London Logic and Metaphysics Forum (x-posted from MV)

If you're in London on a Tuesday evening, what better to do than to take in a talk by a young philosopher on logic or metaphysics?

Spotting this gap in the tourist offerings, the clever folks in the capital have set up the London Logic and Metaphysics forum. Looks an exciting programme, though I have my doubts about the joker on the 11th Dec...

Tues 30 Oct: David Liggins (Manchester)
Quantities

Tues 13 Nov: Oystein Linnebo (Bristol & IP)
Compositionality and Frege's Context Principle

Tues 27 Nov: Ofra Magidor (Oxford)
Epistemicism about vagueness and meta-linguistic safety

Tues 11 Dec: Robbie Williams (Leeds)
Is survival intrinsic?

8 Jan: Stephan Leuenberger (Leeds)

22 Jan: Antony Eagle (Oxford)

5 Feb: Owen Greenhall (Oslo & IP)

4 Mar: Guy Longworth (Warwick)


Full details can be found here.

In Rutgers

As Brian Weatherson reports here, there's a metaphysics/phil physics conference at Rutgers this weekend (26-28th). I'm in Rutgers for the week, and am responding to one of the papers at the event. I'm looking forward to what looks like a really interesting conference.

Tonight (24th) I'm giving a talk to a phil language group at Rutgers. I'm going to be presenting some material on modal accounts of indicative conditionals (a la Stalnaker, Weatherson, Nolan). This piece has evolved quite a bit during the last few weeks as I've been working on it. A bit unexpectedly, I've ended up with an argument for Weatherson's views.

Briefly, the idea is to look at what mileage we can get out of paradigmatic instances of the identification of the probability of a conditional "If A, B" with the conditional probability of B on A (CCCP). We know that in general that identification is highly problematic, due to notorious impossibility results due to David Lewis and more recently Ned Hall and Al Hajek. But I think it's interesting to divide the issue into two halves:

First, what would a modal account of indicative conditionals that obeys (a handful of paradigmatic) instances of CCCP have to look like? I think there's a lot we can say about this: of the salient options, it'll look a lot like Weatherson's theory; it'll have to have a particular take on what kind of vagueness can effect the conditional; it'll have to say that any proposition you know should have probability 1.

Second, is this package sustainable in the face of impossibility results? Al Hajek (in his papers in the Eels/Skyrms probability and conditionals volume) does a really nice job of formulating the challenges here. If we're prepared to give up some instances of CCCP in recherche cases (like left-embedded conditionals, things of the form "if (if A, B), C", then many of the general impossibility results won't apply. But nevertheless, there a bunch of puzzles that remain: in particular, concerning how even the paradigmatic instances can survive when we receive new information.

I'll mostly be talking about the first part of the talk this evening.

Edgington vs. Stalnaker

One of the things I'm thinking about at the moment is Stalnaker-esque treatments of indicative conditionals. Stalnaker's story, roughly, is that indicative conditionals have almost exactly the same truth conditions as (on his theory) counterfactuals do. That is, A>B is true at w iff B is true at the nearest B-world to w. The difference comes only in the fine details about which worlds count as nearest. For counterfactuals, Stalnaker like Lewis thinks that some sort of similarity does the job. For indicatives, Stalnaker thinks that the nearness ordering is rooted in the same similarity metric, but distorted by the following overriding principle: if A and w are consistent with what we collectively presuppose, then the nearest A-worlds will also be consistent with what we collectively presuppose. In the jargon, all worlds outside the "context set" are pushed further out than they would be on the counterfactual ordering.

I'm interested in this sort of "push worlds" modal account of indicatives. (Others in a similar family include Daniel Nolan's theory, whereby it's knowledge that does the pushing rather than collective presuppositions). Lots of criticisms of Stalnaker's theory don't engage with the fine details of what he says about the closeness ordering, but more general aspects (e.g. its inability to sustain Adams' thesis that the conditional probability is the probability of the conditional; its handling of Gibbard cases; its sensitivity to fine factors of conversational context). An exception, however, is an argument that Dorothy Edgington puts forward in her SEP survey article (which, by the way, I very much recommend!)


Here's the case. Let's suppose that Jill is uncertain how much fuel is in Jane's car. The tank has a capacity for 100-miles'-worth, but Jill has no knowledge of what level it is at. Jane is
going to drive it until it runs out of fuel. For Jill, the probability of the car being driven for n miles, given that it's driven for no more than fifty, is 1/50. (for n<51).

Suppose that in fact the tank is full. The most similar worlds to actuality, arguably, are those where the tank is 50 per cent full, and so where Jane drives 50 miles. The same goes for any world where the tank is more than 50 per cent full. So, if nearness of worlds is determined by similarity, the conditional is true as uttered at each of the worlds where the tank is more than 50 per cent full. So without knowing the details of the level of the tank, we should be at least 50 per cent confident that if it goes for under 50 miles, it'll go for exactly 50 miles. But this seems all wrong. Varying the numbers we can make the case even worse: we should be almost sure of "If it goes for no more than 3 miles, it'll go for exactly 3 miles", even though we regard 3, 2, 1 as equiprobable fuel levels.

Of course, that's only to take into account the comparative similarity of worlds in determining the ordering, and Stalnaker and Nolan have the distorting factor to appeal to: worlds that are incompatible with something we presuppose/know to be true, can be pushed further out. But it doesn't seem in this case that anything relevant is being presupposed/known.

I don't think this objection works. To see that something is going wrong, notice that the argument, if successful, would work against other theories too. Consider, for example, Stalnaker's theory of the counterfactual conditional. Take the case as before, but suppose we're a day later and Jill doesn't know how far Jane drove. Consider the counterfactual "Had it stopped after no more than 50 miles, it'd have gone for exactly 50 miles". By the previous reasoning, the most similar worlds to over-50 worlds are exactly-50 worlds; so we should be half confident of the truth of that conditional. Varying the numbers, we should be almost sure that "If it had gone no more than 3, it'd go exactly 3", despite regarding the probabilities of 3, 2 and 1 as equally likely. But these all seem like bizarre results.

Moral: the counterfactual ordering of worlds isn't fixed by the kind of similarity that Edgington appeals to: the sort of similarity whereby a world in which the car stops after 53 miles is more similar to one in which the car stops after 50 miles than one in which the car stops after 3 miles. Of course, in some sense (perhaps an "overall" sense) those similarity judgements are just right. But we know from the Fine/Bennett cases that the sense of similarity that supports the right counterfactual verdicts can't be all in cases (those cases are ones concerning counterfactuals starting "if Nixon had pushed the nuclear button in the 70's..." All-in similarity arguably says that closest such worlds are ones where no missiles are released, leading to the wrong results).

Spelling out what the right notion of similarity is is tricky. Lewis gave us one recipe. In effect, we look for a little miracle that'll suffice to let the counterfactual world diverge from actual history to bring about the antecedent. Then we let events run on according to actual laws, and see what happens. So in worlds where the tank is full, say, let's look for the little miracle required to to make it run for no more than 50 miles, and run things on. What are the plausible candidates? Perhaps Jane's decides to take an extra journey yesterday, or forgets to fill up her car two days ago. Small miracles could suffice to get us into those sorts of worlds. But those sorts of divergences don't really suggest that she'll end up with exactly 50 miles worth of fuel in the tank, and so this approach undermines the case for "If were at most 50, then exactly 50" being true in antecedent-false worlds. (Which is a good thing!)

If that's the right thing to say in the counterfactual case, the indicative case too will be sorted. For it's designed to be a case where presuppositions/knowledge don't have a relevant distorting effect. And so, once more, the case for "If the car goes for at most 50, then it'll go for exactly 50" doesn't work.

I think that the basic interest of push-worlds theories of indicatives like Stalnaker's and Nolan's is to connect up the counterfactual and indicative ordering: whether there's anything informative to say about the counterfactual ordering of worlds itself is an entirely different matter. So if the glosses of the position lead to problems, it's best to figure out whether the problems lie withthe gloss of the counterfactual ordering (which then should be assessed in connection with that familiar and worked through literature) or with the push-worlds maneuver itself (which has, I think, been less fully examined). I think Edgington's objection is really connected with the first facet, and I've tried to say why I think a more detailed theory will make the problem dissolve. But even if it did turn out to be a problem, the push-worlds thesis itself is still standing.

