Emiratio

Easter Monday

WWU once again made a great showing at the APA:  four alumni (Joshua, Kris, Neal and I) and two profs (Hud and Ned) all gave presentations.  And, happily, I also got to hang out with them!!  Joshua even did a bit of sight-seeing with me at Fisherman's Wharf.  We ended up spending about an hour hiding in a coffee shop from the cold foggy weather (in spite of being ineffably brave) and practicing our presentations.  Then we emerged into the sunshine and wandered about, saw some sea lions, tracked down some SF sourdough, and then rode the trolley back to the conference (with the Monads' song "Trolley" running through my head the entire time).

In addition to having a bunch of fun, I found out that Ned is teaching a class on stuff this term (lucky students!), I finally bought a copy of Hud's latest book, and I presented a paper.  The presentation was really beneficial for me:  several of the audience members had interesting questions that have left me with a lot to think about.  And I got to meet Donald Baxter!  It was kinda' strange to present a paper that contains multiple citations of a philosopher's work, when that philosopher is in the audience (I've done it before with the WWU profs, but somehow it was stranger when it involved, well, a stranger).  If I'm lucky, it's something I'll have to get used to!

In transit to and from the conference (and a bit since), I indulged in reading Matthew Scully's Dominion.  A friend recommended it to me, and I'd like to pass the recommendation on (especially to my family:  if anyone's interested in reading it, I think it'd be a lot of fun to chat about it next time I come home to visit!).  The central argument is really interesting:  whereas many arguments for vegetarianism depend on similarities between animals and persons (often to establish that animals have rights), Scully focuses on the differences:  these animals are defenceless, unable to take any control of what their fates will be.  We have absolute power over these poor creatures, and given that they are totally at our mercy it is our place to show some.  The argument is presented early in the book, and followed by several chapter-sized snapshots of how we've been treating these worldmates of ours.  Somewhat disappointingly there's a lot of emphasis on person-animal similarities in those chapters, but I still find the snapshots really moving, and in a way that I think is good (though not particularly pleasant) for me.  (By the way:  I'd like to find something about pescetarianism in particular.  Does anyone know of literature focusing on that?)

A more cheerful subject:  following the APA I had a really fantastic Easter, the main event of the day being a trip to the UN with a couple of friends from Germany.  Yes, for a couple hours I (technically, at least!) left the country and found myself in international territory!  It was incredible to finally see this place for myself, especially after having read and heard about it so much growing up.  And I loved learning about the things they're doing to make the world a better place!

In addition to that excursion, my Easter included a taste (literally!) of something non-American when I was given a treat called a Kinder Egg.  Sale of these is illegal in the US, but they're mad popular in Europe, and especially in Germany.  Each consists of a chocolate hollow egg with a toy inside that requires some assembly -- offering a lesson in engineering, apparently.  This, I was told, is the key to culture in Germany:  chocolate and engineering.  :)  Regardless of what we think of that, I'm at least certain of this much:  sweets and scholastics make a great combination!

Meanwhile, back in Alaska my dad spent his Easter busily working on his cabin.  Marzette has posted new photos of it, and I find them incredible.  It's hard to believe that in only two or three months, this became this!  Absolutely amazing, Dad!!

With that, I think I should be off.  I've gotta' get back to work on my "Time-Travel and Motion" presentation -- its temporal extension needs to be cut by about 60% . . .  Happy April!

Meanwhile Elsewhere . . .

Presenting on Wednesday was fun -- and except for some complaints about the length of the handout, I think it went well.  Now I'm busy preparing my Trinity presentation for next Saturday, and in an hour I'll take a break to go running with some RU Philosophy grad students.  Wish me luck on both!

In other news:  Check out these two links.  The first is pretty self-explanatory, and the second is to some pictures of a "cabin" my dad is in the process of building.  It'll be beautiful:  two stories, with a beach on one side and Alaskan temperate rainforest on the other, all across the Tongass Narrows from Ketchikan and with a view of the town and mountains.  Congratulations, dad!!!

