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.

The power of Carnap

Yes, this is awesome.

I wish

My google alert for 'Carnap' usually just turns up stories about carjacking gangs in the Philippines. But today I got the following little gem, from essaymill.com. (The title of my post refers to the first sentence below -- and please check out the last sentence of the first paragraph.)

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name that philosopher

"Every method of inquiry is justified; disputes can only arise over the question of the purpose and fruitfulness of a given method."

* * * * * *

If you guessed the epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend, you're wrong. It's Carnap, in 1932's "Psychology in Physical Language" (p. 192 in the Ayer collection). (On this blog, 'Carnap' is always a pretty good guess.) It sounds to me like his Principle of Tolerance, with methods of inquiry substituted for logical systems.

Is 'is' ambiguous?

One of the essential components of modern logic is the view, standardly attributed to Frege and Russell, that 'is' is ambiguous: 'is' has the senses of
(i) identity (Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens; in other words, Mark Twain = Samuel Clemens),
(ii) predication (Mark Twain is an author), and
(iii) existence (Mark Twain is; in other words, Mark Twain exists), and
(iv) class inclusion (Authors are artists).

After grading a batch of logic problem sets, I'm wondering whether (i) and (ii) really are ambiguous; more specifically, how the senses of identity and predication fare with respect to the standard ambiguity tests. As I've mentioned several times before on this blog, one of the most widely-accepted ambiguity tests is the conjunction-reduction (or 'no crossed readings') test. The basic idea can be illustrated by an example: 'Alice has a bat' can mean she has a flying pet or a new baseball bat; 'Bob has a bat' has the same two possible readings, with Bob instead of Alice. However, 'Alice and Bob have bats' cannot mean that one has a baseball bat, and the other has a pet flying mammal.

Now let's think about 'is'.
'Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens' has a true reading, and
'Mark Twain is a famous author' has a true reading.
But what about 'Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens and a famous author'?
This sounds zeugmatic to me, confirming the Frege-Russell view of 'is' as ambiguous. However, many of my logic students wrote something analogous to this on their most recent problem set, when asked to translate a particular sentence of first-order logic into English. Student responses to logic problem sets are probably some of the worst data imaginable for this kind of question, but it did make me wonder whether my observations about 'is' in English are very theory-laden, ruined by years of logic and logically-inspired philosophy. What do other folks think about 'Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens and a famous author'?