One of the ways to understand what Humean Supervenience (HS) amounts to is to work out which worlds it is true at. So I want to explore for now whether HS could possibly be true in the worlds of the Harry Potter novels. This requires only a little knowledge of the Harry Potter novels, most of which I’ll explain as I go along. The payoff for this little investigation will be a rather serious problem for Lewis’s theory of laws, but that’s a fair way off.
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The online papers blog has fallen into a little bit of disrepair (that will hopefully get fixed shortly) but in the meantime I should note a few updates. So here are two.

* “Tim Crane’s online papers”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctydtc/Crane%20online%20papers.htm including “Is there a perceptual relation?”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctydtc/Perceptual%20relation.doc and “Brentano’s Concept of Intentional Inexistence”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctydtc/Brentano%20paper.doc (both Word docs.)
* John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan, “What Would Telelogical Causation Be?”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dpn/docs/TeleologyHawthorneNolan.pdf (PDF)
* Alex Byrne, “Soames on Quine and Davidson”:http://web.mit.edu/abyrne/www/soamesonQandD.pdf (PDF)
* Andy Egan, “Imagination, Delusion and Self-Deception”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/bim.11.11.pdf (PDF)
* Jonathan Ichikawa, “Truth and Truth in Fiction: Authorial Authority and Making it So”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/gradstudents/papers/jichikawa-ttf.pdf (PDF)
* Richard Heck, “Frege’s Contribution to Philosophy of Language”:http://bobjweil.com/heck/pdf/unpublished/FregeContribution.pdf (PDF)
* Robert Williams’s “Work in Progress Page”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phljrgw/wip.htm including “Is supervaluational consequence logically revisionary?”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phljrgw/wip/revisionism.pdf (PDF)
* Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, “Concepts”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/ from the SEP

Jerry Dworkin pointed out to me that Mike Leigh’s film “All or Nothing” contains a scene that seems to support interest-relative-invariantism. The script is “here”:http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a/all-or-nothing-script-transcript.html, though be warned that link contains pop-ups.

bq. Husband: Give us a clue, then.
Wife: ‘Biblical son of Isaac, five letters.’ Starting with a ‘J.’
H: Jonah.
W: Oh, yeah.
H: No, it ain’t. It’s what’s-his-name. Jacob.
W: Are you sure?
H: Yeah.
W: It’s a thousand pound prize.
H: Is it? No, I ain’t sure, then.

Well, maybe it is only interest-relative-invariantism about ‘sure’, rather than ‘knows’, but it seemed like a good way to celebrate the “publishing of Jason Stanley’s book on IRI”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/?p=480. More on IRI after the fold.
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Thony Gillies has “a new paper”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thony/counterfactual_scorekeeping.pdf up defending a strict implication account of subjunctive conditionals. That is, he says that (1) can be analysed as (2), with the quantifier in (2) being restricted by context, as many quantifiers are restricted by context.

(1) If it were the case that _p_, it would be the case that _q_.
(2) In all worlds where _p_ is true, _q_ is true.

The usual argument against this, tracing back to Lewis, involves what Thony calls Sobel sequences, such as the following examples from Lewis.

(3) If the USA were to throw its nukes into the sea tomorrow, there would be war; but of course, if the USA and all the other superpowers were to throw their nukes into the sea tomorrow there would be peace.

It is possible that both conjuncts of (3) are non-trivially true, but this is not possible on the strict conditional analysis. There’s a few responses one can make to this argument of course. As Jason Stanley has pointed out, quantifier domains can move around fairly quickly; certainly they can be different either side of a semi-colon. So it isn’t obvious the strict implication theory has this consequence. Another response notes that on Lewis’s own account, (4) should be just as good as (3), but it isn’t.

(4) If the USA and all the other superpowers were to throw their nukes into the sea tomorrow there would be peace; but of course, if the USA were to throw its nukes into the sea tomorrow, there would be war.

Now here’s the question I’m getting to. Thony credits this observation to Irene Heim, as reported in a 1999 paper of Kai von Fintel’s. Is that really the earliest source? I thought it was made in the 1996 McCawley paper that Thony cites, if not before – but I don’t have that paper on me so I can’t tell. Anyone out there with an instant encyclopedic knowledge of the history of conditionals who can help?

I should say that I very strongly suspect this point is one that many many people independently discovered, so given the speed (or lack thereof) with which some things get into print, I expect that there will be many good candidates for the honour of having discovered the distinction.

