Help me write a book

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.

Off to the Pacfic APA

I'll be at the APA in San Francisco from this Wednesday til Saturday afternoon; I'm be commenting on a paper by Barry Ward on the paradox of confirmation (a.k.a. the Ravens paradox).

So if you're there, and you want to catch up/ chat/ harrass me etc., please track me down.

Now broadcasting from the desert

I have not posted in a long time -- I've been busy with my move from Pittsburgh to Las Vegas, and with all the craziness that attends moving cross-country and starting your life over. But we are starting to settle in, so blogging may pick up again soon.

Several months ago, Doug Patterson asked me if I could contribute something to a volume he's editing for OUP called Alfred Tarski: Philosophical Background, Development, and Influence. I was honored, since many of the other contributors breathe rarified logico-philosophical air, so I cobbled an article together out of various bits of my dissertation. I now have a draft of the paper, boringly entitled "Tarski's Nominalism," and I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback from interested readers. To help you determine whether you are an 'interested reader,' I've cut-and-pasted a bit of the intro:
"This essay aims to answer three related questions about Tarski's self-described 'nominalism with a materialistic taint' through an examination of Carnap’s 1941 dictation notes. First, what is Tarski’s view? Second, what are the rationales for his view? Finally, how does Tarski attempt to reconcile his nominalist philosophical scruples with mathematics, since mathematics deals with paradigmatically abstract objects, such as numbers and sets, whose rejection is a standard sine qua non of modern nominalism?"

As a brand-new Pitt HPS alumnus, I wanted to sing the praises of a couple members of the incoming class. First, Jonah Schupbach, of Berkeley, Bacon, & Bird blog-fame, just had a paper published in Philosophy of Science on one of my favorite topics, the evidential and explanatory role of unification in science. And Jason Byron (nee Baker) has written an article, forthcoming in BJPS, that argues for a point that I became convinced of while doing work for my dissertation. Just to get a sense for what the logical empiricists were thinking about in 1940, I flipped through a few journals from the 1930s that they were reading and publishing in, especially Erkenntnis and Synthese. I was very surprised to find that there were lots of articles on philosophical details related to biology -- some of them dealing rather closely with the science. This was surprising because the usual story among current philosophers of biology is that philosophy of science completely (or almost completely) ignored biology until the late 60s. Jason has now done the detailed spade-work needed to substantiate that impression I had.

Happy birthday

This blog started one year ago today. Blogging has actually been a more rewarding experience than I expected, mostly because it's put me in contact with smart and interesting folks (in both cyberspace and meatspace) that I otherwise would not have met. It's repeatedly been extremely helpful to hear other people's reactions to what's bouncing around inside my head.

I'm not sure what the future holds for Obscure and Confused Ideas. On the one hand, I start my first academic job in just under 2 months, and everyone tells me that the first year is pretty brutal -- so if anything is squeezed out by time pressures, it might be blogging. On the other hand, it'll be the first time in seven years that I won't be surrounded by 30 or so other people interested in history and philosophy of science, so I may have to bounce my ideas off the online community instead of my current offline community. We'll see.

Just so this post contains something other than insufferable self-absorption, I'm linking to a Colloquium Bingo game card, produced by the grad students at Johns Hopkins's Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. And one other thing: I was looking over the Experimental Philosophy blog again recently, and was filled with a mixture of admiration and envy -- for it looks to an outsider like me that they really have a genuine online research community there. People post new papers-in-progress, which are given careful and serious feedback my several people, and the authors engage in a substantive conversation about their work. It appears to be a model of what people wish the web would do -- link up people, in a real and almost intimate way, separated by thousands of miles. I wonder why Experimental Philosophy has succeeded here, while other blogs with the same basic idea (for example, Philosophy of Biology, which has apparently disappeared) have not done as well.

