MOVE!!!

TAR is on the move. Here's the new address.

http://tar.weatherson.net

The papers blog is also moving. Here's its new address

http://opp.weatherson.net

Sadly all of the internal links got rerouted when the change happened, so I think there will be quite a bit of linkrot over time. But these addresses should be somewhat permanent.

Papers Blog notes

Three new pages have been added to the papers blog recently.

Jean Nicod Institute has an extensive online papers page. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to keep track of the additions, but there looks to be a lot of interesting stuff there.

Russ Payne from Bellevue Community College has several papers on metaphysics online. He also has an announcement for the Northwest Philosophy Conference to be held in October and featuring Jeff King and Michael Jubien (both to be formerly of UC Davis) as keynotes. It should be a lot of fun I'd imagine. I'm not sure if I'll be going because, as much as I like philosophy conferences (especially in the northwest) I'm currently up to 8 invitations for the second half of 2004, and I can't really go to all of them. But I do recommend checking out the northwest philosophy conference page.

John Gregg, a computer programmer/scientist from Boston, has an interesting page of papers about consciousness. One of these days I'll have to make a policy decision about when non-academic pages (i.e. pages by people whose paycheck doesn't include the words 'university' or 'college' somewhere on it) should get listed on the papers blog. For now I'm running by seat-of-someone's-pants judgments, and I hope it's working out OK. I try not to place too much weight on things like what words are on one's paychecks, but it's easy to use academia as a kind of cheap filtering device. If you really need to hear about credentials though, John has written "a surprisingly accessible, entertaining and very reasonably priced book about Boolean algebra", which is as much as I've ever done academically (if not more) I guess.

Contextualism and Relativism

Rob Stainton's talk at the INPC inspired me to come up with a little example designed to show that if we accept the speaker-context-relativity of knowledge talk, we should accept audience-context-relativity of knowledge talk. In other words, whatever support there is for contextualism is really support for relativism in the sense Andy, John and I discuss in the epistemic modals paper, which uses many concepts from John MacFarlane's paper about future contingents.

INPC

I will have many more specific things to say about topics that came up at the INPC, but for now I just wanted to note what a wonderful conference it was, and thank the organisers Michael O'Rourke and Joe Campbell, for their great job. Attending 10 papers and 2 roundtable discussions in 2½ days was tiring, but rewarding, and I didn't even go to all the philosophy on offer. I was just looking back over the program, and noted that I managed to miss, either through scheduling conflicts or exhaustion, papers by Louise Anthony, Kent Bach, David Chalmers, Stewart Cohen, Fred Dretske, Catherine Elgin, Rich Feldman, Peter Klein, John Pollock and many more. Despite that I still got to see lots of great philosophy, but I must have missed a great conference's worth of papers just from that list.

The highlight I thought was Elijah Millgram's paper on refuting scepticism with style. I can't possibly do the paper, or particularly the presentation, justice, but here's the line. If we're brains in vats, then the visual presentation we're getting is, in a broad sense, an artwork. But one of the striking features about artworks is that they are recognisable as such relatively easily, at least if you have a sense of style. This is even true of art that aims to be realistic. Indeed, it may be especially true of art that aims to be realistic. Since the world does not present itself as an artwork, since it does not have a distinctive style, the brain in a vat hypothesis is false.

There were one or two objections to the epistemology here, but on reflection I think the aesthetics might be more worrying. I think the world displays lots of characteristics of a genre piece. Marx's dictum that history always repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce, looks like just the kind of rule that is followed in low-rent serials. This probably misses the point somewhat, since (speaking roughly) the argument is more concerned with the form of the world/story than its content, but it could be an issue.

More generally I'd be really pleased to see there be serious interaction between epistemology and aesthetics. Epistemologists are starting to complain a little about the philosophy of language interlopers, so I think it might be time for a completely different kind of interaction.

