Greg Restall has returned “his blog”:http://consequently.org/ to life. “Matt”:http://emanations.braininavat.net/archives/000042.html is right that this makes me happy!

And Greg reports (or at least hints) that one of his students is working on “non-standard probability theory”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/11/teaching_teaching_teaching. That’s what I started out in, so I have high hopes for whatever project it is!

I like the time before conferences when people start posting their conference papers on the web. This is nice for people who can’t get to the conference, and for people who can’t get to every session at the conference.

Today’s submission is from “Michael McKinsey”:http://www.cla.wayne.edu/Philosophy/McKinseyPublications.html, who has posted his “comments on __Beyond Rigidity__”:http://www.cla.wayne.edu/Philosophy/Remarks-Soames.rtf, for the Scott Soames book party. There’s lots of interesting stuff there, and I recommend reading it, but I wanted to quibble with a couple of points.

First, something McKinsey says about sarcasm.

bq. Here it is plausible to say that the speaker has not asserted the proposition literally expressed – that Sam is a fine friend. Rather, as Soames says, the speaker asserts “something like the negation of that proposition” (p. 58). But notice that typically the speaker would utter the sentence in a special sarcastic tone of voice (‘Sam is a __fine friend__’) which by convention is reserved for the expression of irony. In the absence of this convention, it is not at all clear that ironic assertion would occur. It may even be that the speaker’s tone of voice functions to conventionally transform the sentence uttered into its negation, so that the spoken utterance literally expresses the proposition that Sam is not a fine friend.

So McKinsey’s view is that sarcasm needs a special tone of voice, and the semantic content of this tone is negation. That’s so obviously correct I don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of it earlier. It would explain why some people “don’t pick up on written sarcasm”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001494.html I guess.

He also denies that “Trenton, New Jersey” is a name, claiming that (20) is just a convention way of saying (21).

(20)   Trenton, New Jersey is a small city,
(21)   Trenton, which is located in New Jersey, is a small city.

But that isn’t quite right, because (20a) is bad although (21a) is good.

(20a)   *Ithaca, upstate New York, is a small city.
(21a)   Ithaca, which is located in upstate New York, is a small city.

So maybe the comma elides ‘which is located __in the state of__’. But that isn’t right either, because of the way international locations are given. (20b) is fine in American English, even though (21b) is wrong.

(20b)   Melbourne, Australia is the site of the first tennis grand slam of the year.
(21b)   #Melbourne, which is located in the state of Australia, is the site of the first tennis grand slam of the year.

Melbourne of course is in the state of __Victoria__, which is part of the federation of states Australia. Maybe (20b) is fine just due to ignorance on the part of the speakers. But maybe not. If the convention that gives us phrases like “Trenton, New Jersey” does not create descriptive names, as Scott Soames says it does, it’s hard to state exactly what it does do.

One final hard case. Imagine Killington, Vermont gets to “secede and join New Hampshire”:http://www.onthesnow.com/news/030604.html as it is trying to do. The proper way to refer to it, as the townsfolk already are, will be “Killington, New Hampshire”. But will Killington really be __located__ in New Hampshire? I think not, though it’s hard to say. I’d say it is located in Vermont, but part of New Hampshire for political purposes. But I could be misusing __located__ here. In any case, I think these locutions are harder than McKinsey allows.

Sorry for the snafu with the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ yesterday. I really don’t know what went wrong with it. There’s a double issue up today to make up for it.

If you haven’t yet done so, you should read Bob Stalnaker’s comment on the “game theory post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002563.html from a couple of weeks ago. (Scroll down to see the comment; I don’t have permalinks for comments enabled yet.)

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the “break-up lines”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002593.html thread. Keep the lines coming in! I think we could be cornering the market on corny-geeky jokes. I just wish I could come up with some to add to the hilarity. My reputation for wit is vanishing as I write.

By the way, thanks largely to the jokes, yesterday was the highest traffic day in this’s blog history, and the break-up lines post is the most read single post since I’ve been keeping track of those things. Previously it was my APA schedule, but I really don’t understand why that was so popular. Shouldn’t people here pay more attention to, say, “my conference paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002577.html than to who I care to name drop in “my conference schedule”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002581.html?

Yesterday was also, naturally, the biggest traffic day on the papers blog, just in time for a system malfunction.

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000925.html follows up the comment about USC yesterday by listing all the leading philosophy of language departments in the country in order of quality. Despite the fact that Rutgers gets more people mentioned as specialists than anywhere else, I think the list could have been even longer. Both of them are primarily philosophers of mind, but I think both Jerry Fodor (compositionality) and Brian McLaughlin (vagueness) have made important contributions to philosophy of language in recent years and could easily be mentioned in this context.

I fully agree with Jason’s comment in “the thread below”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002591.html that there are a lot of linguists at Rutgers who do work that should be interesting to students interested in philosophy of language. I also agree with Ken Taylor’s comment in that thread that it’s really foolish for philosophers to try ranking linguistics departments. But the strength of departments other than philosophy could matter to how good your grad school experience is. So if you are a potential grad student planning on working in an area that potentially has interdisciplinary collaborations (and these practically all areas of philosophy outside perhaps analytic metaphysics have interdisciplinary links) you should investigate the quality of the departments other than philosophy at potential schools, as well as the existence of connections between those departments and philosophy.

