The bLOGOS

We have moved!

2010-11-13T16:33:00.000+01:00

Go check the new bLOGOS here!

On Properties of Sets of Properties

2010-10-21T19:33:00.002+02:00

If I understood it right, part of the core of Zalta's LOGOS Colloquium today was the thesis that his abstract objects were not mere sets of properties. I wasn't completely clear about exactly his reasons for this, but he mentioned the contention that sets can not exemplify any of its members. Apologies in advance if I am missing something basic, but is this really so? Take P to be the property of being a set mentioned at The bLOGOS and consider its singleton. Isn't it both the case that P is a member of {P} and that {P} exemplifies P? No?

Are King's propositions too fine-grained?

2010-04-05T00:48:00.000+02:00

Jeffrey King is well-known for his account of propositions as worldly entities, as facts consisting of objects, properties and relations. The fact that King claims is a propositions is of the following sort: there is a language containing some expressions that stand in certain sentential relations (basically, the way they got syntactically combined) , with each expression having as semantic value an object, a property or a relation. (This is the basic set-up, he adds more bells and whistles on top of that.) One main advantage of King's view is the ability to solve a major problem for unstructured views of propositions (especially for the propositions-as-possible-worlds view): namely, accounting for necessary truths (or falsehoods) in a way that doesn't make them all equivalent. Since King's propositions inherit their structures from the sentential relations that bind together the words in the sentences expressing those propositions, each proposition (including necessary ones) will have a different structure, closely related to the sentence used to express it. A related problem that is nicely solved in King's framework are the different puzzles arising from embeddings under propositional attitude verbs: for example, the propositions expressed by the sentences "Annie ran 20 kilometres" and "Annie run 12.43 miles" are different, and that accounts for Bill's (who's ignorant about lenght measures) believing one and not the other. It thus seems that on King's account propositions have enought structure as to count as different when we want them to count as such.
This is all nice and good. The question now is: doesn't this positive feature of King's view turn on closer inspection into a negative one? For, as it has been pointed out, it could be that now propositions are too fine-grained. For King claims that not only the propositions expressed by "Annie ran 20 kilometres" and "Annie ran 12.43 miles" are different (which might be easier to accept), but also, for example, that the propositions expressed by the sentences "1=2" and "2=1" are different. This might very well strike some as being utterly counterintuitive.
King is aware of the counterintuitiveness of his claim, and therefore tries to alleviate the worry. To this effect, he asks the reader to compare the propositions expressed by the sentences above with those expressed by the following ones: "1<2" and "2<1". Do these sentences express different propositions? They clearly do. But notice now that what makes the latter sentences express different propositions is just the different order of their constituents. But if that's the case, why shouldn't we accept that "1=2" and "2=1" also express different propositions? Our reluctance to do so is traced down by King to one peculiar feature of the relation that the equality sign stands for: namely, its transitivity. It's true that equality is transitive, King says, but that is just a feature of that particular relation, and it shouldn't bear on the issue whether the same propositions is expressed or not by sentences that differ only in the order of their constituents. I find the explanation involving the peculiaity of equality convincing, but I also understand that one could still feel that one's intuitions about the identity of propositions have not being attended to. To be sure, King has a shot at dispensing with those intuitions; usual motives are invoked - their unreliability, them tracing other kinds of content than propositional content, etc. But this seems to me problematic, at least for the following reason: if King has to give up intuitions at some point, the defendant of the unstructured propositions view could do the same. The set of intuitions given up by each camp will be different, of course, but what becomes unclear is whether King can still claim the advantage he thinks his view has over the unstructured propositions view. So, the questions to be answered are: Do you believe that King has a problem here - are his propositions too fine-grained? Do you find his explanation in the case of the propositions expressed by "1=2" and "2=1" correct? What do you think about his dismissal of (some) intuitions? [This post is a late semi-transcription of a discussion that took place at a reading group in Paris, and the points raised here were originally raised by Michael Murez and Adrian Briciu.]

Philo-Surveys

2009-11-19T08:01:00.002+01:00

Around in the web:

A survey on philosophers’ views about normative judgments.
A survey on publishing in philosophy.
A survey on a new journal in philosophy.

Plus, if you're a PhilPapers user, a survey on the distribution of philosophical views among professional philosophers and others (in your inbox).

