Obscure and Confused Ideas

History of Philosophy of Science at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting?

2012-01-03T12:55:00.000-08:00

I'm currently trying to figure out what, if anything, I should submit for the 2012 PSA. I was thinking of sending in a paper on Carnap, but then I had a look at the Program Committee (here's the list), and 0 of the 20 people on the committee work primarily in history of philosophy of science. Furthermore, at the last PSA (see here), there were zero papers in HOPOS -- though there was one HOPOS person on the Program Committee then. I remember that there were HOPOS papers at PSA's in the recent past (I'm certain there was a HOPOS session at the 2004 meeting, because I presented).

Although I'm mildly curious about why HOPOS has apparently dropped off the PSA's radar, I guess the more immediate question for me is whether I should bother submitting the Carnap paper.

A datum on the reception of the 'Verifiability Criterion of Meaning'

2011-12-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

One of my pet views about logical empiricism is that the verifiability criterion of meaning, for those who actually espoused some version of it (as opposed to attributed it to someone else), often does not mean exactly what the average professional philosopher in 2011 thinks it means.

I just stumbled across a new data point that suggests the reception of the verifiability criterion was more accurate than the straw-man version popular today. Here's Susan Stebbing, in 1933's "Logical Positivism and Analysis":

A proposition is understood only if it is verifiable; it is verifiable if, and only if, we know the conditions under which the proposition would be true, and the conditions under which it is false.(p.13)

Just as Carnap says in "Overcoming Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language," the meaning of a sentence is given by its truth-conditions. (One cannot be a complete revolutionary about the verifiability principle: the texts rule that out. Discussions of observations appear in treatments of the verifiability principle--these 'truth-conditions' are often further articulated as something like 'sets of possible experiences,' where 'possible' is taken very broadly.)

A new kind of semantics for confusion

2011-12-17T06:06:00.000-08:00

(There's a decent amount of set-up/ review in this post, before I reach the main point -- the new idea comes in the 4th paragraph.) I took a grad seminar with Joe Camp on the topic of confusion 8 years ago, and have been thinking on-and-off about it ever since. Camp illustrates the phenomenon with the example of Fred, who buys an ant colony. At the time of purchase, Fred is told that there is one big ant in the colony, and a bunch of smaller ones. Unbeknownst to Fred, however, there are actually two big ants in his colony (we'll call them 'Ant A' and 'Ant B'). Fred says to himself "I'm going to call the big ant in my colony 'Charley'." Fred then goes on to say various sentences including the word 'Charley,' and to make various inferences involving such sentences.

The questions that most interest me about confusion concern truth and consequence: 1. What truth-value, if any, should we assign to such sentences? (Think about 'Charley is an ant', Charley is not an ant,' or 'Charley=Charley'.) 2. How should we make sense of logical consequence in languages containing 'Charley' and similar words? (Think about: 'Everything is an ant; thus Charley is an ant', 'Charley is a big ant; thus there is a big ant,' and 'Charley is an ant; thus Charley exists').

For people who don't want to say that every atomic sentence containing 'Charley' is false, or is truth-valueless, the (apparently?) most common strategy is to use a supervaluational strategy: 'Charley is an ant' is true, because it is true on every disambiguation: 'Ant A is an ant' is true, and so is 'Ant B is an ant'. The same goes for 'Charley=Charley.' For logical consequence, there are two ways we could go: 'local' or 'global', in the jargon current in recent work on the logic of vagueness. The 'global' option: If every premise is true on every complete disambiguation, then the conclusion is true on every complete disambiguation. The 'local' option: for every complete disambiguation, if all the premises are true, then so is the conclusion. (If an argument is locally valid, then it's globally valid, but not conversely.)

So here's my new idea: what if, instead of using supervaluations (which were initially introduced in the 60's to handle empty names), could we instead use something like the other main contender for the model theory of empty names, usually called 'inner domain-outer domain' semantics? In this semantics, extra entities are added to the 'outer domain,' which serve as the referents for empty names (such as 'Santa Claus'). But the quantifiers only range over the 'inner domain,' in which all the objects exist. So 'Santa exists' will be false.

The idea to try an inner domain-outer domain semantics for confused terms resulted from re-reading Krista Lawlor's "A Notional Worlds Approach to Confusion." She objects to the supervaluational approach, because "[i]n supervaluing, we give up on understanding the confused belief." Why?

Fred’s ontological commitments involve one big ant (‘Charley’), not two. Our assignment of truth and falsity to Fred’s beliefs rests on our ontology, not Fred’s. We evaluate Fred’s beliefs for how far they might lead us astray, by our lights. In a very clear sense we give up on understanding Fred, in favor of using him, we might say, as an instrument (and a not-too-well-calibrated one at that), for detecting the facts as we understand them. (p.153)

I don't know yet whether I agree with this argument. But I do think it's a plausible argument, and thus it is worth trying to devise a type of formal semantics that respects the idea behind it. If there were one object in the outer domain that is the referent of 'Charley,' perhaps we have not 'given up on understanding' Fred's belief.

The obvious next question is: what are these individuals in the outer domain? Which one is the referent of 'Charley'? The short answer is 'I don't know,' but I think there have to be some constraints on this individual, related to Ant A and Ant B's properties (this would be a difference with the old inner/outer domain semantics for empty names -- there, the inner-domain individuals do not themselves impose constraints on the outer-domain individuals). Ruth Garrett Millikan describes confused concepts as "amalgams" of distinct concepts; so could we somehow make the individual in the outer domain associated with the name 'Charley' an amalgam of Ant A and Ant B? But what would such an amalgamated individual be (or: 'How should we model such an amalgamated individual in this formal semantics')? First-thought candidates include the set {Ant A, Ant B}, or the mereological fusion of Ant A and Ant B, but neither of those seem obviously right. Obviously, I'm just at the very beginning of thinking about this, and any thoughts would be very appreciated.

Carnap's FBI files

2011-12-15T07:11:00.000-08:00

Carnap's FBI file is available on the web:

http://vault.fbi.gov/Rudolph%20Carnap/

Thanks to Chris Wüthrich for the tip.

Ethical disagreement and ethical anti-realism

2011-10-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

For one of my classes, I've been reading John Doris and Stephen Stich's Stanford Encyclopedia article "Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches," and in particular the section "Moral Disagreement". They offer the following argument against moral realism/ moral objectivity (they use both terms):

(P1) If morality is objective, then [all?] moral disagreements will decrease over time.
(P2) Many moral disagreements do not decrease over time.
--------------
Thus, morality is not objective.

In support of (P2), they point to Nisbett's interesting findings about differences between non-latino whites in the Southern U.S. vs. in the Northern U.S. on the subject of when and to what extent force is justified. Very roughly, Southerners think violence is warranted and excusable in a wider range of cases than Northerners (if you aren't familiar with Nisbett's data on this, it's fascinating; Doris and Stich do a great job of summarizing and explaining it). Another example in support of (P2) is that Western Europeans and East Asians respond (on average) differently to the 'magistrate and the mob' thought-experiment: Westerners are more likely to say that an innocent man should be set free, even if setting him free leads to a riot killing many people. Their final example is Hopi attitudes about harming animals.

Doris and Stich recognize that most realists will direct their criticisms at (P1): disagreement can persist because people are selfish, biased, or unaware of certain things -- but if we were all disinterested, unbiased, and fully informed, then disagreements would eventually vanish.

I was wondering about another type of reaction to their argument. I wonder whether we could say that, for some moral disagreements, there is a fact of the matter about whether one side is right and the other wrong, whereas for other moral disagreements, there is no fact of the matter about which side is correct.

Perhaps this is conceptually incoherent, and a 'sometimes objective, sometimes not' position is unworkable. But I think it is intuitively appealing in some other cases, such as athletic merit. For example, think about the question 'Who is the best baseball player in the world?' I think it's defensible to say that there is no fact of the matter about this question. There will be a fact of the matter for various more specific questions, like which professional player had the most home runs this year. But since different players have different strengths and weaknesses, and because there are different demands on different positions, there is no fact of the matter as to which one person is the best player. However, there is a fact of the matter about whether Albert Pujols is a better baseball player than I am.

What's going on here? It seems to me that there are a number of dimensions or variables we use when evaluating a baseball player. At the most coarse-grained level, these variables would be the ability to hit, throw, and field. Now, Pujols is much better than I am at all three; that is why he is better than me period. But if one person is not better than the other on all three, then it will matter how we weight the different variables, and (I'm thinking) that there is no fact of the matter as to the unique correct weighting of the various variables.

It could be that something similar is going on in the three ethical examples of disagreement Doris and Stich present. In each of these three, there are various ethical principles in play, that could be weighted differently, and there is no fact of the matter as to exactly which weighting is the right one. In the case of the Magistrate and the Mob, utilitarian (and/or communitarian) principles conflict with a fairness principle. Now, everybody agrees that other things being equal, we should not punish the innocent, or choose a greater harm over a lesser harm. But those two ceteris paribus principles conflict in this case.

Perhaps a similar (if not identical) account could be given in the Northerner/ Southerner case: most people agree that most transgressions should be punished. But which transgressions, exactly? -- And how much punishment, exactly? Everyone who punishes must balance justice against avoiding cruelty. Alternatively, this case might be better understood as an instance of vagueness -- but many people (but not epistemicists) believe that there is no fact of the matter concerning whether a particular borderline patch of red-orange really is red.

So in short: some ethical claims are objective, and some are not, just as some claims about who is a better baseball player are objective and others not.

I am not an ethicist. Is this proposal already out there in the literature? (Ted Sider has an article "Hell and Vagueness" that discusses cases of borderline ethical goodness, but does not address the objectivity of morality.)

Edison and philosophical progress

2011-09-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across the following quotation from Thomas Edison, and thought it might offer a way to give a positive answer to the question (which is the subject of an upcoming conference) "Does philosophy make progress?"

If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed.

I think there are several areas in philosophy where people show fairly conclusively (modulo choice of logic) that a certain set of prima facie plausible views are inconsistent and/or have counterexamples. So we have eliminated certain possibilities (least as well as any intellectual endeavor can eliminate any possibilities), and that elimination constitutes progress.

Carnap on YouTube

2011-08-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

For all you Rudolf Carnap fans out there: about 20 minutes of Carnap interview footage (in German) has been posted on YouTube. Here's the first and the second parts.

On the relation between philosophy of science and political action

2011-08-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

Did any other philosophers of science out there notice this on last night's Colbert Report?

Looking for places to send your manuscript?

2011-08-02T07:55:00.000-07:00

I'm sure many readers are working on new papers over the summer. If you'd like to present your work in upstate New York in early November, submit your manuscript to the annual Creighton Club meeting.

If your work-in-progress deals with the history of analytic philosophy, please consider sending it to the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy. It's open access, so your work will be disseminated widely.

Stephen Colbert, philosopher of science

2011-07-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

The pessimistic induction makes an appearance on a recent episode of the Colbert Report. (The relevant bit starts at 4:55 in the video clip.)

logic bleg

2011-06-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

I have a question for the logically savvy:

Suppose A is a logical truth ( |= A ).

In which logics (if any) does the following fail?

(A&B) → C
entails
B → C

Thanks!

When did 'analytic philosophy' become an actor's category?

2011-05-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

The title question is better phrased as: when did 'analytic philosophy,' with something very close to its current meaning, become an actor's category?

I started thinking about this after reading Ryle's 1929 review of Heidegger's Being and Time in Mind; interestingly, it did not really contain any of the things so-called 'analytic' philosophers are 'supposed to' say about so-called 'continental philosophers.' Ryle does not treat Heidegger as somehow alien, or as engaged in a fundamentally different pursuit.

Anyway, here's a google books ngram, from 1900 to 2000, with 'analytic philosophy' in blue and 'continental philosophy' in red.

Here's a bigger version of the graph. You'll see that there's no real significant appearance of 'analytic philosophy' until the early 1940s, and that 'contintental philosophy' doesn't appear with much frequency until much later.

With a little bit of googling, I found John Wisdom's 1934 Problems of Mind and Matter referring to analytic philosophy as a definite type of philosophy. However, 'analytic philosophy' in that book appears to be more narrowly confined to something like G.E. Moore's analysis. For example, Wisdom says in the introduction: "Speculating and analyzing are operations which differ in kind: the object of the one is the truth; the object of the other is clarity. It is with the latter that we shall be concerned. ... [T]he analytic philosopher... is not one who learns new truths, but one who gains new insight into old truths" (1-2). Although this characterization does capture an important part of analytic philosophy, I think it leaves out a large amount of what we today think of as analytic philosophy. I have not read through the whole book yet, so I could be wrong about Wisdom restricting his meaning to Moorean analysis. I also found a 1935 Analysis article by A.C. Ewing, "Two Kinds of Analysis," in which the phrases "the analytic school" and "analytic philosophy" apparently apply to Moorean analysis and its adherents (Russell's analysis of descriptions is also mentioned as an example).

In a 2-part 1936 Journal of Philosophy essay, Ernest Nagel reports on a Bildungsreise he took in Europe. The title of the essay is "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe (I, II)." Here Nagel unites under the heading of 'analytic philosophy' Moorean analysis, early and middle Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and their intellectual allies, and the Polish logicians and nominalists. This is the first instance I could find via quick googling of 'analytic philosophy' meaning roughly what it does for us today. But my search has been very casual and cursory; I expect a more careful and thorough investigation will turn up earlier uses of 'analytic philosophy' in roughly our sense. If you find one, please post it in the comments.

A question about necessary truths and non-referring terms

2011-05-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

Someone must have already thought about this. If you know who, I'd appreciate a reference.

In our Kripkean era, most philosophers hold that sentences like 'Hesperus=Phosphorus' and 'Cicero=Tully' are necessarily true, if they are true. In other words, if these two sentences are true in our world, then they are true in every possible world (accessible to ours).

But I'm not so sure about this received view. In other possible worlds, Venus does not exist, and therefore in those other worlds the names 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' lack referents. But on most standard semantics for non-referring names, 'Hesperus=Phosphorus' will NOT be true. (For the free logic cognoscenti: that sentence will be false on a negative semantics, truth-valueless on neutral semantics, and truth-valueless on a positive supervaluational semantics. It could only be true on a positive, inner-domain/ outer-domain [roughly Meinongian] semantics.) In short: 'Hesperus=Phosphorus' will be untrue on 3 of the 4 extant semantics for non-referring names.

So, if we want to maintain that 'Hesperus=Phosphorus' is necessary if true, then it looks like we're stuck with only unpalatable options:
(i) accept the roughly Meinongian semantics that makes 'Hesperus=Phosporus' true in possible worlds where Venus does not exist.
(ii) Say that Venus exists in all possible worlds accessible from ours.

But I would rather accept that 'Hesperus=Phosphorus' is NOT a necessary truth, than accept either (i) or (ii).

logic humor

2011-05-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

If you like logic humor, then have a look at this, which I just saw on Lambda the Ultimate.

If you don't like logic humor, then... enjoy being a normal human being.

On Richard Joyce's debunking argument

2011-04-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Debunking explanations of morality are receiving a lot of attention recently. In my senior seminar, we are reading Richard Joyce's The Evolution of Morality (2006). He thinks that if our current best explanation of our capacity for making moral judgments via evolution by natural selection is correct, then our moral beliefs are unjustified. The basic idea is that this current best explanation never appeals to the truth of our moral judgments in explaining why and how the moral faculties evolved.

Here's a nice summary of his argument:

We have an empirically confirmed theory about where our moral judgments come from (we are supposing). This theory [i] doesn't state or imply that they are true, [ii] it doesn't have has a background assumption that they are true, and, importantly, [iii] their truth is not surreptitiously buried in the theory by virtue of any form of moral naturalism. This amounts to the discovery that our moral beliefs are the product of a process that is entirely independent of their truth, which forces the recognition that we have no grounds one way or the other for maintaining those beliefs. (p.211; emphasis mine)

I have italicized the inference that I think is mistaken.

Consider the following belief-forming mechanism: If I read something Stephen Hawking writes about astrophysics, then I believe it. Suppose the correct explanation (corresponding to 'empirically confirmed theory' above) of why I believe that there was a big bang is that Hawking wrote 'There was a big bang,' I read it, and that I have this belief-forming mechanism.

