History of Philosophy of Science at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting?

I'm currently trying to figure out what, if anything, I should submit for the 2012 PSA. I was thinking of sending in a paper on Carnap, but then I had a look at the Program Committee (here's the list), and 0 of the 20 people on the committee work primarily in history of philosophy of science. Furthermore, at the last PSA (see here), there were zero papers in HOPOS -- though there was one HOPOS person on the Program Committee then. I remember that there were HOPOS papers at PSA's in the recent past (I'm certain there was a HOPOS session at the 2004 meeting, because I presented).

Although I'm mildly curious about why HOPOS has apparently dropped off the PSA's radar, I guess the more immediate question for me is whether I should bother submitting the Carnap paper.

A datum on the reception of the 'Verifiability Criterion of Meaning'

One of my pet views about logical empiricism is that the verifiability criterion of meaning, for those who actually espoused some version of it (as opposed to attributed it to someone else), often does not mean exactly what the average professional philosopher in 2011 thinks it means.

I just stumbled across a new data point that suggests the reception of the verifiability criterion was more accurate than the straw-man version popular today. Here's Susan Stebbing, in 1933's "Logical Positivism and Analysis":

A proposition is understood only if it is verifiable; it is verifiable if, and only if, we know the conditions under which the proposition would be true, and the conditions under which it is false.(p.13)

Just as Carnap says in "Overcoming Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language," the meaning of a sentence is given by its truth-conditions. (One cannot be a complete revolutionary about the verifiability principle: the texts rule that out. Discussions of observations appear in treatments of the verifiability principle--these 'truth-conditions' are often further articulated as something like 'sets of possible experiences,' where 'possible' is taken very broadly.)

A new kind of semantics for confusion

(There's a decent amount of set-up/ review in this post, before I reach the main point -- the new idea comes in the 4th paragraph.) I took a grad seminar with Joe Camp on the topic of confusion 8 years ago, and have been thinking on-and-off about it ever since. Camp illustrates the phenomenon with the example of Fred, who buys an ant colony. At the time of purchase, Fred is told that there is one big ant in the colony, and a bunch of smaller ones. Unbeknownst to Fred, however, there are actually two big ants in his colony (we'll call them 'Ant A' and 'Ant B'). Fred says to himself "I'm going to call the big ant in my colony 'Charley'." Fred then goes on to say various sentences including the word 'Charley,' and to make various inferences involving such sentences.

The questions that most interest me about confusion concern truth and consequence: 1. What truth-value, if any, should we assign to such sentences? (Think about 'Charley is an ant', Charley is not an ant,' or 'Charley=Charley'.) 2. How should we make sense of logical consequence in languages containing 'Charley' and similar words? (Think about: 'Everything is an ant; thus Charley is an ant', 'Charley is a big ant; thus there is a big ant,' and 'Charley is an ant; thus Charley exists').

For people who don't want to say that every atomic sentence containing 'Charley' is false, or is truth-valueless, the (apparently?) most common strategy is to use a supervaluational strategy: 'Charley is an ant' is true, because it is true on every disambiguation: 'Ant A is an ant' is true, and so is 'Ant B is an ant'. The same goes for 'Charley=Charley.' For logical consequence, there are two ways we could go: 'local' or 'global', in the jargon current in recent work on the logic of vagueness. The 'global' option: If every premise is true on every complete disambiguation, then the conclusion is true on every complete disambiguation. The 'local' option: for every complete disambiguation, if all the premises are true, then so is the conclusion. (If an argument is locally valid, then it's globally valid, but not conversely.)

So here's my new idea: what if, instead of using supervaluations (which were initially introduced in the 60's to handle empty names), could we instead use something like the other main contender for the model theory of empty names, usually called 'inner domain-outer domain' semantics? In this semantics, extra entities are added to the 'outer domain,' which serve as the referents for empty names (such as 'Santa Claus'). But the quantifiers only range over the 'inner domain,' in which all the objects exist. So 'Santa exists' will be false.

The idea to try an inner domain-outer domain semantics for confused terms resulted from re-reading Krista Lawlor's "A Notional Worlds Approach to Confusion." She objects to the supervaluational approach, because "[i]n supervaluing, we give up on understanding the confused belief." Why?

Fred’s ontological commitments involve one big ant (‘Charley’), not two. Our assignment of truth and falsity to Fred’s beliefs rests on our ontology, not Fred’s. We evaluate Fred’s beliefs for how far they might lead us astray, by our lights. In a very clear sense we give up on understanding Fred, in favor of using him, we might say, as an instrument (and a not-too-well-calibrated one at that), for detecting the facts as we understand them. (p.153)

I don't know yet whether I agree with this argument. But I do think it's a plausible argument, and thus it is worth trying to devise a type of formal semantics that respects the idea behind it. If there were one object in the outer domain that is the referent of 'Charley,' perhaps we have not 'given up on understanding' Fred's belief.

