One of these sentences is not like the others.

(1) Donna knows which road goes to San Jose.
(2) Donna knows the way to San Jose.
(3) Donna knows the mayor of San Jose.

The interesting question is, which one is it? If you know the answer, you can probably skip this post, but I think it’s a pretty interesting puzzle.
Continue reading →

I will have many more specific things to say about topics that came up at the INPC, but for now I just wanted to note what a wonderful conference it was, and thank the organisers Michael O’Rourke and Joe Campbell, for their great job. Attending 10 papers and 2 roundtable discussions in 2{1/2} days was tiring, but rewarding, and I didn’t even go to all the philosophy on offer. I was just looking back over the program, and noted that I managed to miss, either through scheduling conflicts or exhaustion, papers by Louise Anthony, Kent Bach, David Chalmers, Stewart Cohen, Fred Dretske, Catherine Elgin, Rich Feldman, Peter Klein, John Pollock and many more. Despite that I still got to see lots of great philosophy, but I must have missed a great conference’s worth of papers just from that list.

The highlight I thought was Elijah Millgram’s paper on “refuting scepticism with style”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/Abstracts/Millgram–Abs.htm. I can’t possibly do the paper, or particularly the presentation, justice, but here’s the line. If we’re brains in vats, then the visual presentation we’re getting is, in a broad sense, an artwork. But one of the striking features about artworks is that they are recognisable as such relatively easily, at least if you have a sense of style. This is even true of art that aims to be realistic. Indeed, it may be especially true of art that aims to be realistic. Since the world does not present itself as an artwork, since it does not have a distinctive style, the brain in a vat hypothesis is false.

There were one or two objections to the epistemology here, but on reflection I think the aesthetics might be more worrying. I think the world displays lots of characteristics of a genre piece. Marx’s dictum that history always repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce, looks like just the kind of rule that is followed in low-rent serials. This probably misses the point somewhat, since (speaking roughly) the argument is more concerned with the form of the world/story than its content, but it could be an issue.

More generally I’d be really pleased to see there be serious interaction between epistemology and aesthetics. Epistemologists are starting to complain a little about the philosophy of language interlopers, so I think it might be time for a completely different kind of interaction.

There was another point raised by Elijah’s paper that I’d like to come back to later if I have anything to say about it. Why do sceptical challenges of the form “You might be a brain in a vat” have more force, more grip on us, than challenges that just say “You might be wrong”? Of course I think a tidied up brain in vat scenario can pose a hard, even unanswerable for some, “a priori or a posteriori” question about our knowledge. But the usual brain in vat cases are nowhere near tidied up enough to make that a hard question, as Stew Cohen noted long ago. This is a topic I’d like there to be more written on.

I also liked the session on Ram Neta’s paper on seeing, even though I agreed more or less entirely with Liz Harman’s objections to Ram’s main conclusions. (I usually end up agreeing more or less entirely with Liz’s papers I guess, but I suspect if I went to her talk “this Friday at UMass”:http://www.umass.edu/philosophy/events/events-main.htm that pattern would be broken.) But I thought there were some interesting questions raised at the intersection of aesthetics and metaphysics that bear thinking about. In particular, if I’m looking at a wall that has a ladder leaning on the far (i.e. invisible) side, I don’t see the wall-ladder fusion. Except, if someone has made an artwork from the wall and the ladder, I do see the artwork by looking at the wall. (Except, as Liz noted, if the ladder is particularly central to the artwork. I can’t see a painting by seeing the back of the canvas it is on, and looking at the back of the wall may be analogous to that.) I’d like to resolve issues about what you see when you look at a surface through a substantive metaphysics of natural and unnatural objects, but this will require us to say quite a lot about how art makes some things natural or unnatural.

But it wasn’t only aesthetics at the conference. There was some philosophy of language too. I’ll write more about that in upcoming days, but just to flag I thought Rob Stainton had a very interesting idea about the relationship between epistemological contextualism and the varieties of context-dependence alleged to exist in the philosophy of language literature. Again, this is not to say I believed a word of it, but I thought it was an interesting proposal. Much more on this to follow.

I could go on much longer, but I have to run to (another) talk back here. So as the old song says, I’ll let the part tell the whole and not talk (yet) about the many other interesting papers I saw or philosophical discussions I had. (My paper by the way wasn’t entirely successful I thought because my presentation was somewhat unclear. But I got some useful feedback despite my lack of clarity. And I was rather flattered at how many people showed up.) Dave Chalmers has posted some conference pics “here”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/pics/idaho.html if you want a sense of how it looked. Next year’s conference is on Time and Identity, so I’ll probably send some version of “this paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/GIs.pdf. I hope it’s just as much fun as this year’s was.

