The Best Philosophy Journals

Via The Brooks Blog:

Best philosophy journals according to the European Science Foundation (incomplete list):

A
American Philosophical Quarterly
Analysis
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Biology and Philosophy
British Journal for the History of Philosophy
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
Economics and Philosophy
Ethics
Journal of Philosophy
Kantian Review
Kant-Studien
Law and Philosophy
Linguistics and Philosophy
Midwest Studies in Philosophy
Mind
Mind and Language
Monist
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
Nous
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
Philosophical Perspectives (Nous Supplement)
Philosophical Quarterly
Philosophical Review
Philosophical Studies
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Philosophy and Public Affairs
Philosophy of Science
Phronesis
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
Social Philosophy and Policy
Synthese

B
Ancient Philosophy
Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie
Argumentation
Asian Philosophy
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Croatian Journal of Philosophy
Environmental Ethics
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
European Journal of Philosophy
Faith and Philosophy
Grazer Philosophische Studien
Inquiry
International Journal of Philosophical Studies
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
Journal of Applied Philosophy
Journal of Consciousness Studies
Journal of Ethics
Journal of Medical Ethics
Journal of Moral Philosophy
Journal of Political Philosophy
Journal of Value Inquiry
Legal Theory
Logique et Analyse
Metaphilosophy
Metaphysica
Minds and Machines
Modern Schoolman
Nietzsche Studien
Philosophia
Philosophical Issues (Nous Supplement)
Philosophical Papers
Philosophical Topics
Political Theory
Ratio
Res Publica
Review of Metaphysics
Social Theory and Practice
Southern Journal of Philosophy
Utilitas

C
Analyse und Kritik
Critique
Danish Yearbook of Philosophy
Das Argument
Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie
Environmental Values
Ethical Perspectives
Fisosofisk Tidskrift
Filozoficky casopis
Hegel-Jahrbuch
LOGOS
Philosophica
Philosphical Investigations
Philosophie
Philosophy
Prima Philosophia
Reports on Philosophy
Sats
Studia Philosophica
Studies in East European Thought
Teorema
Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society

In my opinion, the list is fairly accurate as far as the mainstream journals go, though I think it would have been better to divide the A and B groups into more categories. Thom Brooks has some reasonable complaints (mostly) about the ranking of specialty journals.

UPDATE: There is an interesting discussion of the ESF's ranking of philosophy journals over at Leiter Reports.

FURTHER UPDATE: Noelle McAfee has expressed some worries about this ranking, which are well worth checking out. Also, there is an interesting discussion of ESF's ranking over at Knowledge and Experience.

Digby Wins Progressive Blogger Award

Joe Wilson, Digby, Rick Perlstein

No one knew the progressive blogger Digby's real identity -- until today, where she received the Progressive Blogger Award at the Take Back America conference. You can listen to her speech here.

New Paper

I have uploaded this paper on two-dimensionalism to my website. The paper is scheduled to appear in American Philosophical Quarterly, October 2007.

Around the Blogosphere

Joe has published a summary of our Williamson-on-counterpossibles note.

As Robbie points out, a number of 1-year positions are available at Leeds. If you are a recent Ph.D. and didn't land a permanent job yet, this seems like a nice opportunity.

Carrie Jenkins will appear on Philosophy Talk on August 12th.

Over at Feministe, Roy argues that children constitute an oppressed group.

Norman Finkelstein: Tenure Denied

The much-discussed Norman Finkelstein case ends dramatically with denial of tenure.

Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors and a Princeton graduate, was denied tenure at DePaul for exposing the exploitation of Jewish suffering. Finkelstein has published several book-length critiques of issues relating to the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Finkelstein discusses, among other things, how prominent spokesmen for the Holocaust have turned the Holocaust into a money-making Industry. Elie Wiesel, a spokesperson for the Holocoast, charges a standard fee of $25,000 for revealing the secrets of the Holocoast, while real survivors such as Finkelstein's mother (a survivor of Majdanek camp and slave labor camps) received only $3,500 in compensation.

Finkelstein posted a letter from Depaul's president Dennis Holtschneider on his website two days ago. The letter alleges that tenure was denied because Finkelstein's scholarship is "deliberately hurtful" and clashes with the work of other scholars.

(Thanks to Matt Bell for the links)

UPDATE: Leiter has published a report covering the case. The petition mentioned by Leiter can be found here. There is also a student petition in support of Finkelstein.

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Reports are coming out that Richard Rorty died yesterday, June 8, 2007. Rorty was a leading figure in American Philosophy and Pragmatism (via Leiter).

UPDATE: Other memorial notices and obituaries can be found at TMP Cafe, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, WVEC, New York Times, and Progressive.

Pics from St. Andrews

Elizabeth Barnes has put some great photos from the St. Andrews adjectives conference and the metaphysics conference preceding it online. However, I think I remember people's "reactions to relativism" slightly differently. Re-interpretation:











Ross Cameron and Robbie Williams' reactions to the lack of metaphysics at the adjectives conference.











... and Jason Stanley's rejoinder. Ross wonders whether he went too far. Chris Kennedy and John Hawthorne execute their rights to remain silent.











Peter Ludlow, giving Jason the stare-down stink eye. Robbie, trying to keep his cool.











Jonathan Schaffer: "Robbie, don't you know how big contrastivism is going to be in a few years?!" [Robbie, smiling knowingly. Ross, showing signs of skepticism].











John Hawthorne at 2AM: "Arrrggg, I am on the program at 9 AM in the morning, and I still haven't worked out what to say."











Jonathan and I, illustrating the size of the claws of Australian Magpies.











Breakfast: Ross' reaction to White Pudding.

Philosophers' Carnival # 48

... is here.

The Reasoner 1 (2)

Alan Baker has published a reply to our note on counterpossibles in the latest issue of the Reasoner. Naturally, we are now working on a reply to his reply.

Epistemology in Copenhagen

The spring conference season is coming to an end. Just got back (to my usual location in Copenhagen) from a very stimulating epistemology conference organized by Klemens Kappel, who (as usual) did a fantastic job. Speakers included: Duncan Pritchard ("A Two-Tiered Relevant Alternatives Theory"), Erik Olsson ("Reliabilism, Stability, and the Value of Knowledge"), Nikolaj Nottelman ("Two Problems of Justification Transmission in Light of the Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification"), Erik Carlsson [impersonated by Erik Olsson] ("Williamson on the Causal Efficacy of Knowing"), Kristoffer Ahlstrom ("On Empirical Investigation in Epistemology"), Berit Brogaard ("What Mary Did Yesterday: Reflections on Knowledge-wh") and Esben Nedenskov ("What does it take to make sense of skepticism?"). Discussants included (among many others): Lars Bo Gundersen, Eline Busck Gundersen, Jesper Kallestrup, Klemens Kappel, and Anders Schoubye. I talked about knowledge-wh and got great feed-back from the audience, especially from Jesper and Anders. A little anecdote. After Friday's sessions we met at the local corner bar, close to the old KUA. The restaurant Sult, where the conference dinner was supposed to take place, is located just a few kilometers from the conference location (the new KUA), and the weather was super-nice; so Lars Bo Gundersen and I decided to walk. Klemens had explained how to get to the restaurant but Lars and I apparently didn't listen. I guess we thought others would know. As we started walking we realized we had no idea where we were going. I remembered Klemens mention Gothersgade (a street) and Lars remembered him mention Kongens Have (a large park). As we approached those locations we started asking people for directions. But as "Sult" means "Hunger" in Danish, people didn't take us very seriously (the restaurant is actually named after Henning Carlsen's film version of a famous Knut Hamsun novel). When asked, people looked for hidden cameras. Happy ending: we finally found the restaurant but mistakenly entered through the staff door in the back and came out through the kitchen. Anyway, it was a very fun dinner and night, and the next day we were all a bit tired but managed to carry on at a normal activity level with the help of a moderate amount of more or less well-tasting coffee.

Links

Carrie Jenkins is scheduled to appear on Philosophy Talk in August.

New feminist blog (HT: Sally Haslanger)

Philosophers' Carnival # 47 is here.

UPDATE: Links to discussions of the status of women in philosophy can be found here and here (HT: Feminist Philosophers).

FURTHER UPDATE: Feminist Philosophers reports that women are less likely to thrive in environments with less than 30% women in top positions.

