A Brief Objection to the Conjunction of Schaffer's Contrastivisms

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.

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

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.

Pacific APA (2010)

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":

A Service the APA should offer

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

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)