A new, and just about ready to send to the printers, draft of my imaginative resistance paper is available.

bq. “Morality, Fiction and Possibility”:http://brian.weatherson.org/mfp.pdf

Any last minute comments, suggestions etc gladly received.

I just got back to the office after a few days away, and I found _three_ new editions of _Philosophical Review_ waiting for me! I imagine non-Ithacan subscribers should be receiving their copies in the mail shortly. Here are the tables of contents.

July 2003

# Memory and Persons – Tyler Burge
# Explaining Action – Keiran Setiya
# Nelkin on the Lottery Paradox – Igor Douven

October 2003

# How Truth Governs Belief – Nishi Shah
# Selflessness and Responsibility for the Self: Is Deference Compatible with Autonomy – Andrea C. Westlund
# Does the Categorical Imperative Give Tise to a Contradiction in the Will? – Elijah Millgram

January 2004

# Descriptivism, Pretense and the Frege-Russell Problems – Frederick Kroon
# Form, Substance and Mechanism – Robert Pasnau
# Some Stuffs are Not Sums of Stuff – David Barnett
# Rocking the Foundations of Cartesian Knowledge: Critical Notice of Janet Broughton, _Descartes’s Method of Doubt_ – Lex Newman

I’ll be away for the next couple of days, so today’s papers blog is the last one for a bit.

The new JFP is out, with 322 jobs. Like last year I’ll be doing a breakdown of the jobs available by rank, area, location (in a philosophy dept or not) and (a rough-and-ready measure of) attractiveness. The first thing to note is that 322 is a lot higher than 254, the number of jobs in last year’s edition. The breakdowns (and November’s ads) may reveal things are worse than last year, but the first impression is that things are much better.

And just a reminder that Cornell’s job, number 7 in the JFP, is a genuine position, not a merely possible position.

I won’t be going to Madison for the “Metaethics Workshop”:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/gertler/Metaethics.htm next weekend, but it looks like it should be a fun time for all. For those of us who can’t go, all but a handful of the papers to be presented are available through that link.

I was thinking a little about causation today, and several times I thought I had an idea for a blog post only to see it collapse when I tried to think through things more clearly. So instead I have a broad question.

Imagine the following relatively plausible example. (Only relatively plausible because the computers at Cornell are kept pretty clean.) There’s a virus going around Cornell, call it YourDoom. Both Tamar’s computer and Delia’s computer are infected with it. Both of them send the virus to my computer during the morning which in turn becomes infected. What infected computers do is shout *TROGDOR* at midday. Question: What factors should determine whether Tamar’s computer or Delia’s computer or both caused my computer to shout *TROGDOR* at midday?

Here are some sample issues to consider:

* Which of them sent it first
* Whether the second virus overwrites the first virus on the hard drive, or does nothing to the hard drive if there is a virus there, or writes a second copy of the virus down
* How the virus gets from hard drive to memory

And I imagine there are others. If you think of this case at a fairly abstract level it looks like a case of trumping preemption, but I’m not sure it still looks that way when you get to the details.

This is very weird. I was filling in the details on my latest “DS-156”:https://evisaforms.state.gov/ds156.asp?lang=1 form, a form the State Department quite helpfully makes available electronically. When I went to fill in question 35, “Has Your U.S. Visa Ever Been Cancelled or Revoked?” on my defeault Firefox browser, it automatically marked “Yes” whatever I clicked. Needless to say, this is _not_ the answer I wanted to communicate to the State Department. So I tried opening up the form in IE, and the problem goes away, i.e. it is possible to mark “No”. Nothing in the source code for the page suggests why there should be a problem here, at least to my untrained eyes. It’s just odd.

UPDATE: A commentator over at “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002647.html noted that it was just an effect of an unclosed tag. Those internets come up with answers quickly!

This is very weird. I was filling in the details on my latest “DS-156”:https://evisaforms.state.gov/ds156.asp?lang=1 form, a form the State Department quite helpfully makes available electronically. When I went to fill in question 35, “Has Your U.S. Visa Ever Been Cancelled or Revoked?” on my defeault Firefox browser, it automatically marked “Yes” whatever I clicked. Needless to say, this is _not_ the answer I wanted to communicate to the State Department. So I tried opening up the form in IE, and the problem goes away, i.e. it is possible to mark “No”. Nothing in the source code for the page suggests why there should be a problem here, at least to my untrained eyes. It’s just odd.

UPDATE: A commentator over at “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002647.html noted that it was just an effect of an unclosed tag. Those internets come up with answers quickly!

Three exclamation marks probably aren’t warranted, but good news nonetheless. I just got informed that the relevant university level tenure committees approved my tenure case. Now it’s only got to go through the Board of Trustees. Unfortunately the Board won’t look at cases of people without green cards. And my green card is at least 3 years into the future. So unless Cornell changes policy on giving tenure to non-resident aliens, I’m still officially untenured for three years at least. But short of coming out for Osama bin Laden it’s hard to imagine the trustees would turn the case down when (and if) it comes up.

That’s at least one thing to be happy about for today. Hopefully Bronson Arroyo, John Kerry and Mark Latham can make it four things by the end of the (long) evening.

*UPDATE 1:* Go Sox!!!! Onto the ALCS!!!!!

Sorry for the lack of papers blog the last two days. There have been some technical glitches that we should have sorted by tomorrow.

On that note, does anyone have advice on what’s a good laptop to buy. I think I need a new computer, and it may as well be a laptop. Here are the constraints I’m working under.

* Must be Windows-based (for one thing the papers blog software is Windows, for another I couldn’t be bothered converting all my files)
* Good battery life (or cheap and easy to install second batteries)
* Good networking capacities
* Good keyboard
* Not too expensive

I’m less fussed about processor speed, disk space etc. But I’ve never bought a (new) laptop before so I don’t even know where to start looking or have any sense of which of the brandname models are best.

“Jon Kvanvig”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=153 attacks the appeal to norms of assertion “Andy Egan makes in his paper on relativism”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/might.doc. I don’t really have a dog in this fight, except I will note two things.

First, there’s no reason to think that moving to a justified belief standard for assertion would block, or even noticably slow down, Andy’s argument from these cases for a relativist conclusion. None of the plausible non-relativist semantics for epistemic modals licence the claim that the speakers in these eavesdropping cases are justified. Or at least none that I can see, and Jon doesn’t offer one of his own.

(Hopefully Andy will respond to Jon’s claim along these lines, though he might not read Certain Doubts so he possibly hasn’t got a chance to do so yet.)

Second, I don’t think Andy needs anything like as general as what Jon is attributing to him. For one thing, he only says that _part_ of the story about the appropriateness of the assertion is that it is true, not that this is anything like sufficient for assertion. More importantly, he can rely on direct judgments about what is truly said in what contexts, which don’t go via claims about appropriateness.

This is rather striking in the colour cases we discuss in EMiC. Harry the Human looks at two colour chips that are indistinguishable to humans (but distinguishable by pigeons, and by God) and says “Those are the same colour.” Pete the Pigeon looks at them and says “That’s not true.” Intuitively what Harry said is not just appropriate, but true. That intuition on its own can guide us towards relativism.