Can those who have been around longer than I comment on whether there’s normally “this much movement of people between top philosophy programs”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/04/philosophy_offe.html? And especially this late in the academic year? I thought it was jobs get sorted first, tournament happens second, but apparently not this year. (Of course, if your tournament ended in mid-March you have a different perception I suppose.)

Can those who have been around longer than I comment on whether there’s normally “this much movement of people between top philosophy programs”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/04/philosophy_offe.html? And especially this late in the academic year? I thought it was jobs get sorted first, tournament happens second, but apparently not this year. (Of course, if your tournament ended in mid-March you have a different perception I suppose.)

This won’t matter to most people I guess, but I thought it might be worth noting that Philosophical Books’ “symposium on _Knowledge and its Limits_ is freely available online”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/servlet/useragent?func=synergy&synergyAction=showTOC&journalCode=phib&volume=45&issue=4&year=2004&part=null. I might write some posts on some of the content given that it is all for free!

I’ve been thinking a bit about Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath’s argument for ‘pragmatic encroachment’ into epistemology. Unless I’m missing some important distinctions, their argument is an argument for a position called ‘value-based epistemology’ in the feminist epistemology literature. There is a “long discussion of their paper at Certain Doubts”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=273#more-273. They end up arguing for the following principle:

bq. Two subjects can have the same evidential (or, more generally, purely epistemic) standing to a proposition, but one can be justified and the other not, simply because, for one, the stakes are higher.

(The quote is filched from a comment of Fantl’s on the CD thread.) I want to set out a position that isn’t yet occupied in this debate. This principle may be true, and yet there is in no interesting sense pragmatic encroachment into _epistemology_. The position is that what it is to believe a proposition can be affected by pragmatic matters, but once we’ve fixed what belief is in a practical position, what it takes to be justified in having that attitude does not vary with practical considerations.

There’s a big project that’s at the back of this – a Keynesian “Probability First” approach to epistemology. The position I’m taking here is that there is no pragmatics in probabilistic epistemology, and hence no pragmatics in epistemology proper, but plenty of pragmatics in the relationship between probabilistic and non-probabilistic doxastic states, and hence pragmatics in non-probabilistic epistemology. I don’t have convincing arguments for this position, for instance I don’t have responses to the feminist arguments for values-based epistemology I alluded to above, but I’m going to set out the position anyway.
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As the recent controversies over the APA Pacific venue demonstrated, a lot of philosophers have sympathies for the hotel workers currently in dispute with their employers in San Francisco and elsewhere. So I imagine there will be some interest in events like this one, which I heard about from Janet Levin.

bq. LA-area philosophers sympathetic to UNITE (the union representing SF hotel
workers): Support your local chapter by coming to a fund-raiser, sponsored by
SMART (Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism) at the Jazz Bakery on
Saturday afternoon, April 30. Good food, good music, good cause!

Contact Janet Levin (levin-at-usc-dot-edu) for more details.

Geoff Pynn emails to note that the papers for this weekend’s NYU/Columbia grad conference are available online at the address below.

bq. “NYU/Columbia Grad Conference Papers”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/conference/2005schedule.html.

Get ’em while they’re hot! And if you’re going to the conference this weekend, read ’em closely and plan your killer objections in advance!

From section 254 of the _Investigations_.

bq. What we ‘are tempted to say’ in such a case is, of course, not philosophy; but it is its raw material.

Despite the Wittgensteinian origins, I basically agree. Intuitions are the raw ingredients of philosophy, not the final product. As an aphorist may have put it, we need fewer salads and more curries.

Navel-Gazing Time…

Visitors – 23791
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“Philosophy in Questionable Taste”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000979.html 2048
“APA Pacific venue (yet again)”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004218.html 1607
“Great Thinkers”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004193.html 1444
“Who Got In?”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004201.html 1361
“Rorty vs Soames”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004183.html 1320
“Modal Logic in Aristotle”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004205.html 1164
“French Military Victories”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000256.html 1084
“Memes”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004203.html 1041

Yet again, no papers with original philosophical work of mine made it anywhere near the top, though there are some critical comments in the Rorty and Soames post.

UPDATE: The original title of this was, er, wrong. The stats are for March. It’s now April. Easy to confuse the two. March is for losing money on basketball, April for losing time to baseball.

I’m teaching a seminar on David Lewis in the spring, using “Daniel Nolan’s book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0773529314/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 as one of the texts, but primarily using primary sources. (Note the link is now to Amazon US, not to Britain.) There’s one primary historical claim I want to make through the course, and I might post stuff here as I write it to try and back up this claim.

The claim is that concrete possible worlds aren’t that important to Lewis’s overall philosophy.

Now this might seem like a rather odd claim to make, since the existence of concrete possible worlds is the core claim of Lewis’s longest and most important book, and most summaries of Lewis start with this belief as the lead. So I’m swimming a little against the interpretative tide, such as it is at this early stage. But I do have something like an argument for my preferred interpretation, or perhaps better, preferred sense of what is central and what is relatively peripheral.

