The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up, with two discussions of ancient philosophy, only one of them by someone whom you would normally suspect given that kind of teaser.

I’m doing the after-dinner talk at the conference on the a priori at Syracuse next month, so I’ve been trying to revise my paper on the deeply contingent a priori for just this setting. Since the original paper was written to try and get a job offer from _the people who edit Philosophical Review_, it wasn’t exactly sparkling after-dinner stuff. And it’s not exactly finished yet. I really need to work on section 4, and I need to add _many_ jokes (“A modal rationalist walks into a bar and the barman says…” etc) but it’s a start. There may be more versions of this posted here in the future.

bq. *From Anti-Scepticism to the Contingent A Priori*
“PDF of paper/speaking notes”:http://brian.weatherson.org/fastcap.pdf
“Powerpoint presentation”:http://brian.weatherson.org/fastcap.ppt

And for those really interested, here’s the “syllabus for my intro logic class”:http://brian.weatherson.org/231Syllabus.htm. We’re using Barwise and Etchemendy’s _Language, Proof and Logic_ for most of it, but I’m also going to use chapter 4 of David Velleman’s “blogic”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/Logic/ because it’s a nice introduction to counterfactuals and modality and I think that stuff’s important in many other philosophy courses the students will take. Of course being me within the first half-hour I’ll have segued off into a discussion of which modal logics have the finite model property or something, but I’m going to at least _try_ to keep this philosophically relevant.

Short of coming up with new ideas for the blog, I might steal other people’s ideas that don’t seem to have got much attention. Here’s an interesting example Jon Kvanvig wrote in comments to “a post over at CD”:http://bengal.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=23.

bq. Take the airport case, and suppose that John visited the doctor recently. He was told everything was OK, but since the visit the doctor has just found a serious illness revealed by his blood test which must be treated immediately or John will die. If the plane is late, the waiting health officials will not be able to help him, but if the plane is on time, they’ll inoculate him and everything will be fine. John, of course, knows nothing of any of this. He doesn’t check further to see if his itinerary is still accurate. We assume that apart from the health risk story, John knows that his plane will arrive at 11. Add in the health risk stuff. Are you now inclined to say that he doesn’t know?

This is the kind of case on which the subjective vs objective versions of subject-sensitive invariantism differ. That is, if we think that what standard S’s evidence must meet before S knows that p depends on (something like) p’s importance to S, is what matters S’s beliefs about p’s importance, or p’s actual importance. If the former, then John knows in this case the plane arrives at 11. If the latter, he doesn’t.

A brief bit of history here. Last year Jason Stanley did a paper on subject-sensitive invariantism at MIT at and after which some people (including me) urged him to definitively adopt the objective position as a way out of some troubles that kept recurring for the subjective version. And Jason, as illustrated in that CD thread, does now hold the objective position. (And rightly so say all of us!) I can’t remember, if I ever knew, exactly what Jason’s position was before the MIT talk – he may have had the (correct) objective position all along and we just shored up his belief. Either way it’s good and important stuff Jason’s working on and the details matter. Hence we look at cases like this.

Anyway, Jon’s case is probably the first I’ve seen where the subjective version has a little more pull than the objective version, but I think that’s because I’m just not focussing on the right factors. Or maybe it’s the kind of case that will push me back to thinking knowledge = (justified) true belief 🙂

By the way, I never understood the original airport case, which was about whether a particular plane stops over somewhere. (Chicago?) Maybe other airlines are different but in my experience it’s really really easy to find out where a plane is stopping _first_ – that’s the city name in 300pt font on the monitor behind the check-in desk. What’s hard is to find out whether it’s the same plane that’s continuing on to New York or wherever you’re going. I know the epistemological relevance of this little empirical datum is not enormous, but it always made it hard for _me_ to think clearly about the case.

I haven’t been doing much blogging because I’ve been doing important things like writing the syllabus for my decision theory course. “Here it is”:http://brian.weatherson.org/483Syllabus.htm. Not all the links are active yet, and it’s subject to revision, but I hope it’s at least ready for public view.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up with about a million new pages tracked. Many of them are listed “here”:http://www.arizonaphilosophy.com/index.php?p=48 but there’s two others I got through my own sleuthing/contacts.

bq. “Barry Loewer”:http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/loewer.html
“Alyssa Ney”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/ney.html

Via “Justin Leiber”:http://www.hfac.uh.edu/phil/leiber/jleiber.htm, here’s “a playable version”:http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/monty.html of the “Monty Hall Problem”:http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.html. It’s simultaneously a lesson in decision theory and in the perils of small sample sizes – my first two plays I lost the car by switching.

I’m going to be running the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org as of tomorrow. Much much thanks to Jonathan Ichikawa for running the blog while I’ve been travelling and settling into Ithaca. He did an excellent job. I’m not sure the blog will be as good (it certainly won’t be as detailed) now that I’m back in charge of it.

Now that I’ve predicted there’ll be a trend I have to report on everything that confirms my prediction. (There’s _some_ danger of selection bias here.) Anyway, today “Kai von Fintel”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/07/lasersohn_on_personal_taste linked to Peter Laserhohn’s paper “Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mNjMjlkZ/taste.pdf. Here’s the conclusion.

bq. I have argued that sentences containing predicates of personal taste are not completely objective; their truth values vary from person to person. However, this variation in truth value does not involve a variation in semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the very same sentence content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). I presented a semantics which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. However, the context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals.

One of the courses I’ll be teaching this semester is 483 – Philosophy of Choice & Decision. Despite the course number starting with ‘4’, which might be interpreted as a sign the course is pitched at 4th year (i.e. senior) students this is basically a grad class that is meant to be accessible to good undergraduates. I was working through the topics I planned to cover in the course and thought this was as good a place as any to record my first ideas on what we will and won’t cover. Although comments are more than welcome, this is of fairly specialised interest, so I’ve put most of it below the fold.
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