Easy “Difference-Making” Properties?

2009-11-11T12:42:00.003+01:00

Last week we discussed Cameron’s 'Truthmaking for Presentists,' very cool paper!

Bracketing concerns about a notion of indeterminacy whose source is not semantic (nor epistemic) and about the notion of indeterminate truth, we devoted part of the discussion to Cameron’s contention that insatisfaction with “Lucretian” properties like being such as to have been a child motivates restriction to difference-making properties as candidates for truthmaking, understood as properties “the instantiation of which at a time makes a difference to the intrinsic nature of the bearer at that time”.

If I understood them correctly, both Marta Campdelacreu (in attendance) and Pablo Rychter (virtually) independently worried that some properties that would count as difference-making for Cameron seemed insatisfactory for truthmaking in just the same way than “Lucretian” properties were. Take an intrinsic property Ross presently instantiates, say being currently sitting. It would seem as unsatisfactory as before that the presentist used the property of being such as to have been a child and currently sitting in the truthmaker for the truth that Ross was a child. But the property is difference-making for him, given that

(*) Ross has the intrinsic nature at the present that he has partly in virtue of instantiating being such as to have been a child and currently sitting at the present.

(Notice that it won’t do, it seems to me, to reject (*) on the basis of:

(#) Ross has the intrinsic nature at the present that he has partly in virtue of instantiating being currently sitting at the present.

For, arguably, if (#) is true then (*) is also true. See the axiom of subsumption in Fine’s (1995) logic of essence, and the discussion of the conjunction thesis for truthmaking in López de Sa (2009).)

Schaffer's Permissivism

2009-10-27T18:02:00.005+01:00

A couple of weeks ago we discussed Schaffer's 'On What Grounds What'. Although we discussed quite a bit about different, non-equivalent ways of characterizing 'permissivism' in detail, I got the sense that there was a general sympathy towards the spirit of the contention that existential questions about numbers etc. were somehow easy, and the harder questions concerned what grounds what, and thus what is fundamental.

In particular, those in attendance did not object to the following constituting a proof of the existence of numbers (p. 357):

There are prime numbers.
Therefore there are numbers.

This is just an invitation to people not in attendance to share their views ;-).

Lasersohn as a Truth Relativist, MacFarlane style

2009-10-27T15:31:00.002+01:00

I remember there was a discussion at some point between Dan LdS and Manolo CG about whether Lasersohn is a "non-indexical contextualist" or a "relativist" (MacFarlane's terms). The discussion concerned Lasersohn's 2005 paper, "Context dependence, disagreement and predicates of personal taste", where, with the exception of a short paragraph whose interpretation sparked the debate, there is nothing to base a relativist interpretation on ("relativist" - mind you - as opposed to "non-indexical contextualist"; there's no question whether Lasersohn is a contextualist of the ordinary sort.) However, in his more recent paper, which we were supposed to read in our unofficial reading group on contextualism and relativism last year, things are crystal clear. Here is what Lasersohn says in "Quantification and perspective in relativist semantics", Philosophical Perspectives 2008:

What makes this system “relativist”? Different authors use this term in
different ways. As I understand it, there are two crucial features of the system
just outlined which make this term appropriate. First, sentences may vary in
truth value without a corresponding variation in content. Second, this variation
depends on some parameter whose value is not fixed by the situation in which a
sentence is used. (pg. 315)
And then he continues, relating his view with MacFarlane's:
These criteria are equivalent, as far as I can tell, to the claim that sentences
may be assigned contents whose truth values depend not just on the “context
of use” but also on the “context of assessment” (MacFarlane 2003, 2005a). We
treat the context of use as fully determined by the situation in which the sentence
is used; if truth values vary independently of this situation, we regard them as
at least partly dependent on a separate context determined by the situation in
which the sentence is assessed for truth or falsity.

Maybe the debate was solved months ago, but I thought I should mention it anyway!