Congratulations also to Dennis Whitcomb and WWU -- Dennis will be joining the faculty there next fall.  Another WWU/RU connection -- very, very cool!

Alright, back to work . . .

Wednesday Presentation

Wow, I guess it's been a while since I last posted!  For now I've just got a quick announcement for anyone 'round here who might be interested:  I'll be giving a grad student talk at Rutgers tomorrow night at 7:30pm in the Philosophy department, in the classroom across from the seminar room.  Here's some info about it:

The title:  "Time Travel and Motion"

An abstract:  The widely accepted version of Russell’s At-At account of motion is the claim that:  necessarily, something moves iff it’s at one place at one time, and is at a distinct place at a distinct time.  This account has come under attack:  spinning disc cases have been used in an attempt to show that the account is too restrictive in some cases.  I would like to object to the account as well, though on independent grounds.  I find it to be too liberal in some fairly ordinary cases of time travel (though time travel isn't necessary for the cases -- it's really a certain kind of multilocation that generates the problem).  If the cases I suggest are possible, then the At-At account is false.  And even if my cases are merely conceptually possible, the At-At account cannot be accepted as an analysis of motion.  (I'll also talk for a little bit about some intuitive responses to spinning disc cases, and some further problems that we face in giving an account of motion.)

And if this sounds familiar:  I mentioned this paper here last April (though it's changed a bit since I wrote that summary!), and again in September.  And it's what I'll be presenting in Chicago in two weeks -- I'm so excited!!  (I'm also counting the days 'till the Pacific -- less than one week until I board a flight there . . .)

Hope everyone's spring is blissful and productive!

'cause the best way to learn it is via pop culture . . .

I'd like to cover a little Philosophy of Language in the Intro to Philosophy through Film class I'll be teaching this winter (in December and January).  Any movies you can think of that I can (appropriately) use with that bit of the course?

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p.s.  Oh, good!

Still Not Impossible

Jonathan Ichikawa wrote some helpful comments responding to my Not So Impossible post below, and I wanted to respond in a new post, since this'll give me a chance to also (hopefully!) clarify what I was up to in the first place.  My attempted clarificatory bit first:

Recall, the Bayesian’s claim was

(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.

As far as I can tell, I don’t actually need to take much of a stand on what properties ‘E É H’ has. The counterexample schema I’m proposing is simply this:

Take some instance of ‘E É H’, I, and some sortal, s, such that I falls under sortal s, but the following statement, does not:

(S) Nothing falling under sortal s is true.

Let a be some agent who is strongly justified in believing (S), and in virtue of this, justifiably believes that I is not true; further, if it weren’t for this justified belief in (S), a would justifiably believe I. Further, a’s background beliefs are such that, if a were to acquire evidence E, then a would cease to believe that (S).

That’s it.

One might worry about whether an agent really can be justified in believing (S) for a sortal with the relevant properties, but I think I can set up a case where we have a dim-witted yet very rational agent, who believes it on the basis of testimony. Or, we could have a much smarter agent who believes it on the basis of Philosophical argument plus some non-standard intuitions (perhaps in a community too isolated for the agent to be exposed to conflicting intuitions). All of these seem _possible_. Similar things can be said in response to worries about whether one can justifiably believe that I is not true, in virtue of belief in (S).

In my post, I gave an example of how you might fill in some bits of the counterexample. I used the claim about material conditionals ‘cause I thought it was easy, though as I’ve indicated, lots of other sortals would have worked at least as well.

So, on to Jonathan’s worry:

Jonathan thinks that the agent in my case is in a position to know that I, prior to acquiring evidence E. He says, roughly: a could reason, “Suppose that E. Given my background beliefs, it follows that H. Therefore, given my background beliefs, E É H.” That is, valid inference of q from p, entails p É q. Since a is in a position to know all of the lines of the argument above, a is in a position to know the relevant conditional.