That's Doctor Obscure and Confused, to you

Yesterday I defended my dissertation. I wanted to thank, in this very small but nonetheless public space, all the folks here who helped me along with the dissertation: John Earman and Nuel Belnap, who served on my committee, Tom Ricketts, who unfortunately joined the Pittsburgh department a little too late to be on my official committee, but still read dissertation chapters with a fine-toothed comb, and talked to me about them -- and job-market issues -- for hours, Steve Awodey, who not only discussed Carnap with me innumerable times, but also helped me in the process of professionalization and acculturation into the circle of philosophers who study Carnap seriously, and finally my advisor, Laura Ruetsche, who not only gave me searching, insightful, and helpful comments at myriad points in the development of the dissertation project, but also helping me through the occasionally-panic-inducing job search process.

So, thanks to all -- I feel very lucky to have had the final years of my grad school career shaped by you. I hope other PhD students are as fortunate as I have been.

Want a job? Come to Pitt HPS

As some of you know, I am in the last stages (throes?) of my PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh, in the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) department. For those who are not familiar with it, the department is relatively small: there are usually about 8-9 faculty whose primary appointment is in HPS, and about 30 or so graduate students.

In an average year, 1 to 3 people from my department go on the job market, and the department has had a very good placement record since I've been here: everyone who graduated from the program has gotten a tenure-track job, either straight out of grad school or after a 1-2 year post-doc. But this year, we had ten people go on the market, eight of them (myself included) for the first time. There was a lot of hand-wringing and worry, by students and faculty alike, about having so many HPS people on the market at one time. The demand for folks like us, who prove theorems in the foundations of quantum gravity or trace out the technical development of Galileo's kinematic theory, is just not as high as for people who work in ethics or epistemology.

I am now happy to report that all ten people have found good positions: 8 people are beginning tenure-track jobs, and the other two are taking enviable post-doc positions (including filling fellow-blogger Gillian Russell's old spot as Killiam fellow). I won't give the list of where everyone is headed, since I haven't asked their permission to broadcast that information to the three people who read this blog. But I grant myself permission to announce that I will be starting next fall as an assistant professor at UNLV (the University of Nevada-Las Vegas). It's a great position for me, in a department full of smart, sensible, and funny people. I'll probably blog in more detail soon about why I'm so excited about it -- but for starters, it was 70 degrees when I visited in January!

UPDATE: The Killam Fellow mentioned above will have a tenure-track position, though it is not yet determined where he will be yet. So 9 of 10 will start tenure-track jobs.

A job candidate at the APA

I just returned to Pittsburgh from the American Philosophical Association meeting, where I had job interviews and gave a talk. This was my first trip to the APA, and many people had painted for me a picture of it as red in tooth and claw. There was a fair amount of anxiety in the air, but that's to be expected when 600 or so job-seekers are stuffed into a cage (I'm making up the number 600; there may have been more). But the whole affair was less psychologically traumatic than I had expected -- it was good to see old friends, all my interviews led to interesting and enlightening conversations (I never felt like I was being 'grilled,' much less attacked), and I met people I had only previously known in blogospheric form.

There was one difficulty with the conference that I did not expect: it was physically exhausting. I remember one faculty member who, a few months ago, advised job-seekers not to apply to every single job that they could, on the grounds that you don't want to have too many interviews at the APA. "Too many interviews?" -- I thought -- "How can you have too many?" Well, that person was right. I had a hard time keeping up my energy and focus for the interviews I had, and some people in my department had many more than me... I don't know how they did it.

I expect blogging to remain light here for the next couple of months, since I'm now entering the final stage of the job search process.

promotion of self and others

If any readers are going to be at the American Philosophical Association meeting this week in NYC, and want to see some obscure and confused ideas incarnate, I'll be presenting Friday morning (the 30th) at 9AM. It's a philosophical logic paper; you can preview it here.

Also, I noticed two brand-new blogs of potential interest: The Hedgehog Review, covering the early modern period, and Boundaries of Language, dealing with (you guessed it) philosophy of language.