the boundaries of language

Politicians' Logic

2008-09-08T11:57:00.004-05:00

Over at Leiter Reports, Brian Leiter has publicized a 'Spot the Logical Fallacy' party to happen during the build up to the election. It's obviously time to air this old gem again then:

Fetishes

2008-08-26T23:52:00.002-05:00

Proving that xkcd still has it.

The Man Who Told Everything

2008-08-18T17:11:00.002-05:00

I've never understood this video, and I probably never will. It's somewhat disturbing in places, but the song is a classic from one of my favourite bands, and there's definitely something quite beautiful about the video, even its darker images. Here's Doves:

UT Methodology Workshop Pictures

2008-08-17T10:59:00.002-05:00

The UT Methodology workshop is finally over. We had sessions from Jeff King, Marc Moffett, Ernie Sosa, Josh Dever, Dan Bonevac, Roy Sorensen, Derek Ball, Dan Korman and John Bengson, plus round-table discussions on the place of data about natural language in philosophy, paradoxes, and thought-experiments. It's been an exhausting five days, but I've learned a lot from it, and the visiting speakers were great to have around.

Colleen has put up some really good photos of the event on her Flickr site, so check those out if you want a flavour of the event. There were a bunch more photos taken last night by other people, and hopefully some of those will be online at some point.

UT Methodology Workshop

2008-08-12T09:00:00.002-05:00

Well, it's finally that time. I'll be spending the next 5 days at the Methodology Workshop, which kicks off today with Roy Sorensen's 'What Makes Something Interesting?' and our own Josh Dever's 'Linguistic Idealism.

Alex G and Alex B have done a fantastic job putting this all together, and I'm anticipating it being a really fun event.

And I Was a Boy From School

2008-08-11T00:16:00.003-05:00

I heard this being played really loudly in Fopp on Union Street last time I was back in Glasgow, and fell in love with it immediately. I was hugely surprised to learn it was by Hot Chip, since I'd really detested what I'd heard by them previously. Anyway, great song, interesting video. Good combination:

Knowing How to Hold Your Booze

2008-08-10T10:31:00.013-05:00

In this post, I'd like to bring together a couple more thoughts about knowledge how that have been bouncing around my dome for the past eight months or so. As those of you who have read my previous posts on this topic will know, I tend to find myself torn in two directions. On the one hand, the linguistic evidence and my intuitive reactions to several cases discussed in the literature push me towards holding that - contra Neo-Ryleans, who hold that possession of the corresponding ability is necessary and sufficient for knowing how - some kind of propositional attitude is necessary. If this isn't intellectualism, it's damn close. On the other hand, I've been reluctant to accept, despite some of the linguistic evidence clearly pointing in this direction, that the propositional attitude one must have must be knowledge. Moreover, I've found the suggestion that knowledge how attributions don't entail the corresponding attribution of ability or success in action hard to swallow. In particular, I've expressed some sympathy for Noë and Hawley's suggestions that knowledge how attributions entail some kind of counterfactual success condition. My earlier posts on knowledge how were part of my ongoing attempts to balance these competing considerations.

Another source of reluctance towards accepting any version of intellectualism is that to me it intuitively mishandles particular cases. For example, I find it very hard to buy:

'Jane knows how to speak English' is true in a given context iff for some contextually relevant way w, Jane stands in the knowledge-that relation to the proposition that w is a way for her to speak English, and Jane entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation.

Now, I don't have any specific argument against this, and Stanley and Williamson would quite rightly be unimpressed by the mere fact that I find it implausible. But I do find it implausible, and that fact plays a role in my own thinking, even if it's rightly considered dialectically ineffectual.

A perhaps more interesting example is this one:

'Jane knows how to hold her booze' is true in a given context iff for some contextually relevant way w, Jane stands in the knowledge-that relation to the proposition that w is a way for her to hold her booze, and Jane entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation.

Again, I find this pretty hard to believe. Similarly with John and Marc's account:

Jane knows how to hold her booze just in case Jane knows for some way w that w is a way for her to hold her booze, and she minimally understands w, where to minimally understand a way w, is to have a correct and complete (possibly implicit) conception C of w and reasonably mastery of the concepts in C and their mode of combination, and where one has reasonable mastery of a concept just in case one is able, under normal conditions, to correctly apply that concept in core cases.

I guess the worry I had before was that these accounts of knowledge how over-intellectualize knowing how to hold one's booze. The charge of over-intellectualization is considered and rejected by Jenn, John and Marc in 'The Folk on Knowing How' on the grounds that folk attributions of knowledge how seem to be sensitive to whether the subject possesses a certain item of propositional knowledge rather than whether she possesses the corresponding ability. But I wonder if we'd keep getting those kinds of results if we focused on a different set of examples.

In particular, I suspect that people will judge that one knows how to hold one's booze only if one is able to hold one's booze. I can at the very least report my intuitions here; it doesn't matter what a subject knows or believes, if they invariably pass out in the fetal position after one Smirnoff Ice, they don't know how to hold their booze. Of course, sometimes one will be ill, and so on. But if one would pass out after one drink even when there are no mitigating factors of this sort, one does not know how to handle one's booze.

Let me offer a new reason for regarding this example as particularly interesting, before anticipating an objection one might have. The counterfactual I just invoked can seem suspect because of cases in which a subject can manifest her knowledge how without exercising the corresponding ability. As Snowdon writes (p9):

'To construct such examples we need to describe cases in which the subject can show, teach, or tell (or otherwise convey to) us how to do something, and hence must be credited with knowing how to do it, but is for some reason or other unable to do it.'

The paradigm here is Jeff King's ski instructor, who is in great demand to teach particular stunts, but who is unable to perform them himself. We don't, it will be claimed, need to regard him as meeting any reasonable counterfactual success condition in order to regard him as knowing how to perform the stunts.

There is, I think, much to be said about this case. But for now, I want to just suggest that the possessive pronoun in 'Jane knows how to hold her booze' seems to block an analogous move here. Jane might be able to teach Steve to hold his booze, Michael to hold his booze, and Sarah to hold her booze. But none of this would remotely incline me to think that she knows her to hold her booze. Again, my intuition is that she can teach people left, right and center, but if she's the one singing 'Sweet Caroline' after one drink, she doesn't know how to hold her booze.

Let me turn, as promised, to the consideration of an objection that might have occurred to a reader by now. One might think that holding one's booze shouldn't be considered as falling in the scope of a proposal about the nature of knowledge how, just as we're not interested in the digestion of food, to take an oft discussed example. But it's wrong to assimilate holding one's booze to digesting one's food. Knowing how to hold one's booze usually requires practice, and it is something one can systematically work towards (indeed, I have a good friend who did just that the summer before he started college). It's not just something one's body does under normal conditions, like breathing or digesting one's food. Of course that's vague, but there does seem to be a world of difference here. This manifests itself, I think, in the fact that that we're uncomfortable attributing knowledge how to breathe or how to digest food, while it's perfectly natural to speak of someone knowing how to hold their booze. This asymmetry doesn't seem to be due to Gricean effects: notice that 'Jane knows how to breathe - not that I mean to suggest that was in question' seems weird, suggesting that the asymmetry is not explained by our typically assuming people know how to breathe but not that they know how to hold their booze. We just don't naturally think or speak in those terms at all.

Moreover, there are other examples which don't seem at all like the case of digestion of food, but which display the same behavior. Consider, for instance:

'Jane knows how to handle herself.'

Now, one worry I do have is that these examples both seem a little idiomatic. So I end with a couple of questions I'm unable to answer. First of all, if they are idiomatic, does that mess up the points I've been trying to make with them here? Second, are there any examples which don't feel so idiomatic, but which can be used to make those points? To try to be clearer, the crucial features of such examples seem to be this: 1. It is very plausible that one possesses the relevant know how only if one meets a counterfactual success condition; 2. one cannot construct counterexamples to the necessity of the counterfactual success condition by focusing on instructor cases, since a possessive or reflexive pronoun gets in the way of successful instruction being a mark of possession of the relevant item of knowledge how. How about:

'Jane knows how to look after herself'?

Certain Doubters on Evidence

2008-08-04T19:19:00.003-05:00

In the absence of a post here, there's a very interesting and active thread over at Certain Doubts about a paper by Ram Neta (who's visiting Austin in a few weeks time) and Mark Phelan. The paper argues that the 'folk' aren't anti-intellectualists about evidence, a conclusion which they take to cause trouble for Jason Stanley, who has expressed considerable sympathy for the view that evidence is interest-relative. So far the discussion has drawn in the authors, Kvanvig, Fantl, DeRose, Stanley, and others. Worth checking out.

The Only Moment We Were Alone Together

2008-08-04T00:41:00.002-05:00

Ten of the greatest minutes of the three years I've spent in Austin so far were spent watching the city's own Explosions in the Sky pour everything they had to offer into recreating this wonderful piece of music live at Emos. I'll try to get some philosophy up here soon, but for now, just enjoy:

Grice, Dino-style

2008-07-29T12:00:00.004-05:00

From this week's Dinosaur Comics:

HT: Tom

The Mind That Knows Itself

2008-07-28T23:50:00.002-05:00

Here's the beautiful 'The Mistress Witch McClure' by Sufjan Stevens, randomly set to shots of Buffalo:

And there's an added bonus for anyone who tries to spot the references in the titles of posts over at the Philosophy Job Market Blog.

Hawthorne Bleg

2008-07-28T13:15:00.005-05:00

I'd be very grateful if someone with a pdf of Hawthorne's 'Reply to Cohen', or with access to 2000's Philosophical Issues which it appeared in, would please email me a copy. UT's access to PI has a gaping hole in it (1999-2002).

Cheers.

Update: A reader kindly sent me a copy of the paper.

The Dark TA

2008-07-24T15:47:00.004-05:00

Lauren and I went to see 'The Dark Knight' last Friday, and I thought it was pretty rubbish. Not in the same league of terribleness as 'Batman Begins', but not very good at all. Anyway, this review from Pharyngula seemed right on the money, and I can't resist quoting this line:

"As a plot mover, the Joker was less an agent of chaos and more like the TA for a freshman philosophy course, leading everyone through twisty little exercises in artificial circumstances that present the poor student with difficult choices."

HT: Colleen

Dolphins

2008-07-21T17:52:00.001-05:00

Here's Fred Neil singing 'Dolphins', just because it's Monday. Enjoy:

NYU PhilMath Conference Date Change

2008-07-19T16:14:00.002-05:00

As Justin has pointed out, the philosophy of maths conference he and Shieva are organizing has been shifted from October to April 10-12 2009. Check out the website of the conference here.

Wright on Becoming a Philosopher

2008-07-19T10:33:00.003-05:00

A while ago I noted that the Synthese volume featuring Crispin Wright's students reflecting on his work had started to filter into the 'Online first' section. Now you can get Crispin's foreword telling the story of how he became a philosopher, his first encounters with Dummett and with Frege's Grundlagen, etc.

HT: Andreas.

Philosopher's Carnival #73

2008-07-14T12:06:00.002-05:00

The most recent Philosopher's Carnival is now over at Megan Kime's Beyond Borders. It features one of my recent posts, plus two discussions I've been involved in: one on how to Fitch-Church non-factive operators, and another on minimal-Fregeanism and Kripke puzzles.

Hawthorne on Closure

2008-07-12T16:26:00.009-05:00

I'm nearly done with a draft of a paper on Hawthorne's treatment of Closure, but I'm not quite sure I fully understand how the 'practical environments' idea in chapter 4 is supposed to enable us to respect Closure. Most of the details are clear enough, but some of them require inferences from things Hawthorne has written elsewhere in the book. I don't know how good a job I've done of reconstructing what Hawthorne had in mind, or of presenting the reconstruction. Any comments on the following attempt, lifted from the draft, would be very much appreciated - it's clearly in need of improvement.

According to interest-relative invariantism, in contrast, the interpretation of ‘knows’ and its relatives is invariant across different contexts. Nonetheless its extension can shift in more or less the manner suggested by contextualism because whether one’s true belief counts as knowledge is not determined entirely by truth-conducive factors—such as whether it was formed by a reliable mechanism—but also by factors concerning the subject’s practical interests; the direness of the consequences of the her being mistaken, for instance. We can see how this kind of account of knowledge might help save closure by briefly examining John Hawthorne’s preferred treatment of the lottery paradox. When one needs to consider whether one’s lottery ticket (or a ticket someone is offering you) will win for one’s present practical purposes—one is contemplating whether to sell the ticket for a cent, to take Hawthorne’s favorite example—one does not know what one’s spending power will be after the draw has been announced. However, when the outcome of the lottery isn’t an issue, given one’s practical interests, one can know where the ceiling on one’s spending power after the draw will lie.

So far all that has been suggested is that whether one knows the minor premise of the lottery paradox is sensitive to one's practical environment. We now need to consider three kinds of cases to establish whether such an account of knowledge respects closure. The first kind of case is one in which a subject S knows p, and knows that p entails q, but does not draw the consequences of these pieces of knowledge. Such cases are fully compatible with closure. The closure principle we are working with requires that one actually have made the inference in question, and so there can be no failure of closure when one simply doesn’t make the inference. The second kind of case is one in which a subject knows p, knows that p entails q, and has competently deduced q from p at some point in the past. So suppose again that S is in the bookstore, and the outcome of the draw is the last thing on S’s mind. However, S deduced yesterday that her ticket is a loser from her inability to afford to visit Mauritius in two weeks time. Hawthorne’s discussion seems to suggest that in these cases S knows that her ticket is a loser, though her knowledge is ‘idle’ since it is not of practical relevance to S, and that in some such cases S may even be able to assert that her ticket is a loser. (This, anyway, is how I take Hawthorne’s view of these cases based on 2004: 161 and 183).

The third kind of case, in which one starts off in a practical environment such that one knows that p and then competently deduces q, is a little trickier. Suppose once more that S's practical interests are such that whether her lottery ticket wins or loses is not of practical relevance to S, and so she knows that she will not be able to afford to visit Mauritius in two weeks time. S competently deduces that her lottery ticket is a loser, but upon reaching the conclusion her practical environment shifts such that S no longer knows what she will or will not be able to afford in a couple of weeks; knowing p requires that it be acceptable for one to use p as a premise in one’s practical reasoning (see, e.g., 2004: 176), and S should no longer use the premise that she will not be able to afford to visit Mauritius in two weeks time as a premise in her practical reasoning. S now knows neither the premises nor the conclusion, and so closure is still respected. Parallel to the contextualist resolution of the closure-driven puzzles, what appear to be counterexamples to closure are really just shifts in the subject’s practical environment, bringing shifts in the extension of ‘knows’ in their wake. So understood, both contextualism and Hawthorne’s invariantism are instances of a general strategy of maintaining that ‘the Closure Principle only appears to fail, as the result of an epistemically important switch that takes place in the course of our thinking about the example’ (Vogel 1990: 20).

DeRose on the Tracking Account

2008-07-09T13:27:00.005-05:00

While reading back through Keith DeRose's fantastic 'Solving the Skeptical Problem', I came across a claim that I'd previously taken on trust from DeRose, but which came to seem quite puzzling in conversation with John Bengson. In a footnote, DeRose writes:

'I've skipped entirely Nozick's fourth condition, but I believe this fourth condition to be redundant, anyway: It automatically holds whenever true belief is present.' (27fn27)

Now, this redundancy claim might be encouraged by Nozick's presentation of the four conditions of his tracking account of knowledge:

S knows that p iff:

(1) p is true
(2) S believes that p
(3) ~(1) -> not ~(2)
(4) (1) -> (2),

where -> is a subjective conditional, rather than an indicative condition.

But this bare-bones presentation of the account isn't very helpful, and we have to look to Nozick's surrounding discussion to fill it out a bit. What's suggested is that condition (4) should be understood like this:

Were it, in changed circumstances, still the case that p, S would still believe that p.
(Adapted from Wright's 'Keeping Track of Nozick': 135. Wright ignores the needed relativization to methods, and for the purposes of this post I can afford to follow.)

Now, my question is this; why does DeRose think that this condition is redundant given conditions (1) and (2)? For that matter, why isn't the example Nozick used to motivate (4) a counterexample to DeRose's claim that (4) 'automatically holds whenever true belief is present'?

Nozick asks us to imagine a poor envatted subject having his brain manipulated by scientists so that he comes to believe that he is envatted and that scientists are inducing beliefs in him by manipulating his brain. He has a true belief that he's envatted and that scientists are inducing beliefs in him by manipulating his brain. But does this belief satisfy (4)? Nozick argues it doesn't:

'The person in the tank does not satify the subjunctive condition 4. [...] It is not true of him that if he were in the tank he would believe it; for in the close world (or situation) to his own where he is in the tank but they don't give him the belief that he is (much less instill the belief that he isn't) he doesn't believe he is in the tank. Of the person actually in the tank and believing it, it is not true to make the further statement that if he were in the tank he would believe it - so he does not know he is in the tank.'

Even leaving aside Nozick's final claim that the person in the tank doesn't know that they are, the example is a little hard to evaluate since, as usual, claims about the relative closeness of worlds are always somewhat slippery. But it seems plausible enough, and there seem to be other examples of this form readily available. For instance, Nozick mentions Harman's case of the guy who reads about the death of the dictator of his country, but fails to be exposed to the massive cover-up that follows. Structurally similar examples seem to abound.

Any thoughts on what DeRose had in mind? And does the point stand or fall with an analogous complaint against safety (S believes that p -> p)?

Teach the Controversy

2008-07-09T10:15:00.002-05:00

I've blogged about Jeremy of Amorphia Apparel before, when he launched his new Science! range. But he's come to realize that he shouldn't let modern science tell its side of the story without extending the same opportunity to other points of view. That's why he's created a new set of designs, which are available on his new Teach the Controversy site. As the site explains, these are:

'Intelligently designed t-shirts urging you to show both sides of every story.'

Austinites can expect to see me sporting the turtle design, in the interests of keeping an open mind of course, in the new Semester.

What Computer Proofs Don't Tell Us

2008-07-06T18:51:00.004-05:00

Kenny has an interesting post over at Antimeta on an old paper of Tyler Burge's on apriority and computer proofs, and there's an interesting exchange with Carrie Jenkins in the comment thread. I've never got around to reading that paper, though it seems of a piece with 'Content Preservation' and other papers of that period.

But what I want to know is why my map of the world shower curtain, which uses six colours to represent political regions, has Chile and Peru both orange.

CMM Graduate Conference

2008-07-03T18:54:00.002-05:00

As Ross noted in the comments to my earlier post, the CMM Graduate conference in Leeds is taking place on the 4th of September, not the 5th to the 7th as I'd originally written. The excellent-looking Perspectives on Ontology Conference takes place in Leeds from the 5th to the 7th, which presumably explains my confusion.

Grice and Doxastic Voluntarism

2008-07-03T17:35:00.013-05:00

It's generally seen as an objectionable consequence of an account that it entail a robust form of doxastic voluntarism. For instance, take epistemic deontologicalism, which has it that we should understand epistemic justification in deontic terms such as 'requirement', 'blame' and 'obligation'. This view has been criticized on the grounds that it is committed to the appropriateness of assessments of beliefs in these terms, even though such assessments seem to presuppose that we are responsible for our beliefs - that we have voluntary control over what we believe. It is taken as pretty obvious that we have no such control.

