There were two things I should have said in yesterday’s post that I didn’t say. So this is in part a retraction (since what I’ll say now qualifies what I said then), in part an addition, and in part an apology for doing an incomplete job the first time.

First, I was presupposing throughout the post that there is such a thing as *a* difference between the natural and gruesome predicates. That might not be right. There might be several distinctions to be drawn in the area, and the vague talk we make of natural and gruesome predicates cuts across the real distinctions. I haven’t seen their paper, but I believe Maya Eddon and Chris Meacham have been developing a line like this in some work, and it might be right. I refuse to believe there is *no* distinction between natural and gruesome predicates, but there might be several relevant distinctions in the area, and if so we have to say things more carefully than I did.

Second, I left out one very important option in my survey of how we might define naturalness for special science terms. In recent work Barry Loewer has been arguing that a Humean can define naturalness via the theory of laws. (I want to be a bit careful here, because Loewer’s paper isn’t published, or even available on “his website”:http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/loewer.html, but I think what I’ll say here is public record from his various presentations of the material.) Lewis thought that we needed to define naturalness before we could work out what the laws are, but Loewer argues (a) that Lewis’s arguments to this effect don’t work, and (b) that we can work out what the laws are and what the natural properties are simultaneously. I think (a) is right and (b) is an interesting step towards a solution. That’s to say, there is an interesting step towards a solution in existence, so some of the pessimism of yesterday’s post was unwarranted. Whether there would be any epistemological payoff from Loewer’s metaphysical theory (even if it were true) is a further, and difficult, question.

The pictures are copyrighted, so I won’t copy any of them here, but there are several more illusions by “Akiyoshi Kitaoka”:http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/shikisai2005.html at his website. For a really striking contrast effect, scroll down to the “Green and Blue Spirals” image.

UPDATE: And here is the page of illusions by “Beau Lotto”:http://www.lottolab.org/Illusions%20page.html at UCL. Thanks to Jamie Dreier for the link. Again the images are copyrighted, so I won’t cut and paste any, but they are utterly remarkable. (Note that one of them is a brown/orange ‘illusion’ that, as Daniel Nolan noted in the previous comment thread, we might want to think twice about saying is illusory.)

Every term when I’m preparing my 101 notes on illusion, I’m amazed by just how good the “checkershadow illusion”:http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html produced by “Edward Adelson”:http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/index.html is. I use this as a way to get the students to feel the force of Descartes’ worries about the reliability of sense perception. Here is the illusion.

The point, as many of you will know, is that A and B are the same shade on the screen. Seeing this is, to say the least, non-trivial. I’ve made a small “powerpoint demonstration”:http://brian.weatherson.org/Adelson.ppt of it, which I’ll be using in class.
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I’m just back from the SOFIA conference on the metaphysics of epistemology, which was quite rewarding. More serious philosophy to follow soon, but first here are a few links to fun things from while I was away.

* A very interesting thread at PEA Soup on “whether APA interviews are worthwhile”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2007/01/is_the_eastern_.html. My short answer is _no_, not least because one opportunity cost of going to the APA is not going to the Boxing Day Test. I’m also pretty moved by the argument Gilbert Harman gives in that comments thread.

* Wo has “a nice quiz”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2007/01/13/A_Quiz on conditionals.

* Kieran Setiya likes Jarman’s “Wittgenstein”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/2007/12/wittgenstein.html for reasons that can be shown not said. (Sorry…)

* “Clayton Littlejohn dissects”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2007/01/god-delusion.html Alvin Platinga’s “review”:http://blog.johndepoe.com/?p=208 of Dawkins’ _The God Delusion_. Let me mention one technical point about something Clayton quotes from Plantinga. Plantinga says that if God is a necessary being, then the probability He exists is 1. I think that’s not right. In the relevant sense, the probability in question is epistemic probability, and the epistemic probability of a necessary truth can be arbitrarily low. Proof: For any (positive) value _x_, there is a true proposition whose probability is _x_. Let _p_ be such a proposition. The _epistemic_ probability of _Actually p_ is the same as the epistemic probability of _p_, which by hypothesis is _x_. So the epistemic probability of this necessary truth, _Actually p_, is _x_. But _x_ was an arbitrary positive value, so the probability of a necessary truth can be arbitrarily low.

* And Daniel Davies “continues his review”:http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/01/this-has-been-so-absurdly-trailed-it.html of _Freakonomics_.

