I’ve been away from the blog for a few days catching up on more important things in life (e.g. sleep). Maybe there’ll be a few more posts tonight though. Because this is the kind of sentence I never thought I’d read.

bq. In an important way, Priest’s view is _too moderate_. (Matti Eklund, “The Inconsistency View on Vagueness”:http://spot.colorado.edu/~eklundm/ivv.pdf, emphasis in original.)

That’s _Graham_ Priest he’s talking about, not some codesignated actual moderate. And it’s Graham’s view on contradictions he’s talking about, not Graham’s views on sexual perversion, or Hegel, or … well I guess this point doesn’t matter because Graham doesn’t have moderate views _on absolutely anything whatsoever_. (I really do mean that as a compliment. Really.)

Note to self: Dialethicism is not a moderate position, no matter what smart people say.

“Kai von Fintel”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/11/google_scholar links to one of the newest (and coolest) toys in the toolbox.

bq. “Google Scholar”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/11/google_scholar

It returns academic papers matching a search phrase you look for, ranked by number of citations. Hours and hours of fun to be had!

We have two discussion club meetings scheduled at Cornell in the next 40 hours. They are:

* Yurii Cohen (Cornell), Revisiting Aristotle’s Function Argument: Moral Content on a Slender Basis? 7.30 tonight, 124 Goldwin Smith Hall
* Kris McDaniel (Syracuse), Kantian Ignorance. 4.30 tomorrow, 124 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Hopefully as many people as possible from the neighbourhood (broadly defined) will drop by.

UPDATE: As well as being a first-class philosophy, Kris is also a philosophical songsmith. Some of his efforts with _The Monads_ can be downloaded “here”:http://web.syr.edu/~krmcdani/themonads.html. For discussion: which of these songs should I play to ‘warm up’ the crowd before Kris’s talk tomorrow?

I was kinda kidding when I mentioned a few posts ago that I was earning *much* less than the typical expat. My household is well below the average household in salary, but also in size. But we full-time members of the Ivy League gravy train are doing pretty well. Of course I am writing from the office at 10.15 on a Wednesday night, because I’m here reading job files and grading. So the hours aren’t always the best. I like the vacation time though.

As “Matt Carter points out”:http://emanations.braininavat.net/archives/000156.html, for casual staff (I think what they call adjuncts in America, though I’m not sure if the parallel is exact) the situation is, er, not so good.

The rotation for “APA Conferences”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/divisions/schedule.html seems to be getting tighter. The Central is in Chicago for the next 2 years, and the Eastern is back in DC in 2006, just as it was in 2003. Personally I don’t mind this. I’d rather have the Pacific always in San Francisco, the Eastern always in Miami and the Central alternating between Chicago and New Orleans. (If I was a gambler I could imagine adding Las Vegas to the Central rotation, but as it is I’ll stick with Chicago and Nawlins.)

Sorry about the lack of a “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org yesterday. Real life intervened, in the form of my not having enough time in the morning to finalise my preparation for a class on counterfactuals and also do the papers blog. Given the relative size of the blog audience compared to the intro logic class it may have been utility-maximising to do the blog anyway. But for some reason I decided to obey duty rather than utility-maximise. Maybe I’m becoming a Kantian in my old age.

There are several interesting things on “today’s post”:http://opp.weatherson.org/archives/003971.html, perhaps the most notable being _seven_ new papers by “Matti Eklund”:http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Eeklundm/papers.htm. That’s as big as a decent tenure file, and it’s one day’s posting. (If I’d had time to read all seven I’m sure I’d say the quality is also as high as a decent tenure file, or even better, but I’m not that organised.) Very impressive!

“Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_11_14_dish_archive.html#110057476215171285 reminds us of the low point of Colin Powell’s political career – his argument for war in Iraq at the UN. But I was struck by this quote.

bq. My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. *These are not assertions.* What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources. (Emphasis added.)

What exactly does the bolded line even mean? Two hypotheses come to mind. The most natural is that it’s a kind of metalinguistic negation. He means these aren’t *mere* assertions, in the way that when I say “I don’t _like_ cricket” I mean to say I don’t *merely* like it. (I wonder if the tape shows the phonetic patterns usually indicative of metalinguistic negation?) The more charitable is that Powell is telling the truth – he isn’t asserting anything at all. He’s an actor on a stage, or a puppet in a play, reciting lines, and just as actors and puppets don’t make assertions, he’s not making assertions either.

It’s interesting how little pressure there is here to adopt the most charitable reading. Note that even with the standard provisos added to the principle of charity, to turn it into something like a principle of humanity, still the principle-preferred interpretation is that he’s telling the truth in this sentence and this sentence only. But that’s not how we interpret him at all. If we did it might not be the low-point of his political career.

“Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_11_14_dish_archive.html#110057476215171285 reminds us of the low point of Colin Powell’s political career – his argument for war in Iraq at the UN. But I was struck by this quote.

bq. My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. *These are not assertions.* What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources. (Emphasis added.)

What exactly does the bolded line even mean? Two hypotheses come to mind. The most natural is that it’s a kind of metalinguistic negation. He means these aren’t *mere* assertions, in the way that when I say “I don’t _like_ cricket” I mean to say I don’t *merely* like it. (I wonder if the tape shows the phonetic patterns usually indicative of metalinguistic negation?) The more charitable is that Powell is telling the truth – he isn’t asserting anything at all. He’s an actor on a stage, or a puppet in a play, reciting lines, and just as actors and puppets don’t make assertions, he’s not making assertions either.

It’s interesting how little pressure there is here to adopt the most charitable reading. Note that even with the standard provisos added to the principle of charity, to turn it into something like a principle of humanity, still the principle-preferred interpretation is that he’s telling the truth in this sentence and this sentence only. But that’s not how we interpret him at all. If we did it might not be the low-point of his political career.

I’m sure I read “this article”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/12/1100227579853.html about Australian ex-pats in the SMH every 6 months. It’s always kinda interesting, but I swear it’s the very same article each time. A lot of the things they say in the article apply to me, or at least so I’d like to think.

bq. They are the sort of people we all would like Australians to be. Young, well-educated, well-connected, well-paid and well-disposed towards Australia, they have everything you would want as a representative of this country, except perhaps the suntan.

And I never had the suntan. Most the people surveyed left Australia for the prospect of a better job over here. I left for the prospect of _a_ job, and stayed for the same reason. Interestingly, there are 3 new Australians on faculty at Cornell this year, which seems quite high for a country of just 20 million on the other side of the world.

But the main reason I’m posting this is to bring the following paragraph to my employer’s attention.

bq. These people do not leave Australia because they hate it. Rather, they are following job opportunities, seeking greater professional challenges and, put simply, they are becoming world citizens with Australian passports. And they seem to be well paid for their efforts. One study found that more than half the expatriates surveyed had a household income exceeding $230,000.

If I was married to someone earning as much as I was, and the US dollar fell back a bit (i.e. to where it probably was when that study was taken) and we both got pay raises, and the pay raises were substantial, well we might be making over $230,000 as well. I’d settle for $115,000 on my own! If you’re reading this President Lehman…

Blogging is very light these days because I’m spending _all_ my time reading job applications. And while these applications do raise lots of issues and topics that would make for interesting blog discussions, norms of confidentiality prevent me from discussing any of them at all. They even, I suspect, prevent me from launching into vituperative criticisms of papers I’m reading qua writing sample even when those papers are otherwise available (e.g. on website or in journals.) So instead I’ll write about music. In particular, these have been my three favourite job search related songs the iPod has thrown at me so far today.
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