Kaplan and the shotgun

2009-10-15T15:57:00.004+02:00

This is a non-serious post connected to Dan LdS's talk on Wednesday (which I suppose took place...). To be more precise, it's conencted to Egan's paper that Dan was considering. I haven't re-read the paper, but I remember I wasn't convinced that the Kaplanian framework has serious problems with (at least some of) the examples Egan is giving. Also, it struck me as a bad thinig that Egan doesn't think it necessary to sharply differentiate his view from the multiple-utterances view. If I remember correctly, Egan's preferred view is that an utterance produced at a given context of utterance expresses a multiplicity of propositions, which proposition is expressed being determined by the context of utterance together with the context of assessment (don't remember whether he actually uses this latter term, but let's stick to it for the moment). On the other hand, the multiple-utterances view has it that each time different assessors are presented with a sentence produced in a context of utterance (different from the respective contexts of assesment), that counts as a different utterance of the sentence at issue. [Let me here note that even the shotgun metaphor that Egan uses is closer to the multiple-utterances view than to his preferred one: the shotgun is the producing of the sounds, the bullets are the different utterances and the wounded people are the different propositions expressed. (Yes, this is Romanian mafia speaking. Shhhh...)] Now, the thing is I'm not sure Kaplan has problems with the multiple-utterances view. In defining truth in a context, Kaplan speaks of occurences of sentences. Could these be equated with utterances? If not, is the relation between occurences and utterances such that an occurence of a sentence can only result in one utterance being produced? My "I'll be back in 5 minutes" post on my office door constitutes, I take it, just one occurence of the sentence. Yet, it seems to me to spread around a multiplicity of utterances - one for each different minute (second?) the note spends hung on my door. Of course, to get across a content, someone needs to read the note, so that that someone grasps the proposition, but I don't think it's so implausible that there are propositions out there that no one grasps :-) (This is similar to the gravestone poem example, right? What does Egan say about that - how does he reject it? Sorry for being lazy...) So maybe Kaplan's talk of occurences gets things wrong, but defining truth for utterances instead of truth for occurences would fix it - in such a way that the multiple-utterances view is compatible with the "modified" Kaplan. Even if one finds ungrasped propositions hard to swallow, each grasped proposition gets expressed in a context in which there is both a "speaker" and an audience, located in time and space, which seems to me to be the notion of context Kaplan is using.
If you find this too confusing or stupid, please ignore it. :-)

Epistemological Nightmare

2009-10-09T18:26:00.004+02:00

All our worries were justified: Two "Zebras" in a zoo in Gaza turned out to be cleverly painted mules:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8297812.stm
The UN are sending in a hastily assembled squadron of epistemologists to keep the situation from escalating.

Anti-Extensionalists?

2009-10-08T11:53:00.006+02:00

We have had the first session of the new LOGOS Reading Group on Metaphysics. We discussed Varzi’s recent ‘Universalism Entails Extensionalism' in Analysis. I was quite surprised to learn about the difference between characterizing a sum of the Xs as

something that overlaps all and only those things that overlap some of the Xs

something that has the Xs as parts and no part disjoint from the Xs.

We also resumed a discussion we had last year about who should count as anti-extensionalist, allowing that there be two non-atomic things sharing all proper parts. Varzi mentions Wiggins 1980, but as Marta Campdelacreu pointed out, for a Wigginsian arguably the head of the cat is part of it, but not of a ‘mere’ fusion of its body cells, right? Any other candidates?

Illocutions, Perlocutions and Metaphorical Content

2009-10-02T16:35:00.002+02:00

In his talk last Wednesday at the LOGOS Seminar, "On Metaphorical Content", Gergö Somodi gave an argument that puts pressure on anti-Davidsonian theories of metaphorical content, and suggested a possible way out, to be further researched and elaborated. Here I will present my interpretation of the paper, and I will indicate that, if I understood it correctly, the research project is indeed worth pursuing.

Following more or less the Austinian terminology that Gergö was using, and more or less the interpretation of Davidsonian views he was assuming, on a Davidsonian view the only illocution made with an utterance of a metaphorical sentence such as 'Juliet is the Sun' is the one whose content is the literal necessary falsehood that Juliet is identical with our star. It is true that the utterance conveys to audiences other, more sensible ideas, such as the claim that Juliet gives warm and light to the speaker; but this is no illocution, it is only a causal effect of the literal illocution on which the latter has as little rational influence as if that idea had been produced in the audience by "a bump in the head" (Davidson, sic). On a Davidsonian account, then, grasping that Juliet gives warm and light to the speaker is merely a perlocutionary effect.

