Megan has just written about a social network type site for graduate students: Graduate Junction. I think it might be useful if people use it.

Here is something I’ve been thinking about, probably 29 years too late. There’s a certain sort of argument for externalism that goes roughly as follows:

We look at subject S in context C1 and ascribe to them a content clause A. We then imagine S in C2. In that case it would be inappropriate to use A, for reasons to do with the wider social world of A in C2. So, it is the status of the wider social world that controls our ascriptions of content clauses.

There is, of course, an extra step or two needed. (i) We need to hold that when we ascribe distinct content-clauses we are ipso facto attributing distinct mental states. Then we get the result that social environment controls which mental contents we will attribute. (ii) I suppose we also need to hold that it does so legitimately, i.e. that we are inclined in these cases to say that As contents differ that’s because they do differ.

The above argument is Tyler Burge’s in his ‘Individualism and the Mental’ as I read it. I’m sure that people have made the points I’ve just made in the intervening years, but I’d be interested if anybody who happens to be reading this can point me to where.

I’ve been thinking about teleosemantics recently, and reading David Papineau’s 2001 paper ‘The Status of Teleosemantics, or How to Stop Worrying about Swampman’ (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 79(2):279–289). There was something in it I found odd:

“Wherever the normativity of content comes from, it can’t be from biology, since biology deals only in facts, not prescriptions. Nor is it plausible that biology offers the only way of discerning genuine truth and satisfaction conditions among the large disjunctions of possible causes for beliefs and possible effects of desires.”

To be entirely accurate, he is speaking of other peoples’ views at this point. Immediately afterwards he goes on to endorse these sentiments, though. My question would be, if he accepts this sort of thing is he still a teleosemanticist at all? It looks like the project has been abandoned. If teleology isn’t giving us normativity then why are we interested in it in philosophy of language?

I’m very much looking forward to the first workshop for the project at the end of May. I always like to see people speak who I’ve been reading, and several of the people coming to this fit the bill.

Thanks to Tom for posting this interesting video.

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.