Feldman, Heironymi, and others have offered a partial response to this argument by questioning whether the appropriateness of assessing beliefs in deontic terms really does commit us to doxastic volutarism. My concern here is not with this dialectic, however, but with a parallel issue that arises once one adopts certain aspects of Grice's philosophy of language. In 'Meaning', Grice writes:

'Suppose I discovered some person so constituted that, when I told him that whenever I grunted in a special way I wanted him to blush or to incur some physical malady, thereafter whenever he recognized the grunt (and with it my intention), he did blush or incur the malady. Should we then want to say that the grunt meant(nn) something? I do not think so. This points to the fact that for x to have meaning(nn), the intended effect must be something which in some sense is within the control of the audience, or that in some sense of "reason" the recognition of the intention behind x is for the audience a reason and not merely a cause. [...] It looks, then as if the intended effect must be something within the control of the audience, or at least the sort of thing which is within its control.'
(p221 in Studies in the Way of Words)

Now, Grice's account of imperatives looks okay here; the view he comes to in the William James Lectures is that the intended effect should be that one's audience forms a particular kind of intention, and a sufficiently robust voluntarism about intention-formation doesn't seem problematic. But in the case of 'informative' utterances, Grice suggests the intended effect is that a particular belief is induced in one's audience. So, assuming that doxastic voluntarism really is a bad consequence, we seem to have a straightforward objection to Grice on our hands.

Some contemporary Griceans have suggested weakening the intended result in the case of informative utterances to the following: one intends one's audience to entertain a particular thought, rather than to form a particular belief. (For example, see Ray Buchanan and Gary Ostertag's contribution to the Mind volume celebrating the centenary of 'On Denoting'.) Here again a sufficiently robust voluntarism doesn't seem too objectionable - at the very least, the weakening seems to do better with respect to the problem I've sketched than Grice's original suggestion, so some progress seems to have been made.

But the problem still seems to remain for Gricean accounts of assertion. Consider Bach and Harnish's familiar Grice-inspired proposal (Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts: 42):

In uttering e, S asserts that p if S expresses:

1. the belief that p, and

2. the intention that her audience believe that p.

For the purposes of Gricean accounts of meaning, saying and communicating, it might be satisfactory to suggest that the intended result is that one's audience entertain a particular thought. But I'm worried that an attempt to amend Bach and Harnish's (2) along these lines is too weak - that something of the force of assertion, in contrast to mere saying, gets lost. Clearly some work needs to be done clarifying and defending this last point, but hopefully the basic idea is clear enough for now.

Additionally, if this inchoate line of thought is to be developed into an objection to Gricean accounts of assertion, Grice had better be right that the intended result must be under the audience's voluntary control, and doxastic voluntarism had better be genuinely problematic. So there are a lot of interesting issues to be considered before the force of the objection I'm trying to mount can be properly assessed.

NYU Philmath Conference

2008-06-19T15:02:00.005-05:00

While we're on the subject of conferences, let me draw the attention of those of you not on Facebook to Justin and Sheiva's philosophy of maths conference at NYU in October. I'm going to do my best to be there, and the lineup is very exciting. So (at least) two reasons to go!

Update and Calls for Papers

2008-06-19T14:35:00.003-05:00

I've been quiet the last while as Lauren's been visiting me in Glasgow, and I've been trying to make the most of my time here. Tomorrow I fly back to Austin, and I'll be back to work properly on Monday. Expect posting to pick up again around then.

In the meantime, there are a couple of CFPs out for excellent looking conferences in Europe. First, there's the third annual CMM grad conference at Leeds. Papers are to be on metaphysics (construed very broadly) or mind, and are due no later than Friday the 18th of July. The conference will be on September 4th. There will be a panel on grad-student publishing with two former Archeans, Robbie and Ross. The CFP is here. The grad conference is just a couple of days earlier than a grown-ups conference, Perspectives on Ontology, which has a great line-up.

The Arche/CSMN conference is being held in Oslo this year! They're looking for high-quality papers on topics in their core areas, due by the first of September. The conference itself will be held on November 14th-16th. The keynotes announced so far are Zoltan Szabo and Carrie Jenkins (whose forthcoming book, Grounding Concepts, is released in August). See the CFP here for further details.

Lastly, on the other side of the Pond, there's a graduate conference on Essentialism being held at UC Davis. The official webpage is here, but the actual call is a .doc file, so let me offer a more web-friendly version here:

Graduate Conference on Essentialism

U.C. Davis, 26-27 September, 2008

Keynote Speaker: L.A. Paul (University of Arizona)

Submission Deadline: 1 July 2008

About the Conference

The conference is directed primarily at graduate students who are ABD and who are writing in metaphysics. The aim of the conference is to facilitate the exchange of ideas among graduate students working in metaphysics. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to present, not read, their papers. There will be six graduate papers presented. Participants will be expected to pre-read accepted papers.

Submission Guidelines

Topic: Papers on any area of metaphysics will be reviewed. However, preference will be given to papers addressing topics within Essentialism or ontology.

Length: 4000 - 6000 words

Cover Letter: name, paper title, email address, abstract (max. 500 words)

Submit in PDF form to: essentialism.conference@gmail.com

Please ensure that papers are suitable for blind review.

If you are interested in participating in the conference via chairing or commenting, please email Dana at essentialism.conference@gmail.com.

A new Indespensibility Argument

2008-05-29T08:44:00.001-05:00

It seems that bendy-cat-doll-thing isn't as reluctant to draw the conclusion that numbers exist as Putnam.

NDPR Reviews - Stanley and Hossack

2008-05-29T07:44:00.007-05:00

As Shawn points out, there have been a crop of interesting reviews put up on NDPR recently. Here's my pick.

Of most interest to readers of this blog will probably be Gary Ostertag's excellent review of Jason Stanley's collected papers, Language in Context. Ostertag does a much better job of setting out the motivations for Jason's project than I did in my earlier post on the matter, and the review offers a mini-summary of some of the criticisms that have been made since the papers were first published, along with some insights of its own. Overall, the review ends on a very complimentary note:

'The forgoing indicates certain challenges facing the Indexicalist. But there is no question that Language in Context is an outstanding achievement. Not since Stephen Neale's Descriptions has a book brought the apparatus of formal semantics and linguistic theory to bear on issues in the philosophy of language in such a constructive and illuminating way.'

Stephen Hetherington has a review of Keith Hossack's dense and ambitious The Metaphysics of Knowledge. I wasn't able to work my way through the whole book last semester, but some of Hetherington's criticisms seem right on the money. Hetherington's right, for instance, that Keith seems frustratingly unwilling to consider the range of options available to us in the debates he enters into, and this sometimes led to the feeling that he hasn't really motivated his particular positions in those debates. That made it a little hard to appreciate the detailed and careful developments Keith offers of these positions. And like Hetherington, I also found the knowledge-one approach a little unsatisfying and underdeveloped (though I'm sure Hetherington has overstated the extent to which Keith's approach was inspired by Williamson. That said, the book seemed very well written, very thoughtful, and to contain characteristically interesting and imaginative contributions to a wide range of central philosophical debates. Some of these merits also come out a little in the review. So despite my gripes with what I've read so far, I'm definitely looking forward to coming back to the book and taking some time to finish it off.

Arche Assertion Workshop

2008-05-28T04:10:00.004-05:00

I just got back from a pretty spectacular weekend in St Andrews, during which I saw lots of people, and attended eleven - count 'em - eleven presentations. On Friday morning my good friend Marcus Rossberg, who kindly put me up for the bulk of the time I was there, discussed the options one has for reconciling inferentialism about the logic constants with the non-conservatism of third- over second-order logic.

Jonathan Schaffer kicked off the Arche Assertion Workshop that evening with a talk arguing that if you put together the Stalnakarian thought that what an assertion does is aim to reduce the contrast set with the Williamsonian thought that knowledge is the norm of assertion, the outcome is a contrastivist notion of knowledge; in slogan form, knowledge in the image of assertion is contrastive knowledge.

The next morning, Ofra Magidor presented joint work she's done with John Hawthorne which aims to show that the non-transparency of certain notions appealed to in Stalnaker's framework prevents him from being able to retain the following principle, we they label Uniformity: In cases of rational communication, the same proposition is asserted at each world in the context set. (Very roughly indeed: A notion N is transparent just in case Np implies NNp and ~Np implies N~Np.) Jessica Brown's talk noted that the thesis the knowledge is sufficient for warranted assertion is frequently appealed to, but never defended. She explored some arguments analogous to Williamson's arguments for the necessity claim, and suggested that none of them were good enough. In the questions, I tried to argue that her point is even more significant than she'd suggested, since it's actually the sufficiency thesis that Williamson appeals to when defending the necessity condition in the face of cases where a subject asserts something false but on the basis of impeccable evidence. These seem to be cases in which we just as asserter to have asserted well in some sense, yet he clearly did not know that which he asserted. Williamson writes (257, emphasis added):

'The case is quite consistent with the knowledge account. Indeed, if I am entitled to assume that knowledge warrants assertion, then, since it is reasonable for me to believe that I know that there is snow outside, it is reasonable for me to believe I have warrant to assert that there is snow outside. If it is reasonable for me to believe that I have warrant to assert that there is snow outside, then, other things being equal, it is reasonable for me to assert that there is snow outside. Thus the knowledge account can explain the reasonableness of the assertion.'

The same line will get run in response to Gettier cases. So, I suggested, it seems like it may be difficult to defend necessity without appealing to sufficiency - but, as Jessica pointed out, sufficiency has never been remotely adequately defended.

In the afternoon, John MacFarlane explored four different styles of accounts of the nature or purpose of assertion; the Stalnakarian account, the more or less Gricean account, Williamson-style accounts which hold that assertion has a constitutive norm, and commitment accounts. He explored how each of these accounts could make sense of the phenomenon of retraction, and whether they are genuinely competing, ending with a tentative suggestion that the kind of commitment account he has defended in print can make the best sense of retraction, and may enable one to recapture what each of the other accounts seems to have right. Lastly, Jason Stanley argued that defenders of the knowledge norm, his earlier self included, aren't free to appeal to Moore-paradoxical sentences of the form 'p, but I don't know so' to support their view. The reason is that sentences of the form 'p, but I'm not certain that is so/it's not certain that is so' are, as Unger pointed out, just as weird, yet seem to require even more demanding norms of assertion.

I only attended three out of the four talks on the Sunday, the final day of the workshop. Sandy Goldberg kicked things off, arguing that accepting that assertion has an evidential norm can help us explain certain phenomena in the epistemology of testimony. Jennifer Lackey also argued against the sufficiency of knowledge for warranted assertion, though in the question session most of the audience seemed convinced that her counterexamples should really be regarded as cases in which one has violated Gricean maxims. Bob Stalnaker finished things up with a talk on how to accommodate self-locating beliefs within his general framework.

All in all, this was about the best conference I've ever attended. The talks I went to were all very interested, and I learned a lot from them, and the whole thing was superbly organized. Thanks to Jessica Brown, Herman Cappelen, and last but not least, Sharon Coull for putting together such a great event.

Yesterday we had two further talks in the Basic Knowledge seminar from Baron Reed and Jennifer Lackey. Baron tried to defend a new argument for scepticism which would be immune to the charge, commonly leveled against standard sceptical arguments, of having presupposed an internalist picture of knowledge and justification. Jennifer defended and elaborated her 'justificationist' view of what to do in the face of peer-disagreement.

All in all, a fantastic weekend. As well as attending the talks, I got to see a lot of old friends, and meet a bunch of new people. Now I just have to recover in time for Duncan Pritchard's workshop on Basic Knowledge and Scepticism this coming weekend...

Lackey and Moore Again

2008-05-27T14:31:00.003-05:00

I found myself very unhappy with how I put my earlier objection to Lackey's treatment of Moore's Paradox, and I managed to put the worry much better in conversation with Sandy Goldberg this weekend. Towards the end of the earlier post, I wrote:

'it may be that Lackey conceives of the challenge to the reasonable belief account as follows; the account rules as permissible assertions which strike us as paradoxical and/or odd'

I now think this is spot on. Likewise, Lackey takes herself to be playing defense against the following objection; we hear assertions of lottery propositions as conversational fouls, but it's reasonable to believe them, and so Lackey's norm doesn't rule them as infelicitous. The heading that the section in which she discusses these issues is called 'counterexamples to the RTBNA', (i.e. the reasonable to believe norm of assertion), the conclusion of which is:

'neither lottery propositions nor Moorean paradoxes--the two central objections to norms requiring anything less than [the knowledge norm]--pose a problem for the RTBNA.'

But now my worry can be stated. If all the evidence Williamson adduced in favor of the knowledge norm can be explained away with appeal to a principle to the effect that we shouldn't assert what we know will mislead our audience, what reason do we have for thinking there's a norm of assertion at all? The argument for the existence of a norm is an inference to the best explanation, but what's left for Lackey's RTBNA to explain?

Lackey on Moore's Paradox

2008-05-21T08:32:00.005-05:00

I've been reading Jennifer Lackey's new book 'Learning from Words' in preparation for meeting her this weekend, and I've really enjoyed it so far. It's superbly written, and it's both a useful overview of the main issues at stake in the recent debate over testimony, and an interesting and original contribution to that debate. The book is based on a series of papers Lackey has published since 1999, but it's useful to have the material collected together, and there's a significant amount of new stuff and revision.

Here I want to raise a worry about her explanation of Moore-paradoxical sentences in the chapter on norms of assertion. Williamson, taking his cue from Unger, has noted that the knowledge account of assertion offers a particularly elegant account of why there's something wrong with asserting sentences of the form 'p, but I don't know that p'. But an issue immediately arises about what it is that needs explained. Here are three answers that one might endorse:

1. The usual answer is that what needs an explanation is why we hear assertions of such sentences as contradictory or paradoxical, despite the sentences themselves being perfectly consistent.

2. Following DeRose's influential '92 paper on epistemic possibility, some participants in the debate have suggested that all that we need to explain is why such sentences sound odd. (See Douven's 2006 Phil Review article, for instance.)

3. Lastly, we might think that all that really needs accounting for is that such sentences ought not be asserted.

It seems that the tasks involved get less demanding as one moves from (1), through (2), to (3). And, relatedly, it seems like to have successfully carried out one of these tasks is also to have carried out the tasks below it, but not above.

So what does Lackey take to require explanation? It seems that she initially takes it to be (1). Here's how she introduces the topic:

'Moore famously noted that assertions of these general forms--that is, of either the form "p, but I don't believe that p" or of the form "p, but I don't know that p"--seem quite paradoxical.' (130)

It is this paradoxicalness that Lackey takes Williamson and other proponents of the knowledge account (KNA) to trying to explain:

'Advocates of the KNA are in an excellent position to account for the paradoxical nature of asserting Moorean sentences.' (130)

Lackey wants to defend a rival to the KNA, the reasonable belief account. Moorean sentences seem to be a problem for this account, since Lackey herself has described cases in which it is reasonable for a subject to believe p, and that they don't know p. These are cases of selfless assertion, in which a subject asserts p on the basis of great evidence - evidence which makes it reasonable for her to believe p - and yet isn't willing or able to bring her beliefs into line with the evidence, and so either fails to form any belief on the matter, or continues to believe ~p.

In response, Lackey argues for a second norm, the NMNA, which rules an assertion as improper if it is reasonable for the asserter to believe that it will be misleading in the context of utterance. (She suggests this second norm might get subsumed by Gricean maxims; I think it would strengthen her position if she were so.) It's the NMNA that allows her to deal with Moorean assertions:

'the NMNA rules out the permissibility of asserting such paradoxes in most circumstances, even when they involve selfless assertions,' (134)

How? Well, consider one of Lackey's examples of selfless assertion. Sebastian is a well-respected doctor who has seen excellent evidence showing that there's no link between vaccinations and autism. However, his own child was recently diagnosed with autism not long after receiving vaccinations. As a result, he cannot bring himself to believe that there's no connection, despite recognizing that the evidence all points in that direction (he recognizes that the case of his own child isn't evidence to the contrary, and that his reluctance to belief that there's no connection stems from his emotion state). When asked by a patient whether there's a connection between vaccination and autism, he sets his own feelings to the side, and asserts on the basis of the excellent evidence that there is not. Of this case, Lackey writes:

'such an assertion is most likely to lead Sebastian's hearers either forming no relevant beliefs at all, because they are confused by its oddity, or to forming false beliefs, because they are trying to plausibly explain its oddity away.' (134)

Notice the shift. Not only are we now engaged in task 3 rather than task 1, Lackey's account, far from providing an explanation of the oddity of assertions of Moorean sentences (task 2), actually helps itself to the fact they sound odd in order to explain why they should be ruled impermissible by the NMNA.

Now, it may be that Lackey conceives of the challenge to the reasonable belief account as follows; the account rules as permissible assertions which strike us as paradoxical and/or odd. But if so, we should wonder why this lack of ambition wasn't flagged more clearly, and we should wonder whether we can rest content with an account of assertion that can only help us with such an unambitious (type 3) explanation of the Moore cases, when there are rival accounts which enable us to offer type 1 and type 2 explanations.

Knowledge How and Understanding Revisited

2008-05-19T18:05:00.004-05:00

I very quickly came to the conclusion that I'd put the emphasis in the wrong place in my earlier post. I wrote there:

"Toy account or not, I think the guiding account provides the basis of a challenge to the claim that the case is a counterexample to any account that lacks the understanding condition."

But it's not really the account that I want to draw attention to. It's the availability of an alternative diagnosis of why Irina fails to know how in the case described in the post. The reason Marc and John take the case to counter-exemplify any account that lacks their understanding condition is presumably that they take it as obvious that the right diagnosis of the case is that she fails to know how because she fails to understand how to perform a Salchow. What I really wanted to draw attention to in the post was a rival diagnosis. According to the rival, Irina fails to know how because, roughly, it's lucky that her true belief about how to X leads her to successfully X, just as in Gettier cases it's lucky that one's justified belief turns out to be true. Really I'm suggesting that the Irina case is an example of what once seemed like an elusive beast; it's a Gettier case for knowledge how. Gettier cases for knowledge how are ones in which the connection between one's true belief or knowledge about how to X and one successful X-ing is too lucky. The role of the guiding account should really just be to illustrate one way we might give content to the notion of luck being appealed to, one that makes the analogy to standard propositional knowledge particularly clear.

Blackwell Epistemology Anthology

2008-05-19T10:43:00.004-05:00

I got given some book tokens, and so I set off to find some of the books I'll need for my dissertation in Glasgow. The book stores here have become pretty disappointing, and I didn't find anything on my list (none of which was particularly obscure or anything, I hasten to add. For instance, I need to get my own copy of Austin's 'How to do things with words'). In the end, I found a copy of the second edition of the Blackwell Epistemology Anthology. I already have the original Kim and Sosa edition, but Fantl and McGrath have done a superb job of bringing it up to date, and the volume is beautifully packaged. Couldn't resist.