The papers blog is running late today because I just got back from the INPC and real work is calling. The conference was great, much much more on it to follow. So good in fact that some of the participants apparently stayed on an extra day or two.

In light of the discussion over at “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000390.html last week, I thought this new entry on “Feminist Approaches to Analytic Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-analytic/ in the SEP was potentially interesting. I’ve only skimmed it so far, and I have no real competence to judge how accurately it portrays its subjects, but it seems at the very least a worthwhile perspective on those discussions.

Advertising for my department to be. (Original “here”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/philrev/announcement.html.)

bq.. *Young Philosophers Essay Competition*

The Sage School of Philosophy and the _Philosophical Review_ are pleased to announce a *Young Philosophers Essay Competition* in philosophy of language. Full-length articles on any topic in philosophy of language, broadly construed, will be considered. The competition is open to anyone currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program (or equivalent) in philosophy or a related subject, as well as to anyone who did not receive a Ph.D. or equivalent degree before January 1, 2000. Submissions will be judged by members of the Sage School of Philosophy. Provided the number and standard of submissions is sufficiently high, a winner will be chosen to present their article at a symposium to be held at Cornell University. Two specialists in the field will be invited to comment on the winner’s article at the symposium. The winning article will be published as the *Young Philosophers Essay Competition* winner in the _Philosophical Review_. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2005.

_Special Instructions for Submissions_

Submissions to the *Young Philosophers Essay Competition* should conform to the general requirements for submitting a manuscript for publication in the _Philosophical Review_. You can find links to manuscript submission instructions and our style sheet in the “Information for Contributors”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/philrev/info.html section of our website. In addition, the cover letter (whether electronic or hard copy) should clearly identify the manuscript as a submission to the *Young Philosophers Essay Competition* and should state how you meet the eligibility requirements.

p. This all seems very exciting except for three things. First, I much prefer entering competitions to judging them, and I shrewdly suspect that I could be doing a little bit of judging for this one. Second, although it doesn’t say so explicitly I bet there’s some clause like members of the Sage School, members of their immediate family and their pets are ineligible to win. Third, there must be something wrong with the eligibility criteria. It’s analytic that Brian’s a young philosopher, yet I don’t meet these requirements. Something will have to be done about this.

More seriously, I hope we see some excellent entries, especially from TAR readers. Good luck everyone! (Thanks to Zolt{a’}n for the link.)

No papers blog until Monday (at the earliest) because I’m off to Moscow. Unless something got posted after 11.30, there was actually nothing to report from Wednesday, so we would have been skipping that day anyway.

Whether there’s posted here while I’m at the conference depends on how lazy I am. Given my usual practices at conferences, I wouldn’t bet on anything going up, but you never know.

As “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001187.html notes, there’s a very interesting discussion over at “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000390.html about the relationship between the relative prominence of certain disciplines within philosophy and how gendered (or otherwise) those disciplines are.

I mostly want to just recommend those discussions, but let me make one distinction that I think is getting blurred over there. The further we get from positivism, the less and less reason there seems to be to view metaphysics and epistemology as anything like a single discipline. Of course there are connections between the two, but really not much more than between any two large fields in philosophy. From where I sit, that looks like it matters to this debate.

(Warning: the following contains generalisations from a ridiculously small sample, and unscientific observation to boot.) Among my peers, there isn’t that much of a gender gap amongst philosophers working in metaphysics, or philosophy of language, or ethics or (I think) philosophy of mind. There is, however, a noticable gender gap in epistemology still, even among the younger generation. Now this could be a sample size phenomena, and it could be due to the fact that I’m looking at a rather non-random sample. If it’s a real phenomena though, it’s kinda surprising, because I would thought that whatever features of logic and philosophy of language and philosophy of science and metaphysics and so on made them gendered male were less prominent in epistemology, rather than more. Of course that’s the kind of question about which I’m absolutely not an expert, so I’ll defer entirely to more learned opinion on it.

As mentioned earlier, there has been some tinkering with the program for the INPC. The final program is available “here”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/program.html. I am on Saturday afternoon, as advertised, but Dave has been rotated to an earlier spot, so that clash isn’t happening. (Of course that just means there are other clashes.) The program also contains lots of abstracts so you can make a slightly more informed judgment about which sessions to go to.

Hope to see a lot of you there!

