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.

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

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

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.

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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?)


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* 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.