This explanation (/'theory') of why I have this belief
(i) 'doesn't state or imply that 'There was a big bang' is true';
(ii) 'doesn't have as a background assumption that my various Hawking-derived astrophysical beliefs are true'; and
(iii) the truth of 'There was a big bang' is not 'surreptitiously buried' anywhere in the explanation of why I have this belief.

And yet, this does not 'amount to the discovery that my Hawking-derived astronomical beliefs are entirely independent of their truth.' (Of course, you can insert any other genuine expert and area in for 'Hawking' and 'astrophysics,' if you think Hawking's writings in the field aren't truth-tracking.)

So Joyce needs more than (i-iii) to demonstrate that moral judgments are unreliable.

Moore's paradox (or something like it) in the mail

2011-04-07T18:13:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I received a postcard. On one side is a picture of Barack Obama, with the caption "I value your ongoing support," and a facsimile of his autograph. On the other side, it says "This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee."

Granted, this is not precisely Moore's paradox, but it seems close. (Hmm... what's the relationship between uttering P and uttering 'I authorize the communication of P'?)

Thoughts?

An open letter to the Board of Regents for the Nevada System of Higher Education

2011-03-09T17:54:00.000-08:00

I just sent the following letter to the Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education. If you'd like to do something too, Leiter has the emails you need; and there's also a conversation for those interested over at New APPS.

-----------------

March 9, 2011

Dear Regent Leavitt,

I am deeply worried, saddened, and upset by the news that UNLV will eliminate the Social Work, Philosophy, and Women’s Studies departments if Governor Sandoval’s Budget passes.

UNLV will be completely unable to attract good faculty in the future, when future job candidates learn that tenured faculty can lose their jobs. This puts UNLV at an enormous disadvantage when trying to hire good professors: the only people who will accept a job offer from UNLV will be those who cannot get a job anywhere else—and even those people will try to find another job elsewhere as soon as they can. Furthermore, many faculty currently at UNLV who are good enough to land a job offer elsewhere will be applying for jobs next year: ‘if it can happen to Social Work, Women’s Studies, or Philosophy, then it can happen to me.’ So saving a few dollars by destroying the reasonable expectation of tenure will harm the entire university’s ability to attract and retain good faculty members.

I was an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at UNLV from the Fall of 2006 through the Spring of 2009. I had other job offers in 2006, but I declined them, because I was very impressed with the quality of the philosophy faculty. They are smart, they are good teachers, and they put enormous amounts of time into their work and their students. (For example, many department members would often come to the undergraduate philosophy club meetings if invited by the students, taking time out of their lives to spend more time with students, for nothing in return other than the satisfaction of being a good teacher.) UNLV was getting their money’s worth, and then some. Furthermore, in the last 5 years, the department began to be impressive on a national scale: they hired newly minted Ph.D.’s graduating from the very best departments in the world, managed to hire a senior scholar away from a top 10 program, and the department members’ articles began appearing in the most elite journals. It makes me sick that this slow, steady climb is simply going to be destroyed.

So, for the sake of the entire University’s ability to attract and retain faculty, and because UNLV has successfully built up an impressive faculty, please do not eliminate the Philosophy, Social Work, and Women’s Studies departments.

Sincerely,

Greg Frost-Arnold

A question about coherence

2011-03-08T05:57:00.000-08:00

For the record, I am not sympathetic to the coherence theory of truth. But I would like to understand what it is, especially since some logical empiricists (Neurath in particular) entertained it. So here's the question.

The coherence theory of truth maintains:

p is true if and only if p coheres with S

where p is an arbitrary proposition, and S is a special set of propositions. Many people criticize the coherence theory on the grounds that there is no principled way to pick out this special set, but let's bracket that (very important) issue for the moment.

So the obvious question to ask about the above statement of the coherence theory is: What is coherence? There are a number of answers out there, but everyone agrees that logical consistency is a necessary condition for coherence (but insufficient*). In other words:

If p coheres with S, then the set of propositions {p∪S} is consistent.

And now it looks like we're making some progress in understanding what the coherence theory is committed to, because logical consistency is a notion that we have a clear and independently-motivated handle on.

But wait -- our 'clear and independently-motivated' notion of logical consistency depends, of course, on the notion of truth: a set of sentences is consistent iff it's possible that they all be true. But the coherentist's notion of truth is exactly what we were originally trying to explicate here. So it seems like we've got a circular definition.

(Note: one can characterize consistency in purely syntactic terms; for example, in logics where Ex Falso Quodlibet holds: A set of sentences is consistent iff there is a sentence that cannot be derived from that set. Perhaps that is what the coherentist might do?)

-------
* Given certain reasonable instances of S, there will be two propositions q and not-q that are each individually consistent with S. But both can't be true.

lame pun alert (illustrated)

2011-02-17T19:43:00.000-08:00

Any argument that commits the fallacy of equivocation is an ad homonym argument.

Existential questions in Google auto-complete

2011-02-15T08:51:00.001-08:00

For some reason, I really like the fact that people are three times more interested in their mail than the existence of a higher being.

trouble for causal-historical theories of reference determination?

2011-01-29T22:27:00.000-08:00

From the Jan 31, 2011 New Yorker:

"Lou Gehrig may not actually have had the disease that bears his name" (p.44).

So what happened at the baptism of the phrase 'Lou Gehrig's disease'?

hooray for philosophy

2011-01-04T21:09:00.000-08:00

A sign that the apocalypse might not be imminent.

(HT: Emily Nacol)

Creighton Club meeting

2010-11-12T17:00:00.001-08:00

This is extremely last-minute, but for anyone in the upstate New York area, you should come down to this year's meeting of the Creighton Club. The program is below.

156th Meeting of the Creighton Club
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Trinity 305 (On the official Campus Map: The Salisbury Center at Trinity Hall)
Geneva, NY

Keynote Speaker: Fred Feldman

8:30 am Coffee

9:00 am “Giving Up Hume’s Guillotine”,
Aaron Wolf (Syracuse University, Graduate Student)

Commentator: Andrew Alwood (Cornell University)

10:15 am Coffee break

10:30 am “Success and Truth in the Realism/Anti-realism Debate”,
K. Brad Wray (SUNY/ Oswego)

Commentator: Gregory Frost-Arnold (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)

11:45 am Business Meeting

12:00-1:15 Lunch

1:30 pm “Eternal and Historical Kinds”,
Mark Spencer (SUNY/Buffalo, Graduate Student)

Commentator: Adam Taylor (SUNY/Buffalo)

2:45pm Coffee break

3:00 pm “Hume’s Moral Sentiments as Motives”,
Rachel Cohon (SUNY/Albany)

Commentator: Nathan Powers (SUNY/Albany)

4:15 Coffee Break

4:30 Keynote Address:
"What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do"
Fred Feldman (UMass/Amherst)

6:15 Reception (Cash Bar)

7:00 Dinner

lolspeak infiltrates logic

2010-10-27T07:44:00.000-07:00

I found the following (unintentional?) gem in last night's batch of logic homeworks:

"This argument has a valid."

But it doesn't even approach the greatness of this.

contraposition and 'most'

2010-09-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

Is this odd, or am I just under-caffeinated at the moment?

The principle of contraposition (= the equivalence of 'If P then Q' and 'If not-Q then not-P') doesn't hold when the quantifier is 'most'. That is, 'Most As are Bs' is not equivalent to 'Most non-Bs are non-As'.

I take 'Most As are Bs' to mean: the number of things that are both A and B is greater than the number of things that are A but not B.

A minute or two of drawing (unless I've messed up somewhere) will get you a picture where
(1) the number of ABs > the number of A non-Bs
is true, but
(2) the number of non-A non-Bs > the number of A non-Bs
is false.

Again, maybe this point is as obvious as 2+3=5. But I am covering simple inductive arguments in my critical thinking class at the moment, trying to figure out which ones are good, and I had never thought about this case before, but it means the inductive analogue of quantified modus tollens (Most As are Bs, x is not B, Thus x is not A) is no good. And that surprised me, since the analogue of modus ponens is perfectly fine.

Galen Strawson on moral responsibility

2010-09-04T04:52:00.000-07:00

As many readers will know, Galen Strawson recently published a brief piece on his views about free will and moral responsibility in the New York Times. Now I am very late to the discussion on this, and even more out of my professional depth, but we are reading this piece for my freshman seminar, along with Strawson's interview in Tamler Sommers' A Very Bad Wizard, and I wanted to post a thought about the basic argument. I'm sure someone must have said this before; any references to the relevant literature would be greatly appreciated.

Here's Strawson's argument (quoting from the NYT piece):

(1) You do what you do ... because of the way you then are.

(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are ... .

(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are ... .

(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

I take it that (2) is supposed to follow from (1) (since there's a 'So' at the beginning of (2)). Now, what implicit premise does Strawson need to make that inference valid? Something like the following:

(*) If X because of Y, then if you are ultimately [morally] responsible for X, then you are ultimately [morally] responsible for Y.

In other words, you can only be morally responsible for the effect if you are also morally responsible for the cause (=you can't be morally responsible for an effect unless you are also morally responsible for the cause).

I think this principle (*) may have counter-examples; I'm curious to hear about other people's reactions. Here's one such example: A person is driving along a very infrequently traveled mountain road, when some giant falling rocks hit him and his car. His car careens off the road, and he is badly injured by the rocks and subsequent crash. If he does not get to a hospital soon (and there's one 30 minutes away by car), he will die.

Now suppose someone drives by a few minutes later, and she sees that the first person is badly injured and will probably die soon if he doesn't make it to the hospital (imagine the second driver is a physician). She decides that picking him up, putting him in the car, and taking him to the hospital would be an annoyance, and she leaves him there (let's assume that taking him to the hospital wouldn't really be any significant cost/ burden for her).

Now, I think this may be a counterexample to Strawson's argument. Why? Let X be the first driver's death, and Y be the falling rocks hitting the car. It seems reasonable to say that (i) the first driver died because of the avalanche of falling rocks, but (ii) the second driver is at least partially morally responsible for the guy's death, even though (iii) she is certainly not morally responsible for the rocks hitting his car (she wasn't standing at the top of the mountain, pushing down rocks to harm passersby). If (i)-(iii) are correct, then we've got a counter-example to (*).

Someone who wanted to defend Strawson has at least one reasonable response to this: the second driver's leaving the first one to die is (at least part of) the cause of the guy's death; at the very least, we have the right sort of counterfactual dependence that is a necessary condition for causation (If she had not driven right past, then he would not have died). But now we are in the difficult and murky issue of causation by omission -- a contentious and vexed topic, since if we allow omissions to be causes in general, then a LOT of things become causes that we do not ordinarily think of as causes. (Sarah McGrath's "Causation by Omission" is an excellent treatment of this issue.)

So I guess my final conclusion is that, in order to accept (*), you have to accept a contentious metaphysical thesis about omissions being causes as well. This is of course not a refutation, but it certainly provides a respectable 'way out' of Strawson's basic argument.

The power of Carnap

2010-09-03T11:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, this is awesome.

I wish

2010-06-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

My google alert for 'Carnap' usually just turns up stories about carjacking gangs in the Philippines. But today I got the following little gem, from essaymill.com. (The title of my post refers to the first sentence below -- and please check out the last sentence of the first paragraph.)

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name that philosopher

2010-06-01T18:44:00.001-07:00

"Every method of inquiry is justified; disputes can only arise over the question of the purpose and fruitfulness of a given method."

* * * * * *

If you guessed the epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend, you're wrong. It's Carnap, in 1932's "Psychology in Physical Language" (p. 192 in the Ayer collection). (On this blog, 'Carnap' is always a pretty good guess.) It sounds to me like his Principle of Tolerance, with methods of inquiry substituted for logical systems.

Is 'is' ambiguous?

2010-04-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

One of the essential components of modern logic is the view, standardly attributed to Frege and Russell, that 'is' is ambiguous: 'is' has the senses of
(i) identity (Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens; in other words, Mark Twain = Samuel Clemens),
(ii) predication (Mark Twain is an author), and
(iii) existence (Mark Twain is; in other words, Mark Twain exists), and
(iv) class inclusion (Authors are artists).

After grading a batch of logic problem sets, I'm wondering whether (i) and (ii) really are ambiguous; more specifically, how the senses of identity and predication fare with respect to the standard ambiguity tests. As I've mentioned several times before on this blog, one of the most widely-accepted ambiguity tests is the conjunction-reduction (or 'no crossed readings') test. The basic idea can be illustrated by an example: 'Alice has a bat' can mean she has a flying pet or a new baseball bat; 'Bob has a bat' has the same two possible readings, with Bob instead of Alice. However, 'Alice and Bob have bats' cannot mean that one has a baseball bat, and the other has a pet flying mammal.

Now let's think about 'is'.
'Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens' has a true reading, and
'Mark Twain is a famous author' has a true reading.
But what about 'Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens and a famous author'?
This sounds zeugmatic to me, confirming the Frege-Russell view of 'is' as ambiguous. However, many of my logic students wrote something analogous to this on their most recent problem set, when asked to translate a particular sentence of first-order logic into English. Student responses to logic problem sets are probably some of the worst data imaginable for this kind of question, but it did make me wonder whether my observations about 'is' in English are very theory-laden, ruined by years of logic and logically-inspired philosophy. What do other folks think about 'Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens and a famous author'?

Do any languages mark the use/mention distinction in speech?

2010-03-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

In written English, we mark the distinction between using an expression and mentioning it using quotation marks: 'Chicago' has 7 letters, but Chicago does not. In other words, we can use quotation marks to disambiguate between use and mention.

For various reasons, I am interested in ambiguity tests: ways to diagnose whether a particular expression really is ambiguous or not. One common, widely-accepted (I think) test appeals to different languages: if the e.g. English expression you're interested in is in fact ambiguous, then it should be translated by two unrelated words in at least some other languages. For example, 'bank' is ambiguous in English, and it is translated by 'Bank' and 'Ufer' in German.

After reading a batch of student papers about the definition of 'health,' I was struck by their complete lack of inclination to distinguish use and mention. So then I thought about the ambiguity test -- does any spoken language disambiguate use and mention morphologically (without saying 'the word...' or 'the sentence...')? I posted the question at Ask A Linguist, and the three people who responded said they did not know of any. Does anybody out there know of one? (And it would be strange if it were just one or two languages...)

If there aren't (m)any such languages, then it looks like this could be a counterexample to that particular ambiguity test.

Carnap on the internets

2010-03-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

There is no internet acronym that adequately captures my feelings about this post, which I found via my google alert for Carnap:

"There has never been a scientific scam in the history of mankind as big as the science swindle of "climate change." Nothing comes close. Modern scientific hustles like mesmerism, phrenology, eugenics, the Piltdown man, and even Lysenkoism, pale in comparison to the flimflam of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW).

There was, however, one astonishing episode in the early part of the 20th century in mathematics and logic which conceptually roughly parallels the current crisis of science behind AGW. It was the destruction of the dream of the Vienna Circle of the completion of logic. Kurt Gödel, the German mathematician and philosopher, put the philosophical fantasy of "the elimination of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language" to rest[i].

Gödel's two "Incompleteness Theorems" exposed fundamental flaws in the foundations of a school of philosophy known as Logical Positivism. In a somewhat similar vein, the release of the e-mails for the University of East Anglia precipitated the collapse of the house of cards of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the "science" behind AGW. ..."

If that's not enough enlightenment for you, the original post continues for several more paragraphs.

Name that quote, plus a request for history of analytic literature

2010-03-12T12:15:00.000-08:00

Name the author and work for the following two quotes:

(1) "that is a priori which we can maintain in the face of all experience, come what will."

(2) "the whole body of our conceptual interpretations form a sort of hierarchy or pyramid with the most comprehensive, such as those of logic, at the top, and the least general, such as 'swans' etc. at the bottom; that with the complex system of interrelated concepts, we approach particular experiences and attempt to fit them, somewhere and somehow... Persistent failure leads to readjustment... The higher up a concept stands in our pyramid, the more reluctant we are to disturb it, because the more radical and far-reaching the results will be if we abandon it..."

