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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

in lieu of a real post

In this week's Science:

"The first scientific conference held in Azeroth, the online universe of the role-playing game World of Warcraft, went off virtually without a hitch. Although the participants all died during the final day's social event — a massive raid on an enemy fort — they agree that this event is a glimpse at the future of scientific exchange."

I may have a real post up soon: I just got back from Vancouver, where I attended the 8th History of Philosophy of Science conference, and I may file a brief report from the field.

Experimental Philosophy of mathematical intuition

So this is straight psychological research, not done by 'experimental philosophers,' but it does seem highly relevant to any philosophers who appeal to the notion of mathematical intuition:

Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures, Stanislas Dehaene et al. in Science May 30 2008.

We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, whereas Western adults used linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers and logarithmic mapping when numbers were presented nonsymbolically under conditions that discouraged counting. This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education.

Scientific Realism via the internets

I recently found out that Philosophy of Science has conditionally accepted an article I wrote on the no-miracles argument. This is a stroke of good luck, and it's also a testament to the philosophical blogosphere: basic ideas in this paper were hashed out on this blog (see especially here), and honed by readers' astute criticism. Perhaps the paper wouldn't have been good enough for acceptance otherwise.

I would greatly appreciate further help on the paper before I send away the final version; the current draft (in rich text format) is here. Here's an abbreviated abstract:

1. Scientists (usually) do not accept explanations that explain only one type of already accepted fact.
2. Scientific realism (as it appears in the no-miracles argument, or NMA) explains only one type of already accepted fact.
3. Psillos, Boyd, and other proponents of the NMA explicitly adopt a naturalism that forbids philosophy of science from using any methods not employed by science itself.
Therefore, such naturalistic philosophers of science should not accept the version of scientific realism that appears in the NMA.

And as long as I am singing the praises of the blogosphere and begging for readers, P.D. Magnus (of the excellent Footnotes on Epicycles blog) and I have a draft of a paper on another aspect of the scientific realism debate (in pdf format) here. We ask, and give a partial answer to, the question: When should two empirically equivalent theories be regarded as variants of one and the same theory? Comments large and small are appreciated!

Against negative free logic

'Free logic' is an abbreviation for 'logic whose terms are free of existential assumptions, both singular and general.' Free logics attempt to deal with languages containing singular terms that do not denote anything, such as 'Pegasus'.

Free logics come in 3 basic flavors, which differ over what truth-values should be assigned to (atomic) sentences containing non-denoting names.
- Negative free logics declare all such sentences false;
- Neutral free logics declare all such sentences neither true nor false; and
- Positive free logics declare at least some such sentences true (in particular, 'Pegasus=Pegasus').

Tyler Burge argued for negative free logic over its rivals in "Truth and Singular Terms," Nous (1975). I came up with a little argument against negative free logic; but I do not know the argumentative landscape for these 3 options particularly well, so this may be extant already. (Note: if any readers have references for arguments pro and con negative free logic, I'd be very interested. I've found a couple of nice articles by James Tomberlin, and a short response by Richard Grandy to Burge's piece, but not much else.)

According to the negative free logician, all atomic sentences containing non-denoting names are false. Some people reject this because calling 'Pegasus=Pegasus' false seems wrong; here's another problematic type of case. Consider the following three sentences (and assume for the sake of argument that 'Atlantis' is a non-denoting name):
(1) Atlantis is West of London.
(2) Atlantis is East of London.
(3) Atlantis and London have the same longitude.
In negative free logic, all three of these must be false. But for the three predicates 'is west of,' 'is east of,' and 'has the same longitude as,' any one of the three can be defined in terms of the other two using only negation and conjunction. E.g.:
'x is west of y' means 'x is not east of y, and x does not have the same longitude as y.'
But now we've got a problem: If 'Atlantis is west of London' is false (as the free logician says), then at least one of 'Atlantis is east of London' or 'Atlantis and London the same longitude' has to be true -- but that contradicts the earlier assumption (of the negative free logician) that all of (1)-(3) are false.

And this same problem will crop up in general when we have a set of predicates that are definable in terms of one another and negation; in the simplest case, P = ~Q. And this is not that rare: {'before', 'after', 'simultaneous'} is another example. The negative free logician could save her position by maintaining that two of the predicates are somehow really basic, and the other really derivative. But at least in these two cases, it doesn't look legitimate to hold that 'west' is somehow fundamental and 'east' merely derivative.

Does anyone see a good response to this objection on behalf of the proponent of negative free logic?

HOPOS 2008 program posted

The International Society for the history of philosophy of science (a.k.a. HOPOS) has just posted the program for its 2008 conference in Vancouver, taking place June 18-21. (According to the program, I'm speaking about someone named 'Quien.')

Hope to see you there! If you are going, and want to meet up, send me an email.