As “Joe Salerno”:http://knowability.blogspot.com/2008/01/both-kinds-of-philosophy-country-and.html reports, John MacFarlane gave a really nice paper on “ought” (co-written with Nico Kolodny) at the recent Arizona Ontology Conference. In the questions Adam Elga raised a really nice case that I think deserves some thinking about. At the very least it makes me worried about my preferred theories of “ought”.

NB: John’s paper isn’t online yet, so I’m not linking to it, nor directly discussing it. The puzzle raised here is a puzzle for his particular view, but it’s also a puzzle for a view like I like, which is quite unlike John’s.
Continue reading →

Because we haven’t done these for a while.

• APA Pacific Schedule.
• Wo has a really great argument for the halfer solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem. This is one of those nice occasions where a blog post is more philosophically valuable than your average journal article.
• Brian Leiter has a nice thread going on recommendations for where to start reading about LEMMing philosophy.

I was looking around trying to find flights to the APA Pacific, and I noticed that it is possible to get Continental flights starting at the “Lower Manhattan Heliport”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Manhattan_Heliport. They’re a little more expensive than just getting the train (or for that matter a cab) to Newark and flying from there. But not by as much as I expected – I think about $125 each way. And it would be pretty nice to simply fly back into the city after a long trip. Sadly, I’m not sure my research budget covers such little luxuries.

So as many of you will know, Ishani and I recently moved to start new jobs at Rutgers. One of the nice features of the move, which I hadn’t appreciated in advance, was how much more like home it would be. I knew about “Little Australia”:http://www.timeout.com/newyork/restaurants/chinatown-little-italy/3322/rubys, but I hadn’t quite appreciated how South Asian the area was. One cute sign of this is that the deli across the street from me features (enormous) trophies won in local cricket tournaments. Another was that the bus stop across from the department in New Brunswick is currently festooned with fliers recruiting players for the Rutgers Cricket Club.

If only I was half as good at playing cricket as watching it, I’d have plenty to do around here. As it is, I have to hope that the “Indian Premier League”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_premier_league will be broadcast on some convenient American TV channel.

I want my extra £150 a week.

I’ve just been reading Vincent Hendricks’s slides giving advice to graduate students on how to gain visibility in philosophy.  (Hat tip: Lemmings.)

 While I agree with some of this advice, I myself would advise students differently in some respects. 

I agree that keeping one’s CV and web page up to date is essential.  And, I would add, so is making sure your page makes you look good.  I don’t mean that you need to hire a web designer but that (for instance) you shouldn’t have a section headed ‘publications’ which lists a numbers of things which are not publications (e.g. drafts, unpublished conference talks).  It can come across as if you’re trying to be misleading, and people will notice. 

Also, I disagree with the advice to accept all kinds of invitations including requests to do grunt work.  While it is vital to accept as many invitations of the right sort as possible, it seems to me that students often spend a lot of time doing things which earn them no professional respect (such as taking out the garbage at conferences).  Networking requires you to talk philosophy with people at conferences; you can’t do it if you’re too busy running around cleaning up their lunch wrappings. 

Also, I would have cautioned against accepting certain kinds of invitation to review a book.  A book review takes a long time to write, considering how little weight reviews are given in assessing someone’s research record.  And getting one published in a third-rate journal is not going to get you noticed (worse, it might have a negative, is-that-the-best-(s)he-can-do, type of effect).  Your time would probably be better spent working on getting a paper ready to send to a good journal. 

Basically, I’m saying that being selective matters.  Taking every opportunity to talk at a conference, to help organize one, and to write to/co-operate with big names, etc., is a good idea.  But if you present yourself as someone who’s got nothing better to do than make tea and write book reviews for bad journals, people might think that’s true.

(Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not saying you shouldn’t be a good citizen by helping out at conferences and so on.  I’m just saying you don’t do yourself any favours by accepting all requests to do this sort of thing, at the expense of writing a good dissertation in a reasonable time frame and trying to get work published in good places.)

My favourite session at the recent Arizona Ontology Conference was on Daniel‘s paper Finite Quantities.

Daniel argues that there is suggestive evidence from science to the effect that certain fundamental quantities are quantized rather than continuous.  That, for Daniel, is to say that not all properties of the form <em>having n units of X</em> are instantiated, for certain fundamental X such as mass, charge or perhaps distance.  Rather, for these X, there is some minimal n such that the property <em>having n units of X</em> is instantiated, and for all other instantiated properties of this form, ‘n’ is replaced with some multiple of this minimum.

