Monthly Archive

I’ve just come back from this year’s Arché Reading Party, held at Carbost on Skye. We had papers from Dylan Dodd, Marcus Rossberg, Michael De, Elia Zardini, Mark Wales and Ole Hjortland. There was also a spirited discussion of the philosophy of time travel.

Away from philosophy we visited the Talisker whisky distillery, walked up to one of MacLeod’s Tables and played a lot of Mafia.

I’ve been told that from September 2008 I’ll be taking up a studentship with Arché’s Contextualism and Relativism project. I’m delighted.

I’m planning to work on semantic issues to begin with, in particular on contextualist semantics for predicates of personal taste.

It’s a cliché that you always think of the right thing to say after the discussion is over. I think it’s got some truth to it though. Here is what I ought to have said recently when I was talking about differences between epistemic contextualism and contextualism in the semantics of personal taste predicates.

The semantic contextualist has a real problem with keeping content fixed. It seems reasonable to say that two speakers are disagreeing iff their utterances have the same content, plus or minus a negation operator. The details may get messy but the central idea seems to be sound. It may be that some versions of contextualism try and work with only suitably similar content, but most try and claim it is identical. This tends to lead to problems for them. Not least, how is their view then contextualist rather than relativist?

On the contrary the whole point of epistemic contextualism, at least as I see it, is to deny that ‘knows’ has the same content in different contexts. Again the details are difficult but the line of approach is clear.

From this it emerges that the links between semantic and epistemic contextualism are actually pretty tenuous, at least as far as a unified approach to both topics is concerned. What helps one project in a theory is likely to harm the other.

I think I’m going to spend this evening listening to Saul Kripke’s address to the inaugural conference at the centre named for him at CUNY. It’s hard to think of a bigger honour for a philosopher, not just an eponymous conference but a whole institution.

I think that hearing a talk is going to be especially interesting because, while I’ve spent a lot of time with the very conversational style of Naming and Necessity, I don’t believe I’ve actually heard his voice before.

I’ve been re-reading John MacFarlane’s paper ‘Relativism and Disagreement’ this afternoon. It has a nice account of the key problem for contextualists when it comes to the semantics of predicates of personal taste: preserving what he calls the ‘phenomenology of disagreement’. I’m also a fan of the discussion at the end of how and why such terms could ever come to be part of our linguistic practices when they’re so strange. I think that this sort of issue is often ignored when people write about these things.

I did come across something that I found puzzling in his proposed solution to the problem. At one point he writes:

To be a relativist, then, is not to relativize propositional truth to “nonstandard parameters” like standards of taste, but to adopt a certain view about how the accuracy of certain acts or states is to be assessed.

It looks like there is a distinction between accuracy and truth playing a role here. Earlier in the paper such a distinction has indeed been introduced, but it is used to mark the distinction between utterances and propositions. The thought is that an utterance(-token) is an act and an act is not the kind of thing that can be true or false, merely accurate or inaccurate. I think that that’s a reasonable claim to make but I remember wondering when I first read it whether it was going to do any real work. It seems that it does, but, read like that, the work it’s doing looks rather dubious. If the distinction is in play only because utterances are acts then it seems obscure how that can be the bone of contention between relativists and contextualists.

I also wanted to to mention something that has been exercising me about the whole field recently. Looking at MacFarlane’s view I find it hard to discern much difference between it and the position of Peter Lasersohn. I have similar difficulty in finding any big picture differences between Lasersohn and the views of Jonathan Schaffer, at least as they were presented at his recent talk to Arché’s Contextualism and Relativism seminar. But MacFarlane is a relativist and Schaffer is a contextualist. If they disagree more about detail than they do about grand philosophy, then where is the importance of the distinction between these two terms? That’s assuming that I’m not lumping together views that should be kept apart due to a poor understanding of them. I hope I’m not.

I’ve discovered the ‘titlesec’ LaTeX package which solves the hard problem of making my headings look nice. I  can now work on the easy problem of writing good papers.

I’m a pretty enthusiastic LaTeX user, but there’s something I can’t for the life of me work how to do even though I suspect it’s quite simple. I want my section and subsection headings to look different to the defaults in the article class. I think I’d like them smaller, and centred, and not bold. But I can’t do it. Some classes manage it, so it must be possible.

Do you know how it’s done?

I gave a presentation on David Lewis’ ‘What Experience Teaches’ this morning. He makes use of the notion of information in quite a specialised way and it seems pretty important to his discussion of Jackson’s ‘Knowledge Argument’ against materialism. Some issues came up that I thought I’d mention here in case anybody has any helpful thoughts.