There was another point raised by Elijah's paper that I'd like to come back to later if I have anything to say about it. Why do sceptical challenges of the form "You might be a brain in a vat" have more force, more grip on us, than challenges that just say "You might be wrong"? Of course I think a tidied up brain in vat scenario can pose a hard, even unanswerable for some, "a priori or a posteriori" question about our knowledge. But the usual brain in vat cases are nowhere near tidied up enough to make that a hard question, as Stew Cohen noted long ago. This is a topic I'd like there to be more written on.

I also liked the session on Ram Neta's paper on seeing, even though I agreed more or less entirely with Liz Harman's objections to Ram's main conclusions. (I usually end up agreeing more or less entirely with Liz's papers I guess, but I suspect if I went to her talk this Friday at UMass that pattern would be broken.) But I thought there were some interesting questions raised at the intersection of aesthetics and metaphysics that bear thinking about. In particular, if I'm looking at a wall that has a ladder leaning on the far (i.e. invisible) side, I don't see the wall-ladder fusion. Except, if someone has made an artwork from the wall and the ladder, I do see the artwork by looking at the wall. (Except, as Liz noted, if the ladder is particularly central to the artwork. I can't see a painting by seeing the back of the canvas it is on, and looking at the back of the wall may be analogous to that.) I'd like to resolve issues about what you see when you look at a surface through a substantive metaphysics of natural and unnatural objects, but this will require us to say quite a lot about how art makes some things natural or unnatural.

But it wasn't only aesthetics at the conference. There was some philosophy of language too. I'll write more about that in upcoming days, but just to flag I thought Rob Stainton had a very interesting idea about the relationship between epistemological contextualism and the varieties of context-dependence alleged to exist in the philosophy of language literature. Again, this is not to say I believed a word of it, but I thought it was an interesting proposal. Much more on this to follow.

I could go on much longer, but I have to run to (another) talk back here. So as the old song says, I'll let the part tell the whole and not talk (yet) about the many other interesting papers I saw or philosophical discussions I had. (My paper by the way wasn't entirely successful I thought because my presentation was somewhat unclear. But I got some useful feedback despite my lack of clarity. And I was rather flattered at how many people showed up.) Dave Chalmers has posted some conference pics here if you want a sense of how it looked. Next year's conference is on Time and Identity, so I'll probably send some version of this paper. I hope it's just as much fun as this year's was.

Not the Papers Blog

The papers blog is running late today because I just got back from the INPC and real work is calling. The conference was great, much much more on it to follow. So good in fact that some of the participants apparently stayed on an extra day or two.

In light of the discussion over at Sappho's Breathing last week, I thought this new entry on Feminist Approaches to Analytic Philosophy in the SEP was potentially interesting. I've only skimmed it so far, and I have no real competence to judge how accurately it portrays its subjects, but it seems at the very least a worthwhile perspective on those discussions.

Prize!

Advertising for my department to be. (Original here.)

Young Philosophers Essay Competition

The Sage School of Philosophy and the Philosophical Review are pleased to announce a Young Philosophers Essay Competition in philosophy of language. Full-length articles on any topic in philosophy of language, broadly construed, will be considered. The competition is open to anyone currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program (or equivalent) in philosophy or a related subject, as well as to anyone who did not receive a Ph.D. or equivalent degree before January 1, 2000. Submissions will be judged by members of the Sage School of Philosophy. Provided the number and standard of submissions is sufficiently high, a winner will be chosen to present their article at a symposium to be held at Cornell University. Two specialists in the field will be invited to comment on the winner's article at the symposium. The winning article will be published as the Young Philosophers Essay Competition winner in the Philosophical Review. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2005.

Special Instructions for Submissions

Submissions to the Young Philosophers Essay Competition should conform to the general requirements for submitting a manuscript for publication in the Philosophical Review. You can find links to manuscript submission instructions and our style sheet in the Information for Contributors section of our website. In addition, the cover letter (whether electronic or hard copy) should clearly identify the manuscript as a submission to the Young Philosophers Essay Competition and should state how you meet the eligibility requirements.

