In the current version of Microsoft Word _operationalism_ is tagged as a misspelled word.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up with the main thing to note being a page for a “new book by J. Howard Sobel”:http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/%7Esobel/NoLightMatter/.

The papers blog should have included this new paper.

bq. Kevin C. Klement, “Putting Form Before Function: Logical Grammar in Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/004002/

But I was a little disorganised this morning. (Shouldn’t you have a paper on Imprint too – ed. Yeah, but I’ve been too disorganised this year to do the corrections in a way that I was happy with. Maybe the next week or two. Fingers crossed.)

Now iTunes has an “affiliate program”:http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/ too! Maybe I’ll replace the Amazon CD links with iTunes.

Everyone else is reporting their stats, so I will too.

bq. August 2004
Unique Visitors – 7965
Number of Visits – 26670
Pages – 81831
Hits – 98836

The busiest day in terms of hits was August 24, with 16241 hits, but I think most of those were from search engines. The busiest day in terms of unique visitors was 25 August, with 1226 unique visitors.

Finally, “this band”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/02/1093939050848.html looks like they could be pretty good, but I bet I’ll never be able to find their CDs in America. Barnes & Noble has this thing in stores where they say you can listen to “any CD in the world”. What they mean is any CD that’s in their warehouse, which is a subset of the CDs that are available in America. So good luck finding, say, “The Panics”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/02/1093939050848.html, or even much by “You Am I”:http://www.youami.com.au/. Next time I’m in Australia I have a *lot* of CD-buying to do.

Ed Zalta has kindly written a reply to the “sugggestion I made yesterday”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/002861.html about how to fund the Stanford Encyclopedia.

bq.. We’ve considered Brian’s suggestion. It is a good idea, and worthy of analysis.

At present, it is on the list of things we could try to do if our current plan of raising money through the libraries and independently through Stanford doesn’t work out. That list also includes selling directly to publishers sponsored links to their books, to be placed in a special section of each entry, and designated as such, so that readers won’t be misled.

But I hope you can appreciate why these fall into the category of ‘Plan B’. (1) The SEP is part of the open access movement in which information and research should be free. This goes against that grain, since it would be helping publishers who charge for access to academic research, the same publishers to whom authors give away their copyright and who then turn around charge those same authors for the right to see information they gave away. (2) Wouldn’t people wonder whether this commercialization undermines the academic integrity of the enterprise — one could think of scenarios where the transactions aren’t innocent, especially if the process of going through the SEP entry bibliographies and creating links from books to booksellers couldn’t be automated. (3) Our income would be variable each year. If we don’t make enough off booklinks one year … oops there go the funds needed to pay the editorial assistant 8 of the 20 hours/week, or there goes the new server we need. Bad idea.

I could probably think of other reasons.

We’re not ruling it out as a temporary way to make ends meet. But, in the long run, an endowment keeps everything much steadier and maintains academic integrity at the highest possible level.

p. These all seem like good points to me, so rather than getting into an argument over details, let me just take this as another opportunity to plug the Encyclopaedia’s “fund-raising drive”:http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/.

I also see that Jonathan Cohen’s nice colour manifesto is in press at _Philosophical Review_. I think the criticism I (rather clumsily) make “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000662.html and “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000665.html against relationalism as a theory of colour talk still basically works, but relationalism as a theory of the metaphysics of colour seems very plausible to me for the reasons Cohen outlines. If I had a spare semester or two I’d write up something about why MacFarlane-style relativism is more plausible than the hidden variable theory Cohen endorses, but right now I don’t have that spare semester. And I can’t publish replies in the _Philosophical Review_, so I’m less motivated 😉

I see Daniel has reposted the “Credo of the Canberra Planners”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/%7Edpn/docs/credo.htm. Some days I only disagree with one line of the credo. With all the Michigan and MIT influences on Canberra these days it might soon be the credo of the ex-Canberra planners, or the Canberra ex-planners or something.

The “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu/ is having a “fundraising drive”:http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/. If you want to chip in a little, follow that link and send the $$$.

I never sent this to the people who actually do the work on the Encyclopaedia, but as I said before I think there’s a _relatively_ simple way to make money. Both “Barnes and Noble”:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/affiliate/intro.asp and “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw1_mm_2/104-2335491-3139139/?node=3435371 run fairly generous affiliate programs that reward websites for sending customers there. If every book title in the Encyclopaedia was a live link to one of those stores, and they kept 8 to 9% of the sale proceeds generated, I suspect they could make a lot of money. Maybe not enough to run on their own, but a lot. And they’d be helping sell philosophy books, which is a good thing in its own right.

Anyway, this isn’t going to solve all their fundraising problems, so if you like the Encyclopaedia, perhaps chip in a few dollars yourself.

The “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu/ is having a “fundraising drive”:http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/. If you want to chip in a little, follow that link and send the $$$.

I never sent this to the people who actually do the work on the Encyclopaedia, but as I said before I think there’s a _relatively_ simple way to make money. Both “Barnes and Noble”:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/affiliate/intro.asp and “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw1_mm_2/104-2335491-3139139/?node=3435371 run fairly generous affiliate programs that reward websites for sending customers there. If every book title in the Encyclopaedia was a live link to one of those stores, and they kept 8 to 9% of the sale proceeds generated, I suspect they could make a lot of money. Maybe not enough to run on their own, but a lot. And they’d be helping sell philosophy books, which is a good thing in its own right.

Anyway, this isn’t going to solve all their fundraising problems, so if you like the Encyclopaedia, perhaps chip in a few dollars yourself.

This is basically just a local interest story, but since there are a few people from upstate New York who read this, I thought I’d use the space. (It’s also a political post, completely off-topic for this blog normally.)

“Samara Barend”:http://www.samaraforcongress.com/index.shtml is the Democratic candidate for the NY-29th district in Congress. The seat’s Republican incumbent is not recontesting, and the district isn’t overwhelmingly Republican, so this is a Democratic pickup opportunity.

The 29th, as this map shows, runs up to but not into the borders of Ithaca. It stretches over a wide area, from just outside here almost to the western border of the state, and up to the southern suburbs of Rochester. But the main population centre is Elmira. Elmira is nominally just down the road, but since that road is a construction site right now it’s a little further away than normal. But still it’s close enough by that people could potentially help out.

NY is pretty solidly in Kerry’s column, so there’s little on the ground (as opposed to over the telephone) that we can do up here to help take back the White House. But if Samara wins that’d be one seat closer to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which would be a good result.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is running late today because I was a little disorganised yesterday and needed to get to work early enough today to reorganise, and that left insufficient time for it. Sorry about that – it’ll be up this evening.

Because “Syracuse”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/ uses frames everywhere on their website it’s hard to link to things directly. Which is too bad, because it makes it harder to link to things like Tom McKay’s very interesting looking book “Plurals and Non-Distributive Predication”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/mckay.html. Tom’s working through that material in a seminar this semester, and if my organisation skills improve I’ll be going to parts of it.

I have plans for a long post on some stuff related to the previous comments threads and focus and contextualism and kitchen sinks, but for now just one odd thing I noticed. I don’t know if this is an oddity about my idiolect, or it is more general. Compare the sentences in (1) and (2).

(1) a. At the final turn, Jack stopped running and jogged the rest of the way.
      b. Did she run to work or only jog?

(2) a. At the final turn, Jack stopped sprinting and ran the rest of the way.
      b. Did she sprint to work or only run?
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