Kripkenstein's Mules

I've been thinking recently about the possible fruitfulness of comparing cleverly-disguised-mule-worries (CDMW) in epistemology with Kripkensteinian-meaning-underdetermination-worries (KMUW).

I think it is helpful, in understanding CDMW, to think about two kinds of questions:

(1) Why does S believe those animals are zebras rather than lions?
(2) Why does S believe those animals are zebras rather than cleverly disguised mules?

'Because they are zebras' looks like a good answer to questions like (1) and a bad answer to questions like (2).

For a contextualist explanationist about knowledge like myself, this suggests that in contexts where the question 'Is S's belief explained by the fact believed?' amounts to something like (1), 'S knows they are zebras' looks good, and in contexts where that question amounts to something like (2), 'S knows they are zebras' looks bad.

What I find suggestive, in trying to understand KMUW, is an analogy with the questions:

(1') Why does S use 'plus' for addition rather than subtraction?
(2') Why does S 'plus' for addition rather than quaddition?

'Because of the dubbing, or otherwise word-defining, activities of S's linguistic predecessors' looks like a good answer to questions like (1') and a bad answer to questions like (2').

More on this topic will follow ...

Michigan

It's now settled that I will be spending September to December as a Visiting Associate Professor in the excellent Philosophy department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Daniel will be there too as a Visiting Professor.

It's very exciting to look forward to hanging out with an fantastic bunch of philosophers, including my erstwhile Canberra colleague, Andy Egan.

More From Geneva

Mark Jago has a blog post, with pictures, on the recent Eidos conference in Geneva.

New Web Pages, V-day Podcast

Following a small web crisis in the department, I have made myself a new set of web pages using Google Pages. This was fun; while the editor itself is very basic (but also therefore very easy), and doesn't allow you to do much, a workaround when you want to get other kinds of content or formatting into your page is to make another page and then cut and paste (from the page not the html) into the Google Page Editor. This seems to have worked for everything I've needed so far.

In other news, the Nottingham University Podcasts folks recently made a Valentine's day podcast on my work in the Philosophy of Flirting.

Geneva

For the last few days I've been attending the Eidos Because Conference. And for the few days before that I was attending the Eidos pro*doc Graduate Workshop. All in I've given 6.75 hours of talks during the last six days and participated in 19 further sessions. This has been a real marathon. Some photos are available which illustrate some of the effects.

Highlights have included Kit Fine arguing that vagueness is a kind of collective phenomenon like unevenness, then using this idea to motivate a logic where things of the form ~[(Pv~P)&(Qv~Q)] are true but everything of the form (Pv~P) is true; and David Liggins laying into the idea that standard (maximalist, necessitarian) truthmaker theory can be motivated by thinking that truth requires metaphysical explanation.