I guess most everyone who reads this blog also reads Leiter, but I thought it was worth noting a “comments thread”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/hot-topics-in-e.html over at Leiter’s place on hot topics in epistemology. I’d certainly be interested in knowing what everyone thinks are the central topics in epistemology circa November 2007, so head over there and comment!

I meant at the time to post up comments on the two conferences I recently attended: the Ryle conference at Ryerson University in Toronto, and the Metaphysics and Physics conference at Rutgers. Both were lots of fun, and I’ll hopefully have my paper from the Ryle conference posted soon.

Anyway, this is a belated thanks to the organisers of the conferences (David Hunter at Ryerson, and Barry Loewer and Heather Demarest at Rutgers) for putting on such good lineups. I think/hope I learned a lot from each.

Via “Richard Zach”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2007/11/csli-lecture-notes-online-and-free.html, I see that CSLI has posted full PDFs of “many of their books”:http://standish.stanford.edu/bin/search/simple/process?query=pbk for free download. There are a lot of good things here. I basically learned modal logic from Goldblatt’s “Logics of Time and Computation”:http://standish.stanford.edu/bin/object?00003782 (warning: Large PDF), and I might well teach from it now that it is easily available.

The BBC notes that it is illegal to name a pig “Napoleon” in France. Good job we saved it for the aarkvark then.

(p. 96 of Naming and Necessity)

“Robbie Williams writes”:http://theoriesnthings.blogspot.com/2007/10/in-rutgers.html

bq. Tonight (24th) I’m giving a talk to a phil language group at Rutgers. I’m going to be presenting some material on modal accounts of indicative conditionals (a la Stalnaker, Weatherson, Nolan). This piece has evolved quite a bit during the last few weeks as I’ve been working on it. A bit unexpectedly, I’ve ended up with an argument for Weatherson’s views.

I don’t know why this should be surprising. I’m never surprised when I argue for Weatherson’s views.

Two more serious points.

If I’ve understood Robbie right, he isn’t really arguing for my views. What he’s arguing for are the points that I took wholesale from Stalnaker, i.e. Stalnaker’s views. What’s distinctively mine (if anything) are some quirky claims about the details of how indexicals in consequents behave, and some even quirkier claims about how to understand the tacit epistemic modals in (most) indicative conditionals. But I don’t think you need either of those quirks to get what Robbie wants. You just need the basic Stalnakerian foundations, and that’s all to Stalnaker’s credit, not mine.

The other point is that I think Robbie has not only ended up with Stalnaker’s views, he’s really ended up with Stalnaker’s methodology as well. This was all made fairly clear in Stalnaker’s paper at the (very successful) Ryle at Ryerson conference this weekend.

We’d like, for all sorts of reasons, to say that indicative conditionals have truth conditions. We’d also like to explain the two features that make it seem unlikely that they have truth conditions. Those are (a) that a lot of instances of CCCP look to be correct, and (b) assertions of conditionals have many of the same pragmatic features as conditional assertions would have (were there any such things in everyday life). And the real virtue of Stalnaker’s position is that he carves out a position with just these things. The construal of indicative conditionals as epistemic modals, plus a couple of independently motivated assumptions about pragmatics, gets us just the right results. Stalnaker’s paper at the weekend was about a (somewhat charitable) reading of Ryle as stressing the desirability of a theory that threaded the needle between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional theories of conditionals in just this way, and on this point Ryle (as read by Stalnaker) seems very insightful.

So if I’ve understood Robbie right, he’s joined the party. Excellent news; the forces of truth and light have another excellent soldier on their side! But I fear he might be in the same boat as I was for a long time, certainly including the time I wrote _Indicatives and Subjunctives_. That is, he’s underestimating a little how much of this stuff Stalnaker already had right back in the early papers, and how much of the job here and now consists of carefully explaining the Stalnakerian position, not amending it.

(I don’t think this is the paper he’s talking about in the post, but “this paper”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/%7Ephljrgw/wip/conversationconditionals.pdf features some of what Robbie is saying about conditionals for those who want a little more detail.)

While we wait for Game Two to start…

* If you want to be part of the greatest ever research project (on contextualism at least), there are “two postdoctoral fellowships”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/news/2007/09/two-postdoctoral-research-fellowships.shtml currently being advertised at Arché.

* David Chalmers and David Bourget have a phenomenal resource of of “works in philosophy of mind”:http://consc.net/mindpapers/.

* There have been posts about silencing up recently at “Crooked Timber”:http://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/25/the-elimination-of-bigotry-is-a-perfectly-legitimate-aim-of-government/ and “Feminist Philosophers”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/rape-and-communication-a-rapist-in-bunglers-clothing/. Both have interesting comments threads.

* To come back to the baseball theme, in this World Series I think we should all be cheering for the team that “doesn’t practice religious discrimination”:http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/evangelical-litmus-tests-world-series/. On that note, go Red Sox!

Andy Egan pointed out the following quote from “Josh Beckett after his ALCS MVP win”:http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2007/10/22/beckett_captures_another_big_one___mvp/.

bq. Don Sutton used to tell me, ‘Every time you go out there, you’re going to be a different guy. So throughout the course of the year you can be between 30 and 35 people.’

Not only does Heraclitus live, it seems he has a wicked fastball.

This weekend I’m going to be at the “Ryle at Ryerson”:http://www.philosophy.ryerson.ca/ryleatryerson/ conference. It looks like it should be a lot of fun, so any readers who are anywhere near Toronto are encouraged to come along.

When I finish applying sufficient polish to the paper I’m presenting (hopefully later today!) I’ll post it. It will be related to my paper on “epistemic deontology”:http://brian.weatherson.org/ddd.pdf, but with more emphasis on the moral psychology, and *much* more emphasis on Ryle.

Nico Silins sent along this wonderful link to “Snowball the dancing cockatoo”:http://birdloversonly.blogspot.com/2007/09/may-i-have-this-dance.html. I wish I could dance that well! I’d wish I had a cockatoo that could dance that well, but I don’t think that I’d wish a cockatoo an existence this far north of the equator…

On October 26, 27 and 28 there will be a conference at Rutgers (New Brunswick) on metaphysics and physics. The focii of the conference are questions concerning how physics and metaphysics have, do, and ought to inform each other. The speakers are Alan Code, Dean Zimmerman, Cian Dorr, Tim Maudlin, Yuri Balashov and David Albert. If you’re interested in attending, contact the conference organiser Heather Demerast (heatheremerast aht googlemail dawt com).

I’ll be commenting on Dean’s paper. It looks like it should be a fun conference, although some of us may be attending with one eye on the baseball/the nearest iPhone.