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Monday Mill Blogging (#009)

2012-01-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

I've missed a couple of Mondays, but today: Monday Mill Blogging is back.

Today's post is the second that will cover book 1, chapter 2, section 5.

§ 5. Connotative and Non-Connotative Names

Let's just start with a quote:

Proper names are not connotative: they denote the individuals who are called by them; but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals. When we name a child by the name Paul, or a dog by the name Caesar, these names are simply marks used to enable those individuals to be made subjects of discourse. It may be said, indeed, that we must have had some reason for giving them those names, rather than any others; and this is true; but the name, once given, is independent of the reason. A man may have been named John, because that was the name of his father; a town may have been named Dartmouth, because it is situated at the mouth of the Dart. But it is no part of the signification of the word John, that the father of the person so called bore the same name; nor even of the word Dartmouth, to be situated at the mouth of the Dart. If sand should choke up the mouth of the river, or an earthquake change its course, and remove it to a distance from the town, the name of the town would not necessarily be changed. That fact, therefore, can form no part of the signification of the word; for otherwise, when the fact confessedly ceased to be true, no one would any longer think of applying the name. Proper names are attached to the objects themselves, and are not dependent on the continuance of any attribute of the object. (p. 33)

Charitably understood, the structure of this passage is this: Mill asserts a view about proper names, considers a possible objection—the objection that the reason for giving one name rather than another imbues the name with that reason as additional significance beyond its denotation—and gives reasons for dismissing that objection (an uncharitable understanding would be one that requires us to reconstruct a compelling argument in favor of Mill's view of proper names from his response to this objection).

If we distinguish between the reason for assigning a name, and the reason a name applies to an individual, we can frame the point this way: Mill's position is that no attribute makes its way in to the application conditions for a name like "John" or "Dartmouth". The objection raises a worry based on the fact that there needs to be some reason behind the assignment of names, and Mill's reply is to argue that, even granting some reason for the assignment of the name, it seems clear that the attributes which ground the assignment do not establish themselves as conditions of application.

One might be tempted to analogize this to Kripke's distinction between reference-fixing descriptivism and meaning-giving descriptivism, but I think that might be a bit too quick. To be sure, I can see why it might be thought a parallel, but it would be hasty to suggest that this is the best way of understanding Mill's position.

In the next paragraph, Mill mentions the terms "God" (in the mouth of a monotheist) and "The Sun" as instances of connotative terms that might incidentally be indiviudal, but are linguistically general. Mill points out that we can imagine a situation in which there are many suns, and that "the majority of mankind have believed, and still believe, that there are many gods" (p. 33). Mill wants to set these aside, as he thinks they are general names which (in some sense) merely happen to name only one entity. This is introduced to distinguish it from "real instances of individual connotative names". His examples include: "The only son of John Stiles", "the first emperor of Rome", "the father of Socrates", "the author of the Illiad", and "the murderer of Henri Quatre". Now, for some of these, color me puzzled about why they are getting a different treatment from "The Sun" or "God". For others, it is much easier to see why they linguistically require the uniqueness of the entity they name (in a way above and beyond that required by "the Sun").

Mill explains that while it is possible that multiple people jointly authored the Illiad, the presence of the word "the" renders the name individual:

For though it is conceivable that more persons than one might have participated in the authorship of the Illiad, or in the murder of Henri Quatre, the employment of the article the implies that, in fact, this was not the case. What is here done by the word the, is done in other cases by context: thus, "Caesar's army" is an individual name, if it appears from the context that the army meant is that which Caesar commanded in a particular battle. The still more general expressions "The Roman army," or "the Christian army," may be individualized in a similar manner. (p. 34)

This treatment of incomplete descriptions is especially interesting, as it illustrates a sensitivity on Mill's part to the importance of context. The story appears to be that there are many different armies to which the name "Roman army" applies, however the use of the term "the" in conjunction with contextual factors, determines which of those specific armies the phrase operates as an individual name of on an occasion of use.

Mill next relates part of the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves:

If, like the robber in the Arabian Nights, we make a mark with chalk on a house to enable us to know it again, the mark has a purpose, but it has not properly any meaning. The chalk does not declare anything about the house; it does not mean, This is such a person's house, or This is a house which contains booty. The object of making the mark is merely distinction. I say to myself, All these houses are so nearly alike that if I lose sight of them, I shall not again be able to distinguish that which I am now looking at, from any of the others; I must hterefore contrive to make the appearance of this one house unlike that of the others, that I may hereafter know when I see the mark—not indeed any attribute of the house—but simply that it is the same house which I am now looking at. Morgiana chalked all the other houses in a similar manner, and defeated the scheme: how? simply by obliterating the difference of appearance between that house and the others. The chalk was still there, but it no longer served the purpose of a distinctive mark.

When we impose a proper name, we perform an operation in some degree analogous to what the robber intended in chalking the house. We put a mark, not indeed upon the object itself, but, so to speak, upon the idea of the object. A proper name is but an unmeaning mark which we connect in our minds with the idea of the object, in order that whenever the mark meets our eyes or occurs to our thoughts, we may think of that individual object. Not being attached to the thing itself, it does not, like the chalk, enable us to distinguish the object when we see it: but it enables us to distinguish it when it is spoken of, either in the records of our own experience, or in the discourse of others; to know that what we find asserted in any proposition of which it is the subject, is asserted of the individual thing with which we were previously acquainted. (p. 35)

I think I want to agree with Mill that the chalk mark on the house "does not declare anything about the house." It is true that one could devise a language of chalk symbols, in which different chalk marks were used to indicate different qualities. But note that in such a language, the chalk symbols would be functioning like predicates (with their physical locations determining the subject of the proposition). But I want to stress something crucial about Mill's use of the analogy here: if Mill had not so steadfastly insisted that names signify objects rather than ideas, this doctrine of mere denotation would be harder to make sense of. Note that Mill thinks the term is "connect[ed] in our minds with the idea of the object". Since our idea of the object likely includes a variety of attributes we take the object to have, the proponent of the view that terms signify ideas (e.g. Locke) would have no reason to suggest that the name lacks meaning. It might well be that the meaning is not robustly public (as my idea of Dartmouth may not be the same as your idea of Dartmouth), but the term would signify a somewhat detailed idea. Because Mill is committed to cashing out the relationship between the term and the object, and because no particular attribution of quality to Dartmouth is inherent in my calling Dartmouth "Dartmouth", Mill can set aside the various qualities built in to my idea of Dartmouth as linguistically irrelevant.

I might have more to say about this analogy at a later time, but for now, I am going to pause again, and return next Monday (hopefully) to continue working my way through 1.2.5.

Next time on Monday Mill Blogging: §5, "Connotative and Non-Connotative Names" (continued)

Monday Mill Blogging (#008)

2012-01-09T14:31:00.000-08:00

Another Monday, another Mill blogging! 2012 is actually off to a pretty good start for Monday Mill Blogging.

Today's post is the first that will cover book 1, chapter 2, section 5.

§ 5. Connotative and Non-Connotative Names

We saw that §4 closed by foreshadowing the connotative/non-connotative distinction. This is labeled the "third great division of names" by Mill, (following the General/Singular division and the Concrete/Abstract division). We are also informed that "[t]his is one of the most important distinctions which we shall have occasion to point out, and one of those which go deepest into the nature of language" (p. 31). The distinction amounts to this:

A non-connotative term is one which signifies a subject only, or an attribute only. A connotative term is one which denotes a subject, and implies an attribute. By a subject is here meant anything which possesses attributes. Thus John, or London, or England, are names which signify a subject only. Whiteness, length, virtue, signify an attribute only. None of these names, therefore, are connotative. (p. 31)

It is easy enough to see that these are supposed to be instances of Mill applying the definition he has stated, though, if you didn't know what Mill meant by "signifies a subject only"or "attribute only" to begin with, it is unclear that the examples will be as helpful as Mill might have hoped. The subsequent discussion is a bit more helpful:

But white, long, virtuous, are connotative. The word white, denotes all white things, as snow, paper, the foam of the sea, &c., and implies, or in the language of the schoolmen, connotes, the attribute whiteness. The word white is not predicated of the attribute, but of the subjects, snow, &c.; but when we predicate it of them, we convey the meaning that the attribute whiteness belongs to them. (p. 31)

So, a word like "white" is said to be connotative, because it denotes all sorts of things, and also does this other thing ("implying" or "connoting") of the attribute whiteness. In his next example, concerning the term "virtuous" and the things which "virtuous" names, Mill gives us what appear to be the most helpful remarks on what it means for a term to connote an attribute: "The ["virtuous"] is a name applied to all of them in consequence of an attribute which they are supposed to possess in common, the attribute which has received the name of virtue" (p. 31).

This "in consequence of" condition seems to be helpful in getting us onto Mill's conception of this division of language. Some terms, like "virtue" denote attributes, some terms like "Socrates" denote subjects. And that is all they do (at least, as far as we are presently concerned). Other terms, like "virtuous", denote subjects and connote an attribute. Socrates is denoted both by "Socrates" and by "virtuous", but the latter fact is dependent on his relationship to virtue. Of course, this means that Mill would deny any such story for the term "Socrates". We might then be tempted to say that the term "Socrates" denotes Socrates, but not as a consequence of Socrates standing in some relation to an attribute.

This is, however, at best, a misleading way to phrase the position, and might make the view seem silly. Of course there are facts about our usage of the term "Socrates", and those facts will be part of a story as to why "Socrates" names Socrates and not some other person, and that story may well involve the possession of certain attribute by Socrates. Whenever the term (or a relevant predecessor term) began to be used, the story about how "Socrates" came to be a name of Socrates will ultimately involve facts about Socrates, such as him having been in a certain place at a certain time, or him being the intended subject of discussion on certain occasions, or the like. And these will of course involve attributes, the possession of which by Socrates ensures that "Socrates" denotes Socrates. However, it seems clear that this should not be how we understand Mill's position. Note that the phrasing I just described omitted a key element of Mill's phrasing. Mill says "applied to all of them in consequence of an attribute which they are supposed to possess in common" (emphasis mine). The copy of Mill's Logic that I have indicates that the phrase I've got in bold was omitted in earlier editions of the work. I won't speculate on whether the addition was motivated to avoid the reading suggested above, but with the additional qualification in there, it would not be enough for there to simply be an attribute in virtue of which Socrates is denoted by "Socrates"; rather, it would have to be that the term denotes Socrates in virtue of there being a particular attribute we suppose him to have.

I think this is a central and important point about Mill's view. Mill is not committed to denying that some facts about Socrates play a role in explaining why he is denoted by the term "Socrates"; rather, he has the weaker commitment that there is no attribute which, in virtue of our supposing Socrates to possess it, explains his being denoted by "Socrates".

Mill's stance is that concrete general names are all connotative. He indicates that having a body (with a certain sort of shape), possessing animal life, and possessing rationality are the attributes connoted by the term "man" or "human". He then offers a case based on Gulliver's Travels, indicating that rationality and animality are insufficient, because we would not call the elephant shaped (but rational) Houyhnhnms men or humans.

We then get a handful of terminology, and some clarification on how these terms interact with Mill's view.

The term "man"...

...signifies each attribute (corporeality, animal life, rationality, our distinctive shape) and each subject which possesses those attributes.

...directly signifies each subject possessing corporeality, animal life....
...indirectly signifies the attributes (corporeality, animal life...)

...denotes each subject possessing corporeality, animal life...
...connotes the attributes (corporeality, animal life...)

...can be predicated only of the subjects.

Additionally, a connotative term is called denominative, because the subject is/subjects are denominated by the connoted attribute(s). So for Mill, the proper use of "denominate" is as something done by attributes to subjects.

Mill then remarks briefly on connotative abstract terms, giving, as his example, "fault", which denotes various qualities, and connotes hurtfulness/badness/undesirability (of those qualities). I find Mill's discussion of a specific example here somewhat perplexing, and not in the sort of way where presenting my confusion will serve to help enlighten me about it, so I'll just leave it at the point here, that the category we might label abstract general terms (terms which denote many qualities) wind up connotative for Mill.

Ok, and that is all I am covering of this section today. We're a little past one fifth of the way into the section, and the next paragraph opens the issue of concrete, individual names, which I'm going to leave off until next time. So, next week, look forward to the distinction between proper names and a class of names that correspond (roughly) to definite descriptions, including some interesting remarks on incomplete descriptions and context, as well as the very exciting analogy from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Next time on Monday Mill Blogging: §5, "Connotative and Non-Connotative Names" (continued)

The Mod Squad: A Group Blog for Modern Philosophy

2012-01-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

Inspired by my desire to read more blog posts in history of modern philosophy, I recently started a group blog, "The Mod Squad". I posted on my facebook page to see if people wanted to participate, and I got a decent number of people expressing interest in possibly becoming contributors.

Anyone who regularly reads my blog would probably be interested in what is/will be going on over there, so I'm letting people know about it now.

Most of the things I will be posting over there are things I would have posted over here anyway. I am unlikely to double-post, just because built in forking of commenting/discussion threads seems silly, but I am pretty likely to post links in one direction or the other.

Monday Mill Blogging (#007)

2012-01-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

2012 is off to a good start, with Monday Mill Blogging actually occurring on a Monday!

Today's post covers book 1, chapter 2, section 4.

§ 4. Concrete and Abstract Names

For Mill, the distinction between concrete names and abstract names is done based on whether the object or objects named by the term are objects or attributes. So "John" is a concrete name, because John is an object. "Whiteness" is an abstract name, because whiteness is an attribute. "White" and "old" however, are concrete names. This is because "white" names white things. Mill blames Locke for the tendency to label "white" and "old" as abstract names:

A practice, however, has grown up in more modern times, which, if not introduced by Locke, has gained currency chiefly from his example, of applying the expression "abstract name" to all names which are the result of abstraction or generalization, and consequently to all general names, instead of confining it to the names of attributes.[...] A more wanton alteration in the meaning of a word is rarely to be met with; for the expression general name, the exact equivalent of which exists in all languages I am acquainted with, was already available for the purpose to which abstract has been misappropriated, while the misappropriation leaves an important class of words, the names of attributes, without any compact distinctive appellation. (p. 29)

So, using talk of affirmation (extrapolating from Mill's use in §3), we can say that a name is concrete if it can be truly affirmed of objects, and it is abstract if it can be truly affirmed of attributes. It is singular if it can only be truly affirmed of only one object (at a time) and general if it can, in a single sense, be affirmed of several objects at once. Mill briefly discusses whether abstract terms can be singular or general, observing that colour seems to be a good example of a general abstract term, before noting that whiteness would also potentially seem to be a general abstract term (because of the different varieties of whiteness). Ultimately, Mill decides that this is not an especially interesting question, and (essentially) stipulates that "singular" and "general" only apply to concrete terms.

Mill goes on to consider an objection against his decision to class white as a concrete term and not as an abstract term.

It may be objected to our definition of an abstract name, that not only the names which we have called abstract, but adjectives, which we have placed in the concrete class, are names of attributes; that white, for example, is as much the name of the colour as whiteness is. But (as before remarked) a word ought to be considered as the name of that which we intend to be understood by it when we put it to its principal use, that is, when we employ it in predication. When we say snow is white, milk is white, linen is white, we do not mean it to be understood that that snow, or linen, or milk, is a color. We mean that they are things having the colour. The reverse is the case with the word whiteness; what we affirm to be whiteness is not snow, but the colour of snow. Whiteness, therefore, is the name of the colour exclusively, white is a name of all things whatever having the colour; a name, not of the quality whiteness, but of every white object. It is true, this name was given to all those various objects on account of the quality; and we may therefore say, without impropriety, that the quality forms part of its signification; but a name can only be said to stand for, or to be a name of, the things of which it can be predicated. (p. 30)

Recall that Mill has pointed out that some languages permit constructions analogous to "round moves", while English requires us to say something more like "Round things move". I take it this is what Mill has in mind when he indicates that he has before remarked that terms are names of the things they can be affirmed of, since in discussing that case, he decided to treat the constructions like "round moves" (in the languages which permit such constructions) as mere abbreviations of something more like "round things move".

Most interesting, however, about this discussion here, is that Mill puts forward in two slightly different forms, a methodological principle for investigating word meanings (or, alternately, we might conceive it as a straightforward constraint on one's accounts of the meanings of words). The principle takes predication to be the primary use of words. This is not especially shocking. While much recent work has been done on erotetic logic, logic for imperatives, etc., I don't think anyone would be surprised to learn that Mill's conception of logic gave a special primacy to predication. What is interesting, though, is that Mill, in a sense, takes predication to be methodologically prior to naming. There is another sense, as we can see from the structure of the work, in which naming is prior. This is because predication is something we do with names, and so, as components of predications, they wind up being more basic. But in terms of our investigation, Mill takes predications as our starting point, and uses observations about predication to draw conclusions about the denotations of terms.

Mill closes the section by noting that there is an important (semantic) relationship between the term "white" and the attribute whiteness, which is the topic of the next section ("Connotative and Non-connotative names"). This is where we will get Mill's actual statement of the doctrine that has come to be known as "Millianism" about proper names.

Just to forewarn: There is a lot going on in the next section of the text. We get an account of denotation and connotation, the famous "Dartmouth" passage, additional discussion of terms that straddle the singular/general divide, remarks on incomplete definite descriptions, some discussion of the work done by context in fixing meaning, an awesome explanation of his view in terms of Ali Baba and the Forty Theives, and discussion of the elephant people from Gulliver's Travels. So it will either get tackled in a string of posts, or in one absurdly lengthy post.

Next time on Monday Mill Blogging: §5, "Connotative and Non-Connotative Names"

2012 Margaret Wilson Conference

2012-01-02T10:23:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure I can really express how much I like this conference.

Four years ago, Gideon Yaffe e-mailed me the submission information for the Margaret Wilson conference, saying "You might think about submitting a paper for this. You'd meet a lot of good people."

I wound up submitting my paper "The Structure and Content of Belief in Hume's Treatise", and it was accepted. That wound up being my first conference presentation in philosophy. The 2008 Margaret Wilson conference was held at Cornell, in Ithaca, and Gideon was right that I'd meet a lot of good people. I also got a lot of good/helpful feedback on my paper.

Which was really useful, because around a year later, the work in that paper had evolved to become the core of my dissertation proposal.

Two years later, at the 2010 Margaret Wilson conference at UC Boulder, I wound up presenting work from one of the later chapters of the dissertation, again meeting a number of awesome folks, and again getting a lot of good feedback on my work.

The conference is held in memory of Margaret Dauler Wilson, an extremely influential figure in scholarship of early modern philosophy. Here is a brief description from the Princeton Philosophy department website.

I am very excited to participate again this year, at the 2012 conference in Dartmouth. I'll be presenting some work on the relationship between Malebranche's and Hume's views on belief (and in particular, their commitments regarding doxastic voluntarism).

If you are a graduate student working in early modern, you should definitely consider submitting to this conference.

Early Moderns and "Thinking Around"

2011-12-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

I am taking a brief break from grading to make a few notes about something I've become increasingly interested in recently, which I've been labeling for myself as "thinking around" (to be contrasted with "thinking about").

I'm going to start with two examples, one from Hume and one from Berkeley.

On my reading of Hume, there is a sort of mental activity one can engage in towards that which is strictly and literally inconceivable. This activity is supposition. In one part of my dissertation, I attempt to show that Hume can embrace this form of mental engagement without abandoning his commitment to analyze all mental activity (of the understanding) in terms of conception (i.e. ideas). At any rate, there are a few passages which are naturally read as Hume allowing that some things can be supposed which cannot be conceived. This type of mental engagement, I argue, allows a response to a Reidian objection which charges Hume as unable to account for reductio ad absurdum reasoning. So, while you cannot, on my reading of Hume, think of or about an even prime greater than 2, for example, you can think around such a prime, allowing you to reason your way to its non-existence.

Berkeley, like Hume, has a view of conception bound up with what ideas one possesses. Consequently, Berkeley deploys arguments about the nature of ideas to show that certain things are inconceivable. But, as is somewhat explicit in the third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, and fully explicit in Alciphron VII, Berkeley introduces a way to defend the meaningfulness of discourse in which meaningful terms to not signify ideas (rejecting a straightforward Lockeanism about language), with something I'll call "notions" (though I don't know if Berkeley consistently uses the "idea"/"notion" terminology to track this distinction). Having a notion of something does not require having an idea of it. Thus, even though I cannot have an idea of immaterial susbtance, I still have a way to engage with propositions about immaterial substances (whether we are speaking of me or god). This too is a sort of thinking around, as I understand it.

Resources which allow a philosopher to permit our thinking around something which we cannot (on their view) properly think about or of are important elements of their views for two reasons. First, they can give us important insights about other aspects of their views. For instance, noting that Berkeley must appeal to some such resource in the third dialogue, to explain how we can believe in immaterial substance helps us exclude some (seemingly natural) interpretations of the first dialogue arguments against material substance. While it might appear that Berkeley is offering a straightforward inconceivability argument against belief in material substance there, it is clear from his own later admission that we cannot strictly conceive of immaterial substance that the dialogue one argument must be more complicated than it at first seemed.

Second, however, they are important for allowing us to see how powerful objections to those philosophers wind up being. Take Hume, who embraces the view that we cannot conceive of anything which is impossible. Given that various philosophers have appeared to sincerely defend views which, for Hume, turn out to be impossible, there is the objection that Hume cannot be right, because we could not then make sense of such apparently sincere defenses. A natural sort of reply is to invoke some sort of verbal confusion underlying the dispute. But that line of reply is not always satisfying, and does not always do a good job of addressing the behavior of his opponents. On the other hand, Hume's resource of supposition-without-conception permits him a more robust way to understand his opponents as engaging with these impossible views (apart from merely "mistakenly defending that the sentences which express those impossibilities actually express truths").

I'm sure that similar sorts of resources crop up in the views of other philosophers, but I don't want to just start casting around randomly. If anyone has suggestions of places to look (especially in terms of early modern figures other than the "canonical" British empiricists), please let me know.

Monday Mill Blogging (#006)

2011-12-06T06:03:00.001-08:00

Monday Mill blogging makes its triumphant return to Tuesdays, apparently.

Today's post covers book 1, chapter 2, section 3.

§ 3. General Names and Singular Names

Section §3 is largely focused on the distinction between general and singular names. Mill's infamous doctrine about singular names won't be put forward until two sections later, but there are some interesting elements to this discussion nonetheless. The section opens:

All names are names of something, real or imaginary; but all things have not names appropriated to them individually. For some individual objects we require, and consequently have, separate distinguishing names; there is a name for every person, and for every remarkable place. Other objects, of which we have not occasion to speak so frequently, we do not designate by a name of their own; but when the necessity arises for naming them, we do so by putting together several words, each of which, by itself, might be and is used for an indefinite number of other objects; as when I say, this stone: "this" and "stone" being, each of them, names that may be used of many other objects besides the particular one meant, though the only object of which they can both be used at the given moment, consistently with their signification, may be the one of which I wish to speak. (p. 27)

First off, I am not sure, but it sounds like Mill might be going in for a quasi-Meinongian view, given that opening claim. There might be a way to cash it out that doesn't involve quantifying over non-real entities, but it seems like Mill is suggesting that, while not every object has a proper name, every name has a proper object. This sort of commitment is relevant to evaluating, for instance, what we can take Mill as having to say, if anything, about Frege's puzzle and/or other puzzles for the Millian view of proper names. For instance, if Mill is positively committed to imaginary objects as being denoted by meaningful terms, this provides him with something of a response to at least one problem arising from "empty" names. Actually, it might be apt to call it a "presponse", since it looks like Mill recognized that not all meaningful names correspond to real objects, and offered a view about those cases antecedent to a specific challenge being issued.

So, Mill thinks that putting together general names into complexes can supply us (perhaps only incidentally and temporarily) with names for objects that don't have their own proper name. This is a pretty plausible thesis, I'd say. However, this is not the only purpose for general names. Mill suggests that if all general names were for is to allow ad hoc construction of names for objects that don't have their own proper names, they "could only be ranked among contrivances for economizing the use of language". There is a parallel here between Mill and Locke on the role of general terms/names. Both recognize that a language where every objects possesses only a proper name would be unmanageable, and accept some sort of argument from the practical necessities of language in favor of general terms.

