Sun Oct 15

Lewis Powell

Call For Papers:
The Second UCLA/USC Graduate Conference in Philosophy will be held on February 24, 2007. The submission deadline for papers is November 23, 2006. Papers should be suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation. Papers may be on any topic in contemporary analytic philosophy. Further details are available on the call for papers.

Thu Aug 31

Lewis Powell

This is one of those times when I post without having looked into things carefully first, which means I run the risk of rehashing well worn ground or the like. However, I'd rather post this, and have someone link me to a good discussion of it than let the blog stagnate (especially after I officially declared an end to the hiatus and promised a post today).

This is something I've been thinking about since watching an episode of the West Wing in which it (sort of) came up.

When someone asks "Do you know the time?", it is rarely, if ever, the case that a correct affirmative answer to the question would be satisfactory.

At one point in thinking about this I was wondering if maybe a maxim of courtesy was in play, something like, "don't ask a question which you lack sufficient evidence to believe that others in the conversation will be able to answer." That formulation requires tweaking if we consider "I don't know" to be an answer to the question "What time is it?". It's also possible that such a maxim would be superfluous, and existing machinery can already explain what's going on there.

The phenomenon seems to be potentially related to what goes on in situations like this: "What time is it?" "I think its around 5", where the "I think" serves to generate an implicature about the speaker's confidence in that guess.

I haven't really looked into it any literature on implicature and questions, but investigating issues for implicature that are specific to the domain of questions is something I want to do in my spare time this semester (if I have any such time).

If you know of anything good to read on, or related to, this subject, please let me know.

Lewis Powell

Ok, the summer has ended, and the school year is back in gear (at least, the school year at USC is), so that means it is also time to end the summer hiatus.

With the start of a new year, we also have some fresh blood in the form of the first year students. If we're lucky that means, on occaision, someone other than me will be posting here. I'll be creating accounts for any of them who want one later today, and I will also start pestering them to contribute.

I hope everyone had a good summer, and I'll be back to posting philosophy stuff later this very day.

Sat Jun 17

Lewis Powell

Rather than make another promise of content, I'll just say that the blog, (or at least my contributions) is on summer break, though there may be occaisional posts. Check back in the fall though, when regular posting will resume.

Fri Jun 9

Lewis Powell

Some philosophical questions can only be tackled by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I will actually post something of substance soon.

Wed May 24

Lewis Powell

Now that the semester is over and I have had some time to recuperate from the semester, I will be back to posting entries with actual content relatively regularly.

Thu May 11

Brandon Johns

The Society of Christian Philosophers-Eastern Regional Meeting kicks off next week. The conference will be held at Houghton College in Houghton, NY. For more information, click here.

Fri May 5

Lewis Powell

A couple days ago I was reading through chapter one of "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong", The Subjectivity of Values for a paper I was working on for the metaethics seminar I took this semester, and section 5, "Standards of evaluation" caught my attention. It is about two pages long, and in it, he is both clear and insightful. The section lays out the relationship between standards of evaluation and value judgements, as well as the appropriateness of standards relative to aims. He concludes that the objectivity of evaluation relative to standards in no way threatens a denial of objectivity about values in the sense that he means.

Right now, I suspect that he is wrong in that conclusion, and that the contents of that section either directly threaten, or play a role in something that does directly threaten a denial of objectivity, but I haven't had a chance to work that out, as I am trying to get this semester's work finished in a timely manner.

Which I should be getting back to now, actually.

Thu May 4

Lewis Powell

Weatherson mentioned that wikipedia could stand to have a bunch of informed people clean up or augment wikipedia philosophy articles. I agree. For instance, this article on metaphysics could certainly use a lot of help. Cleaning up and organizing the big broad category articles is one way to structure which smaller articles in each area are needed/need to be cleaned up, and allows for people to contribute without tons of experience. So, if you have some free time, and want to contribute, you should.