-----

Answer: C.I. Lewis, Mind and the World-Order (1929): p. 231 and pp.305-6.

Now for the request. Quote (1) sounds very similar to Quine's 'an analytic sentence is one held true come what may' (especially because for Lewis the analytic and the a priori are coextensive). Quote (2) echoes Quine's description of the web of belief (with the major difference that the nodes of Quine's web are claims, not concepts). Does anyone know of a paper or book chapter that describes in detail the relationship between Quine and C.I. Lewis -- specifically Lewis's influence on Quine? Thanks in advance!

Do animals pretend?

2010-02-28T20:32:00.000-08:00

This is my first foray into Sunday cat blogging. Here goes.

Many philosophers have spent a fair amount of time thinking about pretense -- what exactly it is, and how to apply a theory of pretense to various areas of philosophical interest (e.g. perhaps we are playing a game of pretend when we talk about the natural numbers).

I was just watching my cat play with a fuzzy cat toy. The cat, in some sense, realizes that the fuzzy ball is not a mouse (or whatever). However, when it is playing with the toy, it will temporarily exhibit many of the behaviors that it would exhibit toward a real mouse -- e.g., it hides behind furniture so that the toy won't 'see' it.

All the philosophical discussions of pretense with which I am familiar are restricted to human pretense. But given the kinds of things I see with my cat, and given that pretense occurs fairly early in childhood development (sophisticated multi-person pretend games start around 3 1/2), it seems at least possible that animals engage in pretense too.

And if my cat isn't engaged in a pretense, then what exactly is it doing?

New philosophy of physics blog

2010-02-21T12:29:00.000-08:00

I somehow missed this: there's a new philosophy of physics blog by my erstwhile office-mate Chris Wüthrich, who's now at UCSD. It's cleverly titled "Taking up Spacetime," and it looks promising -- he has a good recent post up about the notion of structure.

logic teaching question

2010-02-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

I'm teaching Symbolic Logic this term, and we just introduced the notion that two syntactically distinct sentences can mean exactly the same thing (e.g. DeMorgan's Laws). In class yesterday, I asked the students to come up with a criterion for when two sentences are identical in meaning. We eventually reached the "official" answer: S_1 and S_2 are synonymous just in case they have the same truth-value in all models (ok, we're not using the notion of models; for us, it's "... in all possible arrangements of the board" in Tarski's World -- we're using Barwise and Etchemendy's Language, Proof, and Logic.)

Along the way to the official answer, though, a student gave the following characterization:

Sentences S_1 and S_2 are synonymous just in case the set of all sentences that follow from* S_1 is identical to the set of all sentences that follow from S_2.

After class, I jotted down a proof-sketch showing that the student's characterization is equivalent to the "official" one. But I'm not 100% confident in it, so I'm just curious whether anyone can see a counter-example (i.e. are there any 2 sentences that meet one characterization but not the other?).
----
* EDIT: As Bryan made me realize in the comments, I should specify that 'follows from' here is semantic, not syntactic/ proof-theoretic; i.e. 'Conclusion C follows from premise P' means that every model (or world, or construction, or whatever it is that makes sentences true in your formal semantics) in which P is true is also a model in which C is true.

What type of contradiction, if any, is this?

2009-12-19T07:08:00.001-08:00

Discuss.

Appiah, X-Phi, and a Kripkean intuition

2009-12-13T17:17:00.000-08:00

I have found Kwame Anthony Appiah's work on experimental philosophy insightful and sensible, and I have learned a great deal from it. I find most of his claims very plausible, but one empirical assertion stood out as questionable: there is a diversity of intuitions among Anglophone philosophers about the Schmidt-Gödel thought-experiment.

"When Eduoard Machery and colleagues posed a famous thought experiment of Kripke’s to students, they found that those from Hong Kong had quite a different pattern of response than those from New Jersey. But my guess is that in most cases, the results would shore up the intuition it was meant to pump; and that, where it did not, philosophers, too, have already been left divided." (2007 APA Presidential Address, section IX)

"Here’s the thing about the theory of reference: Versions of both views — Kripke’s and the one he was challenging — have plentiful adherents among philosophers. Both intuitions have their advocates."("The New New Philosophy," NYT Magazine, Dec 9 2007)

(Emphases mine, in both quotations.) It's certainly true that there is nothing close to unanimity among Anglophone philosophers on the correct theory of reference. However, I do have the impression that, sociologically speaking, philosophers do overwhelmingly have the intuition that "Gödel" does not refer to Schmidt in Kripke's thought experiment. People with descriptivist proclivities accept the intuition, but then try to accommodate (or explain away?) that intuition within a broadly descriptivist framework. Or am I wrong about this sociological pattern?

survey says: there are analytic truths

2009-12-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

I imagine many readers are already aware, but the results of the Philosophical Survey are now available here.

The biggest surprise for me was on the question 'Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?': 65% said yes or lean toward yes, and only 27% said no or lean towards no.

This is not an unqualified sociological victory for Carnapophiles, because Chalmers notes in the discussion that many of the 'yes' respondents included a comment along the lines of '... but the distinction does no substantive philosophical work' -- which is precisely Quine's later position (seen perhaps most clearly in his Schilpp Library of Living Philosophers volume).

two advertisements

2009-12-02T17:53:00.000-08:00

This is not a real post; I just wanted to mention a couple of things I'm liking at the moment.

The new, completely open access journal Philosophy and Theory in Biology is available -- and accepting submissions. I've perused the brief first issue, and it's got high-quality contributors and content.

I'm currently reading Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science by Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen, a psychologist who works on reasoning and a logician. The book is pretty idiosyncratic in places, but these idiosyncrasies are usually thought-provoking, and I am learning quite a bit. So I can recommend it to folks who enjoy thinking and learning.

When does the use-mention distinction really matter?

2009-11-13T08:52:00.000-08:00

When ordering a cake.

Differing interpretations of conditionals

2009-10-30T17:08:00.000-07:00

This is not really a philosophy post; instead, I pretend to be a (bad) linguist.

The textbook I'm using for my critical thinking class this term (Feldman's Reason and Argument) claims that the ordinary English sentence 'If Joe is a professional basketball player, then he is tall' is true. This surprised me somewhat, since there are professional basketball players who are not tall (though of course there are relatively few).

I wanted to know if I was strange in this regard, so I took a quick survey of my students. I asked them whether they thought the sentence 'If today is a February day, then the high temperature today is under 40 F in Geneva, NY.' (Highs in Geneva in February are around 30 or so.) 12 of 24 thought this was true. We then had a little discussion about how one group was requiring conditionals to be exceptionless, whereas the other group was allowing a few exceptions.

Thinking about this later, I realized that the majority of people who said it was true were female, and the majority who thought it false were male. I didn't tally votes by sex of respondent, so I don't know how pronounced the difference was, and my sample size is extremely small, so the difference was almost certainly not statistically significant. But it does seem like it might be something worth investigating.

We could perhaps generalize this by asking: when there are multiple ways for a hearer to interpret a speaker's utterance, only some of which are true, are female hearers more likely to attribute the true interpretation than male hearers? In Gricean terms, are female hearers more likely to assume the speaker is following the maxim of quality (Contribute only what you know to be true; Do not say false things; Do not say things for which you lack evidence) than male hearers?

Perhaps this has already been dealt with in the pragmatics literature. But a quick google search did not reveal an answer to this specific question (though I did find interesting research on gender differences with respect to other Gricean maxims).

tautologous or contradictory pictures?

2009-10-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

Following up on the "Russell and Cubism" post, I have another quick question about 20th C philosophy and visual art.

One way my students and I have been thinking about one of the claims of the Tractatus is as follows: there are no pictures (in the ordinary sense of 'drawings' or 'paintings') of tautologies (logical truths) or contradictions (logical falsehoods).

I was wondering, given the conceptual inventiveness of 20th C artists, whether any of them had ever tried to create a picture of a tautology or contradiction. It doesn't seem possible to me (or to Wittgenstein), but my imagination is limited...

come on down

2009-10-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

Update/ Correction: the Creighton club sessions will be held in Demarest room 014.

This post is for the locals: the folks living in upstate New York. The 2009 meeting of the the Creighton Club (the New York Philosophical Association) will be held in Geneva NY, at Hobart and William Smith colleges, this Saturday, Oct. 24th. The program is below; we are very lucky to have Ruth Millikan as our keynote speaker. So if you are within driving distance, please join us this Saturday.

All sessions will be in the Sanford room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library.

8:30 AM coffee, etc.

9:00 AM Graduate Student Award Presentation:
Mihnea Capraru (Syracuse University): “Russellian Semantics of Belief Reports”
Commentator: Andrew Wake (University of Rochester)

10:15 AM coffee break

10:30 AM Carlo Filice (SUNY at Geneseo): “Libertarian Autonomy and Intrinsic Motives”
Commentator: Gordon Barnes (SUNY at Brockport)

11:45 AM Business Meeting

12:00 – 1:30 LUNCH

1:30 PM David Liebesman (Boston University): “Simple Generics”
Commentator: Kris McDaniel (Syracuse University)

2:45 PM coffee break

3:00 PM Julie Ponesse (SUNY at Brockport): “Enthusiasmos and Unnatural Natures in the Eudemian Ethics VII, 2”
Commentator: Tad Brennan (Cornell University)

4:15 PM coffee break

4:30 PM Keynote Address: Ruth G. Millikan (University of Connecticut):
"Finally implementing the eviction notices; chucking meaning out of the head"

6:30 PM reception (cash bar)

7:00 PM DINNER

Russell and Cubism

2009-09-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

In my upper-level History of 20th C Philosophy course, we're currently reading Our Knowledge of the External World. Readers of OKEW will recall Russell's logical construction of "thing" (at an instant) in Lecture III: the set of aspects that would normally be said to be aspects of that thing. Aspects are sense-data. (These aspects include not only those actually perceived, but also those sense-data that would be perceived if a perceiver were there.) So, in other words, a thing (at an instant) is defined as the set of all the ways the thing would look (and smell, and feel, etc.) at that instant.

What struck me was how similar this is to the essential aim of cubist painting, which aims to capture multiple perspectives or aspects of an object simultaneously, on a single canvas. How far can this comparison between Cubist objects and Russellian ones be pushed? There's at least one difference: Cubist paintings (so far as I know) do not attempt to capture every perspective, just multiple perspectives -- whereas Russellian things exhaust all perspectives.

Also, someone else must have thought of this comparison before. Any references?

Moving, plus evidence and truth-value

2009-09-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

Very long time, no blog. The main reason is a cross-country move and a new job. For those who don't already know, I'm now at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, in upstate New York. But I also spent a very nice 2+ weeks in Australia, seeing old grad school friends as well as meeting new family members.

A discussion with a student today brought up an interesting question (which probably has been extensively explored in a literature of which I'm completely ignorant). We were talking about what sorts of linguistic expressions were truth-valued, and which were not. She suggested that there might be some sort of connection between being the kind of thing that has a truth-value, and being the kind of thing that can have evidence count for or against it. But what's the connection between these two conditions? Necessary? Sufficient? Neither? Both? -- and is there already a thorough treatment of this question in the literature?

Note: As I understand it, this is not a variant of verificationism, since one can imagine evidence that is unavailable to us weak, frail humans, with our very limited epistemic powers.

Note 2: If you take the position that the sentence 'Planet Vulcan is between Mercury and the Sun' is truth-valueless, instead of false, then that sentence is an example where we have evidence against a claim, but it nonetheless lacks a truth-value. But maybe the other direction of the connection would still hold?

new draft on analytic truth

2009-06-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

I've just finished a draft of a short paper (<3000 words) that asks: are there any sentences whose meaning suffices for their truth? Many post-Quineans say no; the paper argues that, for sentences expressing logical truths, the answer is yes.

The paper can be downloaded here. I would really appreciate all comments great and small. Thanks!

Against "Carnap and Logical Truth" again

2009-06-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

In "Carnap and Logical Truth," Quine makes the following argument (expanded by Harman in his 1967 article "Quine on Meaning and Existence: I" in Review of Metaphysics):

"Consider... the logical truth 'Everything is self-identical'... We can say that it depends for its truth on traits of the language (specifically on the usage of '='), and not on the traits of its subject matter; but we can also say, alternatively, that it depends on an obvious trait, viz. self-identity, of its subject matter, viz. everything. The tendency of our present reflections is that there is no difference."
(Carnap Library of Living Philosophers volume, p.390)

I think, contra Quine, that there might be a clear difference. To say that one thing (e.g. the truth-value of a sentence) depends on another (e.g., the traits of a language, or the traits of its subject matter) usually means that changing the second can change the first; the first is sensitive to changes in the second. E.g. thermometer readings depend on ambient temperature: as the ambient temperature changes, the readings change. This is not to say that 'X depends on Y' means that every change in Y will have a corresponding change in X (that would be perfect correlation), but it does require that there must be some change in Y that results in a change in X. If X stays the same no matter what values Y takes, then X does not depend on Y.

Now think about Quine's (English) sentence 'Everything is self-identical.' If we were to vary the traits of the language in which this is written, e.g. by letting 'self-identical' mean not self-identical but red, then the sentence would be false. This shows that (as Quine happily admits elsewhere) the truth-value of a sentence does depend on the traits of the language in which it is expressed.

But now think about varying the traits of the subject-matter of this sentence, 'viz., everything,' or the world, or however you want to think about it. Assuming we hold the meanings of the words fixed, there is no possible way the world can be that would change the truth-value of this sentence. That is, there is NO change in the way the world is that would change the truth-value of this sentence. (In logic-ese, the sentence is true in all models.) Thus, if the above characterization of dependence is right, then the truth-value of 'Everything is self-identical' does not depend on the traits of its subject matter, viz. everything.

Analytic truth and the Daily Show

2009-06-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

Many philosophers have suggested that the sentence 'I am here' is an analytic truth. The view goes back to Kaplan, and it has recently been vigorously defended by Gillian Russell in her recent book Truth in Virtue of Meaning (which I'm currently reading).

On The Daily Show with Jon Stewart recently (May 11th), there was an exchange that made me wonder whether 'I am here' really is analytically true. On the Daily Show, the correspondents are often presented as 'on location' in Washington DC or Kabul etc., but are actually in the studio standing in front of a backdrop of DC or Kabul. On this show, there was a particularly unconvincing backdrop of DC behind correspondent John Oliver. There was then the following exchange (cleaned up transcript -- the full video is available online; start at about 5:00):

Stewart: "For more on this story, we go to John Oliver, who joins us live from Washington. [Audience laughs] Washington."
Oliver: "That's right, I'm here. [Audience laughs] I'm here."

Oliver seems to be saying that he is in DC. But he's clearly not; he's in New York. So we appear to have an utterance of 'I am here' that is false (which is why the audience laughs), and thus it seems that 'I am here' cannot be analytic.

What to do? Here's one suggestion for how to save at least the truth (if not necessarily the analyticity) of 'I am here': say that 'I am here' is true both literally and in the pretense/fiction, but that what 'I' and 'here' refer to in the fiction differs from what they refer to literally. Literally, 'I' refers to John Oliver, and 'here' to the Daily Show studios in New York. In the pretense, 'I' refers to the journalist character (who happens to be named 'John Oliver'), and 'here' refers to DC. Then, 'I am here' is both true in the pretense and true literally. (The statement 'That's right' is true in the pretense but false literally.)

However, this maneuver does not get us all the way to 'I am here' being analytically true in the pretense -- more details about the meanings of indexicals in fiction would have to be spelled out to get there, and this post is long enough already. (Plus, I haven't thought the matter through.)

Does anyone have other thoughts about this instance of 'I am here'?

puzzles from the later Quine on meaning and synonymy

2009-05-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

In the Quine volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, Quine says the following in his "Reply to Alston":

"It would be reasonable to refer to those conditions [="the conditions under which a sentence may be uttered"] collectively as the meaning of the sentence."