St. Andrews

Just returned to Copenhagen after a few intense days in St. Andrews at the adjectives conference. Sharon Coull, Herman Cappelen and Jason Stanley did a great job organizing the conference. In fact, Sharon's contribution was so excellent that she ended up with several job offers from conference participants. "Jason-Billy-Whizz" chaired all sessions, except his own, which was chaired by Ludlow. That added to the fun. Some highlights: Chris Kennedy defended a version of his famous degree account of gradable adjectives, Delia Fara showed how allowing relativity to comparison classes and respects can be used to solve Kit Fine's puzzle of coincidence, Gabriel Segal and Daniel Rothschild argued that gradables are indexicals, Peter Ludlow defended a variation on this view, according to which gradables are associated with hidden domain variables, John Hawthorne offered objections to Stanley's nominal restriction strategy, Paul Pietroski offered a new theory of gradables as monadic predicates, Jonathan Schaffer offered reasons against a relativistic account of predicates of personal taste and defended a contextual variant, and Stanley defended an anti-Chomskian line with respect to the adjective "average" (as it occurs in 'the average American has 2.3 children'). Stanley's theory predicts that the following examples (due to Gabriel Segal) are infelicitous:

The average American has 2.3 children, and he sends all of them to college
The average American has 2 children, he used to have 3, and now he is worried about his fertility
The average American has 2 children, he used to have 3 and wonders where the last one went (perhaps he went to college).

The award-winning Central Pub close to the Arche Research Center (picture) formed a natural meeting place for drinks after the talks. More reports from DK epistemology workshops will follow.

Report from Great Britain

Just a quick update from Great Britain. We have now arrived in St. Andrews and are looking forward to the amazing talks starting today. Our tour of Great Britain began about a week ago with a fantastic Epistemology and Linguistics conference, organized by Martijn Blaauw. Kent Bach opened with Bach-y solutions to a number of problems in epistemology, including the apparent shiftiness of the truth-value of knowledge-attributions. Joe then talked about the most general factive mental state operator (and guess what? It ain't 'knows that'). I was next with my new cleft approach to knowledge-wh. Meanwhile there were other fun parallel sessions going on. As for the other keynote addresses, my friend Peter Ludlow concluded on the first day with a talk on knowledge reports and indexicality. Ram Neta replied. The next day my soon-to-be-colleague Jonathan Schaffer came on stage and showed that if the knowledge account of assertion is correct, then we ought to be contrastivists. After some super-interesting parallel sessions we reached the grand finale: Jason Stanley's talk on knowledge and action. Actually, it was, strictly speaking, Stanley and John Hawthorne's joint talk. But Stanley covered it brilliantly alone, with a very interesting reply from Duncan Pritchard.

So much for the serious part of the conference. After all the talks and dinners we waisted valuable time drinking ale, scotch and the like at Scottish clubs. And don't ask Stanley or Ludlow whether they went to Babylon, because they will most certainly deny it. Anyway, pictures will follow, as soon as Ludlow will allow it.

After Aberdeen we went to a nice mini-conference in Edinburgh. The conference was organized by Jesper Kallestrup and Matthew Chrisman, and the speakers included Ram Neta, Duncan Pritchard, Jonathan Schaffer, Joe and I. A fantastic day and a fantastic night out in Edinburgh. We then went down to Manchester and York and have just arrived back in Scotland. That is, we arrived yesterday, and we finally got to meet the famous philosopher of language Gabriel Segal whose work I have replied to on earlier occasions. The adjectives conference (which is organized by Herman Cappelen and Jason Stanley) begins today. So expect more updates. Next week I will report from various workshops in Copenhagen.

Trip to Europe

I am off to Europe. My paper for Aberdeen is available here. After Aberdeen Joe and I are presenting something on subjunctives, impossible worlds and two-dimensionalism in Edinburgh (we will also give our new account of essences). After Edingburgh I am off to England. Then back to Scotland to St. Andrews. I will be taking a sidetrip to Copenhagen as well. See you in a month.

Trolling and the Public Woman

Kathy Sierra, a female technology blogger, was recently so severely threatened online that she had to cancel all her public speaking engagements and stay inside her house for fear that the online stalker would track her down. The Kathy Sierra incident is a severe case of what is called 'trolling'. According to Blogging Feminism, trolling is 'a particular use of commenting on blogs: commenting intended to stop the ongoing conversation or to turn it into a fight'. Trolling can take various forms, from comments with unrelated content or content questioning the importance of the topics discussed to insults, threats, and harassments intended to question the authority, integrity, intelligence or fundamental human rights of bloggers – typically female bloggers. Blogging Feminism lists some examples of moderately severe trolling. In one of them the troll expresses a wish to torture and rape women. Not all trolling is that severe. It can also take the form of regular spam posted in the comments section of a blog.

The sort of trolling feminist bloggers experience is typically the most severe. As Jill from Blogging Feminism points out, the fact that women bloggers are subject to this sort of discrimination has a lot to do with the old-fashioned picture of respectable women as domestic creatures. She writes:

The original "public woman" was the prostitute. Men have traditionally occupied the public space (including the political), while women were relegated to the domestic -- or at least, certain kinds of women were relegated to the domestic. Cloistering women away or at least keeping them tied to domestic duties has long been a sign of socioeconomic class, from ancient Greece through Victorian England through the 1950s and The Feminine Mystique. "Other" women -- poor women, women of color -- worked outside the home. The lowest class of women were the publicly available ones. And public availability was tied to sexual availability.

I would like to think that this picture of the public woman has changed. But the recent incidents in the blogosphere indicate that it has not. In this regard it is noticeable that, while educated women with a bachelor's degree or higher are in the majority in America, working women in America are still in the minority, and their earnings are considerably lower than those of men. Here are some stats:

Percent of women 25 to 29 who had attained a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2005: 32%
Percent of men 25 to 29 who had attained a bachelor's degree or higher in 2005: 25%.

Percent of women 16 or older who participated in the labor force in 2005: 59%.
Percent of men 16 or older who participated in the labor force in 2005: 73%.

The median annual earnings of women 16 or older who worked year-round, full time, in 2005: $32,168
Women earned 77 cents for every $1 earned by men.

The difference is quite noticeable. Only 59% of adult women participate in the labor force. The fact that some of these women do not participate owing to the fact that they attend colleges and universities does not explain this difference. And needless to say, the fact that men earn more than women in spite of the fact that women, on average, are better educated is atrocious. The stats confirm that the old-fashioned gender-roles haven't yet been wiped out.

(Thanks to Sally Haslanger for the S&F Online link)

Materials Concerning Women and Minorities in Philosophy

Sally Haslanger has posted the available data concerning the status of women and other minorities in philosophy at the SGRP site. Her paper on the status of women in philosophy, which she presented at the Central Meeting of the APA, 2007, is available here (HT: Brian Weatherson).

Reflections on Donkey Sentences

Philosophers and linguists tend to agree that donkey sentences such as:

(1) If a farmer buys a donkey, he vaccinates it

are deeply problematic. What they tend to disagree about is how best to deal with them. My students sometimes wonder why (1) is thought to be problematic at all. It just says that for all farmers x and all donkeys y, if x buys y, then x vaccinates y, doesn't it? The problem with this reply is that it treats 'a farmer' and 'a donkey' (constructions that look like existentially quantified constructions) as universally quantified constructions.

There are numerous alternative proposals in the literature. And old and famous one is David Lewis'. (1) is to be understood as containing an implicit adverb (e.g. 'always', or 'generally'). The adverb is thought to bind both variables. It is a so-called unselective quantifier quantifying over pairs, triples, or whatever (in this case, pairs of farmers and donkeys standing in certain relations).

Lewis' view runs into trouble. Consider:

(2) If a farmer buys a donkey, he usually vaccinates it.

Given Lewis' view, (2) is true iff for most farmer-donkey-bought-by-farmer pairs, the farmer in the pair vaccinates the donkey. But consider now a scenario with 31 farmers and 130 donkeys. 1 rich farmer buys exactly 100 donkeys and vaccinates all of them. 30 poor farmers buy exactly one donkey each but do not vaccinate it. There are then 100 farmer/donkey pairs (of the right sort) where the farmer and the donkey stand in the vaccination relation. And there are 30 farmer/donkey pairs (of the right sort) where the farmer and the donkey do not stand in the vaccination relation. Since most farmer-donkey-bought-by-farmer pairs are such that the farmer in the pair vaccinates the donkey, Lewis' view predicts that (2) is true. but intuitively, it is false. This is the so-called 'proportion problem'.

There is also the so-called D-type account (defended by numerous people, including Stephen Neale). On this view, donkey pronouns go proxy for numberless descriptions. For example, in (1) the 'it' goes proxy for 'the donkey(s)'. The D-type approach predicts that (1) is equivalent to 'every farmer who buys a donkey vaccinates every donkey he buys'.

