This is probably of interest to no one but me, but here’s the current list of IP Addresses that I’ve banned from the site because of repeated spam attacks. I imagine a few of them are fake addresses, but here they are.
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It’s a common device in philosophy (one I use excessively) to turn philosophical investigation into an imagined debate between advocates for the salient positions on the table. Sometimes this is a helpful stylistic device, because it lets the reader keep track of the dialectic more easily than the alternatives. But sometimes it has costs.

Consider a philosopher trying to find out whether there are representations who thinks to herself as follows.

bq. Let’s imagine a debate between proponents of the two positions, the representationalist who says that there are representations, and the anti-representationalist who says that there are not. The anti-representationalist’s position is obviously incoherent, since she cannot state her position if it is true. So the representationalist has to win this debate. So there are representations.

Now I think there are representations (it wouldn’t be worth writing this blog if there weren’t) but I think this is a lousy way of arguing for them. It’s a lousy argument because it’s obviously a _contingent_ fact about the world that it contains representations, but no step of the argument relies on contingent premises. So the argument proves more than we could hope to prove, since it seems to prove that representationalism is true everywhere.

From this I infer (perhaps incorrectly) that we should be very careful in arguments from the loss of the anti-p-ist in a debate to the truth of p. David Lewis noted long ago that by many debate rules the anti-dialethist would lose debates because they begged questions against the dialethist. He denied that implied anything about whether dialethism is actually true, in fact it is false though there are no non-question-begging arguments to that effect.

More pertinently, a large chunk of Tim Williamson’s paper on “Everything”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0009/files/everything.pdf seems to turn on an argument from the incoherence of generality-relativism to the truth of generality-absolutism, with the argument going via the embarrassment of the generality-relativist at being unable to state her position. I don’t think this is much help to the generality-absolutist, because it isn’t a conclusive argument that her position is true, even if her opponent’s position is unstatable. To be fair, Williamson acknowledges that the difficulty for the relativist isn’t conclusive, the absolutist still needs to quantify over everything, but I think he still puts too much weight on the incoherence objection.

Thanks to Scott Rolen’s home run (did anyone else think it looked exactly like McGwire’s 62 – a liner to that left field corner) I won’t be in the town of the NL champions next week. Which is too bad because from “this story”:http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2004/columns/story?id=1907102 it looks like tickets may have been affordable. Fenway tickets are over $1200 on the scalper market, which is pretty insane, but Busch tickets are $500 to $700. Going by Andy’s advice in the last thread, that might have been a utility maximising option for me, were Houston tickets the same price. (Could one night be worth that much? Not on its own, but if we win being there increases how much utility I’d get from the win over the next months, years, decades etc so I’d say it’s a chance.) So I’m $500 to $700 richer and potentially some utils poorer. C’est la vie. On the upside, I was petrified of the Astros homefield advantage, and now I only have to worry about the Walker/Pujols/Rolen/Edmonds lineup.

Red Sox 10
Yankees 3

If Houston win tomorrow and the series doesn’t end in 4, I’ll be in Houston for Game 5. How much should I pay for a scalped ticket I wonder.

Good question to be thinking about. Good good times.

Regular philosophical content will return sooner or later.

“Here”:http://brian.weatherson.org/jfp2004.htm is some analysis of how the jobs in the October 2004 JFP break down. This is obviously a preliminary analysis of what’s available this season, because we still have to see the November numbers, but I think it’s of some interest. I’ll mostly post the numbers here, analysis will wait. But I can’t help but note that the numbers for logic and philosophy of science are _very low_, with many open jobs being some compensation for this.

At the end of my “new intuitions paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/iam.pdf I have three arguments that Gettier cases are cases of knowledge. At dinner with Ishani, John Hawthorne and Ernie Lepore last night we discussed (inter alia) a fourth argument. It’s one I’d previously missed, though I should have seen it given its proximity to the arguments I make.

Let p be a Gettiered belief that X has. It seems that X could be happy that p, or sad that p, or disgusted that p and so on. If we accept Williamson’s line that knowledge is the most general factive mental state, so happiness/sadness/disgustedness that p entails knowledge that p, this means that X knows that p, as required. More formally, the argument is:

1. X is happy that p
2. If X is happy that p then X knows that p.
C. X knows that p

Of course someone who strongly rejects the conclusion can reject one of the premises, but 2 is supported by very plausible theoretical claims, and the intuition that 1 is true (in cases where X is plausibly _happy_ rather than, say, _sad_ about p) is at least as strong as the intuition that X does not know that p.

