The following ad will appear in the next issue of JFP.

bq. *Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.* Possible tenure-track appointment at the level of Assistant Professor or, in exceptional circumstances, at a higher level. Starting date: July 1, 2005. AOS: Open. AOC: Open. Four courses/year. Thesis supervision. Some administrative work. Some summer work available. EO/AAE. Send complete dossier (letter of application, CV, letters of recommendation, written work) to: Search Committee, Sage School of Philosophy, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3201. No applications by fax or email. Deadline for applications: November 1, 2004.

Since JFP deadline, the position has been officially approved, so you can ignore the _Possible_. This really is an available position, and hopefully the electronic version of our ad will reflect this. Don’t send applications, questions, etc to TAR! This is just a piece of Cornell advertising, not a new way of accepting applications.

“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/10/cancel-it.html linked to “this discussion”:http://www.xoverboard.com/blogarchive/week_2004_10_03.html#000967 of the rather odd claim that in 164 different TV shows, what we’re seeing is not what is really happening in the fiction, but what happens in the mind of a small character from _St. Elsewhere_ called Tommy Westphall.

The argument for this claim, what I’ll call the Westphall Hypothesis, is based around a rather impressive bit of research about “crossovers in TV-land”:http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html. (The site seems to be based in Victoria, so I have some natural fondness for it.) The reasoning is as follows. The last episode of _St. Elsewhere_ revealed that the entire storyline of that show hadn’t really (i.e. really in the fiction) happened but had all been a dream of Tommy Westphall. So by extension any story involving a character from St. Elsewhere is really (in the fiction) part of Tommy’s dream. And any story involving a character from one of those shows is also part of Tommy’s dream, etc. So all 164 shows that are connected to _St. Elsewhere_ in virtue of character sharing are part of Tommy’s dream.

It’s a nice little idea, but there are half a dozen things wrong with it.
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I already wrote “one post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/002888.html attempting to poke holes in David Christensen’s paper “Preference-Based Arguments for Probabilism” (Philosophy of Science) and after a little back-and-forth in the comments it seems my argument didn’t work. (It didn’t work for an interesting reason, namely that some of the constraints Christensen had imported from Patrick Maher are “less than persuasive”:http://brian.weatherson.org/totmoc.pdf, but not working for an interesting reason is still a way of not working.) So you’d have every right to be suspicious of another attempt to hole-poke. But I’ll try anyway.
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It might not look obvious, but I did a fairly large overhaul of the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org this evening. The sidebar of pages has mostly been updated, with a lot of dead links either updated or removed. Thanks to Ming Tan at Melbourne University for lots of suggestions for what to improve while overhauling this.

I was recently teaching David Christensen’s 1991 paper “Clever Bookies and Coherent Beliefs”, and I thought there were many good points there that I should have really noticed when I read the paper years ago. My dissertation would have been better if I’d seen all this years ago, but better late than never. Christensen gives a nice method for determining just what particular Dutch Book arguments do and don’t show. I agree with him _mostly_ about how to apply that method to particular cases, as we’ll see below.
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I was recently teaching David Christensen’s 1991 paper “Clever Bookies and Coherent Beliefs”, and I thought there were many good points there that I should have really noticed when I read the paper years ago. My dissertation would have been better if I’d seen all this years ago, but better late than never. Christensen gives a nice method for determining just what particular Dutch Book arguments do and don’t show. I agree with him _mostly_ about how to apply that method to particular cases, as we’ll see below.
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A draft of my paper for the Switzerland conference is online. It’s rather scrappy, but it covers most of the ideas I want to cover.

bq. “Intuitions and Meanings”:http://brian.weatherson.org/iam.pdf

There are a few tendentious arguments that Gettier cases are cases of knowledge at the end which I might export here. I sort of got convinced by Tim Williamson that generalised arguments against the reliability of Gettier cases won’t work against Gettier cases. We need more specific arguments. There are four such arguments in the paper, some of which I might put on here if I’m feeling brave.

Peter Smith is writing “a book on Gödel’s Theorems”:http://www.godelbook.net/, and he’s been kind enough to make “most of it available for download”:http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/godelbook/download.html. Thanks to “Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/09/28/The_Antidiagonal_of_the_Primitive_Recursive_Functions for the link, and interesting comments on the book.

I wanted to quibble with one thing Prof Smith wrote.

bq. You can, for the moment, freely download these draft 16 chapters. However

bq. *The deal is that — if you actually read them — you send any comments you have, however brief or general, to comments at godelbook dot net[1].*

bq. I note — not entirely with surprise but with disappointment — that for the last versions, the ratio of downloaders to those who’ve sent comments seems to be well over 200 to 1. OK, no doubt a good many download in a speculativve way, and find that the book isn’t for them. Still, if that ratio doesn’t improve a bit, I guess I’ll go back to just circulating my friends and relations! :-)))

My ratio of readers to commentators is frequently in the 1000 to 1 range. This kind of thing isn’t unusual. If you really want comments, you should send manuscripts to friends with begs for comments _and_ post things online. I think from the smileys Prof Smith knows this, but I thought it worth pointing out that his situation is not particularly unusual.

fn1. I’ve replaced a live email link here with a description of the email address because I’m a little afraid this page is scanned regularly by robots looking for spammail addresses, and I thought I’d spare Prof. Smith that pain.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up featuring four papers by fellow Monash alum “John O’Dea”:http://members.iinet.net.au/~jodea/online.html. (They don’t have abstracts because I couldn’t figure out how to cut-and-paste from the PDFs available. This is a common problem I find, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.)

While looking at everyone’s web pages I saw that there’s a new volume of Mind our featuring a 72-page paper on variable grade predicates by Oliver and Smiley. I remember back in the old days (circa 1999) when you had a paper 60 to 90 pages long it was a bit of a disaster because it was too long for a journal and too short for a book. In recent years _Mind_ seems to have taken it upon itself to fill in that niche. (Philosophical Review took some of those papers, though of course it’s _very_ hard to get into, and _Philosophers’ Imprint_ also takes long papers because they aren’t burdened by printing costs.) I’m glad this void is being filled, though I worry this will make _Mind_ either too hard to get into (and it wasn’t easy to start with) or too backlogged. But the good news is that papers that are naturally that length don’t have to be chopped to journal size or padded to book length any more.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up featuring four papers by fellow Monash alum “John O’Dea”:http://members.iinet.net.au/~jodea/online.html. (They don’t have abstracts because I couldn’t figure out how to cut-and-paste from the PDFs available. This is a common problem I find, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.)

While looking at everyone’s web pages I saw that there’s a new volume of Mind our featuring a 72-page paper on variable grade predicates by Oliver and Smiley. I remember back in the old days (circa 1999) when you had a paper 60 to 90 pages long it was a bit of a disaster because it was too long for a journal and too short for a book. In recent years _Mind_ seems to have taken it upon itself to fill in that niche. (Philosophical Review took some of those papers, though of course it’s _very_ hard to get into, and _Philosophers’ Imprint_ also takes long papers because they aren’t burdened by printing costs.) I’m glad this void is being filled, though I worry this will make _Mind_ either too hard to get into (and it wasn’t easy to start with) or too backlogged. But the good news is that papers that are naturally that length don’t have to be chopped to journal size or padded to book length any more.