I’m not going to have great net access for a while, so I’ve closed off comments on all the old posts to prevent the site being covered in spam when I get back. I’ve left the last two threads, both of which seem fairly active, open for now so I hope that’s not too big a target for the spammers to hit.

“Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/ posts a new paper, “Lewisian Meaning Without Naturalness”:http://www.umsu.de/words/magnetism.pdf arguing against an interpretation of Lewis’s theory of meaning that has been promoted by Ted Sider, Robert Stalnaker, and me. (At least if I’m wrong I’m in good company!) Well worth reading closely.

“Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000708.html links to Edge’s “World Question Centre”:http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html which each year asks an open-ended question, in this case “What is your dangerous idea?”. Cleis notes that of the 117 luminaries they get to answer the question, only 11 are female. This isn’t a very good effort on their part at getting a good cross-representation. Sadly, their representation of non-whites, or even of us southern hemisphereans, isn’t great either.

“Prosblogion”:http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/ links to “this article on ID”:http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051221/News01/512210382/CAT=News01 in the South Bend Tribune featuring a few Notre Dame philosophers. One lowlight is this contribution from Alvin Plantinga.

bq. But, Plantinga asked and answered, who should decide what children are taught in schools? Parents. According to Plantinga, the majority of people are against the form of unguided evolution that says life as we have it “arose without the benefit of divine design.”

Well this is an indirect quote, so we should give Plantinga the benefit of the doubt that what he said isn’t as absurd as what he’s reported as having said. And I’d bet most of the biology books Plantinga is (implicitly) criticising don’t say that life arose without divine design, but instead say how life arose in a way that is (a) true, (b) doesn’t _require_ a divine designer, and perhaps (c) leaves it a little mysterious why a designer would have chosen this means. But that’s very different from _teaching_ there is no divine origin to the world. And let’s still note something else wrong with what’s reported.

Imagine a mythical community that takes the passages in the bible indicating that pi equals 3 so seriously that they insist this be taught in maths classes. (Or, more relevantly, that 51% of the community thinks this.) By Plantinga’s lights the parents should get to insist that in their students’ maths texts, pi equals 3 is to be taught. Now two interesting questions arise.

# Is there any grounds for supporting the parents’ right to have ID taught that wouldn’t extend to a right to these mythical parents to have pi equals 3 taught?
# Would it do more intellectual damage to (a) teach that the broadly Darwinian story about the development of species is false or (b) teach that the broadly “Lambertian”:http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Lambert.html story about the irrationality of pi is false?

I think the answers are ‘no’ and (a). I also think that’s a reductio of Plantinga’s (reported) position, but your mileage may vary. There is a hard political philosophy problem around here, the problem of the outvoted democrat, but I’ll leave off at this.

So at the APA I was planning to attend this session on epistemic modals featuring Kai von Fintel, Thony Gillies and John MacFarlane. Unfortunately events intervened and Kai couldn’t make it. For better or worse, the organisers decided that it would be best if someone else, namely me, presented Kai’s paper. This kind of thing isn’t unusual at APAs, people often read out other people’s papers, but in this case I just had the slides to go off. Fortunately they were very good slides, as you can see “here”:http://mit.edu/fintel/www/apa-slides.pdf, and combined with some guidance from Thony and Andy Egan, I was able to stumble through fairly easily. I even learned something interesting from the paper.

Imagine the following situation. I’m standing in the hotel lobby, on the phone to Andy who is back in his room. I see some people coming in from outside with wet umbrellas and water dripping off their clothes. It seems I can say either (1) or (2) to Andy. (I assume he’s not looking out his window, so weather news is really news to him.)

(1) It must be raining.
(2) It is raining.

Now change the situation a little. I don’t say anything to Andy on seeing the wet people, but wait until I step outside, then report. Now (2) is OK, but (1) seems dubious. So in this context we have

(1) #It must be raining.
(2) It is raining.

It seems that (1) is not a proper assertion when I have direct visual knowledge of the rain. Philosophers (at least philosophers of my acquaintance) usually take the difference between (1) and (2) to be that (1) is only true if someone salient knows that it is raining. But it seems that (1) requires more, namely that the knowledge is somewhat indirect.

That’s what Kai suggested in the paper. I had various long discussions with Andy Egan, Kenny Easwaran and others about what might count as direct and indirect knowledge. The upshot seemed to be when it comes to perception, most anything except direct visual inspection counts as indirect, which is somewhat interesting.

But the most interesting thing I heard was a point that Ishani made. It seems that for the purposes of this exercise at least, testimonial knowledge counts as *direct* knowledge. (This contradicts the chart that Kai quotes in his slides.) To see this, imagine that Ishani tells me that the Packers won, and I thereby come to know that the Packers won, and Andy doesn’t know this. It seems I can use (4) but not (3).

(3) #The Packers must have won.
(4) The Packers won.

Note that I can say something like (5).

(5) Ishani said that Packers won, and she’s always right about these things, so the Packers must have won.

It is just standalone (3) that seems odd. But this isn’t really a distinction with (1)/(2), because it doesn’t sound _too_ much worse to say (6).