In my talk at the Central Meeting, I argued that a problem arises for this account (Neale acknowledges that this is a problem in a footnote in an article from 1990, and if I remember correctly, he also refers to a personal correspondence he had with Heim).

Consider a different scenario in which 10 farmers (the only ones) buy 10 donkeys each and vaccinate 9 of them. The majority of informants report that (1) is true in these circumstances. But the D-type approach predicts that it should be false. A similar problem arises in the following case:

(3) If a farmer buys a donkey, he sometimes vaccinates it.

The majority of informants report that (3) is true if the only 10 farmers buy 10 donkeys each and vaccinate 3 of them.

I argued that we need to treat donkey pronouns as plural definite descriptions (using plural variables, in line with Boolos), and I then appealed to an earlier paper of mine in which I argued that plural definite descriptions function as partitive constructions at a subsequent level of analysis [my paper is forthcoming in Mind and Language, and also contains a precis of the donkey proposal].

I then said that the force of the partitive construction will depend on the monotonicity properties of the adverb (or initial quantifier in the case of relative clause doneky sentences). As a rule, the partitive that goes proxy for the pronoun inherits the force of the adverb of quantification (or initial quantifier in the case of relative clause donkey sentences) when the quantifier is upward-entailing in the VP. When the quantifier is downward entailing in the VP, the partitive has existential force. I also said that this cannot be the whole story, because of so-called weak and strong readings. I won't go over that again.

Before continuing let me just summarize how to test for monotonicity.

Right-upward monotonic (upward-entailing in VP, or just upward-entailing, e.g., 'some', 'most', 'almost all', 'every', 'all')
DFs are Gs
All Gs are Hs
DFs are Hs

Left-upward monotonic (upward-entailing in NP, e.g. 'not every', 'some')
DFs are Gs
All Fs are Hs
DHs are Gs

Right-downward monotonic (downward-entailing in VP, or just downward-entailing, e.g. 'no', 'not every', 'at most 3')
DFs are Gs
All Hs are Gs
DFs are Hs

Left-downward monotonic (downward-entailing in NP, e.g. 'every')
DFs are Gs
All Hs are Fs
DHs are Gs.

Non-monotone: e.g., 'exactly 3'

What I want to focus on here is Jessica Rett's most interesting example:

(4) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

Rett took me to be saying that when a quantifier is upward-entailing in the NP the partitive inherits its force from the quantifier and when it is downward-entailing in the NP the partitive is existential. But that can't be right, as 'every' is not upward-entailing in its NP.

Anyway, if we follow me in taking the partitive to have existential force when the quantifier is downward-entailing in its VP, and if we follow Rett in taking 'not every' to be a quantifier construction, then we should expect (4) to be equivalent to:

(5) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats at least one of the donkey(s) he owns.

This may or may not be a good reading of (4). I will get back to this later.

An alternative is to say that 'not every' is not a quantifier construction at all. We might treat 'not' as a sentential operator. 'Every' is then the quantifier, and the relevant quantifier in (4) is then upward-entailing in its VP. So, we'd get:

(6) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats all the donkeys he owns.

So which one (if any) is the best reading of (4)?

I have now pilot-tested this on students. The majority actually got (5) as the most natural reading. Here is how I tested it (thanks to Barbara Abbott for helping me think through this -- most of what follows is from a correspondence with her, and for the most part I am using her formulations -- all mistakes are mine).

If 'not' is a sentence negation, then

(4) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

should be true if (6) is false:

(6) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats all the donkeys he owns.

E.g. if one farmer beat all but one of his donkeys (and all the other farmers beat all of them), then (4) would be true.

On the other hand if 'not every' is a quantifier, then (4) would be true if (5) is true (since 'not every' as a quantifier is downward entailing in the VP):

(5) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats at least one of the donkeys he owns.

(5) would not be true in the circumstance given above (where all the farmers beat all their donkeys except for one, who spares just one). Instead, we'd need to have at least one farmer sparing all of his donkeys, and not just one.

In testing this I presented students with sentence (4):

(4) Not every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

and asked: If one farmer beat all but one of his donkeys (and all the other farmers beat all of them), is (4) true? The majority answered 'no'.

So, interestingly, if my proposal is right, then it is indeed the monotonicity properties of 'not every' that matter in this case and not the monotonicity properties of 'every'. That is, (4) comes out as 'not every farmer who owns a donkey beats at least one of the the donkeys he owns'.

Thanks to Barbara Abbott, Jessica Rett, and the audience.

Impossible Objects

In this eery short story from 1997 written by Graham Priest the main character finds a mysterious box in Richard Sylvan's home. The story reminded me of the importance of being intellectually unassuming. Even if classical logic is true, it is far from clear that we know that it is. As a minimum, Priest's line should bring about some doubt and maybe some intellectual modesty.

Sleepless Nights for Graduate Students and Department Heads

Jonathan Wolff has started writing a monthly column for the Guardian. The post on sleepless nights can be found here (HT: The Boundaries of Language and Leiter)

The Reasoner vol. 1 no. 1

From Certain Doubts:

The first issue of The Reasoner, volume 1, no 1, is now online. Feature articles by Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, Laurence Goldstein, Amit Pundik, and Gregory Wheeler. The deadline for vol. 1, no. 2 is May 15.

Joe Salerno has a post summarizing one of the arguments from our short contribution to the counterpossibles debate.

Interview with David Chalmers

From the Sci Phi Show: very cool interview with David Chalmers. Click on 'Outcast #36'.

(HT: Florida Student Philosophy Blog).

Women Harassed, Intimidated, and Silenced Online

Read Majikthise's contribution to the movement recently made to protect the "rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging".

The Second Online Philosophy Conference

The Second Annual Online Philosophy Conference will take place on May 14-May 27, 2007. The format is similar to last year's. Everyone with access to the internet can participate in the discussion online. This year's conference will include video-taped keynote addresses by Ernie Sosa and Jeff McMahan. Other speakers include: Juan Comesaña, Delia Graff Fara, Shaun Nichols, Meredith Williams, Jonathan Dancy, John Martin Fischer, Caspar Hare, Jeff McMahan, Derk Pereboom, and Gillian Russell. Commentators: Tim Black, John Greco, Ted Sider, Eric Schwitzgebel, Kelby Mason, Ram Neta, Duncan Pritchard, Hans-Johann Glock, David Stern, Joseph Raz, Candace Vogler, Randolph Clarke, David Widerker, Peter Graham, Alastair Norcross, Thomas Hurka, Joseph Campbell, Dana Nelkin, JC Beall, and Jonathan McKeown-Green.

Abortion

Via Majikthise: one father's experience.

APA Report: the Status of Women in Philosophy

Thursday afternoon the APA Committees on the Status of Women and Inclusiveness sponsored a joint session on the central question "Why Are Women Only 21% of Philosophy". The session took place in the grand Crystal Room at the Palmer House. Given the importance of the topic I was surprised to find the room less than half full. Of course, the Crystal Room is rather large, but still. Another peculiarity: there were only 3 men in the audience, and one of them probably wouldn't have gone if I hadn't twisted his arm. One wonders whether male philosophers think female philosophers should solve this problem on their own.

As for the session, Erin McKenna chaired, and Sharon Crasnow, Elizabeth Minnich and Sally Haslanger gave excellent speeches which provoked much discussion. As Abigail Stewart was unable to attend (due to illness), Haslanger read her paper and answered several questions on her behalf.

Crasnow opened the session with a report on the raw numbers. Here are some numbers from her handout:

1) 21% of employed philosophers are women (Kathryn Norlock)

2) 18.5% of philosophy faculty at top 54 programs (Leiter Report) are women (Julie van Camp)

3) 2004 US Department of Education estimates 41% of those employed in the humanities are women.

4) National Digest of Educational Statistics (NCES) reports 39% female at postsecondary degree granting institutions.

5) Philosophy PhDs awarded: 27% (and stuck there for the last ten years or so, with a spike to 33.3% in 2004, 25.1% in 2005).

6) Survey of Degrees Awarded (SED) 2005 figures. History 41%, Astronomy and physics 26%, Economics: 30%, Political Science 39%.

The numbers speak for themselves: there are very few women in philosophy. But what is the explanation? Here are some of the possible factors mentioned by Crasnow and the audience:

A) Differential Treatment: male and female students tend to be treated differently by their (male) professors. For example, female students do not get called on in class as often as males.

B) Vicious Circle: female students lack contact with female professors. As a result, they do not feel inclined to pursue a career in philosophy.

C) Misleading Stats: Universities tend to focus on the number of women enrolled in the humanities as a whole. When the percentage of women enrolled in the humanities approaches 50, administrators tend to ignore the problem remaining in disciplines such as philosophy.