Anti-Davidsonians like Elizabeth Camp argue instead that the more sensible idea is also an illocution (in addition perhaps to the illocution of the literal meaning) of the utterance, perhaps conveyed in the indirect way that indirect speech acts or conversational implicatures are conveyed, or perhaps more in the way that context-dependent meanings are conveyed. Now, the problem that Gergö raised for these views (as Genoveva helped me to appreciate) goes as follows: writers like Camp accept that an essential part of the mechanism through which the alleged metaphorical illocution is conveyed to audiences has audiences "noticing resemblances, seeing things, entertaining pictures"; but all of these are perlocutionary effects; how can an illocution be conveyed by essential perlocutionary means?

My initial resistance to this way of setting the problem was as follows: if perlocutions are defined the way Gergö proposed (intention-irrelevant causal effects of utterances), then it is not clear that the categories illocution/perlocution are incompatible. For understanding the literal semantic content of a context-dependent utterance, such as Kaplan's 'That is a picture of the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.', might well be an intention-irrelevant (in the sense indicated by Gergö) causal effect of an utterance. But then the anti-Davidsonian is safe, because "noticing resemblances, seeing things, entertaining pictures" might be perlocutions but also illocutions, and there is no problem with the view. This would be clearer if we used a less question-begging description of the way we interpret metaphors, such as, in our example, "thinking of the target-domain of persons in terms of the commonly believed properties of the source-domain of stars", instead of speaking of "noticing, seeing, picturing".

Alternatively, we can define "perlocution" in such a way that the categories of illocutions and perlocutions are really incompatible, as on the Strawsonian definition that what is distinctive of perlocutions is that they cannot be produced by Gricean communicative intentions. But then it is question-begging to say that the way we interpret metaphors, through "noticing resemblances, seeing things, entertaining pictures", is a perlocution. The anti-Davidsonian would say that this is no perlocution, in the Strawsonian sense, but rather something that can indeed be achieved by means of communicative intentions, what, again, would be clearer if we described it in less question-begging terms such as "thinking of the target-domain of persons in terms of the commonly believed properties of the source-domain of stars".

In the course of the discussion (particularly the exchange with Josep), I came to think that this is also what Gergö wants to suggest, and that his point was rather that defending it requires a better clarification of what is usually meant by perlocution, so that we can see that effects that in some sense can be called 'perlocutionary' can contribute to properly illocutionary effects. With this I agree, in fact Gergö's characterization of a perlocution as an intentionally-irrelevant causal effect of an utterance is what many writers on these topics seem to have in mind (see for instance chapter 2 of Alston's Illocutionary Acts and Sentence-Meaning).

On the distinction between positive and negative conceivability in Chalmers

2009-08-06T22:39:00.002+02:00

I'm sorry but the following was written in Spanish, if anyone has trouble reading and is interested I can translate.

Sobre la distinción entre concebibilidad positiva y negativa en Chalmers:

Según Chalmers, la concebibilidad positiva tiene las siguientes ventajas epistemológicas sobre la negativa:

“se corresponde con el tipo de intuición modal clara y distinta invocada por Descartes y que refleja la práctica en el método de concebibilidad como es usado en los experimentos mentales filosóficos contemporáneos” (155)
la concebibilidad positiva es mejor guía para la posibilidad que la negativa (160)

Ambas resultan de su concepción de la misma más o menos en los términos de Yablo (1993):

concebir positivamente consiste en “imaginar (en algún sentido) una configuración específica de objetos y propiedades” (150)
se diferencia de suponer o “entertaining” porque (al igual que la imaginación perceptiva) el acto de imaginar que S tiene un carácter objetual mediado: consiste en tener “una intuición de (o como de) un mundo en el que S, o por lo menos de (o como de) una situación en la que S, donde una situación es (a grandes rasgos) una configuración de objetos y propiedades dentro de un mundo” (151)

A diferencia de Yablo, imposibilidades manifiestas pueden ser imaginadas en este sentido según Chalmers y por ello agrega que la imaginación debe ser coherente (152-3).