(6) I have a visual impression of heavy rain, and my visual impressions are always reliable, so it must be raining.

Well, (6) isn’t great, but neither is (5) if Ishani’s reliability about football is something that is too obvious to mention (as it is).

Anyway, I now think I’ve learned two things in under a week. First, English has “evidential”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality terms. Second, the ‘swamp epistemology’ of English groups (at least for these purposes) visual observation and testimony together, and separate from inference, and (arguably) non-visual perception. That’s quite a lot to learn from looking at a few small pairs like that.

I’m trying to cut down the number of classified ads on TAR, which makes me glad there are blogs for this kind of thing. In particular, there is an excellent blog run by “Tina Huggins”:http://www.fsu.edu/%7Ephilo/people/grad/thuggins.html,

bq. “Philosophy Conferences and Calls for Papers”:http://www.philosophyconferences.com/

The name is probably self-explanatory, but it provides links to upcoming conferencs and calls for papers, including calls for conference papers. Hat Tip: “Clayton”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2005/12/cool-new-to-me-service.html.

Having said that, there is a conference coming up in upstate NY.

bq. “Syracuse Grad Conference”:http://web.syr.edu/~degould/philgradconf2006.html.

While on the announcements, I notice the “Missouri folks”:http://www.missouri.edu/~philwww/show-me/?p=117 were plugging Blackwell’s service for annoucing journal tables of contents by email. This service is useful, but if you _really_ want to keep up to date, the thing to do is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of the various journals. For instance, here is the feed for “Mind”:http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/rss and for “Nous”:http://api.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/nous/latest?format=rss, and there are plenty more available (for free) through “Ingenta”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/subcat;jsessionid=24bq96jfr8npg.victoria?j_subject=223&j_availability=. (This post has been edited slightly for clarity.)

“Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2003/02/24/The_Problem_of_Conjunctive_Events has a nice schema for how to generate counterexamples to transitivty of causation, assuming that something like the causation as influence theory is correct. Here’s an instance of his schema, designed to show that some of the things Lewis wants to say about events are in conflict.
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“Certain Doubts”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/?p=489 reports that the new “Philosophical Perspectives”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/phpe/19/1/ is out, including one of “my favourite papers”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf. Comments are open over there, so I’ll leave them closed here.

A lot of philosophers have NedStat counters on their webpage. (A lot of them because I might have suggested it at one stage.) Recently NedStat has taken to having its ‘free’ counters be supported by popup ads. The effect of this is that if your page has a NedStat counter on it, readers may get a lovely popup thrown at them. I’ve already had this on two webpages I visited that are housed on university servers, and where I wouldn’t expect popups. (And I’d think having such commercial popups would be a violation of all sorts of perfectly good university policies.) I’m sure this is all inadvertant, but I’d like to recommend that everyone remove the NedStat counters as soon as possible unless they are sure that their counters do not generate popups.

Well, I’d finally clean out my email inbox for a start. And I’d read many more of the things in the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org and “Brad DeLong’s links”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/12/if_i_had_infini_4.html. But instead I’ll just mention a finite number of things that I’d like to spend more time on.

David Wallace, “Language Use in a Branching Universe”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert0130/papers/branching.pdf – what should our semantics of tense look like if time happens, as a matter of contingent fact, to be branching? I’d be tempted to start using a MacFarlane-style relativist semantics, which Wallace doesn’t consider. But what he does consider looks fascinating.

Paul Pietroski, “Interpreting Concatenation and Concatenates”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Epietro/research/papers/ICC.pdf – as he says “Some readers may find this shorter but denser version, which ignores issues about vagueness and causal constructions, easier to digest. The emphasis is on the treatments of plurality and quantification, and I assume at least some familiarity with more standard approaches.” I’m not sure that I find ‘shorter and denser’ versions easier to digest, either when we’re talking about stacks of pancakes or semantics papers.

Jeremy Butterfield, “Against Pointillisme about Mechanics”:http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002553/01/APM1.pdf – an argument that Humean Supervenience can’t handle even the vector quantities of classical mechanics, and in particular that it can’t handle velocity. I’m not sure I follow it all, I’m in particular not sure what he means by ‘perdurantism’, I’d like to be able to follow it all.

Frank Jackson and Michael Smith have “a very nice new paper”:http://www.princeton.edu/~msmith/mypapers/Absolutist%20ethical%20theories%20and%20uncertainty.pdf on a puzzle for absolutist ethical theories. An absolutist ethical theory is a theory that says actions of a certain kind (call it K) cannot be done, no matter how good the consequences that would result from doing such an action. So an absolutist might, for instance, say that it is always impermissible to kill an innocent person, no matter how many lives we might save that way.

Frank and Michael (hereafter FM) point out that it will always be uncertain whether a particular action is or is not of kind K. And an ethical theory that tells us we cannot do things when they are of kind K, should tell us what to do when they are probably, or perhaps, of kind K. That question, they argue, absolutists cannot give a satisfactory answer to. I don’t want to defend absolutism, which I think is generally absurd to be frank, but I’m not sure FM have quite put their finger on exactly where the problem is.
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