I’ve been spending the afternoon alternating between writing a syllabus for a decision theory course and websurfing. So naturally I’ve been drawn to web sites about decision theory and game theory. And I was struck by this question “David Shoemaker”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2004/06/teaching_or_exp.html raises – are games played in the classroom covered by rules on human experimentation?
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“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/001646.html reports that my department has made an offer to Keith DeRose. (Do you really get your news about Cornell through Leiter?-ed. Some days I check blogs before email, so yeah sometimes.) We’re all very excited about this and hope that he accepts. Even if we don’t believe some of that contextualist stuff 😉

I assume Keith knows all about how clever and witty and friendly and so on the people at Cornell are, so as my little contribution to the lobbying effort, and because it’s so much fun to do, here are some pictures of what it looks like around Cornell that I’m stealing off the Cornell website. (Some may object to this piracy, but if you can’t steal pictures and bandwidth from the university in the service of helping the university out, what can you steal?)

!http://www.explore.cornell.edu/tour_nature/img/beebelake02.jpg!

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“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/001646.html reports that my department has made an offer to Keith DeRose. (Do you really get your news about Cornell through Leiter?-ed. Some days I check blogs before email, so yeah sometimes.) We’re all very excited about this and hope that he accepts. Even if we don’t believe some of that contextualist stuff 😉

I assume Keith knows all about how clever and witty and friendly and so on the people at Cornell are, so as my little contribution to the lobbying effort, and because it’s so much fun to do, here are some pictures of what it looks like around Cornell that I’m stealing off the Cornell website. (Some may object to this piracy, but if you can’t steal pictures and bandwidth from the university in the service of helping the university out, what can you steal?)

!http://www.explore.cornell.edu/tour_nature/img/beebelake02.jpg!

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* It wasn’t intended as a follow-up to our earlier discussion on private vs public health-care performance, but nevertheless in that context it was very helpful for “Chris Shiel”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000537.html to link to “this paper”:http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf (PDF) on how well, or as it turns out badly, the US does on health-care outcomes.
* I missed this when it was posted a week ago, but if you’re still interested in this stuff “Geoff Nunberg”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001169.html has a very good dissection of that study by Groseclose and Milyo purporting to show liberal media bias.
* And “Ben Bradley”:http://mt.ektopos.com/orangephilosophy/archives/000563.html wants reader input to help choose a murder victim. Purely for academic purposes.

One of the nice things about living in Ithaca is that my walk to work (on dry days) consists of strolling up “Cascadilla Gorge”:http://www.explore.cornell.edu/scene.cfm?scene=Natural%20Beauty&stop=CU%20-%20NB%20-%20Cascadilla%20Gorge. On the walk I pass by between six and twelve waterfalls. On “this video”:http://www.explore.cornell.edu/tidbit_template.cfm?scene=Natural%20Beauty&tidbit=The%20Hiking%20Path they say six, but I’m not convinced. It would be nice to be more precise, but it’s a little hard for a few reasons. These include.

# I’m not very good at keeping count while climbing up stairs;
# Some areas are marginal cases (at best) of being waterfalls; and
# Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether we have one waterfall or two.

It turns out the last case is a problem for some theories of vagueness. Sadly there are no clear-cut cases of it, though what’s called “Lower Falls”:http://www.explore.cornell.edu/tidbit_template.cfm?scene=Natural%20Beauty&tidbit=Down%20in%20the%20Gorge&tidbitnum=8 comes close. In any case, the theoretical possibility is enough to cause problems, even if I don’t get the nice benefit of walking past a counterexample each day.
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“Certain Doubts”:http://www.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/, the epistemology blog running out of Missouri, is developing some very active comments threads on lots of interesting topics. (Including one very uncharitable interpretation of me _et al_ on epistemic modals!) It’s exactly the kind of thing I hoped would spring up when I was pining about the lack of topically but not geographically focussed blogs. And it’s a nice example of WordPress in action, though personally I don’t like comments and trackbacks being run together as they do. Anyway if you haven’t been there yet head on over and see what they’re up to, or at least marvel at the contributors list they’ve put together.