La pregunta a hacer es ¿en qué consiste esa “intuición” de un mundo/situación en el caso de la imaginación modal? Está claro que en el caso perceptivo sería algo que podemos llamar una “imagen mental” de la misma. Lo único que se me ocurre es que en el caso modal en lugar de visualizar/construir una imagen, lo que hacemos es captar/construir una descripción del mundo/situación en cuestión. Siguiendo a Chalmers, imaginar modalmente (visualmente no se puede) que Alemania gana la II Guerra Mundial consiste en "imaginar un mundo donde Alemania gana ciertas batallas y procede a abrumar a las fuerzas aliadas dentro de Europa! (151). Esto es, uno debe describir el mundo imaginado en algunos aspectos adicionales pero relevantes a la verdad de la proposición involucrada. Por ejemplo, Si deseo imaginar un mundo donde los cerdos vuelan debo imaginar algunos rasgos biológicos de los seres voladores que me permitan afirmar que son cerdos (¿rasgos morfológicos tal vez? ¿genéticos?) y algún detalle acerca de cómo animales así logran volar. Cuanto más detallada la descripción del mundo (cuanta más información contenga), más "positiva" habrá sido la concepción. De este modo el requisito de coherencia puede ser también más fácilmente comprendido: la descripción debe ser consistente.

Si esta reconstrucción está encaminada, la diferencia entre concebibilidad negativa y positiva de una oración S consiste en la diferencia entre que S no sea falsa a priori y que una descripción D relevante de un mundo-S sea consistente.

Aquí surge una segunda pregunta: ¿qué tipo de información relevante para la verdad de S debemos considerar? Supongamos un conjunto de tales oraciones O₁...O_n que son condiciones necesarias de S. Ahora bien, para toda Oi el condicional Oi entonces S es verdadero, pero en algunos casos es conocido a priori y en otros a posteriori. Cuando caracteriza la concebibilidad primaria (1-concebibilidad) afirma que "es siempre un asunto a priori" e involucra suspender todo conocimiento a posteriori (158). ¿Significa esto que las únicas Oi relevantes para 1-concebir positivamente un mundo-S son aquellas en las que el condicional es a priori? No entiendo muy bien en ese caso cómo podríamos 1-concebir positivamente que algunos cerdos vuelan. Tal parece que tenemos que examinar qué es lo que sabemos a priori de los cerdos, por ejemplo, que son animales de cuatro patas, tal vez. Pero parece que hay poco que sepamos de este modo y no alcanza para construir una descripción que determine un mundo-S. Si este diagnóstico es correcto resultará que a estos efectos es tan difícil concebir positivamente que algunos cerdos vuelan como un enunciado matemático complejo. En otras palabras, se repite contra la concebibilidad positiva de Chalmers la objeción de van Inwagen a la concebibilidad a la Yablo. ¿Qué opinan?

Do you think that there is anything it is like to have a visual experience in general?

2009-07-13T08:56:00.010+02:00

There are different shades of red that you can experience. You can distinguish between RED35 and RED36, two experiences of different shades of red. Both experiences of the two shades of red are more similar, phenomenologically speaking, between them that with regard to RED2.
Furthermore experiences RED35, RED36 and RED2 seem to be more similar that an experience of GREEN21. In general we distinguish between red experiences and green experiences. The phenomenal properties that characterize red experiences are in a sense different from those which characterize green experiences.
Do you think that it is controversial to suppose that red experiences have something phenomenological in common?

The former four experiences are in a sense similar, they are color experiences. They differ in a sense from visual experiences of forms, like a visual experience of a square. But again this experience and an experience of a red object have something in common: they are visual experiences, and in a sense the way they feel is similar.
Do you agree that visual experiences feel somehow similar and that the way that they feel is different from, say, auditory experiences?

Indeterminacy Problem or Fact?

2009-07-07T13:30:00.004+02:00

Recently, Manolo Martínez presented his “A Solution for the Indeterminacy Problem.” I voiced a worry I had some time ago, according to which indeterminacy will be just a fact if whatever it is in the individual that determines reference, fails to determine a particular one within a range of equally natural candidates.

In the discussion with Sònia Roca, however, it seemed to me that he would agree with this but contend that, in a given range of cases in the discussion, one of the candidates was indeed more natural than the alternatives. So reconstructed, the paper will advance a particular elaboration on the relevant notion of naturalness via HPCs as to substantiate the contention. Is this a fair reconstruction?