(Incidentally, I do think Edgington's setup (which she attributes to a student, James Studd) has wider interest. It looks to me like Jackson's modal theory of counterfactuals, and Davis' modal theory of indicatives, both deliver the wrong results in this case.)

[Actually, now I've written this out, it strikes me that maybe the anti-Stalnaker argument is fixable. The trick would be to specify the background state of the world to make the result for counterfactual probabilities seem plausible, but such that (given Jill's ignorance of the background conditions) the indicative probabilities still seem wrong. So maybe the example is at least a recipe for a counterexample to Stalnaker, even if the original case is resistable as described.]

UK job market

As the next crop of PhDers gear up for the job market, I thought I’d try to systematize some info about the UK system that might not be transparent to outsiders. It's not always totally transparent to insiders either, but I’m hoping that everything I say below is accurate, at least as a rule of thumb. I’d very much welcome queries, corrections and supplements.

Basics:

1. The UK job market has no unified system for applications. Jobs come out in dribs and drabs, and you apply individually to each one you fancy going for at the appropriate time.
2. Three main categories of job that PhDers look for:
1. “Lectureships”. Usually these jobs comes with responsibilities to teach, to do research, and to do certain amounts of administrative work. These come with the equivalent of tenure. These are sometimes called “permanent” or “continuing” lectureships to distinguish them from (c) below.
   People sometimes think of these---very roughly---as US assistant professorships (though coming with the equivalent of tenure).
2. “Postdocs”: (normally) full time research positions, often held for two or three years.
3. “Fixed term lectureships” (including “teaching fellowships” and “replacement lectureships”). These are usually positions covering teaching needs within a department. Pay and conditions vary wildly: some of them are de facto full-time teaching positions, some of them will have the same conditions as the non-fixed term lectureships.
3. It’s far more common in the UK than in the US for PhD-ers aiming for a research career to try for a postdoc position for a few years. Postdocs are pretty prestigious things to get. However, over the last few years quite a few PhD leavers have moved straight into continuing lectureships, which offers the extremely nice feature of instant job security, if less upfront time to spend on research.
4. Lectureships come in grades: Lecturer A and lecturer B are the entry-level grades (lecturer Bs getting a bit more money than lecturer As). Then come senior lectureships and “readerships”; then professorships. You can roughly map the UK lecturer/senior lecturer/prof divisions onto US assistant/associate/full prof. But I don’t have enough familiarity with the US system to know how closely it matches---and of course there isn’t a tenured/untenured line to be drawn as there is in the US.
   Fixed term lectureships are the equivalent, I guess, of US visiting professorships.
5. Sometimes but not always UK jobs will be advertised according to US norms (e.g. specified with AOS/AOC, advertised in JFP). But to get the full whack, the best thing to do is to sign up for the most popular UK academic job website, www.jobs.ac.uk.

Appointments procedure

6. What’s asked for in a UK application will vary. There’s often an application form to be given out, writing samples will be asked for (perhaps with a specified wordlimit) and of course you need to include a CV. References aren’t typically required at the initial application stage. But often US applicants find it easiest to send their standard application pack, including references, teaching reports and whatever. This’ll probably mean that US applicants end up providing a *lot* more info than their rivals at the initial stages. Obviously you can contact the dept for guidance if you’re worried your application pack will be out of sync with what’s officially requested.
7. If you’re invited for interview, you should be aware that the setup will differ markedly from US norms. Often, there’ll be a shortlist of 4 or 5 for a continuing lectureship, and often all candidates will be interviewed on the same day, and even taken out for dinner together. Some people find this totally awkward, and hate it. I sort of enjoyed the camaraderie. But it is standard practice, so don’t be surprised by having to socialize with your competitors. (Remember: there's nothing like the APA smoker to go through in the UK system: the interview days are a one-stop-shop). The institution will tell you what to expect, but often the formal proceedings will include a presentation and an interview, carried out over one or two days.
8. Any presentation will typically be to the whole department, who’ll give feedback to the appointments committee who run the interview and who actually make the hiring decisions. Presentations can be of various formats: from 20 min presentations with 10 mins for questions, to hour-long presentations with substantial discussion time. For fixed term lectureships, you might be asked for a teaching-based presentation (“give a presentation suitable for a first-year course”). For postdocs, obviously a research presentation is appropriate. For continuing lectureships, it’ll probably veer towards the research. The institution will give guidance, and don’t be afraid to ask for clarification/advice if you’re unsure what they’re wanting (particularly if they ask for something totally impossible e.g. “a twenty minute presentation accessible by second year undergraduates that gives an overview of your research programme”).
9. As mentioned, UK appointments are made by appointments committees, not by individual departments. The makeup of appointments committees can vary, but it isn’t atypical for there to be just two philosophers in a committee of five or more for a philosophy-only post. Obviously, these philosophers have an influential voice, both in the interview itself (you can expect them to ask the majority of the questions) and in the hiring decisions. But for continuing positions probably also be asked questions by non-philosophers. For obvious reasons “are there interdisciplinary aspects to your research?” is a question often heard at that stage of the interview.

Finally, the Oxbridge section:

10. Oxford and Cambridge are exceptions to almost every UK rule. Their unique college-based setup means that their jobs are titled differently and graded differently: [for example, in Oxford] CUFs and University Lectureships are the main continuing jobs they offer. Those are, again, both tenured positions. See this discussion on Leiter (by Michael Rosen) for the lowdown. Oxford and Cambridge also have a vast stock of postdoc positions (called in Oxbridge “junior research fellowships” or JRFs) and a vast stock of fixed term appointments “lectureships”. All terribly confusing even to UK folk.
11. Not all Oxford and Cambridge JRFs are advertised on jobs.ac.uk, though I believe all continuing positions will be. I found the only way to get comprehensive listings for JRFs is by looking at the Oxford Gazette: http://www.ox.ac.uk/gazette/ (this comes out weekly, and you can sign up for email notification). From the homepage, click on “weekly issues”, then an issue, then “appointments”. Amusingly under “positions outside Oxford”, it lists all and only positions available at Cambridge. That’s quantifier restriction for you. Two warnings: these positions are often (though not always) advertised across disciplines, so that a philosopher will be competing with biologists and mathematicians and whatever. Also, at least when I applied, each JRF position that came up (and there are lots) seemed to require it’s own research statement, of varying lengths with varying requirements. That’s hugely time-consuming for the applicant (Oxbridge: please introduce some uniformity!)

[updated in the light of Brian's queries in the comments about whether the Cambridge continuing positions are relevantly like those in Oxford or relevantly like those in the rest of the UK. I don't know about this. Be very pleased to receive information.]

Sleeping bookie

I've spent more of this week than is healthy thinking about the Sleeping Beauty puzzle (thanks in large part to this really interesting post by Kenny). I don't think I've got anything terribly novel to say, but I thought I'd set out my current thinking to see if people agree with my take on what the dialectic is on at least one aspect of the puzzle.

Sleeping Beauty is sent to sleep by philosophical experimenters. He (for, in a strike for sexual equality, this Beauty is male) will be woken up on Monday morning, told on Monday afternoon what day it is, and sent to sleep again after being given a drug which will mean that the next time he wakes up, he will have no memories of what transpired. Depending on the result of a fair coin flip, he will either be woken up in exactly similar circumstances on Tuesday morning, or be left to sleep through the day. Beauty is aware of the setup.

How confident should Beauty be on Monday morning that the coin to be flipped in a few hours will land heads (remember, he knows it’s a fair coin). Halfers say: he should have credence 1/2 that it’ll be heads. Thirders say: the credence should be 1/3. (All sides agree that on Sunday his credence should be 1/2).

What I’m interested in is whether there are Dutch book arguments for either view. The very simplest takes the following form. Sell Beauty a [$30,T] bet for $15 on Sunday evening. Then, if Beauty’s a halfer, on Monday and (if awoken) Tuesday mornings, sell him [$20,H] bets on each awakening for $10.

If H obtains, Beauty loses the first bet but wins the sole remaining bet (on Monday morning), for a net loss of $5. If T obtains, Beauty wins the first bet, but loses the next two, for a net loss of $5 again. So Beauty is guaranteed to lose money.

