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.

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.

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.

Brandon Johns

The On-line Philosophy Conference is here here.