faces appearing.

One last Ryle post for the day. This was a very odd section in Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson’s “Knowledge How”:http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ejasoncs/JPHIL.pdf (PDF).

bq. Let us turn from Ryle’s arguments against the thesis that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that to his positive account of knowledge-how. According to Ryle, an ascription of the form ‘x knows how to F’ merely ascribes to x the ability to F. However, it is simply false that ascriptions of knowledge-how ascribe abilities. As Ginet and others have pointed out, ascriptions of knowledge-how do not even entail ascriptions of the corresponding abilities. For example, a ski instructor may know how to perform a certain complex stunt, without being able to perform it herself. Similarly, a master pianist who loses both of her arms in a tragic car accident still knows how to play the piano. However, she has lost her ability to do so (cf. also Ziff (1984, p. 71). It follows that Ryle’s own positive account of knowledge-how is demonstrably false.

I’m not where Ryle offers that account. As I read him, Ryle says that knowledge how is, like most mental states, a complex disposition that has no (easily statable) necessary or sufficient conditions. To get a sample of the kind of thing Ryle does think is involved in knowledge how, consider what he says about knowing how to tie a knot.

bq. You exercise your knowledge of how to tie a clove-hitch not only in acts of tying clove-hitches and in correcting your mistakes, but also in imagining tying them correctly, in instructing pupils, in criticising the incorrect or clumsy movements and applauding the correct movements that they make, in inferring from a faulty result to the error which produced it, in predicting the outcomes of observed lapses, and so on indefinitely. (55)

It seems to me that Ryle could quite easily say that the pianist and the ski instructor both have the knowledge how Tim and Jason assign to them, since both of them can imagine how to perform the act, can instruct, criticise and praise pupils accordingly, can infer what’s going wrong in misperformances etc etc. So while these may be counterexamples to the equation of know how and ability, I don’t see how they are counterexamples to anything that Ryle says.

Greg Restall was recently interviewed by ABC’s Radio National about logical pluralism. I’m really not kidding – there was a radio show on logical pluralism on national radio. I’m so proud of my country, or at least its national broadcaster, sometimes. The link is “here”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2006/1689459.htm.

It’s not actually a philosophy link, but assorted ex-pats might like to know that you can listen to a lot of ABC shows as podcasts. They recently added the flagship current affairs shows, AM, PM and the World Today, which are great for keeping up with what’s happening. And they also have the Philosopher’s Zone, which Greg appeared on, as a podcast.

Did you know you can get a Firefox plugin that adds an option to search the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy to the search bar? It is available “here”:http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=stanford+ency&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search.

Finally, on the recent trend of noticing what’s happening in philosophy blogs, Eric Schwitzgebel has a blog, “The Splintered Mind”:http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/ which I’ve been enjoying a lot.

Ryle offers a regress argument for the impossibility of reducing knowing how to knowing that. Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson in “Knowing How”:http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ejasoncs/JPHIL.pdf (PDF) suggest a way to block the regress. I think Ryle anticipated their reply, and has something interesting to say about it. I’m not sure whether Ryle’s response works, but it is I think a response. (What I’m going to say is similar to what Alva Noe says in his “Against Intellectualism”:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/journals/analysis/preprints/NOE2.pdf (PDF), but I hope different enough to be worth saying.)
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In a couple of places, e.g. “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2006/06/14/fundamentalism-and-knowledge/ and “here (PDF)”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dpww.pdf I’ve suggested that Ryle’s argument against Descartes relies (illegitimately) on general sceptical principles about induction. I now think that’s something of a mistake. (As Michael Kremer was trying to point out to me at the time.)
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More YouTube fun.

When I changed over to WordPress, I tried to keep the layout pretty much as it was. And on a few browsers it seems I did. But on some versions of Safari, only the main column, not the header or either side column, is showing. This isn’t the case on all versions of Safari, but it is happening on some. Does anyone who knows more about what is distinctive about Safari know what could be going wrong?

I haven’t yet figured out (a) how to make a list like my sidebar links to posts I see, or (b) whether I want to do this, so for now I’ll put interesting links in main posts. Here are two posts on causation:

bq. Joshua Knobe on “causal judgments and normative judgments”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2006/07/the_doingallowi.html
Wo on “causation and the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis account of Theoretical Terms”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2006/07/15/Causation_and_the_Ramsey_Carnap_Lewis_account_of_theoretical_terms

I also haven’t decided whether to bring back the Monday Message Board. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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I’m putting together the syllabus for my Fall intro course, and once again I’m very grateful for Jim Pryor’s “page of teaching resources”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/index.html. His directions to students on “how to read philosophy papers”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/reading.html, “how to write philosophy papers”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html and “what we’re looking for while grading philosophy papers”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/grades.html are exactly what I wish I’d written for my students. Happily, I can now just point to these rather than trying to write them myself. I have linked to these before, but I suspect a few other people writing syllabi, especially those teaching for the first time, will be happy to be reminded of the links.

Sorry about some of the delays in getting comments to appear. I think I had too many layers of security. I still have _two_ of the three layers. You have to register to post, and if you haven’t commented before (I’m not sure whether comments pre-WordPress move count) I have to approve the comment. Other than that, it should be a case of comment away! (Delays in me replying to comments are not because of technical errors, but because I’m slow in coming up with interesting things to say in reply.)

There have been a bunch of new philosophy blogs appear (or appear on my radar screen) recently. Here are some of them.

* “Lemmings”:http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/
* “Brain Brain”:http://brainbrain.blogspot.com/
* “de crapulas edormiendo”:http://decrapulasedormiendo.blogspot.com/
* “Philosophy from the Left Coast”:http://brianberkey.blogspot.com/
* “Reality Conditions”:http://realityconditions.blogspot.com/

UPDATE – And another: “Knowability”:http://knowability.blogspot.com/

Following up on the causation post the other day, I’ve been reading some very interesting stuff by “Phillip Wolff”:http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pwolff/CLSLab.htm, especially stuff about experiments on when people will use causitives, and when they’ll merely use causal phrases. “This paper”:http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pwolff/papers/DirectCausation.pdf has tons of references and some fun experiments.

Slate “reviews the Language Log blog book”:http://www.slate.com/id/2143324/?nav=ais. I was going to call it a blook, but that term seems to have a “dubious history”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blook.

“The Onion”:http://www.theonion.com/content/index/4228/5 has been reviewing its greatest hits of the first ten years online. If you don’t want to do any other work today, click over there.

I promise that this blog won’t descend into a place where we post nothing but YouTube videos. (Even if I don’t have many interesting actual thoughts to post.) But below the fold is the first descent into this madness. We have two pieces of evidence that people have way too much time on their hands.
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