In lieu of my actually having something to say, here are a few announcements about things happening hereabouts. If you’re not interested in philosophical and/or musical events around Boston and Providence, skip over this post.
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In my seminar class last week we were reading over Milton Friedman’s __The Methodology of Positive Economics__ and I was surprised by a couple of things. First, I agreed with much more of Friedman’s view than I had remembered from last time I’d looked at it. Second, I thought there was a rather large problem with one section of the paper that I didn’t remember from before, and that I don’t think has received much attention in the subsequent literature.[1]
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No, not that one.

I was asked to pass this on though, so if you’re interested…

bq.. THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM

Senior Fellow/Professor
Ref: SS2200
The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to make a continuing appointment at the level of either Senior Fellow or Professor (Academic Level D or Academic Level E). This is an opportunity for an outstanding scholar to take up an ongoing research position in a program with a major international profile and a very strong graduate program. Appointment at Level E will be offered at Level E1 or Level E2, depending on qualifications and experience.

The vacancy is occasioned by the departure of Professor Michael Smith who will take up a position at Princeton University on 1 September 2004. Applications in any area of philosophy are invited. The Research School of Social Sciences particularly welcomes applications from women. The beginning date is negotiable.

Intending applicants must obtain a copy of the further particulars from the School Administration at the Research School of Social Sciences either by email on , or by telephone on (+61 2) 6125-2257 or web:

Salary Package:
Senior Fellow (Level D) $81,982- $90,087 per annum plus 17% super
Professor (Level E1) $104,946 per annum plus 17% super
Professor (Level E2) $111,296 per annum plus 17% super

For further information consult the Philosophy Program’s website, or, if you wish to discuss the position after obtaining the selection documentation, please contact the Chair of the Selection Committee, Professor Frank Jackson, Director, RSSS, ANU, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia; (email) philrsssjob@anu.edu.au or Frank.Jackson@anu.edu.au or (tel) +61-2-6125-52340.

Information for applicants
Job Application Cover sheet
Closing Date 30 March 2004

As Michelle notes, it’s about that time of year when decisions have to be made on which grad school to attend. Michelle has lots of good advice for what to look for in a grad school, though I wanted to quibble with a couple of things and expand on another.

One important thing to remember about grad school is that you’re going to end up spending much more time talking philosophy with other grad students than you are with professors. That isn’t to say you’ll learn more from the other grad students (though you might) but it is to say it’s an important consideration in picking a school. (I think lots of the points Michelle rightly makes flow from this fact.) If the other students are smart, and energetic, and interested in talking about other people’s work, that will make an enormous difference to how much you get out of grad school.

Having said that, I do think school quality is more important than Michelle allows.

bq. Don’t just look at the academic and hiring strengths of the departments…also keep in mind whether you’ll be *happy* in that department. Too often the academic strengths are emphasized so much that we as graduate students are willing to put up with six years of personal hell to go to a school that’s slightly better than one in which we’d be happy

Taken literally, that’s good advice. Don’t go somewhere you’ll be miserable. Do be prepared to make small trade-offs for a higher quality of life.

But be careful!

In a few years time when you’re going on the job market you’ll be looking for every possible advantage, and if you turned down a school with better placement records/facilities to be where you actually are, you may very much regret that. At the very least, before you make such a trade-off, look __very closely__ at the placement records of each school to be sure you know what you’re getting in for.

This isn’t to say you should pick the highest Leiter-ranked school. I think I still agree with my earlier judgment that a student who is accepted everywhere should go to MIT other things being equal. (Assuming their area is covered by MIT, which is a salient concern given how small the department is.) But remember that lots of really good departments, with high-profile well-respected faculty and smart hard-working graduate students have placement records that aren’t that good.

I also wanted to quibble with the assumption that you’ll be in grad school for six years. Seriously, I think every new student should go in with a plan of being done in four years. The plan won’t work (in most cases) and you’ll end up needing the fifth year for things, but I think it’s the right attitude to take. At the very least a new grad student should think that she’ll be able to plausibly apply for post-docs in her area of expertise (if any come on the market) in her fourth year. There might not be any such things, or she might not get offered any, but in the worst case scenario she’ll have a sense for what the job market is like which can only help when she properly goes on the job market in year 5. In my experience (which I think is typical) you do a lot better on the job market if you’ve been through it all before.