This all seems very exciting except for three things. First, I much prefer entering competitions to judging them, and I shrewdly suspect that I could be doing a little bit of judging for this one. Second, although it doesn't say so explicitly I bet there's some clause like members of the Sage School, members of their immediate family and their pets are ineligible to win. Third, there must be something wrong with the eligibility criteria. It's analytic that Brian's a young philosopher, yet I don't meet these requirements. Something will have to be done about this.

More seriously, I hope we see some excellent entries, especially from TAR readers. Good luck everyone! (Thanks to Zoltán for the link.)

Papers Blog

No papers blog until Monday (at the earliest) because I'm off to Moscow. Unless something got posted after 11.30, there was actually nothing to report from Wednesday, so we would have been skipping that day anyway.

Whether there's posted here while I'm at the conference depends on how lazy I am. Given my usual practices at conferences, I wouldn't bet on anything going up, but you never know.

Gender Imbalances

As Brian Leiter notes, there's a very interesting discussion over at Sappho's Breathing about the relationship between the relative prominence of certain disciplines within philosophy and how gendered (or otherwise) those disciplines are.

I mostly want to just recommend those discussions, but let me make one distinction that I think is getting blurred over there. The further we get from positivism, the less and less reason there seems to be to view metaphysics and epistemology as anything like a single discipline. Of course there are connections between the two, but really not much more than between any two large fields in philosophy. From where I sit, that looks like it matters to this debate.

(Warning: the following contains generalisations from a ridiculously small sample, and unscientific observation to boot.) Among my peers, there isn't that much of a gender gap amongst philosophers working in metaphysics, or philosophy of language, or ethics or (I think) philosophy of mind. There is, however, a noticable gender gap in epistemology still, even among the younger generation. Now this could be a sample size phenomena, and it could be due to the fact that I'm looking at a rather non-random sample. If it's a real phenomena though, it's kinda surprising, because I would thought that whatever features of logic and philosophy of language and philosophy of science and metaphysics and so on made them gendered male were less prominent in epistemology, rather than more. Of course that's the kind of question about which I'm absolutely not an expert, so I'll defer entirely to more learned opinion on it.

INPC Update (Part II)

As mentioned earlier, there has been some tinkering with the program for the INPC. The final program is available here. I am on Saturday afternoon, as advertised, but Dave has been rotated to an earlier spot, so that clash isn't happening. (Of course that just means there are other clashes.) The program also contains lots of abstracts so you can make a slightly more informed judgment about which sessions to go to.

Hope to see a lot of you there!

Papers Blog - April 28

The papers blog is posted, with more responses by Alex Byrne and David Hilbert to the commentary on their BBS colour paper headlining a rather large crop of papers.

Morals in South Park?

I haven't watched South Park in years, but when I did I tended to agree with the conclusion of this article that it's too preachy for its own good. Still, the article's title gives me an idea or two.

South Park and Philosophy could be better than most of the Randomly Chosen Segment of Pop Culture and Philosophy books that are coming out I think. Not that there isn't still potential for life in the genre. Baseball and Philosophy has been done already, so maybe it's time for NFL and Philosophy, or WWE and Philosophy, or, one that raises genuine ethical concerns, Joe Millionaire and Philosophy. OK, those are jokes, but I think Real World and Philosophy could be spectacular. And if someone didn't know what it really was, you could list the book title on the CV without arousing suspicions. Brilliant! (That last sentence, by the way, will be the title of my entry in Guinness and Philosophy.)

I had an idea the other week for a book where every chapter was kinda like a paper for a volume like that, ranging from the somewhat serious (e.g. 24 and Philosophy) to the complete joke (e.g. Teletubbies and Philosophy).

I couldn't work out the marketing plan for the book though. One thought was that each chapter could be co-written with a different author, a la The 6ths, but I didn't really see how that would help the marketing. It would be fun to write all those chapters though, particularly if I chose the co-authors correctly.