As noted, Mill does not think this is the only role of general terms:

But it is evident that this is not their sole function. It is by their means that we are enabled to assert general propositions; to affirm or deny any predicate of an indefinite number of things at once. The distinction therefore, between general names, and individual or singular names is fundamental; and may be considered the first grand division of names. (p. 27)

Mill then defines a general name as a name that is capable of being truly affirmed, in the same sense, of each of an indefinite number of things. Individual or Singular names, then, are capable of being affirmed, in the same sense, of one thing only. Mill's example of a general name is "Man" and his example of a singular name is "John". Mill is not concerned about the fact that lots of people are named "John", because he thinks that "John" in "John Lennon" has a different sense than "John" in "John Fitzgerald Kennedy". Here is the interesting part. In defending this claim, we get a preview of Mill's famous claim about proper names:

For, though there are many persons who bear that name, it is not conferred upon them to indicate any qualities, or anything which belongs to them in common; and cannot be said to be affirmed of them in any sense at all, consequently, not in the same sense. (p. 28)

I am not sure how to make sense of this claim made here, that "John" cannot be affirmed of people named "John" at all, and the earlier claim that "a singular name is a name which is only capable of being affirmed, in the same sense, of one thing." The definition seems to suggest that singular names are affirmed of individuals, while the latter remark seems to suggest that (some) singular names are not affirmable at all. Now, Mill goes on to say that "The king who succeeded William the Conquerer" is a singular name, and presumably that can be affirmed, so some singular names would still be affirmable. However, Mill's point that the propriety of calling someone "John" does not depend on their antecedently possessing some feature that is designated by "John" seems right. Intuitively, the dependence goes in the other direction, the quality of "going by the name 'John'" is had in virtue of being called "John". Mill's reason for taking "The king who succeeded William the Conquerer" to be singular is this: "that there cannot be more than one person of whom it can be truly affirmed, is implied in the meaning of the words." In other words, there is a sort of semantic guarantee of the term applying to at most one object, and this suffices for it to be singular.

I have not mentioned revisions or amendments to the text, though the Liberty Fund edition of the text I am using has ample detail about changes to the text between the manuscript and different editions. I do want to make mention of an interesting revision to the passage I've just been discussing. The earlier text had, as the example definite description, "The present King of England" and in the explanation of it qualifying as singular, he said, "never can be more than one person at a time of whom it can be truly affirmed". This revision is interesting to me because I think Mill would still want to count "The present king of England" as a singular name, but it seems that it is a messy example to use, since it can, at different times, be affirmed truly of different people. I suppose one could say that it is being used in different senses at different times, but then to explicate this, one would have to suggest that the word "present" undergoes a continual change of sense. While this might, ultimately, be the best thing to say about it on Mill's view, it would make things much messier to lay all this out when trying to explain the division than to treat of the quirkiness of the example later, when more of the machinery is in place.

Back to the main text: Mill observes that even an incomplete definite description, such as "the king", can, in the right context, count as an individual name. Like the point about "the present king of England", this looks to open the door to all sorts of complications, at least if one tries to reconcile the official definitions of singular and general names with a willingness to allow context to dictate the singular/general nature of a name.

The last two things Mill does in this section are: a) complain about use of the word "class" to define "general name" and b) distinguish between collective singular names and general names.

On (a): Mill says that it is common for people to define general names by saying general names are names of classes. "But this, though a convenient mode of expression for some purposes, is objectionable as a definition, since it explains the clearer of the two things by the more obscure." Mill goes on to propose that the definition be reversed, seemingly insensitive to the fact that this would rule out unnamed classes. I don't know if that is a major issue, but it seemed worth observing.

On (b): Here Mill is essentially telling us that general names are predicated distributively, collective names predicated jointly. "The 76th regiment of foot in the British army" is a collective singular name for a group of soldiers. There is only one group (at a given time) of whom you can properly affirm that name, and you can't affirm it of each of the individual members. "Regiment" is Mill's example of a collective general name, since it can be affirmed of a lot of different groups in the same sense. Mill suggests that it is "general with respect to all individual regiments, of each of which separately it can be affirmed: collective with respect to the individual soldiers of whom any regiment is composed." This last line suggests that collectivity is type-relative. This is good, because it means we don't have to decide all questions of collectivity in our basic semantics. "Mt. Everest" can be non-collective with respect to the category mountain, but still turn out to be collective with respect to the category particles of matter.

Next time on Monday Mill Blogging: §4, "Concrete and Abstract Names"

Monday Mill Blogging (#005)

2011-12-01T07:17:00.001-08:00

Monday Mill blogging on a Thursday? Why not.

Today's post covers book 1, chapter 2, section 2. All this focus on naming is making me want to take some time to re-read part III of Carnap's "Meaning and Necessity". But for now I am sticking with the Mill.

§ 2. Words Which are Not Names, but Parts of Names

Mill ended §1 by indicating the need to outline a taxonomy of names. But before he will give us his taxonomy of names, he feels it is necessary to discuss words that are not properly considered names, but which are parts of names. Mill shares the conventional wisdom of which words those are:

Among such are reckoned particles, as of, to, truly, often; the inflected cases of nouns substantive, as me, him, John's; and even adjectives, as large, heavy. These words do not express things of which anything can be affirmed or denied. We cannot say, Heavy fell, or A heavy fell; Truly, or A truly, was asserted; Of, or An of, was in the room. Unless, indeed, we are speaking we are speaking of the mere words themselves, as when we say, Truly is an English word, or, Heavy is an adjective. (p. 25)

Mill's view here seems to be that words, in addition to their customary uses, can be used to denote "the mere letters and syllables of which [they are] composed", and in that usage, words like "of" and "heavy" are names.

Ultimately, Mill is going to remove adjectives from this list, and treat them as names. He explains his reasoning as related to the fact that it is a mere grammatical accident of English that we cannot say "A heavy fell". Mill marshalls some cross-linguistic evidence from Greek and Latin in support of this point, and then reaffirms that adverbs and particles can't ever denote terms in a proposition (except when being used as names for the words themselves).

Mill then puts the views he has just been outlining in scholastic terms. What he is calling names are what the scholastics called Categoremic terms, the words that are not names, but only parts of names, are the scholastics' Syncategoremic terms. Rather than have a third class for compound terms ("A court of justice"), Mill treats these as many-word names, and classes them as Categoremic.

In treating of these many worded names, Mill also presents a view on non-restrictive relative clauses (though he doesn't call them that):

Thus, when we say, John Nokes, who was the mayor of the town, died yesterday—by this predication we make but one assertion; whence it appears that "John Nokes, who was the mayor of the town," is no more than one name. It is true that in this proposition, besides the assertion that John Nokes died yesterday, there is included another assertion, namely, that John Nokes was mayor of the town. But this last assertion was already made: we did not make it by adding the predicate, "died yesterday." (p. 27)

I say this is a view, even though it seems a bit cursory in terms of detail, because it, in a sense, helps us figure out what Mill would want to say about the truth or falsity of a sentence of the form, "n, who was G, is H", when the referent of 'n' has the property designated by 'H', but not the property designated by 'G'. The use of that sentence, it seems, makes the proposition, of the referent of 'n', that they have the property designated by 'H', so the primary assertion made in uttering the sentence is true. However, in the subject term of the sentence "there is included another assertion", the assertion, about the referent of 'n', that they possess the property designated by 'G', which is false. It isn't clear whether this gives us a satisfactory answer about how to classify the sentence "n, who was G, is H", relative to a circumstance of evaluation, but it does shed some light on how Mill thinks about the relationship between sentences and assertions.

Next time on Monday Mill Blogging: §3, "General and Singular Names"

Monday Mill Blogging (#004)

2011-11-01T05:31:00.000-07:00

In this week's Mill Blogging, we're actually going to start getting to the meat of some of Mill's views on language. Today's post covers Book 1, Chapter 2, section 1.

§ 1. Names are names of things, not of our ideas

As the chapter opens, Mill approvingly quotes Hobbes on the definition of "name":

"A name" says Hobbes, "is a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark which may raise in our mind a thought like to some thought we had before, and which being pronounced to others, may be to them a sign of what thought the speaker had before in his mind." This simple definition of a name, as a word (or set of words) serving the double purpose of a mark to recall to ourselves the likeness of a former thought, and a sign to make it known to others, appears unexceptionable. Names, indeed, do much more than this; but whatever else they do, grows out of, and is the result of this. (p. 24). (Mill cites the Hobbes work "Computation and Logic" as the source of this quote)

Mill then goes on to ask whether names are "more properly said to be the names of things, or of our ideas of things?" Mill suggests that common usage is on his side in answering that names are names of things, and not names of our ideas of things. Mill charges Hobbes with taking the contrary opinion, though I don't think I see it, at least, not from the passage he quotes:

The eminent thinker, just quoted, seems to countenance the latter opinion. "But seeing," he continues, "names ordered in speech (as is defined) are signs of our conceptions, it is manifest that they are not signs of the things themselves; for that the sound of this word stone should be the sign of a stone, cannot be understood in any sense but this that he that hears it collects that he that pronounces it thinks of a stone."

Now, I grant that this passage appears to commit Hobbes to the view that the word 'stone' is a sign of the conception/idea STONE (to adapt a notational convention from contemporary philosophy of mind). However, Mill's question was not whether names were signs of things or signs of our ideas, but whether they were names of things or names of our ideas. This may seem to be a nit-picky point, but I think it is important to be careful about the various semantic (or quasi-semantic) relations invoked on various theories of language. Absent something like the assumption that, for any term t and any object o: t names o just in case t is a sign of o, Hobbes's view about what names are signs of doesn't (for all that has been said) directly bear on the question of whether terms name things or ideas.

I am taking some time to dwell on this because it seems clear that various approaches to theorizing about language will differ with respect to which semantic relations they take to be central or primary, but often, will propose definitions or accounts of other semantic relations in terms of their favored semantic relation. For instance, someone could adopt the Hobbesian view that 'stone' is a sign of STONE, and then analyze the naming relation as obtaining between a term and the object or content of the idea that term is a sign of.

So, without having read "Computation and Logic", I am inclined to think that Mill has undersold the case that Hobbes is committed to the wrong answer about whether terms name things or ideas.

There is another frustrating/confusing bit in §1, where Mill offers an argument against the view that names are names of ideas:

When I say, "the sun is the cause of day," I do not mean that my idea of the sun causes or excites in me the idea of day; or in other words, that thinking of the sun makes me think of day. I mean, that a certain physical fact, which is called the sun's presence (and which, in the ultimate analysis, resolves itself into sensations, not ideas) causes another physical fact, which is called day. It seems proper to consider a word as the name of that which we intend to be understood by it when we use it; of that which any fact that we assert of it is to be understood of; that, in short, concerning which, when we employ the word, we intend to give information. Names, therefore, shall always be spoken of in this work as the names of things themselves, and not merely of our ideas of things. (p. 25)

To me, it looks like Mill is offering a conflation of two arguments one of which is abysmal and one of which is spot-on. The spot-on argument is something like:

1) If the term "sun" is the name of the idea SUN, then when I assertively utter "the sun is the cause of the day", I am making a claim about SUN.
2) It is not the case that when I assertively utter "the sun is the cause of the day", I am making a claim about SUN.
3) So, the term "sun" is not the name of the idea SUN.

I'm willing to get on board with that argument. Note, however, that the wacky stuff about SUN causing DAY plays no role. Which is for the best, since, there is no reason for the proponent of the view that 'sun' names SUN to suggest that 'cause' names the relation of causing, instead of naming the idea CAUSE. There is then an open question for the view about the difference between listing three ideas (SUN CAUSE DAY), and actually doing some assertion/predication.

Sometimes when I read this, I think it is supposed to be a slam on Hume, since, on some readings, Hume's reductive account of causation makes it a relation between ideas, but if that's what is going on here, it is difficult to see why Mill would include an incidental objection to Hume (which, I should add, is also not entirely charitable), in the midst of giving a general argument against the view that names are names of ideas.

At any rate, the last surprising bit in this passage is the claim that "in the ultimate analysis" the sun "resolves itself into sensations, not ideas". I am assuming that, when we get further into the Logic, enough about Mill's metaphysics will be revealed for me to know what that claim amounts to.

Next time on Monday Mill Blogging: §2, "Words which are not names, but parts of names"

Monday Mill Blogging (#003)

2011-10-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 of the Logic is titled, "Of the Necessity of Commencing with an Analysis of Language".

Mill acknowledges that it is common enough to begin a treatise on logic by discussing terms and other matters of language that there isn't really a need to explain why he is going to start with a discussion of language, but he goes on to discuss it anyway.

Language is evidently, and by the admission of all philosophers, one of the principle instruments or helps of thought; and any imperfection in the instrument, or in the mode of employing it, is confessedly liable, still more than in almost any other art, to confuse and impede the process, and destroy all ground of confidence in the result. For a mind not previously versed in the meaning and right use of the various kinds of words, to attempt the study of methods of philosophizing, would be as if some one should attempt to become an astronomical observer, having never learned to adjust the focal distance of his optical instruments so as to see distinctly. (p. 19)

This remark from Mill is a very similar thought to one advanced by Tim Williamson in "Must Do Better":

Philosophers who refuse to bother about semantics, on the grounds that they want to study the non-linguistic world, not our talk about that world, resemble astronomers who refuse to bother about the theory of telescopes, on the grounds that they want to study the stars, not our observation of them. Such an attitude may be good enough for amateurs; applied to more advanced inquiries, it produces crude errors. Those metaphysicians who ignore language in order not to project it onto the world are the very ones most likely to fall into just that fallacy, because the validity of their reasoning depends on unexamined assumptions about the structure of the language in which they reason. (p. 9)

I find the telescope/microscope analogy interesting, and compelling. Note that neither Mill nor Williamson is embracing the view that questions about language are the primary target of inquiry; rather they both liken the importance of understanding how language works to the importance of knowing how to use your tools.

In the next section of Chapter 1, Mill explains, more or less, the basics of his view of propositions. We are told that "the answer to every question which it is possible to frame must be contained in a Proposition, or Assertion" and that "whatever can be an object of belief, or even of disbelief, must, when put into words, assume the form of a proposition" (p. 20).

Mill goes on to characterize a proposition as "discourse, in which something is affirmed or denied of something" (p. 21), and analyzes propositions as containing three parts (subject, predicate, and copula). Throughout this section, Mill seems to be describing what an Early Modern like Locke called "Verbal Propositions", insofar as they are "formed by putting together two names", and Mill tells us that propositions "consist of at least two names". Similarly, when we were earlier told that the answer to every question is "contained in a proposition", or that propositions are a certain type of "discourse", it is clear that Mill is taking propositions to be something linguistic or verbal. Mill's propositions diverge, importantly, from at least one major strand of use of the term "proposition" in contemporary philosophy, and this will be important to bear in mind.

Mill ends chapter 1 with an argument in favor of studying names before studying things, by appeal to the fact that language was shaped by many people:

In any enumeration and classification of Things, which does not set out from their names, no varieties of things will of course be comprehended but those recognised by the particular inquirer; and it will still remain to be established, by a subsequent examination of names, that the enumeration has omitted nothing which ought to have been included. But if we begin with names, and use them as our clue to the things, we bring at once before us all the distinctions which have been recognised, not by a single inquirer, but by all inquirers taken together. It doubtless may, and I believe it will be found, that mankind have multiplied the varieties unnecessarily, and have imagined distinctions among things, where there were only distinctions in the manner of naming them. But we are not entitled to assume this in the commencement. We must begin by recognising the distinctions made by ordinary language. If some of these appear, on a close examination, not to be fundamental, the enumeration of the different kinds of realities may be abridged accordingly. But to impose upon the facts in teh first instance the yoke of a theory, while the grounds of the theory are reserved for discussion in a subsequent stage, is not a course which a logician can reasonably adopt. (p. 22)

Here I think we see an interesting commitment on Mill's part to a sort of qualified attention to ordinary language. There is something like a very weak presumption that distinctions made by ordinary language are legitimate distinctions, at least to the extent that one has to show cause to disregard them, rather than having to show cause for attending to them. This, I think, falls far short of a commitment to anything like the subsequent movement of ordinary language philosophy, but it is worthwhile to note that Mill explicitly references ordinary language (and not, say, specifically the technical vocabularies of past scholars).

Monday Mill Blogging returns next week

2011-10-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

I wound up taking this week off of Mill blogging, to finish up some grading. Mill Blogging will return next Monday (or Tuesday, if my past performance is any indication).

Berkeley on the Molyneux Problem

2011-10-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

In the course of "An Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision", Berkeley considers Molyneux's question. The question, as quoted by Locke (and Locke being quoted by Berkeley at NTV 132): "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other, which is the cube and which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?"

Berkeley, in agreement with Locke (who was in agreement with Molyneux), says "no": it is not possible for someone born blind, who learned shape-names by touch, to then tell by vision alone, which of two shapes presented is a sphere, and which a cube.

Berkeley uses this opportunity to argue for the doctrine of proper sensibles—the view that there is no overlap among the ideas proper to different senses. In other words, Berkeley maintains that there are no ideas that originally enter the mind through more than one sense.

It is easy to see what Berkeley has in mind if we put the issue this way: Call the idea you get through touch of one side of a cube T-SQUARE (for tangible square). Call the idea you get through one vision of one side of a cube V-SQUARE (for visible square). Berkeley proposes that, if some ideas (such as the idea of a square) come in through both sight and touch, then T-SQUARE would be identical to V-SQUARE, and the only difference would be in the way you acquired them. But if T-SQUARE and V-SQUARE are identical, then, Berkeley argues, the formerly blind individual should be able to identify the cube, since they know that a cube is a body terminated by squares, and they can also see some squares.*

The most interesting part of Berkeley's discussion, though, comes in NTV 141 to 143(ish). And what makes this interesting is the startling similarity between what Berkeley says here, and the position Leibniz takes in New Essays On Human Understanding.
Right before NTV 141, Berkeley has just responded to the worry that V-SQUARE and T-SQUARE are called by a common name ('square') because they are of a common species, by appeal to the view that we often use the same name for the sign as well as for the thing signified. This, in combination with the view that V-SQUARE is a sign of T-SQUARE is intended to address that worry. The discussion moves on, then, to another potential worry:

But, say you, surely a tangible square is liker to a visible square than to a visible circle: it has four angles and as many sides: so also has the visible square: but the visible circle has no such thing, being bounded by one uniform curve without right lines or angles, which makes it unfit to represent the tangible square but very fit to represent the tangible circle. Whence it clearly follows that visible figures are patterns of, or of the same species with ,the respective tangible figures represented by them: that they are like unto them, and of their own nature fitted to represent them, as being of the same sort: and that they are in no respect arbitrary signs, as words. (NTV 141)

The worry of this passage rests on what I'll call the "greater fitness" claim: Some visible ideas have greater fitness than others to serve as signs of a given tangible idea. The worry attributes this fitness to a cross-modal commonality of species. In NTV 142, Berkeley responds to this worry by noting that the fitness of representation can be accounted for in terms of the complexity or simplicity of the ideas, without appeal to a common species. Importantly, Berkeley does not deny the greater fitness claim. Rather, he tries to show that a canonical instance of arbitrary representation exhibits a parallel case of differential fitness.

But it will not hence follow that any visible figure is like unto, or of the same species with, its corresponding tangible figure, unless it be also shewn that not only the number but also the kind of the parts be the same in both. To illustrate this, I observe that visible figures represent tangible figures much after the same manner that written words do sounds. Now, in this respect words are not arbitrary, it not being indifferent what written word stands for any sound: but it is requisite that each word contain in it so many distinct characters as there are variations in the sound it stands for. Thus, the single letter a is proper to mark one simple uniform sound; and the word adultery is accommodated to represent the sound annexed to it...It is indeed arbitrary that, in general, letters of any language represent sounds at all: but when that is once agreed, it is not arbitrary what combination of letters shall represent this or that particular sound. I leave this with the reader to pursue, and apply it in his own thoughts.

In the New Essays, Leibniz (through the mouth of Theophilus), answers Molyneux's question thus:

[Y]ou will see that I have included in [my reply] a condition which can be taken to be implicit in the question: namely that it is merely a problem of telling which is which, and that the blind man knows that the two shaped bodies which he has to discern are before him and thus that each of the appearances which he sees is either that of a cube or that of a sphere. Given this condition, it seems to me past question that the blind man whose sight is restored could discern them by applying rational principles to the sensory knowledge which he has already acquired by touch...My view rests on the fact that in the case of the sphere, there are no distinguished points on the surface of the sphere taken in itself, since everything there is uniform and without angles, whereas in the case of the cube there are eight points which are distinguished from all the others. (NEHU, book 2, chapter 9)

Leibniz claims that the formerly blind person could reason their way to the right answer, if they are told that the two visual appearances are of shapes with which they are already familiar (and further, told the specific pair of shapes that the two visual appearances are of). Berkeley concedes that, taking for granted that the visual is to be a sign of the tangible, it is not arbitrary which visible figures represent which tangible figures.
To give credit where credit is due; Leibniz himself indicated that he thinks he is on pretty much the same page with people who want to give a "no" answer; he just thinks they are giving a fine answer to the wrong question.
Anyway, it was interesting for me to find out that Berkeley pushes what is essentially the Leibnizian line on Molyneux's problem.
*Berkeley's argument is actual given in terms of numerical and specific difference, which is good, because it avoids an issue present in my quick reconstruction, having to do with token vs. type identity. To frame it so as to avoid this issue, we can take T-SQUARE to name a particular idea you got through touch. Then the question is whether T-SQUARE and V-SQUARE are of the same kind (i.e. intrinsically alike, for a certain sense of intrinsic), not whether they are identical. That way of putting it captures Berkeley's language more clearly: "upon the supposition that a visible and tangible square differ only in numero it follows that he might know, by the unerring mark of the square surfaces, which was the cube, and which not, while he only saw them" (NTV 133).

Monday Mill Blogging (#002)

2011-10-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

You might be thinking that there is something wrong with naming this feature "Monday Mill Blogging" when I appear to only ever post these entries on Tuesdays. I rest secure in the knowledge that a few weeks from now, we'll be canvassing the Mill's views on whether names can be inaccurate, and we can find out whether it is actually a problem.

§ 4. Logic Concerns Inference, not Intuition
Mill had been concerned that "the art and science of Reasoning" was too narrow, and that "the art and science of the pursuit of truth" too broad. His middle route between the two is to distinguish between truths known "directly", and those known "through the medium of other truths". The suggestion is that logic is concerned with inferences from intuitive (i.e. directly known) truths, and not with the intuitive truths themselves. Importantly, this will not limit our attention to deductive inference, since it was already flagged that Mill intends to include inductive reasoning, as well as syllogistic under the scope of inquiry.

Most interesting in this section is Mill's discussion of the certainty of directly known truths, and related caveat:

Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels. No science is required for the purpose of establishing such truths; no rules of art can render our knowledge of them more certain than it is in itself. There is no logic for this portion of our knowledge.
But we may fancy that we see or feel what we in reality infer. A truth, or supposed truth, which is really the result of a very rapid inference, may seem to be apprehended intuitively. It has long been agreed by thinkers of the most opposite schools, that this mistake is actually made in so familiar an instance as that of the eyesight. (p. 7)

Mill goes on to discuss our knowledge of distance through sight. Also worth noting in this section is the claim that it is "almost universally allowed that the existence of matter or of spirit, of space or of time, is in its nature unsusceptible of being proved" (p. 9). He ends the section by declaring that "logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence."

§ 5. Logic and Other Sciences

Mill moves on to consider the "authority of logic" with regard to other sciences, concluding that, because most of our knowledge is inferred, "the greatest portion of our knowledge...is amenable to the authority of logic" (p. 9). He is careful though to distinguish logic from knowledge::

Logic, however, is not the same thing with knowledge, though the field of logic is coextensive with the field of knowledge. Logic is the common judge and arbiter of all particular investigations. It does not undertake to find evidence, but to determine whether it has been found. Logic neither observes, nor invents, nor discovers; but judges. (p. 10)

Mill's example is the appearances found to accompany a violent death. Logic, he says, isn't in the business of telling the surgeon which appearances those are (that is the business of observation and testimony). "Logic sits in judgment on the sufficiency of that observation and experience to justify his rules, and on the sufficiency of his rules to justify his conduct." It appears, then, that Mill thinks logic also bears on what we would term "practical reasoning", though this is the first mention I've noticed of anything like that.

Also important to note: Mill does not seem to think that the fact that this science is grounded on the descriptive science of our actual human mental operations of inferring stops logic from being "the science of science itself."

§ 6. Logic is Useful

The main thrust of this section is that, with the rare exception of certain savants, most people benefit from knowledge of the principles governing good inference, rather than simply following our unreflectively acquired or natural inclinations.

§ 7. Logic Defined

We are finally told (provisionally) what logic is:

Logic, then, is the science of the operations of the understanding which are subservient to the estimation of evidence: both the process itself of advancing from known truths to unknown, and all other intellectual operations in so far as auxiliary to this. (p. 12)

We are also informed of what this amounts to, in terms of a goal for the project of Mill's System:

Our object, then, will be, to attempt a correct analysis of the intellectual process called Reasoning or Inference, and of such other mental operations as are intended to facilitate this: as well as, on the foundation of this analysis, and pari passu with it, to bring together or frame a set of rules or canons for testing the sufficiency of any given evidence to prove any given proposition. (p. 12)

Also worth noting in this section, is Mill's claim that he will be treating certain operations/processes as relative primitives (i.e. as not subject to analysis for his purposes), without intending to claim that they are themselves primitive. His comparison is to "analytical chemistry", of which he says the results "are not the less valuable, though it should be discovered that all which we now call simple substances are really compounds." (p. 13). In other words, there may be more analysis left to do, but we can make progress in developing this science without entering into those analyses.

