“Matt”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000163.html thinks he can jump in the philosophy/basketball competition. Not so fast. Below is the __definitive__ take on how to confuse philosophy with basketball, with a surprise twist at the end.
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More APA previews to present, this time Gil Harman’s wonderful “contribution to the symposium on Donald Davidson”:http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Davidson.html. Here’s an excerpt.

bq. I first met Davidson at the American Philosophical meeting in December 1963 when he presented his paper, “Action, Reasons, and Causes,” a paper which contains the germ of many of the ideas he developed in the following years. I next saw him in the summer of 1965. I was teaching a course at Berkeley that summer. Hearing that Paul Grice was running a weekly seminar at Stanford, Tom Nagel, Barry Stroud, Tom Clark and I drove down to attend. In the seminar, Paul presented an early version of “Logic and Conversation,” with Davidson regularly asking for clarifications, “because otherwise what you say will just go in one ear and out the other.” Various other philosophers were at the seminar, including Michael Dummett, who later presented his own “antirealism” in opposition to Davidson’s “realism.” (However, I believe that at this time the big issue between them was whether Michael would go surfing with Davidson.)

I’ve linked to this before, but if you haven’t seen it you really should read Ernie Lepore’s “interview with Donald Davidson”:http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/interview.html that covers all sorts of topics about Davidson’s philosophy and life.

I should have mentioned this in the papers blog post this morning, but Matt Weiner has posted his “APA paper”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000159.html. And Jonathan Sutton, his commentator, has posted the comments – in the comments. (This is so philosophy-blog-geek-cool that I can barely write straight.)

Matt’s defending the “Boo Closure!” response to the preface paradox, though he doesn’t put it that way. Here’s a related challenge for readers. Can you come up with a list of names such that (a) for each person on the list you intuitively do know they will be in Pasadena and (b) you intuitively don’t know that they will all be in Pasadena? I’m tempted to say that the list of people I mentioned on my APA schedule is such a list, but I have to think harder about what my intuitions are to be really sure about that.

Wednesday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online, with two papers by Aaron Zimmerman on how we know what we believe, a paper by Robert Williams on semantic indeterminacy, and a revision of a paper on conditionals by Chris Gauker.

Much thanks to everyone who has made comments and suggestions about yesterday’s post, both by email and in the comments section. When I get some time I’ll try and say a bit more clearly what I’d like the site to do, and keep that a little separate from how I’d guess it should be implemented.

Tuesday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online, and it’s RSSS day, with new papers by Andy Egan and Laurie Paul. There’s also _eight_ new papers posted by Friederike Moltmann and a review by Christopher Zorn of a new collection of papers on Habermas.

I spent way too much of today looking at software I could use to make the papers blog a more distributed effort. Actually, what I want more than the papers blog is a central database that has entries for and links to _every_ paper online, with searchable abstracts and keywords. Since there would be something like 5000 entries (I’d guess) I’m not going to write them all, so it would have to be a distributed effort. I would make some effort to keep it updated, and hopefully the updates would provide something like the service the papers blog provides.

Now it should be really easy to set up such a database, but I couldn’t see the easy way to do it.

One solution, which would be overkill, is to use “eprints”:http://www.eprints.org/ just as a database. Another solution would be to try and build a Wiki, but I haven’t been impressed by the search capacities on Wikis I’ve seen. (And I’m not sure a novice like me could set one up.) Another is to have a giant blog, but it really requires hacking into Movable Type to do so. Maybe Movable Type 3 will help here. Ideally this would be running by June, so when I go away for the summer the papers blog (or something like it) will still be there. But that’s unlikely to happen I think.

Tuesday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online, and it’s RSSS day, with new papers by Andy Egan and Laurie Paul. There’s also _eight_ new papers posted by Friederike Moltmann and a review by Christopher Zorn of a new collection of papers on Habermas.

I spent way too much of today looking at software I could use to make the papers blog a more distributed effort. Actually, what I want more than the papers blog is a central database that has entries for and links to _every_ paper online, with searchable abstracts and keywords. Since there would be something like 5000 entries (I’d guess) I’m not going to write them all, so it would have to be a distributed effort. I would make some effort to keep it updated, and hopefully the updates would provide something like the service the papers blog provides.