But "the synonymy relation gains no support from this notion of meaning. The reason is that, on this notion of meaning, no two sentences can have the same meaning; for no two sentences are wholly alike in their conditions of utterance." (1986, p.73)

That last claim strikes me as implausible; is that just me and my un-Quinean prejudices? Is there a decent argument for Quine's claim that two sentences never have the same conditions of utterance?

That's my main question. But I should mention that Quine gives his own very terse argument: "A sentence can be uttered only to the exclusion of all other sentences, and// hence only under conditions not totally shared, if we grant determinism" (73-74). But that strikes me as a (for lack of a better word) weird argument, for at least two reasons. 1. The fact that sentence A is uttered instead of sentence B at a given time and place does not mean that B could not have been uttered (note that the definition of 'meaning' is the conditions under which a sentence MAY be uttered, not IS (ACTUALLY) uttered. 2. I would've thought that any reasonable notion of 'conditions of utterance' would not require the conditions to be specified up to the level of detail of full physical theory; that is, there could be physically different instantiations of the same 'conditions of utterance'. And it strikes me as very strange to require determinism at that linguistic level (even if we want to be hardcore determinists about physics): sometimes I just keep my mouth shut, even if there's some utterance that would have been fully appropriate for those conditions.

Validity, Venn diagrams, and ex falso quodlibet

2009-05-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

(The first 2 paragraphs here are set-up; those in the know can start at the third paragraph.) I teach a class called "Critical Thinking and Reasoning" most semesters. It covers argument recognition, reconstruction, and evaluation. At the very end of the semester, we talk about how one can show a particular argument form is valid. For propositional/ sentential logic, we use truth tables: if there is no row of the truth table where all the premises are true and the conclusion false, then the argument form is valid. For categorical logic, we use Venn diagrams. If you are not familiar with how this works, it's very straightforward and simple; here is a quick introduction for the unacquainted. The basic idea is that you diagram all the premises on a single diagram, and then check whether you have 'already' diagrammed the conclusion.

One interesting thing about presenting both of these to an intro class is their difference over ex falso quodlibet: in classical propositional logic, any argument with inconsistent premises is valid, whereas in categorical logic there are invalid arguments with inconsistent premises. This is reflected in the semantics for the two logics, truth-table or Venn diagram, respectively. That is, if you diagram 'All A are B' and 'Some A are not B', you have not already diagrammed 'All C are D' (or whatever -- I mean, or quodlibet). Whereas, in the truth table case, if one of your premises is p and another is 'not-p', it is of course impossible for there to be a row where both all the premises are true and the conclusion is false -- since there is no row in which all the premises are true.

Everything so far is completely uncontroversial. Now comes the point I've been wondering about for the last couple of days. What if we set up a validity test for a propositional language that looked more like the Venn-diagram test for categorical logic? That is, instead of thinking of validity in the usual way as absence of counterexamples (in the propositional case, no row of the truth table has all true premises and a false conclusion), we demand that the diagram of all the premises be a diagram of the conclusion. In categorical logic, each of the points in the Venn diagram represents an individual object, and the circles represent sets of objects; in a propositional Venn diagram, we let each point be a case/circumstance/state of affairs/whatever, and let the circles be sets of cases etc. The resulting propositional logic would NOT be classical, since ex falso quodlibet would not hold.

Why care about setting up such a Venn-diagram validity test for propositional logic? Here's why: when relevance logicians (and anyone else who doesn't like EFQ) accept the 'no counter-example' account of validity, they are forced to say some pretty counterintuitive things, first and foremost that there is a case (or whatever) in which both p and 'not-p' are true (and some other q false). If they don't say this, then they can't say EFQ is invalid. But if this Venn-diagram validity test for a propositional language is viable, we can reject EFQ without accepting true contradictions. All that's required is tweaking the no-counterexample notion of consequence -- a tweak that is already used in critical thinking textbooks.

Finally, this idea seems so obvious that somebody must have already explored it. Any pointers to the relevant literature?

Logical pluralism and special relativity

2009-04-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

I spent the end of last week at UCSD. I had a great time, and I got some extremely useful feedback on a couple of things I've been working on. I'm especially grateful to my host, Chris Wüthrich.

At dinner, we had a helpful discussion about the logical pluralism project I've been working on. The basic hope is to figure out if Beall and Restall are right in saying that the notion of consequence really is "unsettled" or indeterminate. I've had a couple of past posts discussing whether 'entails' is ambiguous (as Beall and Restall sometimes suggest). The upshot of those posts was that, if 'entails' is indeterminate, its indeterminacy arises from having a (hidden) parameter. This hidden parameter is what Beall and Restall call a 'case', as in: 'An argument is valid = In every CASE where all the premises are true, the conclusion is too.' Different logics fall out of different specifications of cases.

The next question to ask is: Is there any evidence that 'entails' really does have a hidden parameter? One way to answer this is to look at an argument that (most) people think is impeccable, which concludes that some concept does harbor a hidden parameter -- and then ask whether 'entails' is like that. The case that springs to my mind is Einstein's argument that simultaneity is relative in special relativity, i.e., whether 2 events are simultaneous is relative to a 3rd parameter, an inertial trajectory.

Let's spell this out. Let e1 and e2 be events. ‘e1 and e2 are simultaneous’ cannot be true simpliciter; rather, it can only be true relative to a frame of reference. This suggests a possible analogy with logical pluralism: ‘P1... Pn entails C’ is not (or at least rarely -- B&R make two little exceptions) true simpliciter, but rather relative to a specification of cases. So ‘entails’ is analogous to ‘simultaneous with’ (or any other predicate of temporal order), and ‘case’ is like ‘frame of reference.’

The key question is then: does the evidence that Einstein appealed to in order to show that there is not one correct notion of simultaneity have an analogue in the logical case?

So what is the physicists’ justification for claiming that there is no preferred frame of reference in special relativity? The fundamental reason is that the laws of nature can be couched in such a way that they are the same in all inertial frames. For one of the frames to be physically privileged, there would have to be some essential physical difference between it and the others. And because there is no privileged or distinguished frame, there is no basis for elevating one standard of simultaneity above the others—and it is in that sense that simultaneity is relative in special relativity.

Can we draw an analogy to the logical case? To be explicit, the relativistic argument is basically this:

P1. Different frames of reference yield different notions of simultaneity.
P2. The laws of nature are the same in every frame of reference.
Thus, there is no privileged frame of reference.
Thus, simultaneity is relative, i.e. there are multiple acceptable notions of simultaneity.

And, as said above, we are taking specifactions of cases as analogous to frames, and simultaneity as analogous to validity. This yields:

P1. Different specifications of cases yield different notions of validity.
P2. _______ is/are the same in every specification of cases.
Thus, there is no privileged specification of cases.
Thus, validity is relative, i.e. there are multiple acceptable notions of validity.

The question is: what should -— what could -- go in the blank in P2? What is the same in every specification of cases? I can see two suggestions B&R might make: 1. Identity and transitivity hold in every specification of cases. But B&R reject this as far too weak. 2. The desiderata for a logical consequence relation (formality, necessity, normativity) are the same in every acceptable (or something similar) specification of cases (‘acceptable’ will rule out possible worlds, right?). But are these desiderata really like ‘the laws of nature’ in the physics case?

Of course, the evidence for one type of pluralism (e.g. about simultaneity) need not have the same form as evidence for another type of pluralism (e.g. about consequence). That is, even if one cannot create a plausible argument for pluralism about validity analogous to the Einsteinian argument for pluralism about simultaneity, that obviously says nothing about whether another, entirely different sort of argument would do the job. Does anyone out there see what it could be? At UCSD, Jonathan Cohen pushed me on this point over dinner; in particular, he pointed out that Einstein's argument is an instance of an argument from symmetry, and that the broader genus of (good) arguments from symmetry might well encompass an argument-type that would do the trick for Beall and Restall's logical pluralism. Can anyone point me to an example of such?

Validity in logics with ambiguous terms

2009-03-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

First, I have to give a little background about free logic; the point of this post comes towards the end. In model theory for classical logic, every name (= individual constant) is interpreted by exactly one object (in the domain of quantification); colloquially: the name ‘Chicago’ picks out exactly one thing -- the spatiotemporal object Chicago. Free logic relaxes this assumption, by allowing individual constants to be associated with no objects (in the domain of quantification). The rationale here is that some names do not successfully pick out anything in the world (think about ‘Santa Claus’, ‘Pegasus’, or ‘Planet Vulcan’), and since we don’t always know which of our terms are genuinely referential and which ones fail to refer, perhaps we should not build it into our logic that every name in fact refers. (There is another motivation for free logic as well: that we should allow models whose domain of quantification has cardinality zero, since it’s not a matter of logic that at least one thing exists in the universe.)

When we allow names that can refer to nothing into our language, the usual deduction rules have to be modified. In particular, the following (classically valid) argument form is invalid (where a is an individual):

All x are F
Thus, a is F

If a is a non-denoting name, then the premise can be true and the conclusion false or truth-valueless (depending on your preferred semantics for sentences containing non-denoting names). So in short: allowing non-denoting names forces us to give up the usual ‘All’-elimination rule (a.k.a. ‘Universal Instantiation’) just above.

I have recently been thinking about languages in which we relax the classical univocality assumption for names in the ‘other direction’: that is, languages containing terms that refer to more than one thing. (I gave them the uninspired tag ‘Multiply-Referring languages.’) The point of the formal exercise is to model ambiguous or confused terms. I have already developed a family of model theories for such languages (published in JPL last year), and am currently thinking about proof systems.

Back to free logics for a moment. There are three species of semantics for free logics: negative, neutral, and positive. They are distinguished by how they treat atomic sentences containing non-referring names. Negative: all false; neutral: all truth-valueless; positive: at least one atomic sentence with a non-referring name is true. For example, consider ‘Pegasus=Pegasus’: negative semantics declares this false, neutral semantics declares it truth-valueless, and positive semantics declares it true. I take this tripartite characterization straight over into multiply-referring languages.

Now here, finally, is my point. In positive multiply-referring languages without identity, the above rule of Universal Instantiation is valid. And, as far as I can see, all the other classical rules are valid (=truth-preserving) as well. Which means, surprisingly (to me), that the classical introduction and elimination rules for FOL without identity all are also valid rules for positive multiply-referring langauges. More simply, allowing ambiguous names into an otherwise classical language without identity makes no difference to validity. (At least in the sense of truth-preservation; it does mess up ‘backwards-falsehood-preservation,’ for reasons I won't detail here.)

But things change once an identity predicate is introduced into the language. Universal instantiation becomes invalid: ‘Everything is not identical to a’ is true if a is multiply-referring, but ‘a is not identical to a’ is not true. This raises a question for me about the best way to construct the proof system here: put roughly, is the problem with universal instantiation, or with identity? Both of them have to be present to generate the invalid argument form, so which is the one that should be altered? I’ve never tried to make my own proof theory before, so I don’t know how one should proceed under such circumstances. Any thoughts?

Going back to Pittsburgh

2009-03-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

I know posting here has been pitiful lately. Unfortunately, this isn't even going to be a real post: I just wanted to let people know that I am going to be in Pittsburgh this weekend for a conference on underdetermination at the Center for Philosophy of Science. Anybody in Pittsburgh who wants to meet up, just send me an email or leave a comment here, and we'll sort something out.

Also, for folks who can't make it, there are abstracts at the site linked above, and some of the papers are up on the phil-sci archive, on a special conference page.

It's only a theory

2009-02-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

I imagine just about everyone who reads this blog already knows the following, but... A big group blog in philosophy of science has recently been started by Gabriele Contessa. It's called It's Only a Theory, and Gabriele has assembled an all-star cast of contributors. For reasons beyond me, he also invited me to join. So in the future, my philosophy of science posts will usually be cross-posted both here and there; however, the history and logic posts will be here only.

Darwin day disappointment

2009-02-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

In honor of Darwin's birthday today, I checked out a couple of recent books on Darwinism from the library: Michael Ruse's Darwinism and its Discontents and Philip Kitcher's Living with Darwin. After a quick perusal, both books looked pretty good; both are pitched at a more or less at a pop science/ pop philosophy of science level.

The 'disappointment' in this post's title is that, directly under every one of the chapter titles in Ruse's book, someone had written "answersingenesis.org". (Why every single chapter title?)

share your logical intuitions

2009-01-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Consider the following two sentences:

A follows from 'not-not-A' -- but not intuitionistically.

B follows from 'A and not-A' -- but not relevantly.

Are they contradictory? Perfectly fine? Infelicitous?

(If you don't know why I'm asking, Google grice "cancellation test".)

history of analytic rankings

2009-01-22T00:29:00.000-08:00

Let me say, first of all, that I am not one of the Philosophical Gourmet/ Leiter haters. In my personal opinion, the benefits of Leiter's rankings (both general and special) far outweigh the costs.

That said, I was a bit surprised by "The top 10 faculties in History of Analytic Philosophy," which was just posted. What was more surprising to me than the 10 schools that made the cut was the set of evaluators. The evaluators (or at least the ones whose work I know) are all unquestionably excellent philosophers -- some of them absolutely top-notch. However, many of them were not people that I think of as historians of analytic philosophy. I've decided not to pick on anyone in particular, but if you look at the list of evaluators in the above-linked post, and then look at each evaluator's publication record, you will see what I mean. About half of the evaluators have primary research areas outside history of analytic.

What was most surprising to me was who was left out of the list of evaluators. To give you a general sense: if you look at the list of contributors to the recent Cambridge Companions to Quine, Carnap, and Logical Empiricism (that's about 35 people total), a grand total of one appears on Leiter's list of evaluators (Thomas Ricketts, who I think definitely should be on the list of evaluators). But missing were, among others: Michael Friedman, Richard Creath, Peter Hylton, Alan Richardson, William Demopoulus, Thomas Uebel, and other leading figures who have a large proportion of their research in history of analytic.

Of course, I don't have all the facts about how the list of evaluators came into existence; perhaps Professor Leiter did solicit opinions from the folks just mentioned, and they declined to participate. If so, that's a shame; the rankings could perhaps have been better with their input.

Again, in general I really appreciate the existence of Leiter's rankings; and in particular, I think the Philosophy of Science specialty ranking (the only other area where I feel at all competent to judge) is quite well done. And finally, I actually think there is a pretty serious difference between history of analytic and other subfields like ethics or philosophy of science: whereas a big research university could well have four ethicists, or four philosophers of science, virtually nobody has four historians of the analytic tradition. So the 'department' rankings for history of analytic end up depending mostly on how good the one (or perhaps one and a half) people who do that are -- contrast this with Rutgers' strength in language, or Pittsburgh's strength in science.

From the disunity of science to anti-realism

2008-11-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

The two most popular arguments against scientific realism today are (1) underdetermination arguments and (2) the pessimistic induction. There is another kind of anti-realistic argument besides these two, which does not get the attention today that (1) and (2) receive. (Note: I would appreciate it if any readers could point me to someone working today who has developed anything akin to this third line of argument in detail.)

I don't yet have a clean formulation of this third kind of argument for anti-realism that I find satisfactory. All I have so far is an analogy. We see an instance of this third kind of anti-realist argument in Andreas Osiander's (much-maligned) Preface to Copernicus' On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres. Osiander argues that Ptolemy's astronomy is not intended to be the literal truth about the structure of the solar system on the grounds that, if the epicycles Ptolemy ascribed to Venus literally described Venus's movement, then Venus's apparent size for an Earthly observer should vary 16-fold. But Venus's apparent size does not vary in this way. Thus, even though Ptolemy's astronomy predicts planetary positions within the margin of observable error, if it were the literal truth it would also get apparent planetary size right as well.

What does this have to do with present-day scientific anti-realism? This is sketchy, but perhaps the increasing sympathy for 'the disunity of science' and the related notion of 'pluralism in science' could be used to argue for some sort of anti-realism. Now, what exactly those two expressions mean varies greatly from one person to another (I think; I would be happy for better-informed readers to enlighten me), but I think I can illustrate my point by imagining what a 16th Century pluralist/ 'disunifier' would say about Osiander's point above.