I was rereading Patrick Greenough’s _Vagueness: A Minimal Theory_ and I was struck by this footnote that I hadn’t remembered from the previous read through.

bq. [Crispin] Wright has argued that the content of ‘is true’ (and cognate expressions) is entirely exhausted by a ‘network’ of platitudes concerning truth (such as Tarski’s T-schema, the thesis that to assert is to present as true, the thesis that warranted assertibility and truth are distinct, the thesis that truth is absolute, and so on). Here, the idea is to apply a similar methodology to the predicate ‘is vague’ and cognate expressions. The challenge will be to locate a set of platitudes concerning vagueness which at least exhaust our everday understanding of this term while not pretending to thereby identify the underlying nature of vagueness.

That all sounds good to me, but what’s it doing in a paper on a _minimal_ theory. When I was growing up we was taught that that’s how you find out all there is to find about a philosophical concept. It’s a path to a _maximal_ theory! You do thereby identify the underlying nature of things. (Or at least as much of that as you can before the job is turned over to the scientists.)

Less flippantly, I guess the point is that while in metaphysics platitude-systematising is as much as you can or should do before bringing in the scientists, in philosophy of language/formal semantics we are (some of) the scientists, so there is a distinction in what we do between platitude-systematising and finding best deservers in the real world.

Some philosophers, your humble narrator occasionally included, get irritated when people, especially intro ethics students, focus on what we take to be irrelevant details of what are meant to be serious, if somewhat improbably grisly, examples. But really we’re not upset about the lack of philosophical sophistication our students shown, just about how stylishlessly they complain. If all our intro ethics students were like “Fafnir and Giblets”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_07_11_fafblog_archive.html#108973435683602830 I can’t imagine we’d ever be so irritated.

(Warning to those who like to drink and blogsurf. Don’t click that link while consuming liquids. Especially milk. Because there’s a code-turquoise-level chance of said liquid ending up being snorted out of your nose. And I think I speak from experience when I say that that’s just embarrassing. Especially if it’s milk. And you have to explain it to the tech staff when you ask for a new keyboard. For the second time that week.)

I was looking over the forms I’ll have to fill in to get my latest US Visa, and I was struck by this question on the DS-157 form.

bq. Do You Have Any Specialized Skills or Training, Including Firearms,
Explosives, Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical Experience?

Since I’m applying for a specialist skill visa, you’d kinda think I should answer “Yes” just reading the first part of the question. But I think the words after “Including” rather change the meaning of it all. At least I think I think they do. I hope I can’t get brought up on perjury charges for trying to hide my extensive philosophical skills from consular officials.

After the little fun we had with “philosophical break up lines”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000979.html, David Chalmers is promoting a new game. “Match the philosopher with their theme song”:http://www.arizonaphilosophy.com/index.php?p=42. Here are some of the samples so far.

Parmenides – _One_ (U2)
John Rawls – _… And Justice For All_ (Metallica)
V. I. Lenin – _Children of the Revolution_ (T-Rex)

You get the idea, though I think the last one would be better as Kuhn than Lenin. (At least it’d be a philosopher then.) I’m always dreadful at these games. In this casea I can do better with coming up not entirely work-related songs, none of which are exactly on topic.

Descartes – _Elizabeth My Dear_ (Stone Roses)
Elliot Sober – _Come Back From San Francisco_ (Magnetic Fields)
REDACTED – _I Wanna Be Adored_ (Stone Roses)
REDACTED – _Step Into My Office, Baby_ (Belle and Sebastian)

Oops, it seems my lawyers stopped me saying something in those last two cases. Oh well, I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks. (But not in my comments – I closed comments here so the suggestions would go to “Dave’s post”:http://www.arizonaphilosophy.com/index.php?p=42.)