I’ve just finished drafting a critical notice of Ralph Wedgwood‘s book The Nature of Normativity, which I’m writing at the invitation of Analysis Reviews (the future continuer of Philosophical Books).  I’m posting the current draft; comments are welcome.  The critical notice focuses mainly on Wedgwood’s normative epistemology, though it also takes a brief look at his argument against expressivism.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news recently you might have noticed that the university where I work – Washington University in St Louis – has decided to give an honourary doctorate to Phyllis Schalfly. I, like many people here, hadn’t heard of Ms Schlafly, but having read some of her columns and having learned of her work against the Equal Rights Amendment, I’ve signed the letter from the Association of Women Faculty protesting the decision. It’s hard to see how our university can support someone whose life work has been to undermine the legal and social status of so many of its students and colleagues.

But enough about Schlafly. Those more familiar with her will provide a better rapsheet. D’s description of the up-coming ceremony as the worst graduation ever made me try to remember who had been honoured at my own undergraduate graduation ceremony. And the person who sticks out most in my mind is the actress Helen Mirren, who was then famous for playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the TV-series Prime Suspect. And I remember, not just because my dad was rather awed to see Mirren in real life, but because of the speech one of the St Andrews officials gave to introduce her. He talked about how, when he had been growing up, and a girl his own age had been asked what she wanted to be when she grew up she had usually replied with one of the few professions that were thought of as suitable to women at the time: nurse, air-hostess, etc. But last week when he asked his own young daughter what she wanted to be, she’d replied, to his surprise: “Detective Chief Inspector”.

I wonder what my students will remember about their graduation ceremonies this year.

Tim Williamson thinks it is. But I’m not convinced. This is a little paper where I explain (some of the reasons) why I’m not convinced.

Williamson relies heavily on (what he thinks of as) logical equivalences between modal propositions and certain counterfactuals. But such logical equivalences (even assuming that’s what they are) could not support the claim that modal epistemology is just counterfactual epistemology. Or so I claim.

Compare: disjunctive propositions (A v B) are logically equivalent to negated conjunctive propositions ¬(¬A & ¬B). But that doesn’t mean the epistemology of disjunctions reduces to the epistemology of negated conjunctions.

The challenge to Williamson is to say why the equivalences he’s interested in are of more epistemological significance than this. It is a challenge which, this paper argues, he has not met in his various discussions of this topic.

My first ever book has just come out, and is now available world-wide. Here’s what it looks like:

It’s called Truth in Virtue of Meaning and it’s basically a new account of the analytic-synthetic distinction (one which is designed to fit better with phenomena like contextualism and semantic externalism than pre-Quine conceptions of the distinction did), and a defence of that distinction against about 7-zillion arguments (ok, maybe more like 15 arguments) against analyticity.

I’m going to post a bit more about the content of the book later in the week, but what I thought I’d do right now is tell you a bit about the photograph on the cover. The photo is by a Maldivian photographer called Shazeen Samad. He has a beautiful website and some of my favourite images of his are here, here, here and here. If you are looking to procrastinate while you should be grading/writing that final paper, and you won’t be depressed by images of incredibly beautiful people hanging out in what appears to be the most beautiful place on earth, then the site comes highly recommended.

The photo that Shazeen very kindly let me use is called “Maldavian Reflection” and it is an image of the ocean at sunset, when the water is so still that the entire sky (which has lots of cool clouds) is reflected in it. A couple of people have remarked that the picture is beautiful, but doesn’t have much to do with the topic of the book. But to those people I say two things: first, off, what did you want? pictures of bachelors? of one concept containing another? and second: not so! when you first look at the photograph it can seem pretty chaotic and hard to work out what it is a picture of. But then you look harder, and you realise that it is in two halves, with the horizon down the middle and that everything below the horizon is water, and everything above it is sky. What could be more appropriate?

Ernie Lepore and Gilbert Harman are organising a “conference on Quine”:http://www.wvquine.org/wvq-fest.html to celebrate Quine’s 100th birthday. It will be on June 25th at Princeton. More details are “here”:http://www.wvquine.org/wvq-fest.html.

And just after writing the post below, I discovered that a US immigration application (one of several applications needed to get a green card) got approved after 14 months. Hooray for immigration services on tax day!

UPDATE: I just wanted to add a note of thanks to the immigration staff at Cornell, who have been unbelievably helpful through all of these applications, even as I’m somewhat less closely tied to Cornell than I was when I filed the relevant applications. To make this a little topical, if there are any grad students out there today trying to decide which grad school to go to, and are worried about the prospects of dealing with U.S. immigration, Cornell students at least are in good hands.

I’ve been buried recently under (amongst other things) a mountain of immigration paperwork. So it was with some trepidation that I realised that my Australian passport was about to expire and I needed a new one. It wasn’t exactly reassuring to think I’d be dealing with another immigration and citizenship agency, and potentially would be without my passport for a while as the new passport was produced.

Anyway, when I dropped my passport off at the New York Consulate last Friday afternoon, I was worrying that I’d have another long wait until the relevant paperwork was completed and I had a new passport. But yesterday afternoon I got an email saying the new passport was printed (in Washington) and today I got a call saying it is ready to collect in New York. Excellent levels of efficiency Australian consular services!

I’ve had to use the “Sakai”:http://sakaiproject.org/ course management software this term, and it’s really the worst software I’ve had the misfortune of using in a long long time. If anyone out there has the choice between using it and using a commercial product like “Blackboard”:http://www.blackboard.com/us/index.bbb, I strongly recommend the commercial product.