Such a person could say: Different scientific theories explain different phenomena. Ptolemy's theory only aims to account for apparent planetary positions, not their apparent sizes (and/or brightnesses). To demand that Ptolemy's theory also account for apparent sizes/ brightnesses is to impose an ideal of unified science upon Ptolemaic astronomy.

However, we today (and Osiander 450 years ago) think that this problem with apparent sizes is good evidence against the truth of Ptolemaic astronomy. That is, the 16th century pluralist/ disunifier seems to 'let a bad theory off the hook': we have evidence the theory is not true, but that evidence is discounted or ignored on the grounds that the theory's target domain of explanation does not include the countervailing evidence.

Now of course the question for modern-day antirealism is: how good is this analogy? In particular, is the kind of pluralism or disunity that people are championing (or at least accepting) today relevantly similar to the Ptolemaic pluralism/ disunity described above?

philosophy for children

2008-10-31T16:30:00.000-07:00

I just learned about something that makes me very happy: the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children. The director also has a great blog about teaching philosophy to K-12 students. Things like this center and the radio show Philosophy Talk give me hope for philosophy's prospects.

Doris Lessing and idealization

2008-10-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

In her 1993 Preface to The Golden Notebook, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing writes:
"Currently I am writing volume one of my autobiography, and ... I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand." (p. ix)

I cannot say that I understand it either. However, I wanted to explore the notion that it might be related to idealization and abstraction, which have interested philosophers of science over the last few decades.

Roughly, an idealization is something that is strictly speaking false. For example, in usual derivations of the ideal gas law (PV=nRT) from statistical mechanics, the gas molecules are assumed to be massless point particles. But everyone agrees that, actually, the gas molecules do have some mass and some volume. But this reveals something: the mass or volume of the constituent particles do not play a (significant) role in the gas's macro-level properties (like pressure and temperature).

Roughly, an abstraction leaves out something (as opposed to putting in something false); for example, when doing classical mechanics, we need to know the mass and velocity of bodies, but we do not need to know their colors. And in many cases, we don't need to factor in their shapes. This is like the idealization case, because this reveals that the shape of a body is irrelevant to its behavior after an elastic collision.

Now, fiction is also full of both straightforward falsehoods (there's no such person as Harry Potter) and abstractions (How many hairs, exactly, are on Harry Potter's head?). Perhaps we can 'begin to understand' the fact that Lessing finds so perplexing by saying that these two elements of fiction play a role similar to idealization and abstraction in science. That is, by stripping away the infinitely many traits that concrete, actual things and events have, fiction makes manifest the explanatory (perhaps causal?) core of the people and circumstances it depicts, leaving out (supposed) irrelevancies. So I would not say (as Lessing does "that fiction is better at 'the truth' than the factual record," which sounds paradoxical, but rather that fiction can provide a better explanation than a detailed diary -- and it does so for the same reason that idealization and abstraction in science provide better explanations than would a complete causal history of the universe.

Carnap party!

2008-10-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Friday, November 7th, at the PSA. Thanks to Richard Zach for the pointer.

Help

2008-09-29T13:25:00.000-07:00

I've looked at something so long that I have confused myself, and am now hoping to get a little help. Paul Boghossian makes the following charge against analyticity (and smart people quote this approvingly):

What could it possibly mean to say that the truth of a statement is fixed exclusively by its meaning and not by the facts? Isn't it in general true--indeed, isn't it a truism--that for any statement S

S is true iff for some p, S means that p and p?

How could the mere fact that S means that p make it the case that S is true? Doesn't it also have to be the case that p? (Nous 1996, p.364)

Now my question: Is it fair to impute to Boghossian the view that there are no S, p such that S means that p is a sufficient condition for S is true?

(The upshot: if this is fair, then I think any case where S expresses a logical truth p is a counterexample. I still the the 'truism' is true; I just don't think it establishes the claim I'm imputing to Boghossian.)

jurors do the impossible

2008-09-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

I went in for jury duty yesterday for the first time in my life. I learned a lot about the nitty-gritty mechanics of a trial. I was put into the jury box for voir dire, where the judge and the lawyers ask you a bunch of questions to determine whether they want to leave you on the jury or get a replacement. (I was tossed out.)

One thing that struck me during this voir dire questioning is that the judge asks you to do two things that, I think, are impossible. First, he asks you if you can be completely and totally impartial. I'm not a psychologist, but I've seen plenty of studies showing that basically no one is thoroughly impartial; unconscious biases run through our thinking.

Second, the judge asks you if you can refrain from coming to a belief about the accused's guilt or innocence until you enter the jury deliberation room -- that is, after you have heard all the evidence, followed by the judge's specific instructions about the law. If you think that belief is involuntary (as many do), then this is impossible.

I recognize that these 2 things are ideals to strive for, and most likely the judge and lawyers recognize that they cannot be perfectly achieved. By re-interpreting these 2 demands to myself as ideal goals, I felt OK about agreeing to them. But I still felt weird asserting that I could do two things that, if understood literally, I think are impossible.

a new job description

2008-09-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

I just got home from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where I gave my talk arguing for the following slogan:
pessimistic induction + common accounts of reference = semantic anti-realism.
For the blogpost version, with a decent comment thread, see here.

Salt Lake is physically beautiful, and socially it seems to be a strange combination of hippies and Mormons. The Utah department was really great -- plus, Jim Tabery was a model host. The only thing I want to post, though, was Ron Mallon's description of my work on Carnap et al.: he characterized me as a 'boutique historian.' I don't know whether the expression is original to him, but I definitely plan to steal it to describe myself in the future.

Chmess in the pages of Science

2008-09-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

Dennett bad-mouths studying chmess, but it looks like chmessology has appeared in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Science.

Also, in case you haven't seen it, Greg Lavers wrote a good review of the Cambridge Companion to Carnap for NDPR, worth checking out.

Are scientific theories full of truth-value gaps?

2008-09-01T08:29:00.000-07:00

I'm almost done writing a paper that argues that if one accepts the pessimistic induction over the history of science, then one should be a semantic anti-realist about current science -- or should hold unorthodox views in philosophy of language. Here's the argument:

(P1) Certain claims that (a) contain terms with defective reference, or (b) exhibit presupposition failure, are neither true nor false.

(P2) Some fundamental theoretical claims of earlier science exhibit the type of (a) defective reference (e.g. 'phlogiston,' 'absolute velocity,' 'Vulcan') or (b) presupposition failure (e.g. 'Events A and B are simultaneous') described in (P1).

(C1) Therefore, some fundamental theoretical claims of earlier science are neither true nor false.

(P3) Present science probably resembles past science. [That's the step borrowed from the pessimistic induction]

(C2) Therefore, some fundamental theoretical claims of present science are neither true nor false.

The main objections, I think, are:
1. Sentences that contain non-referring terms or exhibit presupposition failure are false, not truth-valueless.
2. Specifically, natural kind terms that fail to pick out a kind/ property (e.g. 'phlogiston') do not generate truth-value gaps (even supposing proper names that fail to pick out an individual do generate truth-value gaps).

I offer replies to these objections, but none of them are absolutely decisive. So, my more tentative conclusion is that a proponent of the pessimistic induction either has to accept my original conclusion OR accept a currently unpopular position in philosophy of language -- e.g. one could justify objection 2 by appealing to a descriptivist account of natural kind terms, but that would fall afoul of the widely endorsed Kripke-Putnam arguments against such descriptivism.

I'll be giving this material as a talk at the University of Utah in a couple of weeks, so any feedback before then would be especially appreciated.

Am I in a fictional character's address book?

2008-08-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

I can't figure out whether the following worries about fictional characters are interesting or silly. They are certainly amateurish, because I don't know the literature about fiction well.

I recently got a Nintendo Wii. You can receive emails on your Wii; you also get various sorts of system updates there. In my Wii inbox yesterday, there was an email from a character in one of the games I'm playing. (Not that it matters, but for sake of concreteness, the email was from a character called the 'mailtoad.')

Now I think there's something strange about the sentence
'Greg got an email from the mailtoad.'*
Why? Because the mailtoad is fictional, and I would've thought it was impossible for me to receive communications from fictional characters. I would've thought that fictional characters can only send letters to other fictional characters, and I'm pretty sure I'm not a fictional character.

Often, if there is a sentence about a fictional character that intuitively feels true, that's because in the fiction the sentence is literally true. That is, while 'Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street' is not literally true, nonetheless 'In the stories written by Conan Doyle, Holmes lives on Baker Street' is literally true. And that accounts for why there is some intuitive pull towards calling it true.

But this won't really work in the present case of my email from the mailtoad: I received an email -- in the actual world. But I am not a fictional character, and I do not appear in the fiction, as e.g. Napoleon appears in War & Peace. This looks analogous to the real-life Napoleon finding a letter from one of the fictional characters of War & Peace in his mailbox.

It seems like the least crazy thing to say is that the mailtoad did not send me a letter, but rather some combination of hardware and software --which are non-fictional things -- sent me the email. But then what is the relationship between the hardware + software combination and the fictional character? I don't have a well-posed worry here, but it does seem pretty different from the way words on a page are related to Sherlock Holmes.

-----
* Actually, the email was addressed to Mario, the character I'm playing in the game. If you think this dissolves the problem, then for the rest of this post, just counterfactually suppose the word "Mario" was not in the first line of the email. But I think it is still weird to intercept a communique from one fictional character to another in my inbox... maybe not as weird, though.

The advantages of theft over an honest post

2008-08-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

I'll have a real post up soon, I hope, but in the meantime I wanted to let readers know about a new blog by Chris Pincock, Honest Toil. (Or maybe I'm just the last one to notice it.) His areas of interest are pretty similar to what you find on Obscure and Confused Ideas, and he's posting good stuff at an impressive pace.

Are offprints obsolete?

2008-07-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

In my department mailbox, I just found a big package, shipped over from Germany, containing 50 copies of a recent article of mine. This struck me as a waste of paper and postage, especially given the unbelievable subscription prices for some for-profit academic journals. I reckon that cutting out offprint services wouldn't save that much money, but lowering the prices even a little might increase access somewhat for institutions that are smaller or in developing countries.

And I personally have never sent anyone a preprint, and never received one. Every paper I've exchanged long-distance has been via email.

Perhaps things are different in other academic fields, but given my limited experience, offprints seem pretty obsolete. (That said, I do like receiving a physical paper copy of the journal issue where my article appears, but I think this is primarily because it somehow feeds my pridefulness and vanity.)

Are there reasons in favor of continuing the status quo offprint practices? If so, I'd like to hear them.

Are truth-value gluts necessary to avoid explosion?

2008-07-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

Before I get to the question in the title of the post, let me give a quick rehearsal of some uncontroversial material, for readers innocent of this particular topic. In classical logic, anything follows from a contradiction:
A & ~A, ∴ B
is a valid argument. This argument form is known as ex falso quodlibet (EFQ); Graham Priest calls it 'explosion.' This clearly runs counter to our intuitions about what follows from what: it just doesn't seem like '2+2=200' follows from 'Grass is green and grass is not green.' Yet it does in classical logic.

Because this seems counterintuitive, people have devised logics in which EFQ is not a valid argument form. The most prominent is the family of relevance logics. So relevance logics score a point because they fit our intuitions about EFQ.

How do relevance logics avoid EFQ? Semantically/ Model-theoretically, they allow 'truth-value gluts', that is, a sentence can be both true and false. Now we can see why (A & ~A), ∴ B is invalid in logics allowing gluts: assign A both true and false, and assign B false. Then all the premises are true and the conclusion is not true.

That was all set-up. Now the question: suppose it turns out that there are no truth-value gluts, i.e., no sentence (or proposition or whatever) is both true and false. Would (some) defenders of relevance logics then accept EFQ? Well, perhaps all the glut people need is that gluts are possible, and not that actually some sentence is both true and false. Then my question would be: would EFQ-deniers accept EFQ if gluts were impossible? From my limited exposure to the literature (Priest, C. Mortensen NDJFL 1983), it seemed like the answer might be yes, because they say things like 'Disjunctive Syllogism (which is valid classically but not relevantly) is valid in all consistent reasoning-contexts.' I would've hoped that we could discard EFQ without taking on such a contentious idea as truth-value gluts...

And a further question just out of ignorance: does anyone characterize logical validity in such a way that it (i) avoids EFQ and (ii) does not require truth-preservation? I don't see any other way besides gluts to declare EFQ invalid, if we stick to the standard characterization of validity.

In Praise of Graham Priest's Intro to Non-Classical Logic

2008-07-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

This summer, I am directing an independent study on non-classical logics. In part because of Ole's glowing recommendation, the primary text has been Graham Priest's Introduction to Non-Classical Logic. The book has been fantastic; I can recommend it without qualification. It is pitched at just the right level for a philosophy student with maybe one logic course under their belt -- neither too slow nor too quick. The end-of-chapter exercises are also just right: neither too difficult nor too easy. And each chapter closes with a couple of pages dealing with how the technical material presented there connects up with overtly philosophical questions, keeping up motivation for people whose primary interest is not in the formal/ mathematical side of things.

Another aspect of the book that appealed to me was that (partial) soundness and completeness proofs were given at the end of each chapter, separated from the main course of discussion as optional material. Such proofs are of course incredibly important to practicing logicians, but I sometimes think that the amount of time and effort needed for them is better spent elsewhere given the limitations of a classroom, and the fact that most philosophy students in logic classes won't go on to be practicing logicians. The nice thing about Priest's presentation is that if you think soundness and completeness proofs are essential, you can cover them, or if (like me) you'd rather spend that time covering a wider array of logics, you can easily skip over them without loss or inconvenience.

Last but not least, I certainly have learned a thing or two (or ten), even though it is labeled as an introductory textbook. I will definitely use this book again in future classes.

committing armchairs to the flames

2008-07-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

I have an avid spectator's interest in experimental philosophy, and do not pretend to expertise. I've recently seen, on email lists and blogposts, announcements for an experimental philosophy workshop called Armchair in Flames? It looks like an interesting conference; but a thought popped into my head about the title, which refers to the X-Phi anthem (performed here ).

Experimental philosophers take themselves to be committing the philosophical armchair to the flames, because (in part) they do surveys of the person-in-the-street's view on various philosophical topics. They thus test whether what professional philosophers say is commonsensical really is common sense, or rather some sort of idiosyncrasy or professional deformation.

But I just wanted to remark that this is only one way of committing the armchair to the flames. Another, which has been the dominant outlook in philosophy of science for the last few decades, is to discount heavily or even completely any deliverances of so-called common sense or intuition, and instead lean heavily or even completely upon the deliverances of mature sciences in formulating philosophical positions. This outlook was unequivocally in full effect in the department where I got my PhD, among faculty and students alike.

So in short, the experimental philosophers don't have a monopoly on casting armchairs into the flames -- the philosophers of science have been stoking that fire for a while already.

HOPOS 2008

2008-06-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

The 8th HOPOS (History of Philosophy of Science) conference finished last week. Unfortunately, because of teaching obligations, I didn't arrive until the end of the second day, so I missed some sessions that I really wanted to see.

I learned a lot, got to catch up with several folks I haven't seen in a while, and met some new interesting and smart people. And I got very helpful feedback on the material I presented (on Quine's trajectory from "Truth by Convention" to "Two Dogmas"). So it was a very good conference for me.

There was one thing that's been bothering me, however. This may just be the result of missing some of the presentations on logical empiricism that I would've liked to see, but I'm wondering whether -- speaking very generally -- scholarship on logical empiricism is in danger of losing a clear and coherent direction. Why? For the last 20 or so years, work on logical empiricism has improved our understanding of Carnap, Neurath, Schlick et al. by leaps and bounds. This is in large part because the old, received view of the logical empiricists was extremely inaccurate. Marginal returns on investment were quite high in the beginning; it is only natural that they come down as our picture of the logical empiricists becomes more and more refined. But my worry is that without the fairly well-defined project of locating and then refuting various caricatures of logical empiricism, the field might begin to drift.

It is not uncommon for a group that is very successful when fighting a common enemy has trouble thriving in peacetime. I hope the same thing is not happening to logical empiricism studies, now that its enemy -- the Received View of logical empiricism -- has been in large part defeated (though we are still waiting for news of that victory to reach the ears of everyone in philosophy). We know what we are against; but what are we for? -- that is, can we identify and rally around some set of interesting and fruitful further research questions about the logical empiricists?