Some of the highlights of the new selection include: a section on epistemic closure; a second paper by Conee and Feldman added to the section on justification; a vastly improved section on virtue- and value-driven epistemology, featuring papers by Greco, Pritchard, Kvanvig, Sosa, and others; a hugely expanded section on knowledge and context, which supplements the three pro-contextualist papers from the first edition (DeRose's masterly 'Solving the Sceptical Problem', Lewis' 'Elusive Knowledge', and Cohen's 'Contextualism Solutions to Epistemological Problems') with a number of pieces representative of the recent backlash, including excerpts from Hawthorne and Stanley's books, Fantl and McGrath's own Phil Review piece, and MacFarlane's paper on assessment sensitivity; a new section on epistemic sources, including Burge's classic paper on testimony and Lackey's rightly influential attack on the transmission model of testimony. And this is just scratching the surface.

There are some noticeable omissions in the topics covered, though. While the original volume included a cluster of papers on the generality problem, including core papers by Goldman, Alston, and Conee and Feldman, the new volume doesn't really have anything on that. It's a shame, since there's been a recent wave of responses to Conee and Feldman, and reliablism remains a very influential, important view. Also not represented, much to my surprise, is the recent debate between Pryor, Wright and others over the conditions under which one can acquire (prima facie) justification for one's perceptual beliefs. And there's no trace of the recent debate over the nature of knowledge how; recently there's been a tangible sense that epistemologists have been too narrowly focused on uncontroversially propositional knowledge, and so it's a little odd to find the volume more or less exclusively preoccupied with that. Stanley and Williamson's piece would at least served to give the flavor of the present debate.

These were just a few of the topics I was surprised not to see covered. But I want to stress again that I think the editors have done a fantastic job, and the volume is beautiful. I just need to work out how to get it back to the States in June...

Knowledge How and Understanding

2008-05-14T14:49:00.006-05:00

Let me continue the theme of working through John and Marc's paper 'Know-how and Concept Possession' while they're too busy at the SEP to notice...

They claim (fn31) that the following case is a counterexample to any account of knowledge how that fails to make understanding necessary (as they sometime put the condition, knowing how to X requires a minimal understanding of X-ing):

'Irina knows a way of doing a salchow, namely, by taking off from the back inside edge of her skate, jumping in the air, spinning, and landing on the back outside edge of her skate. Moreover, she knows that this is a way of doing a salchow (her coach told her). Suppose, however, that Irina is deeply confused about the concepts back outside edge and back inside edge. In particular, suppose that she takes her back outside edge to be her front inside edge and her back inside edge to be her front outside edge. (As per Burge, we take it that this degree of misunderstanding is consistent with attributing to Irina possession of the concepts back outside edge and back inside edge and associated propositional attitudes.) However, as in the case described above, Irina has a severe neurological abnormality that makes her act in ways that differ dramatically from how she actually takes herself to be acting. Whenever she actually attempts to do a salchow (in accordance with her misconception of a correct way of doing one) this abnormality causes her to reliably perform the correct sequence of moves. Despite the fact that what she is doing and what she takes herself to be doing come apart, she fails to notice the mismatch. (48, fn suppressed)

It's supposedly a counterexample since any account that fails to include the understanding condition (including Stanley and Williamson's better known version of intellectualism) will rule this as a case in which Irina knows how.

But I'm sceptical. Here's a skeletal account of knowledge how, inspired by Nozick's tracking account of knowledge that (we may call it the guiding account):

S knows how to X iff:

1. S is able to X (there's a lot of complexity being suppressed here, of course. See the preceding post for discussion)

2. S has a true belief about how to X

3. ~2 []-> ~1

4. 2 []-> 1

If the tracking account gives some content to the idea that if one knows that p, one has the belief that p in virtue of p's being true, then the guiding account gives some (though admittedly not much) content to the idea that one successfully X's (or would successfully X under the right kind of conditions) in virtue of one's having a true belief about how to X.

These 4 conditions obviously raise as many questions and issues as they speak to, but let's not get into that here. The point for now is just that any account that endorses 4 seems to be in a position to deliver the result that Irina does not know how in John and Marc's case. For although in that case Irina is able to perform the jump, and she has a true belief about how to X (as a result of the testimony she's received from her trainer), there is a relevant class of worlds in which she has the belief and yet she isn't able to successfully perform the jumps; the class of worlds in which she lacks the 'severe neurological abnormality' which so fortunately cancels out her misunderstanding.

The guiding account is obviously just a toy account, but the verdict it offers in the case at hand doesn't seem at all ill-motivated. Just as Gettier-man's belief that either Jones owns a Ford or is in Barcelona fails to count as knowledge because it was merely luck that he formed a true belief, Irina fails to know how to perform the jump because her success at performing it is too lucky; there are close worlds in which Gettier man forms the belief by the same method and yet gets things wrong, and their are close worlds in which Irina tries to X, and has a true belief about how to X, but fails to because the factor that cancels out her misunderstanding is absent. On this analysis of why Irina fails to know how in such a case, it's not significant that Irina misunderstands X-ing. The relevant features of the case are just this; there's some factor which prevents her from knowing how and, crucially, it's a matter of luck, in a pertinent sense, that there's a countervailing factor which stops this from interfering with successful performance. Toy account or not, I think the guiding account provides the basis of a challenge to the claim that the case is a counterexample to any account that lacks the understanding condition.

Knowledge How and Abilites

2008-05-14T04:21:00.010-05:00

I'm working on a short paper discussing the claim that knowing, for some way w, that w is a way to X is sufficient for one to know how to X (ignoring for now complications such as the need for one to grasp this proposition under the right mode of presentation, or for one to minimally understand w). But rereading John and Marc's paper has got me thinking again about the associated claim that possession of the corresponding ability is not necessary for knowledge how.

There are now a number of stock cases designed to show that knowing how to X does not entail being able to X. These have tended to fall into broadly three classes. The first are cases in which, as Snowdon puts it, we 'describe cases in which the subject can show, teach, or tell (or otherwise convey to) us how to do something, and hence must be credited with knowing how to do it, but is for some reason or other unable to do it' (Knowing How and Knowing That: 9). Jeff King's example of the ski instructor who is personally unable to perform the stunts is a case belonging to this first class. The second class of cases are one's in which the subject uncontroversially previously both knew how and was able to X, but is now unable to X. The tragic concert pianist who has recently lost his arms in a car accident is a case of this kind. The third class consists of cases where performing X is intuitively 'more of the same' of what it takes to perform Y, where the subject in question uncontroversially both knows how to Y and is able to Y. John and Marc offer the example of Irina, the figure skater who knows how to perform a quadruple Salchow, and is able to. They suggest that intuitively she also knows how to perform a quintuple Salchow, even though she just can't seem to land one. Further cases of this sort have been offered by Jonathan Ellis in unpublished work.

I incline towards thinking that these cases don't yet show that ability is unnecessary for knowledge how, and towards thinking that Noë and Hawley offer responses to these cases that are more or less on the right track. According to Noë, if one knows how to X, and certain 'enabling conditions' are satisfied, one will be able to X. So, of the tragic concert pianist, he writes:

'We judge she knows how to play even though she is now unable to play, because we think of the loss of her arms as comparable (in the relevant sense) to the loss of her piano; as we tell the story, it is reasonable to think that the accident brings about the failure of a necessary enabling condition to be satisfied.' (Anti-Intellectualism: 283)

Hawley suggests that satisfying a counterfactual success condition is necessary for knowing how; if one's knows how to X, then: if one tried to X, under normal circumstances, one would successfully X (Success and Knowledge-How: 22). The ski instructor and the concert pianist meet this condition, since were they to attempt the stunts or playing the piano under conditions which are normal for those activities, they would succeed (23). Their lack of actual success does not impugn their knowing how.

I rather suspect these proposals are best treated as variations of the same idea; one should replace the notion of 'normal' conditions for X-ing with the notion of all of the relevant enabling conditions for X-ing having been satisfied. This kind of response puts tremendous pressure on the notion of an enabling condition, and it's far from clear it can bear the strain. There's a real danger of trivialization here (as John has stressed to me in conversation - there's some relevant discussion in Hawley's paper), since we can't allow that having learned to play the piano is an enabling condition for playing the piano; we don't want to count as knowing how to play the piano someone who would be able to play were it not for her failure to have learned to play. Similarly, having practiced sufficiently cannot count as an enabling condition for playing the piano, nor can having lived in Moscow for 5 years be an enabling condition for speaking Russian; one does not know how to speak Russian even if one would be able to speak Russian if one lived in Russia for 5 years (this latter example is Hawley's). We clearly need a much better grip of the notion of an enabling condition than we currently possess.

One option that Hawley mentions in passing (22) but doesn't pursue is that cases in which one knows how to X but is cannot actually successfully X are cases in which 'physical limitations' prevent one from X-ing. This would mean that satisfaction of enabling conditions would amount to the absence of such physical limitations. Of course, this notion of a physical limitation is itself very slippery, but that doesn't show that no progress has been made. We can make what seem to be intuitively correct classifications: lack of limbs is a physical limitation, being unfit or inflexible are physical limitations, whereas not having learned to play the piano and not having lived in Russia for 5 years are not.

What surprised me reading John and Marc's paper again is that they seem to put quite considerable weight on a distinction between being unable to X right now and being unable to X generally. They hold that putative counterexamples to the necessity of ability for knowledge how fail if they are merely cases in which the subject is unable to X right now (Know-How and Concept Possession: fn5). In contrast, they argue that the ski instructor and ice-skater cases succeed in showing that ability isn't necessary for knowledge how.

They also invoke this distinction in response to an objection later in the paper. They argue that a gap between knowing how and being able does not open up with regards to certain activities, such as carrying out simple mathematical and logical operations. But they consider the objection that a small gap can open up even here:

'For instance, Irina might know how to add, but be unable to do so because she presently lacks pen and paper, the use of her fingers, an abacus, etc. (which , owing to a poor short-term memory, she needs to perform even the simplest mathematical calculations). On the face of it , this seems to be a case of knowing how to add absent the corresponding ability. But in fact it is not. For in such a case, Irina is able to add; she is just unable to do so right now.' (36, emphasis in original)

However, this is misleading. It's not just that Irina is unable to add right now; as the case is described she's unable to add generally in the absence of pen and paper (or an abacus, etc.), and it just so happens that she presently lacks these things, which explains her present inability to add. If we want to maintain that Irina knows how to add quite generally, what can we say to prevent her general inability to add under certain conditions from calling into question the necessity of ability for knowledge how even in John and Marc's restricted class of cases?

I want to suggest that John and Marc have implicitly acknowledged the need for more or less the kind of distinction that the anti-intellectualist seeks to lean on in offering a response to the ski-instructor/ice-skater/tragic pianist cases, but they've mishandled it. In taking it to be a distinction between not being able to X right now, and not be able to X generally, they've thought that it's a distinction which is of no help to the anti-intellectualist. They seem to have seen things as follows. Cases in which a subject is unable to X right now do not show that an ability to X is unnecessary, whether X here is performing a quintuple Salchow or subtracting 2 from 4. However, there are cases in which a subject intuitively knows how to perform a quintuple Salchow but is generally unable to land one, while there are no cases in which a subject intuitively knows how to subtract 2 from 4, but is generally unable to. But the case in which Irina is unable to add without paper and pen is just that; it's a case in which she's only able to add under certain conditions. The anti-intellectualist line I attributed to Hawley and Noë above suggests that just as Irina, idiosyncratically, is only able to add under certain circumstances, people more generally successfully X, for any X, only under certain circumstances; perhaps those are best thought of as circumstances in which the relevant physical limitations are absent - and perhaps not.

This suggests the story about the link between knowledge how and abilites/successful action will be enormously complicated, since we must factor in not only physical limitations or the like, but also idiosyncratic limitations like that displayed by Irina in the simple arithmetic case. But I don't find the conclusion that our story must be complicated a disappointing or objectionable one; it strikes me as one thing we should have all learned already from the ongoing debate between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists.

(Thanks to John Bengson for discussion of these issues over the past year or so).

Methodology Workshop Update - King, Korman, Driver

2008-05-13T07:41:00.003-05:00

Jeff King, Julia Driver and Dan Korman have been confirmed as faculty participants since my previous post. And this may not be the finished list - look out for further updates.

Scotland

2008-05-12T04:58:00.002-05:00

Flying home to Glasgow this morning. Here Dagless offers a taste of what's in store for me. I'm hoping to resume posting real content some point this coming week.

Hello, we're talking about language...

2008-05-07T20:51:00.004-05:00

David Landsberg Landsberg pointed me to this clip of Stephen Fry and Hugh 'House' Laurie on some issues in linguistics, including the flexibility and productivity of language. Enjoy!

Year Three

2008-05-01T19:15:00.002-05:00

Shawn has declared victory over his second year at Pitt. I guess I can claim victory over my third at UT. I certainly couldn't claim I've managed to make it through while maintaining a prolific philosophy blog; on the contrary, there's been a rather pathetic trickle of posts of late, most of which have failed to deliver any substantial philosophy at all. For those who are interested, here's a roundup of some this last semester, which may go some way towards explaining the dearth of posts here:

My rubbish HP laptop decided it was too good for this world the week before my prospectus had to be turned in.

UT Grad students did very well on the job market. Congratulations to Jack, Neil, Derek, Ben, Tracy and Connor!

UT hired Anna-Sara Malmgren, who is just finishing up her thesis at NYU (and who adds to UT's already considerable strengths in epistemologists with their own IMDb pages). I'm really pleased Anna-Sara has chosen to join the department here, as we all are.

We had another very successful graduate conference here, with David Chalmers, Tamar Gendler, and a host of interesting talks from graduate students. Errol Lord recently posted his reflections on the conference over on The Excluded Middle.

In the midst of all this, I somehow managed to get a prospectus written and defended. So now I need to think about actually writing a dissertation, which is scary. In any case, I should have a bit more time to post some philosophy up here, so keep watching the skis.....I mean skies....

UT Summer Methodology Workshop

2008-04-23T18:16:00.003-05:00

From August 12 - 16 UT Austin will host a philosophical methodology workshop aimed at graduate students. Faculty participants already confirmed are:

Josh Dever (UT Austin),

Marc Moffett (Wyoming),

Mark Sainsbury (UT Austin and KCL),

Roy Sorensen (Dartmouth),

David Sosa (UT Austin), and

Ernest Sosa (Rutgers).

Stay tuned for more news on the lineup.

Attendance for those not registered at UT Austin is limited to 10, so if your a philosophy grad student at another program who is interested in attending, you'll want to check out how to apply on the website. From the site:

'The workshop is free for all participants. We hope to provide outside participants with housing and some amount of travel assistance.'

This looks like it's going to be a great event. Thanks to Alex and Alex for putting it all together.

Logical Pluralism in Tartu

2008-04-21T14:17:00.002-05:00

You've probably already seen this on blogs that get updated a bit more often, but....

LOGICAL PLURALISM

27-31 August 2008, University of Tartu, Estonia

Organizers:
Daniel Cohnitz (University of Tartu)
Peter Pagin (Stockholm University)
Marcus Rossberg (Arché, University of St Andrews)

Speakers

JC Beall (Connecticut)
Manuel Bremer  (Düsseldorf)
Hartry Field (NYU)
Per Martin-Löf (Stockholm)
Peter Pagin (Stockholm)
Nikolaj Jang Pedersen (UCLA)
Dag Prawitz (Stockholm)
Graham Priest (Melbourne)
Agustín Rayo (MIT)
Stephen Read (St Andrews)
Greg Restall (Melbourne)
Marcus Rossberg (St Andrews)
Stewart Shapiro (Ohio State)
Johan van Benthem (Amsterdam / Stanford)
Dag Westerståhl (Gothenburg)

The conference will take place in Tartu, Estonia, from August 27-31 
2008. For more information, please go here.


Everyone interested is invited to participate. To plan the event, 
however, we would need your registration by July 1, 2008.

Please send us an email to

cohnitz@ut.ee

Participants are responsible for making their own travel and 
accommodation arrangements. However, we have reserved some places in 
a nearby student dormitory. Please indicate in your registration when 
you are interested in staying at the student dormitory.

The conference is sponsored by the Swedish Bank Tercentenary Fund.

Synthese volume on Crispin Wright

2008-03-16T20:39:00.004-06:00

For those of you with an online subscription to Synthese, Duncan and Jesper's volume on Crispin Wright's philosophy has started to appear in dribs and drabs in their Online First section.

There's already papers up on i-ii-iii scepticism and entitlement, the rule-following considerations, minimalism about truth, Wright's debate with McDowell on scepticism, and more.

If only Spring Break had lasted more than a few minutes, I would be able to find time to read all this stuff....

the boundaries of "language"

2008-03-10T11:18:00.002-06:00

For those of you who have not yet exhausted Spring Break, the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks is here to ensure that you get half as much work/play accomplished as you'd hoped. It's a really cheap way to feel superior, and it's pretty funny, so check it out.

HT: Marcus, soon to be in CT!

Schedule: UT Austin Grad Conference 2008

2008-03-09T19:43:00.003-06:00

I've been pretty lax about posting, with things going on in the department and my imminent prospectus defense creeping up. Hopefully that'll change shortly. In the meantime, the schedule for this year's grad conference has just gone online. Check it out here.

When you're tagged, you're tagged....

2008-02-26T22:12:00.005-06:00

"Air pollution is indeed a significant health threat in the former socialist economies, where decades of inefficient production still takes its toll. Nevertheless, apart from the risk of unsafe sex and illicit drugs, even here the pollution risk of 3.5 percent YLL is the smallest of the industrialized world risks. And when we look at the OCED-area, it becomes obvious that at 0.6 percent the environmental risk from air pollution is by far the smallest of all OCED risks."

This is from p123 of Dan Bonevac's Today's Moral Issues. I'm Dan's TA again this semester, and the tag caught me preparing for this week's discussion sections.

Anyways, thanks Shawn. I guess I need to pass on the favor, huh. Well, no real pressure guys, but I'll go for:

Errol,
Neil,
Bryan,
Aaron and
Flic

Here's your instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I'm unclear on what the point of this exercise is supposed to be - I guess it's meant to be revealing in some way.

Student types

2008-02-18T15:02:00.001-06:00

I can't resist linking to Jon Cogburn's updated list of student types. If you've ever led a philosophy discussion section, this will all sound awfully familiar....

Testing for Context Sensitivity (Part 2)

2008-02-18T08:06:00.006-06:00

I think Bryan was probably right in his criticisms of my last post on this topic, but let me post some further thoughts on Cappelen and Lepore's tests for context sensitive. In a footnote on page 101, they give us the 'VP-ellipsis test'. But their discussion of this test has always struck me as somewhat bizarre.

Here's the test in short. Context sensitive expressions have fixed interpretations under VP-ellipsis. So if an expression has a fixed interpretation under VP-ellipsis, it's context sensitive, otherwise not.

This seems initially very surprising. One would have thought that context insensitive expressions also had a fixed interpretation under VP-ellipsis. But Cappelen and Lepore write:

'noncontext sensitive expressions do not exhibit this feature, as in

John bought a car, and so did Bill.' (101fn7)

But here the supposedly context invariant expression is the quantifier expression 'a car' - hardly a good choice of an uncontroversially context invariant expression.

(I'm taking it that 'noncontext sensitive' just means context insensitive here. Let me know if that's wrong).

