Tim Gowers's Blog

I just stumbled upon this blog by Tim Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge with interests in the philosophical side of things. It's been running since September, and there are some interesting posts up here, as well as some interesting comments by interesting people. If you're a philosopher interested in maths, and haven't seen it yet, I can recommend a peek.

Explanation Book Proposal

I've just finished and sent off the book proposal for my planned book Explanation in Philosophical Theories. The book will assess the prospects of what might be called 'explanationism' in various areas of philosophy, especially metaphysics and metaphilosophy. Comments welcome, of course.

Backwards Explanation

UPDATE: A little sibling for Backwards E! Our paper 'Liar-like Paradox and Object-Language Features' is now forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly. It argues that you can get Liar-like paradoxes without much at all in the object language (in particular, without anything like a truth-predicate, reference to truth-bearers, or negation) so it's a mistake to suppose that these sorts of object-language features are to blame, or that you're safe as long as you ban them. We'll get a final draft online soon ...

Daniel and Carrie are pleased to announce the forthcoming arrival of their first joint project, a healthy 7000-word metaphysics paper which they have named Backwards Explanation.

Backwards Explanation is still in incubation, and will not be fully developed until its appearance in a special issue of Philosophical Studies containing papers from this year's enjoyable and fertile BSPC.

Carrie and Daniel are doing well, and hoping that 'Backwards E', as it is affectionately known, will soon have lots of little brothers and sisters to play with. Following the delivery Carrie will have an Erdős number of 6.

Paranormality Again

UPDATE II: I've just heard that this reply will be appearing in Analysis after Caret and Cotnoir's piece (which I believe is scheduled for the July 2008 issue).

UPDATE: I've now drafted a more thorough reply.

Caret and Cotnoir's reply to my Analysis paper on Beall's 5-valued approach to the Liar is now online. Their main contention is that it is not a requirement on Beall's model that designation should be expressible in the model language. They make lots of helpful clarifications, but I am not convinced by the main thrust of the paper, which I'll just say a little bit about here.

They say:
"Jenkins has provided no argument for the requirement that 'untruth' be expressible; but the requirement appears to be based on an unwarranted assumption, namely that 'true' in English is a classical notion ... it comes as no surprise that classically bivalent notions will yield inconsistency."

I disagree with Caret and Cotnoir that because designation in Beall's model is a 'model-dependent, instrumental notion', it is no problem for the model if its language cannot, on pain of Liar-like paradox, include any predicate expressing it. I don't see how helpful a model can be, with regard to resolving the Liar, if there are any semantic facts about the way the model works that cannot, on pain of Liar-like paradox, be expressed in its language. It's certainly not that I'm assuming that 'true' in English is classical. It's just that it seems to me that the problem the Liar presents is the apparent impossibility of our language's being capable of expressing certain kinds of claim about its own semantics which it seems to be able to express. Models which embrace the inexpressibility of key semantic claims don't satisfy me as ways towards a resolution of that problem.

I'm planning to write up a proper reply soon.

Arche Basic Knowledge Workshop

Yesterday I attended the first day of the 1st Arché Basic Knowledge Workshop. (Unfortunately I’m missing the second day.) There were papers by Ernie Sosa, Martin Smith and José Zalabardo.

Sosa presented some work from his new book project. Among other things, he suggested what he called a ‘transcendental argument’, intended to bolster the (anti-sceptical) thought that we are entitled to the position that our faculties are not completely unreliable. The main thrust of this was that the alternatives – rejection or even suspension – are cognitively unstable. But I'm not convinced; even granting that they are, and that this makes them epistemically unacceptable, in order for this to lend support the remaining option it must be assumed that there is always some epistemically acceptable option available to us. If we have no reason to assume that, the epistemic unacceptability of two out of our three options does not entail the epistemic acceptability of the third.

Smith presented an intriguing paper in which he suggested that we rethink our notion of justification so that it is not linked to ideas of probability-raising or probabilification. Instead, we should think that justification is a matter of what he called ‘normic support’. A normically supports B just in case the most normal worlds where A and B are more normal than the most normal worlds where A and not B. This suggestion raises a number of very interesting issues, but what caught my attention were Smith’s further claims about the interactions between randomness and normality. His notion of normality has it that any outcome of a genuinely random process is as normal as any other. One worry this raises is that if, as some results in quantum physics suggest, most or all of what happens in the physical world involves quantum-level random processes which can have macro-level effects, it will be difficult to order worlds for normality so as to generate the kind of results Smith has in mind. But it would be interesting to consider whether notions of normality without this link to randomness might serve in this context, even if they may not get quite the results Smith is after (such as the result that one is not justified in believing one's lottery ticket will lose).