I was feeling a little guilty today at pimping for Cornell on Brown’s website, so let me make up for that by plugging Brown a little. One of the reasons that I started thinking about the importance of other departments to a grad school is because of the benefits Brown philosophy gets from its interactions with other departments.

For instance, Brown is ranked as ‘Also Notable’ in “political philosophy”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown.htm#05, largely on the strength of Dave Estlund’s work. And that seems right as an evaluation of Brown’s philosophy department. Dave’s work is very good, but you can only rank a department so high on the strength of one person. (That’s a slight exaggeration since Jamie and Nomy and others do work that’s relevant to political philosophy, but only a slight one.) But when you consider also that Brown’s “political science”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Science/ department is very strong in political theory (especially because “John Tomasi”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Science/faculty/tomasi.htm is there) the combined offerings start to look like quite a strong political theory/philosophy program. (And in this case it’s not just an ‘in principle’ strong combined program, it’s a case where the two departments are actively engaged. There are active reading groups with philosophy and political theory students and faculty for instance.) Brown also benefits from our interactions with classics and our interaction with cognitive and linguistic sciences. I have more first-hand knowledge of the latter (the only reading group I’m in right now is over in linguistics) but I think all these connections are valuable to the program.

I don’t think you should ever choose a grad school because the departments other than philosophy are good. The strength of the philosophy program should always be the most important factor. But I think the benefits you get from having people around the university doing philosophically interesting work are not entirely trivial, and it should be __a__ factor in choosing a grad school.

“Hugh Mellor”:http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/ has posted a link to a David Lewis paper (more a discussion note really) that I had not previously seen.

bq. “Ern Malley’s Namesake”:http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/ErnMalley.html

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000925.html reports that Jeff King has accepted the offer to move from UC Davis to USC. He says this might move USC into the top 3 in philosophy of language. So that got me thinking, what are the best schools in philosophy of language? Rutgers, Michigan, Stanford and NYU all deserve very strong consideration, as does this fall’s manifestation of USC. And, to toot our own horn a little, so does Cornell as it will be in a few months time, with Delia and Zoltán and __moi__ working directly in philosophy of language, and many other members of the department working in very closely related areas.

One of the difficulties in evaluating how strong a school is in philosophy of language is that in the ideal case, a large chunk of the strength will reside in the linguistics department. Of course the same issue arises in many other areas, including ancient philosophy, philosophy of law, political philosophy and many areas of philosophy of science. It’s a difficulty in performing any measurements because what matters is not just how strong the linguistics program is, but how strong they are in philosophically relevant areas (especially semantics) and how much contact philosophy students have with the relevant people in linguistics. Perhaps one can from the outside how strong in semantics a program is, but it’s hard to tell without first-hand evidence how much interaction between philosophy and linguistics there is. This is perhaps one of those variables that can’t be measured by something like the Leiter report, but which a prospective graduate student should investigate for themselves before choosing a school.[1]

In principle, the strength of the linguistics program, especially in semantics, could affect the relative standing of quite a few philosophy programs in philosophy of language. This consideration makes Stanford even more attractive in philosophy of language, and also helps MIT, UMass Amherst, UC Santa Cruz and, I think, Cornell. (And probably several others that I’ve forgotten about.)

fn1. This isn’t intended in any way as a criticism of the report. As Brian often points out, there are more factors relevant to choosing a graduate school than what can be measured by the report. This is just one of those factors.

Very sad news today. Susan Moller Okin, author of __Women in Western Political Thought__, __Justice, Gender and the Family__ and __Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?__ has died at 57. Here is the obituary notice from the “Stanford News Service”:http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/04/obitokin310.html.

I never met Professor Okin, and I don’t know enough about her work to comment with any credibility, but everyone I know who knew of her and/or her work reported glowingly on each. Many more details can be found in the Stanford notice linked above.

Professor Okin worked closely with the “Global Fund for Women”:http://www.globalfundforwomen.org/, and her family has requested that donations in her memory be made to them.

Every year the Philosophers’ Annual makes its selection of the best ten philosophy papers from the past year and republishes them in a separate volume. (I think the republishing will be electronic this year.) A couple of members of the board of the Philosophers’ Annual, which chooses the papers, have written to me (I imagine among others) asking for nominations for good papers. One of them suggested that blog readers could assist here.

So, if you have any recommendations for great papers published in calendar year 2003, use the message board to leave a note. No self-nominations please! There’s no immediate time limit on this, but obviously the sooner the better.

“Caoine”:http://caoine.org/mt/archives/2004_03.php#002966 is feeling remarkably generous for an undergraduate. She has decided to donate her 2004 Amazon referrals income to a charity, but can’t decide which one. This seems like a good opportunity to ask blog readers who might know something about this, which charities do provide good value for your donated dollar? I’ve always thought Oxfam was good value, but my evidence for that isn’t entirely overwhelming. (I remember Peter Unger did some investigations and decided they were worth supporting, so that’s some evidence, but that was one data point several years ago.) If anyone has any better suggestions, or reasons why Oxfam isn’t really as good as I’ve always thought, I’d be happy to hear them.

My secret mission to ensure every Brown graduate student has a blog continues apace, though the clock is ticking on whether I can succeed before I leave for the wilds of upstate New York.

bq. “Be That As It May”:http://dcruz.blogspot.com/ by Jason D’Cruz.

Greg Restall has updated his “papers page”:http://consequently.org/writing/, and it now has an “RSS Feed”:http://consequently.org/writing/index.xml! If only everyone in the world was so kind, the papers blog would just write itself.