A page over (102fn8) they suggest that Stanley is hoist by his own petard, since he employs the VP-ellipsis test to argue that vague expressions aren't context sensitive, failing to realize that the test tells against his own treatment of quantifier domain restriction. This isn't the first time I've encountered this interpretation of Stanley's argument, so I think it's worth pointing out it's badly mistaken. Stanley never uses the VP-ellipsis test, and in fact, he never argues that vague expressions as a class are context insensitive. Rather, he argues that even if they are context sensitive, that doesn't serve to offer a unified solution to the Sorites paradoxes. He takes contextualists to be making the claim that vague expressions are indexicals, and constructs instances of the Sorites which employ VP-ellipsis to fix the interpretation of the vague expression in question throughout the series. The contextualist about vagueness wanted to disarm the reasoning driving the Sorites whilst explaining why we find it so compelling, and Stanley's objection is that the contextualist's story, in terms of context shifts as we run through the series, has limited scope.

So Stanley doesn't use the VP-ellipsis test to argue that vague expressions are context insensitive. That's a really bad interpretation of his argument. Rather he uses the fact that indexicals have a fixed interpretation under VP-ellipsis (a couple of tricky examples such as the now famous A - 'I love you', B - 'I do too' exchange aside) to enable him to construct instances of the Sorites which contextualist accounts of vague expressions (or at least those according to which they are indexicals) can't disarm. And since the claimed fact is explicitly restricted to indexicals (and demonstratives), we needn't expect quantifier expressions to behave similarly.

So let me boldly state my conclusion: the VP-ellipsis test provides no test for context sensitivity, and it is powerless against Stanley's acccount of quantifier domain restriction. Right?

Does Knowing Figure Ineliminably in Causal Explanations?

2008-02-06T19:07:00.000-06:00

In chapter 2 of Knowledge and its Limits, Williamson argues that in some cases 'reference to states of knowing is essential to the power of a causal explanation' (63). He notes that in order to prove that this held for a given causal explanation 'one would need to show that [the reference to states of knowledge] could not be eliminated in favour of any combination of believing, truth, and so on' (63). So instead of providing such a proof, he offers a general recipe for countering such suggestions:

'Given a potential substitute for 'knows', suppose that it does not provide a necessary and sufficient condition for knowing. One then constructs possible cases in which the failure of necessity or sufficiency makes a causal difference, making the proposed substitute not even causally equivalent to knowing. The potential substitute avoids this problem only if it does provide a necessary and sufficient condition for knowing.' (63)

So suppose one substitutes 'believes truly' for 'knows' in some causal explanation. To take Williamson's example, we can ask why a burglar spent the entire night ransacking a house, given that he increased his risk of being caught the longer he stayed. Start with the explanation that he knew that there was a diamond in the house. If we merely say he truly believed that there was a diamond in the house, we give a worse explanation of why he stayed so long, risking detection. For suppose he truly believed that there was a diamond in the house because he had been told that there was a diamond under the bed, when in fact the only diamond was in a drawer in the study. In that case, it seems he would be likely to give up his search after looking underneath the bed, having given up his true belief that there's a diamond in the house. Williamson now argues:

'Given suitable background conditions, the probability of his ransacking the house all night, conditional on his having entered it believing truly but not knowing that there was a diamond in it, will be lower than the probability of his ransacking it all night, conditional on his having entered it knowing that there was a diamond in it. In this case, the substitution of 'believe truly' for 'know' weakens the explanation, by lowering the probability of the explanandum conditional on the explanans.' (62)

If we try to get around this point by substituting 'believes truly without reliance on false lemmas', we can construct a scenario where the burglar's true belief does not rely on false lemmas, but he receives misleading evidence in the course of his search, which makes it less probable that he would risk staying the entire night than if he knew that there was a diamond there (63). We could switch to 'believes truly without reliance on false lemmas and with stubbornness in one's belief in the face of counterevidence', but then, since such stubbornness is not necessary for knowledge, we can find an alternative cases in which the failure of necessity for knowledge makes a causal difference. And so on; for each proposed substitute for 'knows', there will be an argument that that substitute doesn't cut it.

Frank Jackson has a paper offering a response to this argument (which I think is appearing in Duncan Pritchard and Patrick Greenough's Williamson on Knowledge volume with OUP), but I have a different worry. I'm just not sure with what right Williamson can assume that for any substitute which does not provide necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, there will be a possible case in which 'the failure of necessity or sufficiency makes a causal difference, making the proposed substitute not even causally equivalent to knowing'. That seems to beg the question against someone who wants to maintain that reference to states of knowing are not essential in a given causal explanation; it's just an assertion that any non-equivalent substitute can't be causally equivalent.

So far I've been arguing that a crucial premise in Williamson's argument for the essentiality of reference to states of knowing in some causal explanations is question-begging; it's just an unwarranted assumption that any substitute for 'knows' which does not give necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing cannot be causally equivalent, and I don't see why Williamson's opponent should grant that. Without that premise in place, I don't see how consideration of a few cases suffices to get us to Williamson's conclusion. But clearly my point here would be much stronger if one could show that premise to be not just under-motivated, but actually mistaken. I think Williamson's own account of knowledge provides materials for one attempt to show this.

Williamson holds that knowledge requires safe belief; that is, the following subjective conditional must hold:

Safety: Bp -> p

(In words: in the closest worlds in which you believe that p, p is true: your belief could not easily be false)

Now suppose our burglar enters the house with a confident, true belief that's not based on any false lemma that there's a diamond in the house, but that belief is unsafe. Now, how do we continue the case so that the failure of his belief to be safe makes it more likely that he'd leave the house before morning than if he knew? The relevant difference between him and his counterpart who knows is just that the modal space around them is different. I don't see how to continue the case so that this modal fact makes the kind of causal difference Williamson needs it to.

I don't mean to suggest that Williamson holds that knowledge is just confident, safe, true belief. Of course he'd reject this analysis of knowledge, just as he'd reject any other. Williamson writes, 'the search for a substitute for knowing in causally explanatory contexts is forced to recapitulate the history of attempts to analyse knowing in terms of believing, truth, and so on, a history which shows no sign of ending in success' (63). Though I'm not as pessimistic as Williamson on this score, I take the point. It is going to be very hard to specify the right substitute for 'knows', without just describing it as 'knowledge minus safety'.

But the general point I've tried to make should be clear despite these - admittedly difficult - complications; once we add modal constraints such as safety onto knowledge, it becomes hard to see how on what grounds we should hold that any substitute which does not give sufficient conditions for knowledge must fail to be causally equivalent. And that's a crucial premise in Williamson's argument that reference to states of knowing are essential in some causal explanations.

Epistemological? What are you talking about?

2008-01-22T12:41:00.000-06:00

I just found one of my favourite clips from the best comedy ever made up on Youtube, so I thought I'd share. This is Sir Humphrey trying to explain to the Prime Minister that he lied to the House of Commons..........

Language in Context: On Quantifier Domain Restriction (Part 1)

2008-01-20T13:26:00.000-06:00

Why are philosophers, and not just philosophers of language, so interested in the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction (QDR)?

1. One reason stressed, by Jason in Knowledge and Practical Interests, is that David Lewis based his contextualist semantics for knowledge attributions on QDR. The sceptic is right to suggest that in order to know that p we must be able to rule out all relevant alternatives to p; to adopt fallibilism, according to which one may felicitously utter 'p, but I haven't ruled out possibilities in which not-p', is madness. But the sceptic fails to recognize that this does not set an absolute standard on which alternatives need to be ruled out; it's 'all' of them, but in everyday contexts the domain of 'all' is seriously restricted. In particular, we can properly ignore sceptical scenarios. Indeed, Jason argues against Lewis's epistemic contextualism on the grounds that knowledge attributions don't behave like uncontroversial cases of QDR in the relevant respects (see Jonathan's recent post for discussion of Jason's argument). So a proper understanding of QDR is necessary to evaluate certain proposals in epistemology.

(I don't mean to endorse Lewis's characterization of fallibilism here. As most of you will know, Jason and others have resisted Lewis's argument against fallibilism on the grounds that it was never committed to the felicity of the problem utterances in the first place.)

2. QDR also plays an important role in defending various views Lewis held in metaphysics. For example, how are we to square the apparent truth of,

i. there are no talking donkeys,

with the truth of moral realism, according to which if there could be talking donkeys, then in some worlds there are talking donkeys? Likewise, how are we to square universalism--the doctrine that some things always compose some further thing--with our ordinary talk, which seems to pay no heed to objects like the fusion of my iPod and Jeremy Bentham's preserved corpse? In each case, it can be contended that in ordinary settings, we implicitly restrict our quantifiers, ignoring possibilia and gruesome fusions. (See Dan's paper for a critique of this as a defense of the claim that universalism is continuous with common-sense.)

3. Stephen Neale has argued that the puzzle associated with so-called incomplete definite descriptions, such as:

ii. the table is covered with books,

should not be thought of as providing a decisive objection to Russellian views according to which definite descriptions are really quantificational (and imply uniqueness), since the fact that the existence of a bare table in St Andrews does not entail the falsity of my utterance of:

iii. every table is covered with books

made in a room full of book-laden tables in Austin clearly does not impugn the claim that (iii) has quantificational form. The problem of incomplete definite descriptions is really one and the same as the problem of giving a satisfactory account of QDR.

iv. Stanley and Szabo (70) take QDR as a test case for determining the source and nature of an expression's dependence on context. That is, the process by which they think we arrive at a satisfactory account of QDR provides a model for discussion of other constructions. So one might hope that a proper understanding of QDR will lead to better understanding of context dependence in natural language more generally.

Of course, these do not exhaust the sources of philosophical interest in QDR. But I thought it was worth setting on the table some implications for epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language before turning our attention to Stanley and Szabo's paper.

Arché Methodology Postdocs

2008-01-15T09:46:00.000-06:00

UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS: School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies

Arché: Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology

2 Research Fellows

Salary – £27,857 per annum

We are seeking to appoint two research fellows for up to four years. You will commence on 1 September 2008, or as soon as possible thereafter. You will conduct research within the scope of the AHRC funded research project ‘Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology’.

We encourage applicants working in any area of philosophy who have a genuine interest in methodological issues. You must have a PhD in Philosophy by the time of appointment and be capable of demonstrating outstanding research potential in the areas of the project. A track record of high quality publications will be an advantage. Please include with your application a CV, research proposal (1000 word max) and recent writing sample (5000 word max.).

Please quote ref: ME097/08 Closing date: 15 February 2008

Application forms and further particulars are available from Human Resources, University of St Andrews, College Gate, North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AJ, tel: 01334 462571, by fax 01334 462570 or by e-mail @ jobline@st-andrews.ac.uk. The advertisement and further particulars and a downloadable application form can be found here.

The University is committed to equality of opportunity.

Conferences at UT

2008-01-14T10:21:00.000-06:00

The deadline for the 2008 Graduate Conference here at UT has been pushed back until Feb. 1st. It's mutual-knowledge* that the graduate conferences here have been great in the past, and with David Chalmers and Tamar Szabo Gendler as keynotes, that's surely going to continue. So get submitting!

As if that weren't enough, Michael Tye is organizing this year's MLK conference. which will feature papers and responses by UT graduate students. It's taking place on MLK day (Monday Jan. 21st), all are welcome, and the program is as follows:

9.30
Coffee, rolls, etc.

9.55
Welcome by Michael Tye

10.00 - 10.55
Speaker: Enrico Grube, "In Defense of Content Preservation"
Respondent: John Bengson
Chair: Nora Berenstain

11.00 - 11.55
Speaker: David Ivy, "Perceptual Experience as Neither Veridical Nor Nonveridical"
Respondent: Alex Baia
Chair: Stephen James

12.00 - 1.25
Lunch

1.30 - 2.25
Speaker: Kate Ritchie, "Quantifiers, Context, and Semantic 'Completing' Strategies"
Respondent: Talia D'Abramo
Chair: Liz Rodgers

2.30 - 3.25
Speaker: Alex Grzankowski, "Against DeRose on Epistemic Modals"
Respondent: Malte Willer
Chair: Aidan McGlynn

3.30 - 4.25
Speaker: David Frank, "Once Again, With Feeling: Affectivity and the Emotions"
Respondent: Briggs Wright
Chair: Tomas Bogardus

4.30
Reception at Crown and Anchor

Belated Birthday!

2008-01-10T12:02:00.001-06:00

It's just occurred to me that this blog's second birthday went by on 12/12/07, and I completely forgot. Thanks to all for reading it, and in particular to those who've been leaving such excellent comments in the threads.

I've tried to keep to my promise of making sure things picked up around here at the New Year. We'll see how that keeps up once the semester gets going, but I'm confident it won't be a repeat of last semester. There's been a philosophy of language bias around here recently, and that's going to continue for a while, though I'll throw in some mind, epistemology, and other delights along the way.

Language in Context: Review of Recanati's 'Literal Meaning'

2008-01-07T23:36:00.000-06:00

I'm getting a little out of order here, but I had to read Literal Meaning over the break, so it made sense to offer something on Jason's NDPR review just now, and then come back to 'On Quantifier Domain Restriction'.

One of the things I've noticed reading the literature on this stuff is that no one agrees about where the really interesting issues lie. Recanati, for example, spends a great deal of time putting distance between his view and Relevance Theory on issues such as whether primary pragmatic processes (those that go into determining truth-conditional content, rather than those by which what is communicated is determined) are inferential (a topic which some of you will know is becoming very close to my heart). In contrast, Jason writes:

'the genuinely important disputes in the theory of meaning are between those who maintain that the contents primarily asserted by speakers are not generally the semantic contents of the sentences they use (even relative to contexts), and those who maintain that the contents primarily asserted by speakers are generally (not always, but typically) the semantic contents of the sentences used (relative to those contexts).' (237)

Cappelen and Lepore also want to downplay the importance of debates between contextualists, but from their perspective, Jason's view is to be lumped together with Recanati and the Relevance theorists:

'The label 'the Deep/Fundamental Issues' should be awarded to a range of issues independent of any debates internal to MC or RC.'
(Insensitive Semantics: 13)

So not only do we have a range of very different takes on this set of issues, which position one takes seems to shape one's perception of where the real action is. I don't think this is at all unusual in philosophy, but here we have a particularly stark illustration of the phenomenon.

Jason's review is of particular note between it takes on directly the difficult tasks of offering a taxonomy of positions in the debate and trying to get clear on what's at stake between them (as befits a review of Recanati's book). It also raises some methodological issues about how the debate should be conducted, and it's these I want to discuss here. I'll come to them a little indirectly, however, via a discussion of the following (independently interesting) issue.

Let's follow Recanati in calling the thesis Jason wants to defend indexicalism, and consider the following question: does indexicalism start at a serious disadvantage in the nature over the nature and extent of context sensitivity in natural language? In Literal Meaning, Recanati argues that indexicalism does indeed occupy lower ground, on account of the kind of claim the indexicalist must defend:

'Without going into those [technical and empirical] details, it is fair to say that the indexicalist starts with a significant disadvantage; for he makes a universal claim while his opponent only makes an existential claim. For his opponent to win, it is sufficient to produce one convincing example of a strong pragmatic effect. But the indexicalist is condemned to deal with all putative cases, and to show that they are not what they seem to be.' (2004: 89-90)

Jason writes in response:

'Recanati misstates the dialectical situation. The contextualist's method for arguing against indexicalism is to produce a reading R of a sentence S, and argue that R is not the result of the semantic interpretation of S, relative to the context of utterance. In each such case there are three responses available to the indexicalist.......The advocate of strong pragmatic effects on intuitive truth-conditions must produce a case, and show that none of these options is available for that case. For each putative case in which it can be persuasively argued that [it is not an option to 'establish that the alleged reading is not part of the intuitive truth-conditions of an utterance of that sentence, but is instead due to the pragmatics'], the contextualist [...] must establish that there is no way of accounting for the problematic reading within the semantics. From this perspective, it is the contextualist who makes a universal claim.' (239)

It's not immediately clear what Jason is claiming here. The first and last sentences of this passage might suggest that he thinks Recanati has just got things back to front; it is the contextualist who makes the universal claim and the indexicalist who makes the existential claim. But that doesn't seem quite right. For indexicalist clearly does make a universal claim; recall Jason's statement of his core thesis from the opening lines of 'Context and Logical Form':

'My purpose in this chapter is to defend the thesis that all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to logical form.' (30)

So I think a charitable reading of Jason's response to Recanati has to credit him with recognition that at some level Recanati has correctly described the structure of the debate between them. I think that in claiming that Recanati 'misstates the dialectical situation', Jason is referring less to the claim about the structure of the debate, and more to the suggestion that the indexicalist starts with a disadvantage. The contextualist might only have to produce one persuasive case of a truth-conditional effect of extra-linguistic context which is not traceable to logical form, but Jason's real objection is that Recanati has misrepresented how easy it will be to come up with the golden ticket here.

Interestingly, Jason's response here seems to assume that indexicalism should be the default position, and that the burden is on the contextualist to provide examples that aim to move us away from indexicalism. This is a point he addresses explicitly in the review, responding to Recanati's charge that indexicalism is 'dogmatic and stipulative' (it's also a theme of the introduction to Language in Context, recall). He writes:

'Why believe the indexicalist hypothesis? Recanati finds excluding "top-down" or "strong" pragmatic effects on intuitive truth-conditions "as dogmatic and stipulative as the literalist restriction of context-sensitivity to a short list of familiar indexical expressions' (160). But the indexicalist claim is an empirical hypothesis, not a stipulation about content. Furthermore, it is an empirical hypothesis that has a reasonable basis.' (238)

'The indexicalist's position is a plausible starting hypothesis for how language is able to be sufficiently elastic as to be usable, and sufficiently rule-governed as to be useful. It is a reasonable empirical hypothesis, in advance of detailed inquiry.' (239)

But I'm not sure this really gets at Recanati's worry. Though he perhaps didn't put things very well by accusing indexicalism of being 'dogmatic and stipulative' (and hence inviting precisely the kind of response Jason offers), I think Recanati worry is methodological from the outset. The charge he wants to make isn't really that Jason's claim is empirically empty; as he admits in a passage cited above, the issues get technical and empirical very quickly. The point is rather that we shouldn't endorse such a general thesis in advance of examining the various constructions. We should instead adopt methodological contextualism:

'Any expression may, upon analysis, turn out to have a context-sensitive semantics, that is, be such that its truth-conditional contribution varies across contexts.'

Put in hippy form, Recanati's objection to Jason is that he's not going into the study of particular constructions with an open mind; he's already laid down in advance a strong generalization about the limited role extra-linguistic context can play, and that, Recanti is suggesting, is stifling.