This is in some sense a diachronic dutch book. But as several people note, it’s not a particularly convincing argument that there’s something wrong with Beauty being a halfer. For notice that the information here is asymmetric: the bookie offering the bets needs to have more information than Beauty, since it is crucial to their strategy to offer twice as many bets if the result of the coin flip is tails, than if it is heads.

Hitchcock aims to give a revised Dutch book argument for the same conclusion that avoids this problem. He suggests that the experimenters put the bookie through the same procedure as they put Beauty through, and the bookie’s strategy should then simply be to offer Beauty the bets every time they both wake. That has the net effect of offering the same set of bets as above for a sure loss for Beauty, but the bookie and Beauty are in the same epistemic state. This is the sleeping bookie argument.

What I’d like to claim (inspired by Bradley and Leitgeb) is that if we concentrate too much on the epistemic state of hypothetical bookies, we’ll get led astray. Looking at the overall mechanism whereby bets are offered to Beauty, we initially described this as one where an agent (bookie) is offering bets to Beauty each time they are both awake. But I’d prefer to describe this as a case where a complex agency (the bookie and the experimenters in cahoots) are offering bets to Beauty. The second description seems at least as good as the first: after all, without the compliance of the experimenters, the bookie’s dutch book strategy can’t be implemented. But the system constituted by the experimenters and the bookie clearly has access to the information about the result of the coin toss, and arranges for the bets to be made appropriately, even though the bookie alone lacks this information.

Now dutch book arguments are only as good as the results we can extract from them about what credences are rational to have in given circumstances. And clearly, if Beauty knows that the bets coming at him encode information about the outcome on which the bet turns, then he needn’t (perhaps shouldn't) simply bet according to his credences, but adjust them to take into account the encoded information. That’s why, to get a fix on what Beauty’s credences are, we put a ban on the bookie having excess information. That's why the first dutch book argument for thirding looks like a bad way to get a fix on what Beauty's credences are. But this rationale for forbidding the bookie from having excess information generalizes, so that we shouldn't trust dutch books in any situation where the mechanism whereby bets are offered (whether in the hands of a single individual, or a system) relies on information about the outcome on which the bet turns. (Equally, if the bookie had extra information, but the system of bets doesn’t exploit this in any way, there's as yet no case against trusting the dutch book argument, it seems to me.)

The moral I take from all this is that what’s going on in the head of some individual we deign to call “bookie” is neither here nor there: what matters is the pattern of bets and whether that pattern exploits information about the outcomes on which the bet turns. This is effectively what I take Bradley and Leitgeb to argue for in their very nice article. What they suggest (roughly) is that a necessary condition on taking a dutch book argument to give a fix on rational credences, is that the pattern of bets be uncorrelated with the outcomes on which the bets turn. I conjecture (tentatively), that this is really what the ban on bookie’s having extra information was trying to get at all along. The upshot is that Hitchcock's sleeping bookie argument is problematic in the same way as the initial dutch book argument against halfers.

But more than this. If we refocus attention on the issue of the goodstanding of the pattern of bets, rather than the epistemic states of hypothetic bookies, we can put together a dutch book argument against thirders. For suppose that the experimenters offer Beauty a [$30,H] bet for $15 on Sunday, and then a genuine bet of [$30,T] for $20 on Monday morning no matter what happens, and (so he can’t tell what’s going on) a fake bet where he’ll automatically get his stake returned, apparently of [$30,T] for $20 on Tuesday. Then he’ll be guaranteed a loss of $5 no matter what happens. Of course, the experimenters here have knowledge of the outcomes. But (arguably) that doesn’t matter, because the bets they offer are uncorrelated with the outcomes of the event on which the bets turn: the system of bets offered is the same no matter what the outcome is, so (it seems to me) the information that the experimenters have isn’t implicit in the pattern of bets in any sense. So I think there’s a better dutch book argument against thirding, than there is against halfing. (Or at least, I'd be interested in seeing the case against this in detail).

All this is not to say that the halfer is out of the woods. A quite different dutch book argument is given in a paper by Draper and Pust, which exploits the standard halfer’s story (Lewis’s) about what happens on Monday afternoon, once Beauty has been told what day it is. The Lewisian halfer thinks that once Beauty realizes its Monday, he should have credence 2/3 that Heads is the result. And that, it appears, is a dutch-bookable situation.

Notice that this isn’t directly an argument against the thesis that Beauty should have credence 1/2 in Heads on Monday morning. It is, in effect, an argument that he should also have credence 1/2 in Heads on Tuesday. And, with a few other widely accepted assumptions, these combine to give rise to a contradiction (see for example, Cian Dorr's presentation of the Beauty case as a paradox).

If this is all we say, then we should conclude that we really do have here a puzzling argument for a contradiction, where all the premises look pretty plausible and the two crucial ones both seem prima facie defensible via dutch book strategies. Maybe, as some suggest, we should revise our claims about updating of credences to make halfing in both circumstances appropriate: or maybe there’s something unavoidably irrational in Beauty’s predicament. What will finally come out in the wash as the best response to the puzzle is one matter; whether the dutch book considerations support halfing or thirding on Monday morning is another; and it is only on this narrow point that I’m claiming that there is a pro tanto case to be a halfer.

Thoughts?

Emergence, Supervenience, and Indeterminacy

While Ross Cameron, Elizabeth Barnes and I were up in St Andrews a while back, Jonathan Schaffer presented one of his papers arguing for Monism: the view that the whole is prior to the parts, and the world is the one "fundamental" object.

An interesting argument along the way argued that contemporary physics supports the priority of the whole, at least to the extent that properties of some systems can't be reduced to properties of their parts. People certainly speak that way sometimes. Here, for example, is Tim Maudlin (quoted by Schaffer):

The physical state of a complex whole cannot always be reduced to those of its parts, or to those of its parts together with their spatiotemporal relations… The result of the most intensive scientific investigations in history is a theory that contains an ineliminable holism. (1998: 56)


The sort of case that supports this is when, for example, a quantum system featuring two particles determinately has zero total spin. The issues is that there also exist systems that duplicate the intrinsic properties of the parts of this system, but which do not have the zero-total spin property. So the zero-total-spin property doesn't appear to be fixed by the properties of its parts.

Thinking this through, it seemed to me that one can systematically construct such cases for "emergent" properties if one is a believer in ontic indeterminacy of whatever form (and thinks of it that way that Elizabeth and I would urge you to). For example, suppose you have two balls, both indeterminate between red and green. Compatibly with this, it could be determinate that the fusion of the two be uniform; and it could be determinate that the fusion of the two be variegrated. The distributional colour of the whole doesn't appear to be fixed by the colour-properties of the parts.

I also wasn't sure I believed in the argument, so posed. It seems to me that one can easily reductively define "uniform colour" in terms of properties of its parts. To have uniform colour, there must be some colour that each of the parts has that colour. (Notice that here, no irreducible colour-predications of the whole are involved). And surely properties you can reductively define in terms of F, G, H are paradigmatically not emergent with respect to F, G and H.

What seems to be going on, is not a failure for properties of the whole to supervene on the total distribution of properties among its parts; but rather a failure of the total distribution of properties among the parts to supervene on the simple atomic facts concerning its parts.

That's really interesting, but I don't think it supports emergence, since I don't see why someone who wants to believe that only simples instantiate fundamental properties should be debarred from appealing to distributions of those properties: for example, that they are not both red, and not both green (this fact will suffice to rule out the whole being uniformly coloured). Minimally, if there's a case for emergence here, I'd like to see it spelled out.

If that's right though, then application of supervenience tests for emergence have to be handled with great care when we've got things like metaphysical indeterminacy flying around. And it's just not clear anymore whether the appeal in the quantum case with which we started is legitimate or not.

Anyway, I've written up some of the thoughts on this in a little paper.

Fundamental and derivative truths

I've posted a new version of my paper "Fundamental and derivative truths". The new version notes a few more uses for the fundamental/derivative distinction, and clears up a few points.

As before, the paper is concerned with a way of understanding the---initially pretty hard to take---claim that tables exist, but don't really exist. I think that that claim at least makes good sense, and arguably the distinction between what is really/fundamentally the case and what is merely the case is something we should believe in whether or not we endorse the particular claim about tables. I think in particular that it leads to a particularly attractive view on the nature of set theory, since it really does seem that we do want to be able to "postulate sets into existence" (y'know how things form sets? well consider the set of absolutely everything. On pain of contradiction that set can't be something that existed beforehand...) The framework I like lets us make sober sense of that.