It is commendable to get clear about what the quantized hypothesis looks like, and Daniel gets quite a lot clearer about it than most other discussions I know of.

However, having clarified that it is not a claim about the necessity (nomic, metaphysical or otherwise) of this restriction on the instantiation of certain properties, or about the non-existence, unreality or other substandardness of such properties (assuming that properties can exist uninstantiated), the view does not seem so very surprising or controversial. 

It strikes me as a much more modest and palatable claim than the claims that quantizers – including Daniel – often <em>sound</em> like they are making.  It sounds considerably less shocking, for instance, than the claim that ‘there is no such thing as’ (say) 1/2 n units of mass, or that although I may express things like “1/2 n units of mass” in <em>language</em> there is ‘no quantity corresponding to these representations’ and that ‘these quantities are not physically real’ (p. 2).

Moreover, clarity as to the exact nature of the quantizer’s thesis seems to make some of Daniel’s argumentative moves puzzling.

One of Daniel’s main opponents in the paper is someone who says that every time (say) a mass of six units is instantiated, the thing which instantiates the property <em>having six units of mass</em> also instantiates <em>having three units of mass</em> (twice over) and <em>having two units of mass</em> (three times over).
  
But let’s be clear about two readings of ‘having three units of mass’.  On the first, it means ‘having at least three units of mass’.  On the second, it means ‘having exactly three units of mass (and no more)’.

Now no-one would deny that everything which instantiates <em>having six units of mass</em> also instantiates <em>having at least three units of mass</em>.  That would be silly.  The quantizer, in this (made up) case, must instead be looking at denying that the property of <em>having exactly three units of mass (and no more)</em> is instantiated by anything.

But once we are clear that this is what is meant, the <em>opponent</em>’s position looks silly.  Obviously something which instantiates <em>having six units of mass</em> does not instantiate <em>having exactly three units of mass (and no more)</em>.

On neither reading, then, does it seem as if a Daniel-style quantizer and the opponent he describes in his paper have a sensible dispute such that they might need to look at the science to resolve it.

This is a comments thread for Jennifer Nagel’s paper “Epistemic Intuitions”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpl104 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/. This article has been made free by Blackwell for the purpose of this thread. Here is the abstract.

bq. We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone’s condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology.

In the extended entry are notes on how to comment on threads here at TAR.
Continue reading →

This is a comments thread for Stephen Finlay’s paper “Four Faces of Moral Realism”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpl100 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/. This article has been made free by Blackwell for the purpose of this thread. Here is the abstract.

bq. This article explains for a general philosophical audience the central issues and strategies in the contemporary moral realism debate. It critically surveys the contribution of some recent scholarship, representing expressivist and pragmatist nondescriptivism (Mark Timmons, Hilary Putnam), subjectivist and nonsubjectivist naturalism (Michael Smith, Paul Bloomfield, Philippa Foot), nonnaturalism (Russ Shafer-Landau, T. M. Scanlon) and error theory (Richard Joyce). Four different faces of ‘moral realism’ are distinguished: semantic, ontological, metaphysical and normative. The debate is presented as taking shape under dialectical pressure from the demands of (i) capturing the moral appearances; and (ii) reconciling morality with our understanding of the mind and world.

In the extended entry are notes on how to comment on threads here at TAR.
Continue reading →

This is a comments thread for John Worrall’s paper “Evidence in Medicine and Evidence-Based Medicine”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?article_id=phco_articles_bpl106 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/. This article has been made free by Blackwell for the purpose of this thread. Here is the abstract.

bq. It is surely obvious that medicine, like any other rational activity, must be based on evidence. The interest is in the details: how exactly are the general principles of the logic of evidence to be applied in medicine? Focussing on the development, and current claims of the ‘Evidence-Based Medicine’ movement, this article raises a number of difficulties with the rationales that have been supplied in particular for the ‘evidence hierarchy’ and for the very special role within that hierarchy of randomized controlled trials (and meta-analyses of the results of randomized controlled trials). The point is not at all to question the application of a scientific approach to evidence in medicine, but, on the contrary, to indicate a number of areas where philosophers of science can contribute to a proper implementation of exactly that scientific-evidential approach.

In the extended entry are notes on how to comment on threads here at TAR.
Continue reading →