Now it should be really easy to set up such a database, but I couldn’t see the easy way to do it.

One solution, which would be overkill, is to use “eprints”:http://www.eprints.org/ just as a database. Another solution would be to try and build a Wiki, but I haven’t been impressed by the search capacities on Wikis I’ve seen. (And I’m not sure a novice like me could set one up.) Another is to have a giant blog, but it really requires hacking into Movable Type to do so. Maybe Movable Type 3 will help here. Ideally this would be running by June, so when I go away for the summer the papers blog (or something like it) will still be there. But that’s unlikely to happen I think.

Speaking of “Tom Kelly”:http://www.nd.edu/~tkelly6/projects.html, I just read “his paper”:http://www.nd.edu/~tkelly6/NousSunk.htm on why the Red Sox were justified in continuing to give at-bats to “Tony Clark”:http://www.baseball-reference.com/c/clarkto02.shtml in 2002 as he put up that gaudy .207/.265/.291 batting line.

Well, strictly speaking, Tom doesn’t defend sending Tony Clark out to GIDP every day, just the rationality of _sometimes_ doing what is usually called ‘honouring sunk costs’. (Tom quibbles about whether this is really the best description of this behaviour in a couple of parts of the paper.)

The rough idea is that since the value of an action is partially determined by what happens in the future (just like “the value of an organism”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/harman/papers/Potentiality.pdf) our current actions can be sometimes justified by the redemptive value they confer on past actions. It’s an interesting idea, though I’m not sure how much it should matter in practice. For one thing, I think we need a more comprehensive theory than Tom offers here about which past actions are worth honouring. (I imagine Tom has such a theory but space constraints kept it out of the _Nous_ paper.) It clearly isn’t worth redeeming an off-season waiver claim by running Tony Clark out there every day when it’s really unlikely he’ll hit the ball out of the infield, let alone out of the park. Tom often refers to the kind of actions that are worthy of redemption as ‘sacrifices’, and I wonder if there’s more to be said about what makes those actions redemption worthy.

Tom also notes that honouring sunk costs, or at least being perceived to do so, can have game-theoretic advantages in certain situations. I’m less impressed by this as an argument for the rationality of such actions. (And Tom doesn’t lean on it particularly.) In some games of Chicken, the best thing to do is to unbolt the steering wheel and throw it out the window. The situations where it is best to honour sunk costs remind me of those games of Chicken. When it works, it’s a neat stunt, but it doesn’t take much for circumstances to change and then it becomes a really really _bad_ strategy.

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000945.html notes that the Daily Princetonian has an article on “Scott Soames’s departure for USC”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/03/08/news/9870.shtml. Brian notes some corrections to the piece, as well as noting that in covering some of the losses (often tragic losses) the Princeton department has suffered recently, it doesn’t mention the additions to philosophy at Princeton. Brian mentions Michael Smith, Philip Pettit, Anthony Appiah and Daniel Garber as being significant recent additions, and they are. He could also have mentioned, as he does in “another context”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000940.html, Tom Kelly’s move to Princeton, which I think will be great for the department.

I’m not exactly in the best position to comment on all the changes, because I’ve been enormously influenced by Michael and Philip over the years so I can’t really make an objective judgment about the quality of their work. So I think they’re great philosophers, but I would think that, wouldn’t I? Still, I think while it’d obviously be an even better program with Scott Soames there, reports of Princeton’s fall from pre-eminence are premature at best.

Monday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online, with a new paper by Danny Korman on the causal theory of perception.

I just read a very strange passage by Daniel Hausman. (It’s page 136 of his _Inexact and Separate Science of Economics_ if you care to check the citation.) He seems to imply that if a sentence of the form _All Fs that are C are Gs_ is to be a law, the terms all have to be semantically determinate. This isn’t because he’s an epistemicist about vagueness, and hence thinks all terms are semantically determinate. Rather it’s meant I think to be something special about laws. This is dropped in as a constraint without much by way of argument, and I didn’t understand why at all.

For example, the following looks like a law to me: _All animals that are humans have blood_. But surely _human_ is vague; it’s vague just where in the evolutionary history we went from being non-humans to humans. And if vagueness normally means semantic indeterminacy, as I think Hausman agrees, then some laws have vague terms.