“Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/18/publishing_a_book/index.html on why it’s a good idea to give away your books. (And he’s entirely right to use shudder quotes when using the word ‘book’ about my stalled vagueness project.)

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000971.html#000971 reports that Jason Stanley has moved to Rutgers, and asks whether this makes Rutgers the best school in philosophy of language. Er, yes. But there are some scholarly differences between some of the philosophers of language there that should make for some interesting tea-room discussions.

“Claire”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anggarrgoon/2004/03/20#a55 mocks some intelligence officials for their inability to tell Uzbek from Chechen. She should be careful – this is just why people are talking about “re-instating the draft”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/03/13/MNG905K1BC1.DTL.

Just for kicks, here are pictures of the kinds of planes that fly out of Ithaca.

bq. !http://www.itn.net/gif/itn/airplanes/D38/d38.gif!

bq. !http://www.itn.net/gif/itn/airplanes/DH8/dh8.jpg!

I have a not entirely rational dislike of small planes. Next month when I’m going to Pullman, WA I’m flying to Seattle and driving the last five hours to hopping around in one of these things. (And to save a few hundred dollars and even I think a little travel time.) The top picture looks WWII era. But I’ll guess I’ll get used to them.

TV ads are very interesting, but I could see those while watching something slightly more highbrow than Super 12s and the tournament. So I’d like a sports example that actually tells us something about philosophy. I don’t know if this eventually works out, but here’s a try at something.

We’ve all heard ironic cheers – cheers given in exchange for something the crowd actually supports, but which are exaggerated because the target of the cheers has not been worthy of much support recently. (The background is that I just heard the Highbury crowd ironically cheer the ref for finally awarding a free kick after previously deciding that homicide in the penalty area was not worth of a penalty.)

Now, we can sort of make sense of irony or exaggeration (or both, as in this case) when it is applied to contentful things like assertions. But can we really make sense of purely expressive acts, as cheers are usually taken to be, being ironic or exaggerated? If not, then we have to say that cheers are contentful. And if that’s true, it’s very hard to defend non-cognitivist theories in other areas. If saying “Murder is wrong” expresses “Boo! Murder!”, but booing murder itself is a partially assertoric act, then in some sense the cognitivists have already won.

Of course, if cheers have content, then it should be sometimes _semantically_ acceptable to respond “That’s true” or “That’s false” in response to a cheer. This does not seem like it is ever acceptable. But maybe there’s a pragmatic reason for that.

This afternoon I have to decide whether to watch Syracuse-Maryland or the Brumbies game that is broadcast at the same time. Decisions, decisions. Hopefully I can find some philosophically interesting things while watching. Here’s my first attempt. This a quote from the ad for Monday’s _CSI: Miami_.

bq. One crime scene is about to become two.

It’s a little controversial just what the logical form of this should be, but I think it’s something like the following.

bq. There is something that is a crime scene and very soon it will be two crime scenes.

I think we can distinguish _two crime scenes_ from _the scene of two crimes_, and the natural interpretation of the quote is that it is talking about two crime scenes.

The background is that someone steals evidence from a crime scene, making that patch of dirt into _another_ crime scene. But this is pretty strange, because here we have the one physical object, one patch of dirt, constituting _two_ things of the same ontological type. (Whatever ontological type a crime scene is.) So in one ad we have folk support for both

bq. (a) temporary identity; and
(b) co-locationism.

If TV is this interesting all afternoon I might _have_ to spend all afternoon in front of the screen.

Saturday’s “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up. The most influential of the papers is sure to be Richard Kraut’s SEP entry on “Plato”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/. There are also papers by Achille Varzi (self-reference), Luis Alonso-Orville (on disjunctive antecedents), Mark Schroeder (on instrumental reason), Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley (on Minkowski spacetime) and Tim O’Keefe (on Lucretius).

Can I just say I’m stunned how bad my tournament picks have been? I can still do OK as long as I get the next like 30 games right, but ugh. Oh well, here’s some interesting links while I watch my bracket turn to dust.

* “John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/fair_is_foul_an.html on imaginative resistance.
* “Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/19/The_Problem_of_Temporary_Extrinsics on the problem of temporary extrinsics.
* “David Edelstein”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2097362/ says that _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ is the best movie he’s seen in a decade. It looked OK from the ads, but best in a decade?

Can I just say I’m stunned how bad my tournament picks have been? I can still do OK as long as I get the next like 30 games right, but ugh. Oh well, here’s some interesting links while I watch my bracket turn to dust.