Turning to the second speech, Elizabeth Minnich reminded us that care must be taken when solving the problem of the status of women in philosophy. Even if 50% of employed philosophers were women, the problem of the status of women wouldn't necessarily disappear. For example, the problem wouldn't have been solved if there were 50% women but the 50% felt pressured to behave like men and do male-style philosophy.

Abigail Stewart was next. As she was unable to attend, Haslanger read her paper. The paper addressed the question of what can be learned from other disciplines. Haslanger (Stewart) mentioned that the performance of women tends to be under-estimated and that the performance of men tends to be over-estimated. This form of differential treatment has a lot to do with gender-schemas. Haslanger mentioned that the female schema clashes with the philosophy schema even if it doesn't clash with philosophy sub-schemas such as the ethics schema or the feminist philosophy schema. If a given discipline's schema clashes with the female schema, then the performance of females in the discipline tends to be under-estimated. The performance of women is also under-estimated when there is a lack of critical mass (i.e., less than 30% women in the discipline). The under-estimation accumulates at each level. As a result, there is a lowered career success rate. This, in turn, results in stronger gender schemas and a continued lack of critical mass.

Haslanger also mentioned that traditionally there have been three ways to deal with a schema clash: a) don't ask, don't tell (gays in the military), ignore (philosophy?), force out (philosophy?) Needless to say that none of these ways of dealing with schema clashes are tolerable.

Haslanger concluded the joint session with a paper on the representation of women in top philosophy journals. Some numbers from Haslanger's handout:

2002-2007 % female
Ethics: 19.30%
JPhil: 13.33%
Mind: 6.38%
Nous: 11.62%
Phil Review: 11.11%
PPR: 12.26%
PPA: 13.98%

Articles on feminism or race issues:
Ethics: 2.86% feminist, 2.86% race
JPhil: 0% feminist, 1.77% race
PPA: 5.13% feminist, 3.85% race

Haslanger mentioned that while more studies need to be done, it is evident that women are strongly disadvantaged (at least statistically speaking). Statistically it is much more difficult for a woman to get published in a top journal than it is for a man. The reason? Here are some suggestions from the session:

1) Nearly all of the top journals are edited by men.
2) No or few women are on the editorial boards of top journals.
3) Even journals that claim to do double-blind refereeing tend not to do tripple-blind refereeing. That is, the editors tend to know the identity of the author at some stage in the process.

The session ended with some "anecdata". Haslanger mentioned (among other things) that she had once been told that she ought to stick to history on the grounds that women ought to reproduce the ideas of men (and keep their own to themselves), that she had been told that she ought to get tested to see whether she was in fact a man (given her success), that people would laugh when she told them that she did metaphysics (would anyone ever laugh at a man?), and so on. The audience (including a female undergraduate student) had similar stories to report about the current climate in the philosophy profession.

In conclusion: the joint session made it exceedingly clear that despite efforts made (under the names of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action) to prevent all forms of discrimination against women in academia (and elsewhere), many departments continue to tolerate discriminatory practices in graduate admissions, interviewing, hiring, promotion, article acceptance and invitation.

UPDATE: Richard Zach has a new report on the status of women in philosophical logic.

Philosophers' Carnival # 46

... is here.

Central APA Report

Just got back from the Central Meeting in Chicago. Yet another intense APA meeting with too many late-night events. There were very many super-excellent sessions, including: Josh Brown, Jennifer Nagel and Jason Stanley's session on practical interests and belief formation; Cumming, Groenendijk, Stokhof, Gillies, and Gauker's session on dynamic logic; Weinberg, Kvanvig, Riggs and Greco's session on the value of knowledge; and the joint session sponsored by the APA Committees on the Status of Women and Inclusiveness, featuring McKenna, Crasnow, Minnich, Haslanger and Stewart (impersonated by Haslanger). My own "Jerry Springer" session on donkey sentences was very enjoyable. Separate posts on the status of women in philosophy and donkey sentences will follow.

The Central APA

I am off to the Central Meeting of the APA in Chicago. My paper for the meeting is available here.

PHINEWS Vol. 10

PHINEWS volume 10, April 2007 (edited by Vincent Hendricks, Pelle Guldborg Hansen, Stig Andur Pedersen and Dov Gabbay) is now available.

UPDATE: I fixed the link. Thanks for your patience.

Sea Battle Semantics: New Draft

My Sea Battle Semantics paper is now nearly finished. I have replied to the main objections raised at the Pacific and hope to be able to send the final version of the paper to the nice editors at the Philosophical Quarterly (who were kind enough to give me an extension) shortly. If any of you has any further concerns, please don't hesitate to email me.

A Linguist with Erdös Number 2

It is rare to find a philosopher or linguist with an Erdös Number less than 3. Here is a rare instance. As Geoffrey K. Pullum reports, the mathematical and computational linguist Andras Kornai has Erdös number 2. Truly amazing.

Vincent Hendricks Wins Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2006

Vincent Hendricks' book Mainstream and Formal Epistemology, Cambridge, 2006, just won the Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2006. Hendricks is Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University in Copenhagen, Editor-in-Chief for Synthese and Synthese Library, Editor of Trends in Logic (Studia Logica Library), and Director of PHILOG and Editor-in-chief of PHINEWS.

From the original announcement:

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries is the premier source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education.

Every year Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.

The list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year. Choice editors base their selections on the reviewer's evaluation of the work, the editor's knowledge of the field, and the reviewer's record. In awarding Outstanding Academic Titles, the editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles: (1) overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, (2) importance relative to other literature in the field, (3), distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form, (4) originality or uniqueness of treatment, (5) value to undergraduate students, and (6) importance in building undergraduate library collections.

Choice Review:

Hendricks (Roskilde Univ., Denmark) identifies several central epistemological concerns and teases out various theoretical solutions. He begins with mainstream epistemologies, works through various formal epistemologies, and ends with an outline for a new research program called "plethoric epistemology," which combines insights of both mainstream and formal researchers. The aim of the work is twofold: to introduce mainstream and formal epistemologists to one another, and to give theoretical unity to a fractured discipline. It succeeds admirably on both fronts, and brings a fresh perspective to every topic it touches. This important work should spark conversation between traditional theorists and their more formally minded colleagues, and inform each of what the other has been up to. It should also bring unity and renewed purpose to the fragmented field of contemporary epistemology. This book is mandatory reading for epistemologists of all stripes, particularly those seeking a crash course in formal epistemology (and those just wondering what "formal epistemology" is). Its importance cannot be overemphasized. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty/researchers.

Synthese Deadline Approaching (Salerno)

This is a reminder about the May 1 deadline for paper submission for the special issue of Synthese, "Knowability and Beyond", which aims to cover modal epistemic issues relevant to knowability, broadly construed. The issue will contain invited papers by Jonathan Kvanvig, Gabriel Sandu and Neil Tennant, but will also provide the opportunity for other authors to make original contributions. Submissions will be double-blind reviewed. If you have something but aren't sure whether it would be appropriate for consideration, email me.

knowability@gmail.com

Impossible Thoughts

As some of you already know, Joe Salerno and I are writing a monograph on impossible thoughts. A book page has now been created. It is available here.

UPDATE: abstracts for most of the chapters are now up.

The Pacific APA

I am back from the Pacific APA, and I am getting ready to go to the Central Meeting on Tuesday (a real linguist -- Jessica Rett -- is actually commenting on my paper, so that should be fun). The Pacific was better than ever. Of course, it would have been great to have Jason Stanley take control of the meeting and the partying but I think we did alright on our own. Since the last post I went to Kent Bach's Context and Content session. The speakers were John MacFarlane, Zoltan Szabo, and Peter Lasersohn (actually I missed his talk due to a terrible eye allergy but fortunately I had heard him give the talk elsewhere). All excellent papers. Later that day I went to Michael Devitt's Author-Meets-Critics session. Michael and his critics' (Elisabeth Camp, Mark Crimmins, and Jim Higginbotham) inputs made for an entertaining afternoon. The day and night ended with a party (or two), and we left early the next morning in a condition not worth writing about.

