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

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

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.

bad pun alert (illustrated)

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

Existential questions in Google auto-complete

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?

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

A sign that the apocalypse might not be imminent.

(HT: Emily Nacol)

Creighton Club meeting

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

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'

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

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.