On some sort of principle, I don’t bet on sporting events. But for research purposes (seriously!) I was looking up the odds to win the division on “this site”:http://www.bet365.com/home/default.asp. And the NL odds are just crazy. The Cardinals are at 1.38 to win the _Central_. That would be about fair odds if the other teams had an 8 game head start. The only team I can really see getting close to them are the Brewers, who are at 12.00. If I were the gambling type (and I’m not), I’d have $100 on the Cards and $12 on the Brew Crew, for just about a guaranteed $26 – $32 return. In the NL East, the Braves are at 2.65. I’d say anyone who doesn’t believe the Braves will win the East again is an example of the inductive sceptic we talk about in epistemology classes as if they were a fictional character.

There is basically no positive return for me writing this, but if the Cubs or Astros win I bet I’ll never hear the end of it. So unlike the gambling strategy above, I seem to have settled on a lose-lose proposition. (And that’s why I don’t bet.) If the Mets or Phillies win I’ll be shocked (because induction is a good way to learn after all), but no more shocked than I was at seeing white swans I guess.

By the way, if the markets were liquid enough there would be arbitrage possibilities between Bet365 and “Tradesports”:http://tradesports.com/aav2/trading/tradingHTML.jsp?evID=44246&eventSelect=44246&updateList=true&showExpired=false#, especially on the Brewers Indians, but I suspect you can’t find enough traders to really take advantage of it.

(This post updated because I miscalculated which team had a sure win bet going. Another reason I don’t do this with real money…)

The weekly post for any sort of announcement to do with philosophy. The previous MMB, which contains several interesting announcements, is “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004693.html.

Why exactly do people underline large passages of _library_ books? Why, in particular, did one of the two people to previously borrow the book I’m currently working on underline large (and often random-seeming) passages _in pen_? It can’t be that much use for going back to. A notebook telling you which are the key pages/passages would do that, and the text that you’re meant to highlight is harder to read once it has pen lines all over it. If you really want to (a) remember a passage and (b) record it in a way that you can go back to, the answer is to type out the passages into a Word document. So this practice seems imprudent as well as inconsiderate.</rant>

Juan Comesana pointed me to “this discussion”:http://digg.com/science/Are_you_Living_in_a_Computer_Simulation__2 of Nick Bostrom’s “Simulation Argument”:http://www.simulation-argument.com/matrix.html at “digg.com”:http://digg.com/. I haven’t read through all of the comments, and I think Zeno’s paradox would prevent reading _all_ of them in any case. But they don’t seem to have got to “my reply”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sims.pdf, and I wouldn’t be a real blogger if I didn’t take this opportunity for self-promotion.

It’s been a while since I wrote it, but I think my reply holds up OK. If I was doing it now I’d make much more of the evidential internalism assumption in Bostrom’s argument. It is very intuitive at first that we have the same evidence as a BIV. I guess if it wasn’t I guess these sceptical arguments wouldn’t have the pull they actually do. But I don’t think that a purely phenomenal account of evidence actually has much to be said for it on reflection. It seems to be constitutive of the notion of evidence that evidence is a guide to the truth. So even if _our_ evidence is constituted by our phenomenal states (which I doubt), we shouldn’t think that a BIV’s evidence is constituted by _its_ phenomenal states, because its phenomenal states don’t give it any information about how the world is. So we don’t have the same evidence as a BIV, so nothing about its doxastic/epistemic state is relevant to our doxastic/epistemic state. And that’s even ignoring the worries about indifference that I set out (at interminable length) in “that paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sims.pdf and in “the paper on Elga’s indifference principle”:http://brian.weatherson.org/evil.pdf.

I really will start writing substantive things for the blog again one day. Until then…

* “Clayton Littlejohn on the New Evil Demon Argument”:http://www.geocities.com/cmlittlejohn/reldemfin.pdf (PDF)
* “Allan Hazlett reviews essays on The Matrix”:http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=5481
* “Peter Ludlow’s Wikipedia Page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ludlow; and finally
* Perhaps “Etan Thomas”:http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blackhistory/news/story?id=2343032 should be the Pride of Syracuse

And a couple more, now that Ludlow’s Wikipedia page has gone tamer

* “Slate on Experimental Philosophy”:http://www.slate.com/id/2137223/
* “Inside HigherEd on Going Academically AWOL”:http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney

As I’ve mentioned before, I get a lot of requests these days to have things announced via the blog. So I’m constantly trying to find a way to balance getting announcements out with keeping the site uncluttered and content-focussed. Here’s the latest attempt.