Phenomenal Properties and Epistemic Access

2009-07-07T06:29:00.004+02:00

Phenomenal properties are properties of mental states. In virtue of a phenomenal property a certain mental state feels somehow, there is something it is like to be in that mental state.
Some philosophers have argued that a mental state M of a subject S can instantiate a phenomenal property P without S realizing (or even being able to realize) that she is feeling anything (phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness in Block's terminology).
I disagree. There is a sense of feeling, that is the sense I am interested in, in which it makes no sense to talk about feeling anything if one does not realize it. In that sense, phenomenal consciousness entails access consciousness.
If we are interested in phenomenal properties and in its naturalization, the discussion is relevant. For imagine that one is interested in a neural correlate of a conscious mental state, or in some empirical evidences relevant for certain theories of consciousness. Is the epistemic access a constitutive part of the phenomenal property?
For instance, blindsighters have been sometimes presented as an objection to representational theories of consciousness. In order to deal with this, representational theorists introduce some further condition for instantiating a phenomenal property besides the representational character (for instance Tye introduces the condition of being available for reasoning and believes -being "poised" in Tye's terminology). But if we accept the distinction between the phenomenal property and the epistemic access, we can say that what is missing in the case of the blidsighter is the epistemic access (poised would not be a necessary condition for consciousness). In that case, I see no pre-theoretical way to decide whether or not a phenomenal property is instantiated.
A further problem would be that, if the process responsible for the instantiation of the phenomenal property and the epistemic access are different, one could fail. Imagine that S is instantiating phenomenal property A, the epistemic access machinery fails (certain neurons misfire) and indicates phenomenal property B. What does S feel? Trilemma:

S feels anything. But this seems to be an ad hoc answer
S feels B. In this case the phenomenal property instantiated plays no role in what S is feeling.
S feels A. In this case S feels A but if she has a believe about what she is feeling this is going to be false. This option seems to go against the widespread intuition that we do have direct access and knowledge of what we are feeling

Option 3 seems not to be acceptable for me. One can fail in categorizing the feeling: for example having a experience A of very cold water and believing that it is really hot. In such a case there is a categorization mistake: experience A is categorized as belonging to experiences of hot water. Nevertheless, it seems to me that I am infallible in knowing what it is like to have experience A when I am undergoing experience A (some kind of indexical knowledge, this feeling)
It seems to me that in virtue of instantiating a phenomenal property I thereby come to know what it is like to undergo the corresponding experience (maybe I cannot remember it 1 msec. later). If this is true, the epistemic access is an intrinsic element of the phenomenal property and there cannot be phenomenal consciousness without access consciouness.

What do you think about the relation between phenomenal properties and the epistemic access?
Thanks

"Discursive Dilemma"

2008-03-26T23:25:00.002+01:00

Today at the LOGOS Colloquium, Stephan Hartmann discussed the so-called “discursive dilemma.” I was convinced by Genoveva Martí that it is not clear how to get a real dilemma from the examples. Suppose a hiring committee agrees to appoint a candidate if but only if s/he is strong both at research and at teaching. One third of them think s/he is, one other third think s/he is strong only at research, and the final third that s/he is strong only at teaching. It seems to me that a collective decision-making mechanism that allows the candidate to be hired in this situation is not the most reasonable one.

Pettit (2001) seems to suggest that, were the candidate not to be hired, the group would suffer from a certain sort of deficiency in “collective rationality”, as the majority think the candidate is strong at research, and the majority think that s/he is strong at teaching. That is true, but it certainly does not follow that the majority think that s/he’s strong both at research and at teaching—actually, the majority think s/he lacks one essential requirement to be appointable. Why should they hire the candidate??

MM Lowe and McCall: two incompatible requisites on sums-at-a-time

2008-03-02T00:06:00.010+01:00

The MM reading group has been reading a paper by Lowe and McCall: “The 3D/4D Controversy: A Storm in a Teacup”. I could not attend the session, but here is a worry that I have about the paper. (Warning: this posting is not self-contained and will not be intelligible for those who have not read the paper. I am sorry about that…)

In order to get the desired result that the 3D and 4D views are equivalent, the authors need “sums-at-times” to satisfy two requisites: (a) sums-at-times are acceptable for endurantists, i.e. they are not additions to the endurantist ontology, they are nothing over and above the enduring particles that the endurantist already accepts (b) Sums-at-times are “timebound”, i.e. they exist at only one time. For any two different times t and t’ in which an object O exists, (O, t) is numerically distinct from (O, t'). (Because of problems with the blogger, I use brackets instead of > and < to represent sums-at-times...In my notation, (O, t)represents the sum of particles that constitute O at t).