*UPDATE* – It seems I was totally wrong about my historical recollections. See the comments. And of course see Thony’s paper for a nice way to handle the data within a strict implication theory.

It’s around the time of year when undergraduates start thinking about graduate school, so naturally it’s the time of year for overheated blog posts on why going to grad school is meant to be a Very Bad Idea. The latest of these is from Dean Dad, who wants to Stop the Cycle of Abuse, i.e. stop people going to grad school. The reasons given are all fairly standard factoids – it’s a huge opportunity cost, it takes forever, and the job market is awful. None of these are good reasons, and it would be an awful decision to not apply to graduate schools because of posts like these.

Now it is true that going to grad school does block you off from doing many other things with your 20s, such as being a professional athelete. But for many people grad school days are some of the most enjoyable of their lives, so the fact they last a while is hardly a major cost. And the job market is, at least for a lot of grad students, much better than the horror stories you’ll find on blogs suggest. Here, for instance, are the placement records for recent years of the philosophy departments at Princeton, Rutgers, NYU and MIT, four of the best East Coast philosophy programs. Note that these are the complete records – they include everyone who graduated, not just those who got headline jobs.
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bq. “Humeans Aren’t Out of Their Minds”:http://brian.weatherson.org/haootm.pdf

This is an update of a paper I posted a while ago, expanding a little on what Humeanism is, and why it is invulnerable to the criticisms John Hawthorne launched in “Humeans are Out of Their Minds”.

bq. “What Kinds of Things Are Natural”:http://brian.weatherson.org/wkotan.pdf

This is a short note arguing that the Lewisian picture works much more smoothly if you take the things that are more or less natural to be _functions_ from objects to magnitudes rather than _properties_. It’s indebted heavily to soon to be published work of John Hawthorne’s. Daniel Nolan tells me that Jack Smart has a similar view somewhere, but I haven’t been able to chase down the reference for that yet. So this probably isn’t an original view, but then again I’m much happier defending views of Smart’s than original views of my own!

Ishani was discussing the following kind of example, and I wanted to get feedback from others who might have clearer intuitions than I.

Billy lives in a house that is painted red on the outside, but every room is painted bright yellow. To get a sense of how yellow, imagine every room looks like this

p=. !http://brian.weatherson.org/dizzee.jpg!

except without Dizzee Rascal, and with yellow floors. His house is _yellow_.

Suzy lives in a house that has a perfectly normal, white walls brown wooden floors interior, but every part of the outside is yellow. When driving down the street, people often look out and say _That house is yellow_.

No other house on the street has a yellow exterior or a yellow interior.

Question: How many yellow houses are there on the street?
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Next Friday, Singapore plans to hang Van Tuong Nguyen, a 25 year old man from Glen Waverley, the Melbourne suburb where I grew up. Nguyen’s crime against the state of Singapore was to change planes in Singapore while en route from Cambodia to Australia carrying 396 grams of heroin. I can see, dimly, how doing this kind of thing could be a crime against Cambodia, and a crime against Australia, but I can’t see how this kind of action could justifiably be punished by Singapore, when he hadn’t even “passed through passport control into Singapore”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/singapores-deadly-sling/2005/10/24/1130006058340.html and clearly had no intention of doing so.

And of course even if we do think Singapore is justified in punishing Nguyen for his crimes, the idea that hanging is the appropriate punishment for attempting to sell heroin would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. Either Singapore should hang people for putting together plans to commit murder, or they are implying that drug trading is worse than murder. Either option is nonsensical.

Anyway, at this stage the important thing isn’t to debate just how absurd Singapore’s position is, but to do something. “Amnesty International Australia”:http://www.amnesty.org.au/ has a number of links for writing to the salient Singaporese ministers to beg for them to change their minds. The very least one could expect our government to be doing is not doing more favours for the Singapore government while they plan to murder an Australian, but that seems “too much for John Howard”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/11/23/crime.singapore.reut/, even when proposed by one of his own MPs.

In the latest _Philosophical Studies_, Jonathan Schaffer launches a series of objections to Interest Relative Invariantism. I suspect most of these will end up being clashes of intuitions, though maybe I’ll write something more about them later. What I want to focus on here are Jonathan’s arguments concerning knowledge claims involving embedded questions. Jonathan claims these support contextualism, but I don’t really understand how that could be true. What he does seem to raise is a problem about how to understand embedded questions.
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