Brief update from the APA

We are having a blast. My talk on sea battle semantics earlier today went well (the paper is available on my webpage). Peter Ludlow offered nice comments, and the questions from the audience were very helpful. When I get back, I will revise the paper and send the final version to the Philosophical Quarterly, who accepted the paper. Other highlights: there are so many. So I can only mention a few. David Chalmers' talk was quite a hit. It was on terminological disputes, translucent sentences and bedrock concepts. Berhard nickel's talk on generics was great. He talked about plural predication and scope ambiguities in generic statements. This is a topic I am very interested in. In fact, I have written several papers on it. So, Bernhard and I had fun afterwards talking about generics. The Kvanvig/Pritchard/Riggs/Greco session on the value of knowledge was really good. Kvanvig even responded (positively) to a criticism I made of his view in an earlier paper. Another big hit: J.C. Beall, Graham Priest, Octavia Buano, and Hartry Field on paraconsistent and paracomplete logics. I think Hartry managed to convince me that I should be a classical glut theorist -- to solve the Liar paradox. He is a classical gap theorist, but he still managed to convince me. Matt McGrath and Jeremy (the famous couple!) had a fun session on subject-sensitive invariantism (or to be more precise, their special variant of it). There were lots of other fun sessions, including sessions I had to miss because they either overlapped with my own or with other can't-miss sessions. Other than that, I can only say that there are lots of fun bars in San Francisco (Terry Horgan's and L.A. Paul's current and my former student Adam Arico got us thrown out of one of them -- Terry was thrilled to hear about it!) More bars tonight!!

Pacific APA

I am off to the Pacific Meeting of the APA in San Francisco. My paper for the meeting is available here.

Philosophers' Carnival # 45

... is here.

John Greco on Philosophy Talk

John Greco was discussing skepticism live at KALW 91.7 FM on Sunday March 25 on Philosophy Talk. The show is available here.

Reflections on My Talk at SLU

I had a great time at SLU yesterday. During my lunch with Eleonore Stump I learned that Eleonore is currently working on issues related to my work on knowledge-wh. Eleonore is especially interested in the neurobiological grounding of knowledge-how and objectual knowledge -- an approach which I find very fruitful. My own approach is primarily linguistic.

My talk went well. One issue that came up during Q & A concerned my analysis of knowledge-how. I treat knowledge-how as a species of knowledge-wh. The reason for this is that it is merely a fluke in English that 'how' is not a wh-word (in old English, old Nordic and Danish 'how' is a wh-word -- that is, it is not strictly speaking a wh-word but rather the equivalent of a wh-word in those languages). So, an adequate analysis of knowledge-wh should be extendable to knowledge-how. In my paper on knowledge-wh I offer a general analysis of knowledge-wh and knowledge-how which is based on my previous analysis of pseudo-clefts. On my analysis, 'wh' clauses are predicates. Two examples:

On my analysis, 'John knows what Mary did at 3 p.m.' cashes out to 'there is an x such that John knows that x is what Mary did at 3 p.m.'

And 'John knows how to play the piano' cashes out to 'There is a w such that John knows that w is how to play the piano' (this instance of my general analysis is very similar to Stanley and Williamson's analysis of knowledge-how)

Most of the questions after my talk concerned my analysis of knowledge-how. Among other things it was pointed out by Scott Berman, Jim Bohman, John Greco, Michael Barber, Joe Salerno and others that John may not know how to play the piano even if there is a w such that he knows w is how to play the piano. My immediate reaction was to refer to the gap between knowledge states and knowledge reports. After the talk Michael pointed out that there is a kind of ambiguity in 'knowing how' (not a lexical one). Sometimes we use 'knowing how' to talk about an ability to do something, and sometimes we use it to talk about knowing-ways (or in some constructions: degrees, as in 'John knows how difficult this task is'). That seems right to me. What I wonder is: how do we analyze 's knows how to F' in the ability sense? (compositionally, that is) Any ideas?

SLU Talk

I have uploaded a new version of my paper on knowledge-wh to my webpage. It is available here. This is also the paper which will form the basis of my talk at SLU on Friday.

Modes of Existence

I now have a draft of my review of Modes of Existence, which I am reviewing for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. The first 12 pages are mostly summaries of the essays (Mulligan, Raspa, Kroon, van Inwagen, Varzi, Reicher, Barbero, Orillo, Spolaore). The last 6 pages are friendly criticisms of Achille Varzi, Giuseppe Spolaore, and others. The very last part is an (overly sketchy) extension of David Chalmers' 2Dism to fictional and perceptual reports. Comments welcome!

Singpurwalla to Maryland

My friend and former colleague Rachel Singpurwalla (currently at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville) has just accepted a tenure track offer from University of Maryland, College Park.

Links

Jon Williamson has started a new venue for short pieces called The Reasoner.

Adam Taylor is organizing a grad conference on powers, dispositions and singular causation.

Also check out this post on the overcrowding problem by Adam Taylor.

And this post on concepts by Jesse Butler.

Nancy

Just got back from the Knowledge and Questions Conference in beautiful Nancy - just east of Paris. In spite of the fact that I had to spend 4 days in Charles De Gaulle Airport on my way back to St. Louis because of Continental Airlines' less than brilliant overbooking policy and bad weather in Newark, I had a really great time. Franck Lihoreau did a fantastic job organizing the conference, and need I say that the food was unforgettable? I learned that Claudine Tiercelin caused something of a revolution in the French University system when she proposed that Russell's work should constitute one of the major components of the comprehensive exam which many French college students need to pass before graduating. Claudine currently holds a visiting position at Fordham University (in addition to her permanent position in Paris). Claudine is well-known for her work on Peirce's logic and is also making important contributions to variouos areas of mainstream analytic. I am a huge fan of Claudine's work on Peirce. She is one of the world's best (if not the best) Peirce scholars.

What else? I finally got a chance to meet Paul Egre (actually, I met him briefly at a book event organized by Hendricks and Pritchard last year in Portland). Paul's paper concerned the question of why wh-clauses embed only under "factive" (or deictic) verbs. Pascal Engel gave a super-interesting talk on the knowledge account of assertion which Timothy Williamson has famously defended, and Ian Rumfitt talked about knowledge and logical consequence. Among other things, he rejected Edgington's suggestion that the consequence relation is one that preserves truth under a priori implication.

Another paper that I rather liked was Maria Aloni's paper on de re attitudes. Maria offered a new 2Dish account of de re attitude ascriptions. As mentioned earlier, a rough draft of my own paper is available here. The papers from the conference are scheduled to appear in a special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien.

Nancy, France

I am off to the Knowledge and Questions Workshop in Nancy, France. I have included the program below. My paper is available here.

Thursday 15th March
12.00—14.00 Registration, Coffee
14.00—14.10 Conference Welcome
14.10—15.20 CLAUDINE TIERCELIN, "The Fixation of Knowledge:
Pragmatist Parries to the Skeptical Challenge"
15.20—16.30 PAUL EGRÉ, "Epistemic Verbs and Embedded Questions"
16.30—16.50 Coffee Break
16.50—18.00 MARIA ALONI, "The Pragmatics of Questions and Attitudes"
20.30 Conference Dinner

Friday 16th March
9.30—10.40 JONATHAN SCHAFFER, "Knowing the Answer"
10.40—11.00 Coffee Break
11.00—12.10 BERIT BROGAARD, "What Mary Did Yesterday. Remarks on Knowledge-wh"
12.10—14.00 Lunch
14.00—15.10 IAN RUMFITT, "Knowledge by Deduction"
15.10—16.20 PASCAL ENGEL, "Asserting, Asking and the Norm of Knowledge"
16.20—16.50 Coffee Break
16.50—18.00 CHRISTOPHER HOOKWAY, "Questions, Problems, Inquiries"
18.00 Conference End

Philosophers' Carnival # 44

... is here.

ANU

Exciting news: I am going to ANU next year. They offered me a Research Fellowship in connection with David Chalmers' "The Contents of Consciousness" project. I am really looking forward to joining this excellent program.

1-Intensions and Strict Epistemic Possibility

Here is a problem I have been struggling with for the last couple of weeks. Suppose we assign the following truth-conditions to 'for all S knows, p might be the case'.

'For all S knows, p might be the case' is true iff there is a scenario v such that v is compatible with what S knows, and the 1-intension of 'p' is true at v.

For simplicity's sake, suppose scenarios are sets of enriched propositions, and suppose a scenario v is compatible with what S knows iff every enriched proposition in v has a 1-intension that is compatible with the 1-intensions of S's knowledge mental states.

This account seems to give us the right result in the simple cases. Suppose I don't know that water is H20. Then there is a scenario, namely the XYZ scenario, which is compatible with what I know and in which the 1-intension of 'water is not H20' is true.

But, now, here is the problem. Suppose I use 'water' and 'H20' interchangeably but fail to know that this is so. Then, since I do not know that I use 'water' and 'H20' interchangeably, it is plausible that I do not know that water is H20. So, it is strictly epistemically possible for me that water is not H20. But, as I use 'water' and 'H20' interchangeably, it is not deeply epistemically possible for me that water is not H20. In other words, 'water is not H20' is compatible with what I know but not compatible with my use of the words 'water' and 'H20'.

