Brad DeLong has “two”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/yes_bentham_got.html “posts”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/experience_mach.html up defending Richard Layard’s defence of Benthamism against criticism from Fontana Labs and Will Wilkinson. I think Brad is misinterpreting Bentham, so while his defence might be a defence of something interesting (say, preference utilitarianism) it isn’t much of a defence of Bentham.
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Unlike a few other blogs, TAR doesn’t do fundraising drives. (That’s entirely because we don’t need the money – the overheads are still very low, though that might change in the future.) To make up for this, I sometimes make a pitch for charitable donations to Oxfam, and now is one of those times.

It is very hard to come up with general principles about how much one _should_ give to charity. I’m sure my readers fall on a very wide range of income levels and expenses. An amount to be donated (either in dollars or percentage of income) that was relatively painless for one person could be extremely difficult for someone else. Having said that, here’s one suggestion that might be pertinent at this time of year, when many of us are finding out what (if any) pay raises we are getting for next year.

If you were living reasonably comfortably last year, and you received a pay raise for next year, it probably won’t cause too much difficulty to donate, say, 10% of the raise to a charitable group. One thing I’ve found as I’ve moved from living off a graduate stipend to an associate professor’s income is that every time I get a pay raise, I can’t figure out how I lived on my former income. If you’re like me, agreeing to donate some of the raise before it is spent might encourage appropriate frugality as well doing some good.

If you got a larger than expected raise, so giving away 10% of it right now would be a burden, you can always sign up for Oxfam’s “Pledge Partner Program”:https://secure.ga3.org/02/monthlypledge, where you automatically make a donation every month.

Many of you will have seen these issues hashed out to death, but I’m not entirely up to speed on the literature, so I thought I’d ask the audience for some advice. The questions will all be about variants on (1), which is itself a version of a hackneyed example of zeugma.

(1) ??She drove home in a red Porsche and a fit of despair.

I take it that this shows that one of the words in “She drove home in” is ambiguous. The first question is, which one? Here’s one argument that it should be “in”. If we posit an ambiguity in any of the other words, we’ll have to posit a matching ambiguity in one or more of the words in (2).

(2) ??He flew to work in a Lear jet and a fit of despair.

Does that seem like an argument that it’s ‘in’ that is ambiguous?

Second question, for those with more knowledge of languages than I. Is this ambiguity common across languages, or do other languages have different words for the different senses of ‘in’? (Assuming they even have a word that plays just this role.) I assume that for at least some of the examples of zeugma “David Dowty has collected here”:http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~dowty/683/dative-ambiguity, the ambiguity replicates across languages, but with my little knowledge I can’t really be sure.

Third question, related to the second. Consider all the instances of (3),

(3) She drove home in a X and a Y

where X and Y are distinct members of the set {red Porsche, blue dress, fit of despair, hailstorm}. Which of these are zeugmatic?

My instinct is to say _all of them_, though the red Porsche/blue dress pair doesn’t seem as bad as the others. Does this suggest ‘in’ is (at least) four-ways ambiguous? (At least because I’m sure it isn’t too hard to extend this list.)

UPDATE: I was working on extending the set mentioned above when I came across some odd data. It seems to me that both (4) and (5) are fine.

(4) She drove home in four hours.
(5) She drove home in record time.

The ‘record’ in (5) has to be contextually set, but it’s perfectly intelligible. But (6) seems odd.

(6) ?She drove home in four hours and record time.

You can say (7), though it seems a little pompous.

(7) She drove home in a record time of four hours.

But it seems a stretch to me to say that ‘in’ is ambiguous between a meaning where ‘four hours’ is an acceptable extension and one where ‘record time’ is. Needless to say, ‘four hours’ and ‘record time’ both produce zeugmatic responses when paired with any of the other members of the set. So ‘in’ looks to be five or six way ambiguous so far.

Surprisingly, (8) seems to me to be not OK, assuming her whole drive was inside the borders of New York.

(8) She drove home in New York.

But (9) is fine, and it isn’t clear that ‘in’ here means the same as in any of the above usess.

(9) She drove quickly in New York and slowly in Massachusetts.

This is more of a mass message to friends than a blog post, but since everyone I’d want to write to reads this blog, I figured I may as well do this here. As part of moving to Ithaca, I finally got a new Ithaca area phone number. Anyone who reads this who is in the habit of calling me should write to me for the new number.

Well, not quite. David Chalmers has “the following request”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/06/terminological_.html.

bq. For the paper I’m writing on terminological disputes, I would like as many examples of terminological disputes as possible. There are a lot of potential examples within philosophy, but it would be good to have some from outside philosophy, too. In particular, it might be nice to start with an example from literature. If anyone can think of good examples from a work of fiction — say, two characters having an argument that starts out looking like a substantive disagreement but which turns out to be an argument over a word — please let me know. Examples from politics, science, everyday life wouldn’t hurt, either. For that matter, I wouldn’t mind gathering a lot of philosophical examples. So you’re hereby requested to post suggestions in the comments or by e-mail.

The President of Cornell, Jeffrey Lehman, resigned in somewhat mysterious circumstances at the weekend. Lehman was the first Cornell alum to be President, and it had seemed like he was treating this as a job for life. But after just two years he has jumped off the ship, in his words because the “Board of Trustees and [he] have different approaches to how the university can best realize its long-term vision.” This isn’t maximally plausible. The best story on the background to Lehman’s departure is by “Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/13/cornell. I suspect there is still a bit more to this story to come out.

The President of Cornell, Jeffrey Lehman, resigned in somewhat mysterious circumstances at the weekend. Lehman was the first Cornell alum to be President, and it had seemed like he was treating this as a job for life. But after just two years he has jumped off the ship, in his words because the “Board of Trustees and [he] have different approaches to how the university can best realize its long-term vision.” This isn’t maximally plausible. The best story on the background to Lehman’s departure is by “Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/13/cornell. I suspect there is still a bit more to this story to come out.

I’ve long been interested in the interaction of negation with vague terms, but sme of the ‘data’ I used might have been idiosyncratic usage. But I just noticed the following line from The Magnetic Fields’ song “I Don’t Believe You”.

bq. You tell me I’m not not cute.

A theory of vagueness should have a story about why this communicates something very different from “You’re cute”.

Jeff Brower has a call for papers for a special issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly on Peter Abelard here.

There’s a lot of stuff in the literature right now on norms about assertion. One issue is whether asserting something you don’t know can ever be appropriate. Another issue is whether you might be criticisable for assertions of things you do know. Of course, some assertions of things you know are irrelevant, or unhelpful, but the issue here is whether this is the only kind of way in which an assertion of something you know can be criticised. Consider the following example.

S believes that p. S is self-aware, so she knows that she believes that p. Unfortunately, this belief is utterly crazy. S has a lot of evidence that ~p, which she is systematically ignoring. She asserts “I believe that p”. Is her utterance criticisable? If so, in what way? Is it criticizable _qua_ assertion?