Today’s “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org/archives/004491.html contains links to two online books.

bq. Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni, “Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory”:http://www.princeton.edu/%7Eharman/Papers/Book.pdf (PDF).

bq. Ralph Wedgwood, “The Nature of Normativity”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emert1230/book/contents.htm.

I wasn’t really sure where it fits onto the papers blog, but it’s also worth noting that the latest issue of the house journal of “CAPPE”:http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/cappe/publications.php, _Res Publica_, is “now available”:http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/cappe/docs/Res_Publica%2013.2%20pdf.pdf.

Via “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000619.html I was pointed to a “Harry Potter personality test”:http://piratemonkeysinc.com/quiz.htm. It’s basically a crude Myers-Briggs with Harry Potter characters for each of the types, but nevertheless it is amusing. Here’s me.

Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

Via “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000619.html I was pointed to a “Harry Potter personality test”:http://piratemonkeysinc.com/quiz.htm. It’s basically a crude Myers-Briggs with Harry Potter characters for each of the types, but nevertheless it is amusing. Here’s me.

Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

Book reviews seem to be the most popular thing on this site. Maybe I should move to doing them full time! Anyway, here’s another review, this one headed for _Mind_.

bq. Review of David Lewis by Daniel Nolan

This month’s edition of _Philosophical Studies_ has a symposium on Truth and the Absence of Fact by Hartry Field that looks like it should be interesting. The contributors are Anil Gupta, José Martínez-Fernández, Barry Loewer and Vann McGee. For various reasons I haven’t had a chance to look it over yet, but if I get a chance I’ll write up some observations.

First at “Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/004748.html and now in “a paper”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/knowledge.pdf Allan Hazlett has been arguing against the claim that knowledge is factive. Since the paper refers rather generously to my work, it would be churlish to criticise it too strongly. Nevertheless…
Continue reading →

Carrie Jenkins, a philosopher from St Andrews who many of you will know from her participation on various blog discussion boards, now has a blog, and it already has several substantive entries on epistemology and meaning.

bq. “Long Words Bother Me”:http://longwordsbotherme.blogspot.com/

While waiting for my English language version of the latest Harry Potter to make its way across the ocean, I’ve been reading the fifth book again. And I’m still amazed at how little happens in so much space. An editor may have helped. But maybe an editor would have insisted on removing sentences like this (page 127 of the English edition.)

bq. Dumbledore was striding serenly across the room wearing long midnight-blue robes and a perfectly calm expression.

That sounds mildly defective doesn’t it? Wearing robes isn’t the same kind of thing as wearing a calm expression.

I’m going to be at the “conference on Dutch Book arguments”:http://www.flu.cas.cz/Logica/Aconf/col2005.html in Prague in a few weeks, and I just finished a draft of the paper I’ll be presenting.

bq. “Dutch Books and Infinity”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dbai.pdf

The paper probably won’t make a lot of sense to people who aren’t (very) familiar with the relevant literature. Probably between now and the conference I’ll rewrite it to make it somewhat clearer.

I haven’t updated my papers page for a bit, so here’s a list of the papers I’ve posted in recent times.

* “Vagueness as Indeterminacy”:http://brian.weatherson.org/vai.pdf
* “Game Playing Under Ignorance”:http://brian.weatherson.org/gpui.pdf
* “Questioning Contextualism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/qc2.pdf
* “Humeans Aren’t Out of Their Minds”:http://brian.weatherson.org/haootm.pdf
A reply to “this paper”:http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~kahern/hawthorne/humeans.html by John Hawthorne
* “Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf
* “Conditionals and Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/car.pdf
For the Barcelona conference on “Relativising Utterance Truth”:http://www.ub.es/grc_logos/activities/conferences/relativismabouttruth/index.htm

I’ve received lots of good feedback on these (not all of which has been incorporated into the papers) and some of them will be sent out for publication sooner or later with much improvement from readers.

In “a paper in today’s issue of Philosophical Quarterly”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/phiq/2005/00000055/00000220/art00003, Michael Bergmann has a discussion of defeaters. Here are the definitions he provides for rebutting and undercutting defeaters.

* d is a rebutting defeater for b iff d is a defeater for b which is (or is an
epistemically appropriate basis for) the belief that b is false
* d is an undercutting defeater for b iff d is a defeater for b which is (or is an
epistemically appropriate basis for) the belief that one’s actual ground or
reason for b is not indicative of b’s truth.

It seems to me these definitions can’t really get at what was driving the identification of these classes. Two examples about chance show this.

Let d be the belief that the objective chance of b is, right now, 0.2. It seems to me that is a _rebutting_ defeater. But since it isn’t sufficient grounds to conclude that b is false, it has to be taken to be an undercutting defeater. And that’s so even if d is not in any sense about my epistemic practices that led me to believe that b.

Second example. Let d be the belief that the objective chance of b is, right now, 0.8. In some circumstances, that is incompatible with believing that b, so it is a defeater. But it is clearly not a rebutting defeater. And, since it is compatible with thinking the processes that led to belief that b are very reliable, it isn’t really an undercutting defeater either. So on this definition rebutting and undercutting defeaters aren’t exhaustive, which seems bad.