The current version tidies up a bunch of things, it pinpoints more explicitly the difference between comparatively "easy cases"---defending the compatibility of set theoretic truths with a nominalist ontology----and "hard cases"---defending the compatibility of the Moorean corpus with a microphysical mereological nihilist ontology. I've got another paper focusing on some of the technicalities of the composition case.

This project causes me much grief, since it involves many many different philosophically controversial areas: philosophy of maths, metaphysics of composition, theory of ontological commitment, philosophy of language and in particular metasemantics, and so forth. That makes it exciting to work on, but hard to present to people in a digestible way. Nevertheless, I'm going to have another go at the CSMN workshop in Olso later this month, focusing on the philosophy of language/theory of meaning aspects.

A couple of bits of news.

First, I've finished a (much extended) draft of the reply I gave to Hugh Mellor's paper "Microcomposition" at the Leeds RIP Being conference (the name still amuses: that's the Royal Institute of Philosophy, folks, not a metametaphysical jibe). The paper's called "Working parts" and presents some arguments against the view that mereological relations are metaphysical primitive. Hugh's position is that they should be analyzed in terms of locational and causal relations, and I think there's a lot to be said for that view. Comments, as ever, very welcome. The paper is available here.

Second, from the end of this month I'm going to be taking over as secretary of the Analysis Committee. The trust does all sorts of good things: from awarding Analysis studentships to giving out conference grants, and of course, and are the figures in the background of the fantastic journal Analysis. I'm really excited to be involved.

A puzzle about supervenience arguments for dualism

Suppose there's a qualitative duplicate of the actual world (It might be a world with haecceitistic differences from the actual one, but it doesn't have to be). Call the actual world A, and its duplicate, B.

I'm conscious in world A. Call the extension at the actual world of the things which are conscious S. There are cauliflowers in world B. Call the extension at B of the things which are cauliflowers, S*. Now consider the gruesome intension cauli-consc, which has S as its extension at world A, and S* as its extension in world B (it doesn't matter what its extension is in other worlds: maybe it applies to all and only conscious cauliflowers).

Is there a property that things have iff they are cauli-consc? So long as "property" is intended in an ultra-lightweight sense (a sense in which any old possible-worlds intension corresponds to a property) then there shouldn't be an trouble with this.

However. Cauli-consc is a property that doesn't supervene on the pattern of instantiation of fundamental physical properties. After all, A and B are alike in all physical respects. But they differ as to where cauli-consc is instantiated.

Cauli-consc is a property, instantiated in the actual world, that doesn't supervene on physical properties! Does that mean that the fact that I'm cauli-consc is a "further fact about our world, over and above the physical facts" (Chalmers 1996 p.123)? That is, do we have to say that, if there are such qualitive duplicates of the actual world, then materialism is shown to be wrong by cauli-consc?

Surely not. But the interesting question is: if some properties (like cauli-consc) can fail to supervene on the physical features of the world, what is that blocks the inference from failure of supervenience on physical features of the world, to the refutation of materialism? For what principled reason is this property "bad", such that we can safely ignore its failure to supervene?

Here's a way to put the general worry I'm having. Supervenience physicalism is often formulated as follows (from Lewis, I believe): any physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter. But if duplication is understood (again following Lewis) as the sharing of natural properties by corresponding parts, then to get a counterexample to physicalism you'd need not only to demonstrate that a certain property fails to supervene on the physical features of the world, but also that some natural property fails to supervene: otherwise you won't get a failure of duplication among physical duplicates. The case of cauli-consc is supposed to dramatize the gap here. Sometimes it looks like you can get properties which fail to supervene, but which don't seem to threaten materialism.

However, when you look at the failure-to-supervene arguments for dualism, you find that people stop once they take themselves to establish that a given property fails to supervene, and not, in addition, that some natural property does so (For example, Chalmers 1996 p132 assumes that it's enough to show that the 1-intension of "consciousness" fails to supervene, without also arguing that it's a natural property) .

Now, I think in particular cases I can see how to run the arguments to address this issue. Add as a premise that e.g. the 1-intensions of the words of our language supervene on the total qualitative character of the world, so that we're guaranteed that if there's a world in which "1-consciousness" is instantiated and another where it isn't, those can't be qualitative duplicates. If now we find a failure of 1-consciousness to supervene on physical features of the world, we'll be able to argue for the existence of physical duplicate worlds differing over 1-consciousness, we now know can't be qualitative duplicates. (In effect, the suggestion is that the sense in which cauli-consc is bad is exactly that it fails to supervene on the total qualitative state of the world).

That all seems reasonable to me, but it does start to add potentially deniable premises to the argument against materialism. (For example, I'm not sure it should be uncontroversial that consciousness supervenes on the total qualitative state of the world. Is it really so clear, for example, that there are no haecceitistic elements to consciousness: that a world containing me might contain a conscious being, but a qualitiative duplicate containing some other individual doesn't?)

So I'm not sure whether the elaboration of the Zombie argument for dualism I've just sketched is the way Chalmers et al want to go. I'd be interested to know how they have/would respond (references welcome, as ever).

Metametaphysics in Barcelona/some distinctions (x-post from MV)

Logos are holding a meta-metaphysics conference in Barcelona in 2008. The CFP is now out: with deadline being April 1st 2008.

I went to a Logos conference back in 2005, when I was just finishing up as a graduate student. It was a great experience: Barcelona is an amazing city to be in, Logos were fantastic hosts, and the conference was full of interesting people and talks. I also had what was possibly the best meal of my life at the conference dinner. This time, the format is preread, which I've really enjoyed in the past.

Here's a quick note on the "metametaphysics" stuff. Following the Boise conference on this stuff, it seemed to me that under the label "metametaphysics" go a number of interesting projects that need a bit of disentangling. Here's three, for starters.

First, there's the "terminological disputes" project. Consider a first-order metaphysical question like: "under what circumstances do some things make up a further thing" (van Inwagen's special composition question). This notes the range of seemingly rival answers to the question (all the time! some of the time! never!) and asks about whether there's any genuine disagreement between the rival views (and if so, what sort of disagreement this is). The guiding question here is: under what conditions is a metaphysical/philosophical debate merely terminological (or whatever).

Note that the question here really doesn't look like it has much to do with metametaphysics per se, as opposed to metaphilosophy in general. Metaphysics is just a source of case studies, in the first instance. Of course, it might turn out that metaphysics turns out to be full of terminological disputes, whereas phil science or epistemology or whatever isn't. But equally, it might turn out that metaphysics is all genuine, whereas e.g. the Gettier salt mines are full of terminological disputes.

In contrast to this, there's the "first order metametaphysics" (set of) project(s). This'd take key notions that are often used as starting points/framework notions for metaphysical debates, and reflect philosophically upon those. E.g.: (1) The notion of naturalness as used by Lewis. Is there such a notion? If so, are their natural quantifiers and objects and modifiers as well as natural properties? Does appeal to naturalness commit one to realism about properties, or can something like Sider's operator-view of naturalness be made to work? (2) Ontological commitment. Is Armstrong right that (at least in some cases) to endorse a sentence "A is F" is to commit oneself to F-ness, as well as to things which are F? Might the ontological commitments of our theories be far less than Quine would have us believe (as some suggest)? (3) unrestricted existential quantifier. Is there a coherent such notion? How should its semantics be given? Is such a quantifier a Tarskian logical constant?

These debates might interest you even if you have no interesting thoughts in general about how to demarcate genuine vs. terminological disputes. Thinking about this stuff looks like it can be carried out in very much first-order terms, with rival theories of a key notion (naturalness, say) proposed and evaluated. Of course, this sort of first-order examination might be a particularly interesting kind of first-order philosophy to one engaged in the terminological disputes project.

The third sort of project we might call "anti-Quine/Lewis metametaphysics". You might think the following. In recent years, there's been a big trend for doing metaphysics with a Realist backdrop; in particular, the way that Armstrong and Lewis invite us to do metaphysics has been very influential among the young and impressionable. A bunch of presuppositions have become entrenched, e.g. a Quinean view of ontological commitment, the appeal to naturalness etc. So, without in the first instance attacking these presuppositions, one might want to develop an alternative framework in comparable detail which allows the formulation of alternatives. One natural starting point is to go with neoCarnapian thoughts about what the right thing to say about the SCQ is (e.g. it can be answered by stipulation). That sort of line is incompatible with the sort of view on these questions that Quine and Lewis favour. What's the backdrop relative to which it makes sense? What are the crucial Quine-Lewis assumptions that need to be given up?