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I have no doubt that I have overlooked some important and interesting elements of the discussion Mill provides in the Introduction (and might well return to some of this later), but for next week, I'll be on to the beginning of book one, "Of Names and Propositions".

Monday Mill Blogging (#001)

2011-09-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

Apologies for starting off on the wrong foot, and not posting this week's Monday Mill blogging until Tuesday. I'll do better next time. Also, the first few chunks of the introduction are sort of dry, at least, I find them to be a bit dry. Things will pick up and get interesting pretty quickly though, I think.

§ 1. Provisional Definitions
Mill opens the first section of the introduction by reporting that there is a wide variety of proposed definitions of logic (as well as for ethics and jurisprudence). He then observes:

This diversity is no so much an evil to be complained of, as an inevitable and in some degree a proper result of the imperfect state of those sciences. It is not expected that there should be agreement about the definition of anything, until there is agreement about the thing itself. (p. 3)

This means that definitions laid out at the outset have to be provisional:

[I]n the case of so complex an aggregation of particulars as are comprehended in anything which can be called a science, the definition we set out with is seldom that which a more extensive knowledge of the subject show to be the most appropriate. Until we know the particulars themselves, we cannot fix upon the most compact mode of circumscribing them by a general definition. (p. 4)

The provisional definitions Mill has in mind are intended, then, to indicate "the scope of our inquiries", and so, the goal of the introduction would appear to be laying out the boundaries of what falls under the scope of logic in particular.

§ 2. The Art and Science of Reasoning?
Mill approvingly cites Archbishop Whately's definition of logic as "the Science, as well as the Art, of reasoning; meaning by the former term, the analysis of the mental process which takes place whenever we reason, and by the latter, the rules, grounded on that analysis, for conducting the process correctly" (p. 4). In the remainder of the section, Mill goes on to say that while that some people limit the application of "Reasoning" to syllogizing, there is a broader use, which he will follow, on which reasoning has to do with any sort of inferring whatsoever (which means that induction is included, as well as geometric demonstrations). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the discussion of this definition of logic is Mill's tangential claim about the relationship of knowledge to action:

Art necessarily presupposes knowledge; art, in any but its infant state, presupposes a scientific knowledge: and if every art does not bear the name of a science, it is only because several sciences are often necessary to form the groundwork of a single art. So complicated are the conditions which govern our practical agency, that to enable one thing to be done, it is often requisite to know the nature and properties of many things. (p. 4, my emphasis)

The view that knowledge is prerequisite to action is hardly unorthodox. I take it that this outlook clashes with elements of pragmatism, or with, for instance, some background assumptions of Alva Nöe's enactive account of perception. That Mill has this view, then, isn't the interesting part, so much as the fact that it is stated so straightforwardly in this passage. At any rate, Mill next turns to the worry that this definition of logic is too narrow.

§ 3. The Art and Science of Pursuing Truth?
It seems that one point of section 3 is to establish that the scope of logic includes, beyond the science and rules of inference, some treatment of terms and propositions. Mill observes that scholastic treatments of logic typically treat terms and propositions, not simply arguments, and then goes on to note:

[A] man is is often called a great logician, or a man of powerful logic, not for the accuracy of his deductions, but for the extent of his command over the premises; because the the general propositions required for explaining a difficulty or refuting a sophism, copiously and promptly occur to him: because, in short, his knowledge, besides being ample, is well under his command for argumentative use. (p. 5-6)

This leads him to consider the expanded definition of logic as "the science which treats of of the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth." The definition would, Mill says, take logic to include naming, classification, definition, etc.

Mill also makes sure to address the worry that this definition of logic is going to subsume all treatment of language, given the expansive definition which includes definition, naming, and so on. He responds to the worry by observing that those operations, besides being used in the pursuit of truth, serve other purposes as well:

For instance, that of imparting our knowledge to others. But viewed with regard to this purpose, they have never been considered as within the province of the logician. The sole object of logic is the guidance of one's own thoughts: the communication of those thoughts to others fals under the consideration of Rhetoric, in the large sense in which that art was conceived by the ancient; or of the still more extensive art of Education. (p. 6)

There is a remaining worry, which we will begin with next time: the worry that our definition is still too liberal because it includes sense-perception and intuition, which are not to be included in logic proper.

Monday Mill Blogging (#000)

2011-09-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to work my way through John Stuart Mill's magnum opus, "A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive", and I have also been wanting to increase the frequency of substantive philosophical posting on this blog. I am combining those aims, and I will be adding a weekly feature to the blog: Monday Mill Blogging, where I blog my way through all six books of of Mill's System of Logic.I'll be using volumes 7 and 8 of the Liberty Fund's "Collected Works of John Stuart Mill" for these purposes.Today's post is just the announcement. Next Monday I'll start blogging about the introduction.

Back to Blogging

2011-09-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

One thing I learned this summer is that it is extremely easy to radically underestimate the time and energy involved in moving from Los Angeles to Detroit.However, now that I am here, have the first few weeks of classes under my belt, and am beginning to get into a bit of a routine, I am happy to say that I will be getting back into somewhat regular blogging.A couple of fun announcements:I'll be presenting a paper on Locke that I've been working on at the South Central Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy. The central argument of the paper is that Locke's philosophy of language runs into some difficult problems because he does not posit negative ideas. I show that these problems are independent of which interpretation of Signification one prefers (signification being the core semantic/linguistic relation employed by Locke). The paper also includes some speculative discussion of the source of Locke's reluctance to admit negative ideas.I will also be presenting a paper at the Central APA this February in Chicago. My paper, "Reid's Complaint against Hume's Maxim: Conceivability, Possibility, and Reductio Reasoning", concerns some pretty daunting challenges for Hume's theory of cognition raised by Thomas Reid. Essentially, Thomas Reid observes that the "maxim of conceivability" (i.e. the view that conceivability implies possibility) has consequences for one's account of various sorts of mathematical reasoning. If you can't conceive of any impossible claim, for instance, how can you suppose one to be true for purposes of a reductio argument against it? I show how Hume's basic resources can be put to work addressing this challenge.

Moving

2011-07-04T16:59:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I am in the midst of moving from Los Angeles to Detroit.

I will be getting pack into the blogging groove once I get to my new home and get settled.

My first publication!

2011-05-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

I recently got a paper accepted to Philosophical Studies, and it is now available online here. I jumped the gun on giving my Wayne.edu e-mail address, as that address isn't yet set up (I thought there would be a longer lag before the paper came out).

Smith on Sympathy for the Deceased: Feeling for the Departed

2011-05-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

This is the third and final post in my series on Smith on Sympathy for the Deceased (previous posts are here and here).

It is easy to come away from the first chapter of Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" feeling like the account of sympathy for the deceased is intended to be one of the central upshots of his view. The materials in this post and the previous posts are all from that first chapter ("Of Sympathy"), and the final paragraph (TMS 1.1.1.13) of that chapter is entirely about our sympathy for the deceased. That paragraph begins:

We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike on our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave; to be prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations.

First, note that Smith appears to simply be applying the theory already laid out to the case of the deceased. We know that they are buried in cold ground, excluded from conversation and society, and thus, on his account, we are prompted to imagine ourselves being buried in the cold ground, excluded from conversation and society, which generates the emotional response of misery/sadness, and thus, according to Smith, we feel sympathy for the deceased.

Second, because this is an account of sympathy for the deceased, we need to distinguish this from another emotional response we have to the death of another; ordinary sadness at our loss. When someone close to us dies, there is emotional pain and anguish which Smith's account is not intended to address: the pain we feel for the loss we have endured. Of course, Smith's account of sympathy is not intended to address such an original emotion, and so it is no problem that such an emotion is absent from this story.

Smith's discussion continues:

Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive the melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we can do is unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress, the regret, the love, and the lamentations of their friends, can yield no comfort to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of their misery. The happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly, is affected by none of these circumstances; nor is it the thought of these things which can ever disturb the profound security of their repose.

Here Smith alludes to the role of sympathy in consolation, something that he will return to in the next chapter ("Of the pleasure of mutual Sympathy"), and so I won't say much about it here. The last sentence in that passage, however, is worth commenting on. This is where we can see relatively clearly, that sympathy for the deceased is a case of imagination-reality mismatch for Smith. As we saw in the previous discussion, it is not clear that there really is anything going wrong with feeling sympathy in such cases, though it is worth noting that this case differs from that of, say, sympathetic embarrassment for someone who is oblivious, because, plausibly, we cannot regard the target of sympathy in this case as committing an error of any sort (whereas the target of sympathetic embarrassment can easily be thought of as failing to have an emotional reaction that they should have). One thought that might help to unify both cases is to observe that both the oblivious individual and the deceased individual are not properly aware of being in the situation that prompts the sympathetic reaction. This could account for the mismatch in both cases, without presuming that anyone's emotional reactions are improper, so long as emotional reactions occur in response to knowledge/belief/awareness, which seems plausible.

Smith concludes:

The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change which has been produced upon them, our own consciousness of that change, from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimated bodies, and then conceiving what would be our emotions in this case. It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it affects and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.

In light of the imagination-reality mismatch in sympathy for the deceased, we have to wonder if sympathy for the deceased is a problematic aspect of the way sympathetic emotions are generated in us, or, if instead, there is something good about sympathy for the deceased coming about in this mismatch-y way. Smith seems to be concluding, here, that there is something good to be said for our sympathy for the dead in this regard. Specifically, it generates in us a fear of death, which he then claims is integral to the preservation of society. Obviously, to see why Smith thinks that fear of death is so integral to the preservation of society, we would need to look to material from later in Theory of Moral Sentiments, something I'll have to take up another time.

Now, I've been excited about Smith's account of sympathy for the deceased since I started reading TMS, but most people seem to be extremely skeptical when I tell them about it. For me, though, Smith's account was "confirmed" in a fairly visceral way. When I imagine the things he describes in the opening of this paragraph, I react, and my reaction does seem to be triggered by imagining myself inhabiting the circumstances so-described. I'm not so overconfident in my introspective powers that I think this clinches the case for Smith, but it doesn't strike me as straightforwardly wrong the way it seems to strike the people I've been telling about it (though perhaps the problem is in my telling of it, and not the theory itself).

The last thing I want to observe about this account is that it seems to address something of a puzzle for believers in the afterlife. Suppose one believes in an afterlife, and is reasonably confident that they will be spending it in heaven rather than hell. It seems difficult to say why such a person should fear death. Smith's account of sympathy purports to account for the fear of death even in such persons, because even knowing that the deceased's state is unaffected by the corruption of their body doesn't interrupt the generation of sympathetic misery for the deceased (and this is what generates fear of death, for Smith).

Since I started reading Theory of Moral Sentiments, I've become increasingly of the opinion that it is one of the most under-rated works in the history of philosophy. I hope that these posts on Smith's account of sympathy for the deceased, if nothing else, have conveyed the incredible richness of material in that work, given how much there is going on in just the first chapter.

Smith on Sympathy for the Deceased: Cases of Imagination-Reality Mis-Match

2011-04-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

In the previous post in this series, I was concerned with presenting the basic mechanisms of sympathy on Smith's view. I stressed that Smith offers a general three-part account of sympathy: (i) perception of another's (external) situation, prompting (ii) imagination of oneself experiencing that situation, which in turn produces (iii) a similar (but less lively) emotional reaction as would be produced by actually experiencing that situation. The links from (i) to (ii) and from (ii) to (iii) are causal. I also noted that the account concerns emotion in general (rather than limiting itself to some subset of sympathetic emotion) as well as that the account is indirect (in that it takes the aforementioned detour through the imagination, rather than regarding, for example, sympathetic sadness as an immediate reaction to the perception of another's sorrowful countenance).

I have found the pair of emotions anger and sadness helpful for summarizing where Smith's view is particularly successful vs. where it faces some challenges: Because of its indirectness, Smith's view is especially well suited to explain sympathetic anger. Merely seeing an angry person does not provoke sympathetic anger in us. On Smith's view, this is because we are not responding to the display of emotion in sympathy as much as we are to an act of imagining the source of that emotion. When someone tells us how they have been slighted, we are then likely to join them in their anger. Sadness, on the other hand, is a challenge for Smith. If we see someone crying, we usually feel for them, (i.e. sympathize with them) before learning the source of their sorrow. Conversely, and account that has an easy time with sadness is likely to be hard pressed to account for the absence of sympathy at displays of anger.

In a later post, I want to discuss two worries that I've heard from people when describing Smith's account. The first is what I'll call the "objection from babies", i.e. the worry that Smith's account over-intellectualizes sympathy (and thereby predicts that babies don't do sympathy). The second is the "sympathy/empathy worry" which is that there is a distinction between sympathizing and empathizing which Smith's account (as I have so far presented it) misses out on this distinction. I'll discuss those in a separate post or two after this series on sympathy for the deceased.

This post, however, is going to focus on Smith's discussion of cases that I'm labeling "imagination-reality mis-match". Immediately after defending the indirectness of sympathy (by appeal to sympathetic anger), Smith introduces a range of cases that he takes to be fodder for his view (TMS 1.1.1.10):

Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself is incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality. We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner.

Contrast Smith's view here with an expression-responsive view of sympathy (i.e. a view on which we perceive the emotions of another by way of expressions of those emotions, and experience sympathetic emotions as a result. The expression-responsive view, unlike Smith's, cannot explain sympathetic embarrassment when the person behaving in an embarrassing fashion fails to experience and express said embarrassment. This is not to say that the proponent of such views is unable to offer some explanation of the case, only to note that such cases are covered by Smith's view in precisely the same fashion as other sympathetic emotions. This, I think, is another virtue of his approach.

It will be useful to raise the issue of whether Smith's view should be considered, then, an error theory, given the preponderance of imagination-reality mis-match cases. Standardly, an error theory about X is the view that that our ordinary judgments about X go wrong, at least, in some reasonably large proportion of cases.

Does Smith's story about mis-match cases of sympathetic embarrassment include some sort of error-theory? I think not. Recall that the general account of sympathy involves (i) an act of perception, (ii) an act of imagination, and (iii) an emotional response. The thing perceived, here, is the external circumstances of another person. For instance, if an individual is horribly overdressed for a casual party, but blithely unaware, the contents of our perception are things like that the individual is over-dressed, that everyone is staring at them, etc. In normal cases, we are correctly perceiving the external circumstances of this individual. So we have no false judgment there.

Second, there is an act of imagination. Now, here, the sympathizer imagines him or herself having the features the individual in question was observed to have. Here we have a false content to the act (the sympathizer is not overdressed, but imagines him or herself to be overdressed), but we also have no judgment in this act, and so, no false judgment.

Third is the emotional reaction to the act of imagining. Again, there is no judgment in this emotional reaction, and so, there can be no false judgment.

The mismatch in question is not a mismatch between the content of a judgment made by the sympathizer and the way the world is. At the same time, there is something, in this case of sympathetic embarrassment, that is properly called a mismatch: the sympathizer's emotional reaction doesn't match the emotional reaction of the person being sympathized with. And it does seem that the very notion of sympathy (which Smith treats as interchangeable with "fellow-feeling") presupposes that there is an accord between the emotion felt by the target and the emotion felt by the sympathizer.

I am not sure what to make of the mismatch in light of this, but it seems that Smith can, at the least, claim that something goes awry in such cases (by the lights of the sympathizer): If sympathy presupposes a match in emotions between the sympathizer and target, this does not mean that any case of mismatch places the error with the sympathizer. In the cases Smith has in mind, it seems to be clear that the mismatch results from something going wrong with the target, and not with a mistake (of any sort) on the part of the sympathizer (TMS 1.1.1.11):

Of all teh calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other. But the poor wretch who is in it, laughs and sings, perhaps, and is altogether insensible of his own misery. The anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object, cannot be the reflection of any sentiment in the sufferer. The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment.

I want to stress that Smith is not offering a special view of these mismatch cases as an amendment to his theory. Smith's stance here is straightforwardly the consequence of his general view, and he regards it as a virtue that his view can explain sympathetic embarrassment or pity in cases where the targets do not, themselves, feel embarrassed or sad.

We've got enough of the view on the table now that I can turn, in my next post, to Smith's account of sympathy for the deceased (and, relatedly, Smith's account of our fear of death).

Nitpick: Schaffer on Contextualism

2011-04-26T14:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, there is a completely minor point that I want to make about a talk/paper/argument/etc., and it occurred to me that such minor points are well suited to being blogged. When I consider something this sort of minor point, I'm going to try and label the post as a "nitpick", so that it is clear how minor I take the point to be. In this case, the point concerns one of Jonathan Schaffer's arguments against contextualism (about "knows") in "From Contextualism to Contrastivism":

The second argument for the preferability of ternicity is the argument from scoring inquiry: ternicity better suits ‘knows’ to its role in keeping score of the overall progress of inquiry.

Ternicity is the view that knowing is a three-place relation between a subject, a proposition, and a contrast class. Contextualism is the view that "knows" is a context-sensitive term, which designates different relations (presumably two-place) in different contexts of utterance/evaluation. Here's the argument Schaffer offers on the basis of scoring inquiry:

(10) One of the roles of ‘knows’ is to keep score of the overall
progress of inquiry;

(11) Indexicality precludes ‘knows’ from scoring the overall progress of inquiry, because indexicals cannot keep a consistent score across contexts; and

(12) Ternicity allows ‘knows’ to score the overall progress of inquiry, because the various stages of inquiry may be consistently logged under various values of q.

The nitpicky point concerns the second premise. Schaffer defends the premise by saying:

indexicality precludes ‘knows’ from keeping score of the overall progress of inquiry. This is because, with indexicality, the denotation of ‘knows’ is always warped to the
current context. As such ‘knows’ cannot keep consistent score across contexts. But scoring inquiry requires evaluating how a subject performs through a sequence of questions, and this requires a consistent score across contexts. (Imagine trying to score a baseball game if the denotation of ‘run’ changed with every inning!)

My nitpick is that, while Schaffer is right that baseball would be difficult to score if the denotation of "run" changed with every inning, I think he overstates the case here. It seems that we could devise a game which would be relatively simple to score, but where the denotation of key scoring terms shifted about throughout the game (at least, in the same sense as relevant for his argument). Here's such a game: there are six numbered buckets in a row. Players stand at one end of the row and take turns tossing differently colored ping pong balls into the buckets. To begin, getting a ball in any bucket is worth one point. After each round of play, a die is rolled. If the die comes up 6, only the points in the furthest bucket count (even from previous rounds). If the die comes up 5, only the points from the furthest two buckets count. And so on. In other words, points in the sixth bucket are "safer" points than points in the first bucket, because each round, the buckets that actually count for points can change, but the higher the bucket number, the less likely it is that those points are excluded. So, if I toss all my ping pong balls in the first bucket, I may end the first round in the lead, but enter the second round with no points.

Ok, so, you might be thinking this fictional bucket-toss game is too minor of a point to raise, even for a nitpick post. At the same time, this isn't entirely unrelated to Schaffer's point: If we think of the shifting standards for which buckets count as analogizing changes in the contextually set standards for knowledge, and the ping pong balls as beliefs, we can see how the contextualist might conceive of scoring inquiry for "knows"-ascriptions. Your score fluctuates from context to context, but some of your points are safer than others. Perhaps a better analogy would allow the players to attempt to influence the bucket-boundary for points (to better analogize the popular contextualist view that knowledge claims can be used to attempt to shift the standards for knowledge-ascriptions).

So, I think Schaffer overstates the case against the indexicalist when it comes to the claim above labeled (11). Of course this is just one small part of Schaffer's case, and I don't think anything crucial for Schaffer's larger project turns on it (hence the status as a nitpick).

Smith on Sympathy for the Deceased: The Mechanism of Sympathy

2011-04-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

I've recently been reading Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments", and already I think it is clear that this is one of the most underrated works of philosophy from the early modern era.

I've been yapping at people a lot about Smith's account of our Sympathy for the deceased, so I wanted to write up some of my thoughts on it, but I'm going to try and do this in a multi-part post, rather than one giant one.

In this first post First, though I need to present my understanding of the basics of Smith's account of sympathy. We'll start with Smith's own statement of the core of the account (TMS 1.1.1.2):

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enuring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or disress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.

Smith's account, I take it, is this: I see someone else in circumstance C. I don't perceive what it is like for them to be in C, but instead, I imagine what it would be like for me to be in C. Imagining myself in C produces a weaker version of the emotional reaction that would be produced if I were in C. This is the mechanism, on Smith's view, whereby I can have sympathy (aka "fellow-feeling") with that person.

There are a few interesting aspects of this account that I want to flag. First, the account can be thought of as having three components: 1) perceiving someone else's circumstances, 2) imagining oneself in those circumstances, and 3) reacting emotionally to the act of imagination. This is interesting because it has specific psychological predictions about instances of sympathetic emotional reaction.

Second, the principal place that judgment or belief enters the picture is in the first component: there, we have a perceptual judgment that so-and-so is in such-and-such circumstances. The subsequent elements of the account involve an act of imagination as well as an emotional reaction to the imagining. And though this judgment is a component of cases of sympathetic emotion, it is non-essential to the machinery of the other components (at least, for all that has been said). The emotional reaction is consequent on the act of imagining, but we can and do imagine ourselves in circumstances that we do not perceive others to be in. This opens room for a puzzle about why I am saddened much more when the act of imagining is prompted by perceiving someone in those circumstances, than when I just imagine myself in such circumstances. I suspect that the strength of the imagining would be a natural thing to appeal to in response to this puzzle, and my guess is that the best response to this puzzle is that we imagine more strongly with perceptual prompting then if we just idly imagine ourselves in some circumstances.

Third, the account is general for various emotions. Smith's opening example is one of sympathetic sorrow, but he intends it to apply to cases of joy, anger, etc. There are some interesting remarks on which emotions are more or less prone to produce sympathy (and the degrees of sympathy they are prone to produce), but I won't go into that here.

Finally, the account is indirect in a way that may be troublesome to some: It is natural to think that I can sympathetically become sad simply by seeing the sadness in someone's face. Smith's account does not, as it stands, permit this. Smith actually discusses this worry though (TMS 1.1.1.6):

Upon some occasions sympathy may seem to arise merely from the view of a certain emotion in another person. The passions, upon some occasions, may seem to be transfused from one man to another, instantaneously, and antecedent to any knowledge of what excited them in the person pricipally concerned. Grief and joy, for example, strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any one, at once affect the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion. A smiling face is, to every body that sees it, a cheerful object; as a sorrowful countenance, on the other hand, is a melancholy one.

This, however, does not hold universally, or with regard to every passion. There are some passions of which the expressions excite no sort of sympathy, but, before we are acquainted with what gave occasion to them, serve rather to disgust and provoke us against them. The furious behavior of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies. As we are unacquainted with his provocation, we cannot bring his case home to ourselves, nor conceive any thing like passions which it excites. But we plainly see what is the situation of those with whom he is angry, and to what violence they may be exposed from so enraged an adversary. We readily, therefore sympathize with their fear or resentment, and are immediately disposed to take part against the man from whom they appear to be in so much danger.

It may seem that here, Smith is conceding that his account does not apply to grief and joy, but does apply to sympathetic fear and anger. Rather, though, Smith is using this case to point out that a general account of sympathy has to be indirect, in order to capture anger. He then goes on to present an account of how we can view sympathetic grief and joy under this indirect account. Roughly, the account is that grief and joy are known to be reactions to bad and good fortune (respectively), so seeing a sad face suggests to us the general idea of ill fortune, and this is what prompts our sympathetic sadness. While seeing an angry person suggests the general idea of provocation, for Smith, this general idea alone does not trigger sympathetic anger. Smith's remarks suggest that the key difference is that anger is directed at another individual, whose interests oppose the angry party's, whereas good fortune or ill fortune (as such) do not go beyond the individual experiencing them.

The only amendment I want to propose to Smith's account here is to allow for habituated emotional reactions to the sight of a sad or joyful face, where sufficient repetition of sympathetic joy and grief allows us to acquire immediate emotional reactions to seeing a sorrowful or joyful face, rather than always requiring the involvement of imagined (general) good or ill fortune. I don't know enough of Smith's views on the human mind to determine whether this would be taken as a friendly amendment, or whether such an account would do violence to other views of his.

Big Updates!

2011-03-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday (March 1st), I successfully defended my dissertation. Also last week, I accepted a tenure-track position in the philosophy department at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. I am, obviously, extremely excited about both of these facts, and, while I still have to format the dissertation and fill out some paperwork, this also means that I am pretty much finished with grad school.

This past Saturday, I gave a talk at the Early Modern Circle (an early modern philosophy workshop here in Southern California). The discussion during the Q&A session was very fruitful for me, so that was excellent.

Oh, also, I will be commenting on a paper at the upcoming Hume conference in Edinburgh, which is awesome because this year is Hume's 300th birthday, so this should be a pretty exciting conference.

I think that's all my major news at the moment. Soon, I will be back to philosophical posts.