The problem now is this. The account of strict epistemic possibility just offered makes use of the notion of 1-intension. However, the 1-intension of a sentence S is a function from deeply epistemically possible scenarios to truth-values (see David Chalmers' work on this). As strictly epistemically possible propositions may be deeply epistemically impossible, the notion of 1-intension should not play a role in an account of strict epistemic possibility. But how then do we deal with strict epistemic possibility? I am pretty much stuck here. Any suggestions?

Alexandrova Accepts Offer

Exciting news: Anna Alexandrova turned down the post doc at Wash U and accepted the position at UMSL instead.

Ernie Lepore on the Heresy of Paraphrase

Ernie Lepore gave a super-interesting talk at SLU Thursday. The talk was about the heresy of translation. According to the heresy, when a poem is translated, something gets lost in translation. As Lepore pointed out, there seems to be a simple refutation of the heresy (I am quoting from the handout):

Suppose someone utters the sentence S in a poem. If S is meaningful, then it expresses a thought or an idea or a proposition or whatever -- call what it expresses p. Why couldn't another sentence S' be introduced to express p, regardless of whether it occurs in a poem or in a patch of prose?

The idea is this. We ought to be able to express the content of a poem in a different language. Just translate the poem word for word, and you should be able to preserve the content. Yet it surely seems that something got lost along the way. Lepore thinks that what gets lost is what he calls 'the vehicle of articulation'. To see the difference between an expression and a vehicle of articulation, consider the following sentences (from Lepore):

(1) 'red' is an English word

(2) 'red' is one word in English, another in Danish, and none in Italian

In (1) 'red' is an English word, in (2) it is a vehicle of articulation which expresses a color word in English, a past tensed verb in Danish, etc. The vehicle of articulation is different from the expression. Vehicles articulate expressions. Expressions have semantic values, vehicles don't.

Now, some expressions can only be expressed with one vehicle. Quotation expressions, for example, cannot pick out different things. Unless you use a name (e.g. 'Jason') to refer to 'Quine', 'Quine' can only be expressed with "Quine". "Quine" carries the semantic value with it. That is, the thing we quote is contained in the quotation expression. According to Lepore, quoted expressions create hyperintensional contexts. Consider, for instance:

(3) 'bachelor' is the first word in 'bachelors are unmarried men'

(4) 'unmarried man' is the first word in 'bachelors are unmarried men'

Even though 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man' are synonyms, substitution is illegitimate in a quotation context. According to Lepore, poetry is in important ways similar to quoted expressions. If you substitute a synonym for a word in a poem, something may get lost. Like quoted expressions, poems create hyperintensional contexts. Substitution into the context of a poem is illegitimate. Lepore concluded that the heresy got things exactly right. Some poetry is not simply about the content but is about the vehicle of articulation. For this reason, poetry can only be translated with great difficulty, and something usually gets lost.

On Adam's Counterexample to Modus Tollens

Ernest W. Adams famously offered the following counterexample to modus tollens:

If it rained, it didn't rain hard.
It rained hard.
So, it didn't rain.

Obviously, this is not a counterexample, given a logic 101 reading of the indicative conditional. Rather, it is a counterexample, given an intuitive assignment of truth-values to the premises and the conclusion. On an intuitive assignment, it seems that 'if it rained, it didn't rain hard' and 'it rained hard' may both be true. But the conclusion seems false, given the premises.

Notice that we get the same result with a subjunctive instead of an indicative:

Should it rain, it won't rain hard.
It is raining hard.
So, it is not raining.

The subjunctive in the first premise is a so-called future subjunctive, which differs pragmatically from the past and pluperfect subjunctives, for example the past and pluperfect subjunctives introduce a counterfactual implicature). With a future subjunctive, the argument seems invalid. But the appearance is an illusion. If it is raining hard in reality, it is not true that it doesn't rain hard at the closest worlds at which it rains. For the closest worlds at which it rains will include the actual world. So, if the second premise is true, then the first premise is false. Now, on a possible world account of the indicative conditional, Adams' argument fails for the very same reasons. I take that to be a virtue of a possible worlds analysis of indicative conditionals. But obviously more needs to be said about how to avoid certain problems that arise on a possible worlds analysis of the indicative.

Here is one such problem: if subjunctives and indicatives have the same truth-conditions, why is 'if Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, someone else did' acceptable when 'if Oswald hadn't killed Kennedy, someone else would have' is not? Edgington suggested that the difference turns on a difference in the tenses. I think that story is plausible.

Another problem is to account for the difference between pairs of conditionals such as 'If Kerry had won the election, the actual U.S. president would have been a democrat', which seems false, and 'if Kerry won the election, the actual U.S. president is a democrat', which seems true. Solutions have been suggested by e.g. David Chalmers, Brian Weatherson and Daniel Nolan. Weatherson and Nolan suggest that the evaluation world (the "A-world") may fix the reference of the expressions in indicative conditionals. That's an interesting idea but it does seem to have some odd implications. For example, 'If language didn't exist 80,000 years ago, then language existed 80,000 years ago' comes out true. Chalmers' two-dimensional account seems to fare better, as it avoids this consequence. On his account, language doesn't have to exist at the scenarios used to evaluate indicative conditionals.

Reference:
Adams, E. W. "Modus Tollens Revisited", Analysis 48 (1988) 122-128.

Links

Joe reports on some riots in Copenhagen.

Joe also has a new post on the old puzzle: if you were to call a horse's tail a 'leg', how many legs would a horse have? I especially enjoyed the picture of the five-legged horse.

Jonathan Ichikawa has an interesting post on apriori metaphysical possibility over at the Splintered Mind.

Arkansas' Sibilant 's' (Salerno)

Do you have good grammar? Not so much? You can always become an Arkansas lawmaker and change grammar. I quote from NPR today that

Rep. Steve Harrelson, a Democrat in the Arkansas legislature, yesterday introduced a resolution to declare the correct way to write the possessive form of the state's name. That would be, he says, "Arkansas's." ... Not everyone agrees, however, including the largest newspaper in Little Rock, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The daily stands by the Associated Press stylebook, which mandates that the state's possessive form is Arkansas'

There, see? The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette says he's wrong. Nice correction NPR!

PHINEWS Bulletin, February 2007

(1) PHINEWS / Volume 10 is scheduled to be published in April 2007. Deadline for submissions is March 15, 2007; Please send your annoucements and other relevant material to Vincent F. Hendricks, vincent@ruc.dk.

(2) SYNTHESE ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Synthese hosts its first annual conference Between Logic and Intuition: David Lewis and the Future of Formal Methods in Philosophy at the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen, October 3- 5 , 2007.

Invited Speakers: John Collins, Alan Hajek, Hannes Leitgeb, Rohit Parikh and L.A. Paul

Call for Papers - Deadline April 1, 2007

Synthese invites papers on the work of David Lewis and formal philosophy in accordance with the conference abstract. The final papers should be submitted electronically directly to editor-in-chief Vincent F. Hendricks, vincent@ruc.dk, classified as a "SAC"-submission in the subject entry. The deadline for submitting a paper for consideration is April 1, 2007. Notification of acceptance for presentation at the conference is August 1, 2007

(via Vincent Hendricks)

Two New Danish Blogs

... new to me anyway. One is Anders Schoubye's Legenden.dk -- a blog which has actually been around since 2002 (long before I started mine). Anders was just accepted as a graduate student at UCLA and is interested in definite descriptions, presupposition-failure and other exciting topics. The other is Klemens Kappel's Klemens Kappel's Blog (very fitting name!). Klemens is an associate professor at University of Copenhagen. Unfortunately (for you English-speaking (only) readers), the language of Klemens' blog is Danish. So, you (English-speaking readers) will have to wait for my occasional reports. Anyway, in spite of the fact that both of these topnotch philosophers are Danish, I have never had a beer with them in Copenhagen (likely explanation: it's 11 years -- yes, 11 years -- since I left the country). Actually, I never met Anders (but I am looking forward to meeting him at the Aberdeen epistemology conference in May, which he has promised to show up for!). I know Klemens from conferences, and he is definitely one of my favorite epistemologists. Hopefully, I will bump into him again soon.

Offer Out to Alexandrova

Exciting news: we have an offer out to Anna Alexandrova, who just completed her Ph.D. at UC San Diego. I very much hope she will accept the offer. She currently holds a post doc position at Wash U and has also taught a course for us last year. Her reasearch area falls within the broad area of formal philosophy, though with a special focus on philosophy of economics. This is an area of philosophy which I was hoping to learn more about. Now that may happen in a quite natural fashion.

