Here’s an argument that every respectable epistemologist will reject the conclusion of. But I wonder which premise most people will think is false.

1. If S has a justified, true belief that _p_, then S is aware that _p_.
2. If S is aware that _p_, then S knows that _p_
3. So, if S has a justified, true belief that _p_, then S knows that _p_.

At a pinch, I’d say premise 2 is false. But I’d be interested to know which premise other people think is false.

*** Call for Papers ***

The 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology

June 12-14, 2009

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

http://www.socphilpsych.org/CFP.html

Submission deadline is February 2nd, 2009.

(From <A href=http://cognition.berkeley.edu/Home.html>Tania Lombrozo</a>.)

<img src=http://www.newyorker.com/images/2009/01/19/cartoons/090119_cartoon_1_a13890_p465.gif>

<A href=http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2009/01/19/cartoons_20090112?slide=2#showHeader>(From next Monday’s New Yorker magazine.)</a>

I’ve been receiving several text messages in the middle of the night from an Ithaca phone number that I don’t recognise. To be clear, the messages are coming in the middle of the night in Australia, where I am. They may be being sent at a normal hour from Ithaca.

The messages look like they are spam, not intentionally sent messages. But they are listed as coming from the phone number 229-4563. If that’s your phone, then you may have some kind of virus that’s sending out spam messages. You might want to do something about this so you don’t run up a huge phone bill. And so I won’t be woken by my phone going off in the middle of the night.

Happy New Year everyone!  Here are a few links of interest.

• There’s an interesting discussion following a post on Gowers’s Weblog asking how one of a pair of equivalent statements can be ‘stronger’ than the other. 
• A second graduate conference on the philosophy of logic and mathematics will take place in Cambridge on 17-18 January.  For the schedule, pop over to Nothing of Consequence.
• Finally, there’s a workshop on alethic pluralism at Arche next weekend  that looks like fun. 

Addendum:
Another link of interest.  JC Beall has a budding blog called B-log.

The Basic Knowledge Project at the “Arché Research Centre”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/ at the St Andrews University will be hosting a major conference on 13-14 June. The conference theme will be Scepticism. There will be four 30 minute talks delivered by graduate students, followed by 20 minutes for questions. Please send us your paper via e-mail to “Dylan Dodd”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dd40/Site/Welcome.html by 15 March, 2009. Papers should be made suitable for blind refereeing. You will be notified of acceptance by 15 April.

And submissions are due January 15th for the Rutgers-Princeton grad student conference. Papers should be submitted by email to prconf2009@gmail.com. A papers should be no more than 4,000 words and preceded by an abstract of no more than 150 words. Papers should be submitted in blind review format. Notification of acceptance will be sent no later than February 9th, 2009. More information is available “here”:http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/philconf/call.html.

Apparently, in their year-end list of “reasons to love New York”, New York Magazine’s reason number 56 is <A href=http://nymag.com/news/articles/reasonstoloveny/2008/52897/>Because New York Has Become a World Capital of Philosophy</a>.  I suppose being just a city publication they can only really mention NYU, Columbia, and CUNY, and not Rutgers and Princeton, which are no farther than UC Irvine is from UCLA.

In a comments thread over at Brian Leiter’s blog, “John Doris mentions the following experiment”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/will-the-financ.html#comment-143044684.

bq. If you’ve been around awhile, think of the 2 or 3 rookie “stars” from your year(s) on the job market (the ones who got most and best interviews and offers), and then ask if these people are the most influential members of their cohort. I suspect that for many of us, this exercise does not engender strong confidence in the profession’s predictive acumen. (Perhaps this is why some major programs avoid hiring junior.)

I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of hiring junior, especially while Rutgers is searching, but I thought this was an interesting experiment.

Here’s one data point. When I was first on the market, 10 years ago, the person who seemed to have the most interviews was Jonathan Schaffer. And the person who has been (deservedly) the most influential from my cohort has been … Jonathan Schaffer. Now Jonathan didn’t do too well through the interview/fly-out process that year, and certainly didn’t get the most offers. So I think we end up with a mixed verdict here. The evidence from the 1998/99 hiring season is that philosophers look relatively prescient when reading files, but less so when interviewing people and/or hearing job talks.

But what about other years?

Lots of morning after writings on the RAE results. Here are some of the headlines.

• In the Guardian, “Jonathan Wolff”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/18/higher-education-rae-tables-jonathan-wolff has a nice before and after column on the results. (And he deserves congratulations for UCL’s outstanding results.)
• The comments thread at “Brian Leiter’s Blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/2008-research-a.html has lots of interesting discussion. I liked Andrew McGonigal’s “summary of my summary”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/2008-research-a.html#comment-143049302 of the results.
• Robbie Williams has a “detailed discussion”:http://theoriesnthings.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/uk-philosophy-rankings-rae-gourmet-etc/ of the results, looking in particular at which way of parsing the rankings matches most closely with Leiter’s rankings.
• One other point Robbie makes is important. “[W]ho every thought that there’s a linear ordering to capture in the first place?” As someone who has made a career out of arguing that probabilities aren’t linearly ordered (as many people agree), and that truth values aren’t linearly ordered either (which everyone thinks is crazy), I should agree. Philosophers are much too quick to assume that a comparative induces a linear ranking in general, and this case is no exception. But of course both probabilities and truth values, although they don’t induce linear orderings, do have top values. So while you shouldn’t take any of these tables too seriously, you should remember that St Andrews is at the top.
• Slightly more seriously, I do think The One True RAE Ranking of Philosophy Programs does tell us something important. If you focus on averages, UCL is overall best I think, followed closely by St Andrews, then Kings, then it gets a little messy. (I know St Andrews is tied with UCL on GPA, but I’d prefer their profile to ours.) If you focus on total quality, obviously Oxford is first, then Cambridge HPS, then it gets messy, with Kings, Leeds, St Andrews and Sheffield in the mix. I think there’s something to be said for taking both perspectives, the averages and totals, seriously. And if you do that, it’s easy to see St Andrews as doing particularly well, because it is in the mix in both categories. I do think the One True Ranking understates how well some departments (esp UCL) did, but I think it’s worth noting the overall judgment of the RAE panel that St Andrews (like Kings) maintained a spectacular batting average while being a large-ish department.
• In non-philosophy news, “John Gardner”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lawf0081/rae.htm produced a similar series of tables for law. In law it seemed the judgments were easier. LSE was best on averages, Oxford was best once you factored in size. And the Borda count method had them, happily, coming out exactly tied.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Robbie’s comment that we should be cautious about drawing ordinal rankings from the RAE data. 

The point I want to make here is the obvious one that some of that information will be more useful for certain purposes than others, although all of those purposes could aptly be described as “assessments of research quality”.

For instance, a student wondering where to go to get the most great discussions with the most great researchers may be uninterested in the difference between department A with a large amount of 4* output and nothing else and department B with a similar amount of 4* output and also a large amount of 1* output.  If so she should not take averaging scores too seriously. 
 
To university admins, however, the difference between A and B might be extremely important for determining things like how much research bang for their salary buck they are getting.  They should take averages seriously.

Various different kinds of ordinal information might be obtained from the RAE data which might be useful for different purposes (though like almost everyone else I don’t think the methods used to formulate it were perfect), but I don’t think we should assume any ordinal ranking is best (or even approximately best) for all (or even most) research-quality-assessment purposes. 

UPDATE: I say this as someone who claims affiliation of one kind or another with a number of British departments, and is feeling neither particularly thrilled or nor particularly dispirited about any of their performances!