Actions: Intentional Under Some Description? Redux

2011-02-24T14:20:00.000-08:00

In "Intention", Elizabeth Anscombe introduces the verbiage of an action being intentional under a description in the following way:

Since a single action can have many different descriptions, e.g. 'sawing a plank', 'sawing oak', 'sawing one of Smith's planks', 'making a squeaky noise with the saw', 'making a great deal of sawdust', and so on and so on, it is important to notice that a man may know that he is doing a thing under one description and not another. Not every case of this is a case of his knowing that he is doing one part of what he is doing and not another (e.g. he knows that he is sawing, but not that he is making a squeaky noise with the saw). He may know that he is sawing a plank, but not that he is sawing an oak plank, or Smith's plank; but sawing an oak plank or Smith's plank is not something else he is doing besides just sawing the plank that he is sawing. For this reason, the statement that a man knows he is doing X does not imply the statement that, concerning anything which is also his doing X, he knows that he is doing that thing. So to say a man knows he is doing X is to give a description of what he is doing under which he knows it. Thus, when a man says 'I was not aware that I was doing X', and so claims that the question 'Why?' has no application, he cannot always be confuted by the fact that he was attentive to those of his own proceedings in which doing X consisted. (Intention Sec. 6, p. 11-12, emphasis in the original)

This, at any rate, is the citation offered by Anscombe in her later "Under a Description" in which she endeavors to clear up a large number of confusions that people had surrounding the notion of an action's being intentional under a description.

In my previous post on these issues I claimed that this "action under a description" business was in tension with Leibniz law. My argument was basically this:
1) If my flipping the light switch and my alerting the burglar are the same action, then for any property P, my flipping the light switch instantiates P if and only if my alerting the burglar instantiates P.
2) Suppose that my flipping the light switch was intentional, but that my alerting the burglar was not intentional, and that my flipping the light switch is the same action as my alerting the burglar.
3) Then, there is a property — the property of being intentional — instantiated by my flipping the light switch, but not by my alerting the burglar.
4) So, my flipping the light switch is not the same action as my alerting the burglar.
5) But, (from 2) they are the same action.

So, we have a contradiction following from the supposition in (2) and Leibniz Law. And for what it is worth, I think the argument is right: one should not have a view which commits them to all the elements of (2), unless one wishes to abandon Leibniz Law.

My mistake was in thinking that (2) correctly encapsulates the business about actions being "intentional under a description". As Anscombe makes very clear in the paper "Under a Description", the point of this under-a-description business was not to posit some weird entities, actions-under-descriptions and then take the stance that a-under-description-D1 and a-under-description-D2 (1) are the same thing, and (2) possess different properties. Rather, Anscombe points out that this "under-a-description" business is qua "in modern dress", and takes it to attach to the predicate, rather than the subject. So, it is not that A-under-description-D1 is intentional, and A-under-description-D2 is not intentional; rather, A is intentional-under-D1, but not intentional-under-D2.

It is clear that this is the way to structure the view, if one wants to say that the flipping of the switch is the same action as the alerting of the burglar. It is perfectly fine for there to be one action which has the feature of being (for lack of better phrasing) purposefully-switch-flippy while lacking the feature of being purposefully-burglar-alerty.

This Leibniz-law concern is just one of the issues that Anscombe discusses in "Under a Description". As I begin gearing up for the Intention reading group I'm organizing, I'll definitely be going carefully through that article as well, since it did a really nice job, I think, of clarifying this talk of actions being "intentional under a description".

Actions: Intentional Under Some Description? [Correction]

2011-02-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post on this topic, I mis-attributed the origin of "intentional under a description" talk to Davidson's 1963 paper, rather than Anscombe's 1957 book Intention. More importantly, I wrote the post without having read Anscombe's excellent 1979 paper "Under a Description", which clears up a number of things about what is supposed to be going on with the view. In the next few days, I hope to have a post up detailing my new and improved understanding of this "under a description" talk. I know see ways in which my presentation of the view in the previous post were missing what is, essentially, the key element of the view (hint: my statement of component (B) of Davidson's view in the earlier post is thoroughly incorrect).

Talk: Early Modern Circle (March 5th @ CalTech)

2011-01-29T19:17:00.000-08:00

On March 5th, I will be presenting my paper, "How To Avoid Mis-Reiding Hume's Maxim of Conceivability" at the Early Modern Circle. The meeting will be at CalTech, in Pasadena.

In the paper, I defend David Hume's endorsement of the principle that conceivability implies possibility from two of the four criticisms offered by Thomas Reid. While I have been spending most of my time recently arguing that Reid's complaints about Hume are wrong, I should note that Reid has a tremendous talent for finding challenges that Hume needs to address, even if I am much more optimistic than Reid is about Hume's prospects for addressing those challenges.

It strikes me that Hume and Reid were, to an important extent, on the same page about what sort of project they were up to, and Reid was amazingly sharp, so that all adds up to a recipe for some really interesting and important challenges to look at in connection with Hume's account.

Gift-giving and Economics

2011-01-12T20:53:00.000-08:00

One of the podcasts I listen to during my commute is NPR's Planet Money podcast.

I fell behind over break, and was catching up today, so I just heard the December 27th edition on why some economists don't like gift-giving.

This isn't the first time I've come across the anti-gift giving sentiment of economists, either. I was sincerely puzzled when I first came across the sentiment, and I continue to be perplexed. I keep coming across economists advocating a theory of gift-giving on which instead of exchanging sweaters, DVDs, and the like, we should be giving each other cash.

Now, I should preface this post by acknowledging that I am not an economist, and I have not had any real exposure to economic theory (though Mankiw's "Principles of Economics" is sitting on my bookshelf next to Spivak's "Calculus" and Abelman and Sussman's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" in the space reserved for non-philosophy textbooks I intend to work through when I am able to find/make the time.

It seems to me that any theory of gift-giving which recommends that all gift-giving take the form of cash transfers is a pretty bad theory of gift-giving. As I understand it, the thought behind migrating to cash-gifts is something like this: If Jones spends $30 on a Christmas sweater for Smith, and Smith has no desire or use for that sweater (i.e. the sweater produces no utility for Smith), we have missed out on the chance for that $30 to increase the utility in the world, and instead we wasted that money and used up some resources (e.g. yarn and time). Better to have given that Smith that DVD Smith has been wanting, or, better yet, give Smith the power to choose the purchase(s) that maximize utility; the gift of cash.

A clear way to see the problem with this system is that, if Smith and Jones are good friends, they probably exchange gifts during the holidays. It is safe to say that it would be pretty ridiculous for them to each put $30 in an envelope and swap envelopes. So, if the best account of gift-giving is one that recommends cash exchanges, I'd take that to be, roughly, a condemnation of gift-giving.

It seems to me that there are a few ways to resist this conclusion, which is fortunate for those of us who like the practice of gift giving.

Way 1: The efficiency argument against gift-giving requires the assumption that Smith is better informed than Jones about Jones's preference ordering, and this assumption can be challenged. One of the best gifts I have ever received was a personalized book embosser that was given to me by family friends at my high school graduation. I did not know about customized book embossers prior to receiving one. Had someone told me about them, there is a decently high chance that I would not have placed a high priority on acquiring one. However, now, almost 10 years later, I still use it, and still think it was a great gift, and there is no way I would have been happier with whatever it is that I might have spend the equivalent amount of money on for myself.

This seems to me to bring out one of the distinctive values of gift-giving; the opportunity to enrich a friend's life or have a friend enrich your life by giving you something that you didn't even know you wanted. Note that, for someone who is good at picking out such gifts, the dead-weight loss would occur (I think) if they failed to give a gift, and instead just handed over some cash.

Way 2: Many gifts have sentimental value, but sentimental value can't attach to cash (at least, not without interfering with its role as currency. For instance, if you save the first bill you earned at a childhood lemonade stand, because of its sentimental value, you aren't able to spend that money while treating it as a keepsake. So, while the books my brother has given me as gifts can remain function both as literature and as store-houses of sentimental value, money really can't play that role.

This is, I imagine, one of the most common thoughts about what is missing from the picture advocated by the sorts of economists I've linked above. The sentimental element of gift-giving is a pretty glaring omission in the utility-exchange story (at least, it seems to be — if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know).

Way 3: It may be impermissible for someone to spend their own money to acquire certain types of items (frivolous/fun/luxury items), but not impermissible for them to receive those items as a gift. A lot of people in grad school, for instance, would have to be irresponsible to spend a sizable chunk of money getting themselves an ipod or a videogame or what have you. If they have the money to spend on that sort of thing, they really should put some of it into savings, or the like. But it is not irresponsible for them to accept an ipod or a videogame as a gift. The fact that it would be irresponsible for the person to splurge on something unnecessary/impractical for themselves does not mean that it would be bad or wrong for them to possess it. Gift-giving provides a way for people who couldn't responsibly treat themselves to occasionally get those sorts of treats.

One thing that is important to note is that both the NPR podcast and the article I linked indicate the enormous amounts of money that get sunk into our ritualized gift-giving. And nothing I've indicated here really defends the scale of our gift-giving practices or the huge numbers of gifts that don't fall under the category of preferred-but-unknown, sentimentally-valuable, or fun-enabling-without-being-irresponsible. For all I have said, it may be the case that we ought to tone down the practice a fair amount and focus on increasing the relative frequency of the particularly valuable modes of gift giving. But that conclusion is a far cry from the view that the real values of gift-giving are best promoted by handing over cold hard cash.

Spring Reading Groups (and Other Plans)

2011-01-04T20:26:00.000-08:00

This Spring (i.e., the semester, not the season), I am planning to organize two reading groups:

(1) A reading group on Anscombe's Intention (and related works). A lot of USC people expressed interest in this one, and there are a lot of people with related interests in the department, so that should be a lot of fun and very rewarding.

(2) The continuation of our Early Modern Women in Philosophy reading group. I imagine we will stick with Mary Shepherd for now, but there are a lot of other great female figures to study in the early modern period, so we are not likely to run out of options.

Anyone outside USC with interest in either of these should let me know so I can include you in e-mails and the like.

I'll also be sitting in on Ed McCann's Locke/Leibniz seminar, defending my dissertation(! — on March 1st), and continuing in my role as managing editor of the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

APA Book Purchases

2011-01-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

Books I got this year at the Eastern APA:

Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation — Raffaella De Rosa
Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad — Daniel Garber
Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication — Rachel Cohon
Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid — Louis Loeb
The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion — Paul Russell
Scientific Representation — Bas van Fraassen

Useful Scheduling Resource

2010-12-22T18:05:00.000-08:00

A site I've been using a fair amount recently is called "When is Good?". This site is amazingly useful, and I figured I should spread the word about it.

Suppose you are trying to find a good meeting time for a reading group you are organizing, or that you are, perhaps, scheduling your dissertation defense. The "When is Good" site gives you a really easy way to collate the information you want about everybody's schedules. You enter some basic information about the event and the range of dates you are looking at, and it will give you a link to distribute to all of the potential participants. All they have to do is fill out their availability in that range. You get a separate page to look at that collects all the results together, and shows you which times work for everyone. It also tells you how many people have conflicts for any given time, and lets you exclude individual respondents to see what times work best for subsets of the groups.

It is free to use the site (you don't even need to register an account), though you can apparently join as a premium member and get some helpful add-ons (like giving people a way to indicate whether a time that they are available is ideal or not).

Some Reactions to Malebranche

2010-12-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

I, along with Kenny Pearce, have been reading some selections from Malebranche's Search after Truth, and one of the things that comes up pretty early on is Malebranche's account of judgment/belief. Since I haven't posted much philosophical content recently, and as I find Malebranche's account pretty interesting, I decided to allow myself some time this morning to indulge in a little (potentially underinformed) Malebranche interpretation. All quotations are taken from the Hackett "Malebranche: Philosophical Selections" (Steven Nadler, ed.).

Malebranche, like many other Early Moderns, endorses the understanding/will division of the faculties of the mind. Both faculties are described in terms of what it is they receive:

The mind of man likewise contains two faculties; the first, which is the understanding, is that of receiving various ideas, that is of perceiving various things; the second, which is the will, is that of receiving inclinations, or of willing different things. (p. 8)

Regarding the understanding as passive with respect to the receipt of ideas, Malebranche concludes that "it is the understanding that perceives or knows, since only it receives ideas of objects; for it is the same thing for the soul to perceive an object as to receive the idea that represents that object" (p. 9). Here I want to note that Malebranche might win among the early moderns for giving the best, most succinct statement of a non-inferential version of indirect realism. I don't know nearly enough Malebranche to know if the view stated here is consistently embraced throughout his works, but this is just a really nice statement of the view that perception of objects consists in the mind's interaction with ideas of said objects. This is in contrast to views on which the mind, in the first instance, perceives its own ideas, followed by an act of inference to the existence of the objects of those ideas (often described as "indirect perception"). I think both of the two views merit the title "Indirect Realism", but the view on which the mind's interaction with its ideas is constitutive of perception has some strong advantages over views which require us to infer our way to those objects.

Back to the issue at hand though, you might think that if the understanding is the faculty that perceives or knows then the understanding is also the faculty that judges. But not so for Malebranche. In fact, since everything the understanding does, for Malebranche, is to perceive, Malebranche notes about his own view that "it might fairly be concluded [...] that the understanding never judges since it does nothing but perceive (or that judgments and inferences on the part of the understanding are but pure perceptions)" (p. 13).

The parenthetical at the end there is ambiguous when taken out of context, as it could be taken to suggest that Malebranche just beats Hume to the punch at endorsing the view that "belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures" (T. 1.4.1, p. 183). However, the view in parentheses is not an alternative to the view that "the understanding never judges", rather an explication of what role the understanding plays in judgment. The section in question ends with this:

The understanding, therefore, does nothing but perceive the relations between ideas, whcih relations, when they are clear, are expressed by clear ideas; for the relation of six to three, for example, is equal to two, and is expressed by two. And only the will judges and reasons, by voluntarily remaining with what the understanding represents to it, as has just been said [p. 14, emphasis added]

The following section is titled "That judgments and inferences depend on the will", and describes this situation of voluntarily remaining with the representations of the understanding as a type of assent or consent. So, now we've got the relevant aspects of the view on the table, I want to highlight what I take to be some of the most interesting aspects of the view.

The view, as I understand it, is that judgment consists in voluntarily assenting (or consenting) to a representation provided by the understanding. In particular, this voluntary assent is not a positive act of the mind (i.e. not the mental equivalent of getting out a seal of approval and affixing it to the representation), but instead is a sort of voluntary omission. Suspension of judgment then is the positive act*, and occurs when we continue to investigate the representation, rather than letting the matter stand. A Stalnakerian account of updating the context set is really a sort of striking parallel here. On a standard version of something like Stalnaker's picture of conversational dynamics, propositions that are put forward get added to the context set unless they are challenged, rather than because there is some distinctive response that one issues to allow them in. If we are talking and I say, "the weather was nice yesterday, and I hope it will be tomorrow", you don't need to say, "I agree about the weather yesterday" in order for my claim about the weather to successfully incorporate itself into the context set. Rather, you would need to go our of your way to prevent it from succeeding.

As far as voluntarist views of judgment go, there is something very appealing about the view that judgment involves a voluntary omission. It seems that we can try to explain the intuitions against doxastic voluntarism on a picture like this, by observing that, in cases of judgment, there is a sense in which the will didn't really do anything. Judgment results from a voluntary failure to resist the representation, in the same way that we might think that my failure to act when I witness a harm I could have prevented is a voluntary omission.

Returning for a moment to the comparison with Hume's views, it is worth noting that there is a certain sense in which we can take Hume and Malebranche to be closer together in their views than I indicated before. Setting aside a major component of Hume's view (according to which judgments do not require multiple ideas), the "intrinsic" composition of the mental state that is a judgment is basically the same for Hume and for Malebranch. All the "ingredients" come from the understanding. The difference lies in the fact that Malebranch requires that an additional extrinsic condition be met, and so not every mental state that is intrinsically like a judgment winds up also being a judgment. Hume on the other hand gives an account of judgment on which only these intrinsic features matter (well, on my reading of Hume, at least).

Anyone who knows more about Malebranche's theory of judgment, or who has recommendations of good papers about it, should definitely let me know.

*Malebranche's occaisionalism may gum up the works somewhat in an attempt to spell this out more precisely, but the gist is that judgment is a sort of privation, while suspension of judgment is something positive. At the same time, I think Sean Greenberg argues that this view of judgment as a voluntary omission is crucial for combining the occaisionalism with the view "that rash judgments are sinful, and that all sin is voluntary" while still attributing all real changes that occur to God.

Dissertation Submission Procedures

2010-11-24T14:57:00.000-08:00

Today I started looking through the Formatting guidelines for doctoral dissertations here at USC, alongside the rest of the paperwork that is required for submitting one's dissertation. I'll be defending my dissertation in the early part of the spring semester, and I am especially glad I found out now about how many different forms and documents I'll need to have ready so that I can officially submit the dissertation and receive my degree in May.

APA Committee On the Status and Future of the Profession

2010-11-16T14:08:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I nominated myself for consideration as a member of some of the APA's committees. Today, I received notice that I have been selected for a three year term (from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2014) as a member of the APA Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession:

The Committee is charged with studying and making recommendations to the Board of Officers concerning trends in graduate and undergraduate education in philosophy and conditions relevant to the employment of philosophers in academic and non-academic work. To this end the Committee conducts periodic surveys of philosophers and philosophy departments and monitors changes in higher education in the humanities as reported by the learned societies and by government agencies, working closely with other APA Committees when appropriate.

I had actually been assuming that I had been rejected for a position on an APA committee, since I hadn't heard anything about it since nominating myself last June. Which made this news quite a pleasant surprise.

History of Philosophy Roundtable @ UCSD

2010-10-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

My attempt to avoid disappearing from the blog as I geared up for the job market was, sadly, unsuccessful. This probably also has something to do with having taken over as the managing editor of the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. At any rate, I have a brief bit of news to post, relevant, principally, to folks in southern California. I am presenting some of my work at the History of Philosophy Roundtable.

This Friday, October 15th, I will be presenting work from chapter 4 of my dissertation. My paper/talk is titled "How to Avoid Mis-Reiding Hume's Maxim of Conceivability", which I am aware contains a painfully awful pun, and for that I apologize.

As I understand it, the format is read-ahead, so, after a short intro, the bulk of the time is just discussion/Q&A on the paper. I am really excited, as this seems like a good opportunity to get valuable feedback on my work.

If I were blogging more, I would almost certainly be blogging about the seminar I am sitting in on that is covering Thomas Reid's "Essays on the Active Powers". I would also be blogging about the reading group a few of us in the department are organizing on a couple of the sorely under-appreciated women philosophers from the (early) modern period. I put "early" in parentheses because one of the figures, Lady Mary Shepherd, was writing in the 1800s, which is a bit late for "early modern", but she has some really interesting discussions of Thomas Reid, George Berkeley, and David Hume, so she fits fairly naturally with study of those figures.

History of Early Modern Philosophy Google Group

2010-08-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

I recently started a Google Group as a resource for scholars working in the History of Early Modern Philosophy (link to site).

One thing that a forum like this is good for is the dissemination of calls for papers, conference announcements, etc., but, based on the discussions I've seen on some of the other mailing lists I've seen, it can also be useful for more substantive discussions with colleagues you'd otherwise only interact with at conferences, or as a resource for finding out where to look in the secondary literature for discussions of specific issues.

Spread the word!

Dissertation and Job Market

2010-08-15T13:08:00.001-07:00

My posting frequency will be even lower than usual for the forseeable future, as I am working on getting my dissertation and job market materials into appropriate shape for entering the job market this fall.

I will try not to disappear entirely.

A Funny Anecdote with Very Narrow Appeal

2010-07-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

This story will only be amusing to people who have the relevant background in Frege's philosophy of language and about the programming language LISP:

During my undergrad years, my friend Dennis (a computer science major) was excitedly informing me about the progress he'd been making in teaching himself the programming language LISP:
"First, I wrote a program that lets you play Mastermind. It generates the puzzle, and lets you take ten guesses."
"Ok. That sounds cool."
"I'm not done. So, then I wrote a program that can play mastermind against the first program."
"Does it guess randomly, or what?"
"No, I programmed it with the algorithm to solve any mastermind puzzle in less than six guesses."
"Wait, so, do you just check which guesses the one program says to make?"
"No, in LISP, programs are all functions, and functions can take other functions as arguments, so, I just have the one program call the other program as its argument."
"And what does that do?"
"Oh, umm, it takes a little while and then returns the value True."

You'll all just have to take my word for it that this strikes one as funny if they hear it just after learning about the Fregean view on what sentences refer to.

Dissertation Epigraph (care of Thomas Reid)

2010-06-24T19:02:00.000-07:00

In my dissertation, I investigate David Hume's account of cognition (i.e. the acts of conception, judgment, and reasoning) and offer a qualified defense of Hume's account from a number of criticisms and objections. Without a doubt, the critic who plays the most prominent role in my discussion is Thomas Reid. This is because Reid was a) Hume's contemporary, b) a fierce critic of Hume, and c) an exceptionally sharp thinker. In my view, Reid's largest shortcoming as an objector (not just to Hume, but to most of his targets) is that he is insufficiently charitable.

Since I am engaged in defending Hume from Reid's attacks (and thus think of him as the principle antagonist in my dissertation), I was pleasantly surprised to discover, in Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers, a passage that near-perfectly encapsulates my own attitudes towards Hume:

A system of consequences, however absurd, acutely and justly drawn from a few principles, in very abstract matters, is of real utility in science, and may be made subservient to real knowledge. This merit MR HUME’s metaphysical writings have in a great degree. Thomas Reid, EIP II.12

As this is the very outlook that motivates my investigations of Hume's views, I've decided that it will make an appropriate epigraph for my dissertation.

Expressivist Semantics and Locke's Theory of Language

2010-06-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some reading on the relationship between historical philosophy and contemporary philosophy (much of which also concerns methodological considerations for either or both of those pursuits). While many of the papers I've read from the volume acknowledge that knowing contemporary philosophy can enrich one's historical work, and people I know who work on contemporary philosophy occasionally acknowledge that understanding the views of historical figures can enrich one's contemporary philosophizing, I wanted to give a relatively straightforward example of a place where it seems extremely likely to me that strong benefits are to be had from both approaching historical/interpretive issues through the lens of certain contemporary debates, and from approaching contemporary issues through the lens of certain historical debates. In this instance, it is the case of meta-ethical expressivism and Locke's theory of language (and more specifically: problems arising from sentences that are "logically complex" or are "attitude" ascriptions).

Generally speaking, Expressivism is a sort of mentalistic approach to giving the meaning or significance of language. An expressivist semantics for a language L assigns, to each meaningful sentence of L, a mental state, which that sentence is said to express. Roughly, a sentence S expresses a mental state M, when ordinary, sincere, assertive utterances of S are properly related to the speaker's being in state M (this way of stating it sets aside complications arising from context-sensitivity, and I will continue to ignore those throughout this post).

On the assumption that belief is a propositional attitude, it is relatively easy to translate any traditional truth-conditional semantic theory into a corresponding expressivist theory. For any proposition P and any sentence S, if the truth-conditional theory assigns P to S, there is a correlate expressivist theory which assigns the belief that P to S.

Though this fact about the ability to translate such theories is itself interesting, it primarily helps us demarcate an especially uninteresting sub-class of expressivist semantic theories (i.e. those that are the belief-y correlates of traditional truth-conditional theories). More often, the reason contemporary philosophers adopt an expressivist view of language would be out of a belief in the inadequacy both of traditional truth-conditional semantic theories and of the uninteresting expressivist correlates of such theories for a given portion of language. Consequently, when I describe a view as "expressivism about X", I mean to be picking out views on which the move to an expressivist framework is intended to capture the way in which X-type sentences do not simply express belief in the-proposition-traditional-truth-conditional-semantics-would-have-assigned, but, instead, express some other attitude.

So, non-cognitivists in metaethics who adopt an expressivist approach to theorizing about language do so because they think (many) sentences with moral/normative terms express states that are importantly distinct from the beliefs expressed by descriptive sentences. Typically, they regard moral thought as involving states that feature some desire-like phenomena (broadly construed), and thus, think that moral/normative sentences express some non-cognitive mental states, rather than ordinary belief (or perhaps, in addition to expressing some ordinary belief). Not all expressivist positions have to be strictly non-cognitivist, however. One version of expressivism about epistemic modals is to treat "Must(P)" as differing from "P" not in terms of which proposition is believed when one utters the sentences sincerely, but, instead, as differing in the amount of confidence in P required for sincere utterance, and thus, treat "Must(P)" as expressing highly confident belief in P, while "P" merely expresses belief in P (more likely, such an account would be done in terms of subjective credences, rather than all-out belief and different levels of confidence, but the point stands).