The picture of information Lewis paints is of something that narrows down the possible worlds that might be actual. If we take a simple case, when I learn that the Earth has one moon I am getting information. I know that I am not in one of the worlds where it has any number of moons not equal to one. Lewis goes in for this quite strongly, as he denies that anything that repeats previous information under a new guise can count as information. If it doesn’t eliminate any new possibilities then it is not just not new information but it’s not really information at all. At least that’s how I read him.

I had a thought about this. On this picture it would seem that what is, and is not, information is relative to what a particular person already knows. If I have read a book with the same content as the book you’re now recommending to me, then the book does not (for me) contain information. It might for someone else.

Is this really a consequence of Lewis’ view, and would it matter if it was?

I’ve not thought about ethics, in a philosophical sense, for a while so this may seem shallow and naïve to those that do. But I’m going to plough ahead anyway.

I was thinking about why someone would want to do ethical theory. I’m taking as my starting point the thought that most people have some feeling about what they should do much of the time. My evidence is that many people act for reasons they take to be moral even when they know no moral theory. Given that it seems that three reasons for going in for moral theorising present themselves:

1. Checking our moral intuitions.
2. Diagnosing what is wrong with those who are (by our lights) depraved.
3. Extending our intuitions into hard cases by means of a system.

Immediately there is a problem. The problem is that the main way that competing theories are assessed seems to be by dismissing those that conflict with intuition. So, the order of determination suggested by (1) is false. We check our theories by our intuitions and not vice versa. I’m going to put (2) on one side too. It seems to be the hardest problem for any moral theory. If the point is to solve it then nobody seems to have succeeded, at least if that would involve having a sound argument to offer amoral people for not being amoral.

(3) looks much more promising. We need a moral theory because in simple cases our intuitions are clear and to be followed. In more complex cases our intuitions fail but we can deduce principles from the simple cases and apply those principles to the hard cases. There might well be worries here about the underdetermination of principles by intuition but I want to focus on something else. It’s not so much an objection as just something I find puzzling.

In metaethics various considerations are brought to bear on theory choice that have to do with the metaphysics of morals. One theory is to be preferred over another if it is naturalistic, say. But what does this have to do with the success of a system for organising and rationalising our intuitions?

I’ve pruned away some links to blogs that haven’t been updated in a while. It doesn’t mean you’re not my friends, but I don’t think you’re my friends with philosophy blogs any more.

I’m still puzzled by linguistic tests and related issues. I think that the following will do as a paradigm example. We want to test e to see if it plays the role of a gradable adjective in English. Suppose we run the test with two candidates, ‘tall’ and ‘knows’. We might then have:

‘Jane is taller than Jill.’

# ‘Jill knows more than Jane that snow is white.’

The ‘#’ is, I believe, commonly used to indicate the supposed unacceptability of an expression. One trouble i have is in being precise about just what defect is being marked. The problem is that I do see that the expression is defective, I suppose I want to say that it is in some sense not well-formed. Of course I can’t say that it’s because the sentence is false. Things in displayed contexts like the above aren’t even assertions in the usual way. (This is an important point in the later sections of the Cappelen and Lepore book that I mentioned in a earlier post.)

I suppose my main worry is in what sense such things are to count as tests, as a way to sort expressions once we have decided what categories are available for them to belong to but before we have decided to which categories they do belong. For example, take the second test described in Cappelen and Lepore’s book. This test relies on collecting expressions together in a single context. So, if we want to test ‘yesterday’ we construct certain sentences and observe that even though we can have a context in which:

‘Jane left yesterday’

and one in which:

‘Jill left yesterday.’

there need not be one in which:

‘Jane and Jill left yesterday’

Context-sensitive expressions block such collective descriptions, not in the sense that such a collective description is always false, but in that just because there are true utterances of the components there need not be any context in which there could be a true utterance of the collected expression.

Of course this is true, and plausibly all the basic set block collective descriptions and certain intuitively insensitive expressions (e.g. ‘Penguin’) do not. What bothers me about the whole practice of testing is that if I thought ‘Penguin’ were context-sensitive, wouldn’t I report that it blocked collective descriptions? And if I had no idea whether it was or not, wouldn’t I avoid committing myself? It looks like the test marks a sharp distinction between the sensitive and the insensitive but does it really count as a way of discriminating between them?

Maybe the story to be told is that the withholding or applying the ‘#’ on the basis of intuition is the real result of the test. It seems to me that everyone who uses tests, i.e. many philosophers of language, owe a story of what this consists in. I’ve not yet come across it.

Apparently somebody arrived here today after googling ‘philosophy about penguins’. I hope they found what they were looking for.

This is another Dinosaur Comics that I like.