Everywhere I go now, this blog is a major topic of conversation. If I wasn’t so fond of it, I might start to resent the attention it gets. One of the things that came up was a worry that I was giving away ideas without getting much credit. This would be a serious worry if it were true, but I don’t think it is for a number of reasons.
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First three examples of oddities in fiction, and then a purported explanation of them all. Much of this post arose in conversation with Andy Egan. Most of the rest, including the first example, comes from section 4.5 of Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe.

Othello (Walton)

In Act 2, scene 2, Othello utters the following lines.

Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction, had they raised
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,
Steeped me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes;
I should have founds in some place of my soul
A drop of patience. But alas…

In the real world anyone who could compose these lines would be a first-rate poet. The standards for being a first-rate poet are no different in Othello’s world to ours. Othello does compose those lines. Yet it is not fictional that Othello is a first-rate poet.

555 (Egan)

In every movie nowadays, every phone number we hear starts 555. Yet it is not (it seems) fictional that every phone number starts 555, nor that we are seeing a non-random sample of phone numbers.

Censorship (Weatherson)

In airplane versions of movies, profanity is censored. But the censorship normally takes place only on the soundtrack, not the screen. So when the passenger hears the Mob boss say “Kill the lowlife scum”, the Mob boss’s lips are mouthing a much more obscene phrase. Anyone who could produce that sound while moving their lips that way would be a skilled ventriloquist, both really and fictionally. Yet it is not fictional that the Mob boss is a skilled ventriloquist.

Walton suggests that often (not always, but often) the response to ‘silly’ worries like these is to say that the odd claims are true in a story, but are ‘de-emphasised’. Very roughly, that means that they are the kind of fictional truths that it a skilled participant in the fictional game will not attend to. I want to argue that in some cases, including these, actually less is true in the fiction than first appears. (My disagreement with Walton here is a matter of degree – I’m basically saying his solution to the problem posed by blue jeans in Greek plays should be generalised.)
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Imagine a world in which there are nothing but two atoms. If you are not a believer in mereological sums, you will think that you are thereby imagining a situation in which (1) is true.

bq. (1) ExEy (~x=y & Az (z=x v z=y))

The conceiving of this imagined non-believer is positive and primary, as far as I can tell. Is it ideal conception? Well in one sense no, because it isn’t really a situation in which (1) is true. But that’s a sense in which conceivability trivially entails possibility. In Dave Chalmers’ preferred sense,

bq. S is ideally conceivable when there is a possible subject for whom S is prima facie conceivable, with justification that is undefeatable by better reasoning.

In that sense, I think (1) is ideally conceivable. Some people believe that the 2 atom room verifies (1), and some of them won’t be talked out of this by better reasoning. There’s an important point about the epistemology of metaphysics here. Ultimately getting to the right answer involves a matter of judgement. There’s no valid argument from premises everyone accepts to the impossibility of (1). At least, there’s no such argument now, and there’s no reason to think that there ever will be one.

Could we restrict the ideal conceivers to those with appropriately good judgement? Yes, but only at the cost of trivialising the conceivability/possibility thesis.

In the paper I linked, Dave briefly discusses this case, and suggests somewhat tentatively “that there is no fact of the matter about the issue, or that it can only be settled by terminological refinement”. But it’s wildly unclear how either of these strategies will help. (Here I’m following some arguments Ted Sider has made really closely.) It’s implausible that there might be no fact of the matter about claims stated using only logical vocabulary, like (1). It’s also implausible that extra refinement of the terms will help. If the logical terms aren’t refined enough to use in stating propositions, who knows what is?

So I’m inclined to conclude that this is a case of conceivability without possibility. I don’t know if this case has been discussed widely, or indeed if it’s been discussed at all outside of a small note in Dave’s paper. So this is something I should do a little more research on.