In defense of the claim that a little anachronism can provide benefits for history, I am going to cherry-pick the example of Locke, who was helpfully explicit about the relationship of thought and language. While it is clearly somewhat anachronistic, it is relatively easy to read expressivist positions back into someone like Locke, due to his view that the role of language is principally to publicly manifest one's mental life:

Locke provides a nice example of this (selection from Locke's Essay, 4.VII, "Of Particles"):

The Mind, in communicating its thought to others, does not only need signs of the Ideas it has then before it, but others also, to shew or intimate some particular action of its own, at that time, relating to those Ideas. This it does several ways; as, Is, and Is not, are the general marks of the Mind, affirming or denying. But besides affirmation, or negation, without which, there is in Words no Truth or Falshood, the Mind does, in declaring its Sentiments to others, connect, not only the parts of Propositions, but whole Sentences one to another, with their several Relations and Dependencies, to make a coherent Discourse.

Neither is it enough, for the explaining of these Words, to render them, as is usually in Dictionaries, by Words of another Tongue which came nearest to their signification: For what is meant by them, is commonly as hard to be understood in one, as another Language. They are all marks of some Action, or Intimation of the Mind; and therefore to understand them rightly, the several views, postures, stands, turns, limitations, and exceptions, and several other Thoughts of the Mind, for which we have either none, or very deficient Names, are diligently to be studied. Of these, there are a great variety, much exceeding the number of Particles, that most Languages have, to express them by: and therefore it is not to be wondred, that most of these Particles have divers, and sometimes almost opposite significations.

Locke goes on to give a quasi-treament of the various actions of the mind that can be signified by the term "but", which I won't get into here.

While there are obviously some lurking interpretive questions, it is at least natural to come away from passages like this with the thought that Locke thinks a) the basic account of the meaning of simple declarative/descriptive sentences is to be given in terms of the judgments they signify, and that b) a complete account of linguistic significance will invoke actions other affirmation and denial (as attested by the case of particles other than the copula, such as "but").

Note that this commitment places Locke's view fairly squarely within a framework fitting the definition of "expressivism" given above, and further, that the view of particles like "but" would clearly render it what I was thinking of as an interesting version of expressivism.

In fact, given i) his claim that we signify the connections among "not only the parts of Propositions, but whole Sentences one to another", and ii) his use of a sentential connective like "but" as a central example of this phenomenon, one would expect him to be an expressivist about other connectives, such as "if...then..." (and thus for the conditional sentences containing them). Unfortunately, the chapter on particles is only about 2 pages long, and doesn't contain (or even suggest, really) all that much in the way of guidance on how we could systematically construct the rest of his theory of language.

At the outset of this post, I said I was going to illustrate how projects in historical philosophy can benefit from attention to contemporary philosophy as well as how projects in contemporary philosophy can benefit from attention to the history of philosophy. So far, I have, at best, shown that we can draw some connections between historical and contemporary issues. Now I'd like to explain how such connections can produce the benefits I've indicated:

At the New England Colloquium on Early Modern Philosophy, Jennifer Smalligan Marusic presented a paper investigating issues arising for Locke and Arnauld's theories of judgment, on which propositions are formed in the mind by way of acts of judgment (acts of affirmation and denial). One concern surrounding such judgment-based theories of proposition-formation is that they appear to rule out merely entertaining a proposition (or, at least, merely entertaining a proposition without having previously judged it). Another natural concern is that, if "is" signifies affirmation, then we get surprising predictions about the judgments possessed by someone competently uttering disjunctions ("Either Susan is smartest or Nancy is smartest"), externally negations ("it is not the case that Philip is loud"), conditionals ("if Carol is happy, then Lisa is happy"), or attitude ascriptions ("Beth thinks Lupe is smartest", "Tom hopes that Alejandro is home").

If "is" signifies that the speaker is doing some affirming of the ideas signified by the terms/phrases flanking the "is", then the sentences just mentioned should all signify affirmations which they do not, in fact, seem to signify. For instance, sincerely uttering "Beth thinks Lupe is smartest" doesn't seem to involve the speaker judging Lupe to be smartest, and "Tom hopes that Alejandro is home" doesn't signify that anyone judges that Alejandro is home).

Some have (in the face of such worries) opted for proto-Fregean readings of Lockean judgment, in which "affirmation" is forming-but-not-necessarily-endorsing an affirmative proposition. In her talk (which was excellent), Marusic made a compelling case against such proto-Fregean interpretations of Locke and Arnauld and in favor of the reading which generates these worries, while also exploring ways that Locke and Arnauld, on her preferred interpretation, might be able to resolve the worries.

My point in discussing this may already be apparent to those familiar with non-cognitivist accounts of moral terms, who no doubt recognize in this challenge, a belief-based cousin to the Frege-Geach problem for emotivism about, say, "good" (I am here referring to the version of the problem presented by Geach and later by Searle, as described on pp. 705-7 of Mark Schroeder's paper).

If, as those views maintain, the moral sense of "good" indicates/expresses commendation, then something (though it is unclear what) should be commended in an utterance of the sentence "if giving money to charity is good, then giving money to Oxfam is good". But, prima facie, one could endorse the conditional without commending charitable donation (generally) or donations to Oxfam (specifically).

I won't take the time here to carefully detail why I think the parallel is more than just superficial similarity, but I will observe that both problems arise because a claim about what a term is doing appears to work well in certain basic/ground-level sentential contexts, but does not seem to generalize well across all possible occurrences of the term, and seems to fail, in particular, with respect to occurrences of the term either in "logically complex" sentences or inside the "scope" of an "attitude ascription". As this post is getting quite long, I will attempt to briefly wrap up, and indicate the potential benefits:

If the problem faced by Locke's view of judgment and language is as similar to the problem faced by contemporary meta-ethical expressivism as I have suggested, we can learn quite a bit about the individual problems by observing the similarities and differences they exhibit when it comes to evaluating proposed solutions. If a proposal looks promising in the one case, but not the other, that would be useful information for the people working to solve either one individually. If some proposals look equally promising for both problems, that is also useful information. If the approach to language embodied in Locke's view can avoid the problems (without simply invoking Fregean or proto-Fregean resources), we might find that working within the range of currently dominant frameworks (which were heavily influenced by Frege and Russell's approaches to philosophy of language) unduly constrains various expressivist projects. Solving the Frege-Geach problem is one thing, but it is an additional constraint to do so while preserving a particular story about why there is no Frege-Geach problem for the descriptive case.

Hume's Inaccurate Predictions

2010-05-31T12:17:00.001-07:00

In the introductory section of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume contrasts two ways of doing philosophy. While I don't want to try and sort out the interpretive issues of how, precisely, he means to distinguish the two categories here, his discussion includes a set of (retrospectively) bizarre predictions about the longterm popularity of practitioners of the different styles. He says:

This also must be confessed, that the most durable, as well as justest fame, has been acquired by the easy philosophy, and that abstract reasoners seem hitherto to have enjoyed only a momentary reputation, from the caprice or ignorance of their own age, but have not been able to support their renown with more equitable posterity. It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtile reasonings; and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on his consequences, and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion, by its unusual appearance, or its contradiction to popular opinion. But a philosopher, who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours, if by accident he falls into error, goes no farther; but renewing his appeal to common sense, and the natural sentiments of the mind, returns into the right path, and secures himself from any dangerous illusions. The fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed. La Bruyere passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: but the glory of Malebranche is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten. (source)

From the perspective of contemporary academic philosophy in the United States, at least, these predictions are exactly backwards. I've had a decent amount of exposure to Aristotle's actual views, while the main thing I know about Cicero is that he also went by "Tully", and is thus a convenient example for illustrating Frege's Puzzle. While Malebranch wasn't a major focus of my early modern studies, he certainly got more attention that La Bruyere, and it is pretty clear that Locke has not been "entirely forgotten".

While I don't know how these figures reputations turned out outside of academia, or even outside of philosophy departments (and it is also possible that my experiences are not really representative), I always find this paragraph somewhat jarring as I settle in to read the Enquiry.

Simplicity Follow-Up

2010-05-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

As I could have predicted, much of what I wrote in the previous post is not especially novel. From Alan Baker's SEP entry on Simplicity:

With respect to question (ii) ["What is the role of simplicity principles in different areas of inquiry?"], there is an important distinction to be made between two sorts of simplicity principle. Occam's Razor may be formulated as an epistemic principle: if theory T is simpler than theory T*, then it is rational (other things being equal) to believe T rather than T*. Or it may be formulated as a methodological principle: if T is simpler than T* then it is rational to adopt T as one's working theory for scientific purposes. These two conceptions of Occam's Razor require different sorts of justification in answer to question (iii)[Is there a rational justification for such simplicity principles?].

While this system of classifying ways of formulating Occam's Razor is pretty clearly in the same neighborhood as the contrast I was suggesting, I notice that Baker characterizes the methodological approach to Occam's Razor as facing the following practical challenge:

Justifying a methodological principle requires answering a pragmatic question: why does it make practical sense for theorists to adopt parsimonious theories? Most attention in the literature has centered on the first, epistemic question. It is easy to see how syntactic elegance in a theory can bring with it pragmatic advantages such as being more perspicuous, being easier to use and manipulate, and so on. But the case is more difficult to make for ontological parsimony. It is unclear what particular pragmatic disadvantages accrue to theories which postulate extra kinds of entities; indeed—as was mentioned in the previous section—such postulations can often bring with them striking syntactic simplification.

I quoted this passage because the sort of defense I gave for methodological simplicity was that it is easier to discover the limits of simpler theories, and (consequently) easier to learn how complex a theory must be in order to account for certain sorts of things. The methodology I described is not really the method of "adopting" a simple theory of practical purposes. It is the methodology of investigating the versatility of simple theories, without any further claim about epistemic or practical advantages of outright adopting that theory.

Baker's breakdown into epistemic and methodological seems to draw out the contrast between preferring simplicity because believing the simpler theory is a better way to arrive at true beliefs about the thing it is a theory of, versus preferring simplicity because proceeding as if the simpler theory is true is a better way to actually make predictions about and exert influence on the thing it is a theory of. My proposal, on the other hand, prefers simplicity because investigating simpler theories is a more efficient way to learn about the explanatory power of various sets of primitive resources. In itself, it carries no recommendation for believing the theory or for proceeding as if the theory were true.

Two Ways of Caring about Simplicity

2010-05-25T23:43:00.000-07:00

I am not familiar with the literature on theoretical/ontological simplicity, so this post might be rehashing material that is well-worn among people who focus on such issues.

I think we can distinguish between two different ways in which a preference for simplicity can be manifested in philosophical inquiry. The first is in the role of adjudicating competing explanations. We have before us a set of rival theories, in competition as explanations of something or other, and we want to generate a ranking of theories from worst to best (presumably so that we may proceed to infer the best explanation). A ranking is going to be generated by scoring the theories in terms of some theoretical virtues (as in, the virtues possessed by theories). Caring about simplicity or parsimony can be manifested by making these rankings sensitive to the relative simplicity of the competing theories. As a first thought about this, it seems to me like simplicity isn't just going to be less important than, say, the virtue of capturing the data but that we will want a method of ranking that produces a lexical ordering where, for any two theories T1 and T2, if T1 is substantially better at capturing the data than T2, T1 outranks T2 regardless of their relative degrees of parsimony/simplicity. At the same time, as I said, I don't know the literature on this and it might be that something like noise in the data would weigh against such lexical orderings in favor of simply placing a lot more weight on data-capture than on simplicity. It is clear that there are a bunch of ways to actually institute the preference for simplicity as playing a role in ranking competing theories, and we can think about those as different versions of the view that simplicity matters in our evaluations of proposed explanations.

Contrast that way of valuing simplicity with a role it can play in guiding theory construction. We have some area of inquiry, like theory of mind, and maybe a general program or explanatory project we are keen to pursue, and we employ simplicity as a guide in our pursuit of the project. Here, caring about simplicity or parsimony can be manifested as a methodological commitment to be conservative with respect to the postulation of new primitive resources. As an example from the early modern period, philosophers offering reductive theories of mind (often in terms of a set of mental faculties/behaviors and a set of mental contents, like ideas) exhibited a wide range of different approaches to theory construction. Some were pretty liberal in introducing new primitive mental faculties or behaviors, while others tried to analyze all of our mental activities in terms of a quite small set of privileged faculties or behaviors.

It seems like the main advantages of adopting this sort of methodological preference for simplicity are: a) that, by severely constraining one's range of options for analyzing things, it consequently provides the theorist with increased direction for proposing analyses (roughly: there is a smaller search space of proposals using only the sparse resources), and b) that, by having fewer resources, it is easier to exhaust them, and thus, our investigations are likely to give us information about what the bare minimum of resources are for addressing a given issue (roughly: fewer resources means, in principle, less you can explain, and so you are more likely to find your explanatory needs outstripping your explanatory resources).

Incidentally, this is a big part of how I understand Hume's project in Book I of the Treatise. Hume's empiricism leads him to adopt hefty constraints on the nature and variety of ideas available on his theory, and Hume further limits himself by proposing only one fundamental type of cognitive activity (which can alternately be labeled conception if we are talking about the typing of cognitive states, or being present to the mind/understanding (with some or other degree of "force"/"vivacity") if we are speaking of the underlying analysis in terms of impressions and ideas. In the case of interpreting Hume, the (a) advantage outlined above produces a nice secondary benefit: it sufficiently narrows the range of viable interpretations of Hume's position on particular issues to inspire confidence about making progress on a number of interpretive debates.

Turning back to things not-directly-related-to-my-dissertation: It seems as though there are important differences between these two ways of implementing a preference for simplicity.

First, the former way assumes we have the array of competing theories already laid out in front of us, and we already know that we are selecting among adequate theories. On the other hand, the latter approach is recommended by, among other things, the high potential for generating inadequate theories. The attempt to rank theories looks like it should be supported by considerations having to do with a propensity for the simplest adequate theory to be true (or for simplicity of an adequate theory evidence of its truth), while the constraint on theory construction is supported by the utility of finding out the explanatory limits of a given set of resources.

Second, when using simplicity in ranking theories, it is important to note that just because T1 is the simplest adequate theory to explain P, and T2 is the simplest adequate theory to explain Q, it does not follow that T1&T2 is the simplest adequate theory to explain P&Q. It may be that T8 was pretty complex among the adequate explanations of P, and T12 was pretty complex among the adequate explanations of Q, but T12 and T8 overlap in such a way that T12&T8 is the simplest explanation of P&Q. So, the ranking of competing explanations of P (in isolation) may wind up being highly misleading about which theory of P we should prefer (all things considered). On the other hand, if T1 is not complex enough to account for P, it is also not complex enough to account for P&Q.

I am inclined to think the latter approach is safer in some sense, since it never delivers recommendations against the true view. I'll probably check out the SEP article on simplicity when I get a chance, but if you have particular recommendations for things worth reading on these topics, let me know.

Hume on Unreasonable Affections

2010-05-14T12:37:00.000-07:00

On the question of whether passions can be unreasonable, Hume writes, famously:

[I]t is only in two senses, that any affection can be called unreasonable. First, When a passion, such as hope or fear, grief or joy, despair or security, is founded on the supposition or the existence of objects, which really do not exist. Secondly, When in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the designed end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects. Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it.

On a natural reading of this passage, Hume has in mind cases like these:
False Supposition: Tom's fear of Casper the ghost. Given that there are no ghosts (and, in particular, that Casper the ghost does not exist), Tom's fear is founded on a false supposition (the supposition that Casper exists). Thus, Tom's fear can be called unreasonable.

Insufficient Means: Jane's decision to eat an apple (when motivated by her aversion to scurvy). Given that eating apples will not help one avoid scurvy, Jane's decision to eat the apple is founded on a false judgment about causes (of scurvy) and effects (of eating apples). Thus, Jane's decision (and/or action) can be called unreasonable.

Note that Hume's account of what makes for an "unreasonable" belief seems to be the following: A belief that P is unreasonable if and only if ~P. I'll come back to this point in a later post, but it is important to notice it here.

A natural criticism of Hume's position is that these cases don't seem to be cases of unreasonable emotions/decisions/actions. If anything, the false beliefs giving rise to Tom's fear and Jane's decision seem to help (rather than hinder) the reasonableness. What would be unreasonable, the thought goes, is for Tom to fear Caspar when he doesn't believe that Caspar exists (or for Jane to eat an apple as a way to avoid scurvy when she doesn't think apples prevent scurvy). To the first part of this criticism (the claim that the affections in these two cases are not unreasonable), I think Hume has room to maneuver. He even makes a point of articulating that "properly speaking" it is the judgments involved (and not the passions) which are unreasonable. So, what about the thought that there are these other cases, in which the passions are unreasonable?

Interestingly, Hume's framework leaves no room for such cases. Passions are secondary impressions (aka "impressions of reflection"), and thus, are responses to antecedent mental activity. In these cases, the passions can't be present in the absence of the relevant judgments. Setting aside the question of whether this is a desirable feature for Hume's mechanics of mind, it is, at least, an explanation of why Hume doesn't consider such cases: they are impossible, not irrational.

Corrupt the Youth: Bring Philosophy to the Schools

2010-04-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

Through a link to this blog post at the philosophy teaching blog In Socrates' Wake, I found out about PLATO, the Philosophy Learning And Teaching Organization, which is "a national support and resource-sharing organization for parents teachers, philosophers, and others involved in teaching philosophy to pre-college students." (note to PLATO's web-designer: the main text on the website should be actual text, not an image of text).

Does anyone know of countries/places/particular schools where logic and/or critical reasoning courses are staple elements of the K-12 (or equivalent) curriculum?

Stipulations and Semantics

2010-04-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

I want to consider how the relatively common (and not particularly controversial) practice of stipulatively introducing terms into a language fares relative to three conceptions of the basic business of semantic theories. The three conceptions I am interested in are:

A) Propositional semantics
B) Expressivist semantics
C) Speech-act Theoretic Semantics

Very roughly, the (A) conception of semantics is one on which the business of semantics is to assign propositions to sentences. On this type of view, a basic idea is that a true utterance of some sentence will place constraints on how the world can be, and the job of a semantic theory is to assign a proposition that is properly related to those constraints.

Very roughly, the (B) conception of semantics is one on which the business of semantics is to assign mental states to sentences. On this type of view, a basic idea is that the sincere utterance of some sentence will require certain goings-on in the speaker's mind, and the job of a semantic theory is to assign a mental-state that is properly related to those requirements.

Very roughly, the (C) conception of semantics is one on which the business of semantics is to assign speech-acts to sentences. On this type of view, a basic idea is that a successful utterance of some sentence will have certain effects on the conversation or audience, and the job of a semantic theory is to assign a speech-act that is properly related to those effects.

I've obviously oversimplified these views a great deal, and we could quibble about my formulations or about what I take to be key components of the views, but, this rough sketch of the views is sufficient for my purposes.

Now, if the only mental state ever proponents of (B) invoked was belief, and the only speech-act proponents of (C) ever mentioned was assertion, and the thing one needed to believe for sincerity always lined up with the assertion made by successfully uttering it, and that thing also lined up with what the world needed to be like for the sentence to be true, it would not seem like these conceptions were really at odds with one another. However, proponents of (B) do not assign _only_ beliefs to sentences, and proponents of (C) do not assign _only_ assertion. Theorists who find (B) appealing may be motivated by non-cognitivism about normative terms, or by the desire to offer a semantic treatment of slurs or pejoratives (either of which could involve assigning non-cognitive mental states to sentences containing the respective terms). Proponents of (C) might be motivated by wanting to distinguish conditional assertion from the assertion of a conditional. These clearly aren't all the reasons one could be pulled towards the views, but just a way to see how the (B) and (C) conceptions can genuinely come apart from (A) and from each other.

My interest in this post is in how these conceptions of semantics interact with the practice of introducing a new term and giving it a stipulated definition. Here is a brief example of the practice:

Let 'garzy' be a common noun that picks out all parties having at least 100 attendees and only parties having at least 100 attendees.
Now that we've introduced 'garzy', I can use it: If I were the sort of person inclined to do such things, I could go around talking about garzies, ask people whether the gathering they attended was a garzy, and I could attempt to plan a garzy, etc. Some of these require people to go along with my introduction and use the term themselves, but that doesn't cause problems for my investigation.

I want to contrast the foregoing example with the following pair of cases:

1. Let 'morko' be a common noun that picks out all people who read philosophy blog posts, and only people who read philosophy blog posts, and, further, let it be the case that sentences using 'morko' express the attitude of hatred towards people who read philosophy blog posts.
Now that I have introduced 'morko', it seems like I can use it, but not quite as I have stipulated. For instance, I can say that, spammers aside, only morkos comment on my blog posts, and I can ask whether morkos are making up an increasing proportion of blog readers in general, etc. Now I'm not 100% sure that those previous sentences were meaningful/good in the relevant sense, but I am sure that I didn't just express hatred for people who read philosophy blog posts, and that the sentences I used don't express hatred for people who read philosophy blog posts.

2. Let 'rutu' be a common noun that picks out all bananas and only bananas, and further, let it be the case that sentences using 'rutu' express (in addition to the assertoric speech-acts they would ordinarily have, the speech act of apologizing for discussing bananas.
Now that I have introduced 'rutu', it seems like I can use it, but not quite as I have stipulated. For instance, I can say that my favorite fruit is the rutu (though the assertion would be false), and I can ask whether you had any rutu in the last week or so, etc. However, I don't think I've apologized for discussing bananas, and I don't think the sentences I used express an apology for discussing bananas.

Now, it isn't all-by-itself a problem for the (B) or (C) conceptions that I can stipulate truth-conditional contributions of an invented term and start using it pretty easily. And it isn't all-by-itself a problem for the (B) or (C) conceptions that I can't stipulate any expressivist or speech-act theoretic contributions of an invented term and start using it pretty easily. However, those two things combined do seem to raise a question for those conceptions of semantics: Why is it that some parts of semantics can be stipulated and not others? The (A) conception is the only one on which invented terms can have their semantic values given straightforwardly by stipulation. The (B) conception allows new terms to have a stipulative contribution to what belief might be required for sincere utterance of the sentence, but not for non-cognitive contributions to the semantic value. The (C) conception allows new terms to have a stipulative contribution to what assertion is made by successful utterance, but not for non-assertoric contributions to the semantic value. There may be some explanation for why only the semantic values that map neatly onto (A)-type conceptions of semantic value can be stipulatively defined, but it seems like one is needed. I should also note that I'm not basing the argument on some pre-theoretic intuition that semantic value should be apt for stipulative definition, rather, I am noting a contrast within the realm of (B)- and (C)-type semantic values, and observing that there should be some account of why there is such a contrast.

I should note that not everyone seems to agree with me on the inability to stipulate these other sorts of contribution. Dave Barnett, for instance, in a paper on conditionals, stipulatively introduces a connective that has a suppositional semantics, and, if I remember correctly, in "Thinking How to Live", Alan Gibbard introduces a stipulatively expressive predicate in one chapter (I'll have to verify both of these. At least one of them may have been a thought experiment about what would happen if some possible term had such-and-such semantics, which is quite different from the stipulative definition of an actual term as having those semantics).

Weinberg on Intuitions/Methodology at the APA

2010-04-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

At the Pacific APA, there was a pretty interesting Symposium on the role of intuitions in philosophy. The three presenters were George Bealer (offering a defense of the use of intuitions), Jonathan Weinberg (offering a criticism of the use of intuitions), and Brian Talbot (offering a moderate, empirically-based defense of the use of some intuitions).

I've been wanting to write up a brief post on Weinberg's talk. The talk contained an argument along the following lines:
Two sorts of argument widely employed in philosophy are (a) Compact Deductive Arguments, and (b) Inference to the Best Explanation arguments (broadly construed). Weinberg then argued that (a) is amenable to traditional armchair methodology, while (b) requires revising philosophical methodology in the manner articulated/defended/preferred by experimental philosophers. Weinberg concluded that this makes experimental philosophy a necessary/appropriate/inevitable next stage of philosophy.

During the Q&A, I asked why the methodological revision called for by this situation was the adoption of empirical methods, rather than an increased reliance/use of Compact Deductive Arguments (and reduction in the use of IBE arguments). In reply, Weinberg i) acknowledged that his talk hadn't established the appropriateness of using IBE, and ii) indicated that he would be curious to know what philosophy would look like if my proposed methodological revision occurred.

I don't mean to be taking a stand on whether to abandon IBE arguments, adopt such-and-such experimental methods, or challenge Weinberg's position that using IBE arguments requires the adoption of such-and-such experimental methods. All I wanted to point out is that one could have substantively agreed with almost everything Weinberg sought to establish, and not have felt much pressure at all to abandon the armchair.

Referee Hours

2010-04-05T20:41:00.000-07:00

Not that I get tapped for referee work all the time, but it happens often enough that I decided to figure out a strategy for ensuring that whenever I do get tapped, I get the work done in a timely manner. Since the strategy I've developed has been at least somewhat effective so far, I figured I would share it in case anyone else is interested.

