“Jon Kvanvig is rather mad”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=327#more-327 at some things Donald Kagan said in his Jefferson lecture arguing for (or at least asserting) the preeminence of history in the humanities. I don’t want to get into a war about what the leading humanities department should be (I don’t think it should be philosophy because I don’t think it’s part of the humanities, but never mind that) but I do want to agree with one thing Kagan said.

bq. [S]ome things [are] truer than others.

Truer words were never spoken!

Some readers may be interested in a conference on naturalism in law and philosophy to be held at Rutgers next month, June 7 to be precise. It’s a fairly impressive speaker list, including the blogworld’s own Brian Leiter, as well as Michael Smith, Jerry Fodor, Stephen Stich and many others. This link provides many more details about the program as well as the logistics. In an earlier post, Brian Leiter said, “As things stand, Stich and I will be carrying the flag for naturalism, with the Williamses and Zipursky representing the forces of retrograde philosophy!” As a proud reactionary, I’m hoping some of the other philosophers and legal scholars present, especially Michael Smith (who has never seemed averse to good a priori theorising) can help hold the fort.

The following feels like a purely technical problem for standard versions of causal decision theory, and it should yield to a purely technical solution, but the said solution wasn’t immediately obvious to me, so I’m posting the puzzle here.
Continue reading →

In their sustained “defence of insensitivity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405126752/caoineorg-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1, Cappelen and Lepore rely quite a bit on indirect speech reports. So, for instance, the fact that the following bit of discourse always seems natural

bq. A: S knows that p
B [later, in different context]: A said that S knows that p

is taken as evidence against contextualism. I think this is fairly strong evidence, but not everyone agrees. It might be argued that speech reports are messy things, and no one really understands them. Fair enough, perhaps. It might be worth noting though that the same kind of phenomenon occurs with questions. Consider the following scenario. A is walking aimlessly around Ithaca. Every five minutes, she asks “Is Tamar here?”. All through this time, Tamar is working in her office in Goldwin Smith Hall, so her location doesn’t change. B, who knows this, changes her answer to A’s question, depending on whether or not A is in Goldwin Smith Hall. When A asks the question downtown, B says “No”. When she asks it again in Goldwin Smith, B says “Yes”. When she asks it yet again while climbing down Cascadilla Gorge, B says “No”. ‘Here’ is a true contextually sensitive term.

Note that if A and B are separated, B will answer according to A’s location, not her own. So if A is downtown (and B knows this) and is talking to B by phone, and asks “Is Tamar here?”, if B is in Goldwin Smith she can answer, “No, Tamar is here.” For any context sensitive term such that different speakers are in different contexts, this kind of speech act, where we answer “No” and then follow up by uttering the sentence that looks like the indicative form of the question, is possible.

Here we have two tests for context sensitivity. First test, can we change answers while the underlying facts stay the same? Second test, can we consistently answer “No” and then repeat the question? It seems ‘knows’ fails both tests for context-sensitivity. Since neither case involves speech reports, this means the contextualist has to posit semantic blindness that extends even to fairly simple question and answer conversations. Let’s see a couple of cases illustrating this.
Continue reading →

A lot of people seem to have the intuition that you can’t, in ordinary circumstances, know that a particular lottery ticket will lose. Dana Nelkin, in a 2000 _Philosophical Review_ paper says this is because the belief you have is based solely on statistical evidence. (She says you can’t even have a justified belief to this effect.) Duncan Pritchard (in “this paper (PDF)”:http://www.philosophy.stir.ac.uk/staff/duncan-pritchard/documents/KnowledgeLuckLotteries.pdf) says that it is because the possible world in which the ticket wins is too similar to the actual world. As he says…

bq. After all, the possible world in which I win the lottery is a world just like this one, where all that need be different is that a few coloured balls fall in a slightly different configuration.

I rather doubt both of these explanations. I think the intuition that you can’t know you’ll lose is a bit of bad scepticism. To test that, I want to see how intuitions go on the following kind of lottery. This is a real-world case by the way, a bit of found philosophy. On Monday through Saturday, the lotteries in Australia are based around coloured balls falling in distinctive configurations. But on Sundays things are different, as “this site”:http://www.ozlotteries.com/play.php?lottery_id=6 explains.

bq. Sunday Lotto (or ‘Soccerpools’) is based on Australian and European soccer matches. You don’t need to know anything about Soccer though – it can be played just like a normal lottery game. Each week, 38 matches are listed and numbered 1 to 38 inclusive. For a standard lottery, you choose 6 numbers from the range of 1 to 38. The 6 matches that accumulate to the highest total drawn scores are the winning numbers (e.g. Match A with a final score of 4-4 has a higher total score than Match B which finished 3-3). The 7th highest result is the supplementary number.