One quick note about (1) to end with. Lots of people actually take (1) to be prima facie conceivable. The fact that they do so is, to those of us who are otherwise inclined to believe it is impossible, no evidence whatsoever that (1) really is possible. So why should the prima facie conceivability of zombies be any different?

I don’t normally post about philosophy moves. This isn’t because I’m averse to discussing the stuff. As anyone whose been stuck in a bar with me during hiring season knows, it’s just about my favourite topic of conversation. But I normally like to stay a little above the fray here. But I wanted to make a few comments on Scott Soames’s move to USC, discussed already by Brian Leiter and Kai von Fintel

First, and obviously, this is a really big move for USC. High profile philosophers do move. Philosophers at the peak of their careers do move. Philosophers do move from higher ranked schools to lower ranked schools. But it’s pretty rare to see all three happen at once, to anything like the degree we’ve seen here. Soames was already a very important figure in philosophy before the last few years. But the quantity and quality of his work in the last few years has just been staggering. (And I’m saying this about someone with whom I very rarely agree on the issues.) He’s a great great addition to the USC department. Conversely, it’s a big loss for Princeton, but if anyone is in a position to bear losses like that, it’s Princeton.

Having said that, I’m not sure whether Brian knows anything special that makes him say it increases the probability Jeff King will move from Davis to USC. UC Davis is a pretty good department, in my opinion the most under-rated in the country, so Jeff is facing a pretty tough decision. (Or was so facing. For all I know he’s decided what he is doing.)

The mammoth papers blog entry only took an hour to put together, which was much less than I’d feared. And I got it done in time that tomorrow can have a separate entry. There are dozens of links there, so if you want some bedtime reading…

This isn’t normally a classifieds column, but I was asked to pass this along and it looks like it could be interesting to many readers.

bq.. *Research Fellowship in Philosophy*

Merton College proposes to elect to a four-year Research Fellowship in Philosophy to commence in October 2004. This career development post will provide a promising academic at an early stage in his or her career with the opportunity to develop skills in teaching and academic administration, in combination with substantial support for research. The teaching commitment will be up to six hours per week in full term and the College is particularly seeking candidates able to teach some of the following subjects: Elementary Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics, and the History of Philosophy from Descartes to Kant.

The stipend will be £20,671 p.a. and the Fellow will be entitled to meals in College and to other benefits.

Full details of the post and its conditions are set out in the further particulars, obtainable from the Sub-Warden’s Secretary, Merton College, Oxford, OX1 4JD (e-mail: lesley.walsh@admin.merton.ox.ac.uk). The closing date for applications is Friday 19 March 2004. Merton College is an equal opportunities employer.

I returned from Louisiana to find 80 emails needing to be answered, and 57 webpages that had changed and needed to br processed for the papers blog. So apologies to everyone if I take a while to respond to everything.

There are several points I’ll come back to from the trip, but I thought it would be nice to start with this story.

As regular readers may recall, in the cloning paper Sarah and I rely quite heavily on Liz Harman‘s[1] paper “Can we Harm and Benefit in Creating”[2]. As it turned out, I delivered the parts of the paper that most directly appealed to Liz’s work, and Liz was sitting in the front row of the audience. So I could get fairly quick feedback on whether I was getting Liz’s views right by just looking at whether she was nodding in approval or not.

As you might expect, this was rather terrifying. I normally like to have a very long lead time between saying something and it being evaluated. Fortunately, it seems we were following the lines of Liz’s theory well enough – or at least she was polite enough to make it look like we were even when we weren’t.

The conference overall was great. James Stacey Taylor and the krewe at LSU put on another great show, and I’m again grateful to have gone there. As I said, hopefully more stories to follow.

fn1. So the set of people to whose authority I’m prepared to gratuitously appeal is now, it seems, {Joyce, Keynes, Lewis, Fodor, Harman}. I’m not sure whether that’s too much appeal to authority or too little.

fn2. Doesn’t it seem like there should be a link to the paper here? This paper has been delivered at enough places that it should be posted on a webpage by now somewhere.