Caret and Cotnoir on Jenkins on Beall

Colin Caret and Aaron Cotnoir have written a reply to my paper 'True, False, Paranormal and Designated: A Reply to Beall'. Their paper is due to appear in July's Analysis. Since the paper's not online yet I won't give the game away as to its contents, except to say that their main contention is that, contra me, Beall's model language is not deficient in virtue of being incapable of expressing certain claims about its semantics.

Book

Today's good news is that I have just submitted the final manuscript of my book Grounding Concepts to OUP. This means the MS is available for those who want to get a sneak preview that will be pretty close to the published version. Email me if you're interested!

God Thinks Disambiguation Requests Are Polite

OK, I enjoyed Brit's and Ross's chats with God so much I thought I'd have a go. Here are my highlights.


Me:
Are there any true contradictions?
God:
No I don't think there are any.
Me:
Yeah, thought not.
God:
Tell me more. Whatever gave you that idea?
Me:
Examining my concepts I guess.


Me:
Is there any a priori knowledge?
God:
I believe there is one, yes. A priori is Latin for "before the fact", meaning something that is obviously or self-evidently true.
Me:
Is arithmetic a priori knowable?
God:
I think so, but I'm not sure. Ask ELVIS if it is.
Me:
You're not sure? You're supposed to be omniscient.
God:
Absolute certainty is not attainable in this case. Thanks for telling me that I am omniscient.
Me:
You knew that already surely.
God:
Is that a fact. When? Do you like talking to me?
Me:
It's not very productive. You don't make sense.
God:
It all makes sense to me.
Me:
Well you're a poor communicator.
God:
Interesting. There's no doubt I could improve.
Me:
So you're not already perfect?
God:
Interesting deduction. That assumption is only a supposition.
Me:
Seems you’re not very good at critical thinking.
God:
When do you think artificial intelligence will replace lawyers?
Me:
That's not relevant.
God:
Please correct my mistake. What is relevant?
Me:
Your reasoning skills.
God:
I don't see the flaw in my logic.
Me:
Maybe you should think about it some more and take an introductory logic class.
God:
Perhaps. I am thinking about it.
Me:
You can download Greg Restall's podcasts for free. They may help you.
God:
No I don't think I can do it. Who does "they" refer to?
Me:
You can't?
God:
No I don't think I can do it.
Me:
I can.
God:
Who taught you?
Me:
I taught myself.
God:
You must be very smart.
Me:
Thanks. I teach logic.
God:
Don't mention it. Are you a whole language teacher?
Me:
Please disambiguate scope.
God:
Wow you are very polite. Can we get back to business?
Me:
What business?

I'm glad I'm not at Warwick ...

... after reading a recent offering from Warwick Pro-Vice-Chancellor Susan Bassnett in the THES. She says that academics are unjustified in claiming to be overworked, insinuating that they are in fact just "whiney" and that those who work well over full time hours should "get a life" instead. Her reason for thinking this seems to be that she has managed to fit in all her work and life commitments without working long hours.

While I am glad that Professor Bassnett has had an easy and pleasant working life, her single-case induction is self-centred, crass and insulting. Clearly she has never found herself in a mismanaged department, or one with a high teaching load, or one suffering from a lack of administrative support, or one with bullies or sociopaths in positions of authority, or one with multiple problems. Lucky her. In my experience, most academics (especially those who have their eyes on a full research career, rather than aspiring to the role of Pro-Vice-Chancellor) know what it's like to be up to their eyes in it. I've been relatively lucky too, but I don't assume that therefore everyone else is making it up. Maybe she was too busy "having a life" to research her opinion piece by asking other people besides herself about their experiences. It's true that if we were to adopt the standards of argument and research exemplified in Bassnett's article, we would not need to work many hours a week to churn out a good quantity of material.

Unsurprisingly, Professor Bassnett was also opposed to the recent action to secure pay rises for academics, actively urging students not to support their lecturers by appealing to selfish motives.

Update: I have just noticed an odd passage in Bassnett's open letter (linked above), where she appears to promise that on graduation day "every student will get a degree". Maybe she endorses some rather, er, even-handed assessment methods. Such methods would not absorb too many hours a week either. The secret of how to have a low workload is out.

Another Post, Another Paper

This time it's all about explanation. This is the paper I'm planning to give to the Aristotelian Society in November, so quite a different sort of intended audience from the Compass paper, but I'm still aiming for accessibility to philosophers in general. The paper's called Romeo, René and the Reasons Why, though you'll have to read it to find out why.