Now, this sort of project differs from the first kind of project in being (a) naturally restricted to metaphysics; and (b) not committed to any sort of demarcation of terminological disputes vs. genuine disputes. It differs from the second kind of project, since, at least in the first instance, we needn't assume that the differences between the frameworks will reduce to different attitudes to ontological commitment, or naturalness, or whatever. On the other hand, it's attractive to look for some underlying disagreement over the nature of ontological commitment, or naturalness, or whatever, to explain how the worldviews differ. So it may well be that a project of this kind leads to an interest in the first-order metametaphysics projects.

I'm not sure that these projects form a natural philosophical kind. What does seem to be right is that investigation of one might lead to interest in the others. There's probably a bunch more distinctions to be drawn, and the ones I've pointed to probably betray my own starting points. But in my experience of this stuff, you do find people getting confused about the ambition of each other's projects, and dismissing the whole field of metametaphysics because they identify it with some one of the projects that they themselves don't find particularly interesting, or regard as hard to make progress with. So it'd probably be helpful if someone produced an overview of the field that teased the various possible projects apart (references anyone?).

Williamson on vague states of affairs

In connection with the survey article mentioned below, I was reading through Tim Williamson's "Vagueness in reality". It's an interesting paper, though I find its conclusions very odd.

As I've mentioned previously, I like a way of formulating claims of metaphysical indeterminacy that's semantically similar to supervaluationism (basically, we have ontic precisifications of reality, rather than semantic sharpenings of our meanings. It's similar to ideas put forward by Ken Akiba and Elizabeth Barnes).

Williamson formulates the question of whether there is vagueness in reality, as the question of whether the following can ever be true:

(EX)(Ex)Vague[Xx]

Here X is a property-quantifier, and x an object quantifier. His answer is that the semantics force this to be false. The key observation is that, as he sets things up, the value assigned to a variable at a precisification and a variable assignment depends only on the variable assignment, and not at all on the precisification. So at all precisifications, the same value is assigned to the variable. That goes for both X and x; with the net result that if "Xx" is true relative to some precisification (at the given variable assignment) it's true at all of them. That means there cannot be a variable assignment that makes Vague[Xx] true.

You might think this is cheating. Why shouldn't variables receive different values at different precisifications (formally, it's very easy to do)? Williamson says that, if we allow this to happen, we'd end up making things like the following come out true:

(Ex)Def[Fx&~Fx']

It's crucial to the supervaluationist's explanatory programme that this come out false (it's supposed to explain why we find the sorites premise compelling). But consider a variable assignment to x which at each precisification maps x to that object which marks the F/non-F cutoff relative to that precisification. It's easy to see that on this "variable assignment", Def[Fx&Fx'] comes out true, underpinning the truth of the existential.

Again, suppose that we were taking the variable assignment to X to be a precisification-relative matter. Take some object o that intuitively is perfectly precise. Now consider the assignment to X that maps X at precisification 1 to the whole domain, and X at precisification 2 to the null set. Consider "Vague[Xx]", where o is assigned to x at every precisification, and the assignment to X is as above. The sentence will be true relative to these variable assignments, and so we have "(EX)Vague[Xx]" relative to an assignment of o to x which is supposed to "say" that o has some vague property.

Although Williamson's discussion is about the supervaluationist, the semantic point equally applies to the (pretty much isomorphic) setting that I like, and which is supposed to capture vagueness in reality. If one makes the variable assignments non-precisification relative, then trivially the quantified indeterminacy claims go false. If one makes the variable assignments precisification-relative, then it threatens to make them trivially true.

The thought I have is that the problem here is essentially one of mixing up abundant and natural properties. At least for property-quantification, we should go for the precisification-relative notion. It will indeed turn out that "(EX)Vague[Xx]" will be trivially true for every choice of X. But that's no more surprising that the analogous result in the modal case: quantifying over abundant properties, it turns out that every object (even things like numbers) have a great range of contingent properties: being such that grass is green for example. Likewise, in the vagueness case, everything has a great deal of vague properties: being such that the cat is alive, for example (or whatever else is your favourite example of ontic indeterminacy).

What we need to get a substantive notion, is to restrict these quantifiers to interesting properties. So for example, the way to ask whether o has some vague sparse property is to ask whether the following is true "(EX:Natural(X))Vague[Xx]". The extrinsically specified properties invoked above won't count.

If the question is formulated in this way, then we can't read off from the semantics whether there will be an object and a property such that it is vague whether the former has the latter. For this will turn, not on the semantics for quantifiers alone, but upon which among the variable assignments correspond to natural properties.

Something similar goes for the case of quantification over states of affairs. (ES)Vague[S] would be either vacuously true or vacuously false depending on what semantics we assign to the variables "X". But if our interest is in whether there are sparse states of affairs which are such that it is vague whether they obtain, what we should do is e.g. let the assignment of values to S be functions from precisifications to truth values, and then ask the question:

(ES:Natural(S))Vague[S].

Where a function from precisifications to truth values is "natural" if it corresponds to some relatively sparse state of affairs (e.g. there being a live cat on the mat). So long as there's a principled story about which states of affairs these are (and it's the job of metaphysics to give us that) everything works fine.

A final note. It's illuminating to think about the exactly analogous point that could be made in the modal case. If values are assigned to variables independently of the world, we'll be able to prove that the following is never true on any variable assignment:

Contingently[Xx].

Again, the extensions assigned to X and x are non-world dependent, so if "Xx" is true relative to one world, it's true at them all. Is this really an argument that there is no contingent instantiation of properties? Surely not. To capture the intended sense of the question, we have to adopt something like the tactic just suggested: first allow world-relative variable assignment, and then restrict the quantifiers to the particular instances of this that are metaphysically interesting.

Ontic vagueness

I've been frantically working this week on a survey article on metaphysical indeterminacy and ontic vagueness. Mind bending stuff: there really is so much going on in the literature, and people are working with *very* different conceptions of the thing. Just sorting out what might be meant by the various terms "vagueness de re", "metaphysical vagueness", "ontic vagueness", "metaphysical indeterminacy" was a task (I don't think there are any stable conventions in the literature). And that's not to mention "vague objects" and the like.

I decided in the end to push a particular methodology, if only as a stalking horse to bring out the various presuppositions that other approaches will want to deny. My view is that we should think of "indefinitely" roughly parallel to the way we do "possibly". There are various disambiguations one can make: "possibly" might mean metaphysical possibility, epistemic possibility, or whatever; "indefinitely" might mean linguistic indeterminacy, epistemic unclarity, or something metaphysical. To figure out whether you should buy into metaphysical indeterminacy, you should (a) get yourself in a position to at least formulate coherently theories involving that operator (i.e. specify what its logic is); and (b) run the usual Quinean cost/benefit analysis on a case-by-case basis.

The view of metaphysical indeterminacy most opposed to this is one that would identify it strongly with vagueness de re, paradigmatically there being some object and some property such that it is indeterminate whether the former instantiates the latter (this is how Williamson seems to conceive of matters in a 2003 article). If we had some such syntactic criterion for metaphysical indeterminacy, perhaps we could formulate everything without postulating a plurality of disambiguations of "definitely". However, it seems that this de re formulation would miss out some of the most paradigmatic examples of putative metaphysical vagueness, such as the de dicto formulation: It is indeterminate whether there are exactly 29 things. (The quantifiers here to be construed unrestrictedly).

I also like to press the case against assuming that all theories of metaphysical indeterminacy must be logically revisionary (endorsing some kind of multi-valued logic). I don't think the implication works in either direction: multi-valued logics can be part of a semantic theory of indeterminacy; and some settings for thinking about metaphysical indeterminacy are fully classical.

I finish off with a brief review of the basics of Evans' argument, and the sort of arguments (like the one from Weatherson in the previous post) that might convert metaphysical vagueness of apparently unrelated forms into metaphysically vague identity arguably susceptable to Evans argument.

