Ryle offers a regress argument for the impossibility of reducing knowing how to knowing that. Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson in “Knowing How”:http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ejasoncs/JPHIL.pdf (PDF) suggest a way to block the regress. I think Ryle anticipated their reply, and has something interesting to say about it. I’m not sure whether Ryle’s response works, but it is I think a response. (What I’m going to say is similar to what Alva Noe says in his “Against Intellectualism”:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/journals/analysis/preprints/NOE2.pdf (PDF), but I hope different enough to be worth saying.)
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In a couple of places, e.g. “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2006/06/14/fundamentalism-and-knowledge/ and “here (PDF)”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dpww.pdf I’ve suggested that Ryle’s argument against Descartes relies (illegitimately) on general sceptical principles about induction. I now think that’s something of a mistake. (As Michael Kremer was trying to point out to me at the time.)
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More YouTube fun.

When I changed over to WordPress, I tried to keep the layout pretty much as it was. And on a few browsers it seems I did. But on some versions of Safari, only the main column, not the header or either side column, is showing. This isn’t the case on all versions of Safari, but it is happening on some. Does anyone who knows more about what is distinctive about Safari know what could be going wrong?

I haven’t yet figured out (a) how to make a list like my sidebar links to posts I see, or (b) whether I want to do this, so for now I’ll put interesting links in main posts. Here are two posts on causation:

bq. Joshua Knobe on “causal judgments and normative judgments”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2006/07/the_doingallowi.html
Wo on “causation and the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis account of Theoretical Terms”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2006/07/15/Causation_and_the_Ramsey_Carnap_Lewis_account_of_theoretical_terms

I also haven’t decided whether to bring back the Monday Message Board. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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I’m putting together the syllabus for my Fall intro course, and once again I’m very grateful for Jim Pryor’s “page of teaching resources”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/index.html. His directions to students on “how to read philosophy papers”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/reading.html, “how to write philosophy papers”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html and “what we’re looking for while grading philosophy papers”:http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/grades.html are exactly what I wish I’d written for my students. Happily, I can now just point to these rather than trying to write them myself. I have linked to these before, but I suspect a few other people writing syllabi, especially those teaching for the first time, will be happy to be reminded of the links.

Sorry about some of the delays in getting comments to appear. I think I had too many layers of security. I still have _two_ of the three layers. You have to register to post, and if you haven’t commented before (I’m not sure whether comments pre-WordPress move count) I have to approve the comment. Other than that, it should be a case of comment away! (Delays in me replying to comments are not because of technical errors, but because I’m slow in coming up with interesting things to say in reply.)

There have been a bunch of new philosophy blogs appear (or appear on my radar screen) recently. Here are some of them.

* “Lemmings”:http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/
* “Brain Brain”:http://brainbrain.blogspot.com/
* “de crapulas edormiendo”:http://decrapulasedormiendo.blogspot.com/
* “Philosophy from the Left Coast”:http://brianberkey.blogspot.com/
* “Reality Conditions”:http://realityconditions.blogspot.com/

UPDATE – And another: “Knowability”:http://knowability.blogspot.com/

Following up on the causation post the other day, I’ve been reading some very interesting stuff by “Phillip Wolff”:http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pwolff/CLSLab.htm, especially stuff about experiments on when people will use causitives, and when they’ll merely use causal phrases. “This paper”:http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pwolff/papers/DirectCausation.pdf has tons of references and some fun experiments.

Slate “reviews the Language Log blog book”:http://www.slate.com/id/2143324/?nav=ais. I was going to call it a blook, but that term seems to have a “dubious history”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blook.

“The Onion”:http://www.theonion.com/content/index/4228/5 has been reviewing its greatest hits of the first ten years online. If you don’t want to do any other work today, click over there.

I promise that this blog won’t descend into a place where we post nothing but YouTube videos. (Even if I don’t have many interesting actual thoughts to post.) But below the fold is the first descent into this madness. We have two pieces of evidence that people have way too much time on their hands.
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For several reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about causation recently. And one thing that has come up in a few places is the variety of causal talk that we have. Consider the following two claims.

bq. (1) Andy turned the TV on.
(3) Andy caused the TV to be turned on.

The two claims are fairly clearly distinct. Imagine that I have the habit of turning on the TV any time someone drives a red car down my street. Andy drives a red car down my street, so I turn the TV on. Then (3) is true but (1) is false. I’m pretty sure (1) entails (3), but it is clearly the case that (1) can be false and (3) true.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of a discussion I had with Zoltan Szab{o’} about where claims like (2) fit into the equation.

bq. (2) Andy made the TV turn on.

I think (after being prodded by Zoltan in this direction) that (2) is strictly weaker than (1) and strictly stronger than (3).

The latter claim should be easy enough to prove. It seems in the case I gave above (3) is true, but (2) seems false. But anyone who causes a TV to turn on makes it turn on, so (2) is strictly stronger than (3).

It’s the former claim that I worry about. Anyone who turns on a TV makes it turn on, so the entailment of (2) by (1) isn’t a problem. The interesting question I think is whether (1) can be false and (2) true. Here are three cases that suggest it might be true.

bq. (4) Andy discovers my habit of turning on the TV when a red car drives down the street. Desiring that the TV be turned on, he drives down my street in a red car. I observe him, and this causes me to turn the TV on.

bq. (5) Andy asks me to turn on the TV. I do so.

bq. (6) Andy, who is President, orders me, a lowly soldier, to turn on the TV. Since I don’t feel like being court-martialled for insubordination, I do so.

In (4) it is clear that Andy doesn’t turn on the TV, but it isn’t clear (I think) that he makes the TV turn on. Perhaps the case is similar enough to our original case that he doesn’t do so.

In (6) it is clear that Andy does make the TV turn on, but perhaps he does turn on the TV. Note that if we change the verb, we get cases where we will clearly use a causitive construction. If Andy commanded me not to turn on the TV, but to kill various prisoners, then we’d say that he killed them. At least, that’s what we do say about dictators who kill thousands, or millions, of their subjects.

I suspect (5) is the best case for one where Andy makes the TV turn on without turning it on. It would be odd, not impossible but odd, to deny either of these claims. So I’m inclined to think that (2) is strictly intermediate between (1) and (3).

The next question is how much this three-way distinction matters to familiar debates about causation. I’m inclined to think it matters a lot, in two respects. (The rest of this is going to be very speculative.)

First, whether a particular event is a causing of something phi, a making something phi, or a phi-ing matters, I suspect, to our intuitions about the causal relevance of other events that are causally connected to it.

Second, causation, understood as the relation being picked out in (3), might be much less philosophically and practically interesting than the making relation, or the relation that is relevant to causitives, like _killed_ or _turned on_. Call that latter relation R. I think both the making relation and R occur much more commonly in regular thought and talk than the causal relation, and that both concepts are acquired at an earlier age than the general causal concept. And I suspect, though I have no idea how one would prove this, that the making relation and R figure in more analyses than the causal relation itself does.