As I said above, I hope this was just a sampling error on may part: I think I missed some really good presentations, which are truly representative of the state of the art in the field. So I'm not worried yet.

in lieu of a real post

2008-06-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

In this week's Science:

"The first scientific conference held in Azeroth, the online universe of the role-playing game World of Warcraft, went off virtually without a hitch. Although the participants all died during the final day's social event — a massive raid on an enemy fort — they agree that this event is a glimpse at the future of scientific exchange."

I may have a real post up soon: I just got back from Vancouver, where I attended the 8th History of Philosophy of Science conference, and I may file a brief report from the field.

Experimental Philosophy of mathematical intuition

2008-05-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

So this is straight psychological research, not done by 'experimental philosophers,' but it does seem highly relevant to any philosophers who appeal to the notion of mathematical intuition:

Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures, Stanislas Dehaene et al. in Science May 30 2008.

We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, whereas Western adults used linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers and logarithmic mapping when numbers were presented nonsymbolically under conditions that discouraged counting. This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education.

Scientific Realism via the internets

2008-05-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

I recently found out that Philosophy of Science has conditionally accepted an article I wrote on the no-miracles argument. This is a stroke of good luck, and it's also a testament to the philosophical blogosphere: basic ideas in this paper were hashed out on this blog (see especially here), and honed by readers' astute criticism. Perhaps the paper wouldn't have been good enough for acceptance otherwise.

I would greatly appreciate further help on the paper before I send away the final version; the current draft (in rich text format) is here. Here's an abbreviated abstract:

1. Scientists (usually) do not accept explanations that explain only one type of already accepted fact.
2. Scientific realism (as it appears in the no-miracles argument, or NMA) explains only one type of already accepted fact.
3. Psillos, Boyd, and other proponents of the NMA explicitly adopt a naturalism that forbids philosophy of science from using any methods not employed by science itself.
Therefore, such naturalistic philosophers of science should not accept the version of scientific realism that appears in the NMA.

And as long as I am singing the praises of the blogosphere and begging for readers, P.D. Magnus (of the excellent Footnotes on Epicycles blog) and I have a draft of a paper on another aspect of the scientific realism debate (in pdf format) here. We ask, and give a partial answer to, the question: When should two empirically equivalent theories be regarded as variants of one and the same theory? Comments large and small are appreciated!

Against negative free logic

2008-05-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

'Free logic' is an abbreviation for 'logic whose terms are free of existential assumptions, both singular and general.' Free logics attempt to deal with languages containing singular terms that do not denote anything, such as 'Pegasus'.

Free logics come in 3 basic flavors, which differ over what truth-values should be assigned to (atomic) sentences containing non-denoting names.
- Negative free logics declare all such sentences false;
- Neutral free logics declare all such sentences neither true nor false; and
- Positive free logics declare at least some such sentences true (in particular, 'Pegasus=Pegasus').

Tyler Burge argued for negative free logic over its rivals in "Truth and Singular Terms," Nous (1975). I came up with a little argument against negative free logic; but I do not know the argumentative landscape for these 3 options particularly well, so this may be extant already. (Note: if any readers have references for arguments pro and con negative free logic, I'd be very interested. I've found a couple of nice articles by James Tomberlin, and a short response by Richard Grandy to Burge's piece, but not much else.)

According to the negative free logician, all atomic sentences containing non-denoting names are false. Some people reject this because calling 'Pegasus=Pegasus' false seems wrong; here's another problematic type of case. Consider the following three sentences (and assume for the sake of argument that 'Atlantis' is a non-denoting name):
(1) Atlantis is West of London.
(2) Atlantis is East of London.
(3) Atlantis and London have the same longitude.
In negative free logic, all three of these must be false. But for the three predicates 'is west of,' 'is east of,' and 'has the same longitude as,' any one of the three can be defined in terms of the other two using only negation and conjunction. E.g.:
'x is west of y' means 'x is not east of y, and x does not have the same longitude as y.'
But now we've got a problem: If 'Atlantis is west of London' is false (as the free logician says), then at least one of 'Atlantis is east of London' or 'Atlantis and London the same longitude' has to be true -- but that contradicts the earlier assumption (of the negative free logician) that all of (1)-(3) are false.

And this same problem will crop up in general when we have a set of predicates that are definable in terms of one another and negation; in the simplest case, P = ~Q. And this is not that rare: {'before', 'after', 'simultaneous'} is another example. The negative free logician could save her position by maintaining that two of the predicates are somehow really basic, and the other really derivative. But at least in these two cases, it doesn't look legitimate to hold that 'west' is somehow fundamental and 'east' merely derivative.

Does anyone see a good response to this objection on behalf of the proponent of negative free logic?

HOPOS 2008 program posted

2008-04-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

The International Society for the history of philosophy of science (a.k.a. HOPOS) has just posted the program for its 2008 conference in Vancouver, taking place June 18-21. (According to the program, I'm speaking about someone named 'Quien.')

Hope to see you there! If you are going, and want to meet up, send me an email.

Are there empty natural kind terms? (The 2nd in a series)

2008-04-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

There are empty names, like 'Santa' and '(Planet) Vulcan'; there is a fairly large literature dealing with them in both the philosophy of language and in logic (called 'free logic'). But there has not been any discussion of empty natural kind terms -- which prompts the question: are there any such terms? I ask because it seems to me that 'phlogiston,' 'caloric,' and other central terms of now-discarded scientific theories may qualify as empty natural kind terms.

This question is complicated by the fact that there is not widespread agreement on what natural kind terms are. The two candidates are (I) predicates and (II) names. (Predicates are the leading contender, so you can skip the final paragraphs if your patience for this kind of thing is limited.)

(I - Predicates) This takes us back to the subject of the previous post: are there any empty natural kind predicates? As noted in the last post on this subject, if 'empty' just means 'has the null set as its extension, and the whole domain of discourse as its anti-extension,' then the answer is obviously yes. But then it's uninteresting -- empty names are interesting because (both for direct reference theorists and Frege) sentences containing them will lack truth-value, unless the direct reference theorist proposes an ad hoc fix (cf. David Braun). If empty predicates behave classically/ nicely, they won't generate truth-value gaps.

So here's an argument that natural kind predicates like 'phlogiston' are empty in the same way that 'Vulcan' is, i.e. they can fail to express semantic content sufficient to determine truth-value. How? On a Kripkean account, natural kind terms express properties that objects have essentially. To determine what property is expressed by a natural kind term, we take samples of the stuff that that term refers to in the actual world, and determine what is essential to them, i.e. what property (or combination of properties) those samples must have in order to be that kind of stuff. So the natural kind term ‘water’ expresses the property of being H2O, because in the actual world, having that inner constitution suffices for something to be water. But what is the essential, inner constitution of all the stuff we call ‘phlogiston’ in the actual world? Nothing —- since there is no such thing as phlogiston, there is no essential property or inner constitution to discover. (Note: James Woodbridge helped me a lot with this argument; if you like it, you should attribute it to him, not me.)

So if phlogiston has no inner constitution, then 'phlogiston' lacks semantic content. And thus (atomic) sentences containing the term will be semantically defective, and thus (presumably) will lack a truth-value. But is this argument any good?

(II. - names) One might think natural kind terms are names, because they appear in subject position:
'Water is wet'
But if they are names, what are they names of? Scott Soames (Beyond Rigidity) gives two 'obvious candidates':
(i) the merelogical sum of all the water everywhere, or
(ii) an "abstract type" that is instantiated by the stuff that comes out of our faucets etc.

If it's (i), then there are clearly empty natural kind terms, and 'phlogiston' and 'caloric' are examples. However, Soames gives two arguments against (i): first, if (i) were correct, then 'Water weighs more than 1 million pounds' should be true and felicitous, but it seems clearly not so. Second, if (i) were right, then 'water' would not be (anywhere close to) a rigid designator, and there is a widespread intuition (or Kripkean dogma?) that it is.

If it's (ii), it's not clear to me that there are empty natural kind terms; I don't know how one shows a type does not exist (or, for that matter, how one shows a type does exist). As James Woodbridge and Seyed (in the comments on the first installment of this series) pointed out to me, it seems reasonable to say that an abstract type that is somehow contradictory does not exist, but we'll have nothing like the set-theoretic or semantic paradoxes when it comes to natural kind terms. But I am not all that worried about (ii), because it's not clear (again following Soames in Beyond Rigidity) that natural kind terms are names at all -- they seem to be predicates first and foremost. As Soames points out, 'Whales are mammals' is naturally understood as 'Anything that is a whale is a mammal.' So natural kind terms are not names.

Indeterminism in developmental biology

2008-04-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

There's a review article in this week's Science (v.320, April 4 2008, 65-68) that is potentially of philosophical interest, "Stochasticity and Cell Fate". The bumper sticker version: although a cell's transformation into a specialized subtype is deterministic in most cases, "[i]n some cases, however, and in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans, cells choose one or another pathway of differentiation stochastically, without apparent regard to environment or history."

Discussions of indeterminism in biology have usually been restricted to the 'random' mutations that drive evolutionary change. This, if it holds up, looks to be a quite different kind. And interestingly, the authors point out reasons why a certain degree of indeterminism may confer selective advantage upon organisms whose development contains stochastic elements.

Are there empty predicates?

2008-04-03T21:50:00.004-07:00

Empty names are names that fail to refer, like 'Santa,' 'Pegasus,' and 'Planet Vulcan.' 'Santa Claus' fails to refer because (on most semantics for empty names) there is no entity that is assigned to 'Santa' as its referent. This is clearly distinct from another view (e.g. Frege's) that 'Santa' should be assigned e.g. the empty set as its referent. That is, there is a difference from having no referent and referring to the empty set -- for my cat has no referent, but '∅' refers to the empty set.

So are there empty predicates? That is, are there predicates that do not signify properties (or extensions, kinds, intensions (= functions from possible worlds to extensions), or whatever your preferred semantic value for predicates is). There are of course predicates whose extension is the empty set (e.g. 'is not identical with itself') -- these predicates signify uninstantiated properties (assuming you think predicates signify properties). But they still signify a property.

There is a fairly massive literature on empty names. (I can recommend Ben Caplan's 2002 dissertation as a nice survey of the empty names landscape.) But there is no talk of empty predicates -- is this because somehow every predicate, unlike names, automatically refers?

Related issue: Philosophers of science often say things like 'phlogiston' and 'caloric' fail to refer. Often, in explaining their claim "The word 'phlogiston' does not refer", these philosophers will say things like "The extension of the predicate 'is phlogiston' (or 'contains phlogiston') is empty." But having the empty set for your extension is different from failing to refer. So when we say that 'contains phlogiston' fails to refer, it seems like we should be saying that it has no (determinate?) extension, not that its extension is empty.

So are there any empty predicates? Are such things even possible? And can the usage of the philosophers of science be defended?

stuff seen in Science

2008-03-28T13:44:00.003-07:00

There's been a few items in Science the last two weeks that are potentially philosophically interesting:

[This week]
1. Rats can learn rules and then generalize them to new, different situations to a degree that people previously thought was confined to humans or at least primates.

2. Two smells that are initially indiscriminable to a human can, with painful conditioning, be made discriminable. (The initial indiscriminability was not just in terms of verbal reports of conscious states; the scientists did fMRIs on the patients too.)

[Last week]
3. After your basic needs are met, having more money does not make you much happier (that's been known for a while); however, giving that money away instead of spending it on yourself does have a significant effect on your (self-reported) happiness.

4. One of my favorite biologists, Günter Wagner, argues that pleiotropy (one gene having several effects) is actually not as significant as once thought (philosophers of biology have used pleiotropy to argue for various points).

Of course, this is just the bumper-sticker version of each of these claims; the actual positions will be more sophisticated, and require various caveats. Nonetheless, it seems like each of these studies could merit philosophical attention.

Logical Pluralism, take 2

2008-03-14T15:07:00.003-07:00

This post supersedes the previous one on logical pluralism; it's the post I would've written, had I bothered to do a bit of research before posting. I apologize in advance for how long it is...

Beall and Restall say we should be pluralists about logical consequence, because there are multiple acceptable ways of spelling out the notion of case in the standard criterion of validity:
(V) C is a logical consequence of P1 ... Pn iff in every case where all of P1...Pn are true, C is true also.
Different specifications of case, say B&R, yield different consequence relations.

My impulse is to address this issue 'from above'; that is, in general, when is any sort of pluralism an acceptable stance? Well, one case (though probably not the only one) in which it can be acceptable is when ambiguity is present. E.g., there are multiple, equally acceptable ways of spelling out 'Aaron is at the bank'. And Beall and Restall, on the 3rd page of "Defending Logical Pluralism," state that they think logical consequence is ambiguous; presumably the ambiguity is traced back to the word 'case' in (V) (what else in (V) could it be?). So if 'case' really is ambiguous, and (V) captures the core notion of consequence correctly, then we should be logical pluralists.

But I'm not sure 'case' is ambiguous -- prima facie, it doesn't feel like 'bank,' or 'duck'. It might just be 'general in sense' or 'lack specificity': for example, 'sibling' is general in sense between 'brother' and 'sister', the same goes for 'parent' and 'mother' and 'father.' And nobody wants to be a 'sibling-pluralist' or 'parent-pluralist.' (Note: 'thing', which seems to me closer to 'case', does not seem ambiguous either.)

Linguists, fortunately, have devised a test to distinguish ambiguous expressions from ones that are general in sense: the 'conjunction reduction' test. Suppose my friend Pat is making a monetary deposit, and my friend Tracy is sitting next to a river. Then the two sentences
'Pat is at the bank' and
'Tracy is at the bank'
are both true. However, these truths cannot be expressed in a 'conjunction reduced' sentence
'Pat and Tracy are at the bank,'
for this can only mean that both of Pat and Tracy are next to a body of water, or both are at a financial institution. No 'crossed reading' is possible. The impossibility of crossed readings in the reduced sentence suffices for the ambiguity of 'bank' (Jay D. Atlas, Philosophy without Ambiguity, OUP 1989, p.40). From the little I've seen, almost all linguists and linguistically-inclined philosophers accept this as an ambiguity test. And most also accept: If crossed readings are possible, then there is no ambiguity. E.g., 'Pat and Tracy are parents' can be read as saying that Pat and Tracy are both fathers, both mothers, or one of each -- and the possibility of that 'one of each' reading is what makes 'parent' non-ambiguous, but rather just general in sense.

With a test for ambiguity in hand, we can see if 'case' and 'consequence' are ambiguous (so pluralism is the right stance) or merely general in sense (in which case pluralism is not obviously the right stance). Let C0 be a construction (of the sort used in semantics for intuitionistic logic), and let S0 be a situation (of the sort used in semantics for relevance logic). (Cf. previous pluralism post if that doesn't make sense.) Then, I think, Beall & Restall would say
'C0 is a case'
is true, and so is
'S0 is a case'.
(If they don't, then 'case' is not ambiguous, but something else.)
Now the question is: Are 'crossed readings' possible for
'C0 and S0 are cases'?
That is: can that last sentence express that C0 is a construction and S0 a situation, or can it only be read as saying that C0 and S0 are both constructions or both situations? I lean towards the possibility of crossed readings, but I'm just not sure.

We might try the conjunction-reduction test with logical consequence as well:
not-not-A (relevantly) implies A [but not intuitionistically]
not-not-A (intuitionistically) implies 'If B, then B' [but not relevantly]
The conjunction reduced sentence is:
not-not-A implies A and 'If B, then B'
Here, a crossed reading DOES seem impossible, to me at least. So that makes it look like 'implies' is ambiguous. (Note: I'm not certain I've formed the correct conjunction reduction sentence.)

Now I'm stuck: it looks like 'implies' is ambiguous, while 'case' is not. If this is right, then we could deny (V) -- but what could we put in its place?