From vague parts to vague identity

(Update: as Dan notes in the comment below, I should have clarified that the initial assumption is supposed to be that it's metaphysically vague what the parts of Kilimanjaro (Kili) are. Whether we should describe the conclusion as deriving a metaphysically vague identity is a moot point.)

I've been reading an interesting argument that Brian Weatherson gives against "vague objects" (in this case, meaning objects with vague parts) in his paper "Many many problems".

He gives two versions. The easiest one is the following. Suppose it's indeterminate whether Sparky is part of Kili, and let K+ and K- be the usual minimal variations of Kili (K+ differs from Kili only in determinately containing Sparky, K- only by determinately failing to contain Sparky).

Further, endorse the following principle (scp): if A and B coincide mereologically at all times, then they're identical. (Weatherson's other arguments weaken this assumption, but let's assume we have it, for the sake of argument).

The argument then runs as follows:
1. either Sparky is part of Kili, or she isn't. (LEM)
2. If Sparky is part of Kili, Kili coincides at all times with K+ (by definition of K+)
3. If Sparky is part of Kili, Kili=K+ (by 2, scp)
4. If Sparky is not part of Kili, Kili coincides at all times with K- (by definition of K-)
5. If Sparky is not part of Kili, Kili=K- (by 4, scp).
6. Either Kili=K+ or Kili=K- (1, 3,5).

At this point, you might think that things are fine. As my colleague Elizabeth Barnes puts it in this discussion of Weatherson's argument you might simply think at this point that only the following been established: that it is determinate that either Kili=K+ or K-: but that it is indeterminate which.

I think we might be able to get an argument for this. First our all, presumably all the premises of the above argument hold determinately. So the conclusion holds determinately. We'll use this in what follows.

Suppose that D(Kili=K+). Then it would follow that Sparky was determinately a part of Kili, contrary to our initial assumption. So ~D(Kili=K+). Likewise ~D(Kili=K-).

Can it be that they are determinately distinct? If D(~Kili=K+), then assuming that (6) holds determinately, D(Kili=K+ or Kili=K-), we can derive D(Kili=K-), which contradicts what we've already proven. So ~D(~Kili=K+) and likewise ~D(~Kili=K-).

So the upshot of the Weatherson argument, I think, is this: it is indeterminate whether Kili=K+, and indeterminate whether Kili=K-. The moral: vagueness in composition gives rise to vague identity.

Of course, there are well known arguments against vague identity. Weatherson doesn't invoke them, but once he reaches (6) he seems to think the game is up, for what look to be Evans-like reasons.

My working hypothesis at the moment, however, is that whenever we get vague identity in the sort of way just illustrated (inherited from other kinds of ontic vagueness), we can wriggle out of the Evans reasoning without significant cost. (I go through some examples of this in this forthcoming paper). The over-arching idea is that the vagueness in parthood, or whatever, can be plausibly viewed as inducing some referential indeterminacy, which would then block the abstraction steps in the Evans proof.

Since Weatherson's argument is supposed to be a general one against vague parthood, I'm at liberty to fix the case in any way I like. Here's how I choose to do so. Let's suppose that the world contains two objects, Kili and Kili*. Kili* is just like Kili, except that determinately, Kili and Kili* differ over whether they contain Sparky.

Now, think of reality as indeterminate between two ways: one in which Kili contains Sparky, the other where it doesn't. What of our terms "K+" and "K-"? Well, if Kili contains Sparky, then "K+" denotes Kili. But if it doesn't, then "K+" denotes Kili*. Mutatis Mutandis for "K-". Since it is is indeterminate which option obtains, "K+" and "K-" are referentially indeterminate, and one of the abstraction steps in the Evans proof fail.

Now, maybe it's built into Weatherson's assumptions that the "precise" objects like K+ and K- exist, and perhaps we could still cause trouble. But I'm not seeing cleanly how to get it. (Notice that you'd need more than just the axioms of mereology to secure the existence of [objects determinately denoted by] K+ and K-: Kili and Kili* alone would secure the truth that there are fusions including Sparky and fusions not including Sparky). But at this point I think I'll leave it for others to work out exactly what needs to be added...

The fuzzy link

Following up on one of my earlier posts on quantum stuff, I've been reading up on an interesting literature on relating ordinary talk to quantum mechanics. As before, caveats apply: please let me know if I'm making terrible technical errors, or if there's relevant literature I should be reading/citing.

The topic here is GRW. This way of doing things, recall, involved random localizations of the wavefunction. Let's think of the quantum wavefunction for a single particle system, and suppose it's initially pretty wide. So the amplitude of the wavefunction pertaining to the "position" of the particle is spread out over a wide span of space. But, if one of the random localizations occurs, the wavefunction collapses into a very narrow spike, within a tiny region of space.

But what does all this mean? What does it say about the position of the particle? (Here I'm following the Albert/Loewer presentation, and ignoring alternatives, e.g. Ghirardi's mass-density approach).

Well, one traditional line was that talk of position was only well defined when the particle was in an eigenstate of the position observable. Since on GRW the particles' wavefunction is pretty much spread all over space, on this view talking of a particle's location would never be well-defined.

Albert and Loewer's suggestion is that we alter the link. As previously, think of the wavefunction as giving a measure over different situations in which the particle has a definite location. Rather than saying x is located within region R iff the set of situations in which the particle lies in R is measure 1, they suggest that x is located within region R iff the set of situations in which the particle lies in R is almost measure 1. The idea is that even if not all of a particle's wavefunction places it right here, the vast majority of it is within a tiny subregion here. On the Albert/Loewer suggestion, we get to say on this basis, that the particle is located in that tiny subregion. They argue also that there are sensible choices of what "almost 1" should be that'll give the right results, though it's probably a vague matter exactly what the figure is.

Peter Lewis points out oddities with this. One oddity is that conjunction-introduction will fail. It might be true that marble i is in a particular region, for each i between 1 and 100; and yet it fail to be true that all these marbles are in the box.

Here's another illustration of the oddities. Take a particle with a localized wavefunction. Choose some region R around the peak of the wavefunction which is minimal, such that enough of the wavefunction is inside for the particle to be within R. Then subdivide R into two pieces (the left half and the right half) such that the wavefunction is nonzero in each. The particle is within R. But it's not within the left half of R. Nor is it within the right half of R (in each case by modus tollens on the Albert/Loewer's biconditional). But the R is just the sum of the left half and right half of R. So either we're committed to some very odd combination of claims about location, or something is going wrong with modus tollens.

So clearly this proposal is looking like it's pretty revisionary of well-entrenched principles. While I don't think it indefensible (after all, logical revisionism from science isn't a new idea) I do think it's a significant theoretical cost.

I want to suggest a slightly more general, and I think, much more satisfactory, way of linking up the semantics of ordinary talk with the GRW wavefunction. The rule will be this:

"Particle x is within region R" is true to degree equal to the wavefunction-measure of the set of situations where the particle is somewhere in region R.

On this view, then, ordinary claims about position don't have a classical semantics. Rather, they have a degreed semantics (in fact, exactly the degreed-supervaluational semantics I talked about in a previous post). And ordinary claims about the location of a well-localized particle aren't going to be perfectly true, but only almost-perfectly true.

Now, it's easy but unwarranted to slide from "not perfectly true" to "not true". The degree theorist in general shouldn't concede that. It's an open question for now how to relate ordinary talk of truth simpliciter to the degree-theorist's setting.

One advantage of setting up things in this more general setting is that we can "off the peg" take results about what sort of behaviour we can expect the language to exhibit. An example: it's well known that if you have a classically valid argument in this sort of setting, then the degree of untruth of the conclusion cannot exceed the sum of the degrees of untruth of the premises. This amounts to a "safety constraint" on arguments: we can put a cap on how badly wrong things can go, though there'll always be the phenomenon of slight degradations of truth value across arguments, unless we're working with perfectly true premises. So there's still some point of classifying arguments like conjunction introduction as "valid" on this picture, for that captures a certain kind of important information.