I think the following passage, from John Earman, John Roberts and Sheldon Smith’s paper “_Ceteris Paribus_ Lost” (Erkenntnis 57: 281–301, 2002) is somewhat mistaken.

bq. But the second problem with CP laws, their untestability, is decisive in our view. In order for a hypothesis to be testable, it must lead us to some prediction. The prediction may be statistical in character, and in general it will depend on a set of auxiliary hypotheses. Even when these important qualifications have been added, CP law statements still fail to make any testable predictions. Consider the putative law that CP, all Fs are Gs. The information that _x_ is an F, together with any auxiliary hypotheses you like, fails to entail that _x_ is a G, or even to entail that with probability p, _x_ is a G. For, even given this information, other things could fail to be equal, and we are not even given a way of estimating the probability that they so fail. Two qualifications have to be made. First, our claim is true only if the auxiliary hypotheses don’t entail the prediction all by themselves, in which case the CP law is inessential to the prediction and doesn’t get tested by a check of that prediction. Second, our claim is true only if none of the auxiliary hypotheses is the hypothesis that “other things are equal”, or “there are no interferences”. What if the auxiliaries do include the claim that other things are equal? Then either this auxiliary can be stated in a form that allows us to check whether it is true, or it can’t. If it can, then the original CP law can be turned into a strict law by substituting the testable auxiliary for the CP clause. If it can’t, then the prediction relies on an auxiliary hypothesis that cannot be tested itself. But it is generally, and rightly, presumed that auxiliary hypotheses must be testable in principle if they are to be used in an honest test. Hence, we can’t rely on a putative CP law to make any predictions about what will be observed, or about the probability that something will be observed. If we can’t do that, then it seems that we can’t subject the putative CP law to any kind of empirical test.

They are arguing against the claim that there are any _ceteris paribus_ laws with *ineliminable* CP clauses. And they claim, plausibly, that if the claim that other things are equal is statable in physical terms then it quite well can be eliminated. So far so good.

The problem is that they leave out a very easy way in which the CP law could be testable without the CP clause being statable in physical terms. Assume that there is a _p_ such that _p_ entails that other things are equal, but is not entailed by it. Now nothing in what has been said about CP clauses rules out this possibility. Indeed, if CP clauses are infinite disjunctions of physical state descriptions, that situation will be easily possible. Then if _p_ is one of the auxiliary hypothesis, the CP law will be testable even though the CP clause cannot be (finitely) stated.

I don’t have any particular fondness for CP laws, but this argument that they are untestable seems to have a hole here. (We’re _bracketing_ questions about the philosophical importance of testability here by the way. I also have no idea whether this point has been made elsewhere in the literature – this is a diary entry not a quasi-publication.)

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted, with more responses by “Alex Byrne”:http://web.mit.edu/abyrne/www/papers.html and David Hilbert to the commentary on their BBS colour paper headlining a rather large crop of papers.

I haven’t watched _South Park_ in years, but when I did I tended to agree with the conclusion of “this article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/arts/television/28SOUT.html?ex=1398484800&en=9cf4a2bb20610253&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND that it’s too preachy for its own good. Still, the article’s title gives me an idea or two.

_South Park and Philosophy_ could be better than most of the “_Randomly Chosen Segment of Pop Culture and Philosophy_”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/20/1082395861338.html?from=storyrhs books that are coming out I think. Not that there isn’t still potential for life in the genre. _Baseball and Philosophy_ has been done already, so maybe it’s time for _NFL and Philosophy_, or _WWE and Philosophy_, or, one that raises genuine ethical concerns, _Joe Millionaire and Philosophy_. OK, those are jokes, but I think _Real World and Philosophy_ could be spectacular. And if someone didn’t know what it really was, you could list the book title on the CV without arousing suspicions. Brilliant! (That last sentence, by the way, will be the title of my entry in _Guinness and Philosophy_.)

I had an idea the other week for a book where every chapter was kinda like a paper for a volume like that, ranging from the somewhat serious (e.g. _24 and Philosophy_) to the complete joke (e.g. _Teletubbies and Philosophy_).

I couldn’t work out the marketing plan for the book though. One thought was that each chapter could be co-written with a different author, a la “The 6ths”:http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDMISS70404280127010048&sql=Aj77zefyk1gf4, but I didn’t really see how that would help the marketing. It would be fun to write all those chapters though, particularly if I chose the co-authors correctly.

Another was to basically make it a 101 textbook, with the underlying aim being to cover all the bases for a 101 course, and use the pop culture to draw in the masses. It might work, but it could date fairly quickly. All I need is for it to catch fire on the textbook market one year though and I’d be sorta rich. My reputation for serious philosophy would take such a hit that I’d probably never get offered another academic gig, but since I just landed a 40-year, multi-million dollar contract maybe that isn’t a concern.