Another was to basically make it a 101 textbook, with the underlying aim being to cover all the bases for a 101 course, and use the pop culture to draw in the masses. It might work, but it could date fairly quickly. All I need is for it to catch fire on the textbook market one year though and I'd be sorta rich. My reputation for serious philosophy would take such a hit that I'd probably never get offered another academic gig, but since I just landed a 40-year, multi-million dollar contract maybe that isn't a concern.

Joe Cruz

...a philosophy professor at Williams has a blog. It looks like it's early days on it, but there's already a very active discussion board. (I think I went twelve months before I had that many comments!) It also looks like it's powered by a university-wide blogging system, which is a very nice thing thing for a university to setup.

Larry Horn talk at Brown

Somehow this announcement ended up in my spam tray, when it clearly is not junk at all.

Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
Colloquium Series
Dr. Larry Horn
of Yale University
"Pragmatics and the Lexicon"
Monday, May 3rd, 2004 at 4:15 p.m.
METCALF RESEARCH BUILDING, ROOM 129

The silver anniversary of Jim McCawley’s classic paper “Conversational Implicature and the Lexicon” provides a natural springboard for an exploration of the state of the art in lexical pragmatics. A century before McCawley’s investigation of how Gricean inference informs our understanding of the structure and use of lexical items, Hermann Paul (1880) had surveyed a range of constructions whose form and distribution reflect the interplay of two functional principles governing conversation, the tendency to reduce expression (later formulated by G. K. Zipf as the linguistic correlate of a more general Principle of Least Effort) and the contextually determined communicative requirements on sufficiency of information. The descendants of this functional dialectic include the speaker's vs. hearer's economies of Zipf and Martinet and the opposed halves of Grice's Maxim of Quantity ("Make your contribution {as informative as is required/no more informative than is required} for the current purpose of the exchange"), grounded within a general theory of rationality and co-operation. From these Gricean submaxims, in turn, derive the Q and R Principles of Horn 1984 (essentially = “Say enough”/ “Don’t say too much”) and the interplay of effort and effect within Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986). While the interaction of the Paul/Grice principles pervades the entire linguistic system—as emerges notably in the minimax between articulatory "laziness" vs. perceptual distinctness in functional phonetics and the corresponding violable constraints in Optimality Theory—it is the consequences of this interaction for the lexicon that provide the focus for this presentation.

Since McCawley's seminal paper, it has become gradually evident that choices among lexical alternatives is guided to a large extent by pragmatic principles; work by Elizabeth Traugott and others has examined the role of these principles in semantic change. After comparing pragmatic and semantic approaches to asymmetries in lexicalization and the inference from most to not all, I will survey the role of speaker- and hearer-based economy principles in motivating syntagmatic reduction, euphemism and negative strengthening, lexical clones (_No, I wanted a SALAD salad_) and the productive formation of "un-nouns" (from the un-cola to the un-politician). Finally, drawing on the complementary tendencies of Avoid Synonymy and Avoid Homonymy, I will argue that synchronic, diachronic, and developmental aspects of lexical pragmatics provide support for a neo-Gricean view of the division of labor in natural language meaning.

I'll be getting off a red-eye flight, going to teach a class on Gödel, then going to this talk. I might not ask the most enlightened question I suspect.

INPC Update

It's not online yet, but there's been a small change to the INPC schedule that affects me, and hence anyone interested in going to my talk. I'm now going to be on Saturday at 12.30, not Sunday at 10.15 as was scheduled. It looks like this puts me up against Dave Chalmers's session, which is too bad for one or both of us. I'll post more news about other changes when they are available.

A Little Project

There's some first thoughts on how to do probability theory in Łukasiewicz's 3-valued logic below the fold, but since they are more diary style notes-to-self than actually something written up for public consumption, I don't want anyone to take them too seriously. But some days I like using my web diary as my diary, so I use it as a depository for first thoughts.