If this is how we should take Recanati's objection (and I think it is, though I have to admit there are passages in these pages where he clearly seems to be making the kind of charge of empirical emptiness that Jason takes him to be), then Jason's comments in his review don't really seem to get to the heart of the issues; Recanati would presumably just regard it as more of what he was objecting to. That's not to say Jason has nothing to say in response; on the contrary he's going to push the line that contextualist views that allow extra-linguistic context to determine truth-conditional content in ways that go beyond providing values for items in logical form render mysterious how it is that we can interpret the utterances of others as smoothly as we are able to. And so indexicalism provides a better starting point. As he writes in the introduction to the book:

'I have great difficulty seeing alternative proposals as sufficiently constrained. Proposals that appear smoothly to account for the bewildering variety of ways in which context appears to affect the relation between utterances and their intuitive truth-conditions only do so because they appeal (whether overtly or covertly) to interpretative processes that are deeply mysterious or wildly unconstrained. I prefer to explore a view that is neither mysterious nor unconstrained, and see how far one can use it to explain our linguistic behavior. If, at the end of the day, my proposal is too constrained, perhaps the investigation into its adequacy will reveal systematic ways of modifying it or liberalizing it. This seems more promising that beginning with a mysterious and unconstrained process, and trying to add on stipulative constraints. If we do not have a clear grip on the process with which we began, why thing that adding on restrictions will yield any greater elucidation?' (21)

We'll get to assess the charge of lack of constraint when we get to 'Making it Articulated'. In any case, these methodological issues about which perspective we should adopt going into the empirical study of different constructions seem about as challenging, rich and important as the issues about who's right, and it's a virtue of Jason review that it brings the former issues into such sharp focus.

Testing for Context Sensitivity (Part 1)

2008-01-05T12:14:00.001-06:00

There's been some further discussion on the thread about Stanley's motivations concerning Cappelen and Lepore's stance on issues about context sensitivity. Here I'd like to discuss one of their tests for context dependence put forward in Insensitive Semantics, since it strikes me as deeply problematic.

Here's their Inter-Contextual Disquotation Test:

Say one wants to test whether some expression e is context sensitive. First, one choses a sentence S containing e, but no other context sensitive expressions (2004: 105fn12). Then S, and hence e is context sensitive only if there is a true utterance of the following:

(ICD) There are (or can be) false utterances of ^S^ even though S (Where ^^ should be read as corner quotes).
(2004: 105)

Cappelen and Lepore are explicit that past and future utterances can be quantified over here (see 2004: 205fn10) Problem then is that S might feature a context invariant expression which denotes a property that an object might possess at one time, but not at another. For example, the following is supposed to show that the first-person pronoun is context sensitive:

(2c) There is a false utterance of 'I'm hungry' even though I am hungry. (2004: 106)

But I don't think this shows anything at all about the context sensitivity of 'I'. For (2c) could be true even on the bizarre assumption that 'I' invariantly denotes me (i.e. Aidan McGlynn), since my being hungry now does nothing to prevent there from being false past, future or merely possible utterances of 'I'm hungry'.

Objection: The schema should really have been understood as this:

(ICD') There are (or can be) false utterances of ^S^ at t even though S at t.

So the idea is there can be false utterances of a sentence S co-temporally with S being the case. That's the real mark of context sensitivity.

Response: This obviously won't work, since sometimes a context dependence expression is sensitive to the time of utterance. For example, take Cappelen and Lepore's discussion of 'now':

'(2d) There is a false utterance of 'Tom is leaving now' even though Tom is leaving now.

Suppose Tom is leaving now. Then, obviously, any utterance of 'Tom is leaving now' made at times other than now, say, a few days into the future when Tom isn't leaving, suffices to establish that the test utterance of (2d) expresses a truth."
(2004: 106)

By the way, notice that my original point could equally have been made with this example - one could repeat just the same reasoning as Cappelen and Lepore offer even if (2d) hadn't contained 'now':

Suppose Tom is leaving. Then, obviously, any utterance of 'Tom is leaving' made at other times, say, a few days into the future when Tom isn't leaving, suffices to establish that the test utterance of (2d) expresses a truth.

Unless I'm missing something, the ICD test is pretty hopeless insofar as the aim was to find a necessary condition for an expression to count as context sensitive.

(By the way, if anyone knows any literature where this or a related point is made about this test, I'd be very interested to know. I'm still catching up on the literature generated by the book).

Scalar Implicatures and Speakers' Knowledge

2008-01-04T22:11:00.000-06:00

There's been revived interest recently in the issue of whether scalar implicatures cannot be accounted for by the usual Gricean mechanisms (that is, reasoning on the assumption that one's conversational partners are trying to be co-operative), or whether they get computed in the grammar (in fact, I see that Eliza Block is writing her entire dissertation on this issue). Crudely speaking, the Griceans hold that the truth conditions of sentences are computed in a compositional fashion in the grammar (actually, as readers of this blog will be well aware, they don't need to assume that this process gets us all the way to something truth conditional, but bracket those issues for the moment), and then there is an secondary process whereby the propositions communicated are determined. This secondary process is not merely independent of the first, but also works on the output of the first process. We get a modular picture of the faculties we bring to bear in communication, with roughly the following picture of the division of labor between semantics/syntax and pragmatics:

'Grammar (which includes semantics and syntax) is a computational system that delivers, say, pairs of phonetic representations and interpreted logical forms. The output of the computational system is passed onto the conceptual/pragmatic system that employs it for concrete communication. The computational system of grammar and the conceptual/pragmatic system are separate units and work in a modular way: each unit is blind to the inner workings of the other. Things like agreement or c-command belong to grammar; things like relevance or conversational maxims belong to the conceptual/pragmatic system.'
(Chierchia 2004: 39)

Chierchia has focused on scalar implicature in an attempt to undermine this natural picture. He writes:

'I will argue that pragmatic computations and grammar-driven ones are "interspersed." Implicatures are not computed after truth conditions of (root) sentences have been figured out; they are computed phrase by phrase in tandem with the truth conditions (or whatever computational semantics computes).
(2004: 40)

He's offered essentially two sets of considerations in favor of this alternative picture:

1. The Gricean account both under- and over-generates scalar implicatures.

2. Adopting a picture according to which scalar implicatures are computed phrase by phrase in the grammar enables one to explain so-called 'intervention effects' on negative polarity items (NPIs); that is, it helps one explain why NPIs are blocked in certain environments which, by the lights of our best existing theories of NPI-licensing, should allow an NPI.

I'm going to leave the second argument aside here, and concentrate on the first. Let's focus on the following example:

(1) George ate some of the fries or the apple pie.
(1a) George ate some (but not all) of the fries or the apple pie.
(1b) It is not the case that George ate all of the fries or the apple pie.

(Chierchia 2004: 46. The example has been changed following Russell 2006.)

Now, intuitively (1) implicates (1a). But, Chierchia argues, if scalar implicatures are determined globally, that is, after the truth conditions of (1) have been computed, it seems like we can't explain how that's so. Rather, Griceans should expect a hearer to reason as follows:

"The speaker said 'George ate some of the fries or the apple pie, and could as easily have said 'George ate all of the fries or the apple pie', which is stronger. Because she is co-operative, she makes the strongest statement possible, so 'George ate all of the fries or the apple pie' can't be true."
(Based on Russell 2006: 361)

It seems, then, that the Gricean predicates that (1) implicates (1b). As Chierchia puts it, 'negation, in the globalist view, seems to wind up in the wrong place: it is expected to take scope over the whole disjunction, whereas we would want it to negate just the [first] disjunct of the alternative'. And this is problematic, since the suggestion that (1) implicates (1b) seems plain wrong, for (1b) entails (1c):

(1c) George did not eat the apple pie.

In his 2006, Benjamin Russell has tried to respond to both of Chierchia's arguments against the Gricean. Here's his line of response to Chierchia's discussion of constructions like (1).

Firstly, he suggests, following Horn and Soames, that in a case like (1), Gricean reasoning shouldn't license one to conclude that a stronger statement would be false: just that the speaker isn't in a position to make it. So, for instance, the reasoning about should really go as follows:

"The speaker said 'George ate some of the fries or the apple pie, and could as easily have said 'George ate all of the fries or the apple pie', which is stronger. Because she is co-operative, she makes the strongest statement possible, so she can't know that 'George ate all of the fries or the apple pie' is true."
(Russell 2006: 370)

So (1) doesn't implicate (1a), but rather (2):

(2) ~K (to be read: the speaker does not know that) George ate all the fries or the apple pie.

And (2) doesn't entail the problematic (1c), but rather the following unproblematic epistemic facts about the speaker:

(2a) ~K George ate all of the fries

and,

(2b) ~K George ate the apple pie.

Russell then asks how we are to account for the fact that (2b) cannot be strengthened to the 'obviously undesirable' (3):

(3) K ~(George ate all the apple pie).

He suggest that '[t]his can be explained in Gricean terms: a sentence's scalar implicatures cannot be strengthened if this leads to contradiction with another of its basic implicatures' (2006: 371). Hence, since (1) has as a basic implicature

(4) ~K George ate some of the fries,

we cannot strengthen (2b) to (3). Of course, (4) doesn't by itself contradict (3), but Russell offers the following proof that it nonetheless suffices to block strengthening to (3) in this case. Recall our target sentence and its basic implicature:

(1) George ate some of the fries or the apple pie.
(4) ~K George ate some of the fries.

From (1) we have,

(a) K (George ate some of the fries or the apple pie).

Hence,

(b) K ((~George ate the apple pie) -> George ate some of the fries).

Assuming that K distributes, we arrive at

(c) (K ~George ate the apple pie) -> (K George ate some of the fries)

So by contraposition,

(d) (~K George ate some of the fries) -> (~K ~George ate the apple pie)

Therefore, given (4) we arrive at:

(e) ~K ~George ate the apple pie,

which directly contradicts (3). This is why (2b) cannot be strengthened to (3). (Russell 2006: 371)

I'm sympathetic to Russell's stance on these issues, but I'm worried about the appeal to a distribution axiom for K in this proof, and the step from (a) to (b). First of all, all the usual suspects that have been touted as counterexamples to closure are going to be worries for distribution:

i. K (I will visit San Antonio this coming weekend -> I will not have a fatal heart attack this Friday)
ii. K I will visit San Antonio this coming weekend -> K I will not have a fatal heart attack this Friday

i. K (I have hands -> I am not a handless brain in a vat being fed experiences of an external world)
ii. K I have hands -> K I am not a handless brain in a vat being fed experiences of an external world

i. K (That is a zebra -> it is not a mule cleverly painted to look just like a zebra)
ii. K That is a zebra -> K it is not a mule cleverly painted to look just like a zebra,

and so on. And notice that the step from (a) to (b) actually requires the closure of K under known (or perhaps obvious) logical consequence. (Well, there are other principles one could appeal to here, I guess. But that won't seriously affect my main point, which I'm happy to make just with respect to the distribution axiom.)

But more worryingly in my view, the assumptions that knowledge distributes over the conditional and that it obeys a closure principle that will license the step from (a) to (b) lead to tension with the kind of examples that have moved even friends of closure like Hawthorne to Chisholm the principle:

'...the principle is not especially intuitive as it stands. If at t, I know that p and know that entails q, I may still have to do something--namely perform a deductive inference--in order to come to know that q. Until I perform that inference, I do not know that q. At any rate, that seems to be the natural view of the matter.'
(Hawthorne 2004: 32. Author's footnotes suppressed)

In fact, Hawthorne argues that even building in the requirement that the subject actually perform the inference in question isn't enough to render closure plausible. But let's stick there for now. The K in Russell's proof is to be read as something like 'it is known to the speaker that'. It seems to be a worry for Russell's response to Chierchia that it forces us to assume that this operator is obeys the strongest, least plausible version of epistemic closure and a distribution axiom. For it seems that even friends of epistemic closure will find these principles hard to stomach. The upshot is, I suggest, that Russell's Gricean response to Chierchia isn't very satisfactory, assuming as it does some very strong, controversial principles governing the operator 'it is known to the speaker that'.

References:

Chierchia, F. 2004. Scalar Implicatures, Polarity Phenomena, and the Syntax/Pragmatics Interface. In A. Belletti, ed. 2004. Structures and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford.

Hawthorne, J. 2004. Knowledge and Lotteries. Oxford: Oxford.

Russell, B. 2006. Against Grammatical Computation of Scalar Implicatures. Journal of Semantics 23: 361-82.

The Reset Paradox

2007-12-30T11:47:00.001-06:00

(xkcd, naturally).

Intuition Check

2007-12-26T10:39:00.000-06:00

Hope everyone had a good Christmas. I'm just hoping to get some intuitive calls on the following two cases. Any feedback would be really useful and really appreciated. (Well, not any feedback. But any germane feedback).

Suppose we're Russellian's about propositions - so Clark Kent can fly is the very same proposition as Superman can fly - but that in order to solve various puzzles about intensional contexts, we hold that we can entertain one and the same proposition under different modes of presentation. Now what do people think of the following?

Scenario 1: Suppose that Jake doesn't realize that Hesperus is Phosphorus. He believes that Hesperus is visible in the evening on the basis of really good evidence. However, he has very good but misleading evidence which suggests that it's not true that Phosphorus is visible in the evening. Does this latter evidence prevent him from knowing that Hesperus is visible in the evening when entertained under a Hesperus mode of presentation (on the assumption that he's otherwise epistemically well-placed enough to count as knowing)?

Scenario 2: Suppose that Jake knows full well that Hesperus is Phosphorus. He believes that Hesperus is visible in the evening on the basis of really good evidence. However, he has very good but misleading evidence which suggests that it's not true that Phosphorus is visible in the evening. Does this latter evidence prevent him from knowing that Hesperus is visible in the evening when entertained under a Hesperus mode of presentation (on the assumption that he's otherwise epistemically well-placed enough to count as knowing)?

CFP: Powers, Dispositions, and Singular Causation

2007-12-24T15:35:00.000-06:00

For the metaphysicians amongst you, Adam Taylor at Buffalo University is organizing a conference in metaphysics happening on April 5th 2008. If you're interested, the deadline for submissions is soon: January 10th to be precise.

The keynote address will be by Stephen Mumford of the University of Nottingham. Be sure to check out Adam's lovely website for the conference, which includes the full call for papers.

Quotation and Disquotation

2007-12-22T21:50:00.000-06:00

In Language Turned on Itself, Cappelen and Lepore argue that any viable theory of quotation must preserve the following disquotational schema and strong disquotational schema:

QS: ' 'e' ' quotes 'e',

SDS: Only ' 'e' ' quotes 'e',

where both occurances of 'e' are replaced by any quotable item (25-6).

Now, Cappelen and Lepore's own minimalist theory simply takes QS as 'the fundamental axiom governing the semantics of quotation expressions' (124). So it's in the bag. Cappelen and Lepore go on to argue that QS entails SDS, so long as quotation expressions are unambiguous. Here's their argument from p128:

"- From QS it follows that for any quotable item e, ' 'e' ' quotes 'e'. If ' 'e' ' quotes some quotable other than 'e', say 'a', then it follows that the quotation expression ' 'e' ' is ambiguous (because it quotes both 'e' and 'a').

- But, as we argued in Ch. 7, quotation expressions are unambiguous (and context-insensitive and not semantically indeterminate).

- So the quotation expression ' 'e' ' can only quote 'e'.

- So SDS follows."

But notice the conclusion reached isn't SDS at all; we wanted to reach the claim that only ' 'e' ' quotes 'e', not that
' 'e' ' only quotes 'e'. And these simply aren't the same claim (even if they turn out to be equivalent).

Fortunately I think there's a quick fix to their argument so that they clearly get the result they want. For suppose that something other than ' 'e' ', let's say ' 'a' ', quotes 'e'. From QS it follows that ' 'a' ' also quotes 'a'. But then ' 'a' ' quotes both 'a' and 'e', and hence would be ambiguous. So, if quotation expressions are unambiguous, only ' 'e' ' quotes 'e', as required.

This is, I submit, how Cappelen and Lepore should have run their argument. QS is exploited to show that if something other than ' 'e' ' quotes 'e', that quotation expression would have to quote something else also, and hence would be ambiguous.

Raining in Baltimore

2007-12-18T23:17:00.000-06:00

I finally got clear of work from the semester this afternoon. It's been a long four months. In any case, the lack of posting will probably continue as Lauren and I spend some time in North Carolina, and I try to make some serious progress formulating my dissertation project. I'm still confident things will pick up here come the New Year.

Let me just wish everyone heading out to Baltimore for APA interviews the best of luck. Looks like a difficult year to be on the market.

Reminder CFP: The University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Grad Conference 2008

2007-12-17T14:01:00.000-06:00

The deadline for submissions is creeping up for the:

2008 University of Texas at Austin Graduate Philosophy Conference

Keynote Speakers:

David Chalmers (ANU)
Tamar Szabo Gendler (Yale)

Faculty Roundtable: Understanding and Illusion with:

Adam Pautz (UT Austin)
Mark Sainsbury (UT Austin and KCL)
Michael Tye (UT Austin)

When: April 5-6 2008

Where: the live music capital of the world

Call for Papers: Papers are due by January 15th 2008. The official CFP is here.

Semantics and Philosophy in Europe

2007-12-09T15:51:00.000-06:00

There are definitely some big advantages to living in Texas. It's mid-December, and it's in the 70s outside. Plus, as many Brits over here have observed before me, Thanksgiving really is a great holiday. Until we get some equivalent on the other side of the Pond, this seems like the right place to be.

That said, every so often I do see things going on which make me wish I was able to spend more time in Europe. And my attention has been drawn to the new annual colloquium Semantics and Philosophy in Europe. The first event is being held in Paris (a city I have yet to see, and am starting to think I'll never get to see) on May 2-4 2008.

There's a CFP up for the first meeting, which will feature, amongst others, Herman Cappelen, Robert May, Stephen Neale and Zoltan Szabo as invited speakers. Obviously this is a wonderful opportunity, so get your submissions in by February 15th!

X-Phi in the News

2007-12-09T15:47:00.000-06:00

Anthony Appiah has what struck me as an interesting and sensible article on experimental and armchair philosophy in the NYT today. Well worth a look.

Whereof one cannot sing......

2007-12-08T10:25:00.000-06:00

This is one intense tribute to the Tractatus:

Ramsey + Moore = 5

2007-12-05T21:12:00.001-06:00

All this debate. Tsch. Did Kripkenstein teach us nothing???

Past Tense a Thing of the Past

2007-11-30T18:26:00.000-06:00

Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs

WASHINGTON—Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions, and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.

A part of American school curricula for more than 200 years, the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education.

"This was by no means an easy decision, but teaching our students how to conjugate verbs in a way that would allow them to describe events that have already occurred is a luxury that we can no longer afford," Phoenix-area high-school principal Sam Pennock said. "With our current budget, the past tense must unfortunately become a thing of the past."

In the most dramatic display of the new trend yet, the Tennessee Department of Education decided Monday to remove "-ed" endings from all of the state's English classrooms, saving struggling schools an estimated $3 million each year. Officials say they plan to slowly phase out the tense by first eliminating the past perfect; once students have adjusted to the change, the past progressive, the past continuous, the past perfect progressive, and the simple past will be cut. Hundreds of school districts across the country are expected to follow suit.

"This is the end of an era," said Alicia Reynolds, a school district director in Tuscaloosa, AL. "For some, reading and writing about things not immediately taking place was almost as much a part of school as history class and social studies."

"That is, until we were forced to drop history class and social studies a couple of months ago," Reynolds added.

Nevertheless, a number of educators are coming out against the cuts, claiming that the embattled verb tense, while outmoded, still plays an important role in the development of today's youth.

"Much like art and music, the past tense provides students with a unique and consistent outlet for self-expression," South Boston English teacher David Floen said. "Without it I fear many of our students will lack a number of important creative skills. Like being able to describe anything that happened earlier in the day."

