I’ll be spending some time in Oslo in the new year visiting CSMN on an International Student Fellowship. The provisional dates are the 11th of January to the 12th of March. It should be a lot of fun.
I’m spending a few days taking a break from my usual philosophical interests by attending St Andrews’ Kant & Reid Reading Party at the Burn. They say a change is as good as a rest.
is here.
I’ve been reading Martin Davies’ ‘The Problem of Armchair Knowledge’. Among other things he discusses the following argument:
(P1) I am thinking that water is wet.
(P2) If I am thinking that water is wet then I am (or have been) embedded in an environment that contains samples of water.
(C) I am (or have been) embedded in an environment that contains samples of water.
The problem is that (P1) looks like it is known from the armchair (I think we can read this as ‘known a priori’). (P2) is the kind of thing that externalists claim to know from the armchair. Grant that for the sake of argument. It now looks like an instance of this argument would take us by a valid inference from things we know from the armchair to something that, even if true, is an empirical matter. Davies discussion of the problem is fascinating and takes in both transmission of warrant and the language of thought hypothesis.
I’ve been thinking about another example:
(P1) I believe that p.
(P2) A necessary condition for believing that p is standing in some relation to some proposition.
(P3) A proposition is a set of possible worlds.
(C1) Propositions exist.
(C2) Possible worlds exist.
I think this has the same structure. (P2) and (P3) are things that, for example, Stalnakerians think they know from the armchair. Some instances of (P1) look like things we know from the armchair. With the addition of a few extra principles, i.e. that if X is a relatum then X exists and that if there are sets of Ys then there are Ys, we get at least one conclusion that looks like it shouldn’t be a case of armchair knowledge (C2). Of course, the more realist we are about possible worlds the worse this will be, because the more they will look like something that shouldn’t be discovered from the armchair.
This is very much a post requesting help with factual information. I seem to be getting conflicting information about what the word ‘logophor’ means.
Sense 1: Kaplan claimed that there are no monsters in English, i.e. operators that shift parameters of contexts rather than indices. His system allows for them, but it seems to be an empirical prediction that they do not occur. Some linguists have claimed that some languages seem to behave in the way monsters would allow for. Derek Ball gave a talk at the recent Arché Summer School where he discussed some of the data. A candidate language often appealed to is Amharic. For example, it is discussed in Philippe Schlenker’s influential 2003 Linguistics and Philosophy paper ‘A Plea for Monsters’. The claim is that the Amharic first person pronoun can be used in speech reports in a way that it cannot be used in English. It would be as if we introduced an expression I(amh) which allowed:
(1) John said that I(amh) am a hero.
to have the natural reading:
(2) John said that he himself is a hero.
That is how I recall the discussion going, anyway. I think that Derek referred to this as a logophoric (use of a) pronoun. Schlenker certainly uses this terminology in his paper.
Sense 2: I’ve also come across a sense of ‘logophor’ that seems to be a contrast with ‘anaphor’. In his 1997 Analysis paper ‘How much substitutivity?’ Graeme Forbes quotes an example from Quine:
(3) Giorgione is so-called because of his size.
Here ’so’ is identified by Forbes as a logophor. It picks up on the linguistic properties of an antecedent. (Compare an anaphor picking up on its antecedent’s referential properties.)
It might be that there is a difference in that the Amharic type case is a pronoun. But these two cases seem to differ in more than that. Sense 1 doesn’t seem to me to be referring to linguistic properties at all, any more than a standard English ‘I’ is. Am I missing a connection, or are these just different uses?
is here.
It’s just been announced that Arché and Rutgers have finalised a deal for various joint activities over the next few years. It sounds like a very good thing. The announcement:
“Arché/St Andrews has just signed a wide-ranging collaboration agreement with the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University.
The agreement provides fee-wavers for at least six students per year (three at St Andrews and three at Rutgers) and guarantees funding for the successful candidates.
There will be two Arché-Rutgers Conferences each year. These conferences will take place in St Andrews and be jointly organized by St-Andrews and Rutgers faculty, post-docs, and students.
Long-term, we foresee a great deal of collaboration between the two philosophy departments – with a steady flow of students, post-docs, and faculty moving between the two institutions.”
The Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature have started doing podcasts. I haven’t listened to any of them yet, but the topics and speakers suggest that they’re pretty interesting.
I think Arché have a similar project in the works too.
is here.
This week we’ve had the audit process for all the projects except Foundations of Logical Consequence. In practice it ends up like a mini-conference with talks from the auditors and post-docs. I think it’s a very good idea to have this process whereby people from outside cast a critical eye over what we’re doing. It’s nice to hear people from other projects speak as well.
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