Final speculative thought: 'implies' is like 'before' in relativistic physics. If two events are spacelike related (= no signal can be passed between them), then 'e1 is before e2' is neither true nor false until a frame of reference is specified. In one frame of reference e1 will be before e2, and in another frame, e2 will be before e1. But once the frame (and a simultaneity convention) is chosen, then it becomes fully determinate which precedes the other. BUT no one frame is the 'right' one; each frame 'has equal rights'.

The analogy: picking a particular frame of reference is like picking situations over constructions or models etc. As there is no one right frame, so too there is no one right truth-maker. So 'A implies B' is then NOT like 'Aaron is at the bank', for I can use that second sentence meaningfully (= truth-valued-ly) without supplying some further information -- unlike 'e1 is before e2' for spacelike-related events. But once one picks a frame, all instances of 'e1 is before e2' become truth-valued; analogously, once one picks a specification of 'case', every instance of 'Does C follow from {P1, ... Pn}?' has a determinate answer.

In sum: ambiguity may not be the best way of thinking about the different consequence relations; rather, perhaps we should see how well we can make out this analogy with relativistic physics.

Logical pluralism and brother-in-law pluralism

2008-02-28T10:44:00.008-08:00

In my philosophy of logic class this week, we discussed JC Beall and Greg Restall's version of logical pluralism. Our text was their 2000 Australasian Journal of Philosophy article, available on Restall's website here. I've been flipping through their fantastic book-length treatment (OUP, 2006) as well.

Here's their basic idea. The basic, accepted notion of logical consequence is adequately captured in the following:

(V) Consequence C is a logical consequence of premises P1, ... Pn = In every case in which P1, ... Pn is true, C is also true.

Beall and Restall further hold that the notion of case admits of a number of "precisifications" (2006, 88), that is, it can be 'spelled out' or 'fleshed out' in more than one way. [Note: I can't find the quotation now, but I think Beall and Restall said that 'case' is neither ambiguous nor vague (in the sense of having borderline examples). [CORRECTION (3/2/08): In their "Defending Logical Pluralism," Beall and Restall explicitly say that they think the concept of deductive consequence is ambiguous (p.3). This more or less vitiates the main point of this post. I say 'more or less' because there is a test accepted by linguists for distinguishing ambiguity from lack of specificity, and it's not clear that B&R's concept of 'case' passes the test; see my comment #6 in the comment thread.] Different spellings-out of 'case' give rise to different consequence relations (and thus different logics); as examples of cases, they give:
(i) Classical Tarskian models, (ii) possible worlds, (iii) constructions (which yield intuitionistic logic), and (iv) situations (which yield relevant logic).
Finally, because there are multiple ways of spelling out 'case', there is not one correct notion of consequence, since different consequence relations correspond to different ways of specifying the content of (V).

So if someone asks: "Does an arbitrary sentence p follow from a contradiction 'q and not-q'?", the pluralist answer is "Yes and No -- yes, it follows classically (when we take Tarskian models as cases), but no, it does not follow relevantly (when situations are the cases)." Similarly, the pluralist answers the question "Is 'p or not-p' a logical truth?" with "Yes and No -- yes, it is a classical logical truth (since it is true in all Tarskian models), but no, it is not an intuitionistic logical truth (since it is not true in all constructions)".

I find Beall and Restall's position attractive. But while thinking about it, I wondered about when, in general, pluralism is the right (or at least a reasonable) position to take. B&R's claim is the fact that 'case' can be precisified in more than one way -- the meaning of 'case' is somehow underspecified or indeterminate -- to justify being pluralists about 'case' and thereby via (V) about consequence. However, I wonder whether, if this rationale were accepted across the board, pluralism would be almost everywhere, and the appropriate answer to many, many questions would be "Yes and no".

Here's an example of what I mean. The meaning of the phrase 'my brother-in-law' is not completely specific; it is indeterminate between the brother of my spouse and the male spouse of my sibling. However, nobody is a "brother-in-law pluralist": When someone asks me "Is Leon your brother-in-law?", I shouldn't reply "Yes and No -- yes, he is the brother of my spouse, but no, he's not the male spouse of my sibling." And what holds for 'brother-in-law' holds for many, many other terms: lack of specificity is everywhere.

Hopefully the analogy is clear: 'case' and 'brother-in-law' can both be made (more) determinate in different ways. But if this underspecification in the notion of 'case' is all that is required to justify pluralism about consequence, then we should also be pluralists about 'brother-in-law', since there is underspecification there too.

How might someone sympathetic to logical pluralism (e.g. me) respond to this challenge? Well, we could find an example where pluralism seems like the right (or at least reasonable) attitude, and try to argue that 'case' is (more) like that example. For example, I think pluralism about the concept of 'thing' is reasonable: if someone holds out a deck of cards, and asks me "Are there 52 things here?", the right (or reasonable) answer should be "Yes and No -- yes, there are 52 cards, but no, there are far more than 52 molecules".

The question is then: What makes 'thing' different from 'brother-in-law'? And is 'case' (in Beall and Restall's use) more like 'thing' or 'brother-in-law'? The pluralist wants 'case' to be more like 'thing', but I haven't yet figured out how to draw a sharp line. Any ideas?

Which came first: logical truth or consequence?

2008-02-22T20:31:00.004-08:00

This term, I am teaching a philosophy of logic class. We've twice run across the following sentiment:

(CPT) Logical consequence is prior to logical truth.

This sentiment is also expressed as 'The real subject matter of logic is the notion of consequence, not a special body of truths.' (References: We've seen this in Stephen Read's Thinking about Logic Ch.2, and in John Etchemendy's work (1988, p.74) too.)

Seeing (CPT) surprised me, since logical truth is (in most cases -- see below) definable in terms of logical consequence, and vice versa: If C is a consequence of P1 ... Pn, then 'If P1 and ... and Pn, then C' is a logical truth. And if T is a logical truth, then T is a consequence of the null set of premises. This is well-known: Beall and Restall, in their recent Logical Pluralism, make exactly this point.

So, in light of the interdefinability of logical truth and consequence, what would prompt someone to say consequence is somehow prior to logical truth? Stephen Read appeals to valid arguments that ineliminably use infinitely many premisses: A(0), A(1), ... Therefore, ∀x Ax. We can't turn this into a logical truth ('If A(0) and A(1) and ..., then ∀x Ax') in standard languages, because standard languages don't allow for infinitely long sentences. This seems like a fair point in favor of (CPT), but it does assume that (i) you accept arguments with infinitely many premises, and (ii) reject languages with infinitely long expressions. [Edit: as Shawn correctly notes in the comments, these two assumptions are fairly widely held. But I have always been a bit suspicious (perhaps for no good reason) about the idea of an argument with infinitely many premises.]

Here's another argument for (CPT), from extremely weak languages. Imagine we have a propositional language with sentence letters p, q, ..., and only two sentential connectives: 'and' and 'or' specified in the usual way. In this language, there are no logical truths (because we don't have 'If... then...' or anything equivalent), but there are still logical consequences: A is still a logical consequence of 'A and B', and 'A or B' is a logical consequence of A. So here is a case where we have logical consequence without logical truth.

But both of these arguments (Read's and mine) rely on somewhat unusual cases. Are there other reasons to accept (CPT) that do not appeal to unusual circumstances? Is there a big literature out there that I don't know about? And does anything really hinge upon whether we think logical truth is prior to consequence, vice versa, or neither?

Boghossian on ('metaphysical') analyticity

2008-01-13T09:24:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking recently about an objection Paul Boghossian (and many others) make against the Tractarian/ Carnapian conception of an analytic truth, viz. a sentence that is true solely in virtue of the meaning of the sentence. (Boghossian calls this kind of analyticity 'metaphysical analyticity,' which I think is potentially misleading, given the staunch anti-metaphysical tastes of the logical empiricists. Oh well.)

Boghossian considers the notion of metaphysical analyticity untenable. Why? He asks a rhetorical question:
"Isn't it in general true---indeed, isn't it a truism---that for any statement S,

S is true iff for some p, S means that p and p?

How could the mere fact that S means that p make it the case that S is true?" (Boghossian 1996, "Analyticity Reconsidered," Nous [p.364]

Boghossian is not alone in this view: the basic idea can be found in Quine's "Carnap and Logical Truth," and is developed by Gilbert Harman, Elliott Sober, and Margolis & Laurence. How should we interpret this rhetorical question? Boghossian appears to be claiming that the truth of a sentence of the form 'S means that p' is never a sufficient condition for the the truth of a sentence of the form 'S is true'---that appears to be intended force of the rhetorical question in the quotation immediately above. And that is certainly one reasonable way of cashing out the notion of the truth of a sentence being `fixed exclusively by its meaning.'

If we do understand Boghossian's view in this way, then I think his claim is either misleading or incorrect. Consider a standard material biconditional of the form

(1) p iff q

If such a biconditional is true, we usually say that q is a necessary and sufficient condition for p. But as we teach undergraduates in Introduction to Logic classes, if this biconditional is true, then (within the classical propositional calculus) so is

(2) p iff [q and (r only if r)]

(Any other logical truth of the classical propositional calculus could be substituted for r only if r.) If we simply read off the surface structure of sentence-schema (2), one might think that q was no longer sufficient for the truth of p--because there appears to be a second condition that has to be met in order for p to be the case, namely that r only if r. Of course, strictly speaking, this is true: every sentence of the propositional calculus presupposes the truth of all the logical truths of the propositional calculus. However, it seems seriously misleading to me to say that the truth of q is not a sufficient condition for the truth of p in our original biconditional--for that is not the way we standardly understand sufficient conditions.

Hopefully the direct parallel with Boghossian's claim is clear. I certainly agree that his 'truism' quoted above is true. However, when a logical truth--which, as Carnap and Quine agree is a paradigmatic case of analytic truth (if there are any)--is substituted for p in his schema, then that instance of the truism will have (almost) exactly the form of the second biconditional (2). Then, in the usual sense of 'sufficient condition,' we will have a case in which (contra Boghossian) an instance of 'S means that p' is sufficient for 'S is true.' To say otherwise, we would have to give up either classical logic (specifically, the idea that (2) follows from (1)) or the usual understanding of sufficient conditions.

However, one could object that neither classical logic nor our standard view of sufficient conditions is sacrosanct. I think there are reasonable replies to these objections (telegraphically: for whatever non-classical logic you choose, you can substitute some other logical truth for 'r only if r' in (2) above, and the point carries); but I'll leave matters here since this post is too long already.

Comments and criticism from any angle are very welcome, but what I personally go back adn forth on with the above argument is whether it's a 'cheap point' or not... superficial logic-chopping, or genuine insight?

Can a widespread local realist be a global anti-realist?--and the preface paradox

2007-11-19T15:10:00.002-08:00

I have been thinking about whether there might be something like the preface paradox in the scientific realism debates. There is now a distinction being drawn between local (or 'retail') realism, in which one argues for the truth of particular scientific theories (e.g. quantum mechanics) or the existence of particular scientific entities (e.g. quarks), on the one hand, and global (or 'wholesale') realism, in which one argues for the approximate truth (or referential success) of mature scientific theories in general.

What I'm wondering is whether it can be justified and/or rational to be an everywhere local realist (so QM is approximately true, and general relativity is approximately true, and population genetics is (approximately) true, etc.), but still be a global anti-realist -- say, because you place a lot of weight on the pessimistic induction on the history of science. Or, on the other hand, whether everywhere local realism really pushes us towards global realism.

I'm currently guessing that one CAN be an everywhere local realist without being a global one, for the following two reasons.
(1) One standard response to the preface paradox seems perhaps even more applicable here than in the preface case: while the author assigns a high probability to each individual assertion in her book, the probability of (p & q & r & ...) will be low.
(2) Also, although if A is true and B is true, then 'A and B' must be true, it seems to me that even if A is approximately true and B is approximately true, then 'A and B' need not be approximately true, for A and B could be contradictory (for example, the prima facie conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity).

I'm happy to hear any reasons for the opposite view, viz. that widespread local realism pushes us towards global realism.

Azzouni and existential commitment in science

2007-11-12T09:40:00.001-08:00

Last week Jody Azzouni was here to give a pair of talks: one about scientific theories, another about his view that English is inconsistent in a pretty radical way: Every sentence is both true and false. They were both a lot of fun, and Jody is a great interlocutor -- he kept both presentations relatively short and to the point to there'd be more time for questions and clarifications. I also have a soft spot for arguments defending unpopular ideas -- though I usually side with the orthodoxy, incredible ideas are often a bit more interesting to think about.

In the philosophy of science talk, Jody was building on his work on what he calls "thick epistemic access." His argument was that we should not (contra Quinean orthodoxy) have existential committment to all the posits of our current best scientific theory, but rather only those posits to which we have thick epistemic access. (See e.g. Kenny's post here for a quick but accurate description of thick v. thin v. ultrathin posits.)

I was wondering, however, whether the Quinean orthodoxy could be undermined in a more direct way that does not involve developing a whole epistemological apparatus to distinguish when we really do have strong evidence that such-and-such thing exists. (Such a question is certainly philosophically interesting and worthwhile, but it is likely to be complex and contentious in places.) Rather, I thought a simpler argument against the Quinean orthodoxy could go as follows:
Science is rife with idealizations -- some of which are ineliminable/ indispensible. But no one should be committed to such idealizations, since they are (almost by definition) deliberate and conscious falsifications in our theoretical account of the world. So existential commitment does not follow our best theories as well as Quine would like.

I realize that (1) there may sometimes be a legitimate question about whether a given bit of a theory is an idealization or not, but that just shows the term 'idealization' is vague -- all parties agree there is some idealization in science, even if they don't agree on every case. Also, (2) most examples of idealizations are not entities, but rather inaccurate properties (e.g., treating some body that we know to exist, like a point particle: we give an inaccurate description of the thing's dimensions). So maybe pointing out the widespread use of idealization will not create widespread problems for the Quinean orthodoxy.

Why no 'scientific wisdom'?

2007-11-08T17:01:00.000-08:00

Why do people often talk about 'scientific knowledge,' but we virtually never hear of scientific wisdom? Is there something about the content or practices of science that precludes them from counting as wisdom? After all, if ‘wisdom’ means something in the neighborhood of 'deep, important, or fundamental knowledge,' it seems (to me at least) that science should be a paradigm case of wisdom.

Is this merely a linguistic quirk that bears no relation to the relationship between the nature of science and the nature of wisdom? Or does the fact that we rarely—if ever—speak of 'scientific wisdom' reveal something important? Here's a reason for thinking the latter.

Science provides instrumental reasons for action only, not categorical ones: If you want to build a nuclear bomb, then the atomic theory of matter will be an extremely useful tool in designing the weapon. It is no part of physics—or any other of the (paradigmatic?) (natural?) sciences—to say whether you should build a bomb or not. Science does not inform us as to what should be valued for its own sake, and not merely as a means to some further end (though e.g. sociology could inform us what is in fact valued). The information provided by science only helps us acquire those things we already value. This is closely related, if not identical, to the old saw that science tells us about facts, and says nothing about values. Wisdom, in contrast, is thought to involve knowledge of what should be valued for its own sake (as well as how best to achieve those ends). That is, wisdom can offer categorical reasons, whereas science provides instrumental ones only.

The literature on the relationship between science and values is both vast and contentious. However, I do not know of anyone who says that the content of theories in natural science includes claims about what is valuable for its own sake. (I could be oblivious and/or uninformed about this; I'm no expert in this sub-field.) It may be that the scientific ethos includes e.g. valuing truth over personal gain, but that’s not part of the general theory of relativity.

So now we have a reason why no one says 'scientific wisdom'—science is silent on what is valuable for its own sake, whereas wisdom requires this information.

proxy bleg for a textbook

2007-10-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

A post by request: one of my colleagues will be teaching a course for philosophy majors called "Contemporary Philosophy" focusing on what is current in the discipline now. Does anyone know of any good textbooks/anthologies that would work well for such a course?

antimeta in the house

2007-10-22T15:02:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite bloggers, Kenny of Antimeta, was in Vegas last weekend and gave an interesting talk on philosophy of mathematics to our department. His basic aim was to find criteria that separated probabilistic proofs from other proofs (including, hopefully, proof sketches and computer-aided proofs). I'm not going to discuss that directly here.