The problem with the work I need to do as a referee is that, pretty much perpetually, I am going to have a lot of other academic work of my own on my plate, much of which can legitimately be prioritized over the task of refereeing. What this means is that finding time to referee is a project doomed to failure. My other work will usually just expand to fill up all of my work hours. Instead, I realized I need to plan time to referee. So, on the model of office hours, I've designated two hours a week (10:00 am to Noon on Thursdays, if you are curious) as referee hours. And, much like office hours, this is simply a block of time during which I impose a temporary shift in my priorities. If there is refereeing work on my plate, it is (barring unusual circumstances and major deadlines), the primary thing to do during those two hours. And, just as I find myself using my office hours to do my own work if no students come in to see me, I can similarly spend the referee hours doing my own work if I have no outstanding referee requests.

So far, I have been surprised at how effective of a way this is to keep the refereeing I've agreed to do from falling off my radar.

San Francisco APA

2010-03-29T17:12:00.000-07:00

In just a couple days I am headed to San Francisco for the APA. The timing is good in that I will have almost entirely recovered from my trip to Scotland by then (recovered in the sense of getting back to a normal amount of sleep which takes place during the right periods for the time zone I am in, etc.) The timing is bad in that, as soon as I am easing back into my normal work routine here, I am heading off for another conference. Of course, the silver lining to that cloud is that it reminds me that I like my work so much that the major downside to attending a conference is that I don't get to spend as much time actually working as I'd like.

If you will be at the San Francisco APA, and want to hear me talk about Cognitivism about intentions (roughly, the view that intentions are at least partially constituted by beliefs), you should come see my session on Thursday, April 1st, at 2:00 pm.

Reid Conference: Talks I Saw

2010-03-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a week in Scotland, where I attended a fantastic conference on Thomas Reid.

In this post, I am just going to give a list of all the talks I saw, and actually write up more about some specific talks later (note: for many of the conference sessions, I had difficult choices about which talk to attend, and I also left the conference a day early, if that gives you any indication of how much was going on at this conference):

Thomas Reid in the History of Moral Thought (James Harris)
Thomas Reid's Experimentum Crucis (Todd Buras)
Thomas Reid Between Externalism and Internalism (René van Woudenberg)
Dugald Stewart on Innate Ideas and the Origin of Knowledge (Emanuele Levi Mortera)
An Open Revolt against the Authority of Reid: Thomas Brown and the Developments of Common Sense Philosophy (Christina Paoletti)
The Enkinaesthetic Foundation for the Development of Reidian Artificial Signs (Susan Stuart)
Reid's Assault on the Theory of Ideas (Lewis Powell)
Thomas Reid and the Moral Philosophy of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Bradford Bow)
Thomas Reid in the US: a Potato-Pop-Gun? (Jean-Marie Chevalier)
Direct Realism and The Infinite Divisibility of Time in Thomas Reid (James Bruce)
Reid's Theory of Language (David Alexander)
What Kind of Realism? Reid on Aesthetic Response (Laurent Jaffro)
Reid on Consciousness (Dialogue between Rebecca Copenhaver and Udo Thiel)
Reid on Virtuous Habits, Belief, and Moral Responsibility (Esther Kroeker)
Reid and His Fellow Scots on Moral Foundations (Phyllis Vandenberg)
Instinctive Exertions and the Conception of Power (Chris Lindsay)
Reid on the Moral Faculty (Keith Lehrer)
Reid on Acquired Perception (Rebecca Copenhaver)
Four Questions About Acquired Perception (James Van Cleve)

Temple Grandin and David Hume on General Ideas

2010-03-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Mark Schroeder linked me to a TED talk by Temple Grandin. Grandin is autistic, and, in her talk, one thing she attempted to convey was an aspect of her own cognition that she regards as unusual. She said:

So, what is "thinking in pictures"? It's literally movies in your head. My mind works like Google for images. Now, when I was a young kid I didn't know my thinking was different. I thought everybody thought in pictures. And then when I did my book, Thinking In Pictures, I start interviewing people about how they think. And I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different. Like if I say, "Think about a church steeple" most people get this sort of generalized generic one. Now, maybe that's not true in this room, but it's going to be true in a lot of different places. I see only specific pictures. They flash up into my memory, just like Google for pictures. And in the movie, they've got a great scene in there, where the word "shoe" is said, and a whole bunch of '50s and '60s shoes pop into my imagination.

Mark suggested I compare this description of her cognition with Hume's analysis of abstract reasoning. In the Treatise (1.1.7), Hume tells us:

When we have found a resemblance among several objects, that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them, whatever differences we may observe in the degrees of their quantity and quality, and whatever other differences may appear among them. After we have acquired a custom of this kind, the hearing of that name revives the idea of one of these objects, and makes the imagination conceive it with all its particular circumstances and proportions. But as the same word is suppos'd to have been frequently applied to other individuals, that are different in many respects from that idea, which is immediately present to the mind; the word not being able to revive the idea of all these individuals, but only touches the soul, if I may be allow'd so to speak, and revives that custom, which we have acquir'd by surveying them. They are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power; nor do we draw them all out distinctly in the imagination, but keep ourselves in a readiness to survey any of them, as we may be prompted by a present design or necessity. The word raises up an individual idea, along with a certain custom; and that custom produces any other individual one, for which we may have occasion. But as the production of all the ideas, to which the name may be apply'd, is in most eases impossible, we abridge that work by a more partial consideration, and find but few inconveniences to arise in our reasoning from that abridgment.

I think Mark was right to note a striking parallel between Grandin's description of thinking in pictures and Hume's account of abstract reasoning (though I definitely don't mean to suggest that Hume was autistic).

At any rate, I thought this was pretty interesting, and figured I would share.

Socratic Robologues: Euthyphro

2010-03-02T20:32:00.000-08:00

I made a video animation thing today:

In this robologue, Robot Socrates investigates the nature of piety with Robot Euthyphro.

Upcoming Presentations

2010-03-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

1. Later this month, I head to Aberdeen and Glasgow for the conference Thomas Reid: In His Time and Ours. Those who are curious should feel free to read the abstract for my paper.

2. I already posted about this, but my paper "Toward a Less Confident Cognitivism" was accepted for the Pacific APA in San Francisco in early April. The paper argues that Cognitivists about Intention can avoid the commitment that intending to do X involves believing that one will do X without sacrificing the explanatory power of their Cognitivist assumption.

3. I just heard back that my paper "How Can Hume Suppose What Cannot Even Be Conceived?" was accepted to the 5th Biennial Margaret Dauler Wilson Conference in Early Modern Philosophy (which will be held in June at UC Boulder).

Constituency neither is nor requires Parthood

2010-02-24T10:44:00.000-08:00

At the Central APA, I attended a presentation by Greg Fowler and Chris Tillman in which they showed the inconsistency of the following claims relating to the mereological sum of absolutely everything, call it 'U', and the proposition that U exists:

1) U is part of the proposition that U exists.
2) The proposition that U exists is part of U.
3) U is not identical to the proposition that U exists.
4) Parthood is anti-symmetric (i.e. if x is part of y, and y is part of x, x=y).

Their discussion was framed (roughly) as an argument against (4), on the basis of (1)-(3), but I think it is more useful to think of it as an inconsistent tetrad.

If we grant that there is such a thing as the mereological sum of absolutely everything, and we grant the existence of propositions, then (2) would be hard to deny. If everything is a part of U, and there is a proposition that U exists, it is part of U. So, the likely culprits are (1), (3) and (4). But, to me at least, (4) seems to be on better footing than the assumption that there is a mereological sum of absolutely everything, so I'm unlikely to give that up to resolve the tension.

As to (3), I find the following to be a reasonably compelling argument against giving it up: U is not truth evaluable, but the proposition that U exists is truth evaluable, so they are not identical. That said, I think fleshing out a denial of (3) would be among the more interesting responses to the puzzle.

At any rate, I am left with a rejection of (2). Now, Chris and Greg argued that giving this up would cause trouble for explaining the structure of structured propositions, but they only considered denying (2) by denying that structured propositions have any (proper) parts whatsoever. This way of denying (2) is pretty strong, since (2) only asserts that one particular thing is a part of the proposition that U exists. In other words, Chris and Greg argued (compellingly) that parthood is needed in the analysis of constituency, but used that as a basis for concluding that the constituents of a proposition are parts of that proposition.

Here is my flippant argument that constituency neither is nor requires parthood (i.e. that being a constituent of something does not entail being a part of it):
DD1) As a resident of Illinois, I am one of Dick Durbin's constituents.
DD2) I am not one of Dick Durbin's parts.
DDC) So, constituency neither is nor requires parthood.

And here is my almost-as-flippant explanation of why this notion of constituency is relevant to our discussion of propositions:
It is in virtue of being one of Dick Durbin's constituents that I am represented by him in the senate. So, the Dick Durbin argument shows that one can explain why something represents its constituents without the constituents being parts of the thing doing the representing.

So, I'm inclined to think that propositional constituents are represented by the parts of propositions, but need not themselves be parts of propositions.

Prospective Student Season

2010-02-10T09:43:00.001-08:00

As we approach one of my favorite parts of the academic year (prospective student recruitment season), it seems a good time to let anyone who is considering coming to USC for their Philosophy Ph.D. know that they should feel free to contact me with any questions they have about the nature of the program, about our departmental culture, about graduate student life at USC/in Los Angeles, or whatever else they might be curious about.

Two things I remember from when I was applying to Grad school:
1) There was something very nice about the part of the process where programs that had accepted me were trying to convince me to choose them, as opposed to the earlier part of the process where I was trying to convince them to choose me.
2) There was something very stressful about the part of the process where programs that had accepted me were trying to convince me to choose them, since I didn't know what information I needed to be trying to get in order to make a good decision about where to go.

At any rate, I am here and I am available to answer your questions: lmpowell at-sign usc dot edu.

Actions: Intentional under some description?

2010-02-09T23:40:00.000-08:00

This post is subject to an important correction.
I think the origin of talking about actions "under a description" is Donald Davidson's 1963 "Actions, Reasons and Causes". If I am right, Davidson does not so much provide an argument for his thesis, but rather, simply puts it forward:
"I flip the switch, turn on the light, and illuminate the room. Unbeknownst to me I also alert a prowler to the fact that I am at home. Here I need not have done four things, but only one, of which four descriptions have been given.[...]Since reasons may rationalize what someone does when it is described in one way and not when it is described in another, we cannot treat what was done simply as a term in sentences like 'My reason for flipping the switch was that I wanted to turn on the light'; otherwise we would be forced to conclude from the fact that flipping the switch was identical with alerting the prowler, that my reason for alerting the prowler was that I wanted to turn on the light."

It seems that Davidson's view here has two components:
A) My flipping the switch = my turning on the light = my illuminating the room = my alerting the burglar.
B) My flipping the switch was intentional, though my alerting the burglar was not.

Here is a reason to think that if my φing = my ψing, it is not possible that one was intentional and the other not:
1) If my φing = my ψing, then for any property P, if my φing has property P, so does my ψing.
2) Suppose that my φing was intentional but my ψing was not.
3) Then, there is a property P (namely: being intentional) such that my φing has P, but my ψing does not.
4) Then, it is not the case that my φing = my ψing.
5) So, if my φing = my ψing, it is not the case that my φing was intentional while my ψing was not.

Granted, Davidson, it seems, would either deny (1) or the inference to (3) under the supposition of (2). I would have thought that (1) is an uncontroversial instance of Leibniz's law, so I assume it is more likely for one to deny (3). But, at the same time, being intentional seems like a perfectly nice property.

Since I think we should concede component (B) of Davidson's position, I can only assume the motivation to reject (1) or (3) in my argument comes from some good reasons to accept component (A) of Davidson's position, however, it seems like we also have good reason to abandon (A):
1) My flipping the switch could have occurred without the light being turned on.
2) My turning on the light could not have occurred without the light being turned on.
3) So, my flipping the switch is not the same thing as my turning on the light.
(repeat with the necessary alterations for each of the items being identified).

Here's a naive conclusion to draw from my two arguments: My flipping the switch is not the same thing as my alerting the burglar, and thus, we need not appeal to the notion of an action's being "intentional under some description" to explain how my flipping the switch is intentional when my alerting the burglar is not.

But perhaps I am being insufficiently charitable to the Davidsonian position.

It is harder to make the case for non-identity if we consider, for example, my opening the door and my opening the door clumsily. Supposing there is only one door that gets opened, and that I opened it clumsily, we might want to maintain:
A') My opening the door = my opening the door clumsily.
B') My opening the door was intentional, but my opening the door clumsily was not intentional.

Now, my Leibniz law argument should work just as well here, so we still have a problem with reconciling the two theses. On the other hand, I am less confident about my modal argument for the distinctness of the actions in this case. I know there is a decent sized literature on modal-fragility of events, and maybe something from that would help illuminate what to say about this case. Just to consider it briefly, the new version of the modal argument is:
1') My opening the door could have occurred without the door being opened clumsily.
2') My opening the door clumsily could not have occurred without the door being opened clumsily.
3') So, my opening the door is not the same thing as my opening the door clumsily.

(1') still sounds good, just not as good as (1) did earlier. (2') on the other hand sounds at least as good as (2), I think. Suppose we abandon (1'), then. Assuming we are not prepared to give up the claim that my opening the door was intentional, is it possible to say that my opening the door clumsily was intentional? This seems completely unacceptable.

I guess I'll have to look at the literature on the modal profiles of events and at Davidson's "The Logical Form of Action Sentences" to really sort this all out.

APA Suggestions

2010-02-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

I have two simple suggestions for changes to benefit the APA and its members, but I don't actually know how to go about making these suggestions to the people in charge. If anyone does know how ordinary members can officially propose changes like this, please let me know.

Change 1. Adopt an exclusively PDF-based distribution scheme for Proceedings and Addresses, with hard copies of the issues containing Division meeting programs available at the Division meetings. Or, if not, adopt a principally PDF-based distribution scheme, and allow people to opt-in for receipt of paper copies. Or, if not, at least make PDF access available to any member, and make it very easy for individual members to opt out from receiving a paper copy.

I know I am not the only person to think that there must be a better way for the APA to use the resources that go into producing and mailing hard copies out to all of the APA members, but even if, somehow, eliminating the paper copies doesn't save money, it would still enormously less wasteful, right?

Change 2. Allow members to sign up for e-mail notifications/reminders about deadlines for Division meetings. Since the deadlines for APA meetings are usually pretty far in advance of the meetings themselves, it is easy to forget when the deadlines are coming up (for instance, the last Eastern Division meeting occurred less than two months ago, but the submission deadline for next years is in under two weeks). In principle, the cost of setting up such a service would be negligible, so even if it is only moderately helpful for APA members, it still seems like a good idea.

Philosopher's Carnival #103

2010-02-01T14:28:00.000-08:00

New philosopher's carnival is up at Philosopher's, Etc.

On Knowing/Saying To

2010-01-26T17:09:00.000-08:00

First a question. Does anyone know of any literature (in epistemology or philosophy of language) dealing with sentences like either of the ones below?

1) Tom knows to go to the store.
2) Sara said to go to the bank.

It seems to me that sentence 1 should be of interest to epistemologists because it seems to exhibit something akin to the phenomenon that gets labeled "factivity" in the case of "knows that" ascriptions. By which I mean, just as it only makes sense for someone to utter "Tom knows that the store is open" if they themselves are of the opinion that the store is open, it only makes sense for someone to utter 1 if they stand in the some relevant approval/recommendation relationship to Tom's going to the store.

2 is interesting in the philosophy of language, because it seems to be the relevant way to report an instruction in indirect discourse. For instance, if Sara said, "Go to the bank" (to Jeff), but Jeff didn't hear her, and asked me what she said, I might report her utterance by saying 2. Insofar as some philosophers of language invoke considerations about indirect discourse as evidence for propositions (and/or as evidence about the nature of such propositions), sentences like 2 seem to be just as relevant when we raise questions about the existence/natures of instructions (understood as objects of a similar kind to propositions).

It is an interesting dissimilarity between 1 and 2 that a) only Tom can be the agent of "go to the store", while b) Sara is going to be generally dispreferred as a possible agent of "go to the bank" and c) the agent of "go to the bank" in 2 seems highly context sensitive (that is, there are readings corresponding to "Sara said for us to go to the bank", "Sara said for him to go to the bank", "Sara said for you to go to the bank", etc.)

I don't have any big "a-ha" thoughts on any of this yet, which is partially why I am hoping someone has written something about them. Both constructions seem deserving of attention, though.

A Better Statement of the Puzzle for Reid on Color Perception

2010-01-19T22:37:00.000-08:00

Here is a much shorter, clearer statement of the puzzle I see for Reid on color perception:

1) A perceiver observing a uniformly blue sphere would only perceive something uniformly blue if one sees the sphere as a 3-dimensional object.
2) An original perceiver observing a uniformly blue sphere would not see the sphere as a 3-dimensional object
3) So, an original perceiver observing a uniformly blue sphere would see something variably colored, rather than uniformly blue.
4) No external object being perceived is variably colored.
5) So, either a) the original perception is of the sphere, but is not correct., or b) the original perception is correct, but not a perception of something external.
6) Reid's direct realist account of perception requires that the original perceptions are correct, so, not (5a).
7) Reid's direct realist account of perception requires that the original perceptions are of external objects, so, not (5b).

Reid is committed to (1)-(3) by the passage I quoted in the previous post.
I don't have a source for (4), but I am not sure what externally existing object is variably colored in a perceptual situation involving a perceiver and a uniformly blue sphere.
(5) follows because the perception is either correct (and therefore not of any external object) or not. If it is incorrect, it may as well be a perception of the sphere.
(6) comes from the veridicality of perception on Reid's picture (he goes to some lengths to argue that the sense do not deceive us), and (7) comes from the fact that Reid is insistent that the objects of perception are external objects (and their qualities).

So, this is the puzzle. Reid can avoid the puzzle when it comes to visible and linear distances, for instance, because there are two different (but related) qualities he can invoke. But there is no such distinction available when it comes to color.

A Puzzle for Reid on Color Perception

2010-01-19T20:38:00.000-08:00

Thomas Reid recognizes a distinction between qualities originally perceived by a given sense modality and an expanded range of qualities that can be perceived via that sense modality as the result of nature, custom/habit, or experience. Specific parts of Reid's story generate a puzzle about color perception (though I should add the caveat that I haven't yet looked through the secondary literature carefully to see if this has already been discussed).
Reid includes color on the list of original perceptions of vision, but he also makes the following remarks (all bolding added by me, for emphasis):
"Thus, if a sphere of one uniform color be set before me, I perceive evidently by my eye its spherical figure, and its three dimensions. All the world will acknowledge, that by sight only, without touching it, I may be certain that it is a sphere; yet it is no less certain, that, by the original power of sight, I could not perceive it to be a sphere, and to have three dimensions. The eye originally could perceive only two dimensions, and a gradual variation of colour on the different sides of the object.
It is experience that teaches me that the variation of colour is an effect of spherical convexity, and of the distribution of light and shade. But so rapid is the progress of the thought, from the effect to the cause, that we attend only to the last, and can hardly be persuaded that we do not immediately see the three dimensions of the sphere.
Nay, it may be observed, that, in this case, the acquired perception in a manner effaces the original one; for the sphere is seen to be of one uniform color, though originally there would have appeared a gradual variation of color: But that apparent variation, we learn to interpret as the effect of light and shade falling upon a sphere of one uniform color."

The puzzle for Reid is that basically all ordinary color perception turns out to be a case where the original perceptions are in conflict with the acquired perceptions, and, what's worse, if we have to choose one as "veridical", it would be the acquired perceptions, not the original ones.

See, Reid takes color to be a real quality of objects. Now, (supposing the sphere in Reid's example to be blue), if being blue is a quality of objects, the "uniformly colored" sphere is either uniformly blue, or it is not uniformly blue. Since Reid introduces the sphere as uniformly colored, let's grant that the sphere is uniformly blue. But, recall that this is an acquired perception of the sphere's color, which means that an unexperienced visual observer would see, as Reid points out, something with gradually varying colors. Note, however, that, ex hypothesi, the sphere is uniformly colored, and so, either original color perceptions are generally not veridical (contra Reid's position on perception) or, the original color perceptions are not of the externally existing object (contra Reid's position on perception). Put another way, Reid's plausible story about acquired perception requires either non-veridical original color perceptions, or non-external objects of original perception. Reid doesn't want either of these, so his view of color perception is in trouble.

So that's the puzzle. My plan now is to see whether there is any way for Reid to wriggle out of this puzzle (or if I am radically misinterpreting him on the status of colors or on perception, or the like).

Reid Conference Program

2010-01-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

The annual conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy this year is a conference in honor of Thomas Reid. The conference, "Thomas Reid: From His Time To Ours", lasts for a whole week (March 21-26), and spans two different universities (Aberdeen and Glasgow).

The program for the conference has now been posted, and my first response is: wow, that is a lot of conference, and my second response is being excited about seeing my name on the program.

Anyway, this looks like it will be a pretty exciting conference, and I am glad my paper got accepted, giving me a pretty good excuse to go all the way to Scotland to attend it.

Pacific APA News: Possible Location Change

2010-01-18T18:41:00.000-08:00

I just received an e-mail from the APA seeking feedback on an issue arising from a labor dispute between San Francisco's unionized hotel workers and the collection of hotels that employ union workers.

The hotel workers are calling for a boycott because of disputes with management over something to do with their health care packages (I don't have the specifics because the e-mail linked to a survey with more information, but I finished the survey without copying down the info, and I can't re-open the survey after submitting it). It is important to note that the workers are not striking now, and the information provided by the APA suggests it is very unlikely for the workers to go on strike.

The union is calling for a boycott of many of San Francisco's hotels (including the Westin St. Francis where the APA meeting was supposed to be). The poll was aimed at finding out whether people preferred to keep the meeting at the Westin St. Francis (and make arrangements for people who wish to present their work outside the hotel at nearby venues), move the meeting somewhere else in the greater bay area, or move the meeting to another major city entirely. One constraint is the APA policy to use a union hotel for APA meetings (presumably this is part of why there is no discussion of moving to another hotel within San Francisco).

For what it is worth, my survey responses heavily favored the first two options over the last one (in part because I already purchased plane tickets to San Francisco), and I also wound up leaning towards leaving things at the Westin rather than moving to another part of the bay area.

It seems as though participating in the requested boycott would cause serious upheaval for the APA's plans, and for the plans of many individual members of the APA, especially given that the issue may well be resolved before March (though I don't have any information about how likely that is to happen).

I know that, when I was making hotel arrangements, I had considered laying down the money upfront for a non-refundable reservation at a nearby hotel because it was somewhat cheaper than the discounted rate at the Westin. I'd be pretty concerned right now if I had actually gone ahead with that reservation.

I should also note that if the APA was deciding whether to plan future APA meetings in San Francisco (as opposed to deciding whether to change the plans for the upcoming meeting), I'd be much more sympathetic to the boycott request.

If anyone has a link to something a bit more official on all this, please post it in the comments.

Telescopes and the Role of Language in Philosophy

2010-01-18T18:25:00.000-08:00

John Stuart Mill and Timothy Williamson both analogize the role of language in philophical inquiry to the role of telescopes in astronomical inquiry. I don't know that I have anything particularly illuminating to say about this shared analogy, but I thought I would reproduce the relevant passages here.

First, here are the first two paragraphs from chapter one of Mill's System of Logic (titled: "Of the Necessity of Commencing with an Analysis of Language"):

"It is so much the established practice of writers on logic to commence their treatises by a few general observations (in most cases, it is true, rather meagre) on Terms and their varieties, that it will, perhaps, scarcely be required from me in merely following the common usage, to be as particular in assigning my reasons, as it is usually expected those who deviate from it.

The practice, indeed, is recommended by considerations far too obvious to require a formal justification. Logic is a portion of the Art of Thinking: Language is evidently, and by the admission of all philosophers, one of the principal instruments or helps of thought; and any imperfection in the instrument, or in the mode of employing it, is confessedly liable, still more than in almost any other art, to confuse and impede the process, and destroy all ground of confidence in the result. For a mind not previously versed in the meaning and right use of the various kinds of words, to attempt the study of methods of philosophizing, would be as if some one should attempt to become an astronomical observer, having never learned to adjust the focal distance of his optical instruments so as to see distinctly."

And here is Williamson's way of putting a very similar point, in "Must Do Better":
"Philosophers who refuse to bother about semantics, on the grounds that they want to study the non-linguistic world, not our talk about that world, resemble astronomers who refuse to bother about the theory of telescopes, on the grounds that they want to study the stars, not our observation of them. Such an attitude may be good enough for amateurs; applied to more advanced inquiries, it produces crude errors. Those metaphysicians who ignore language in order not to project it onto the world are the very ones most likely to fall into just that fallacy, because the validity of their reasoning depends on unexamined assumptions about the structure of the language in which they reason."

Note that, despite the importance both place on questions of language, neither philosopher is adopting the position that philosophical inquiry is fundamentally inquiry about language. In fact, as revealed by the telescope analogy, both seem to be committed to the view that philosophical inquiry is often not about language.