Bush Funneling Money to al Qaeda-Related Groups

From Truthout:

Seymour Hersh reports that the Bush administration is funding anti-Shiite Sunnis linked to al Qaeda without Congressional approval and without appropriate appropriation. Hersh speculates that the money is coming from the pallet-loads of cash floating around Iraq and has already reached "three Sunni jihadist groups." He says, flatly, that the president is "supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11."

Resistant Counterpossibles

A quick follow-up on Joe's kangaroo post (I couldn't resist). In his forthcoming book The Philosophy of Philosophy Timothy Williamson defends the view that all counterpossibles are true, including:

If Hillary Clinton had been my mother, she wouldn't have been my mother.

and

If the law of excluded middle had failed, 'p or not-p' would have been true.

Williamson then writes as follows (symbols have been translated into English):

If all counterpossible were false, 'possibly-A' would be equivalent to 'if A had been the case, A would have been the case', for the latter would still be true whenever A was possible; correspondingly, 'necessarily-A' would be equivalent to the dual 'not-(if not-A had been the case, then not-A would have been the case)' and one could carry out the programme of section 3 using the new equivalences.

As this is a counterpossible (if Williamson is right), what Williamson just said is true. But so is:

If all counterpossible were false, 'possibly-A' would NOT be equivalent to 'if A had been the case, A would have been the case', for the latter would still be FALSE whenever A was possible; correspondingly, 'necessarily-A' would NOT be equivalent to the dual 'not-(if not-A had been the case, then not-A would have been the case)' and [so] one could NOT carry out the programme of section 3 using the new equivalences.

I am not saying that counterpossibles are sometimes false. My only point is that the subjunctive mood is a common way in which to refute one's opponents in philosophy (perhaps the most common way), and so, if counterpossibles are true (per definition), philosophy isn't as deep and interesting as one would have thought.

Denmark to Withdraw From Iraq

From Truthout:

The Associated Press reports from Copenhagen of Denmark's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq. The Danish announcement came Wednesday as British Prime Minister Tony Blair said his country would withdraw about 1,600 troops in the coming months, if local forces can secure the southern part of the country.

Philosophers' Carnival # 43

... is here.

Rankings

In previous blog posts John Capps has argued that the PGR gives us a somewhat inaccurate picture of the quality of philosophy programs. He now appeals to the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index to back up this claim. The FSPI measures productivity by the number of books and articles published and the number of citations. Given these parameters, the 10 highest ranking philosophy programs are:

1. Michigan State
2. CUNY
3. Princeton
4. U. of Virginia
5. Rutgers
6. UC San Diego
7. Penn State
8. UT Austin
9. SUNY Stony Brook
10. Rice

Capps notes that the list "doesn't look anything like the Leiter list". He also foreshadows an objection. The objection is that the PGR measures quality, whereas the FSPI measures quantity. Capps replies that citations are normally taken to be a good measure of quality. That's a good point. But I wonder whether the numbers cited by the FSPI are really accurate. According to the FSPI, only 20% of the faculty at Princeton and 28% of the faculty at Rutgers published an article in 2003-2005. Though I haven't checked, that seems unlikely. On the other hand, if there are mistakes, everyone is probably affected, and so that does not explain why the FSPI looks different from the PGR. So why does it look different? One possible answer is that there are numerous ways to measure the quality of a program. The FSPI clearly cannot measure originality or quality of articles as well as the PGR. Still, these data are quite interesting, and it might be a good idea for prospective Ph.D. students to compare the lists before deciding where to go. But students should also keep in mind that some prospective employers might consult the PGR rather than the FSPI before they decide whether or not to make an offer.

On McGee's Counterexample to Modus Ponens

McGee's counterexample to modus ponens came up in our reading group today at WashU during our discussion of Chapter 4 of Timothy Williamson's forthcoming book The Philosophy of Philosophy. The counterexample runs as follows. It's just before the election in 1980. The polls suggest that Republican Reagan is a clear winner. Democrat Carter is second, and Republican Anderson is third. Someone reasons as follows:

(1) If a Republican wins, then if it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson
(2) A Republican will win
(3) Therefore, if it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson.

Impeccable reasoning. Or maybe not. Intuitively, (1) and (2) are true, while (3) is false. Of course, if we force a logic 101 reading, then the reasoning is impeccable.

The counterexample is not a counterexample to modus ponens, given a reading of 'if ... then ...' as a material conditional. It is a counterexample to modus ponens, given an intuitive assignment of truth-values. Moreover, if we take the intuitive assignment of truth-values seriously, then it is a counterexample to the logic 101 reading.

But if 'if ... then ...' is not to be read as the material conditional, how is it to be read? A possible worlds account (ala the one for subjunctive conditionals) does not seem give us the intuitive result either. Without any further constraints on the closeness relation, a possible worlds analysis of (1) would tell us to go to the closest world in which a Republican wins. That is the actual world (as Reagan won). Then we go to the closest world in which it's not Reagan who wins. The closest world in which he doesn't win is one in which Anderson wins, if we keep the "Republican wins" feature fixed. So, (1) is true. (2), of course, is true. And so is (3) if we keep the "Republican wins" feature fixed. But this is not the intuitive result.

Why do we get a different result on an intuitive reading? Well, because there are two ways of determining closeness. If we keep the "Republican wins" feature fixed, we get one ordering of the worlds, and if we keep the "most likely to win if Reagan doesn't" feature fixed, we get another ordering of the worlds. If we keep the "Republican wins" feature fixed, Anderson wins if Reagan loses. If we keep the "most likely to win if Reagan doesn't" feature fixed, Carter wins if Reagan loses. The "most likely to win" feature would normally be more important, as it would normally be more salient. In the case of (3), for example, we keep the "most likely to win if Reagan doesn't" feature fixed, hence the false reading. In the case of (1) the "Republican wins" feature was just mentioned in the antecedent. That makes it more salient. So when we evaluate the embedded conditional, we keep it fixed, hence the true reading.

Now, there are of course numerous reasons to be suspicious of a possible worlds analysis of indicative conditionals. But at least the possible worlds analysis fares better than the logic 101 analysis in this particular case, as it is able to explain why modus ponens seems to fail.

Links

Wayne Riggs is hosting a conference on "Why Formal Epistemology?" on April 28-29, 2007. Participants: Luc Bovens, David Chalmers, Branden Fitelson, Alan Hajek, Jonathan Kvanvig, Adam Morton, Scott Sturgeon, and Paul Weirich (via Wayne Riggs).

Keith DeRose's has a new paper on Sly Pete and conditionals of deliberation, which can be found here.

There is an interesting post on Yablo’s Paradox, formal systems and incompleteness over at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog

Freedom & Neurobiology

John R. Searle, Freedom & Neurobiology -- Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power, Columbia University Press, 2007, 128pp., $24.50 (hbk), ISBN 0-231-13752-4.

Freedom and Neurobiology (FN) brings together two of the lectures John Searle gave at Sorbonne in the spring of 2001. One was a public lecture on political power. The other was a lecture on free will. The two lectures appeared in French in a book entitled Liberté et neurobiologie in 2004. The book was subsequently translated into Spanish, Italian, German and Chinese. FN comes with a 37 pages introduction which brings together the two themes. Both essays are written in the style that has characterized Searle's work for several years. Written with great clarity in expression, the essays begin with the fundamental issues (neurobiology and the Big Bang) and work their way up to such issues as freedom, collective intentionality and political power. Along the way the book makes several contributions to the free will debate and the dispute over the status of social reality.

In the first essay Searle formulates the problem of free will as a problem in neurobiology. According to Searle, the problem of free will boils down to the problem of answering the following questions: (1) 'What exactly are the neuronal processes that cause our conscious experiences', in particular, what are the processes that cause the 'active character of what we might call "volitional consciousness" '? (pp. 40-41), and (2) how do we explain the appearance of a gap between subsequent conscious states? Searle does not answer either question fully. Presuably only a neurobiologist/quantum theorist duo could do that. But he does give us reason to believe that these questions ought to be at the center of the debate concerning free will.

What makes the problem of free will a problem, says Searle, is that 'the conscious states are not experienced as sufficient to compel the next conscious state' (p. 43) There is an appearance of a gap in the causal chain. It is awareness of this gap that makes us think we have free will. As Searle puts it,

It is important to emphasize that the problem of free will, as I have stated it, is a problem about a certain kind of human consciousness. Without the conscious experience of the gap, that is, without the conscious experience of the distinctive features of free, voluntary, rational actions, there would be no problem of free will. We have the conviction of our own free will because of certain features of our consciousness.