Despite concerns that cutting the past-tense will prevent graduates from communicating effectively in the workplace, the home, the grocery store, church, and various other public spaces, a number of lawmakers, such as Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, have welcomed the cuts as proof that the American school system is taking a more forward-thinking approach to education.

"Our tax dollars should be spent preparing our children for the future, not for what has already happened," Hatch said at a recent press conference. "It's about time we stopped wasting everyone's time with who 'did' what or 'went' where. The past tense is, by definition, outdated."

Said Hatch, "I can't even remember the last time I had to use it."

Past-tense instruction is only the latest school program to face the chopping block. School districts in California have been forced to cut addition and subtraction from their math departments, while nearly all high schools have reduced foreign language courses to only the most basic phrases, including "May I please use the bathroom?" and "No, I do not want to go to the beach with Maria and Juan." Some legislators are even calling for an end to teaching grammar itself, saying that in many inner-city school districts, where funding is most lacking, students rarely use grammar at all.

Regardless of the recent upheaval, students throughout the country are learning to accept, and even embrace, the change to their curriculum.

"At first I think the decision to drop the past tense from class is ridiculous, and I feel very upset by it," said David Keller, a seventh-grade student at Hampstead School in Fort Meyers, FL. "But now, it's almost like it never happens."

Don't say you weren't warned...

2007-11-29T14:25:00.000-06:00

Here.

Semantics and Pragmatics

2007-11-28T09:49:00.000-06:00

I can't resist reminding you of your horoscope.....

Via Brit and David I see that Semantics and Pragmatics - the new open-access journal edited by David Beaver and Kai von Fintel - is now online and ready to accept submissions. David and Kai have clearly put a lot of thought into this, so I'll be interested to follow the project's progress. Hopefully it'll inspire some further open-access philosophy journals to sit alongside the fantastic Philosopher's Imprint.

This blog has continued to remain very quiet, and it's likely to stay that way through December I'm afraid. But I do anticipate things changing in the new year. I'd particularly like to finish my series of posts on Jason Stanley's Language in Context, and by then I'll have had a chance to read the new Cappelen and Lepore book. So posting will continue to be sporadic for the next month, but I anticipate there being much more life here next semester.

And so we watch the sun come up from the edge of the deep green sea...

2007-11-13T14:13:00.000-06:00

I'm stuck at home, sick and unable to eat, so I'm not feeling up to a substantial post. But here's a roundup of things going on online I'd like to point people to. I hope that keeps any Norwegians who are reading happy enough until I can write a proper post.

Firstly, Jon Cogburn has a timeline of horrible moments in the history of philosophy, as well as a Sorites series of types of irritating professors.

Readers from Austin will be familiar with the work of Jeremy, mastermind behind Amorphia Apparel. Well, he's got a new site up, this time devoted to Science! t-shirts. In Jeremy's own words:

"In this case the theme is Science! which is like the mad and absurd version of mere 'science'. Obviously this spin-off is based on my recent (and unusually successful) 'science robot' design, so think of it as Baywatch Nights to my Baywatch, Knots Landing to my Dallas, Joey to my Friends or Empty Nest to my Golden Girls... Hrrrrm, upon careful consideration perhaps this isn't the best way to convince you to visit."

I've continued to receive suggestions for the Philosophy Job Market and Publishing Advice page, so it's worth checking back from time to time. And, of course, I welcome further suggestions.

For those of you looking for philosophical nourishment, Andreas has started a series of posts reporting from what looked like an absurdly good conference on context-sensitivity in Paris (disambiguate as you see fit). His first post in the series is on Stalnaker's keynote speech.

Lastly, I've been slightly obsessed recently with 'From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea' by the Cure. For the uninitiated, here it is:

That's all for now. I'll try to have a post up on Stanley and Szabo's 'On Quantifier Domain Restriction' up as soon as possible, though it'll have to wait until I'm feeling better - can't tackle Jason on an empty stomach, after all!

Not-OK Computer

2007-10-27T16:15:00.000-05:00

You're probably wondering what's happened to the blog. Actually, you're probably not wondering that at all, but humor me. Well, my laptop is out of the game, which as most of you will know is the kiss of death for a grad student. Fortunately, the damage is only to the AC adapter, so I won't lose any work, and I should be up and running again on Monday. But it really is a pain in the ass - I now have a ton of work overdue. I'm reminded of the old saying: "To err is human. To really mess things up takes a computer".

In other news, Amanda and Andrew have a summary of the Buffalo conference in the latest issue of the Reasoner. That's handy, since I won't have a chance of my own to report on it. But let me add what those guys couldn't write - they did a simply superb job organizing the conference, from making sure everyone got where they needed to be, to feeding us extremely well (including some home-cooking upon arrival!). I'd like to thank the organizers and all involved for a great weekend. Stewart Shapiro proved himself a model keynote, coming to every graduate talk with feedback to offer. Aaron's talk was a real highlight - he has his own short report here.

Ok, back to work.

Update: My new adapter has arrived, thank goodness.

CFP: The University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Grad Conference 2008

2007-10-16T00:11:00.000-05:00

I'm very pleased to announce the:

2008 University of Texas at Austin Graduate Philosophy Conference

Keynote Speakers:

David Chalmers (ANU)
Tamar Szabo Gendler (Yale)

Faculty Roundtable: Understanding and Illusion with:

Adam Pautz (UT Austin)
Mark Sainsbury (UT Austin and KCL)
Michael Tye (UT Austin)

When: April 5-6 2008

Where: the live music capital of the world

Call for Papers: Papers are due by January 15th 2008. The official CFP is here.

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo

2007-10-11T21:36:00.000-05:00

I'm off to Buffalo this weekend for Reason, Intuition, Objects: The Epistemology and Ontology of Logic, where I'll be presenting my paper 'Iterations and Limitations'.

For the interested, here's the abstract:

'The iterative conception of set has been defended as a natural and non-arbitrary successor to the inconsistent naive conception, but in ‘The Iterative Conception of Set’ George Boolos showed that the hierarchical picture of the set-theoretic universe given to us by this conception fails to lend support to some of the axioms of ZFC, most notably choice and replacement. Both these axioms are delivered by a rival conception of set—the limitation of size conception—but unhappily this puts the axioms of power set and infinity beyond our reach, and has struck many as merely a technical device designed to avoid the paradoxes, rather than a genuine elucidation of our conception of set. Boolos has suggested that perhaps our conception of set is a hybrid of the leading thoughts behind the iterative conception and limitation of size, and in this paper I begin an assessment of the prospects of such a conception. I argue that even if this hybrid conception—the limitation of iteration conception, as I call it—can deliver all of the axioms of ZFC, it does so only if we are willing to make assumptions justified (if at all) only on pragmatic grounds. Insofar as our project is that of providing conceptual grounds on which to believe the axioms of ZFC, I conclude that we have reason to reject the limitation of iteration conception.'

Context and Logical Form Link

2007-10-06T20:34:00.000-05:00

Blogger seems to have posted my reflections on Jason Stanley's 'Context and Logical Form' under the date which I started writing it on, rather than the completion date. Very weird. This means it actually appears on the blog underneath the last post I wrote, and I'm worried as a result people will miss it.

So if you'd like to read my post, please go here.

Grice on the Goals of Philosophy

2007-10-05T16:59:00.000-05:00

Here is a lovely quote from the closing paragraph of Grice's 'Postwar Oxford Philosophy' on the goals of philosophy:

'They want philosophy to be grand, to yield one important, nonempirical information which will help one to solve either the world's problems or one's personal problems, or both. To them I feel inclined to reply in the end: "You are crying for the moon; philosophy has never really fulfilled this task, though it may sometimes have appeared to do so (and the practical consequences of its appearing to do so have not always been very agreeable). It is no more sensible to complain that philosophy is no longer capable of solving practical problems than it is to complain that the study of the stars no longer enables one to predict the course of world events."'

(Studies in the Way of Words: 179-80)

Language in Context: 'Context and Logical Form'

2007-10-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled with how much interest and discussion my first post on Jason Stanley's Language in Context has generated already. Thanks to everyone who's joined in the discussion. I'll start here by offering a reasonably substantive summary of what I think Jason's up to. It goes without saying that this is no substitute for reading Jason himself, but it does help me to get to grips with what's going on, and it gives those of us up for discussion a refresher so we're all on more or less the same page. I should add that last time I was in St Andrews I attended a very useful seminar on this paper led by Andreas - sadly I no longer have his handout, but the discussion there improved my understanding of the paper considerably.

Next up is Jason's 2000 Linguistics and Philosophy paper, 'Context and Logical Form'. I first read 'Context and Logical Form' on a flight between Houston and New Jersey. The flight left about 4am, and I hadn't managed to get any sleep the previous night. So this paper has very strong and very strange associations for me.

Last time we saw that Jason wants the process of trying to figure out what was expressed by another's utterance to be a highly constrained process. The way he thinks that a sentence constrains the interpretation of any utterance of it is simply stated as the opening line of the paper:

'My purpose in this chapter is to defend the thesis that all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to logical form.' (30)

Jason then tells us how to understand this thesis:

LOGICAL FORM: By "logical form", Jason means to talk about the so-called "real structure" of the sentence - the claim isn't to be read as the relatively uninteresting and uncontroversial thesis that all truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, conceived of as merely a representation of each natural language construction in a notation which makes any dependence on context perspicuous for the purpose of interpretation (30).

TRUTH-CONDITIONS: For his purposes in this paper, we're to think of truth-conditions as structured propositions: 'an ordered sequence of objects and properties' (31). The choice, at least in this context, is to be regarded as a matter of convenience rather than adherence to a substantial doctrine about the metaphysics of truth-conditions.

I seem to remember that Jason used to bill 'Context and Logical Form' as his 'statement piece' on the semantics-pragmatics interface, though I wonder if he now considers his joint piece with Jeff King (which is a mere 3 papers away on our quest) to supersede it on that front. In any case, Jason spends some time in the present paper orientating himself. He considers just three ways of carving things up, though he acknowledges (33) that they don't even begin to exhaust the options here.

SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS:

1. Semantics is the study of context-invariant meaning, while pragmatics is the study of the contribution of context to communication.

2. Semantic interpretation involves the evaluation of expressions relative to contexts of utterance. So even at the stage on semantic interpretation, context can play a role in assigning denotations to elements in the logical form of an expression. Pragmatic interpretation involves taking the product of semantic interpretation and evaluating it with respect to (Gricean) conversational maxims.

3. Semantic interpretation is the process of interpretation that leads to truth-conditions. Pragmatics is 'the study of those aspects of interpretation that take as input the truth-conditions of a linguistic act, and yield other propositions implicated by that speech act' (33).

Jason opts for the second way of conceiving of the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, though he notes (33) that if his central thesis is correct, the second and third ways of drawing the distinction coincide.

We're now in a position to get clearer on Jason's master thesis. The contribution made by extra-linguistic context in the interpretation of an assertion is restricted to the assignment of values to elements in the logical form of the expression uttered (34). (Jason's thesis isn't really restricted to assertions (31), but he focuses on assertions in this paper). Associated with each such element are rules placing very tight constraints on what context is allowed to throw that element's way; hence the role of extra-linguistic context on determining the truth-conditions of an assertion is very limited. As Jason points out (35):

'If this picture of truth-conditional interpretation is correct, then it is fundamentally different from other kinds of interpretation, like the kind involved in interpreting kicks under the table and taps on the shoulder.'

This aspect of Jason's view has always really intrigued me. And it really gets to the heart of Jason's disagreement with those such as the relevance theorists, discussed in a passage in the introduction that I didn't talk about last time:

'One possible way to pursue a systematic strategy for explaining the relation between utterances and the truth-conditions they intuitively possess is to attempt a systematic explanation of rational communicative action generally. On this model, advocated for example by relevance theorists such as Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston, there is a systematic account of interpretation of the mental states of others. It is our ability to make reasonable inference from the observable behavior and characteristics of our interlocutors to their mental states that ultimately explains our success in acquiring information from their utterances. On this model, linguistic behavior is no different in kind from the other cues (winks and nods, half-smiles) our interlocutors give about their inner narratives.' (9, my emphasis, some references suppressed)

For Jason, this just doesn't do justice to the speed and ease with which we arrive at the specific truth-conditions of another's assertion from hearing them having made the utterance they made (10). Unlike interpreting winks, nods and kicks under the table, interpreting the utterances of another has to be a process that is subject to considerable constraints imposed by the very expressions they uttered - as Jason nicely puts it, it has to be 'under linguistic control' (10).

Jason's opponents hear aren't just the relevance theorists; he mentions also Kent Bach, Rob Stainton, Charles Travis, and Francois Recanati. What unites such theorists is their conviction that semantics doesn't deliver up anything truth-conditional; semantics is only able to offer up something contextually impoverished, since on such views 'the truth-conditions of most utterances go well beyond what semantics can legitimately assign to the logical forms of the sentences uttered' (35). We would do better to think, with Recanati, of truth-condition pragmatics rather than truth-conditional semantics.

Pushing theorists in this direction, Jason thinks, are two assumptions:

FIRST ASSUMPTION: 'In semantic interpretation, one may never postulate hidden structure that is inconsistent with correct syntactic theory.' (35)

SECOND ASSUMPTION: 'In deriving the semantic interpretation of a logical form, every feature of the semantic interpretation must be the semantic value of something in that logical form, or introduced via a context-independent construction rule.' (36)

Jason agrees with both assumptions - he just thinks that his opponents have an impoverished conception of what the elements in the logical form of a various context sensitive expressions will be. That's an empirical issue, to be settled on a construction by construction basis, and so we turn from the grand design to particular constructions; Jason here considers two, which have been thought to undermine the kind of picture of semantic interpretation he favors, namely alleged cases of non-sentential assertion and 'utterances of expressions with sentential structure, which appear to express full-blown propositions, propositions that contain constituents which do not appear to be the values of any constituent in the logical form of the expression uttered' (39).

In the comments of the previous post, Andreas suggests that it's one of the strengths of Jason's work that he's so willing to go beyond programmatic statements of his project, and get stuck into problem cases. I think that's right, but for now I want to maintain a pretty high altitude, and discuss the importance of Jason's project for a particular topic that I'm very very interested in - the inferentialism/anti-inferentialism debate in discussions of linguistic understanding.

Consider again the third distinction between semantics and pragmatics; this splits the process of interpreting another's utterances into two parts, which following some of the plethora of terminological options here we'll describe as arriving at what was said, then determining what was meant. Arriving at what was said is a matter of semantic and perhaps pragmatic interpretation, yielding something propositional, while determining what was meant involves taking the result of semantic interpretation and evaluating it with respect to the maxims governing conversation to determine what implicatures and the like are generated. Even if we want to hold that this isn't the right way to cash out the semantics-pragmatics distinction, let us just agree to regard the latter process as a matter of inference. What of the first process, arriving - by a process of semantic interpretation or a blend of semantic and pragmatic interpretation -at something propositional and truth-conditional? Is this, at least in central cases, inferential or not?

One might have thought this issue turned on the quantity and nature of the context-sensitivity one is willing to acknowledge in natural language. As Jason writes elsewhere, arguing against accounts of linguistic understanding according to which understanding is a non-inferential perceptual or 'quasi-perceptual' grasping (see Fricker 2003, Pettit 2002, 2005):

'...the pervasive context-sensitivity and ambiguity of natural language sentences forces hearers to engage in inferential reasoning about meaning in order to grasp what is said by an utterance.' (2005: 131)

'Virtually every sentence we hear contains context-dependent expressions. Therefore, virtually all of our experience as language interpreters involves making consciously accessible linguistically guided inferences about semantic content.' (2005: 132)

So here's a thought. If you want to defend anti-inferentialism, you should deny the ubiquity of context-sensitivity in natural language. If the list of context-sensitive expressions is more or less exhausted by Cappelen and Lepore's basic set, for example, that might suggest that arriving at what is said, still considered as something truth-conditional for our present purposes, need not be considered an inferential achievement. To motivate moderate or radical contextualism over semantic minimalism, then, would be to motivate inferentialism.

But arguably, things aren't so simple. In fact, it's not only arguable, it's been argued. In his 'Does Linguistic Communication Rest on Inference?', Recanati acknowledges that in general the phenomenon of what he calls 'semantic underdetermination' provides the ammunition for 'the most powerful weapon in the inferentialist's hands' (2002: 2002). Nonetheless, despite holding that reaching something truth-conditional requires a generous helping hand from pragmatic interpretation, he thinks that one we properly understand the anti-inferentialist position, it is the more plausible position to adopt. The good news for perceptual or quasi-perceptual accounts of understanding is that 'communication is 'as direct as' perception' (2002: 125). I'm obviously glossing over a ton of details here, but the upshot if Recanati is right will be that the inferentialism/anti-inferentialism debate turns out to be much richer and more complex than we'd envisaged above. And even demonstrating a ubiquity of context-sensitive expressions outside the basic set in natural language sentences won't bury the Fricker-Pettit account of linguistic understanding, or related anti-inferentialist positions concerning linguistic communication.

I should pause to note that Jason is very careful to state his target in the 2005 paper I've been referring to, and it's plausible to think that he hits it even if one accepts Recanati's point. Jason's official target is the claim that it's a phenomenological datum that, at least in central cases, speakers simply non-inferentially grasp what is said by the utterances of others. It is, of course, perfectly consistent with recognizing the complexity of the inferentialism/anti-inferentialism debate that one urge that the ubiquity of context-sensitivity and ambiguity in natural language shows that the phenomenological claim can't be regarded as a datum.

This points at another way in which the project Jason undertakes in 'Context and Logical Form' and its successors engages with this issue. One might hold that underlying the claim that the phenomenology of linguistic understanding shows that (in central cases) hearers non-inferentially grasp what is said by the utterances of others is a true datum. It's something Jason stressed in the introduction: in most cases, we smoothly, almost effortlessly and almost instantly arrive at what was said by another's utterance, even when dealing with novel sentences. As we saw in the last post, this provides the central motivation for Jason's thesis that the process of interpretation which delivers the truth-conditions of utterances must be highly constrained. So one can see Jason as attempting to do justice to what we might hold to be the real datum underlying the controversial claim that linguistic understanding is nothing more than a kind of non-inferential grasping, thereby knocking out much of the motivation for that claim.

References:

Fricker, E. 2003. Understanding and Knowledge of What is Said. In Barber., ed. Epistemology of Language. OUP.
Pettit, D. 2002. Why Knowledge is Unnecessary for Understanding Language. Mind 111: 519-50.
- 2005. Belief and Understanding: A Rejoinder to Gross. Mind 114: 67-74.
Recanati, F. 2002. Does Linguistic Communication Rest on Inference? Mind & Language 17: 105-26.
Stanley, J. 2000. Context and Logical Form. Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 391-434.
- 2005. Hornsby on the Phenomenology of Speech. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 79: 131-46.

Anti-Luminosity: The Forgotten Premise

2007-10-04T15:05:00.000-05:00

Let a case be a world, subject and time triple < w, s, t >. Conditions either obtain or fail to obtain in each case, and are introduced by that-clauses: e.g. the condition that one is happy or that one feels cold (however, for simplicity I don't always state conditions in this cumbersome form in what follows).