I’m usually quite happy about using open source products. (This post is being composed in Firefox, for instance.) But Sakai is way from being ready for critical usage.

There are two really big flaws that have caused it to be an unremitting nightmare to use all semester.

First, the software is too stupid to handle having multiple tabs open on the same login. So for instance just this morning, I was trying to write an assignment in one tab, while having older assignments open in another tab so I could compare what I was doing with what I had already done. When I went to save the new assignment, the software thought for some reason I was trying to edit the old assignment, and, I guess in a fit of confusion, completely lost the assignment I had written. I guess I’ll just have to rewrite the whole thing – perhaps this time in TextEdit so I can save it before having to deal with the monstrosity of Sakai’s data saving.

This also comes up when entering grades. The server I’ve been using is painfully slow, which might not be the fault of the software. (Though the server runs a lot of other software at much higher speeds.) So it can be a long and painful process entering grades, since this requires opening a new page for each student, entering a number, and then going to a new page that registers that the number has been saved. In Blackboard this process can be speeded considerably by opening the pages for different students in different tabs, and while some pages are loading, entering grades in other tabs. (Or you could, if you were more confident in getting this right, enter the grades in Excel and try to manage the grade import functions. But that’s always seemed like a very hit and miss approach to me.) Sakai can’t handle this because if you open multiple tabs, then do anything in any one of those tabs, it will take the inputs as an attempt to modify the last opened tab. This led to worlds of confusion before I figured out what was happening. And it led to some painful times waiting for pages to open so I could enter grades one by waiting around one.

Second, there are very few capacities for error correction. The main reason I wanted to use course management software was so I could give the students small quizzes on the reading before each class. But in Sakai there is no way, once a quiz is posted, to change it. So sometimes I’ll write questions that are ambiguous or confusing, and one of the students who is first to take the quiz will ask about this. Even if I wanted to, there is no way to change the quiz, short of deleting it and posting a new quiz. (Which would then delete the fact that some people have taken the quiz.)

This is perhaps carelessness on my part, but there are quite a few things that need to be changed from the default settings every time you run a quiz, and which if you forget to change before posting can’t be changed after. For example, questions in a quiz by default are worth 0 points, which isn’t maximally helpful. On a couple of occasions I failed to change the default value before releasing the quiz to students. There’s nothing much, it turns out, you can do about this once it has been released. Perhaps a better user than me wouldn’t have made such a mistake, but it’s really quite annoying that the software doesn’t have the capacity to let you fix mistakes like this.

There are other serious bugs too. Once you post a quiz, there are two different points on the site where it purports to let you change various settings, such as due dates. But only at one of these points will changing the settings make a difference to changing what the students see. At the other point you can make changes, hit save, and if you go back to the same spot it will look like it has saved the changed settings, but this won’t affect what the students see.

Perhaps Sakai will one day be better than its commercial rivals, as Firefox is better than IE. But that day hasn’t yet come, and it’s hard to see it coming in the near future.

As part of an ongoing series of workshops on issues to do with philosophy of language (broadly construed), the “Cornell philosophy”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/phil/ department is running a workshop on evaluative and expressive language. The workshop will be on April 26, from 1-6pm, in room B21, Lincoln Hall. (That’s the building next to Goldwin Smith Hall, where the department is.

The speakers are Chris Potts (UMass-Amherst), Mark Richard (Tufts) and Jamie Dreier (Brown), with commentary from Cornellians Sally McConnell-Ginet, Andrew Alwood and Brent Kyle. It should be a fun day, and quite informative if past workshops are anything to go by. If you want to attend, contact Matti Eklund (me72 at cornell dot edu) for more details.

This stuff is great. I’ve been teaching a slightly-harder-than-usual logic course this semester and I really wanted a blackboard for my office, for practicing proofs on.

One of those things that I think good logic students quickly realise is that it’s one thing to be able to follow a proof in class, and quite another to be able to reproduce it yourself in homework or on a test. Well one of the things that I’ve learned from teaching logic is that it is one thing thing to be able to scribble a proof out on a notepad, and another to be able to present clearly on a blackboard during a lecture.

Why? Well, it has something to do with the fact that one’s notepad is uebersichtlich – scrawling out some complicated instance of an axiom isn’t that hard if the axiom is at the top of your page, but it can be a bit harder when that axiom is 2 blackboards back, or on the other side of the room. (My logic classroom has 6 huge boards that scroll past each other – I rather like that, but it can make it easy to loose the first part of a proof.) So I think that for me to write a proof on the board requires that I know more of the proof off by heart than when I’m just writing it on paper. Second, of course, there’s just more pressure when 30, or 60, eyes are on you, all waiting to be reminded what the induction hypothesis 2 boards ago actually was. And third, when I’m putting a proof on the board I’m often talking at the same time. And as teachers everywhere know, talking goes faster than writing, so you’re basically running two trains of thought at once anyway.

So I’d been yearning for a blackboard in my office, and then I found this stuff. . It consists of flexible blackboard tiles that stick to your wall (they’re removable and re-positionable- they come off my white-painted wall easily, without leaving a mark, and stick right back on, and, surprisingly, it’s really easy to write on them with chalk and clean them off. (I imagine if your wall is a different colour from your chalk you’ll end up with a chalk-coloured “halo” around the board though.) They’re a bit smaller than they look in the photo – each tile is about the size of a US letter sheet of paper – and I ended up buying 2 packs of 4. Also, I think the tiles are a little prone to getting scratched by the chalk – I can imagine having to buy some more after a couple of years or so. But they look great on my wall and they do the job (every Tuesday and Thursday morning before my logic lecture…)