Emiratio

Not so impossible . . .

Brian Weatherson was at Rutgers recently giving a presentation on Bayesianism and Skepticism, during which he discussed this claim:

(B) It is impossible to go from not being in a position to know E É H to being in a position to know it just by receiving evidence E.

Professor Weatherson denies this claim, but I have trouble seeing why it's plausible in the first place.  Let me know what you think of the following.

Suppose that someone justifiably and strongly believes (S):  no material conditionals are true.  This person, then, is not in a position to know E É H.

E:  God says "Some material conditionals are true".

H:  God spoke.

If our agent acquires the evidence described with E, then (given that their background beliefs include a high credence in God's testimony being trustworthy) their justification for believing (S) will be undercut (at least, in some possible cases), and they will be in a position to know E É H, as well as being in a position to know that E.  But, as the only evidence they acquired was the evidence described with E, it looks like any instance of this will be a counterexample to (B).

(If making (S) a claim about truthvaluelessness of material conditionals seems problematic, just replace that bit with some other sortal, s, such that E É H falls under s, and (S) does not.  So (S) will be of the form:  nothing falling under sortal s is true.)

What are your thoughts?

Vacuous Quantification

Today in Semantics 1 we talked about vacuous quantification, looking at how to translate sentences like "Someone is such that Metaphysics is beautiful" into predicate logic.  And now I'm wondering:  how might we translate "Shieva is such that Metaphysics is beautiful" into predicate logic?  I don't want to use a quantifier 'cause (i) intuitively, what we mean doesn't involve one, and (ii) there are relevantly similar sentences where the Free Logic theorist wouldn't like a relevantly similar translation.  Instead, what about just putting 's' where the '$x' would be, at the start of the translation?  (It could occur later in various statements as well, in translations of sentences like "Something is such that Shieva is such that Metaphysics is beautiful".)  I'd have to give some rules and such to go with it, but . . . does this seem fine?  Or am I missing something obvious?

The Rutgers-Princeton Grad Conference

Ah, a conference in the area that I'm not organising!  Here's the info:

The Rutgers-Princeton Graduate Philosophy Conference

Takes place:  March 10th-11th, 2007

Paper submission deadline:  January 12th, 2007

Keynote Addresses:  Tim Maudlin (Rutgers), Elizabeth Harman (Princeton)

Submission guidelines:

Welcoming submission of papers of high quality in any area of philosophy. Papers that are accessible to a general audience will be favoured.

Papers should be submitted by email to philconf@gmail.com. Papers should be in either Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, or Rich Text format, and should include the following as separate attachments:

(1) A cover page that contains (a) the name(s) and institutional affiliation(s) of the author(s), (b) the title and word count of the paper, (c) contact info (email, phone number, mailing address), and (d) area of the paper (e.g., Metaphysics, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics . . .)

(2) A paper of no more than 4,000 words preceded by an abstract of no more than 150 words. Papers should be submitted in blind review format. Please omit any self-identifying information within the abstract and body of the paper.

Notification of acceptance will be sent no later than February 9th, 2007.

Any questions?  Don't email me!  Instead, send emails to the conference organisers (Gabe Greenberg, Alex Morgan, and Will Starr) at philconf@gmail.com.