Wed May 3

Lewis Powell

At the session on Epistemic Relativism, Paul Boghossian was comparing epistemic and/or ethical relativism to a relativism that might be more palatable; relativism about motion. This post is about 'motion' talk, itself.

Basically, since modern science tells us that no motion is absolute, and the only applicable concept of motion is motion relative to some reference frame.

At one point, Boghossian was discussing what to say, once we've concluded how 'motion' talk works now, about what was going on with speakers before we discovered the relativity of motion.

One option discussed was that they were attributing some non-existent absolute motion property and were just wrong all the time. Another was that they were slyly and unawaredly doing whatever we do now. It is from this option that I came up with the title of the post. Retconning is something done in comic books wherein the history of the fiction is revised by current developments in the plot (and similar phenomena).

At first glance, something seems somewhat worrisome about a modern scientific discovery altering the semantics of, say, dead languages. However, to be fair, someone endorsing such a view would almost certainly think that languages have been this way all along and that fact about language is something that we only put together after this scientific discovery. Also, I think that, if one endorses semantic externalism for other reasons, that could reduce worries about this.

Mon May 1

Brandon Johns

The On-line Philosophy Conference is here here.

Tue Apr 18

Lewis Powell

Firstly, let me apologize for being light on the updates. That is because the semester is winding down, which means end of semester work is piling up.

So, no lengthy update, but I will post a link.

If you find yourself bored with the same old Frege's Puzzles, time after time, and want to surprise your audience with something a little more exciting than Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, this list of famous Pen Names may well revitalize that paper you're working on.

Also, I learned today that "Voltaire" was a pen name.

Tue Apr 11

Lewis Powell

This carnival brought to you by the University of Nowhere

Mon Apr 10

Lewis Powell

The UConn philosophy graduate students recently started a blog.

What is it like to be a blog?

Go check it out.

Sun Apr 9

Lewis Powell

Some of the claims made about titles of artwork in the Title paper I recently stumbled across on JSTOR are:

1) Titles, unlike names, are parts of the things they title.
2) Titles, unlike names, are essential to the things they title.
3) TItles, unlike names, have descriptive content (or at least, something that functions as a guide to interpretation, and thus does more than just denote).
4) Titles can only be given by the author of the work.

I'm inclined to think that (1) is true, and (3) is plausible, though the words that make up the title can also be used simply to refer to the artwork.

(2) seems like it would be the first step towards some sort of view wherein every aspect of a piece of art is essential, which I don't know would be very plausible, and I'd like to see an argument for four. I didn't see one in the paper, but I was skimming parts of it and so I might have missed it.

What do other people think about these claims, and how close names are to titles.

Mon Apr 3

Lewis Powell

Today, a book I ordered off amazon arrived:



This (the handbook of language and logic from MIT press) was an exciting acquisition, someone was selling a used copy on amazon for relatively cheap.

Sun Apr 2

Lewis Powell

This might be the best (and nerdiest) game ever. My friends Joshua and Chris at Rochester are responsible for it.

Game Rules:
Take a new issue of some philosophy journal. One player chooses an article in the journal, and reads off the names of the authors cited in that article. The other player(s) attempt to guess what the specific subject of the article is and/or the author of the article, on the basis of names of cited authors alone. The goal is to guess correctly on as little information as possible.

I just thought I'd share that so that you all know what to do if you're ever bored but have access to other philosophers with whom to play and some philosophy journals you haven't read.

Thu Mar 30

Brandon Johns

This year's Berkeley-Stanford-Davis Grad Conference is on April 8th at Stanford. Details here.

Wed Mar 29

Lewis Powell

Rochester is having an epistemology conference.

Tue Mar 28

Lewis Powell

In Insensitive Semantics, Chapter 7: Objections to Radical Contextualism (I), Cappelen and Lepore give three tests for context sensitivity.

Test 1: Blocking inter-contextual disquotational direct reports
Take a clearly context-sensitive term like, "she" in the sentence "She is a banker".

Utterance made in context C1, by Jones, while in a bank, demonstrating a female bank employee: "She is a banker."