The obvious next question is: what are these individuals in the outer domain? Which one is the referent of 'Charley'? The short answer is 'I don't know,' but I think there have to be some constraints on this individual, related to Ant A and Ant B's properties (this would be a difference with the old inner/outer domain semantics for empty names -- there, the inner-domain individuals do not themselves impose constraints on the outer-domain individuals). Ruth Garrett Millikan describes confused concepts as "amalgams" of distinct concepts; so could we somehow make the individual in the outer domain associated with the name 'Charley' an amalgam of Ant A and Ant B? But what would such an amalgamated individual be (or: 'How should we model such an amalgamated individual in this formal semantics')? First-thought candidates include the set {Ant A, Ant B}, or the mereological fusion of Ant A and Ant B, but neither of those seem obviously right. Obviously, I'm just at the very beginning of thinking about this, and any thoughts would be very appreciated.

Carnap's FBI files

Carnap's FBI file is available on the web:

http://vault.fbi.gov/Rudolph%20Carnap/

Thanks to Chris Wüthrich for the tip.

Ethical disagreement and ethical anti-realism

For one of my classes, I've been reading John Doris and Stephen Stich's Stanford Encyclopedia article "Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches," and in particular the section "Moral Disagreement". They offer the following argument against moral realism/ moral objectivity (they use both terms):

(P1) If morality is objective, then [all?] moral disagreements will decrease over time.
(P2) Many moral disagreements do not decrease over time.
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Thus, morality is not objective.

In support of (P2), they point to Nisbett's interesting findings about differences between non-latino whites in the Southern U.S. vs. in the Northern U.S. on the subject of when and to what extent force is justified. Very roughly, Southerners think violence is warranted and excusable in a wider range of cases than Northerners (if you aren't familiar with Nisbett's data on this, it's fascinating; Doris and Stich do a great job of summarizing and explaining it). Another example in support of (P2) is that Western Europeans and East Asians respond (on average) differently to the 'magistrate and the mob' thought-experiment: Westerners are more likely to say that an innocent man should be set free, even if setting him free leads to a riot killing many people. Their final example is Hopi attitudes about harming animals.

Doris and Stich recognize that most realists will direct their criticisms at (P1): disagreement can persist because people are selfish, biased, or unaware of certain things -- but if we were all disinterested, unbiased, and fully informed, then disagreements would eventually vanish.

I was wondering about another type of reaction to their argument. I wonder whether we could say that, for some moral disagreements, there is a fact of the matter about whether one side is right and the other wrong, whereas for other moral disagreements, there is no fact of the matter about which side is correct.

Perhaps this is conceptually incoherent, and a 'sometimes objective, sometimes not' position is unworkable. But I think it is intuitively appealing in some other cases, such as athletic merit. For example, think about the question 'Who is the best baseball player in the world?' I think it's defensible to say that there is no fact of the matter about this question. There will be a fact of the matter for various more specific questions, like which professional player had the most home runs this year. But since different players have different strengths and weaknesses, and because there are different demands on different positions, there is no fact of the matter as to which one person is the best player. However, there is a fact of the matter about whether Albert Pujols is a better baseball player than I am.

What's going on here? It seems to me that there are a number of dimensions or variables we use when evaluating a baseball player. At the most coarse-grained level, these variables would be the ability to hit, throw, and field. Now, Pujols is much better than I am at all three; that is why he is better than me period. But if one person is not better than the other on all three, then it will matter how we weight the different variables, and (I'm thinking) that there is no fact of the matter as to the unique correct weighting of the various variables.

It could be that something similar is going on in the three ethical examples of disagreement Doris and Stich present. In each of these three, there are various ethical principles in play, that could be weighted differently, and there is no fact of the matter as to exactly which weighting is the right one. In the case of the Magistrate and the Mob, utilitarian (and/or communitarian) principles conflict with a fairness principle. Now, everybody agrees that other things being equal, we should not punish the innocent, or choose a greater harm over a lesser harm. But those two ceteris paribus principles conflict in this case.

Perhaps a similar (if not identical) account could be given in the Northerner/ Southerner case: most people agree that most transgressions should be punished. But which transgressions, exactly? -- And how much punishment, exactly? Everyone who punishes must balance justice against avoiding cruelty. Alternatively, this case might be better understood as an instance of vagueness -- but many people (but not epistemicists) believe that there is no fact of the matter concerning whether a particular borderline patch of red-orange really is red.

So in short: some ethical claims are objective, and some are not, just as some claims about who is a better baseball player are objective and others not.

I am not an ethicist. Is this proposal already out there in the literature? (Ted Sider has an article "Hell and Vagueness" that discusses cases of borderline ethical goodness, but does not address the objectivity of morality.)

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.)