Intrinsicness and the Duplication Account

2010-01-18T16:46:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, Maya Eddon presented a paper ("Intrinsicality and Hyperintensionality") arguing against the adequacy of the duplication account of intrinsicality (where, intuitively, intrinsic properties are those that objects possess solely in virtue of the way the objects themselves are).

Granting, for purposes of spelling out a duplication account, that there is a privileged set of (perfectly) natural properties, we can define what it is to be a duplicate: an object x is a duplicate of object y if and only if x is like y with respect to the instantiation of all perfectly natural properties.

So, the duplication account of instrinsicality is:
DUP: A property P is intrinsic if and only if it never divides duplicates.

One purported problem for the account is identity properties (being David Lewis, for instance). Since there could be a world with two duplicates of David Lewis, but there cannot be a world with two things that are David Lewis, at most one of those duplicates can have the property of being David Lewis, and thus, the property of being David Lewis divides duplicates. Thus, the duplication account treats the property of being David Lewis as not an intrinsic property, but, intuitively, it is an intrinsic property. In other words, the objection maintains that: never dividing duplicates is not a necessary condition for intrinsicality.

Another purported problem comes from necessary properties (being such that 2 plus 2 equals 4, for instance). Since every object is (necessarily) such that 2 plus 2 equals 4, that property never divides duplicates. Consequently, on the duplication account, every necessary property is intrinsic. But, intuitively, being such that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is not intrinsic. In other words, the objection maintains that: never dividing duplicates is not a sufficient condition for intrinsicality.

After the talk, I thought of a possible variation to the duplication account. It doesn't do anything to help with the objection from identity properties, but it does help out with necessary properties. If one is willing to bite the bullet on identity properties, this would be an adequate replacement account (if one is not willing to bite the bullet, one could at least extract a sufficient condition for intrinsicness from the revised account).

DUP*: A property P is intrinsic if and only if it ever divides duplicates from non-duplicates.

Here is how this minor revision helps. Consider a necessary property like being such that 2 plus 2 equals 4. This property never divides duplicates from non-duplicates, because every non-duplicate will possess it. Now consider a paradigmatic intrinsic property, like, having such-and-such shape. Since some object lacks that property, but no duplicate of something possessing the property will lack the property, it does divide duplicates from non-duplicates.

Some things worth noting:
a) As already mentioned, this does not help at all with identity properties.
b) DUP* is incompatible with treating any necessary properties as intrinsic.
c) Eddon's paper is concerned with responding to a number of attempted evasions of these objections, and I haven't discussed any of those. I don't mean to be taking a stand here as to whether any of those ways of evading the objections work.
d) Eddon's broader dialectical purpose is to argue for hyperintensional properties, and I obviously haven't sketched how she pursues that conclusion, but it is pretty clear that, on an intensional conception of properties, there is only one necessary property, and it will have to either be intrinsic or extrinsic, so hyperintensionality is clearly necessary if one wants both intrinsic and extrinsic necessary properties.

Philosopher's Carnival #102

2010-01-11T00:27:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Philosopher's Carnival #102. The Philosopher's Carnival is a round-up of recent philosophy blog posts. I'm going to include my own recommendations alongside the submitted posts, and if there is something good I've missed, be sure to mention it in the comments. All links are after the jump.

My Recommendations:
Over at the Phiosophy of Science group blog, It's Only a Theory, P.D. Magnus asks "How do you think of natural kinds?". The post is about whether it is best to think that things are either natural kinds or not, simpliciter, or whether a kind's being natural is relative to a specific enquiry.

Over at Wide Scope, Andy Cullison posts episode 4 of his Philosophy Podcast.

And as long as I am recommending posts, I'll link my own post right here at Horseless Telegraph: Thomas Reid and Acquired Perception.

Submissions:
Jonathan Phillips submits Adam Arico's post On the Ordinary Concept of Lying over at the Experimental Philosophy blog. The post concerns folk intuitions about possible cases of lying that are potential problems for some popular analyses of lying.

Richard Chappell submits his post Helping Wrongdoers over at Philosophy, et cetera. Chappell discusses the relationship between strong moral demands for beneficence and the principle that one should not help wrongdoers (in their wrongdoings).

Matthew Flannagan submits his post Van Inwagen, Divine Duties and the Deontological Argument from Evil over at MandM. The post critically examines Van Inwagen's reply to a Tooley-style argument from evil, and the relationship between deontological versions of the argument from evil and divine command theories in ethics.

David Gawthorne submits his post Some Thoughts on Realism About Absences and Holes over at Intentional Objects. Gawthorne's discussion covers a pretty broad range of literature on issues surrounding the metaphysical status of holes and absences.

Gualtiero Piccinini submits his post Should Graduate Students Publish Outside Philosophy Journals? over at Brains. The post was linked recently on Brian Leiter's blog, if I recall correctly, and may interest any philosophers with interdisciplinary interests.

Chris Hallquist submits his post The PhilPapers Survey: Believers, Peers, and Experts over at The Uncredible Hallq.

Wes Alwan submits Episode 6: Leibniz’s Monadology: What Is There?, an episode of The Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast. I have not yet listened to the podcast, so I can't say anything more about it.

Gary Williams submits his post Thoughts on the Computational Theory of Mind posted at Minds and Brains.

Thomas Reid and Acquired Perception

2010-01-10T22:23:00.000-08:00

In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man Thomas Reid maintains that experience can allow us to improve on our original perceptions, expanding the information available to us by way of our senses. In this category, Reid includes things from our ability to visually perceive tangible sizes and distances of objects (instead of simply the apparent sizes and distances of objects), to things like hearing the size of a bell and a butcher's ability to (visually) see how heavy some quantity of beef is. Reid labels this phenomenon "acquired perception", and takes the position that instances of it do not involve an act of reasoning, but he also indicates that he is not particularly concerned to argue that it is literally a form of perception — "Whether we call it judgment or acquired perception is a verbal difference" (EIP II.14, paragraph 37). Reid indicates that he is calling it "perception" simply to accord with what he regards as common usage of the term (EIP II.22, paragraph 31).

At the same time, one of the many interesting things that I think we can find in Reid's discussion of this topic is a decent way to defend his substantive underlying position (namely that beliefs arising from acquired perception are importantly different from both our original perceptions and from beliefs formed on the basis of reasoning). When Reid is concerned to show that many purported 'fallacies of the senses' are not really fallacies of the senses, he points out that when our acquired perceptions lead us astray, (for example, if one believes that there is a spherical object in front of them on the basis of seeing a really well-done painting of a sphere), we would not fault their faculty of vision (Reid's discussion of this point is from II.22. paragraph 31).

I think Reid could marshall this test in support of his position that acquired perception is not a product of reasoning. I am just as disinclined to consider someone who is taken in by a trompe l'oeil painting or the like a bad reasoner as I am to consider them someone with faulty vision. However, limiting our attention to this case might be considered stacking the deck in favor of Reid's position, since not all of his opponents would group visual perception of 3d shapes and distances as the same sort of acquired perceptions as a butcher's ability to estimate beef weight, or the like.

So, broadening the range of cases to consider, we can repeat the test. It is important to note that Reid's official position is that acquired perceptions are different in kind from both original perceptions and reasoned judgments, so, if no errors for any of the cases he is interested in fall under errors in the sensory or reasoning faculties, he is in good shape. I'm going to briefly run through the cases Reid gives in his earlier work (An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense Chapter 6, section 20), and evaluate whether errors about such cases would have to be either sensory or reasoning errors.

"The shepherd knows every sheep of his flock, as we do our acquaintances, and can pick them out of another flock one by one. The butcher knows by sight the weight and quality of his beeves and sheep before they are killed. The farmer perceives by his eye, every nearly, the quantity of hay in a rick, or of corn in a heap. The sailor sees the burthen, the built and the distance of a ship at sea, while she is a great way off. Every man accustomed to writing distinguishes his acquaintance by their hand-writing, as he does their faces."

Thinking through these cases, I am also pretty sympathetic to the existence of a category of mistaken belief that is neither the produce of sensory error or the product of erroneous reasoning. Suppose a shepherd, attempting to identify which of the sheep among another flock are his sheep, misidentifies one of the other flock's sheep as his own. While such an error could be due to bad vision, or a bad inference ("one of my sheep has a misshapen ear, that sheep there has a misshapen ear, so, that is my sheep"), it also seems to me possible for the misidentification to occur without attributing the shepherd any visual faults and without any mistakes in reasoning (note: it might be that a shepherd who is prone to misidentify his sheep must be a bad reasoner to rely on his acquired perceptions of whether a given sheep belongs to his flock, but not necessarily in forming the bad judgments).

In fact, this might be one of the better ways to make the case for Reid's position that visual perception of properties like (3d) shape, size, and distance, are acquired perceptions like the farmer's ability to know by vision the quantity of hay in a given bale.

A few miscellaneous notes of things I didn't discuss: i) There are some important similarities between the position of Reid's that I am discussing and some of what Berkeley says about suggestion in the New Theory of Vision; I did not have space to go into those here, and also wanted to avoid saying potentially false things about Berkeley's views. ii) A more thorough discussion of this would definitely involve relating Reid's position to Locke's view about sensations being changed by judgment. iii) I would not be surprised if a better understanding of Reid's views on acquired perception help to shed some light on Hume's skeptical solution to the challenge of justifying causal inferences.

Fictions about Real Things

2010-01-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

I am on the plane from New York back to Los Angeles (currently over Omaha), and since Google was good enough to sponsor free in-flight wifi for all Virgin America flights, I figured I'd take this opportunity to write up a blog post.

I would think that it is utterly uncontroversial that there are some fictions about real people. but, it is often the case that things I take to be utterly uncontroversial are subjects of heated philosophical dispute.

Start with this fiction (which, admittedly, has little aesthetic value):
One day, during his exile on the isle of Elba, Napoleon met a surprisingly friendly group of vampires. After a brief conversation, they parted ways and Napoleon made a mental note not to prejudge vampires. The end.

Here are a couple things I think we should all accept about that story (call it "Vampires on Elba").
1) "Vampires on Elba" is a story about Napoleon
2) The occurrences of "Napoleon" in "Vampires on Elba" refer to Napoleon.

Here is a potential worry for accepting 1 and 2:

It seems to follow from 1 and 2 that:
3) The Napoleon of "Vampires on Elba" is Napoleon.
And, intuitively we would want to accept:
4) The Napoleon of "Vampires on Elba" met some vampires.

But, now we have a contradiction, since:
5) It is not the case that Napoleon met some vampires.

So, 3, 4, and 5 form an inconsistent triad.

Let's take it for granted that 5 is beyond reproach.

We either need to deny 3, deny 4, or argue that there is equivocation going on. And if we deny 3, we will need to figure out whether to reject 1 and 2, or whether 3 doesn't really follow from them at all.

It seems to be the best strategy for rejecting 4 is to argue that it is literally false, but can be used to convey the truth:
4*) According to the fiction "Vampires on Elba", Napoleon met some vampires.

This is somewhat unsatisfying, but does allow us to cleanly preserve 3.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the best strategy for rejecting 3 involves treating "the n of S" (where 'n' is a name and 'S' is the title of a story) as a function that takes one from the referent of n to some other object. I'm going to call this approach the "Cadillac of Minivans" approach. In essence, we reject 3 because it is an identity claim, but the definite description doesn't pick out the object named by 'n', rather, it picks out some relevant counterpart of that object. Note that this is compatible with (and almost requires) treating 'n' as it occurs in 3, as retaining its ordinary reference. Just as "Cadillac" retains its ordinary reference in the phrase "The Cadillac of minivans".

I am not sure whether this strategy is compatible with accepting 1 or 2 (I am more worried about 1, I guess, than about 2).

I am currently inclined to accept 3, and to either maintain that 4 is false, but can be used to make claims about what is true according to the fiction, or maintain that 4 is ambiguous between the false reading and a reading on which it literally makes a claim about what is true according to the fiction.

I'm mostly curious as to whether there is some way to maintain natural readings of 1 and 2, while denying 3. Any thoughts?

Post APA: Sessions I Saw

2010-01-01T14:25:00.001-08:00

I wound up attending quite a few sessions at the APA this year, so I thought I'd take an opportunity to recap what I saw before I forget too much of what went on. I hope to have a couple of posts about some of the things that really grabbed my attention/interest from the talks I saw, but for now, here is a list of the talks I made it to. As always, some talks I wanted to see were scheduled at conflicting times, and sometimes the practical necessities of getting a meal prevented me from attending as many sessions as I'd have liked to:

Monday
• International Berkeley Society: Session Commemorating the 300th Anniversary of the Publication of the New Theory of Vision
Kenneth Winkler: "The First Person in Vision"
Martha Brandt-Bolton: "Is the Doctrine of Visual Language Integral to Berkeley's Theory of Vision?"
• Symposium: Affective Language and Truth-conditional Semantics
Elisabeth Camp: "Presupposition, Complicity, and Literal and Figurative Insults"
• Colloquium: Epistemology
Kay Mathiesen: "Groups as Epistemic Agents"
Julianne Chung: "Hope, Intuition, and Inference"
• Hume Society: Scepticism with Regard to the Senses
Angela Coventry:*
Don Ainslie: "Hume's Phenomenology of Sensory Experience"

Tuesday
•Colloquium: Expressing Truth
Fritz McDonald: "Minimalism and Expressivism"
Clayton Littlejohn: "Truth and Warrented Assertion"
•Colloquium: Perception
Berit Brogard: "An Alternative to Color Relationalism"
James Genone: "How to be a Direct Realist"
•Collloquium: Stuff
Charlie Tanksley: "Masses and Four-Dimensionalism"

Wednesday
•Symposium: Epistemology
Malte Willer: "New Dynamics for Epistemic Modality"
•Colloquium: Metaphysics of Mind
Paul Audi: "Three Types of Antireductionism"

*I don't recall the title of Angela's talk, but it was about Treatise 1.4.2, 'Scepticism with regard to the Senses'

Post APA: Book Purchases

2009-12-30T19:40:00.000-08:00

One highlight of APA division meetings is the book display/sale, where inordinately expensive texts are marked down to be merely ordinately expensive. In no particular order (or rather, in a particular order with no especially interesting organizational features), here are the books I picked up.

• Hume's Skeptical Crisis - Robert J. Fogelin
• Relativism and Monadic Truth - Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne
• The Emergence of Probability (2nd ed.) - Ian Hacking
• Liberty Worth the Name - Gideon Yaffe
• Being For - Mark Schroeder
• Frege on Definitions - John Horty
• Agency and Deontic Logic - John Horty
• The Concept of Law (2nd ed.) - H.L.A. Hart
• Words and Thoughts - Robert J. Stainton
• Justification without Awareness - Michael Bergmann
• Relative Truth - Edited by Manuel García-Carpintero and Max Kölbel
• Saving Truth From Paradox - Hartry Field

(feel free to complain if I nabbed the only copy of a text you had your eye on)

As a side note, I will say that it seems like some presses are just much better about setting reasonable prices to begin with. For instance, I noticed that the actual list price of Mark Balaguer's new book from MIT press ("Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem") was competitive with (if not superior to) the discounted price of similar length monographs at the Oxford table. Since Oxford discounts 50% on the final day, that is a pretty substantive divergence in cost-to-grad-students-and-other-philosophers based on which press one goes with. Don't get me wrong, I love the books Oxford puts out (as my purchases above may well indicate), but maybe they should get some advice from other presses on how to keep costs down (and then, you know, pass the savings along to the consumer).

Upcoming Travel (and a terminological suggestion)

2009-12-23T19:17:00.000-08:00

1. In a couple days I am heading to New York City for the Eastern APA. If anyone has suggestions of exciting looking sessions for me to check out, mention them in the comments.

2. I grew up in Chicago, so I always love an excuse to get back home, so I am also going to the Central APA in Chicago. I am also considering trying to attend the Epistemology shin-dig right before it.

3. A paper of mine was accepted to the upcoming Thomas Reid conference in Aberdeen and Glasgow in March. Those who are curious should feel free to read the abstract for my paper.

4. I already posted about this, but my paper "Toward a Less Confident Cognitivism" was accepted for the Pacific APA in San Francisco in March. The paper argues that Cognitivists about Intention can avoid the commitment that intending to do X involves believing that one will do X without sacrificing the explanatory power of their Cognitivist assumption.

5. I'd be really excited if, in casual conversation, philosophers started using the terms "semantricks" and "pragmagic" to suggest that some phil language shenanigans are going on with respect to a given view. Example uses: "You'd need some serious semantricks in order for that view to get the right truth-conditions." "Even though the semantic value of S is P, defenders of this view claim that an utterance of S pragmagically produces an assertion of Q."

Kit Fine's Denial of Compositionality

2009-12-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

In "Semantic Relationism", Kit Fine proposes to solve Frege’s puzzle by including some irreducibly relational semantic facts. Fine argues that this approach permits him to maintain a) a directly referential semantics for proper names, b) the transparency of meaning, and c) semantic compositionality (of a sort). Fine thus takes his view to have a strong advantage over rival Millian proposals, which typically deny (b).

Fine presents the puzzle as the following inconsistent set of claims (concerning the sentences "Cicero = Cicero" and "Cicero = Tully"):
1a Cognitive Difference: The two identity sentences are cognitively different.
1b Cognitive Link: If the sentences are cognitively different, then they are semantically different.
2 Compositionality: If the sentences are semantically different, then the names “Cicero” and “Tully” are semantically different.
3 Referential Link: If the names “Cicero” and “Tully” are semantically different, they are referentially different.
4 Referential Identity: The names “Cicero” and “Tully” are not referentially different.

For some purposes, Fine collapses 1a and 1b into a single claim:
1 Semantic difference: The two identity sentences are semantically different.

Fine identifies the two major lines of response to this puzzle as the Referentialist response (which denies 1), and the Fregean response (which denies 3). Fine's own response can most naturally be understood as a denial of 2. Fine argues that the problem with Referentialism is the denial of 2, and that the problem with Fregeanism is the denial of 3. Consequently, Fine's view only has an advantage as a solution to Frege's puzzle over Fregeanism or to Referentialism if it avoids the denial of 1 and the denial of 3. However, in order to address all Frege puzzle cases, Fine will have to reject one of those two principles.

Fine's solution to the puzzle involves the rejection of 2. Fine does so by accepting a weaker version of compositionality. The following two principles entail 2, but Fine only accept
2a Compositionality Proper: If the identity-sentences “Cicero = Cicero” and “Cicero = Tully” are semantically different, then so are the pairs of names “Cicero”, “Cicero” and “Cicero”, “Tully”.
2b Intrinsicality: If the pairs of names “Cicero”, “Cicero” and “Cicero”, “Tully” are semantically different, then so are the names “Cicero” and “Tully”.

Fine accepts 2a, but rejects 2b. Now, the point of Fine's rejection of compositionality is to make room for a view according to which "Cicero" and "Tully" do not differ semantically, even though the pairs "Cicero", "Cicero" and "Cicero", "Tully" do. This is where the irreducibly relational semantic facts enter Fine's picture. On his view, "Cicero = Cicero" differs semantically from "Cicero = Tully" because the pairs of names differ semantically despite the names themselves not differing semantically.

The trouble is, understood as an attempt to solve Frege's puzzle, it is insufficient. To address Frege's puzzle, it really is necessary to reject 1 or 3. In order to see this, we can consider two variations of Frege's puzzle: I call the first variant "Too Few Occurrences" because in it, there are not enough occurrences of names to use the maneuver Fine invokes here. I call variant 2 "Too Many Types" because it involves more types of names than the maneuver just mentioned can deal with.

Too Few Occurrences:
Consider the sentences "Cicero is an orator" and "Tully is an orator".
On Fine's view (through Chapter 2, at least), the two sentences have the same semantic content. This is because Fine accepts Referential link (no semantic difference for names without a referential difference), and a version of compositionality that would require a semantic difference between "Cicero" and "Tully" for these two sentences to differ in semantic value.

However, the sentences are cognitively different (both intuitively and by Fine's standards), and Fine accepts Cognitive Link (no cognitive difference without a semantic difference). So, we have a version of Frege's puzzle that does not invoke the richer version of compositionality that Fine rejects. It does still require the assumption of Referential Link and Semantic Difference, though, so one could resolve this problem by rejecting one of those two principles. However, if we reject one of those to deal with Too Few Instances, there is no reason to reject Compositionality in the original case.

Too Many Types:
Consider the sentences "Cicero is Tully" and "Marcus is Tully".
On Fine's view, the two sentences have the same semantic content. This is because Fine's semantic theory for the irreducibly relational facts about pairs of names is, effectively, only sensitive to a notion of "representing as same". "Cicero","Cicero" represent as same, but "Cicero","Tully" do not represent as same. This is the relational semantic difference Fine uses to explain the difference in semantic value between "Cicero = Cicero" and "Cicero = Tully". Consequently, "Cicero","Tully" and "Cicero","Marcus" have the same semantic value (in Fine's terminology, both pairs share an uncoordinated content, and are negatively coordinated, whereas the pair "Cicero","Cicero" has the same uncoordinated content, but is positively coordinated). Consequently, we can generate a puzzle using Compositionality Proper (the principle of compositionality Fine accepts). Again, the puzzle also requires Semantic Difference and Referential Link, so again, the puzzle can be resolved either by the same maneuver as used by the Fregean or through the maneuver used by the Referentialist. Making such a move in this case, however, undermines the motivation for rejecting the stronger version of Compositionality in the first place.

So, to really address Frege's puzzle, it appears that one has to either reject Semantic Difference (i.e. adopt the Referentialist position), or reject Referential Link (i.e. adopt the Fregean position).

In fairness to Fine, he discusses the case I am calling "Too Few Occurrences", but there is a dilemma for understanding his discussion: Either the material addressing it in chapter 3 is intended to consistently extend the account presented in chapter 2, in which case, the objections above still present a problem for the case, or it is a revision of the view. If the view from chapter three forward is an outright revision of the view presented in chapter 2, then, the real work is being done by Fine's discourse-level semantic treatment (which assigns something like a semantic values collectively to entire discourses — sets of sentences), then there is no need for fine to reject compositionality for intrinsic semantic values; the chapter 2 mechanisms are idle in the broader solution to Frege's puzzle. At any rate, the chapter 2 view itself is insufficient for resolving Frege's puzzle.

I have a draft of a paper that presents all of this more clearly, which I may post after tidying it up a bit.

1913 Russell vs. 1899 Meinong

2009-11-18T17:47:00.000-08:00

This semester I am sitting in on Jim van Cleve's perception seminar (which is covering theories from Malebranch and Arnauld up through more recent work by Noe and Gupta), and we wound up doing some readings from Bertrand Russell's "Theory of Knowledge" (ToK), a work that was published in 1984 from a 1913 manuscript of Russell's. In that work, Russell contrasts his approach to acquaintance with the equivalent element of Meinong's theory. Both Russell and Meinong seem to be subscribing to a version of intentionalism (at least about acquaintance/presentation). So, as I understand their views, they both think that states of presentation have a subject as well as an object that is (at least sometimes) extra-mental.

Russell and Meinong here conflict on two fronts: i) they conflict on whether the object presented must exist, and ii) they conflict on whether the state possesses content that is distinct from its object and mental.

Meinong permits a mental state's object to be non-existent, while Russell does not, and Meinong thinks that mental states have mental content distinct from their objects.

Here is Russell, quoting Meinong (from "Uber Gegenstande hohrer Ordnung un deren Verhaltniss zur inneren Wahrnehmung"), on the:
"That it is essential to everything psychical to have an object, will presumably be admitted without reserve at least in regard to that psychical material which will here exclusively concern us. For no one doubts that one cannot have a presentation without having a presentation of something, and also that one cannot judge without judging about something. People will probably also concede just as willingly that there is no presentation or judgment without content; but for not a few this readiness comes from the assumption that content and object are pretty much the same thing. I also long believed that the two expressions could be used indifferently, and that therefore one of them could be dispensed with. To-day I regard this as a mistake."

And here is Russell's characterization of the motivation for the Meinongian view about content and his reply to Meinong:
"The argument which has probably done the most to produce a belief in 'contents' as opposed to objects is the last of those adduced by Meinong, namely that there must be some difference between a presentation of one object and a presentation of another, and this difference is not to be found in the 'act' of presentation. At first sight, it seems obvious that my mind is in different 'states' when I am thinking of one thing and when I am thinking of another. But in fact the difference of the object supplies all the difference required."

As Russell is presenting it, the argument here is something like this: When o1 is not identical to o2, there is some difference between the presentation of o1 to S and the presentation of o2 to S. Since both presentations involve the same relation (acquaintance), there must be some difference in the subject's state (i.e. content) which differs between the two presentations.

Russell goes on to explain that the argument in question presupposes an "internal" theory of relations, saying, "[if] the complex 'my awareness of A' is different from the complex 'my awareness of B', it does not follow that when I am aware of A I have some intrinsic quality which I do not have when I am aware of B but not of A. There is therefore no reason for assuming a difference in the subject corresponding to the difference between two presented objects."

