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.
9/22/2008
9/05/2008
Chmess in the pages of Science
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.
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.
9/01/2008
Are scientific theories full of truth-value gaps?
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.
(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.
8/10/2008
Am I in a fictional character's address book?
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.
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.
8/08/2008
The advantages of theft over an honest post
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.
7/17/2008
Are offprints obsolete?
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.
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.
7/10/2008
Are truth-value gluts necessary to avoid explosion?
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.
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.
7/07/2008
In Praise of Graham Priest's Intro to Non-Classical Logic
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.
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.
7/01/2008
committing armchairs to the flames
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.
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.
6/28/2008
HOPOS 2008
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.
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.
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