Continuing the very welcome trend of philosophers posting exciting books, Mark Kalderon posts the first three chapters of his book Moral Fictionalism. Lots of people have been talking about this well in advance of publication, and I think it should be very good.

The Bush administration’s complete disregard for scientific knowledge in policy making doesn’t get as much airplay as some of the administration’s other shortcoming, but it is an important issue. It shouldn’t be a partisan issue. There’s nothing conservative about ignoring relevant science – I can’t imagine John Howard or Peter Costello acting the way the Bush administration has. Anyway, don’t take my word for how bad they are, take the word of twenty Nobel Laureates . (Hat tip: Brian Leiter.

Allan Hazlett thinks my beliefs about which adjectives are essentially pre-nominal are pretend.

Just for fun: Republicans for Voldemort. (Hat tip: caoine)

Much thanks to everyone who has written in with congratulations and good wishes regarding my move to Cornell. There’s been some interest shown in where TAR will move to if I can’t leave it at Brown. I’m touched that you think I’m not cybersquatting as is.

I’m off to Louisiana for a few days. Just to test how much attention my logic class today I made a joke at the start about how neat it was that we get Mardi Gras off (Brown holds the President’s Day holiday a week late) and then mentioned at the end I was off to a conference in Louisiana. A few picked up the connection. The conference, run by James Stacey Taylor, was wonderful last year, and if it’s as good this year I’ll be having a fun few days. I might be updating TAR while I’m away – or I might just be ethicising and partying.

My favouritist blog post included, amongst the many halluncinations of grandeur, a comparison between your humble narrator and Odysseus. At the time I had a real difficulty finding commonalities between the two of us that would justify such a comparison. Well soon we will have something in common: as of next August we will both be Ithacans.

I’m moving to Cornell.

As well as improving Cornell’s strengths in my core areas, I’ll be starting a new speciality in Martian philosophy, teaching logical positivism and in charge of the sheep dip.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll probably know that I had quite a few choices available. Before I decided what to do I was dreading how I’d feel afterwards, because each of the choices was so appealing and I feared I’d regret all the missed opportunities. In general I’m much too susceptible to regret. I can come home, turn on the TV, watch the Sox overcome a 3 run deficit in last 2 innings of an important game, and my first thought is “That would have been great if I’d watched the whole thing.” It’s important to remember there is such a thing as opportunity cost, but it can really wreak havoc with your emotional well-being if you take it too seriously. So I was worried that I’d reflect too much on the virtues of the paths not taken, and be miserable for months. Maybe that will still happen, but for now I’m managing to be happier about Cornell’s possibilities that upset about the (considerable) virtues of the other suitors. I’d say more about how great each of these other departments is, but (a) you probably know that already, and (b) it might just make me depressed.

So for now it’s yay yay Cornell. Go Big Red philosophy!

Game theory becomes much more fun when we make it harder to adopt mixed strategies. I’d be interested to know what any game theorists reading this (or non-game-theorists) think the players should do in the following game.

A and B are playing for $1,000,000. Each of them has to choose a number: either 0 or 1. If they choose the same number, A gets the $1,000,000. If they choose different numbers, B gets the $1,000,000. Neither is capable of making a genuinely random choice, left to their own devices. They are able to make random choices by flipping coins, but any coin they flip while making the choice must be forfeited, and all coins have positive value. What should they do?

The idea for this game is borrowed from this paper by Roger Koppl and Barkley Rosser Jr that I’ve mentioned previously. One of the many things that make the game interesting is that there is (I think) no Nash equilibrium in the game.

By the way, in case you’re thinking “Why is he talking about this game? Is there a hidden agenda here?” there is a hidden agenda, but it isn’t very well worked out. At some level I think I think there shouldn’t be such a thing as game theory. What’s currently game theory should be viewed as just decision theory where one of the unknown variables is a decision by another agent. But any argument to that conclusion is a long way off. A long, long way off.