The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is updated for March 29, with dozens of new papers. It’s somewhat absurd to highlight any of these in particular when there’s so much, but let me just mention Tom Baldwin’s SEP article on “Moore”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/. This was rather timely since I spent a large chunk of my travel time reading _Principia Ethica_. I’ll write more about this later, but what struck me more than anything was how Moore turns out in chapter five (“Ethics in Relation to Conduct”) to be an inductive sceptic. Of course, _Principia Ethica_ is well before Moore’s anti-sceptical papers, so the clash with the Moore we know and love is not as vivid as it might first seem, but it is still odd to see Moore, of all people, presupposing the truth of inductive scepticism.

turns up, albeit in scare quotes, in a paper “John Bell”:http://publish.uwo.ca/%7Ejbell/ just posted on “Causal Sets and Frame-Valued Set Theory”:http://publish.uwo.ca/%7Ejbell/Causal%20sets%20and%20Frame-Valued%20Set%20Theory.pdf. What’s interesting from my perspective is that Bell doesn’t assume truer, or “truer”, is a linear relation. In the particular case he writes about, truer determines a Heyting lattice. So one more data point for the claim that it is not constitutive of the relation truer that it is linear.

I’m thinking of dropping the ‘Subscription Publications’ section of the papers blog for the following four reasons. First, many readers can’t access subscription publications, and it might be simpler to stick to open access publications. Second, other services, like _Philosophers Index_ already index these. Third, it is much messier to track journals than personal homepages, because many webpages announcing journal publications (especially at Kluwer) are designed to be hard to ‘deep-link’ to. So the accuracy and comphrensiveness of that section is very poor. Fourth, it is by far the slowest and most tedious part of the daily entry to compile. If, however, people find that section particularly valuable I’ll leave it in.

The “Princeton/Rutgers graduate conference”:http://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/gradconf/ has posted its “schedule”:http://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/gradconf/schedule.html and the conference “papers”:https://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/gradconf/restrict/Papers.html. In case you can’t or won’t visit their site (and I was having some troubles getting in using Firebird), here are direct links to the papers.

New Work for a Language Module? Bryan Baltzly (UMD)

Fuzzy
Link Externalism: Fixing the Problem of Dead Cats and Mental Tails:
Mike Tamir (Pittsburgh)

Thought-experiments,
Intuitions, and Descartes on his Essence: Elliot Paul (Syracuse)

Demonstratives
as Pronouns: Eric Swanson (MIT)

Luck,
Leverage, and Equality: A Bargaining Problem for Luck Egalitarians: Matthew
Seligman (Berkeley)

Physicalism
and Illusions of Epistemic Humility: Alyssa Ney (Brown)

Computationalism
versus the Locality Principle: David Longinotti (UMD)

Skill,
Luck, and Folk Ascriptions of Intentional Action: Thomas Nadelhoffer
(FSU)

In the comments below, Kent Bach linked to “an article in the San Francisco Chronicle”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/27/DDGEV5R5KJ1.DTL on “Philosophy Talk”:http://www.philosophytalk.org/

There’s a theme between the last two posts. Both the SEP and Philosophy Talk originate from Stanford, they both provide great public services, and, it seems, both need some extra funding to continue.

The “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu/ is looking to do some fundraising to cover its (very modest) costs. The details are “here”:http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/.

At risk of offending practically every reader of this site, I think this is one of those rare cases where a little advertising would go a long way towards covering costs. If the SEP set up an “Amazon associates”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-2361775-7843169?node=3435371 account, and converted every reference to an in-print book to a live Amazon link, they could raise a huge amount of money with minimal intrusiveness. And it might lead to more philosophy books being sold, which seems to be a good thing.

Here’s a sample of some of the quotes I took down during the APA. I was dying to use some of the off-the-record lines, particularly one great back-handed compliment of New York City, but I’m trying to keep up the impression I have some ethics.

As always, all quotes are out of context. Among other things, they were uttered in Pasadena and I’m writing them up at SFO to be posted from Providence. I probably mistranscribed most of them. And in some cases, particularly the first, I left out qualificatory clauses that change the meaning somewhat – almost like the way appending “NOT!!” does.

“I’m amazed that two critics who understood my book as well as they did could think I was wrong.”

bq. Scott Soames opening his reply by getting more laughs than I got all week.

“I have two quick questions. Both are obnoxious.”

bq. Torin Alter, who then proceeded to ask two of the least obnoxious questions I’ve heard. I asked the next question and it was, well, obnoxious.

“Bwtbwtbwbwbshshshshapapaing.”

bq. Frank Arntzeneuis showing what a ball accelerating to infinite speed while ricocheting back and forth does. (Very rough transcription.)

“The natural thing to say is the ball just disappears.”

bq. Frank doing some a priori physics about the same case.

“I’m sure Jerry Fodor needs no introduction. But this isn’t about Jerry’s needs.”

bq. Ken Taylor shewing that syntax jokes can always be made, and usually are funny.

“I shot an elephant in my pajamas. I don’t know how he got in them.”

bq. Groucho Marx via Jerry Fodor, ditto.

“If you read him long enough and interpret him in the right way, Descartes always turns out to be right about everything.”

bq. Jerry Fodor, revealing that he either believes in dualism or a very charitable interpretation of Descartes.

“Love the blog!”

bq. Many fans before my talk on Friday.

“Where was the !@#$%^& pie”

bq. Same fans after the pie-less talk on Friday.

I might blog a little from the APA Pacific, but I doubt it. So the blog will probably be quiet until next Monday – except perhaps for the comments boards. Hope to see lots of people in Pasadena.

I’d be more excited if he had started posting to “Language Log”:http://www.languagelog.net/, but even if we won’t be seeing flashes of linguistic brilliance, it’s still newsworthy that “Noam Chomsky has started a blog”:http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/. The introductory post is a little hard to decipher.

bq. This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets — always from Noam Chomsky.

bq. Posted by Noam Chomsky

I wouldn’t have guessed that Noam Chomsky calls Noam Chomsky “Noam Chomsky”, but if it’s good enough for Rickey Henderson I guess it’s good enough for the Noam.

Hat tip: “NicoPitney”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/3/24/223959/120 over at Kos.

Does anyone know if there’s a free electronic copy of Moore’s _Principia Ethica_ online anywhere? It should be out of copyright, so there’d be no legal reason it wouldn’t be posted, but maybe no one thought it important enough to convert to electronic form. I wanted to cut and paste some long sections because I got interested in the role of necessity and a priority in Moore’s meta-ethical views, and it would be more convenient to (a) not have to transcribe things and (b) be able to refer readers immediately to the passages I’m talking about.