I'm interested in a related claim Kenny made: that in mathematics, a theorem will be accepted only if the proof does not (he put it variously) appeal to authority/ depend on the reliability of other people/ rely on the testimony of others. That is, for a specialist in the field, they should be able to start out as serious skeptics of the theorem's truth, but end up at the close of the proof as believers. The contrast with experimental science is pretty clear: even specialists in a sub-field of experimental science have to trust (to some degree) the experimental reports of their fellow-workers, or the field would grind to a halt.

Question: Is there such a thing as mathematical fraud, of the sort we hear about periodically in experimental science? If not, that fact looks like evidence for Kenny's distinction being important and robust (since fraud is much harder in the absence of trust).

Comment 1: Some of the posters on FOM endorse Kenny's idea to the extreme: someone suggested that Fermat's Last Theorem will not really be proved until it is written in a way that average mathematics PhDs (whoever that is) can work through it themselves. I don't think Kenny wants to say anything nearly that strong, but the fact that such a strong position exists is a sign that the sentiment Kenny claims to discern really is there in the mathematics community.

Comment 2: At the end of the talk, Kenny suggested that philosophy may be closer to mathematics than experimental science in this regard. He may be right, but one thing that distinguishes philosophy from math in this regard is that in philosophy far more than in mathematics, one person's modus ponens is another person's modus tollens. This is just a direct result of mathematical axioms' being widely accepted throughout the mathematical community, whereas philosophers will challenge any premise, no matter how obvious or fruitful.

Yet another way to think about Quine's critique of Carnap

2007-10-15T12:06:00.001-07:00

Several of the blog entries here have been about the Quine-Carnap debate over the status of analytic truth. Generally, I don't feel the force of Quine's arguments as they are usually presented, either because his interpretation of Carnap is unfair or inaccurate, or the arguments just aren't that persuasive. Multiple commentators on the Quine-Carnap debate have suggested that the two are 'talking past each other,' at least to some degree. So, I am constantly trying to find a way to make Quine's view make sense to me, AND simultaneously really disagree with Carnap. This seems like installment 19 or so in that endeavor.

Carnap and Quine agree that language can be studied at various levels of abstraction. Using Carnap's taxonomy, we start at the level of pragmatics, where we study how individual speakers use expressions under particular circumstances. This level contains the most detail: speakers, their circumstances, plus the meanings of the words for particular speakers under particular circumstances. At the next, more abstract level, we have semantics, which abstracts away from particular speakers and particular circumstances. And at the highest level, we have syntax, which abstracts away the meanings of words, leaving just the symbols, the way they are put together, and which strings follow from others.

In each transition from pragmatics to semantics to syntax, some information about language is omitted/ discarded. (Like the move from Euclidean geometry to neutral geometry, which drops the parallel postulate.) Now, we can conceive of Quine's indeterminacy of meaning thesis (the radical translation thought experiment) as critiquing Carnap in the following way: Carnap is importing or introducing new information at the semantic level, because the semantic facts Carnap includes in a semantically-characterized language [a "semantic system"] cannot be 'read off' even the information contained at the pragmatic level. The analogy in the geometry case shows why this is clearly an unacceptable maneuver. It would be: thinking that there exists some claim that could be proved in neutral geometry (= Euclid's first four postulates only) but couldn't be proved in Euclidean geometry.

This may not be Quine's actual worry; his concern may stem from the fact that applied semantics (or whatever branch of language study) underdetermines pure semantics (or whatever). However, Carnap is perfectly happy to accept that claim: Creath says this is why Carnap's copy of Word and Object Ch.2 (Indeterminacy of Translation) has no marginalia. [But how does the geometry analogy fare here? Would Carnap admit that applied geometry underdetermines pure geometry? My guess is yes; and that that's not so bad...

Is arithmetic empirical?

2007-10-10T14:52:00.001-07:00

One of the questions I've been wanting to think about (in part because of my interest in the Quine-Carnap relationship) but haven't really got around to yet is: Is there any important sense in which arithmetic is empirical? I know there is some good literature on the subject, but I've thus far only perused it without really digging into it.

For me, one consideration that makes me think it might not be crazy to think of arithmetic as empirical is what happened with geometry and general relativity. If Einstein can show that the space in which we live is non-Euclidean, isn't it at least imaginable that some future scientist will show us that the 'true' arithmetic of our physical world is non-classical (which I suppose means: it does not obey the Peano axioms). [There could still be a mathematical structure that obeys classical arithmetic, just as Euclidean space is still a mathematical object that obeys all five of Euclid's axioms.]

However, I've always had a hard time imagining what possible observation could cast doubt on classical arithmetic. In last week's Science, there's a report that at least might merit consideration as a candidate. Researchers found that if you add one photon to a light beam and then take one away, you observe a different end-state than if you reverse the order of operations, i.e., first remove one and then add one. In other words, x + 1 - 1 does not equal x - 1 + 1. Even stranger, the authors find that "under certain conditions, the removal of a photon from a light field can lead to an increase in the mean number of photons in that light field," that is, (roughly) that x-1>x. The summary and background for non-specialists is here, and the full technical report is here (both behind subscription walls).

Now, this effect depends on the failure of commutation relations ubiquitous in quantum mechanics, so it is quite possible that this in no sense makes arithmetic look empirical. But I'm not 100% sure about that. Any thoughts?

Logic job at Alberta

2007-09-26T11:37:00.001-07:00

From my man at the University of Alberta, Ingo Brigandt, comes news of a logic job in his department:

The Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, invites applications for a tenure-track position in Philosophy, with a specialization in Logic. Other areas of research and teaching specialization and competence are open. The appointment will be made at the rank of Assistant Professor, effective July 1, 2008. Responsibilities include undergraduate and graduate teaching and maintaining an active research programme. Tenure stream faculty normally teach four one term courses per year. Candidates should hold a PhD in Philosophy and provide evidence of scholarly and teaching excellence. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience, and the benefit package is comprehensive. Applicants should arrange to send a letter of application indicating the position applied for and describing areas of research interest, curriculum vitae, all university transcripts, a sample of written work, letters from three referees, and, if available, a teaching dossier and teaching evaluations to Bruce Hunter, Chair, Logic Search, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA, T6G 2E5. CLOSING DATE: November 10, 2007. The University of Alberta hires on the basis of merit. We are committed to the principle of equity in employment. We welcome diversity and encourage applications from all qualified women and men, including persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities, and Aboriginal persons. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority. For further information concerning the Department, please consult http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/philosophy/.

Ingo also tells me that Alberta will be advertising a postdoc and an open Associate professor position this year, so all you Oilers fans should start polishing your CVs.

Haslanger on conceptual analysis and social construction

2007-09-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

Last Friday we were lucky enough to have Sally Haslanger visit. She gave a lecture that was open to (and aimed at) the general public, called "But mom, crop-tops are cute! The Social Critique of Social Knowledge". We also basically had a seminar on some of her recent work on social constructionism and the metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics of social kinds, where we peppered her with questions and she enlightened us. We also talked a fair amount about the current deplorable level of sexism in academic philosophy. (Her recent paper on this topic has generated a good deal of discussion, and I, like much of the rest of the philosophical blogosphere, can unequivocally recommend it.)

One thing that I especially like about her work is that she takes the basic ideas of social constructionism and (re-?)formulates them in a way that is much more palatable to analytic philosophers. I always felt some basic affinity for the social constructionist project, yet oftentimes the way it is couched by sociologists, anthropologists, social historians, etc. either confuses me or seems just a bit too crazy. She translates good bits into the idiom of current Anglophone philosophy in a very helpful way.

An example: Social constructionists might say that our conceptual scheme forces us into ways of thinking and acting that is often opaque to ourselves; that our concepts somehow create an illusory false consciousness that 'masks' their true nature. Haslanger has a nice way of thinking about such an idea that (I think) makes sense to an analytic philosopher. How can we misunderstand our own concepts? She says we should distinguish between the manifest concept, which is (roughly) captured by the dictionary definition an ordinary language-user would give, and the operative concept, which is (roughly) captured by the way the community in question actually draws distinctions/ applies the concept in practice. As an example of where these two things pull apart, she suggests race: the 'ordinary' person's definition of race will include some sort of biological (or at least broadly physical/ natural) component; yet the way we actually classify people as white, black, etc. actually does not track some single shared genetic -- or even biological -- trait. So now we have (to my mind) a clean account of where the 'illusion' or 'opacity' comes in: the operative concept will be used in the vast majority of everyday life, but when we consciously reflect on what we're doing (specifically, what distinction we are drawing), then the manifest concept takes the leading role.

What should we do when the manifest and operative concepts split apart like this? Haslanger does not want to say that we should always opt for one over the other as somehow the real meaning. Rather, she says, when we have this mismatch, that creates an opportunity to re-think the question 'What, exactly, do we want this concept for? -- What function (if any) do we want this concept to serve in our thinking?' And here we have a third concept, which she calls the 'target concept.' And here is where the normative aspects of ideology critique can appear: what should this concept be? (Note: we do not need a mismatch between operative and manifest concepts in order to ask about the target concept -- but the presence of a conflict generates a desire for a resolution, and the target concept holds out the promise of resolving the conflict between the operative and manifest concepts.)

I'm pretty sure I haven't captured Sally's ideas in exactly the way she would put them, but I hope I'm not horribly far off. If this is in the ballpark, I'm wondering about a couple of things concerning this tripartite picture:

(1) Are there really ethical ways to sort entities and unethical ones? Just creating a set with a certain group of members does not seem to me like the kind of thing that can be moral or immoral. Of course, classifications can be used to commit horrible injustices – insert any oppressed group here for an example. But, I want to say, just as the atomic theory of matter is not really ethically good or bad in itself, though it can be used to build an atomic bomb which can be used to commit ethical atrocities, the act of classification is not good or bad in itself (even though it may be a necessary precondition for injustice – or reparation). [I should note that after her talk, Sally did mention that she had thought a lot about whether the normative dimension of ideology critique should be separated from the conceptual analysis part; so this remark would be no news to her.]

(2) This is my being thick, I think. I’m having trouble seeing how exactly the idea of ideology (as studied by people in the social sciences) maps onto Haslanger’s tripartite conceptual scheme. Why? Because ideology (when it’s working ‘well’) is “implicit” knowledge, i.e., it is taken for granted and deployed without even noticing that we are using it, only semiconsciously or unconsciously. When it is articulated explicitly, it ceases to be as effective. So that sounds like it maps onto the ‘operative concept.’ But e.g. in the case of race, a social constructionist or an eliminativist about race wants to say the idea of race being biologically grounded is a key part of racial ideology – but that is the ‘manifest concept.’ So maybe ideology doesn’t map neatly onto Haslanger’s conceptual classifications, but I got the sense that she wanted it to.

It was great having Sally here. She is as rigorous and uncompromising an analytical philosopher as you could hope to meet, but she actually works on things that matter to people’s lives. So she really should be a model to the philosophical community.

Out of Africa

2007-09-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

I came back from Africa just in time for the new school term. To my pleasant surprise, we have returned uneaten by the wildlife, and (apparently) uninfected by any of the various diseases that the guidebooks said were rampant in sub-Saharan Africa.

I had hoped that spending over a month working in (first) rural schools and (second) refugee camps, that I would have some sort of insight or revelation about circumstances in the developing world, or the proper relationship affluent Western people and countries should have with developing areas. Or some epiphany about globalization etc. No such luck. I met many people who were very smart, very kind and generous, and very funny. I worked on some very small projects with some of these folks. I miss them now. But no deep enlightenment about the difficult conditions of the majority of the world's inhabitants.

I also didn't have any real thoughts about philosophical stuff; just one little note that I might try to incorporate into an intro to political philosophy class. So one issue that comes up in political philosophy 101 in the debate between Hobbes and Locke is whether it is worse to live in the state of nature, or under a dictator. Hobbes says the former is worse, Locke the latter. I always thought this was an important question in the dialectic between the two, but answering it seemed difficult to impossible -- how could you really decide?

Well, during the 50 hours or so I spent riding travel buses in Zambia, I read a great book by Martin Meredith, called The State of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence. It was perfect for an ignoramus like me: not too much detail, but still plenty of concrete material. And the history of the last several decades in Africa makes Locke's answer to the above question look prima facie pretty good. The large majority of the strongmen were absolutely brutal to citizens, and not just people who "got on the dictator's bad side" -- you could be from the wrong tribe; you could have starvation-inducing taxes levied upon you; as we see in Zimbabwe today, your currency could be massively devalued to the point of worthlessness. If you have a problem, then you are killed -- horrifically -- along with your friends and family. In the state of nature, you at least have a chance of overpowering your neighbor; but imagine if, in a Hobbesian state of nature, God gave one person the power of throwing deadly lightning bolts at will... that's what a strongman's presence is like. And as e.g. Mobutu's power in the DRC waned, and his paramilitary power dwindled, you no longer have a capricious and wrathful Zeus hanging over your head. (Though then another strongman, Kabila, fills the void, backed by neighboring countries, and horrors continue.)

I say this is prima facie evidence, because I think a Hobbesian could conceivably retort that as the strongman's ability to throw thunderbolts decreases, some other social entity steps in to take his place, so that the people are not in the state of nature. But this is all just my amateurish speculation; I am certainly not an expert in early modern British political philosophy.

Off to Africa, and 2nd birthday

2007-07-02T17:10:00.000-07:00

This blog turns two years old today. I'm only averaging about two and a half posts per month, and certainly fewer than that this year. I'm finding myself spending more time on polishing up articles (and a book), and less on writing about brand-new, half-baked ideas better suited for a blog dedicated to obscurity and confusion.

Posting will be even lighter over the next 7 weeks or so, since my wife and I are headed to Zambia under the auspices of a couple of non-profits that she works with: FORGE, which works in refugee camps, and Project Educate, which aims to improve educational, medical, and other infrastructure in western Zambia. We're looking forward to the trip with a lot of anticipation, but a bit of trepidation too, since neither of us have ever been to Africa.

And many, many thanks to the folks who have provided feedback on the book manuscript. I am in your debt. If anyone wants a copy WITH the archival material appendix, please email me. I can't put it on the web, because the Archive from which it comes maintains control over it. This updated version also was my first sustained undertaking with LaTeX, so there are still typographic kinks in it.

Help me write a book

2007-05-10T16:36:00.001-07:00

This post falls under the category of "shameless begging." I am in the later stages of writing a book (based on my dissertation) called Carnap, Quine, and Tarski's Year Together. The plan is to send the manuscript to the publisher in about two months, i.e. very early July. Between then and now, the only thing I'm working on is the book.

I need your help with this. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, large or small, on the manuscript. It definitely needs to be looked at by a fresh set of eyes (preferably attached to a clever mind, but I'll take what I can get). The manuscript can be downloaded, as a 1MB Word file, here.

Thanks in advance to anyone who lends a hand. In my limited experience, the greater the number of people who tear apart something I've written, the better the final product is.

Can a sentence without a truth-value ever be approximately true?

2007-04-19T13:58:00.001-07:00

I am curious to hear people's thoughts on the question in the title. There has been a lot of philosophical work done on the idea that a sentence can be strictly speaking false, yet nonetheless approximately true (or 'truthlike' or 'verisimilar'). For example: I am 5'11", but if someone said 'Greg is 6 feet tall,' we want to say that that claim is approximately true or something like that. But what if the claim was (strictly speaking) neither true nor false? (Readers may insert their own favorite truth-valueless sentence here.)

I ask because, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm toying with the idea that the Pessimistic Induction over the history of science plus something like Kuhnian incommensurability (esp. untranslatability) will lead us not to the conclusion that current science is likely to be false, but rather is likely to lack a truth-value. For if we cannot translate the claims of a pre-revolutionary language into the post-revolutionary one, then the pre-revolutionary language (from our current point of view) is truth-valueless, not false.

I ask the question in the title because one common realist response to the Pessimistic induction is: "Well, yes, our current scientific theories are probably not exactly true, but they are approximately true." If truth-valueless sentences cannot be approximately true, then this response is not available to the realist.