But I don’t yet see why I should endorse the claim that a must be in a position to know all of the lines of the above argument. Why, for instance, must a think that H follows from E? Perhaps, for instance, that premise also falls under sortal s. Or perhaps a has independent motivation for rejecting it (and this motivation would be undercut if a rejected (S), but not in virtue of the role s is playing), or relevantly similar motivation for rejecting the validity of the argument. And all I need is that it is a possible for a rational agent to be in a state like this.

(Further, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that a might still know the relevant facts about how he/she will process the relevant evidence. Here are some beliefs we might claim a has: “Suppose that I believe that E. Given my background beliefs, I will thereby come to believe that H.” Though whether we’ll want to characterise a’s beliefs in this way will depend on how we respond to the worries above, and also on which sortal we take s to be (since none of the propositions mentioned as the content of the meta-beliefs should fall under s). But am I right in thinking that, on its own, taking a to have the relevant meta-beliefs won’t get me into trouble?)

Also, it doesn’t seem strange to me for someone in a’s position to deny that valid inference of q from p entails p É q, and be wary of conditional proof in general. But one having those views might require some accompanying, strange views about how to understand the meaning of ‘É’.

Jonathan also suggests this line of reasoning: a might think, “Suppose E and ~H. Given my background beliefs, H follows from E. And E certainly follows from E and ~H. So given the assumption (and my background beliefs), H and ~H. But that’s impossible. So ~(E and ~H). But that’s just equivalent to E É H.”

As far as I can tell, the responses I gave to the last bit of reasoning can apply here as well. And it might be worth noting, prior to acquiring evidence E a denies it’s true that E É H, but this needn’t require endorsing (E and ~H).

Am I missing something, though?  This isn't my area at all.  Also, it's epistemically possible to me that I've made some really basic error.  Any help you can give me would be much appreciated!

Linguistics-Related Miscellany

Here's a very short story:

Last Sunday, the clock on my computer was an hour behind the other clocks in my house, and I was left wondering the time.

My question: is any bit of my short story ungrammatical?

As you may be able to guess, Linguistics is continuing to take most of my attention. Recently, I tried to take a break by doing something normal: I watched a couple episodes of a television show (Bones, which I downloaded on iTunes). Next thing I knew, I was having nightmares: I dreamt I was a detective, and I was trying to figure out what caused a plane crash by coming up with non-obvious disambiguations of multiply-quantified statements. (Strangely, it was the readings I was coming up with, rather than my methodology for solving the case, that bugged me most.) Lesson learned: don’t attempt normalcy when recreating. Today I took a day off, and ended up reading some of Heim and Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar.  Much less hazardous.

And as long as I’m making comments that are semi-random: you know what are really, really pretty? CPs!  Yesterday I went to a talk in which they were discussed, and it (along with some things that I've been reading and hearing about in lectures lately) made me wish that I could spend the next few years just researching about them.  At least, until I remembered the pretty Philosophy that I'd like to research as well, such as what will be discussed at NYU next weekend . . . (Now have fun and count the CPs that occur in this paragraph!)

Happy November!

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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected].

When the Sun Says 'Howdy'

I just found out:  this spring I'll get to present papers at two APA meetings!  I'll be presenting on Many-One Identity and the Trinity at the Pacific APA, and on Time-Travel and Motion at the Central.  Nifty, nifty nifty nifty!  (I won't be able to attend the Eastern this year because I'll be teaching during winter break, but attending two out of three . . . I think I can live with that!)

It'll be exciting to go back to San Francisco - the last (and currently the only) time I was there was March 26th-30th, 2003, to attend my first Philosophy conference.  And my dad went with me.  Something semi-amusing:  Before that APA meeting, my dad and I were both agnostic about whether I should attempt to become a philosopher; after that meeting, neither of us was agnostic, but for very different reasons!  (For those of you concerned:  my dad seems to have recovered from the experience as much as can be expected, and thanks you for your prayers and well-wishes.)

I'm looking forward to visiting Chicago as well - I've never been there.  Do you think it would be permissible for me to visit the Economics department while I'm in town?  Maybe if I email in advance, to see if there are any talks I could attend . . .