Say that the figure that Albert and Loewer identified as sufficient for particle-location was 1-p. Then the way to generate something like the Albert and Loewer picture on this view is to identify truth with truth-to-degree-1-p. In the marbles case, the degrees of falsity of each premise "marble i is in the box" collectively "add up" in the conclusion to give a degree of falsity beyond the permitted limit. In the case

An alternative to the Albert-Loewer suggestion for making sense of ordinary talk is to go for a universal error-theory, supplemented with the specification of a norm for assertion. To do this, we allow the identification of truth simpliciter with true-to-degree 1. Since ordinary assertions of particle location won't be true to degree 1, they'll be untrue. But we might say that such sentences are assertible provided they're "true enough": true to the Albert/Loewer figure of 1-p, for example. No counterexamples to classical logic would threaten (Peter Lewis's cases would all be unsound, for example). Admittedly, a related phenomenon would arise: we'd be able to go by classical reasoning from a set of premises all of which are assertible, to a conclusion that is unassertible. But there are plausible mundane examples of this phenomenon, for example, as exhibited in the preface "paradox".

But I'd rather not go either for the error-theoretic approach, nor for the identification of a "threshold" for truth, as the Albert-Loewer inspired proposal suggests. I think there are more organic ways to handle utterance-truth within a degree theoretic framework. It's a bit involved to go into here, but the basic ideas are extracted from recent work by Agustin Rayo, and involve only allowing "local" specifications of truth simpliciter, relative to a particular conversational context. The key thing is that on the semantic side, once we have the degree theory, we can take "off the peg" an account of how such degree theories interact with a general account of communication. So combining the degree-based understanding of what validity amounts to (in terms of limiting the creep of falsity into the conclusion) and this degree-based account
of assertion, I think we've got a pretty powerful, pretty well understood overview about how ordinary language position-talk works.

Kripkenstein's monster

Though I've thought a lot about inscrutability and indeterminacy (well, I wrote my PhD thesis on it) I've always run a bit scared from the literature on Kripkenstein. Partly this is because the literature is so huge and sometimes intimidatingly complex. Partly it's because I was a bit dissatisfied/puzzled with some of the foundational assumptions that seemed to be around, and was setting it aside until I had time to think things through.

Anyway, I'm now thinking about making a start on thinking about the issue. So this post is something in the way of a plea for information: I'm going to set out how I understand the puzzle involved, and invite people to disabuse me of my ignorance, recommend good readings or where these ideas have already been worked out.

To begin with, let's draw a rough divide between three types of facts:

1. Paradigmatically naturalistic facts (patterns of assent and dissent, causal relationships, dispositions, etc).
2. Meaning-facts. (Of the form: “+” means addition, “67+56=123” is true, "Dobbin" refers to Dobbin.)
3. Linguistic norms. (Of the form: One should utter “67+56=123” in such-and-such circs).

Kripkenstein’s strategy is to ask us to show how facts of (A) can constitute facts of kind (B) and (C). (An oddity here: the debate seems to have centred on a “dispositionalist” account of the move from A to B. But that’s hardly a popular option in the literature on naturalistic treatments of content, where variants of radical interpretation (Lewis, Davidson), of causal (Fodor, Field) and teleological (Millikan) theories are far more prominent. Boghossian in his state of the art article in Mind seems to say that these can all be seen as variants of the dispositionalist idea. But I don't quite understand how. Anyway...)

One of the major strategies in Kripkenstein is to raise doubts about whether this or that constitutive story can really found facts of kind (C). Notice that if one assumes that (B) and (C) are a joint package, then this will simultaneously throw into doubt naturalistic stories about (B).

In what sense might they be a joint package? Well, maybe some sort of constraint like the following is proposed: unless putative meaning-facts make immediately intelligible the corresponding linguistic norms, then they don’t deserve the name “meaning facts” at all.

To see an application, suppose that some of Kripke’s “technical” objections to the dispositionalist position were patched (e.g. suppose one could non-circularly identify a disposition of mine to return the intuitively correct verdicts to each and every arithmetical sum). Still, then, there’s the “normative” objection: why are those the verdicts the ones one should return in those circumstances? And (right or wrongly) the Kripkenstein challenge is that this normative explanation is missing. So (according to the Kripkean) these ain’t the meaning-facts at all.

There's one purely terminological issue I'd like to settle at this point. I think we shouldn’t just build it into the definition of meaning-facts that they correspond to linguistic norms in this way. After all, there’s lot of other theoretical roles for meaning other than supporting linguistic norms (e.g. a predicative/explanatory role wrt understanding, for example). I propose to proceed as follows. Firstly, let’s speak of “semantic” or “meaning” facts in general (picked out if you like via other aspects of the theoretical role of meaning). Secondly, we'll look for arguments for or against the substantive claim that part of the job of a theory of meaning is to subserve, or make immediately intelligible, or whatever, facts like (C).

Onto details. The Kripkenstein paradox looks like it proceeds on the following assumptions. First, three principles are taken as target (we can think of them as part of a "folk theory" of meaning)

1. the meaning-facts to be exactly as we take them to be: i.e. arithmetical truths are determinate “to infinity”; and
   
2. the corresponding linguistic norms are determinate “to infinity” as well; and
   
3. (1) and (2) are connected in the obvious way: if S is true, then in appropriate circumstances, we should utter S.

The “straight solutions” seem to tacitly assume that our story should take the following form. First, give some constitutive story about what fixes facts of kind (B). Then (supposing there’s no obvious counterexamples, i.e. that the technical challenge is met). Then the Kripkensteinian looks to see whether this “really gives you meaning”, in the sense that we’ve also got a story underpinning (C). Given our early discussion, the Kripkensteinian challenge needs to be rephrased somewhat. Put the challenge as follows. First, the straight solution gives a theory of semantic facts, which is evaluated for success on grounds that set aside putative connections to facts of kind (C). Next, we ask the question: can we give an adequate account of facts of kind (C), on the basis of what we have so far? The Kripkensteinian suggests not.

The “sceptical solution” starts in the other direction. It takes as groundwork facts of kind (A) and (C) (perhaps explaining facts of kind (C) on the basis of those of kind (A)?) and then uses this in constructing an account of (something like) (B). One Kripkensteinian thought here is to base some kind of vindication of (B)-talk on the (C)-style claim that one ought to utter sentences involving semantic vocabulary such as " '+' means addition".

The basic idea one should be having at this point is more general however. Rather than start by assuming that facts like (B) are prior in the order of explanation to facts like (C), why not consider other explanatory orderings? Two spring to mind: linguistic normativity and meaning-facts are explained independently; or linguistic normativity is prior in the order of explanation to meaning-facts.

One natural thought in the latter direction is to run a “radical interpretation” line. The first element of a radical interpretation proposal is identify a “target set” of T-sentences, which the meaning-fixing T-theory for a language is (cp) constrained to generate. Davidson suggests we pick the T-sentences by looking at what sentences people de facto hold true in certain circumstances. But, granted (C)-facts, when identifying the target set of T-sentences one might instead appeal to what person’s ought to utter in such and such circs.

There’s no obvious reason why such normative facts need be construed as themselves “semantic” in nature, nor any obvious reason why the naturalistically minded shouldn’t look for reductions of this kind of normativity (e.g. it might be a normativity on a par with that involved with weak hypothetical imperatives, e.g. in the claim that I should eat this food, in order to stay alive, which I take to be pretty unscary.). So there's no need to give up on reductionist project in doing things this way. Nor is it only radical interpretation that could build in this sort of appeal to (C)-type facts in the account of meaning.

One nice thing about building normativity into the subvening base for semantic facts in this way is that we make it obvious that we’ll get something like (a perhaps restricted and hedged) form of (iii). Running accounts of (B) and (C) separately would make the convergence of meaning-facts and linguistic norms seem like a coincidence, if it in fact holds in any form at all.)

Is there anything particularly sceptical about the setup, so construed? Not in the sense in which Kripke’s own suggestion is. Two things about the Kripke proposal (as I suggested we read it): it’s clear that we’ve got some kind of projectionist/quasi-realist treatment of the semantic going on (it’s only the acceptability of semantic claims that’s being vindicated, not "semantic facts" as most naturalistic theories of meaning would conceive them). Further, the sort of norms to which we can reasonably appeal will be grounded in practices of praise and blame in a linguistic community to which we belong, and given the sheer absence of people doing very-long sums, there just won't be a practice of praise and blaming people for uttering "x+y=z" for sufficiently large choices of x, y and z. The linguistic norms we can ground in this way might be much more restricted than one might at first think: maybe only finitely many sentences S are such that something of the following form holds: we should assert S in circs c. Though there might be norms governing apparently infinitary claims, there is no reason to suppose in this setup that there are infinitely many type-(C) facts. That'll mean that (2) and (3) are dropped.