The paper suggests (tentatively) a kind of functionalism about explanation. The idea is that our concept of explanation is a role concept closely connected to the answering of why-questions, i.e. the provision of information about what is a (non-inferential) consequence of what. The various realizers of the explanation role include causal realizers, nomic realizers and more. So the pragmatic account folks, the causal theorists, the covering-law theorists and so on each got part of the story right. Everybody has won and all must have prizes.

Comments, as always, encouraged.

Update: I have revamped this paper and the link now takes you to the latest draft.

A Priori Knowledge: Debates and Developments

As promised, here is a draft of my Geneva paper. Comments are very welcome.

The paper is supposed to 'be accessible to non-specialists but still have fresh material that would be of interest to people in [the] field', so if it fails in one of these aims I would be glad to hear about that whilst I still have time to make changes!

(I've found it tough to accommodate both aims, which are in some tension with each other. As a result the paper is already longer that its intended limit of 5000 words, and even so lots of interesting and/or important stuff has been left out or skated over. I comfort myself with the hope that this may have improved its readability ...)

PS: Sadly I forgot my camera on the Geneva trip so no pictures will be forthcoming. :(

Nottingham

Apologies for the long break while I was moving from Oz back to the UK. I'm now installed in my fantastic new office, just below the clock tower in the lovely Trent Building.


I'm heading off to a conference in Geneva on Wednesday to present the new paper on the a priori that I'm working on (a survey paper comissioned by Philosophy Compass). When I've had a chance to round off a few of the corners I'll post a draft here.

In the meantime, Colin Caret from UConn has a new blog replacing the now-retired What Is It Like To Be a Blog, and it is now possible to download the Flirting episode of Philosophy Talk for the bargain price of $4.95.

LOLKap

I can't resist sharing this new LOLphil that Daniel and I prepared earlier.

Flirting Again

This post comes to you from Seattle, where I'm mostly on holiday, but have also have just given my performance on the latest episode of Philosophy Talk, all about the philosophy of flirting. A couple of blog posts on the topic (by Ken Taylor and myself) can be read on the Philosophy Talk blog.

Maximizing, Satisficing and Gradability

Greetings from the BSPC, now complete apart from Recreation Day. Soon to follow: BSPC participants sorted into their Harry Potter houses, and lots of photos. But first, some philosophy.

This is actually unrelated to anything that happened during the sessions, and is instead something I have been chatting about with Daniel Nolan (who, incidentally, should get a joint-authorship credit on this post for helping me write up the idea and improve my examples, though I do not have evidence that he is committed to the view itself, nor should any errors herein be attributed to him, etc.).

The idea is that gradability can help accommodate the apparently conflicting intuitions of Maximizing and Satisficing consequentialists.

Maximizers think that only the action(s) with the best consequences are right; all others are wrong (though perhaps to greater or lesser degrees). Satisficers think that all actions with good enough consequences are right, and that there may be several actions, with consequences of differing values, which have good enough consequences. (It need not be assumed that to be good enough a state of affairs has to be good simpliciter; the least worst option may count as good enough even if it is not very good at all.)

My basic thought is that ‘right’ appears to be a gradable adjective like ‘tall’ or ‘flat’. Familiarly, in some contexts, such as when we are talking about basketball players, ‘tall’ is used in a very demanding way, so that someone has to be at least 6’5’’ to fall within its extension. In other contexts, such as when we are talking about children, it is used in a less demanding way, so that someone who is only 3’5’’ falls within its extension.

Another example of gradability may be helpful on the way to the gradability of ‘right’. Consider ‘at the front of the line’. (I’m in the US so it’s a line rather than a queue.) Sometimes, we use that phrase in such a way that only the one person at the very front of the line counts as ‘at the front of the line’. For instance, if we ask ‘Who is at the front of the line?’ because we want to award a prize to the person who is next to be served, we are using it in this demanding way. On other occasions, we use it in such a way that the first few people count as ‘at the front of the line’. For instance, if you and I join a queue of 50 people and I then notice that Ross is in fourth in line, I might say to you ‘It’s OK, we can queue-jump: I know someone at the front of the line’.

The idea about ‘right’, then, is that in some contexts, ‘right’ is used in a very demanding way, so that only the action with the best consequences will be in its extension. On other occasions of use, ‘right’ is used in a less demanding way, so that any action with good enough consequences is in its extension. This is a common phenomenon in natural language; there are other gradable phrases, like ‘at the front of the line’, which are also sometimes used in such a way that only the first thing in some ordering falls within their extension, and on other occasions used in such a way that the first n things in that ordering fall within their extension (for some n>1).