A condition C is luminous iff the following holds:

For every case A, if C obtains in A, then one is in a position to know that C obtains in A.

Tim Williamson's anti-luminosity argument is meant to offer a proof that no non-trivial conditions are luminous in this sense (a condition is trivial iff it obtains in every case, or else fails to obtain in every case).

Williamson proceeds, he claims without loss of generality, by way of a reductio of the claim that the condition that one feels cold is luminous. So from the definition of luminosity, we have as our claim for reductio:

(LUM) For every case Ax, if one feels cold in Ax, then one is in a position to know that one feels cold in Ax.

Now imagine a series of times (T0, T1, T2.......Tn) between dawn and noon, each a millisecond apart. Fixing the subject and the world, we obtain a series of cases (A0, A1, A2........An) individuated by those times. One warms up very slowly, virtually imperceptibly, throughout this period. The following are also stipulated features of the case:

(COLD) In A0 one feels cold.
(WARM) In An one does not feel cold.

Williamson's two crucial premises are the following:

(REL) If in a case Ax, one knows that one feels cold, then in case Ax+1 one does feel cold.

(CON) If in a case Ax, one is in a position to know that one feels cold, then if one actively considers the matter, one knows in Ax that one feels cold.

On the assumption that one actively considers the matter of whether one feels cold in each case (A0, A1, A2........An), (LUM), (CON) and (REL) together entail the following tolerance principle for one feeling cold:

(TOL) For every case Ax, if one feels cold in Ax, then one feels cold in Ax+1.

And now Sorites reasoning will easy demonstrate the inconsistency of (TOL) with (COLD) and (WARM). So, since Williamson thinks he can independently motivate all the relevant analogues of (REL), and that (CON) is plausible, it follows that we should reject (LUM) for any non-trivial condition.

Virtually every discussion of Williamson's argument, online or in print, has focused on the reliability premise (REL). I agree that this is a weak point in the reasoning, and it should be explored, but I believe it's monopoly on attention has been deeply unfortunate - the issues surrounding (CON) have been completely neglected. Many presentations of the argument in the literature don't even acknowledge (CON) as a premise (Williamson's own presentations actually do acknowledge it). It's been the same online: in a recent discussion over at the Excluded Middle Errol Lord defines luminosity as I have above, and then when presenting Williamson's argument he writes:

'Now suppose feeling cold is luminous, which entails (2i):

(2i) If in Ax one feels cold, then in Ax one knows that one feels cold.'

(I've altered the reference to cases to be in line with that of the rest of my post here.)

I certainly don't mean to pick on Errol at all - the same move is made in several papers in print, and indeed, I only barely made things more explicit in my earlier post on this stuff. Moreover, Brueckner and Fiocco relegate the following remark to an endnote in their 2002 paper on the argument:

'Following Williamson, we will simplify things by speaking of knowing rather than being in a position to know.'

Over the next while I'll endeavor to convince you that this isn't a harmless simplification at all - we need to explore the issues surrounding (CON) just as much as those arising from (REL). (CON) is an instance of a more general principle, on which subsequent posts will focus:

Determination:

In every case Ax, if one is in a position to know that condition C obtains, then if one has done everything one is in a position to do to determine whether C obtains, then one knows in Ax that C obtains.

Williamson is quite explicit that as he intends to understand the notion of being in a position to know, Determination is a necessary condition on one's being in a position to know:

'To be in a position to know p, it is neither necessary to know p, nor sufficient to be physically and psychologically capable of knowing p. No obstacle must block one's path to knowing p. If one is in a position to know p, and one has done what one is in a position to do to decide whether p is true, then one does know p.' (Knowledge and its Limits: 95)

In posts to follow, I'll discuss the role of Determination in the debates on the viability of semantic anti-realism and on the constitutive norm of assertion. Stay tuned.

Making an enemy of our own future

2007-10-02T08:31:00.000-05:00

I've been busy grading all weekend, so I haven't had an chance to start work on the next installment of my reflections on Stanley's papers. But hopefully it'll be up before the weekend. I'm excited about this next one - the topic will be 'Context and Logical Form'.

Let me announced another couple of blogging projects for the semester, in the hope that this will encourage me to carve out some time to work on them. Firstly, I want to work my way through Mark Sainsbury's Reference Without Referents, which is about to be released (complete with a great new cover design) in paperback. Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I've blogged pretty extensively about this book in the past, but I'm going to aim to be much more thorough and systematic this time.

Secondly, and following on from exchanges with Jason Stanley and Errol Lord, I want to write a series of posts on the premise everyone forgot in Williamson's anti-luminosity argument. I've been sitting on this material partly to get it into better shape, and partly to enable it to be blind-reviewed, but the time has arrived for me to try to get it onto the web as clearly as I can. The first post on this should be sometime this week, with posts on the relevance of the forgotten premise for the debates on anti-realism and norms of assertion to follow.

Language in Context: Stanley's motivations

2007-09-28T21:12:00.000-05:00

I've been reading the introduction to Jason Stanley's Language in Context, which I got my hands on this week, and it gives a nicer summary of the considerations motivating his project than I think we've had previously. I'm going to be reading the essays over the next while, and I thought I'd try to blog along the way. Here I'm going to be unambitious, and simply try to get straight on the motivations for the project Jason tries to carry out over the course of the papers.

The main thesis seems to be that semantics serves up the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances in a systematic way, even given the ubiquity of context-sensitivity in natural language. There seem to be two main kinds of considerations pushing Jason towards this view:

a. Only then can we avail ourselves as semanticists of the resources afforded by speakers' judgments concerning the intuitive truth-conditions of various utterances
b. Only then can we account for our ability to effortlessly acquire information about the world from hearing utterances of novel sentences (even when those sentences are context-sensitive)

In this introduction, Jason seems to focus on three principle kinds of opponent to his project. Firstly, there are those who think that successful communication doesn't require that one grasp the same proposition as was expressed by another's utterance, but only one sufficiently similar (Jason attributes this thesis to Heck and Bezuidenhout). From his perspective, Jason just thinks this rests on an unsupported pessimism - part of his project is precisely to explain why grasping the proposition another's utterance expressed isn't nearly as demanding as people have supposed.

The second kind of opponent, represented by the authors of Insensitive Semantics, agrees with Jason that semantics should offer up something truth-conditional, but thinks that asking for the intuitive truth-conditions is demanding too much. Instead the semanticist can only offer the minimal proposition - an 'informationally impoverished monstrosity' as Jason describes it (12) - and has to leave all of the real work - explaining how we so effortlessly gain information about the world from each other's utterancs, which presumably involves entertaining something other than the minimal proposition - to pragmatics. And, as Cappelen and Lepore very explicitly stress, if my memory serves me correctly, this view cannot avail itself of the resources afforded by speaker-judgments about the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances. As far as Jason is concerned, that's like trying to do syntax whilst ignoring native speakers' judgments of grammaticality and ungrammaticality; it's tying both your arms behind your back before the big fight.

Lastly, we have those who think that semantics can only serve up things which fall short of determining truth-conditions - again, the real work is done at the level of pragmatics. Jason thinks that this just renders the whole process of interpreting an utterance of a sentence in a language one understands altogether too unconstrained and mysterious. We might be pushed to such a view should it prove that no project like Jason's can be successful, but it's not a fruitful starting point for understanding communication.

Does this seem like a reasonable summary of the kinds of pressures Jason takes himself to be responding to?

Your Horoscope: August 28th 2007

2007-09-22T15:47:00.000-05:00

Sagittarius: A passionate and intelligent debate over semantics this week will unfortunately get bogged down by pragmatics.

(From the Onion.)

Philosophical Methodology: Defending Intuitions

2007-09-22T10:36:00.000-05:00

I've been following with interest the thread on Leiter Reports discussing Jason's post on the relevancy of facts about natural language to philosophy.

Now Marc Moffett has a post up on Close Range critiquing Weinberg, Nichols, and Stitch's research indicating cross-cultural variation in responses to Gettier cases. It seems like this is to be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Anyone with a serious interest in philosophical methodology should head over there.

Warning!

2007-09-21T21:15:00.001-05:00

The BBC, for what reason I know not, has been asking people to email in pictures of silly signs. This self-defeating warning sign was my favorite.

Reminded me of the old philosophy warning signs............

New Blog - Conundrum

2007-09-14T11:53:00.000-05:00

While I remember, I should point out that Aaron Cotnoir (who used to post on the now defunct UConn students' blog) has just started a new blog called Conundrum. Like Colin Caret, Aaron has moved all of his posts from the group blog over to his new digs.

Aaron will also be joining me for the conference at Buffalo, so if you're in the area, you now have at least three good reasons to attend. (The first is, naturally enough, Stewart).

Philosophy Paper Titles and Puns - Together at Last.......

2007-09-14T08:59:00.000-05:00

Randy Barnett is giving a talk at UT next month, and its title is so awesome that it reminded me of something I've been meaning to do for a while now. Barnett's talk is called 'The New Originalism'.

A good pun title is one that makes you laugh, yet at the same time groan and feel a little bit inside of you has died forever. The bad simply encourage a sense of deep sorrow at the state of the world. And, of course, there's a very fine line here between the good and the bad.

So what are people's favorite and least favourite pun title for recent philosophy papers? Here are some of mine (in no particular order) to get things rolling.

(I hope I hardly need add that this is just meant to be for fun - no offense is meant to anyone, nor should these be regarded as comments on the content of any of the papers mentioned).

The cream of the crop:

1. Ted Sider - 'All the World's a Stage' (Sider's stage view version of 4D)
2. Graham Priest - 'A Site for Sorites' (Vagueness)
3. Christopher Hitchcock - 'Beauty and the Bets' (Sleeping Beauty problem)
(HT: Duncan Watson)
4. Kent Bach - 'The Emperor's New Knows' (Contextualism)
5. Roy Cook - 'Iteration One More Time' (The Iterative Conception of Set and Neo-Logicism - to be sung to the tune of Britney)

Oh, the humanity:

1. Crispin Wright - 'Warrant for Nothing (And Foundations for Free)?' (Epistemic Entitlement - this is one of my favourite recent papers in epistemology.....but really......)
2. Heinrich Wansing - 'Diamonds are a Philosopher's Best Friends' (The knowability paradox)
3. Fred Adams and Laura A. Dietrich - 'What's in a(n Empty) Name?' (Direct Reference theory)
4. Thomas Zimmerman - 'What's in Two Names?' (Substitution failure)
5. Timothy Smiley - 'A Tale of Two Tortoises' (Carroll's puzzle)
6. Crispin Wright and Stewart Shapiro - 'All Things Indefinitely Extensible' (Indefinite extensibility and unrestricted quantification)

I'll add more as they come to me. The comments thread is all yours.

Philosophy Job Market and Publishing Advice

2007-09-12T15:38:00.000-05:00

This has been doing the rounds a little in more restricted circles this morning while I sought some feedback on whether it was a good idea. But the reaction has already been very favourable, so I thought it was time to share........

There's a lot of advice and information up on the web about the philosophy job market and about trying to get published as a graduate student in philosophy, but it's really scattered. It struck me that there should be a webpage where all of the relevant links are assembled in the one place - as a piece of non-linguistic division of labour, so to speak. So I've created such a page:

Philosophy Job Market and Publishing Advice

Now, Derek Ball pointed out to me that Gualtiero Piccinini has a similar page on his homepage, and on the blog Brains. I have no desire to step on any toes, but I'm hoping having a page more focused on the specific concerns of grad students - job market and publishing - will be helpful. Piccinini's page features (very useful!) links to advice on getting into grad schools and writing philosophy papers in addition to jobs and publishing, but these won't be of much concern to my target audience, who are already past that stage. My aim is to more comprehensively cover the more specific concerns of grad students.

I hope people find the page of some use. Details of how to make suggestions concerning additions can be found by following the link above.

This is the news..............

2007-09-07T14:17:00.000-05:00

Well, the semester has really gotten underway, and it's just hectic. I don't remember ever having a first week where I felt so busy before. Anyways, following on from my earlier post, I have some good news. I'm heading out to the Reason, Intuition, Objects: the epistemology and ontology of logic conference at SUNY Buffalo next month to join my one-time philosophy of maths professor, Stewart Shapiro, and others for the weekend. I'm presenting my paper on set theory again. As regular readers of this blog will know, Kenny had some pretty persuasive things to say against some of the kinds of arguments I developed in the paper, but while I think he was clearly onto something, I hope there's still a lot to be said on these issues.

While I'm indulging in some navel-gazing, I was wondering if anyone has access to recent issues of Acta Analytica. Apparently I figure in some small way in this paper by Nenad Miščević, and I'm just a little intrigued. Any light that anyone could shed would be welcome (and I hope people won't think I'm too ridiculous for asking!).

One last piece of news. Sadly, What is it like to be a blog?, the blog of the graduate students at UConn, has been put to rest. As I'm sure you are all aware, WIILTBAB was home to many interesting discussions on dialetheism and paraconsistency, Dummettian anti-realism, logical revisionism in general, and a host of other topics from metaphysics to the ethical grounds for vegetarianism. The good news is that Colin Caret, the man behind many of these discussions, has set up a single authored blog called Inconsistent Thoughts on which he'll continue to post about these issues. Be there and be square and not-square.

Philosophy Journals WIKI

2007-09-05T11:01:00.000-05:00

I think it's worth drawing attention to the new philosophy journals WIKI. It's already got a fair amount of data about which journals give prompt responses, which give comments, whether those comments were appropriate, how long the backlog is, etc. The data's currently horribly presented, but hopefully it'll be streamlined as the page builds momentum.

HT: John Symons.

So this is the new year.....

2007-08-31T08:20:00.000-05:00

Well, the new term at UT has started at last. So far I've had Semantics and Pragmatics with David Beaver, Language Acquisition with Robert Meier, and I've been sitting in on Philosophy of Language with Ray, who we just hired out of NYU. I'm finally trying to take seriously my chosen topic, which is more or less the epistemology of language. So I'm taking lots of linguistics again. Ray's class is mostly just for fun - he's fast becoming one of my favourite people to talk philosophy with, and as an added bonus, he's covering a lot of material I don't know all that well, including a lot of Grice. It's shaping up to be a busy but very interesting semester, I think.

I always find Summer the toughest time to keep the blog going. I know a lot of bloggers who just go on hiatus, but I've tried to avoid that when possible - it makes it all the harder to build up any momentum. On the other hand, hardly anyone reads what you write over summer, and there's always other things one could be doing than writing posts noone will read. Anyways, I'm going to endeavor to post much more now term's underway, starting with my twin posts on knowability earlier this week.

On a different topic, I'm intrigued by this new OUP collection of philosophers discussing atheism. There are some names which will already be familiar to readers of this blog, but mostly for other reasons: my teacher at St Andrews, Stewart Shapiro, contributes the opening piece, and Jamie Tappenden, Ken Taylor, Simon Blackburn and David Lewis show up, amongst others. (HT: Logic Matters)

Stewart also seems to have a new paper coming out with William Taschek in JPHIL called 'Cognitive Command and Excluded Middle', which sounds right up my street. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be an online version up anywhere.

Knowability and Actuality

2007-08-27T17:23:00.000-05:00

Here's a point which dropped out of my last post. Anti-realists adopt some local or global version of the knowability principle:

KP: P only if it is possible that P is known.

They've understood this principle such that it's constrained by the actual distribution of truth-values; the actual distribution of truth-values over statements determines what is knowable. Why?

In my post, I took it to be because otherwise knowability isn't nearly demanding enough. Suppose that P is false. Still, P might be knowable in the sense that there is some world in which P is knowable - it might only have to be a world in which P is true. But the anti-realist was looking for a more substantial sense of knowability, one according to which falsehoods are not knowable. So anti-realists understand knowability in such a manner so as P is knowable if and only if P.

In the Analysis note I discussed in the previous post, Jesper Kallestrup clearly sees things quite differently. He writes:

'It would be too easy to refute anti-realism if [KP] failed in cases where P is actually true, but not known in worlds in which P is false.'

The suggestion is that having what's knowable determined by the actual distribution of truth-values blocks putative counterexamples to KP. But I'm not seeing how the point is supposed to go. Suppose that P is actually true, but not known in worlds in which P is false. I'm not seeing any danger from such cases, though they refute the following thesis:

KP!!: P only if it is necessary that P is known.

Since KP doesn't require that P is known in all possible worlds, it's not clear to me how the observation that P is not knowable in worlds in which P is false is meant to provide the material for an even prima facie counterexample to KP. So it's quite unclear to me how consideration of such cases could motivate adopting the thesis that what is knowable is fixed by the actual distribution of truth-values. Unless I'm missing something, I think the motivation has to stem from the worry about diluting the notion of knowability too much.

(Andreas blogged about related issues a while back).

Knowability and Dialetheism

2007-08-27T15:18:00.000-05:00

In the most recent issue of Analysis, Peter Milne has argued that an omniscient being would have to be a dialetheist. The argument proceeds as follows. The assumption that there is an omniscient being entails a contradiction. But rather than merely treating this as a reductio of our assumption, we have the option of holding that the contradiction is true. Since it's true, our omniscient being must know it, so if we want to hold on to an omniscient being, we'll have to recognize that it must know something of the form P & ~P. The argument that the assumption that there is an omniscient being leads to a contradiction runs as follows. Consider the following sentence:

S: No omniscient being knows that which the sentence S expresses.

S is clearly self-referential, but it doesn't trip itself up; it's simply true if there aren't any omniscient beings. Now, suppose that ~S, i.e.,

1. Some omniscient being knows that which S expresses.

Then, given what S expresses,

2. Some omniscient being knows that no omniscient being knows that which the sentence S expresses.

But then by the factivity of knowledge,

3. No omniscient being knows that which the sentence S expresses.

But that's just S. So S is true.

Now suppose that X is an omniscient being. Then X knows all, including what we've just shown, namely (3). So,

4. X knows that no omniscient being knows that which the sentence S expresses,

which, given what S expresses, yields,

5. X knows that which S expresses.

But X is omniscient. So,

6. Some omniscient being knows that which S expresses.

But (6) is just ~S. So, on the assumption that an omniscient being exists, S & ~S.

Milne leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions from his proof. Jesper Kallestrup has picked up the baton, and adapted Milne's proof to show that the knowability principle (KP) entails a contradiction. Again, rather than treating this as a reductio, we might accept that the contradiction is true. A final application of (KP) yields that this contradiction is knowable. Anti-realists are committed to dialetheism.

It can hardly have escaped the attention of readers of this blog that I'm more sympathetic than most to anti-realism, and (unlike Jon Cogburn), I'm not in the market for the conclusion that it entails committment to dialetheism. There's a lot that might be said in order to dodge this conclusion. Jesper notes that so-called restriction strategies that have been offered by Dummett and Tennant in response to the knowability paradox also work here, but he points out they are associated with a whole bunch of problems. Crispin Wright's endorsement of KP as a local thesis also blocks Jesper's reasoning, which requires an assumption that KP holds globally.

Here I just want to suggest that there's a further restriction to KP the anti-realist can make, one that's independently motivated and yet which blocks the proof. Let's begin by examining Jesper's argument that KP entails a contradiction.

