Brad has “good advice”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000485.html for students writing essays.

bq.. The typical easy-to-correct mistakes that the students who come to see me are making seem to be two:

# Nobody ever told them–or they have forgotten, or they are too stressed for time–to _revise_. They are handing in first drafts.
# Nobody ever told them that if you are going to hand in a first draft, an easy way to significantly improve it is to, when you are finished, cut the last paragraph from the paper and paste it at the beginning. Your final sum-up paragraph–written at the end, as you have by trying to write down what you think discovered what you really do think–is almost always going to make a better first paragraph than the first paragraph that you wrote.

The schedule for the “2005 Formal Epistemology Workshop”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Efitelson/few/schedule.html is now posted, with many of the papers available online. I didn’t know this until after today’s “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org was done, so they aren’t included there, but they will be processed shortly.

The FEW this year is a 5 day extravaganza. I guess it makes sense that it is big being in Texas. I was particularly pleased to see that Jim Pryor is on the program – the more interaction there is between leading figures in mainstream epistemology and formal epistemology the better it will be for the discipline I think. There are a lot of very smart young philosophers and friends of TAR (overlapping groups I hope) there, so it looks like it would be fun to get along to.

This post is largely a question about “a post on local reduction”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/archives/2005/03/tonk_and_local_1.html on the new blog “logicandlanguage”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/. Since it mostly reveals my ignorances, I’ll put it below the fold.
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This post is largely a question about “a post on local reduction”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/archives/2005/03/tonk_and_local_1.html on the new blog “logicandlanguage”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/. Since it mostly reveals my ignorances, I’ll put it below the fold.
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I’m sure many of you will know about “Philosophy Talk”:http://www.philosophytalk.org/, Ken Taylor and John Perry’s philosophy radio show out of Sacramento San Francisco. What I suspect fewer readers will know about is “The Philosopher’s Zone”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/philosopher/index/chrono.htm, a Radio National (Australia) weekly radio show. It’s only been going a few episodes so far, and it seems to be fairly Sydney-centric (but isn’t everything?) but it looks pretty interesting. Sadly the archives are not online, but future shows should be available through streaming audio.

Thanks to the “Melbourne Philosophy wiki”:http://melbournephilosophy.com:8080/jspwiki/ for the link.

UPDATE: Christopher Grau pointed out to me that “this philosophy radio site”:http://www.angelfire.com/ego/philosophyradio/ maintains links to a large number of sources of philosophy on the radio, from the BBC, NPR and many other sources. Lots of listening pleasure!

From Michael Huemer’s entry on “sense data”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/ in the SEP.

bq. For instance, an overdose of LSD might cause me to have an experience of seeming to see a pink rat on this table, where there is in reality nothing pink-rat-like.

I was always told that was the kind of reaction you get to a _normal_ dose of LSD, and in an _overdose_ you end up in a coma with no sense data worth reporting. But maybe I should be deferring to those better informed!

At dinner last night, Kit Fine mentioned that the following modal principle can be found in Aristotle. (I think he said it is in _Metaphysics_ Theta, but I could be misremembering.)

A: L (MA -> MB) -> L (A -> B)

As always here, we use L for box and M for diamond. The boxes here take narrow scope with respect to the main arrow.

He also said that A plus KT leads to modal collapse. That is, with those three principles, you can prove p Lp. This is true, but it’s actually quite a bit harder than it may first appear. So the entire point of this post is to give those of you who like Saturday morning logic puzzles a logic puzzle to work on: prove p Lp in the logic KTA.

Kit also said that the logic KA, without T, has a number of interesting properties, but trying to reproduce what was said at dinner on the blog would be pointless I fear, so you’ll have to wait until he writes about that.

I don’t really participate much in meme-spreading throughout the blogworld, but I’m so addicted to lists that I couldn’t help but play along with these two.
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A reminder that Kit Fine will be today’s discussion club speaker at Cornell. He is speaking on “Relatively Unrestricted Quantification” at 4.30 in Goldwin Smith room 142.

Next Friday we have Stephen Yablo on “Non-Catastrophic Presupposition Failure”, also at 4.30 (room to be announced).

A reminder that Kit Fine will be today’s discussion club speaker at Cornell. He is speaking on “Relatively Unrestricted Quantification” at 4.30 in Goldwin Smith room 142.

Next Friday we have Stephen Yablo on “Non-Catastrophic Presupposition Failure”, also at 4.30 (room to be announced).