Some potentially helpful info, from Mark Moyer (cut and pasted from his email):

Several of us that were at the APA have asked for, and have been given, a refund for our hotel bills for the final night of the conference (due to the fire). Those who have been given refunds include a few people who were on the 7th floor (where the fire was) as well as one person on the 3rd floor who incurred water damage. I don’t know if they are giving a refund to everyone who asks, or just to those on the 7th floor, or … But presumably many people would like to know this so they too can try to get a refund, whether they were funded by their school or, for many such as graduate students, they were footing the bill themselves. Hence, I thought this might deserve it’s own post on TAR.

Is it better to think of the deaf positively as those who speak America Sign Language, rather than negatively as those who have a distinctive kind of impairment? Sounds good perhaps but here’s Lennard Davis on the reasons not to:

The central problem with defining deaf people as a linguistic group is that to do so, you have to patrol the fire wall between the deaf and nondeaf in very rigid ways. If deaf people are defined as only those who are native users of ASL, you have to define all nonusers of ASL as “other.” That excludes, or at least marginalizes, deaf people who are orally trained — that is, who were taught to eschew ASL for speech alone; have cochlear implants; or never had the chance to learn sign language. Many people who grew up in non-ASL settings in the 1950s and 1960s and who have quite happily thought of themselves as deaf would have to reassign themselves to some other camp. Likewise, the strict linguistic-group definition expels hard-of-hearing people who have not learned ASL. Ironically, the model also stigmatizes those who have been educated orally; they are seen as victims of oral education rather than as victims of audism. Since it is hearing parents who usually make the decision to educate their deaf children orally, rather than with ASL, or to give them cochlear implants, it doesn’t seem fair to define those children as not deaf. The other flaw in the model is that it defines hearing, signing children of deaf adults (CODA’s) as deaf, since they are native sign-language speakers. One could argue that CODA’s aren’t discriminated against by the hearing world, but if one takes that tack, then one has to abandon the idea that language is the key defining term.

To which we can add the following against the specific suggestion considered: it would be crazy to think of the deaf as the community of native speakers of ASL because lots of the deaf speak OTHER sign languages instead.

There’s lots of interesting comments in the thread on disagreement below. I’m about to head off to the SOFIA conference, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to dive into the debate when I’m back. In the meantime, here is the almost complete draft of the doxastic responsibility paper I’ve mentioned a few times here.

bq. “Deontology and Descartes’ Demon”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DatD.pdf

The paper tries to cover a lot of ground. Here are the key points.

* We need to distinguish the claims that beliefs are volitional from the claims that they are voluntary and that they are free. (The importance of this distinction is made clear in Ryle’s _Concept of Mind_, and it plays an important role in some contemporary moral psychology.)
* We also need to distinguish claims about whether belief formation is volitional/voluntary/free from claims about whether belief maintenance is volitional/voluntary/free.
* So there are six possible claims here, and if any of them are true that would imply that we have some level of responsibility for beliefs.
* Given that, whether belief formation is volitional isn’t particularly relevant to whether we have responsibility for beliefs.
* There are close parallels between belief formation/maintenance and other actions that are free (and perhaps voluntary) and beliefs, from which I conclude that the formation and maintenance of many beliefs is free (and perhaps voluntary).
* But some beliefs (esp perceptual beliefs) are formed unfreely, and at least in the short term are maintained unfreely.
* So while we have responsibility for some beliefs, we don’t have responsibility for all beliefs, and this matters for epistemology.
* This dichotomy opens up a defence of externalism from the new evil demon argument. The defence is similar to, though I think not quite identical with, the defence offered by externalists such as “Clayton Littlejohn”:http://www.geocities.com/cmlittlejohn/reldemfin.pdf (PDF).
* Although epistemic justification is a deontological concept, it should not be construed as being something like blamelessness; rather, having justified beliefs for which one is responsible is a respect in which one is praiseworthy.

Along the way, there are a few asides about will, self-control, evidence and other concepts, as well as a running commentary (mostly in footnotes) on the relevance of various Rylean observations to my argument and to various related works in moral psychology. So the paper is probably not as focussed as it might have been, but I hope it is fun anyway!

On a different note, but keeping with the theme of the blog in recent days, the final “Arché Vagueness Conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/vagueness/index.html will be held this June, and the call for papers is at the attached link. It’s a lot of fun being in St Andrews, especially when there’s all that daylight around the solstice, and it looks like the philosophy they’ll have on show will be absolutely first class.

Another conference, this time a little further afield…

Call for Papers

Eleventh Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XI)
June 25-27, 2007
Brussels, Belgium, http://www.tark.be

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The website for the 2007 edition of the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference is up now. This is a great conference – if you’re a philosopher in the market for summer conference-attending, you should probably send them a paper! The site is here.