Every Monday, I’ll put up a ‘message board’ post where people can leave announcements in the comments of any kind they want concerning philosophy or things connected to philosophy. Because the spam situation is getting under control, I’ve loosened some of the restrictions on links in comments, so you should be able to include links in the announcements. If there’s something you want publicised on the blog then, announce it on the message board.

In comments I’ve left two messages that people sent in before I started the message board. Obviously in future it would be easier to cut out the middle man (i.e. me) and post these directly.

Via “Finnegans Wake”:http://finnswake.blogspot.com/2006/02/peter-strawson-rip.html, I found a link back to a really well written “obituary of David Lewis”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,579258,00.html by Jane O’Grady. I remember at the time that the American obituaries about Lewis mentioned modal realism and very little but modal realism. And while of course modal realism gets a run here, it’s a very good systematic account of what’s valuable in Lewis’s philosophy. (As well as mentioning many of the reasons so many people were so fond of Lewis in person.) Anyway, the reason I’m linking to it here is to note the start of the final paragraph.

bq. Lewis restored philosophical respectability to systematic metaphysics. Like Hume, he tried to reconcile a scientific conception of the world with how it actually appears to us.

I’m not entirely sure this is the most perspicuous way to describe Hume, but as a claim about Lewis it seems just right. I bring this up mainly to be self-deprecating. I think focussing on this reconciliation project is the “right way to read Lewis”:http://lewisblog.weatherson.org/archives/004572.html, but I don’t think in saying that I’m being particularly groundbreaking. Still, I’m not sure it’s been said in the unpopular press quite so clearly before, so perhaps there’s some value in me continuing to say it.

Peter Lasersohn’s paper Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste is now out in “Linguistics and Philosophy”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/ling/2005/00000028/00000006/00000596 (subscription required). This is potentially going to have a big impact on the debates about relativism. Laserhohn used to be a contextualist about taste, but changed to being a relativist, much like my trajectory on conditionals.

My Lewis seminar has been (and will be) discussing whether the role that qualities play in Lewis’s metaphysics, and whether that role could be best played by quantities instead. (Short answer: Yes. The longer answer is being written.) The biggest influence on my thinking on this has been discussions I’ve had with John Hawthorne, but I should also mention a paper by “David Denby”:http://ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/people/denby.shtml called “Determinable Nominalism”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/search/article?author=denby&year_from=2001&year_to=2006&database=1&pageSize=20&index=24 (subscription required) that discusses many of the motivations for moving away from a pure object/property view towards an object/quantity view. (UPDATE: Denby’s paper is now available “via Tufts”:http://ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/people/Determinable_Nominalism__Philosophical_Studies__vol._103__No.3__February__2001_.doc.)

Metaphysical Mayhem is being transformed this year from a faculty-based conference to something largely directed at grad students. See “here”:http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~shievak/MM.htm. Something more like the traditional Mayhem is the “Mereology, Topology and Location”:http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~shievak/MTL.htm conference taking place in October. By Nozick’s ‘closest continuant’ principle, I think I’m tempted to say that the conference called ‘Mereology etc’ _is_ this year’s Mayhem, and the conference called ‘Mayhem’ is a new conference type. Perhaps we should have a conference on conferential identity to work this out.

Finally, frequent TAR commentor Robert Allen has a paper on “The Mereology of Events”:http://www.ifs.csic.es/sorites/Issue_16/allen.htm in the latest “Sorites”:http://www.ifs.csic.es/sorites/Issue_16/index.htm. I don’t think I kept track of _Sorites_ when I ran “OPP”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/, which was a mistake on my part, but one that I see that Jonathan “has corrected”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/2006/02/february_17_2006.html.

UPDATE: Two more links.

The latest Philosophical Studies is on bridges between formal and traditional epistemology. From browsing the abstracts some of the bridges seem more elaborately designed on the side of the formal shore, but hopefully there is interesting stuff here. There is obviously a lot of potential for this kind of project (see, for instance, Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument) as long as we take both sides of the river seriously.

At the “Symposium on Gender, Race and Philosophy”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/, Elizabeth Anderson’s reply to the comments on her paper “Uses of Value Judgments in Feminist Social Science: A Case Study of Research on Divorce” has now been posted.

The pride of Syracuse, “Jason Stanley”:http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/stanley.html is coming home to do a talk at S.U. next Friday at 3.30pm in the philosophy department. The title is “Meaning, Use and Truth”. If I was doing the talk I would have rearranged the second and third conjuncts for historical resonance.

Below the fold are some thoughts on three blog entries on or linked by the “Leiter blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/.
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