Edison and philosophical progress

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

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

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

Looking for places to send your manuscript?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.