This is a slight exaggeration, on Searle's part. For, as he subsequently points out, to say that there would be no problem of free will if we didn't experience the gap is not yet to say that the gap is not real. It could be that whatever precedes our actions is in every case sufficient to determine the action. But if it is not, then we are owed some account of how such gaps are possible in a largely deterministic world. Searle admits that there may be indeterminacy at the quantum level (p. 44). But the indeterminacy is often described as randomness, and randomness does not make for freedom in choice. Suppose I flip a coin before "deciding" whether to go to a bar in the Central West End or one in University City. I end up in University City. So do you. But unlike me, you weighed pros and cons -- your preference for walking home rather than driving settled the issue. Who is making a free decision in this case? Well, certainly not me.

What then is Searle's answer to the big question? After dismissing what he calls 'epiphenomenalism' -- the view that 'our experience of freedom plays no causal or explanatory role in our behavior' (p. 62) -- he argues that the brain 'causes and sustains' a conscious self which then engages in deliberations and reports its results to the brain. Finally, the brain moves the body. For Searle the self plays an important role in explaining our experience of the gap but the self is not something over and above the brain. As he puts it,

the self is not some extra entity; rather, in a very crude and oversimplified fashion, one can say that conscious agency plus conscious rationality equals selfhood. So if you had an account of brain processes that explained how the brain produced the unified field of consicousness, together with the experience of acting, and in addition how the brain produced consicous thought processes, in which the constraints of rationality are already built in as constitutive elements, you would ... get the self for free (p. 72).

So how does Searle's account differ from old-fashioned determinism? Is the account simply a form of compatibilism -- a theory that reconciles free will and determinism? It is not. While the self isn't some extra entity for Searle, the results of its deliberations are not caused by the brain. Searle thus assumes that there is a level of indeterminacy in decision-making. As quamtum indeterminacy is the only (known) kind of indeterminacy in nature, the indeterminacy in question can only be quantum indeterminacy. Searle points out that just because quantum indeterminacy is best described as randomness at the quantum level, this does not mean that the self's deliberation processes are also random. There can be radomness at the micro-level even if there is none at the macro-level. Searle concludes by noting that the hypothesis he has outlined is 'a mess' and that it seems to remove one mystery only to replace it with three others (free will, consciousness and quantum mechanics). Searle never says how quantum indeterminacy explains system indeterminacy. In spite of the inconclusiveness, the essay gives new structure to a very complicated debate without rehearsing all the tangents that have emerged in recent years. Moreover, it makes it absolutely clear where in the debate Searle stands: he is an old-fashioned indeterminist.

If you are already familiar with Searle's previously published books, in particular The Construction of Social Reality and Rationality in Action, the second essay will bring back old memories. The essay is about how political power supervenes on brute facts and collective intentionality. There is nothing mysterious about collective intentionality, according to Searle. If several organisms engage in an activity with consciously shared attitudes, there is collective intentionality. However, collective intentionality does not suffice for political reality. The institutional and political realms require what Searle calls 'status functions'. A status function is a function we impose upon an object by believing collectively that the object performs the function in question. Searle's favorite example is the one dollar bill. If we didn't believe that the one dollar bill had the value corresponding to the number printed on it, it would just be green paper. But the green paper is not just green paper, it functions as currency, and that function is a status function. Status functions are imposed on objects via constitutive rules of the form 'X counts as Y in context C'. According to Sarle, prominent or forceful individuals in a given social group initially impose the status functions. Then, slowly, the imposing becomes routine, and the practice then creates a constitutive rule. Searle thinks 'language is partly constitutive of all institutional reality' (p. 95). This makes institutional reality different from social reality (broadly construed). Within institutional reality, status functions exist only to the extent that we represent them as existing.

Now, as for political power, political power (and in particular governmental power), says Searle, is a system of status functions. It depends for its existence on collective acceptance (p. 97) When a system collapses, it is usually because the acceptance by a large number of people is withdrawn. One interesting feature of Searle's view is that he holds that political facts could not exist without language and armed violence. What makes it true that Bush is president is that enough people regard him as and accept him as president. And this they do by accepting the entire governmental system. But the governmental system would not remain in place if it were not 'backed by the threat of armed violence' (p. 108). It is only through the threat of armed violence that the government can be sustained as the ultimate system with ultimate power.

As noted at the outset, the essay on political power was intended as a public lecture. It does not deviate much from the theory Searle set out in the Construction of Social Reality and Rationality in Action. The essay raises important fundamental questions, such as 'what is a constitutive rule?', 'what makes social and political facts true?', 'how is a governmental system sustained?' A brief remark on the second question. On Searle's view, what makes it true that Bush is president is that we have imposed the president status function on Bush. He has the status function only insofar as we continue to believe that he has certain obligations and powers. But maybe this is overstating the role our alleged acceptance of Bush has in keeping him in place. Perhaps it is true that the continued acceptance of the governmental system is needed in order to sustain the government. And maybe it is also true that collectively we decided to impose a status function on Bush. But, it seems, the president status function is not sustained by our beliefs. Rather, it seems to be a role in a system that can be filled by different individuals. What characterizes the role is a collection of formal properties. What makes it true that Bush is president is that Bush fills the role. In this sense, the president status function is akin to numbers, it is a role in a larger system defined by its relations to other places in the order.

In sum: for those already familiar with Searle's philosophy, Freedom & Neurobiology introduces few new issues but it sheds light on old ones, and it clearly and concisely states Searle's views on a number of issues, including language, collective intentionality, free will, and the self.

Note: My colleague Gualtiero Piccinini was also asked to review the book for CUP. His review can be found here.


John Searle, the Free Speech Movement
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Erdös Number 8

Richard Zach reports that the Mathematical Reviews database MathSciNet has an "Erdös Number calculator" in the author search. He calculated Jason Stanley's, which is 5. I looked up my own, which is 8:

Berit Brogaard coauthored with Barry Smith MR2224530
Barry Smith coauthored with Achille C. Varzi MR1693227 (2000e:03014)
Achille C. Varzi coauthored with Anthony G. Cohn MR1996110 (2004e:03021)
Anthony G. Cohn coauthored with Ernest S. Davis MR1716181 (2000k:68156)
Ernest S. Davis coauthored with Jeffrey M. Jaffe MR0677084 (84f:90042)
Jeffrey M. Jaffe coauthored with Michael Rodeh MR1025464 (90m:68019)
Michael Rodeh coauthored with Maria M. Klawe MR0668088 (84a:68026)
Maria M. Klawe coauthored with Paul Erdös MR0593526 (82c:05058)

As Zach points out, you can also calculate other numbers, for instance, your Stanley or Zach number. My Zach and Stanley numbers are both 10. So is my Carnap number. My Taski number, on the other hand, is 7, and my Quine number is 8.

'The President has been Assassinated 5 Times'

Some think worm theory is suspect because we rarely quantify over worms in ordinary language. However, consider the following sentences (from Carlson 1977):

(1) The president makes good decisions when he is from Ohio
(2) The president has eaten at the Statler Hilton on saturday nights every week for the past 25 years.
(3) The president inhabited the White House continuously for 136 years until Truman moved into Blair house.
(4) The president has been assassinated by a disgruntled job-seeker five times since the turn of the century.

(3) seems to assert that a four-dimensional spacetime worm to which the predicate 'president' applies lived in the White House for 136 years until one of its temporal parts moved into Blair house, and (4) seems to assert that a four-dimensional spacetime worm to which the predicate 'president' applies has been killed five times. Carlson himself treats bare plurals and definite descriptions used generically as terms referring to kinds. But (1) of course does not assert of a kind that it makes good decisions when it is from Ohio. To avoid this implication Carlson distinguishes between kind-level and characterizing predicates. Kind-level predicates are predicates such as 'is extinct' which apply to the kind itself (as in 'the dinosaur is extinct'). Characterizing predicates are predicates such as 'makes good decisions when he is from Ohio' which apply only to instances of the kind. It is not the kind that makes good decisions when it is from Ohio but the individuals that fall under it. Carlson treats kinds as basic but if kinds were mereological sums, as some philosophers think, his suggestion would be consistent with the thesis that ordinary language quantifies over worms.

Reference: Carlson, G. 1977. Reference to Kinds in English, Ph.D. thesis, UMass.

Papers

Two of my articles just appeared in print:

"Number Words and Ontological Commitment", The Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2007), 1-20.

"Span Operators", Analysis 67 (2007), 72-79.

The papers are available here.

I'm cool with that

From LanguageLog:



Mark Liberman points out that 'Holly's slang scholarship is weak', as 'I'm cool with that' was current in the 80s when the mother was a teen. He also points out that 'cool' was used as 'a general term of approval' all the way back in 1884. SWEEEEEEET!