This whole dispute was very perplexing to me, until I figured out that what is really going on is that Russell is thinking about this mental relationship as something like pointing, while Meinong is thinking about it as something like depicting.

To bring Russell's thought out, we can consider the relation of pointing at. Suppose I stick my arm out, and the result is that I am pointing at a certain green couch. There is a difference between pointing at that green couch, as opposed to pointing at a certain red chair, but it does not follow that there is a difference intrinsic to me or my contribution to the pointing event in the two cases. To see this, imagine that I remain unchanged while someone else swaps the location of the chair and the couch. There is a different object of my pointing, but no difference in my contribution to the act of pointing.

But to think that this is an adequate reply to Meinong is to misunderstand the motivation for Meinong's position. Let's take the depicting analogy seriously, and consider depictions of what I will, for present purposes, assume to be non-existent entities.* Depiction A is a depiction of Pegasus, and depiction B is a depiction of Medusa. The two depictions have different objects. But this is not something we can explain by appeal to spatio-temporal, causal, or other physical relations obtaining between the depictions and their objects. Neither Pegasus nor Medusa is causally efficacious, spatio-temporally located, or physically related to me (alternately: whatever physical, spatio-temporal, or causal relations one stands in to me, the other does also). What's more, it seems as though there does need to be an intrinsic difference in the depictions that explains why they differ with respect to their objects.** At the very least, intuitively, part of what makes something a depiction of Pegasus is the intrinsic features of the depiction.

How does this understanding of Meinong help blunt the Russellian criticism? Well, if a subject hallucinates a dagger, Meinong thinks that the object of the state is a non-existent dagger. But he sees a need to explain why the object of the state is a non-existent dagger rather than a non-existent alligator. Since this explanation cannot come, in his view, from external relations between the subject and the dagger or the alligator, there must be something about the mental state itself that secures the relevant object. Veridical cases differ from hallucination insofar as some existing object answers to the content of the mental state.

What can Russell say about hallucinatory states? I see three options: i) Russell could make the objects of presentation property complexes (which exist, but are not instantiated by anything), ii) Russell could be a disjunctivist, and maintain that hallucinatory states are simply not presentational, or iii) Russell could opt for the move considered by William Alston (in his 1999 article "Back to the Theory of Appearing"), and maintain that hallucinations involve presentation with misrepresentation, or in other words, that there is some existing thing, like a region of space or quantity of air, that one perceives as F, when it fails to be F.***

I think that option (i) will not work, though I include it as some of Russell's comments (p. 41-44) seem to suggest a view in that neighborhood, insofar as the property complexes, existing in platonic heaven, do not seem to exhibit the right sorts of differences in external relations to the individual needed to use Russell's internal/external appeals to deal with them. This is not a good place to try and settle the prospects for disjunctivism about perceptual experience, so I will not say much about it. Finally, option (iii) might work, but it pushes the problem back to one about the character of perceptual experience. We would be left with the question of what it is for an experience to present the x as F. Since some experiences of a given region of space or quantity of air present them as they are, an explanation is needed of what the difference consists in between those presentations, and the ones in which one or the other is presented as a dagger. This makes the problem harder for Russell, because he would be unable, in that case, to attribute the difference in the character of the presentations to a difference in their objects.

Given that I don't find any of those options appealing, I am drawn to Meinong's view (at least with respect to content), and my understanding of the division of labor on his view makes it much clearer a) why one might be sympathetic to his non-existent objects, and b) why, given his commitment to non-existent objects, and b) why, if he has a commitment to non-existent objects, he sees himself as needing to also postulate that states have contents that are distinct from their objects and mentalistic.

*I definitely do not intend to be taking the stance that this is the right way to think about the case, just that it will help illustrate what Meinong is proposing.
**In actuality, this is a fallacious step, insofar as one might appeal to a difference in the intentions of the person making the depictions, without any intrinsic difference in the depictions themselves, but this is not a direct problem for the analogy I am spelling out.
***Alston writes, of the hallucination case, "Thus it seems that if we are to save [The Theory of Appearances], we will have to find something that was appearing to Macbeth as a dagger, the handle toward his hand [. . .] And what might that be? There are various candidates. One is the air occupying the region where the dagger appears to be. Another is the portion of space apparently occupied by the dagger. A less plausible candidate would be the part of the brain playing a causal role in the production of that experience." It is worth noting that this does not seem to be his settled view, but rather, a survey of some potential options available to a defender of the Theory of Appearances.

Liar Family Reunion?

2009-11-09T19:34:00.000-08:00

Most philosophers are familiar with the Liar Paradox:

L: This sentence is not true.

If L is true, then things are the way it reports, namely, L is not true.
If L is not true, then thing are not the way it reports, namely, L is true.

So, we seem to be able to conclude that L is true iff L is not true. Paradox.

But let's consider some related sentences:

P: I promise not to fulfill this promise.
C: Do not comply with this command.
Q1: What is an incorrect answer to this question?
Q2: What is not an answer to this question?

Now, P, C, Q1 and Q2 seem to admit of similarly paradoxical results.
An action fulfills the promise made by P just in case it does not fulfill the promise.
An action complies with the command issued by C just in case it does not comply with the command.
Something is the correct answer to Q1 just in case it is not the correct answer to Q1.
Something is an answer to Q2 just in case it is not an answer to Q2.

It is worth mentioning that, like L, each of the above can be reformulated in non-directly self-referential terms (replacing name for the sentence with "the the Nth labeled sentence in such-and-such blog post" and rephrasing slightly).

One thing that I want to note is that, if these are genuinely Liar-like paradoxes, they might be taken to suggest that focusing on "truth" in the Liar paradox is something of a red-herring. Prima facie, none of these invokes the truth-predicate, but seem to be of a piece with the Liar paradox.

One thing I want to ask is whether these paradoxical sentences have been discussed in the literature. I've read a fair amount about the Liar and the truth predicate, but haven't come across any discussion of these sorts of sentences. The closest thing I know of is Markosian's paradox of the question ("What is the pair <Q, A> such that Q is the most useful question, and A is its correct answer?").

Any thoughts?

Hume on Miracles

2009-11-03T23:44:00.001-08:00

I began writing this as a comment on this blog post, but it quickly achieved a length that I am pretty sure would seriously violate blog comment etiquette. So, I am posting it here. But, as it is a reply to the aforelinked post, it may be a good idea to read that before checking out what I have to say.

To very briefly summarize, Andrew Bremmer suggests that perhaps Hume's various claims/positions in "Of Miracles" are contradictory in the sense that Hume equivocates or otherwise alternates between different 'central' theses about miracles. While I think it is fair to charge the discussion with being somewhat slippery, I don't see it as an act of interpretive acrobatics to avoid treating Hume as contradicting himself. And to frame my response in terms of Andrew's central questions: I interpret Hume's argument in "Of Miracles (Part 1)" to be an argument against the possibility of any testimony (no matter how strong) serving to justify belief in a miracle, and also establishing the condition which would need to be met for testimony to justify belief in a miracle: namely, for it to be sufficiently more contrary to one's experience that the testimony is innaccurate than that the attested event occurred. As I read him, Hume clearly does not think that any testimonial evidence for a miracle can be stronger than the experiential evidence against it (evidence one is guaranteed to have in virtue of the event in question being a miracle). Hume then proceeds, in "Of Miracles (Part 2)" to argue that the actual situation for purported miracles is much worse than it may have seemed from the discussion in part 1, since no purported miracle attested in actual human history enjoys testimonial evidence anywhere near as strong as that which was supposed for purposes of part 1. Let me also be clear up front that I am not (at least not in this post) defending the substance of Hume's arguments; I don't intend to defend the principles Hume invokes in offering his argument, but simply to draw out what I take to be his argument.

Here's what I see going on in "Of Miracles (Part 1)"

First, we get some Humean epistemological preliminaries (pertaining to experiential reasoning):
1) A certain (relatively high degree) of uniformity in experience is required to justify belief in an unobserved matter of fact.
2) The evidential value of testimony is based on past experience of testimony being correct.
3) Most testimony provides only probability (rather than proof).
4) In addition to circumstantial factors that weaken the evidential value of a particular piece of testimony (such as when there are conflicting reports, when the testifier has an interest in what they report, the tone of their voice, etc.), there are content-based factors that undermine the evidential value of a particular piece of testimony. For instance, a normal case would be where a generally reliable witness tells me that they are serving hamburgers at the campus dining hall. Since, in my experience, campus dining halls frequently sell hamburgers, this testimony has pretty good evidential value. If, on the other hand, a generally reliable witness were to tell me that they were serving foie gras in the campus dining hall, the (moderate) incredibility of a campus dining hall serving foie gras would serve to undermine the evidential value of their testimony.

It will be important for Hume later (in the actual discussion of miraculous testmiony) that the very same thing which underwrites the evidential value of any testimonial evidence (namely, experiential evidence of a constant - or frequent - connection between the evidence and the fact) is the thing underwriting the incredibility of the proposition being attested.

We can extrapolate this definition of Marvelous testimony:

MAR: Testimony that P is marvelous (for S) just in case P is neither contrary nor conformable to (S's) experience.

As Hume applies this to the Indian prince and the marvelous testimony of frozen water, we get something like the following:

Hume maintains that, holding fixed circumstantial factors, Marvelous Testimony has lower evidential value than Mundane testimony (where "mundane" is a term I am introducing to pick out the category of testimony that is neither miraculous nor marvelous).

So, supposing that there is a witness who is generally reliable, it is possible that, were he to report to the prince that there is a river located X miles to the north and Y miles to the west, this testimony would be good evidence of the existence of such a river (meriting some degree of assent to the proposition attested), while, were he to instead report to the prince that the water in that river was sometimes solid and could be walked across, his testimony would not be good evidence of the existence of a river whose water was sometimes solid and could be walked on.

However, if there were additional witnesses, etc., it would be possible to get sufficient evidence to merit assent, since the proposition is simply beyond the prince's experience, rather than at odds with it.

It is after this discussion that Hume turns to miracles. We can define miraculous testimony and a maximally credible witness:
MIR) Testimony that P is miraculous (for S) just in case P is entirely contrary to (S's) experience; that is, just in case (S's) experience is itself a proof against P.
WIT) A witness W is maximally credible (for S) just in case W's testimony that P is a proof (for S) of P.

The case Hume is interested in, in part 1 is this:
MT) Suppose that there is a witness W, such that:
A) W is (to S) a maximally credible witness.
B) W testifies (to S) that M and M is miraculous (for S).

Hume's positions on the case seem to be the following:
1) Since M is contrary to (S's) experience, there is a maximally strong proof against M.
2) Since W is maximally credible, there is a maximally strong testimonial proof of M.
3) It is impossible that the the maximum strength of a testimonial proof is greater than the maximum strength of proofs, so, at best, the strength of the proof for M would be equal to the strength of the proof against M.
4) For the proof of M to be as strong as the proof against M would require that M being wrong is so contrary to one's experience that one's experience provides a proof against M testifying to something that is not true.*
5) The strength of support for M or for ~M is equal to the difference in strength of the proof for M and the proof against M.
6) So, the strength of support for M on the basis of W's testimony is never positive (given 3).

Thus, Hume reasons, there is no testimony strong enough to warrant belief in a miracle.

*Note that this is not simply a situation where W being wrong would be extraordinary or marvelous, but a situation in which it would be miraculous (on Hume's definition) for W to be wrong. It is possible that Hume is thinking, due to the subordination of testimonial evidence to experiential evidence more generally, that no witness is so credible that their inaccuracy would legitimately be a miracle.

Now, there are a lot of potential places to criticize Hume's position (for instance, it is not at all clear how Hume can really cash out the marvel/miracle distinction so that it legitimately does the work he needs it to). I do not mean to subscribe to the arguments/principles Hume is advocating (though obviously some of them seem to be at least prima facie plausible), but I do think that it is clear that Hume's is (in part 1) arguing against the very possibility of establishing a miracle on the basis of testimonial evidence. The end result is that the best support testimony can offer for a miracle is quite weak, and the main point of part 2 is to drive home the empirical claim that no miracle attested by any religion whatsoever approaches the strength of support hypothetically granted in part 1.

Frege's Jigsaw Puzzle

2009-11-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who makes custom wooden art and toys professionally. I saw that he had done a wooden jigsaw puzzle modeled on the pretty famous Obama "Hope" poster, and it gave me the idea to commission a similarly styled jigsaw portrait of one of the greatest figures in the philosophy of language.

The result is my very own Frege Puzzle:

Metaethical Accessories: advice model wrist band

2009-11-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

On some metaethical views, normative questions about what an agent should do turn on features of some fully rational counterpart of that agent. An important distinction among such views, credited to Peter Railton and Michael Smith, is the difference between the "example model" versions of such views and the "advice model" versions. Rather than positing, as the example model does, that normative facts about an agent turn on how their fully rational self would behave in similar situations, the advice model posits that the normative facts about an on an agent turn on how they would, were they fully rational, prefer that they behave in their actual circumstances.

In the spirit of these views, I present a wristband that asks: "What would my fully rational self want me to do in my actual circumstances?"

I ordered 10 of these initially, all of which have been distributed. I could order more if there is sufficient interest in another batch.

Bayesian Blues: Possibilities with Probability 0

2009-11-03T12:45:00.000-08:00

If my read of the landscape is correct (and it may not be), Bayesian views (relatively broadly construed) enjoy a certain dominance in formal epistemology. No doubt this is because the various explorations into Bayesian formalisms have provided philosophers with rich theoretical resources and aided in the development of many significant advances in formal epistemology. However, despite whatever virtues they have, these approaches wind up saddled with some results that are, prima facie, highly counter-intuitive. The specific counter-intuitive result that I've been thinking about recently has to do with possibilities that get assigned a probability of 0.

Preliminaries: A probability measure is said to be regular if all and only contradictions are assigned probability 0 (or, in possible worlds talk, for any set of possible worlds A, the probability of A is greater than 0 if A is not the empty set). Given the standard axioms of probability, this guarantees that all and only tautologies are assigned probability 1.

Regular probability measures are not very popular these days, at least in part because of issues arising when assigning probabilities to infinitely many exclusive propositions. For a quick illustration, imagine that some deity is going to pick one member of the set of integers, and you are trying to assign probabilities to the options. There is no single positive real value v that one can assign to each and every possible selection, without violating the axioms of probability. So, one could either assign different values to different integers (for instance, .5 to 1, .25 to 2, .125 to 3, and so forth), which requires favoring some as more likely than others, or, alternately, one could assign 0 to each individual integer, which would avoid having to favor some options as more likely than others. This option would require the rejection of a regular probability measure.

The Set-Up: Consider a case where some all-powerful deity is going to throw a dart so that it hits a point on the surface of the earth at random. Now, take the point that is at the center of the surface of Kansas (call it K). On the standard Bayesian picture, the probability that the dart hits K is 0. We can assign positive probabilities to various regions of the surface of the Earth (for instance, the probability that the dart lands in the northern hemisphere is somewhere near .5), but not to the individual points.

The Worry: Take the point on the moon's surface that is closest to Earth (call it M). The probability that the dart hits M is also 0. Consequently, one who endorses this approach is committed to the view that it is just as probable that the dart will hit M as it is that the dart will hit K. K is no more likely a destination for the dart than M, even though it is not possible for the dart to hit M, but entirely possible for the dart to hit K. These non-probable possibilities would then seem to be on a par with outright impossibilities. But this is highly counterintuitive. While I might think Jones ridiculously irrational for betting any money at all on the proposition that the dart will hit K, I would take a dimmer view of Smith for betting on M. But there is no way to account for this.

The Response: The worry is overstated. It is not true that there is no way to account for it. The hard-and-fast result is that the explanation of why Jones is doing better than Smith cannot be cashed out in terms of K being more probable a destination than M, but that isn't the only way to account for why Jones is better off than Smith. For one thing, it is possible that Jones wins, but not possible that Smith wins. But there are other things to be said as well. I won't go into them here, in part because I am not familiar enough with the relevant details to present them cogently, but also because even assuming a perfect explanation of the relative evaluations of Jones and Smith, and the like, there is a lingering worry.

The Real Worry: Forget Jones and Smith, forget evaluations of the rationality of agents making bets, etc., absent the invocation of a non-standard system of numbers (such as infinitesimals), the Bayesian simply cannot affirm that K is a more likely or more probable destination for the dart than M. They have equal probabilities, and thus, are equally probable. And, at the end of the day, it really does seem as though it is more likely or more probable that the dart hits K than that it hits M.

Now, I'm not presenting this as an incontrovertible claim that needs to be captured by any viable theory. If the best view there is cannot capture the claim, it may well be that the claim needs to go, and not the theory. But it is still a legitimate worry for the view that it is incompatible with claiming that every possibility is more probable than any impossibility.

A Brief Objection to the Conjunction of Schaffer's Contrastivisms

2009-10-30T12:10:00.000-07:00

To begin, I want to consider a sentence that I think I understand.

S. Jones knows that Suzy’s throwing the rock caused the window to break.

By claiming to understand this sentence, I do not mean to suggest I have complete and fully worked out views providing informative analyses of knowledge or causation. I simply claim that the sentence makes sense to me. A helpful comparison is to a sentence like this:

S’. Jones knows that Suzy’s throwing rather than tossing the rock caused the window to break rather than shatter, rather than that Billy’s throwing rather than tossing the rock caused the window to break rather than shatter.

While I don't claim that I am outright unable to parse such a sentence, S seems comprehensible to me in a way that S' does not. And this is the basis of one concern I have surrounding the conjunction of Jonathan Schaffer's contrastivisms.

Schaffer is a contrastivist about knowledge. Specifically, rather than taking knowledge to be a binary relation obtaining between an agent and a proposition, Schaffer takes it to be a ternery relation obtaining among an agent, a proposition, and a contrast proposition. As part of the linguistic story required to make this view of the knowledge relation jive with apparently binary knowledge ascriptions (e.g. "Jones knows that grass is green"), Schaffer maintains that such apparently binary sentences are contextually supplemented with a contrast proposition. Essentially, the assertive utterance of "Jones knows that grass is green" in a given context expresses a proposition equivalent to the content of some sentence like "Jones knows that grass is green rather than blue." The question at issue in the context of assertion determines which contrast proposition is contributed, but the explicitly contrastive claims are not themselves context sensitive.

Schaffer is also a contrastivist about causation. Specificially, rather than taking causation to be a binary relation obtaining between pairs of events, he takes it to be a quaternary relation obtaining among one event, a class of events contrasting that first event, a second event, and a class of events contrasting that second event. As part of the linguistic story required to make this view of causation jive with apparently binary causal claims ("Suzy's throwing the ball caused the window to shatter"), Schaffer maintains that such sentences are contextually supplemented with the contrast events. Essentially, the assertive utterance of "Suzy's throwing the ball caused the window to shatter" in a given context expresses a proposition equivalent to the content of some sentence like "Suzy's throwing rather than tossing the ball caused the window to shatter rather than crack". Again, the contextualist element of the view only has to do with superficially binary causal claims, while explicitly contrastive claims are not themselves context sensitive.

Now, on the conjunction of Schaffer's views, assertive utterances of S ("Jones knows that Suzy’s throwing the rock caused the window to break.") express a proposition along the lines of that expressed by S' ("Jones knows that Suzy’s throwing rather than tossing the rock caused the window to break rather than shatter, rather than that Billy’s throwing rather than tossing the rock caused the window to break rather than shatter."). But since I generally understand assertive utterances like S and have a lot of difficulty parsing assertive utterances of S', it seems as though this is a rather significant problem for Schaffer's view. The complexity of embedding a causal claim (or, for that matter, a knowledge ascription) within a knowledge ascription, is much higher, on Schaffer's view than on a binarist approach to causation and knowledge.

I am sure that there are things for a proponent of the views to offer, but it does strike me as something that requires an answer.

Ross's Paradox, "ought", and "wants"

2009-10-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

Ross's Paradox is a problem arising in Standard Deontic Logic. On the SDL interpretation of "ought", obligations survive weakening, in the sense that, if P entails Q, and it ought to be that P, then it follows that it ought to be that Q. Ross's paradox involves an instance of this commitment.

1) Jones ought to mail the letter.
2) Jones ought to mail the letter or burn the letter.

According to SDL, (1) entails (2), but, intuitively, (2) seems false in situations where (1) is true. Intuitively, (2) suggests that it is permissible to either mail the letter or to burn it, while (1) would seem to rule out the permissibility of burning the letter (it being assumed that you cannot both mail it and burn it).

I recently noticed a parallel between (2) and the following sentence:*

3) Jones wants a dog or a cat.

(3) is interesting because it can be extended in either of two ways:

3a. Jones wants a dog or a cat, but I don't know which.
3b. Jones wants a dog or a cat, but doesn't care which.

(2) can be similarly extended:

2a. Jones ought to mail the letter or burn the letter, but I don't know which.
2b, Jones ought to mail the letter or burn the letter, but it doesn't matter which.

It seems to me that the most natural way to treat (3) is as ambiguous between a disjunction of desire attributions (the 3a reading) and a desire with a disjunctive content (the 3b reading). A different approach would be to suppose that when one has a desire towards a disjunctive content, this can be true in virtue of either, a desire towards one of the individual disjuncts, or in virtue of a desire which is equally well satisfied by either disjunct.

On the former approach, it does not follow from my desiring a cat that I desire a cat or a dog. On the latter approach, the first clause of 3a. and 3b. would express the same proposition, and it would follow from my desiring a cat that I desire [a cat or a dog]. The former approach seems better in the case of desire. Sentence (3) is ambiguous in a way teased out by (3a) and (3b), and that difference is captured precisely by the difference between a disjunction of desire attributions and a desire with disjunctive content.

The parallel between (2) and (3), combined with the superiority of an ambiguity treatment for (3), seems to me to provide good reason to accept an ambiguity treatment for (2).

Getting back to Ross's paradox, it appears that SDL builds in the latter (non-ambiguity) reading of disjunctive ought claims. After all, the three possibilities that would render (2) true are a) that Jones ought to mail the letter, b) that he ought to burn the letter, or c) that he ought to mail or burn the letter, but it is not the case that he ought to mail it or that he ought to burn it. This is simply the semantic content needed on the non-ambiguity approach.

I think this provides some reason for thinking that SDL, and specifically the fact that oughts survive weakening, are not correct for the treatment of the english "ought".

*Insofar as I can source the observations I mention about this sentence, they come from Lepore's "Meaning And Argument", though I don't have it handy, and don't intend to be trying to accurately represent his views here.

Pacific APA (2010)

2009-09-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

I just got word this past weekend that my submission to the upcoming Pacific APA was accepted. I had already been planning to attend the Eastern APA this year (having received the advice that it is a good idea to see what it is like before one is actually on the job market), and am up in the air about attending the Central (since I grew up outside Chicago and my parents still live there, it is fairly easy and relatively inexpensive for me to make it to that one).

This will be my first time attending an APA meeting as a presenter, so I am pretty excited to be on the program. Here is a brief description of my paper, "Toward a Less Confident Cognitivism":

Cognitivism about intention is the view that intentions involve beliefs, and the principle motivation for being a Cognitivist about intention is to explain the norms/rational requirements on one's intentions in terms of the norms/rational requirements on one's beliefs (by way of the particular beliefs involved in the intentions in question). The dominant variety of Cognitivism involves commitment to the Strong Belief Thesis (i.e. the view that intending to do X involves believing that one will do X). Since, prima facie, one can intend to do something without believing that they will succeed, commitment to the Strong Belief Thesis is a cost for the view. While some argue that this is only an apparent cost, or that the cost is outweighed by the explanatory benefits, my paper argues that it may be possible to avoid this cost while still achieving the same explanatory power. I make my case by appealing to some subtle differences between locutions like so-and-so will do X and locutions like so-and-so is going to do X. Though I think the account I sketch is worth of consideration on its own merits, I also draw out some general lessons from the discussion which equip the Cognitivist with a broader arsenal of resources, regardless of whether my particular proposal is successful.

A Service the APA should offer

2009-07-24T13:17:00.001-07:00

Here's a simple idea that would be, I think, really good: A week or so before the submission deadlines for the three division meetings, the American Philosophical Association should send out e-mail notices (maybe as an opt-in mailing list rather than automatically), so that people remember deadlines with enough lead time to maybe clean something up beforehand.

About the Author

2009-07-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

Name: Lewis Powell (web site)

Description: II completed my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Southern California. My dissertation pursued a limited defense of David Hume's attempt to reductively analyze all cognitive activities as manners of conception in the Treatise. I argue that the prospects for Hume's account are generally much stronger than has been appreciated, by showing how Hume's account avoids or addresses the most central/fundamental sources of concern.

Historical Interests:
°David Hume
°John Locke
°Thomas Reid
°Lady Mary Shepherd
°John Stuart Mill (esp. his System of Logic)

Contemporary Interests:
°philosophy of language
°philosophy of mind
°action theory and free will
°metaethics
°epistemology (incl. formal epistemology)