the boundaries of language

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.

Labels: Epistemology, Links

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

Labels: Links, Misc

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.

Labels: Links

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.

Labels: Links

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.

Labels: Links, Misc

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.

Labels: Links, Misc

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.

Labels: Conferences, Links, Metablogging

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

Labels: Links

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.

Labels: Jason Stanley, Links

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....

Labels: Links

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!

Labels: Links, Misc

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.

Labels: Links, Methodology

Here.

Labels: Links, Misc

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.

Labels: Links, Metablogging

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!

Labels: Links

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.

Labels: Links

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.

Labels: Jason Stanley, Links, Methodology

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............

Labels: Links, Misc

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).

Labels: Conferences, Links

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.

Labels: Links