What type of contradiction, if any, is this?

Discuss.

Appiah, X-Phi, and a Kripkean intuition

I have found Kwame Anthony Appiah's work on experimental philosophy insightful and sensible, and I have learned a great deal from it. I find most of his claims very plausible, but one empirical assertion stood out as questionable: there is a diversity of intuitions among Anglophone philosophers about the Schmidt-Gödel thought-experiment.

"When Eduoard Machery and colleagues posed a famous thought experiment of Kripke’s to students, they found that those from Hong Kong had quite a different pattern of response than those from New Jersey. But my guess is that in most cases, the results would shore up the intuition it was meant to pump; and that, where it did not, philosophers, too, have already been left divided." (2007 APA Presidential Address, section IX)

"Here’s the thing about the theory of reference: Versions of both views — Kripke’s and the one he was challenging — have plentiful adherents among philosophers. Both intuitions have their advocates."("The New New Philosophy," NYT Magazine, Dec 9 2007)

(Emphases mine, in both quotations.) It's certainly true that there is nothing close to unanimity among Anglophone philosophers on the correct theory of reference. However, I do have the impression that, sociologically speaking, philosophers do overwhelmingly have the intuition that "Gödel" does not refer to Schmidt in Kripke's thought experiment. People with descriptivist proclivities accept the intuition, but then try to accommodate (or explain away?) that intuition within a broadly descriptivist framework. Or am I wrong about this sociological pattern?

survey says: there are analytic truths

I imagine many readers are already aware, but the results of the Philosophical Survey are now available here.

The biggest surprise for me was on the question 'Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?': 65% said yes or lean toward yes, and only 27% said no or lean towards no.

This is not an unqualified sociological victory for Carnapophiles, because Chalmers notes in the discussion that many of the 'yes' respondents included a comment along the lines of '... but the distinction does no substantive philosophical work' -- which is precisely Quine's later position (seen perhaps most clearly in his Schilpp Library of Living Philosophers volume).

two advertisements

This is not a real post; I just wanted to mention a couple of things I'm liking at the moment.

The new, completely open access journal Philosophy and Theory in Biology is available -- and accepting submissions. I've perused the brief first issue, and it's got high-quality contributors and content.

I'm currently reading Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science by Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen, a psychologist who works on reasoning and a logician. The book is pretty idiosyncratic in places, but these idiosyncrasies are usually thought-provoking, and I am learning quite a bit. So I can recommend it to folks who enjoy thinking and learning.

When does the use-mention distinction really matter?

When ordering a cake.

Differing interpretations of conditionals

This is not really a philosophy post; instead, I pretend to be a (bad) linguist.

The textbook I'm using for my critical thinking class this term (Feldman's Reason and Argument) claims that the ordinary English sentence 'If Joe is a professional basketball player, then he is tall' is true. This surprised me somewhat, since there are professional basketball players who are not tall (though of course there are relatively few).

I wanted to know if I was strange in this regard, so I took a quick survey of my students. I asked them whether they thought the sentence 'If today is a February day, then the high temperature today is under 40 F in Geneva, NY.' (Highs in Geneva in February are around 30 or so.) 12 of 24 thought this was true. We then had a little discussion about how one group was requiring conditionals to be exceptionless, whereas the other group was allowing a few exceptions.

Thinking about this later, I realized that the majority of people who said it was true were female, and the majority who thought it false were male. I didn't tally votes by sex of respondent, so I don't know how pronounced the difference was, and my sample size is extremely small, so the difference was almost certainly not statistically significant. But it does seem like it might be something worth investigating.

We could perhaps generalize this by asking: when there are multiple ways for a hearer to interpret a speaker's utterance, only some of which are true, are female hearers more likely to attribute the true interpretation than male hearers? In Gricean terms, are female hearers more likely to assume the speaker is following the maxim of quality (Contribute only what you know to be true; Do not say false things; Do not say things for which you lack evidence) than male hearers?

Perhaps this has already been dealt with in the pragmatics literature. But a quick google search did not reveal an answer to this specific question (though I did find interesting research on gender differences with respect to other Gricean maxims).

tautologous or contradictory pictures?