Although Lewis held fairly consistently to most of his views throughout his career, he was amenable to changing his mind in the face of good argument. He was constantly tinkering with the analysis of causation, he accepted some tinkering to the analysis of intrinsicness, and most importantly, he abandoned egalitarianism about properties. So we can coherently, even easily, imagine him changing his mind on some of his conclusions.

Now for any paper or work of Lewis’s, do the following thought experiment. Imagine someone giving him a convincing argument that the core conclusion of the paper failed, shortly after the paper appeared in print. Try to follow through then how many changes would have been needed to later work if he’d accepted this criticism, and hence not been able to presuppose the truth of his earlier claims.

In some cases the changes would be immense. It is almost impossible to imagine what Lewis’s work would look like if he didn’t have the Ramsey-sentence definition of theoretical terms, and his convention-based account of language to work with throughout. Similarly we would need massive revisions if he’d been convinced that Humean supervience was fundamentally flawed, or that egalitarianism about properties was true after all, or that one of the paradoxes from chapter 2 of _Plurality_ was fatal to the possible worlds apparatus. These I think are the five core claims that Lewis’s philosophy is built around, and if he’d given any of them up, it would have forced massive revision to the rest of his work.

Not so for concrete possible worlds. If someone had written a version of ersatzism in 1987 that Lewis thought gave us all we needed from a theory of possible worlds, and wasn’t vulnerable to the chapter 3 objections, then he could have accepted it, and, more importantly, he would have had to make next to no substantive changes to anything else he wrote. What is of broad philosophical importance for Lewis (and others such as Stalnaker and Jackson are in this camp too) is that the possible worlds framework is coherent and applications of it can be philosophically enlightening. Lewis had opinions on the metaphysical foundations of that framework, but they weren’t central to the philosophical picture he gave us.

The test I’m using for importance isn’t perfect, because it isn’t clear always how to apply it. I’ve been deliberately silent in what I’ve said above about the importance of the analysis of counterfactuals and of causation to the picture, as it is being sketched here. I tend to think that in both cases the details (in some sense of detail) are not important, any more than the details of the account of intrinsicness or colour or dispositions or chance or laws are important. (Which is not to say they don’t at all matter – Lewis worked hard on finding reasons to support particular analyses of all of these.) But both causation and counterfactuals seem more central to the project than these other cases, especially counterfactuals. Saying just why I think that needs more work, and hopefully I’ll be able to have something more coherent by the time next spring rolls around.

I have a vested interest in this interpretation being taken seriously, because broadly speaking I’m a “Canberra Credo”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dpn/docs/credo.htm guy, and “We [Credoers] believe in the substantial correctness of the doctrines of David Lewis about most things (except the nature of possible worlds).” It would be nice if (a) we could argue that this is a coherent position, which it isn’t if concrete possible worlds are central to Lewis’s picture, and (b) one which involves only a small deviation from Lewis’s theories, since it’s odd to look up to someone on so many matters while disagreeing with them about what is fundamental to their work.

We have talks each of the next three Fridays at Cornell.

This Friday April 1 we have Max Pensky of Binghamton University whose talk is titled “On Constitutional Law and Solidarity”.

Next Friday April 8 we have Rae Langton of MIT whose talk is titled “Objective and Unconditioned Value”.

And the Friday after that, April 15, we have Christopher Taylor of Oxford University (currently visiting at Cornell) whose talk is titled “Courage in the Protagoras and Nicomachean Ethics”.

All talks are in Goldwin Smith Hall at 4.30pm. Max Pensky is in room 134 and Rae Langton and Christopher Taylor are in room 142. I hope many people from the area can make these talks.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention two other talks in the Time and Tense seminar.

Next Monday Armin von Stechow will be doing a talk titled “Temporal Orientation of Modals and Covert Temporal Operators” at 4.30 in Goldwin Smith 134.

The Monday after that Peter Ludlow will be doing a talk titled “‘I Resemble Fitz Hugh Ludlow’: Presentism and the Problem of Cross-Temporal Reference”. It is April 11, 4.30pm in Goldwin Smith 134.

And it isn’t in the the philosophy department, but since it is a philosophy talk I should mention that von Stechow is doing another talk, this one on Tuesday April 6 at 4.30, in Morrill 106 called “Anankastic Conditionals”. Here’s the abstract.

bq.. Anankastic conditionals are constructions exhibited by the following paradigm:

a. You have to take the A train if you want to go to Harlem.
b. If you don’t take the A train you can’t go to Harlem.
c. To go to Harlem you have to take the A train.

They express the idea that the consequent is a necessary condition for achieving the goal expressed by the antecedent. The contstruction has been very reluctant to a compositional analysis. We will propose a counterfactual analysis. The truth condition arrived at is this:

d. The nearest worlds where you go to Harlem, are contained in the worlds where you take the A train and the nearest worlds where you don’t take the A train are disjoint from the worlds where you go to Harlem.

We will give a compositional semantics, which derives this.

We will compare our analysis with the analysis of Saeboe, von Fintel & Iatridou and Huitink.