This is what I need more of – theoretical justifications for __not__ reading things.

bq. “Neil Levy”:http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/cappe/STAFF/Neil.html, “Open-Mindedness and the Duty to Gather Evidence; Or, Reflections Upon Not Reading the Volokh Conspiracy (For Instance)”:http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/cappe/STAFF/open_mindedness.pdf (PDF)

At times Neil comes perilously close to endorsing Kripke’s paradox. Assume __p__ is something I know. So any evidence against __p__ is evidence for something false. Evidence for something false is misleading evidence. It’s bad to attend to misleading evidence. So I shouldn’t attend to evidence against __p__. So more generally I should ignore evidence that tells against things I know.

But Neil’s main point is more subtle than that. It’s that it can be a bad idea to approach a topic as an expert when in fact you’re not one. And that seems like good advice, even if you really should be reading “the Volokh Conspiracy”:http://www.volokh.com (for instance).

Note to self – check these things __before__ accepting new job. It seems Cornell’s standard personal webspace does not support CGI scripts. I’m sure I can work around this somehow, but I should have done this a month ago I think rather than now. Worst case scenario, I’ll use my office computer as a server and run the blogs off that. That way I could get my own URLs I guess. Alternatively, I could buy a second computer to use as a departmental server and do all kinds of neat tricks with it. Seriously, I think I can use OPP as justification for getting MT installed somewhere, and then once that’s in I can run TAR off it. Still, it would have been easier if MT was already running for me.

Jonathan has a post and a __very long__ discussion thread on Hume’s Law. I think some of the discussion could have benefited from looking at Gillian Russell’s paper on Hume’s Law, but it’s still pretty interesting. And I never have comments threads that go 33 deep, although the Homestar Runner post keeps approaching that level.

Ektopos is keeping a list of philosophy blogs, and it’s now reached 50. But it’s already out of date, since it doesn’t include this blog. (By the way, despite the efforts of that blogger to stay anonymous, I think I have enough evidence to figure out who they are. Their secret is safe though, because I’m too lazy to do said figuring out.)

While on the topic, I’d include Crooked Timber as a philosophy blog, but we don’t seem to make it to Ektopos. For that matter, caoine (which I definitely __don’t__ know how to pronounce) is much more a philosophy blog than many of the 50 on that list. I thought maybe they were not counting undergrad blogs, but Hot Abercrombie Chick is a freshman, so that can’t be a policy.

Imagine, if you will, a person, but not any actual person. Let’s call the person you imagine Jerry. When you imagine Jerry, do you imagine Jerry having a middle ear? Do you imagine Jerry having eyelashes? (If you particuarly focussed on the eyelashes when imagining Jerry, think of some other visible but not particularly salient body part, like cuticles.)

I think the answer in each case is no, though the answer to a similar question is yes. If you think of your imagination as a little fiction, it is fictional that Jerry has a middle ear, and eyelashes, and cuticles, and so on. That’s because fictions, including very simple fictions like __Jerry exists__ are governed by what Walton calls the Reality Principle, which (roughly) says that real world facts are made fictional unless something stops them being imported into the fiction. But I don’t think you imagine Jerry having all these features.

I think imagining a person in full detail, right down to the cells and beyond, is beyond the capacity of any individual, although you can imagine a person and it be fictional that they have all kinds of detailed characteristics. So I think you can’t imagine a zombie, though (for all I’ve said here) you can imagine a zombie-like creature in rough outline and it be fictional in the imagination that the creature is a zombie. But this is very tentative, even for a blogpost.

In the comments below Dave Chalmers said he’s on the road, so it’s probably wrong to launch into criticisms of his theory at just this time while he’s not ideally placed to respond. But I’m never as motivated to avoid the wrong as I should be, so here’s a brief note on Dave’s concept of positive conceivability. All the references are to Does Conceivability Entail Possibility?.
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