In sum, Kripke's proposal is sceptical in two senses: it is projectionist, rather than realist, about meaning-facts. And it drops what one might take to be a central plank of folk-theory of meaning, (2) and (3) above.

On the other hand, the modified radical interpretation or causal theory proposal I’ve been sketching can perfectly well be a realist about meaning-facts, having them “stretch out to infinity” as much as you like (I’d be looking to combine the radical interpretation setting sketched earlier with something like Lewis’s eligibility constraints on correct interpretation, to secure semantic determinacy). So it's not "sceptical" in the first sense in which Kripke's theory is: it doesn't involve any dodgy projectivism about meaning-facts. But it is a "sceptical solution" in the other sense, since it gives up the claims that linguistic norms "stretch out" to infinity, and that truth-conditions of sentences are invariably paired with some such norm.

[Thanks (I think) are owed to Gerald Lang for the title to this post. A quick google search reveals that others have had the same idea...]

Why preserve the letter of Humean supervenience?

Today in the phil physics reading group here at Leeds we were discussing Tim Maudlin's paper "Why be Humean?".

The question arose about why we should accord to the letter of the Humean supervenience principle. What that requires is that everything there is should supervene on the distribution of fundamental (local, monadic) properties and spatio-temporal relations. Why not e.g. allow further perfectly natural relations holding between pointy particles, so long as they are physically motivated and don't enter into necessary connections with other fundamental properties or relations?

Brian Weatherson's Lewis blog addressed something like this question at one point. His suggestion (I take it) was that the interest of tightly-constrained Humean supervenience was methodological: roughly, if we can fit all important aspects of the manifest image (causality, intentionality, consciousness, laws, modality, whatever) into an HS world, then we should be confident that we could do the same in non-HS worlds, worlds which are more generous with the range of fundamentals they commit us to. If Brian's right about this, the motivation for going for the strongest formulation of HS, is that allowing any more would make our stories about how to fit the manifest image into the world as described by science, more dependent on exactly what science delivers.

If that's the motivation for HS, then it's not so interesting whether physics contradicts HS: what's interesting is whether the stories about causality, intentionality and the rest that Lewis describes with the HS equipment in mind, go through in the non-HS worlds with minimal alteration.

Jobs at Leeds

Just to note that there are currently a bunch of jobs in philosophy/history and philosophy of science being advertised at Leeds. These are fixed-term (one year) lecturerships, and are pretty nice. While some places make temporary positions into teaching drudgery, Leeds has a policy of appointing full lecturer replacements, and so people appointed to these posts have in the past got exactly the teaching/admin load as the rest of us. Importantly for people looking to get out publications and secure permanent jobs, this means you got the same time to do research as a permanent lecturer. (Recent occupants of these roles have just secured permanent jobs and postdoc positions in the UK).

And of course you get to hang out with the lovely Leeds folk. So apply!

converting LaTeX into word...

I write (most) of my research in LaTeX format. But journals often demand .rtf or even .doc formats for the final version of my paper. Sometimes by speaking to them very nicely you can get them to accept tex versions (Phil Studies and Phil Perspectives both did this). But sometimes that's just not an option.

This leads to hours of heartache and potentially lots of typos, as I try ten ways of transferring the stuff over to my word processor. And I have to deal with getting logic into word, which is never nice. I used to use a special compiler to get it into html format, and then "save as" word. But that didn't actually save much time, so I've recently begun to just cut-and-paste the raw tex file, and reformat it and rewrite any code I've put in. I've downloaded a couple of trial applications that promise to convert stuff directly into doc, but with no success (they throw a wobbly whenever they meet any dollar signs, it seems).

Does anyone know what the best way to do this is? Would it help to get scientific word (more money to the man, I know, but at this stage I'm desperate).

Worlds

earths
Originally uploaded by blue sometimes

Hee hee

Supervaluations and revisionism once more

I've just spent the afternoon thinking about an error I found in my paper "supervaluational consequence" (see this previous post). I've figured out how to patch it now, so thought I'd blog about it.

The background is the orthodox view that supervaluational consequence will lead to revisions of classical logic. The strongest case I know for this (due to Williamson) is the following. Consider the claim "p&~Determinately(p)". This (it is claimed) cannot be true on any serious supervaluational model of our language. Equivalently, you can't have both p and ~Determinately(p) both true in a single model. If classical reductio were an ok rule of inference, therefore, you'd be able argue from ~Determinately(p) to ~p. But nobody thinks that's supervaluationally valid: any indeterminate sentence will be a counterexample to it. So classical reductio should be given up.

This is stronger than the more commonly cited argument: that supervaluational semantics vindicates the move from p to Determinately(p), but not the material conditional "if p then Determinately(p)" (a counterexample to conditional proof). The reason is that, if "Determinately" itself is vague, arguably the supervaluationist won't be committed to the former move. The key here is the thought that as well as things that are determinately sharpenings of our language, their may be interpretations which are borderline-sharpenings. Perhaps interpretation X is an "admissible interpretation of our language" on some sharpenings, but not on others. If p is true at all the definite sharpenings, but false at X, then that may lead to a situation where p is supertrue, but Determinately(p) isn't.

But orthodoxy says that this sort of situation (non-transitivity in the accessibility relation among interpretations of our language) does nothing to undermine the case for revisionism I mentioned in the first paragraph.

One thing I do in the paper is construct what seems to me a reasonable-looking toy semantics for a language, on which one can have both p and ~Determinately p. Here it is.

Suppose you have five colour patches, ranging from red to orange (non-red). Call them A,B,C,D,E.

Suppose that our thought and talk makes it the case that only interpretations which put the cut-off between B and D are determinately "sharpenings" of the language we use. Suppose, however, that there's some fuzziness around in what it is to be an "admissible interpretation". For example, an interpretation that places the cut-off between B and C, thinks that both interpretations placing the cut-off between C and D, and interpretations placing the cut-off between A and B, are admissible. And likewise, an interpretation that place the cut-off between C and D think that interpretations that place the cut-off between B and C are admissible, but also thinks that interpretations that place the cut-off between D and E are admissible.

Modelling the situation with four interpretations, labelled AB, BC, CD, DE, for where they place the red/non-red cut-off, we can express the thought like this: each intepretation accesses (thinks admissible) itself and its immediate neighbours, but nothing else. But BC and CD are the sharpenings.

My first claim is that all this is a perfectly coherent toy model for the supervaluationist: nothing dodgy or "unintended" is going on.

Now let's think about the truths values assigned to particular claims. Notice, to start with, that the claim "B is red" will be true at each sharpening. The claim "Determinately, B is red" will be true at the sharpening CD, but it won't be true at the sharpening BC, for that accesses an interpretation on which B counts as non-red (viz. AB).

Likewise, the claim "D is not red" will be true at each sharpening, but "Determinately, D is not red" will be true at the sharpening BC, but fails at CD, due to the latter seeing the (non-sharpening) interpretation DE, at which D counts as red.

In neither of these atomic cases do we find "p and ~Det(p)" coming out true (that's where I made a mistake previously). But by considering the following, we can find such a case:

Consider "B is red and D is not red". It's easy to see that this is true at each of the sharpenings, from what's been said above. But also "Determinately(B is red and D is not red)" is false at each of the sharpenings. It's false at BC because of the accessible interpretation AB at which B counts as non-red. It's false at CD because of the accessible interpretation DE at which D counts as red.

So we've got "B is red and D is not red, & ~Determinately(B is red and D is non-red)." And we've got that in a perfectly reasonable toy model for a language of colour predicates.

(Why do people think otherwise? Well, the standard way of modelling the consequence relation in settings where the accessibility relation is non-transitive is to think of the sharpenings as *all the interpretations accessible from some designated interpretation*. And that imposes additional structure which, for example, the model just sketch doesn't satisfy. But the additional structure seems to me totally unmotivated, and I provide an alternative framework in the paper for freeing oneself from those assumptions. The key thing is not to try and define "sharpening" in terms of the accessibility relation.).

The conclusion: the best extant case for (global) supervaluational consequence being revisionary fails.