Indirect report in C2, made by Smith, who knows Jones, demonstrating a lawyer: "Jones said that she is a banker."

This is what test 1 blocking looks like. The indirect report is unacceptable because there was a context sensitive term and so Smith's disquotation is insufficient for a true report.

Test 2: Blocking collective descriptions
Staying with "she", consider the following:
Utterance 1: Jones, demonstrating the manager of the First Bank of Fredonia: "She is a banker"
Utterance 2: Smith, demonstating the manager of the Second Bank of Fredonia: "She is a banker"

The following is clearly false: "Jones and Smith both said that she is a banker" (note that it really doesn't matter who is indicated, since there is no one female who both Jones and Smith said was a banker.

Test 3: Admit of Real Context Shifting Arguments
The final test is, I think, slightly more confusing.
Consider:
U: "She is a banker"

(1) There can be false utterances of "She is a banker" even though she is a banker.
(1*) There can be true utterances of "She is a banker" even though she is not a banker.

If one imagines a demonstration accompanying the non-quoted she, it should be clear that (1) and (1*) are true.

Ok, so that's how the tests are supposed to work. In the chapter, Cappelen and Lepore argue that quantifiers do not pass the test, using the quantifiers "at least one" and "at least two". My intuition is that "at least one" is able to be used disquotationally, and so that is evidence against its context sensitivity (test 1). My intuitions are substantially weaker for test 2, where it is alleged that the following is acceptable:
If there is a true utterance in some context of "Jill bought at least two penguins" and a true utterance in some context of "Jill bought at least two ducks" then it is perfectly natural to say: "Jill bought at least two penguins and ducks". Set aside that worry for a moment though. In fact, set aside the quantifiers they've chosen for a moment, and consider the following:

(2) There can be true utterances of "every bat is flying" even though not every bat is flying.
(2*) There can be false utterances of "every bat is flying" even though every bat is flying.

(2*) strikes me as obviously false. (2) on the other hand, is far less objectionable, and were my intuitions not so skewed, I might find it utterly unproblematic. Consider the utterance as made by a Zookeeper who is showing a tour group the bat cage, and none of the bats in the cage are at rest. Now say sentence two stressing the non-quoted "every" so that it reads like this:

(2) There can be true utterances of "every bat is flying" even though not every bat is flying.

This sounds fine to me. Stressing the every seems to be a fair counterpart to imagining the "she is a banker" case with a demonstration for the non-quoted "she".

For the sake of completeness, I'll put "every" through the first two tests.
T1:
Beth, a zookeeper standing in front of the bat cage, in which no bat is at rest: "Every bat is flying".

Report by Steven, who is in a cave filled with many sleeping bats and who just got off the phone with Beth. He turns to his fellow spelunkers and says: "Beth said that every bat is flying"

Evaluation: "Every" seems fine to use disquotationally here, and I intentionally chose a case in which the context of the report was one in which not every bat was flying. This type of result is claimed by Capellen and Lepore to indicate that the word tested (in this case, "every") is not context sensitive. I suspect that contextualists would have something to say about this case, but I hardly think its necessary in light of the following two tests.

T2:
Beth, a zookeeper standing in front of the bat cage, in which no bat is at rest: "Every bat is flying".

Steven, having just dropped his flashlight, startled the bats in the cave so that none of them remained at rest. He says, "Every bat is flying."

Ming the Merciless, watching both Beth and Steven on some sort of monitors turns to an advisor and says, "they both said that every bat is flying"

Evaluation: Something seems wrong about this attribution.

So, T1 indicates non-context-sensitivity, while T2 and T3 indicate context sensitivity for "every" (or, arguably, "bat", but my money is on "every").

Most people probably don't see it as a startling discovery that there is evidence for context sensitivity for quantifiers, but Cappelen and Lepore claimed that the tests came down on the side of quantifiers not being context sensitive, so I thought I'd see if my reasoning above seemed right to others.

(this post is due in part to discussion I had with Geoff Georgi, a USC Graduate Student and all around good guy)

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