“David Lewis on the internet”:http://www.david-lewis.org/links.php, via “wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/07/David_Lewis_and_Google. Wo also has a post up on “impossible fictions”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/06/Impossible_Fictions that I need to respond to, once I think of something intelligent to actually say.

“David Lewis on the internet”:http://www.david-lewis.org/links.php, via “wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/07/David_Lewis_and_Google. Wo also has a post up on “impossible fictions”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/06/Impossible_Fictions that I need to respond to, once I think of something intelligent to actually say.

So many things to attend in Pasadena, so little time. Here’s a brief list of which sessions seemed most interesting to me. (Be warned – I have very odd interests, so some objectively interesting things are probably not included. And I have a pro-Brown and pro-Cornell bias.) What follows will look awful in anything less than 1024*768, so if you’re running 800*600 I suggest moving to a higher resolution before clicking the ‘more’ link.

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So many things to attend in Pasadena, so little time. Here’s a brief list of which sessions seemed most interesting to me. (Be warned – I have very odd interests, so some objectively interesting things are probably not included. And I have a pro-Brown and pro-Cornell bias.) What follows will look awful in anything less than 1024*768, so if you’re running 800*600 I suggest moving to a higher resolution before clicking the ‘more’ link.

Continue reading →

I like this little snippet from the Cornell webpage:

bq. Brian Weatherson (Associate Professor – Ph.D. Monash, 1998). Beginning Fall 2004.
Vagueness, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Probability.

My name with ‘Associate Professor’ next to it! On an official website no less! That does make things seem official now, doesn’t it? At this stage officially getting tenure will feel a little anti-climactic.

Some of the most charmingly pointless controversies on this blog have been about just what region is denoted by ‘Midwest’. (For prior installments, see “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001580.html, “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001568.html and “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002519.html.) I think those are fun, but we seem to have run out of things to say on that word. So it’s time for something new. Just which parts of New York State are denoted by ‘upstate’?

This became topical because “some”:http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=4508550&section=news “news”:http://www.beliefnet.com/story/141/story_14164_1.html “articles”:http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1861&dept_id=152366&newsid=11076095&PAG=461&rfi=9 have described New Paltz, where Mayor Jason West has been solemnizing gay marriages, as being upstate. This seems like a mistake to me. (And as someone who once lived in Syracuse and soon will live in Ithaca, I should know.)

Here’s where the border between upstate and not upstate is. It might be helpful if you have a map of the relevant area, like “this one”:http://mq-mapgend.websys.aol.com:80/mqmapgend?MQMapGenRequest=FDR2dmwjDE%3byt29%26FDJnci4Jkqj%2cMMCJ%3aHOEvq%3bw2aqz8%3a%29zr25za%3a%26%40%24%3a%26%40b%3aqyb%3al4b%3aTD%15JFE%3aHOHQJ%3bw2aqz8%3a%29zr25za%3a%26%40%24%3a%26%40%24×9%40. Draw a line connecting up the Massachusetts/Connecticut border with the northern edge of the New York/Pennsylvania border. North of that line is upstate, south of it is not. This is not to say that south of it is downstate or anything else in particular, it’s just not upstate.

As you can see on “the map”:http://mq-mapgend.websys.aol.com:80/mqmapgend?MQMapGenRequest=FDR2dmwjDE%3byt29%26FDJnci4Jkqj%2cMMCJ%3aHOEvq%3bw2aqz8%3a%29zr25za%3a%26%40%24%3a%26%40b%3aqyb%3al4b%3aTD%15JFE%3aHOHQJ%3bw2aqz8%3a%29zr25za%3a%26%40%24%3a%26%40%24×9%40, New Paltz (which is starred) is south of the line, so it shouldn’t be regarded as upstate. If I didn’t approve of what was going on in New Paltz, I’d start lobbying to stop these spurious connections being drawn between New Paltz and the wonderful upstate region.

Here’s a draft of my APA paper. It’s very drafty, but at least I have something. It’s also a bit long, which wasn’t the problem I thought I’d have when I started writing. It’s more a script than a real paper yet, so messy things like acknowledgements are missing. The main things to note are that I stole arguments from Kendall Walton, Stephen Yablo, Greg Currie and Ted Sider, and that apart from those four, I relied heavily on conversations with Wo, Tamar Gendler and, especially, Tyler Doggett and Dave Chalmers. (And I imagine many other people I’m not remembering at 1 in the morning. I’ll try and do better in the real paper.) Of course I won’t be actually reading the paper out, but I always like to have a script to ad-lib from. Several of the jokes won’t make sense unless you know that I’ll be presenting it on a panel that also has George Bealer and Paul Churchland on board, and I plan to turn up armed … with a pie. Mike Martin suggested the first example, which is based on a recent paper I did with Andy Egan. The idea of actually having the pie there is Andy’s.

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Here’s a draft of my APA paper. It’s very drafty, but at least I have something. It’s also a bit long, which wasn’t the problem I thought I’d have when I started writing. It’s more a script than a real paper yet, so messy things like acknowledgements are missing. The main things to note are that I stole arguments from Kendall Walton, Stephen Yablo, Greg Currie and Ted Sider, and that apart from those four, I relied heavily on conversations with Wo, Tamar Gendler and, especially, Tyler Doggett and Dave Chalmers. (And I imagine many other people I’m not remembering at 1 in the morning. I’ll try and do better in the real paper.) Of course I won’t be actually reading the paper out, but I always like to have a script to ad-lib from. Several of the jokes won’t make sense unless you know that I’ll be presenting it on a panel that also has George Bealer and Paul Churchland on board, and I plan to turn up armed … with a pie. Mike Martin suggested the first example, which is based on a recent paper I did with Andy Egan. The idea of actually having the pie there is Andy’s.

Continue reading →

Clearly demand for blogs by people working in philosophy of language/game theory was too low, so now there is

bq. “Scribo”:http://scribo.blogs.com/

I also had an advisor who recommended the “five envelopes”:http://scribo.blogs.com/scribo/2004/03/the_five_envelo.html method for getting articles published, but I’ve never got around to following it. Given the delay time for refereeing these days (which I’m partially to blame for I guess) I don’t think it would be a wise strategy now.

Is it morally acceptable to throw pies at zombie strangers for fun, provided a significant number of third parties are amused?

Since zombies are not conscious, anyone who thinks consciousness is necessary for moral standing should think this is OK. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that having a certain amount of functional complexity is all that’s required for moral standing may feel this is bad because it violates zombie autonomy.

While we’re on this topic, can zombies be amused? I think what the consciousness literature needs is a long discussion of thick qualitative concepts, concepts that have both conscious and non-conscious dimensions. I think __being amused__ may be such a concept, but I’m not sure.