Following up on the "Russell and Cubism" post, I have another quick question about 20th C philosophy and visual art.

One way my students and I have been thinking about one of the claims of the Tractatus is as follows: there are no pictures (in the ordinary sense of 'drawings' or 'paintings') of tautologies (logical truths) or contradictions (logical falsehoods).

I was wondering, given the conceptual inventiveness of 20th C artists, whether any of them had ever tried to create a picture of a tautology or contradiction. It doesn't seem possible to me (or to Wittgenstein), but my imagination is limited...

come on down

Update/ Correction: the Creighton club sessions will be held in Demarest room 014.

This post is for the locals: the folks living in upstate New York. The 2009 meeting of the the Creighton Club (the New York Philosophical Association) will be held in Geneva NY, at Hobart and William Smith colleges, this Saturday, Oct. 24th. The program is below; we are very lucky to have Ruth Millikan as our keynote speaker. So if you are within driving distance, please join us this Saturday.

All sessions will be in the Sanford room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library.

8:30 AM coffee, etc.

9:00 AM Graduate Student Award Presentation:
Mihnea Capraru (Syracuse University): “Russellian Semantics of Belief Reports”
Commentator: Andrew Wake (University of Rochester)

10:15 AM coffee break

10:30 AM Carlo Filice (SUNY at Geneseo): “Libertarian Autonomy and Intrinsic Motives”
Commentator: Gordon Barnes (SUNY at Brockport)

11:45 AM Business Meeting

12:00 – 1:30 LUNCH

1:30 PM David Liebesman (Boston University): “Simple Generics”
Commentator: Kris McDaniel (Syracuse University)

2:45 PM coffee break

3:00 PM Julie Ponesse (SUNY at Brockport): “Enthusiasmos and Unnatural Natures in the Eudemian Ethics VII, 2”
Commentator: Tad Brennan (Cornell University)

4:15 PM coffee break

4:30 PM Keynote Address: Ruth G. Millikan (University of Connecticut):
"Finally implementing the eviction notices; chucking meaning out of the head"

6:30 PM reception (cash bar)

7:00 PM DINNER

Russell and Cubism

In my upper-level History of 20th C Philosophy course, we're currently reading Our Knowledge of the External World. Readers of OKEW will recall Russell's logical construction of "thing" (at an instant) in Lecture III: the set of aspects that would normally be said to be aspects of that thing. Aspects are sense-data. (These aspects include not only those actually perceived, but also those sense-data that would be perceived if a perceiver were there.) So, in other words, a thing (at an instant) is defined as the set of all the ways the thing would look (and smell, and feel, etc.) at that instant.

What struck me was how similar this is to the essential aim of cubist painting, which aims to capture multiple perspectives or aspects of an object simultaneously, on a single canvas. How far can this comparison between Cubist objects and Russellian ones be pushed? There's at least one difference: Cubist paintings (so far as I know) do not attempt to capture every perspective, just multiple perspectives -- whereas Russellian things exhaust all perspectives.

Also, someone else must have thought of this comparison before. Any references?

Moving, plus evidence and truth-value

Very long time, no blog. The main reason is a cross-country move and a new job. For those who don't already know, I'm now at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, in upstate New York. But I also spent a very nice 2+ weeks in Australia, seeing old grad school friends as well as meeting new family members.

A discussion with a student today brought up an interesting question (which probably has been extensively explored in a literature of which I'm completely ignorant). We were talking about what sorts of linguistic expressions were truth-valued, and which were not. She suggested that there might be some sort of connection between being the kind of thing that has a truth-value, and being the kind of thing that can have evidence count for or against it. But what's the connection between these two conditions? Necessary? Sufficient? Neither? Both? -- and is there already a thorough treatment of this question in the literature?

Note: As I understand it, this is not a variant of verificationism, since one can imagine evidence that is unavailable to us weak, frail humans, with our very limited epistemic powers.

Note 2: If you take the position that the sentence 'Planet Vulcan is between Mercury and the Sun' is truth-valueless, instead of false, then that sentence is an example where we have evidence against a claim, but it nonetheless lacks a truth-value. But maybe the other direction of the connection would still hold?