Consider the following variant of S:

S*: Nobody possibly knows that which the sentence S expresses.

Again, this is self-referential but does not simply implode. But now suppose that we adopt the following:

KP: P expresses a truth only if it is possible that somebody knows that P expresses a truth.

Actuality Assumption (AA): It is possible that somebody knows that P expresses a truth only if there is some actual person who, perhaps which finite extensions to her capacities, possibly knows that P expresses a truth.

Factivity Assumption (FA): It is possible that somebody knows that P expresses a truth only if P expresses a truth.

AA and FA are usually taken as being part of a package with KP (though, always the exception, Jon Cogburn seems to reject FA here, p238).

Now, suppose the following:

1. That which S* expresses is true.

Then by KP we have,

2. It is possible that somebody knows that which S* expresses.

By AA, we get,

3. Somebody possibly knows that which S* expresses.

But (3) is simply ~S*.

Now suppose,

4. That which S* expresses is false.

Then, by the contrapositive of FA, we arrive at,

5. It is not possible that somebody knows that which S* expresses.

Hence by AA,

6. Nobody possibly knows that which S* expresses.

But this is just S*! So, given KP, AA, and FA (the standard anti-realist package), we get ((S* -> ~S*) & (~S* -> S*)), which intuitionistically yields (~S* & ~~S*), and classically (~S* & S*). Hence the standard package entails a contradiction.

I think the main issue here is how to understand the constraint on KP that FA imposes. We don't want KP to be trivially true or false; surely every party in this debate wants to be affirming a doctrine with some substance. But there's some trickiness here: adopting FA is meant to block trivializing KP by allowing it to be satisfied in cases where P is false in @ and yet it is possible to know that P since there is a world w such that w is not @, and P expresses a truth and thus something knowable in w. The motivating idea behind FA is that KP is supposed to be constrained by the distribution of truth-values at the actual world, since otherwise even falsehoods are knowable - not the interpretation of knowability the anti-realist wants.

Unfortunately, adopting FA threatens to make KP come out trivially false. KP is supposed to be a necessary truth by the anti-realist's lights. So it's supposed to be impossible that P express a truth and yet it be impossible for some suitably pimped-out subject to come to know that P expresses a truth. But now suppose that it happens not to be known that Q expresses a truth, even though it in fact does. Given the requirement that we've attempted to capture in FA, that KP be sensitive to the actual distribution of truth-values, the question is whether it's possible that someone might come to know that Q expresses a truth, given the actual distribution of truth-values. But this obviously isn't possible, since the actual distribution of truth-values determines that nobody knows that Q expresses a truth. So, contrary to KP taken as a necessary truth, it is possible that Q express a truth and yet it be impossible that a suitably pimped-out subject to come to know that Q expresses a truth. That's a possibility just because of the simple fact that sometimes truths aren't in fact known by any subject in the actual world. (This line of thought is Sven Rosenkranz's, from p354 of his 2003).

So the anti-realist has a balancing act to do. (S)he wants to hold on to the thought that P expresses a truth if and only if it is possible that somebody knows that P expresses a truth. The right-to-left direction of this is AA, and it constrains the notion of knowability so that what is knowable is determined by the actual distribution of truth-values. But if we allow that what is knowable is determined by the actual distribution of truth-values over sentences expressing our current state of ignorance (or knowledge), we're in trouble, for then KP is clearly false. That was the upshot of Sven's argument. A principled way of avoiding this difficulty is needed, and Sven offers a proposal in his paper.

This has all been pretty torturous, but I've still to show how this all might bear on Kallestrup's proof. We need to look again at the move from line (4) to line (5):

4. That which S* expresses is false.

Then, by the contrapositive of FA, we arrive at,

5. It is not possible that somebody knows that which S* expresses.

But S* is clearly a sentence expressing something about our current state of ignorance, and we resolved, in the light of Sven's point, to understand KP and FA in such a way that the truth-values of such sentences did not go towards determining what is knowable (for example, Sven's suggestion may be put (I hope!) as follows: KP and FA only hold when the truth-value of P isn't alterable by any (perhaps idealized) subject). My suggestion, then, is that once we take Sven's point seriously, and change our understanding of KP and FA accordingly, the move from (4) to (5) will be invalidated. So the upshot, if I'm right, is that an already necessary restriction on the standard anti-realist package serves to invalid Kallestrup's proof of a contradiction.

Homework: What's the bearing of this, if any, on the knowability paradox?

References:

Kallestrup, J. 2007. If omniscient beings are dialetheists, then so are anti-realists. Analysis 67: 252-4.
Milne, P. 2007. Omniscient beings are dialetheists. Analysis 67: 250-1.
Rosenkranz, S. 2003. Realism and Understanding. Erkenntnis 58: 353-78.

Stanley's Knowledge and Practical Interests

2007-08-23T09:44:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to Jason Stanley, whose Knowledge and Practical Interests, which I'm currently re-reading, won the APA book prize. Jason's book, as readers of this blog will know, has formed the basis for many a post here when it first came out, and it's good to see it getting such great recognition. Hopefully I'll find some new things to write about this time around.

Hat-tips: Kvanvig and Leiter.

Bleg: Epistemic Closure and Testimony

2007-08-17T11:07:00.003-05:00

Does anyone know of any literature on the closure problem for testimony: that if one gains knowledge that p from someone's assertion that p, and one's knowledge is closed under known implication, then one knows (or is in a position to know) that the asserter was telling the truth? There seems to be a little bit of discussion in the SEP article on Epistemological Problems of Testimony by Jonathan Adler, but I don't know of any other discussions in the literature.

(There are, of course, a number of general discussions of closure, and of other specific closure puzzles such as other sceptical arguments and the lottery paradox. But I'm hoping specifically for references on the problem for testimony).

CFP: Knowledge and Understanding

2007-08-11T13:58:00.000-05:00

Adam Carter has just posted up the call for the graduate conference he and Duncan are organizing at Edinburgh over at Epistemic Value. It's happening on the 13th of November, and abstracts of 500 words are due by the 20th of October, to be sent to edinburghgradconference@gmail.com.

The keynote is Ernest Sosa of Rutgers, so it should be a wonderful conference - get submitting!

Is Knowledge-How Gettier-Susceptible?

2007-08-03T11:56:00.001-05:00

I think the force of one of Dean Pettit's arguments in 'Why Knowledge is Unnecessary for Understanding Language' has been somewhat missed by a lot of people (on the most common interpretation I've encountered, this includes Pettit himself). The point turns out to have significance for the recent debate about knowing-how sparked by Stanley and Williamson's very influential and important JPhil piece.

Pettit's target is epistemic accounts of linguistic understanding, whereby understanding an expression just is, or at least requires, knowledge of some proposition stating that expression's meaning. Pettit's first attack on the epistemic view proceeds by offering a case in which a subject's belief in the proposition that 'Krankenschwester' means 'Nurse' is Gettierized, and yet we are strongly drawn to judge that the subject nonetheless understands 'Krankenschwester'. The natural reading of Pettit takes his argument to proceed as follows. The moral to draw from the case described is that understanding language, in stark contrast to propositional knowledge as it is usually understood by epistemologists, is unGettierizable. Hence the identification of linguistic understanding with propositional knowledge is untenable, and Gettier cases like the one Pettit offers will be examples of understanding without the relevant piece of propositional knowledge.

But it seems clear that Pettit does not need to make the really strong claim that understanding is unGettierizable. All he needs, and all his case strictly speaking shows, is that there are Gettier cases in which we are prone to judge that a subject understands some expression, and yet that subject's belief in the proposition knowledge of which - according to the epistemic view - constitutes or necessarily accompanies understanding of that expression is Gettierized. That's enough to defeat the epistemic view.

(I should stress, I don't buy Pettit's conclusion. I've been convinced by Stanley in his reply to Hornsby that there's a lot still to be said in favor of the epistemic view. Here I'm simply pointing out that the argument need not rely on drawing the moral that understanding is immune to Gettierization.)

Pettit and others have suggested that his argument against the epistemic view can also be wielded against Stanley and Williamson's proposal that it is true that one knows how to x (in a given context) if and only if for some contextually relevant way w, one stands in the knowledge-that relation to the (Russellian) proposition that w is a way for one to x (and one entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation). The basic suggestion is that while propositional knowledge is usually taken to be vulnerable in Gettier cases, knowledge-how - like linguistic understanding - is unGettierizable.

Stanley and Williamson offer two replies to this (435). Firstly, they doubt that propositional knowledge in general is Gettier-susceptible. Secondly, they describe what they take to be a Gettier case for knowledge-how, undermining the claim that knowledge-how is unGettierizable.

But, as with the epistemic view of understanding, it would suffice to object to their proposal if it could be shown that there are Gettier cases in which Stanley and Williamson's biconditional fails: so cases in which we would on reflection attribute the subject knowledge-how to x, and yet we'd hold that the subject fails to stand in the knowledge-that relation to the proposition that w (for some appropriate w) is a way for her to x because her belief has been Gettierized. On a first pass, Stanley and Williamson's responses don't seem to address this point; once we refrain from making the strong claim that knowledge-how is unGettierizable, their purported Gettier case for know-how is besides the point, and unless we have good reason to think that beliefs in propositions of the form 'w is a way for me to x' are amongst the ones that it might be plausible to regard as Gettier-immune, it's hard to see how it helps to point out that some knowledge-that might enjoy such immunity.

The upshot is it seems that there's still room to explore a version of the Pettit objection against the Stanley-Williamson proposal. Mark Sainsbury has suggested to me that if one accepts their account, it will be quite plausible that there could not be Gettier cases in which their biconditional fails (so their first reply, that not all knowledge-that is Gettier-susceptible, is very much to the point after all). As I've blogged before, Stanley and Williamson see themselves in part as trying to challenge the Rylean account of the nature of the knowledge-that relation, and Mark's suggestion is that once we take that challenge seriously, it's very difficult indeed to come up with Gettier cases in which it's intuitively the case that the subject knows how to x, and yet fails to possess the knowledge-that which the right-hand side of the Stanley-Williamson biconditional would have us attribute. So the suggestion is that once we understand the kind of view of the nature of knowledge-that which Stanley and Williamson favor, their proposal is not vulnerable to a Pettit-style objection, even as I've reconstrued it here. I think Mark's probably right about this, and there's no counterexample to Stanley and Williamson in the offing here, but it seems worth thinking more about, and I don't know of any discussion in the literature.

CFP: 2007 Yale/UConn Conference

2007-08-03T11:08:00.000-05:00

Colin Caret has posted a call for papers over at What is it like to be a blog? Note that the deadline has been extended to the 31st of August. I'd love to submit something myself, but my sister gets into Austin to visit the day the conference starts. Should be great fun though, so submit!

The times, they are a changin'

2007-07-20T14:42:00.000-05:00

Here.

Knowledge and Action

2007-07-19T08:42:00.001-05:00

I just discovered that the long-awaited 'Knowledge and Action' by Hawthorne and Stanley is online, so I've spent the morning so far reading it instead of doing anything I was meant to be doing. There's plenty of interest in the paper, including discussion of Fantl and McGrath's earlier proposal, and the development and defense of their own new positive proposal. That said, I found it a little dissatisfactory in a number of ways. First of all, one objection Hawthorne and Stanley have to the Fantl and McGrath proposal is that it looks like it'll have serious trouble retaining multi-premise epistemic closure. In the paper, there's a suggestion that the correct diagnosis of these difficulties is that Fantl and McGrath allow that knowledge might be compatible with probability less than 1. Then when developing their own framework in which to chart the connections between knowledge and reasons for acting, they write (10):

'It is clear enough that if we want multi-premise closure, we had better operate with a notion of probability according to which knowledge delivers probability 1.'

But I take it it's left open whether Hawthorne and Stanley really do retain MPC. Adopting a view on which knowledge delivers probability 1 may allow them to avoid the specific problems that the Fantl and McGrath proposal faced, but Hawthorne's own Knowledge and Lotteries pointed out that adopting knowledge-action principles, given the kind of sensitive-invariantist epistemology both Hawthorne and Stanley have expressed a preference for, may lead to trouble preserving MPC. (I argued last year that Hawthorne's proposal, while it may preserve the letter of single premise closure, seems unable to retain it's spirit). Now, perhaps their new proposal linking knowledge to reasons for action might allow them to steer clear of those problems. But it would have been nice to see the details; in their absence, it seemed entirely unclear whether the new proposal really marked that much of an improvement over Fantl and McGrath with respect to MPC, irregardless of whether knowledge delivers probability 1. As Hawthorne himself put it in his earlier discussion, ensuring that knowledge delivers probability 1 is just a 'first step' (182) towards a vindication of MPC.

But the main gripe I had, as with Hawthorne and Stanley's recent books, is the uncritical Williamsonianism which runs through the paper. That Williamson's anti-luminosity argument establishes its conclusion just seems to be taken for granted. Now, of course one doesn't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time one writes a paper. But on the other hand, it seems strange to treat Williamson's arguments almost like mathematical lemmas that one can simply help oneself to when needed, given their deeply controversial status. More importantly, I would really have liked to have seen a defense of the Williamson/DeRose proposal for handling putative counterexamples to the knowledge account of assertion. Virtually every time something that looks like a counterexample is produced, the reply is that it is a violation of the norm, but that's ok so long as we can find some excuse for the violator (he thought he was conforming to the norm, for example). Hawthorne and Stanley just seem to again take for granted that this kind of response is fine, but it's hard not to feel somewhat uneasy about it. Jennifer Lackey has given voice to these kinds of concerns in section 4 of her 'Norms of Assertion'.

Lastly, it seems relatively straightforward to convert Matt Weiner's counterexamples to the knowledge account of assertion in his excellent Phil Review paper into putative counterexamples to Hawthorne and Stanley's knowledge-action principle. (See p8 of this draft of 'Must We Know What We Say' for the counterexamples). Such cases are specifically designed to be cases in which the asserter doesn't even think their assertion conforms to the knowledge account, and yet we're meant to be pulled to judge that it was perfectly proper. Of course, there may be all kinds of ways to dodge the bullet here. But we're not given any clues about how to do that in the paper.

So, to sum up, the positive proposal of the paper seems really worth exploring, and the comparison with Fantl and McGrath's earlier attempt to articulate the relationship between knowledge and action is very welcome. I think Hawthorne and Stanley are right that this is an issue which has been unfairly neglected. But again I get the sense that chunks of Knowledge and its Limits are taken to be simply not up for discussion. That's very unfortunate. I'm sure our understanding of these aspects of Williamson's epistemology could well benefit from serious attention from Hawthorne and Stanley, but once again they don't receive it.

Life is Elsewhere

2007-07-12T10:17:00.000-05:00

Not much going on here as I get settled back into Austin, start teaching again, and revise the draft of the paper I've been working on this past while so that I can start to get some feedback on it. In the meantime, I have been participating in some fun discussions elsewhere.

First of all, myself and others have been trying to get clear on Wright's Cautious man problem over at the Florida Student Blog.

Secondly, I've been attempting to criticize Errol Lord's interesting response to Williamson's anti-luminosity argument over at the Excluded Middle.

Happy Birthday!

2007-07-11T11:23:00.000-05:00

Brit Brogaard's LEMMINGS is one year old today!

Update: Joe Salerno's Knowability has come of age too.

Mere Probability and Warranted Assertion

2007-07-06T14:59:00.000-05:00

On the flight back to Austin I reread a chunk of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which I really enjoyed again. I hear that for American school kids, the period around the civil war is the equivalent of the Second World War in Europe; you end up studying it countless times, almost to the exclusion of anything else. But I'm coming at it all fresh, and I haven't really had much contact with Pragmaticism, so it's all very new and very interesting to me. Plus there's great stuff on the philosophical agenda of On the Origin of Species and its reception, and, if my memory serves me correctly, there's the story of the philosophy departments at Chicago and John Hopkins to come.

Here are just a couple of quotes I liked. First of all, there's Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. on the KK principle (p62):

"I detest a man who knows what he knows."

"The abolitionists had a stock phrase that a man was either a knave or a fool who did not act as they knew to be right. So Calvin thought of the Catholics and the Catholics of Calvin. So I don't doubt do the more convinced prohibitionists think of their opponents today. When you know that you know persecution comes easy. It is as well that some of us don't know that we know anything."

More seriously, I thought a quote from Benjamin Peirce raised a nice issue. As part of a court case, he and Charles Sanders Peirce were to figure out the likelihood that a woman had signed her name perfectly twice, once on her will, and once on a purported secret 'second page' to that will nullifying any further will that might be drawn up on that person's behalf. The person who had produced both documents stood to gain all of the money if they were accepted as genuine, so obviously the authenticity of the documents became of great importance. The Peirces calculated that the chance that the lady had produced a second signature quite so like the first, with precisely the same distribution of distinctive strokes, was 1 in 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000, and so they urged the signature on the 'second page' must have been traced from the first page. Peirce testified that this number:

"transcends human experience. So vast an improbability is practically an impossibility. Such evanescent shadows of probability cannot belong to actual life. They are unimaginably less than those least things which the law cares not for.

The coincidence which is presented in this case cannot therefor be reasonably regarded as having occurred in the ordinary course of signing a name. Under a solemn sense of the responsibility involved in the assertion, I declare that the coincidence which has here occured must have had its origin in an intention to produce it...[I]t is utterly repugnant to sound reason to attribute this coincidence to any cause but design." (p172-3)

I thought it was interesting that Peirce makes no bones about his merely probabilistic grounds to make this assertion, but he also acknowledges that he is in a situation which make the standards for warranted assertion particularly high. There's a well known argument from Williamson in favor of the knowledge account of assertion which proceeds by pushing the intuition that you cannot flat-out assert that a lottery ticket has lost (before the outcome of the draw is known), even if the probability that it hasn't lost is utterly minuscule. The diagnosis given is that mere probabilistic grounds are enough for assertion; one needs to know. But who would resent Peirce's assertion on these grounds were he to make it?

CFP: The Arché/CSMN Graduate Conference

2007-07-02T10:23:00.000-05:00

Where: The University of St Andrews

When: November 2-4, 2007

Keynotes: Kit Fine (NYU), John Hawthorne (Oxford) and Gabriel Uzquiano (Oxford)

For the fourth annual graduate conference hosted by Arché at the University of St Andrews, we invite high-quality papers in the areas of Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Logic, Epistemology, and Metaphysics.

Deadline for submissions: August 15th, 2007

All papers will have Arché/St Andrews staff respondents, and will be follows by open discussion. Applicants should submit the following for blind review:

1. A cover sheet including author name, title of paper, institutional affiliation and email address

2. An abstract ready for blind review

3. A paper suitable for a 35-minutes presentation, of no more than 5000 words, and ready for blind review.

Electronic submissions are preferred. Papers can be submitted in .doc, .rtf, .ps., .txt, or .pdf format to: archephimail@st-and.ac.uk.

Submissions in hard copy are also accepted. These should be sent to:

Arché Graduate Conference
Arché Research Centre
17-19 College Street
St Andrews
Fife
KY16 9AL
Scotland

Accommodation expenses for all graduate speakers will be covered. Travel expenses for graduate speakers traveling from within the UK will also be covered.

For more information, please contact the organizers at archephimail@st-and.ac.uk, or visit the conference website.