Imagine I’m looking at a particular ticket, say the ticket of someone who does play the Sunday Lotto as a lottery, and I believe it won’t win. Could this be knowledge?

Pritchard says that it isn’t knowledge if there is a nearby world in which it wins. But imagine that (unbeknownst to me or the buyer) for this ticket to win requires there to be a score draw between Chelsea (at home) and a relegation threatened team. Chelsea normally win these one-sided games, and they very rarely concede a goal. So the worlds in which this ticket wins are rather remote. Is that sufficient for my knowing the ticket will lose? Do I have to believe it will lose because of these facts about Chelsea to know it will lose? Immediately following the quote above, Pritchard says

bq. Crucially, however, the _nearness_ of the relevant possible worlds has an impact on our judgements about the presence of luck.

That doesn’t seem right. If I believe this ticket will lose, and it turns out that (because one of the numbers corresponds to the Chelsea vs scrubs game) that the nearest world in which it wins is a long ways away, our judgments about the luckiness of my belief don’t seem to change. Or at least they don’t to me. Known distance from the actual world matters more than actual distance, I think for determining whether my belief is true by luck or not.

If I just believe this ticket will lose for standard lottery reasons, then Nelkin will still say I don’t know it will lose. But by her standards, all I need to do is have a minimal amount of knowledge about the underlying games in order to genuinely know the ticket will lose. And that doesn’t seem right either. Unless I’m deeply involved in fixing the games or some such, I think intuitions about the cases are that I can no more know a particular Sunday Lotto ticket will lose than I can know a Saturday lotto ticket will lose, even if I know a little bit about football.

If this is right about the intuitions, one of three things follows.

# We reject both intuitions (the one about Sunday and the one about Saturday) as being bad sceptical intuitions; or
# We find a way to distinguish Saturday from Sunday lotteries; or
# We find a new explanation for what is wrong with beliefs about lotteries.

I’m all for option 1, but obviously it isn’t the only option on the table.

I’ve been interested for a while in vague terms that don’t generate Sorites arguments. I hadn’t had much success in coming up with precise terms that do generate Sorites arguments. I was convinced by discussions with Josh Parsons that such terms must exist, but I could never come up with one on my own. The next best thing to discovering one is finding a paper in which one appears. The following is from a paper by “Gerald Hull”:http://home.stny.rr.com/ghull/ on “Vagueness and ‘Vague’: A Reply to Varzi”:http://home.stny.rr.com/ghull/site/mind2005.pdf, soon to appear in _Mind_.

bq.. Let ‘approximately n’ be defined as ‘n plus or minus a tiny amount’. We can now construct the following sorites paradox:

Approximately 0 is less than 1000.
If approximately n is less than 1000, then approximately n+1 is less than 1000.
Therefore, approximately 10000 is less than 1000.

Clearly the first premise is true and the conclusion false. In between there are values, e.g. approximately 1000, that result in borderline cases.

p. You’ll have to read the whole thing to see the point Hull wants to make with this, but I think it’s a perfectly successful example of a Sorites argument where the major predicate is _not_ vague.

For some unknown reason my browser ended up pointed at “Right Reason”:http://rightreason.ektopos.com/ earlier, and I saw “a post by Dan Bonevac on Ann Coulter”:http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/001478.html. Well, I thought to myself, if there are going to be any sensible conservatives in blogtropolis, Bonevac, who is a pretty fine philosopher, should be among them. If someone is going to be able to show why conservatism is worth taking it seriously by distinguishing it from what Ann Coulter does, it should be him. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.
Continue reading →

As mentioned yesterday, my brother Scott is in a band called ‘Hennessey’ that is in an online bands competition back home. My attempt to drum up support (boom boom) yesterday was moderately successful. But for some reason the links you have to go to to vote changed, potentially thwarting my plans. Anyway, the “new link is here”:http://soundcheck.ninemsn.com.au/charts.jsp?fvChart=allbyartist&fvCurPage=10. His band has the first two songs on “that page”:http://soundcheck.ninemsn.com.au/charts.jsp?fvChart=allbyartist&fvCurPage=10, and any votes for them (especially repeat votes – you can vote once per day) would be much appreciated!

When I was doing the job search this year, I thought of a couple of points that would be worthwhile for job seekers going on the market to know. For various reasons I didn’t want to go into this in much detail while the search was ongoing, but it’s probably safe now. This advice might be a little late for people going on the job market this year, but current 3rd years might get some value out of it.

[UPDATE: As noted in the comments below, all I’m offering here are anecdotes about what matters at one place. There are plenty more anecdotes in the comments threads that should be given equal weight.]
Continue reading →

I’ve finally added a “new entry”:http://opp.weatherson.org/archives/004350.html to the papers blog. There are I’d guess around a hundred new papers linked there, so there should be plenty of reading for everyone who has finished their teaching and wants to get started on summer research.