This is really not ready for prime-time musings, but it’s mid-afternoon so maybe that’s OK.

What exactly does (1) mean?

(1) Jack went to the doctor.

It’s tempting to think the LF of (1) is just the same as the LF of (2), except that we have a DD in place of a name.

(2) Jack went to Coventry.

But I don’t think that’s right. For one thing (1a) seems like a much worse paraphrase than (2a).

(1a) The doctor is such that Jack went to him or her.
(2a) Coventry is such that Jack went to it.

Superficially, it seems that (1) is a slightly conventionalised way of saying that Jack had a medical check-up or appointment or something of the sort. As some evidence for this, note the difference between (3) and (4) in terms of whether they imply Jack and Jill visited the same doctor/game.

(3) Jack went to the doctor and so did Jill.
(4) Jack went to the game and so did Jill.

It’s almost tempting to say that “the doctor” denotes here something other than the individual Jack went to, denotes the class of doctors or doctors’ offices or the like. Tempting, but surely false, for we can have anaphoric pronouns antecedent on ‘the doctor’, as in “this Bob Dylan line”:http://bobdylan.com/songs/ww3.html.

(5) I went to the doctor the very next day
     To see what kinda words he could say.
     He said it was a bad dream.

So I’m just confused. Maybe I should learn to live with (1a) as a paraphrase of (1) and give a pragmatic explanation for the differences between (3) and (4).

This is really not ready for prime-time musings, but it’s mid-afternoon so maybe that’s OK.

What exactly does (1) mean?

(1) Jack went to the doctor.

It’s tempting to think the LF of (1) is just the same as the LF of (2), except that we have a DD in place of a name.

(2) Jack went to Coventry.

But I don’t think that’s right. For one thing (1a) seems like a much worse paraphrase than (2a).

(1a) The doctor is such that Jack went to him or her.
(2a) Coventry is such that Jack went to it.

Superficially, it seems that (1) is a slightly conventionalised way of saying that Jack had a medical check-up or appointment or something of the sort. As some evidence for this, note the difference between (3) and (4) in terms of whether they imply Jack and Jill visited the same doctor/game.

(3) Jack went to the doctor and so did Jill.
(4) Jack went to the game and so did Jill.

It’s almost tempting to say that “the doctor” denotes here something other than the individual Jack went to, denotes the class of doctors or doctors’ offices or the like. Tempting, but surely false, for we can have anaphoric pronouns antecedent on ‘the doctor’, as in “this Bob Dylan line”:http://bobdylan.com/songs/ww3.html.

(5) I went to the doctor the very next day
     To see what kinda words he could say.
     He said it was a bad dream.

So I’m just confused. Maybe I should learn to live with (1a) as a paraphrase of (1) and give a pragmatic explanation for the differences between (3) and (4).

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up. One thing to note is a resource that Samuel Scheffler brought to my attention, the “University of California eScholarship Repository”:http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship. This looks like it could be a great way to organise online papers from across the UC system.

It’s not really the best week for competitive activities, but we’ll press ahead…

bq. “Young Philosophers Essay Competition”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/philrev/announcement.html

bq. The Sage School of Philosophy and the Philosophical Review are pleased to announce a Young Philosophers Essay Competition in philosophy of language. Full-length articles on any topic in philosophy of language, broadly construed, will be considered. Submissions must be in English. The competition is open to anyone currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program (or equivalent) in philosophy or a related subject, as well as to anyone who did not receive a Ph.D. or equivalent degree before January 1, 2000. Submissions will be judged by members of the Sage School of Philosophy. Provided the number and standard of submissions are sufficiently high, a winner will be chosen to present their article at a symposium to be held at Cornell University. Two specialists in the field will be invited to comment on the winner’s article at the symposium. The winning article will be published as the Young Philosophers Essay Competition winner in the Philosophical Review . The deadline for submission is March 1, 2005.

Good luck everyone!

I am, by the way, incredibly disappointed that I’m no longer a young philosopher. I suspect this idea of tying youthfulness to PhD completion dates disadvantages philosophers from countries where it is standard to do shorter PhDs and then do a post-doc or something similar before becoming permanently employed. Though since I wouldn’t be eligible for the prize anyway, it hardly matters in this case.