* “John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/fair_is_foul_an.html on imaginative resistance.
* “Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/19/The_Problem_of_Temporary_Extrinsics on the problem of temporary extrinsics.
* “David Edelstein”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2097362/ says that _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ is the best movie he’s seen in a decade. It looked OK from the ads, but best in a decade?

Thanks largely to an obscurely worded link from “the most important philosopher on the internet”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/ yesterday was the biggest day in the history of this blog – with somewhere between 1900 and 2800 page views (depending on which counter you believe).

I was worried that some of the new readers would not understand the subtle ironies of this site. So just to be clear, I don’t think Andy’s tournament picks reveal a disposition to akrasia. I do, however, think that Cornell is both the best philosophy school and the best basketball school in America. 24 hours later, the arguments I made for those conclusions just still look compelling.

But it seems basketball posts get all the hits, so here’s another.

Why is it that players are taken out of the game when they get into foul trouble? If they stay in the game, the worst thing that can happen is they foul out. And the cost of fouling out is that you have to spend part of the game on the bench. So to avoid the risk of the player spending a chunk of time on the bench, you make them spend a chunk of time on the bench. This doesn’t obviously make sense.

I can think of three possible explanations, none of them in general very good, although they might work in some cases.

First, minutes at the end of the game are more highly valued than minutes in the middle of the game. So sitting the player down so they can come back at the end is important. The problem is that there’s little evidence I can see that that claim is true. Buckets don’t count more at the end of the game, for instance.

Second, there might be some strategic loss from not having the option of moving the player in or out once they’ve fouled out. But that wouldn’t explain why star players, who would normally play most of the game anyway, sit when they’re in foul trouble. And the strategy coaches actually follow of automatically benching guys when they get in foul trouble seems to lead to just as large a loss of strategic options.

Third, if the player is part of a platoon, where two players rotate in and out of the one spot to each get a reasonable amount of rest, you might not want the other player being forced to cover the last ten or twelve minutes on their own. This one I think does make sense, but only when the players actually are meant to be platooned in this way.

So I think in general coaches would be better off leaving the players in foul trouble in, and telling them to be a bit careful about picking up cheap fouls.

Of course, I’m 11-5 in my selections after day 1 of the tournament, so you might want to ignore everything I have to say about basketball because I clearly still have a lot to learn.

Why were the picks so bad? I always pick 9 seeds over 8 seeds unless there’s a compelling reason, but all 3 8 seeds won today. And I was robbed on Dayton-DePaul. Dayton clearly should have won at the end of the first overtime. That would have made it a semi-respectable 12-4. The good news is that all my second round winners won, so I can still make up for the losses in round 2.

Friday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, with three new papers by Stephen Schiffer (on paradox, descriptions and justification respectively), a paper by Alexander Pruss arguing that western monotheism is incompatible with standard versions of evolutionary theory, and new entries in the Stanford Encyclopaedia and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

The Pruss paper is a little misleading I think, because what’s he really objecting to isn’t the evolution, but the indeterminism. I’ve long thought that if theists wanted to object to one part of modern science, it should be indeterminism, not evolutionary theory. Evolution, after all, undercuts at most two theistic beliefs, and they were pretty implausible to start with. (The two are the literal truth of Genesis and the soundness of the teleological argument. Since Genesis is self-contradictory the first is clearly wrong. And Hume disposed of the teleological argument a century before Darwin.) On the other hand, indeterminism seems to imply that God isn’t really in control.[1] And that seems to really be inconsistent with the theological picture.

fn1. Pretend there’s a long discussion of middle knowledge here that deals with all possible objections to the previous claim but ends up concluding that, as always, I’m 110% correct.

Just for historical purposes, I’m moving my old blog entries (from before I was even on Blogger) onto this site. The old posts should be showing up in the monthly archives shortly. There’s sure to have been lots of linkrot, but there’s some interesting content in various places.

Syracuse is making their first-rounder much more interesting than I’d like, especially with Hakim Warrick on three fouls. But they’ve come back from 11 down to tie it before half-time.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online for Thursday, a little belatedly, but with lots of content. There’s the note on Davidson by Gil Harman I mentioned last night, a paper by Simon Keller on virtue ethics, a paper by Øystein Linnebo on the context principle, and three papers by William Larkin on wide content. Also Richard Davis has posted his thesis on counterpossibles, theism and necessity, and there are three reviews from Metapsychology Online.