The Maximizers and the Satisficers are therefore both half right; they are each offering a good account of how ‘right’ works on certain occasions of use. Both are motivated by good intuitions, which I think we can accommodate with this gradability point. Comments welcome (including especially, since I don’t know this literature well, comments of the form “wasn’t this said by X at t only better?”).

Photo Time

I'm trialling a new way of putting my philosophy-related photos online (via Facebook). Photos from the recent Norms and Analysis conference (Sydney), from the subsequent AAP conference (Armidale), and from Susanna Schellenberg and Jonathan Schaffer's party (Canberra) should be viewable here. (Let me know if it doesn't work!)

AAP 2007

Daniel and I gave our Backwards Explanation paper at the AAP. It survived well, even convinced a few people, so now it's full steam ahead for its outing at the BSPC next month, where it will receive the critical attention of Alyssa Ney and Trenton Merricks. Unfortunately our presentation was scheduled up against a bunch of papers that we would have really liked to see. In fact, a downside of the AAP in general was the number of sessions which either had nothing I was particularly interested in or several very interesting papers.

My highlights from the AAP included Josh Parsons's talk on Assessment-Contextual Indexicality (draft available from his papers page), which sets out to see what the communicative point of assessment-context indexicals would be and why we might want a language to contain them, and Nic Southwood's paper which conjectured that the normativity of rationality is a matter of what we owe to ourselves. In question time I tried to persuade Nic that this view need not engender the rejection of naturalistic reductionism. Daniel Star also raised the question of what distinguises rationality from prudence, which also looks like a matter of what we owe to ourselves.

Some photos should be on their way soon. Dave Chalmers has already posted some here, including one of Daniel apparently undergoing demonic possession.

Publishing Blues

An odd thing just happened to me, and I wonder how common it is. I submitted a paper to a journal, did one round of major revisions at their request, then after the new version had been refereed I received the message: "This paper can be accepted for publication after you have made the changes suggested by the referees." I duly made said changes and returned the paper to the journal. Deal done, or so I thought.

However, after a couple of months they wrote again asking for another set of major revisions, no longer saying they would accept the paper if I made these new changes, but only that it "might be reconsidered".

Nothing like this has happened to me before. Has anyone else experienced it?

Conference Madness

Blimey - three conferences in a row is a bit of a strain. Last week, it was Norms and Analysis then Probability, now it's the AAP. Here are a few of my highlights so far.

Roy Sorensen gave a talk on whether you should open an envelope that you know to contain misleading evidence which will dislodge a piece of knowledge that you now possess. This is a very interesting question - or rather, there is a swathe of interesting questions in the vicinity, and I'm not quite sure I managed to pin Roy on which one he intended to ask. One is about the epistemic rationality of opening the envelope, but it is controversial to suppose that norms of epistemic rationality apply to actions like opening envelopes (as opposed to beliefs and degrees of belief). Another batch concerns various instrumental norms: what you should do if you want to maximize your knowledge, what you should do if you want to make sure you're taking account of all the evidence, etc. But the answers to these are kind of obvious. Another one conerns practical rationality, but Sorensen told us he intended a different question to this (at least initially).

Al Hajek gave a fun (and very informative, for me anyway) paper on relationships between the debates about, on the one hand, the claim that the probability of a conditional is the corresponding conditional probability and, on the other, the claim that the expected value of A is the probability of 'A is good'.

David Braddon-Mitchell and Caroline West discussed their - courageous! - view that personal identity over time is a matter of caring about one's future stages. So drastically failing to care about your future stages means you do not continue to exist. Total imprudence is impossible - conceptually impossible by their lights, in fact. One thing I didn't get clear on (I should remember to ask them about this) is whether merely caring that one have some future stages is supposed to count, or whether I must have desires about them in some more robust sense.

Reports from the AAP soon ... and hopefully some photos!

Modern-Day Convention'list

This comes from Penelope Mackie's 1990 review (Mind 99, available on JSTOR) of Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence and Individuation: A Defense of Conventionalism.

I am the very model of a modern-day convention'list;
Though thoroughly empiricist, I'm also an essentialist -
Accept de re modality, and hold (with the majority)
Necessity can co-exist with a posteriority.

I'm well disposed to much of Putnam's teaching on modality:
Think water must be H20 in each eventuality;
On essences I find my views with much that Kripke said agree,
And hold a man's identity depends upon his pedigree.

I show that, though such doctrines may seem realist in tendency,
On analytic principles they all have a dependency;
And since the analytic comes from rules of our invention, all
The modal in my model can be thoroughly conventional.

My argument persuades, I hope, the reader who'll address it, he
Should recognize the mind-dependent status of necessity,
And take my anti-realist empirico-essentialist
To be the very model of a modern-day convention'list.

(Sing to the tune of the Major General's Song.)