The second requisite is necessary for the translation scheme they propose to work. If sums-at-times are not timebound, then something is true of them that is not true of temporal parts (namely, that they exist or may exist at more than one time). This is why, I think, the authors hasten to emphasize that

(O, t) [the sum of particles that constitute O at t] may be understood as a 3D object which exists only at time t and no other time. […] The upshot of this is that the intertranslatability of 3D and 4D descriptions rests ultimately upon entities which can be described indifferently as “instantaneous 4D temporal parts”, or “3D objects which exist at one time only”. (p. 574)

But in ensuring that sums-at-times satisfy (b), the authors compromise (a). Understood as entities that exist at only one time, sums-at-times are genuine additions to the endurantist ontology. And this is so independently of how ontologically promiscuous the endurantist decides to be about other issues (i.e. whether she accepts coincidence, arbitrary composition, etc) while still being endurantist.

Take an example. Suppose that there are two times t and t’ such that Tibbles does not change in its constituent particles from t to t’. Then the set of particles that constitute Tibbles at t is the same set that constitutes it at t’. However, given (b), (Tibbles, t) is not identical to (Tibbles, t’). They are two different entities, one existing only at t and the other only at t’. But why should the endurantist accept the existence of these two numerally distinct things, (Tibbles, t) and (Tibbles, t’)? She accepts the existence of Tibbles, the existence of times, and the existence of enduring particles that constitute Tibbles at different times. Let us assume that she will also accept the existence of sums of these particles. So she will accept the existence of a sum of particles that constitute Tibbles at t, and a sum that constitutes Tibbles at t’. But why should she say that these are two numerically distinct things? After all, they are composed of exactly the same enduring particles. Nothing in the endurantist’s position commits her with the existence of two things here. In fact, the endurantist position can be understood precisely as the negation of the existence of two distinct things in a case like this. So understood, the endurantist view is that there are sums-at-times, but not as many as the perdurantist think there are. Notice that the endurantist can have this view even if she accepts unrestricted mereological composition. The existence of two different sums-at-times in the example above does not follow from accepting arbitrary composition. It would follow from accepting arbitrary decomposition. But this is precisely the doctrine that the endurantist refuses to accept, and what makes her position non-equivalent to perdurantism. .

Against Causal Decision Theory?

2007-12-15T17:28:00.000+01:00

Too bad I missed last session of LOGOS RG on DT, where people discussed Andy Egan's 'Some Counterexamples to Causal Decision Theory'. Did anyone get why exactly CDT predicts that Paul should press the button?

Limitations vs Generality Constraint?

2007-11-29T08:31:00.000+01:00

If I understod it right, in the first part of Pepa’s yesterday seminar Oscar talks about there was an argument from the limitation of discriminative powers of a given perceptual system of representation to the failure of generality constraint. I wasn’t clear however how the argument could succeed.

Suppose the pigeons discriminate between 40 pecks and 50 pecks but fail to discriminate between 48 pecks and 50 pecks, so that are able to think:

(1) 40 pecks is different from 50 pecks.

(2) 40 pecks is different from 48 pecks.

It seems true that due to the limits alluded to the pigeons can not think

(3) 48 pecks is different from 50 pecks

as opposed to

(3#) 50 pecks is different from 50 pecks.

But in order for generality constraint to be put in jeopardy it seems one would need the lack of ability to think (3) (and thus (3#)) period, and nothing about the limitation mentioned seems enough to substantiate this latter contention.

I might be misconstruing something in the situation, can anyone help?

On inference relations and constituents of representations

2007-11-28T18:57:00.000+01:00

Today Pepa Toribio gave a thoughtful and dense talk on nonconceptualism, and the very beginning of it she told us that

"For to contentful mental states to be inferentially related, they ought to have at least one constituent in common"

That puzzled me, because it seems easy to give examples of inferences in which none of the premises share a constituent with the conclusion. Take for example the inference from "b is red" to "There are non-blue things". The inference works because "red things are not blue" is analitically true (though not being logically true, or true in virtue of the sintax alone.) Does anyone else shares my feelings?

St. Petersburg Paradox -Where are you?

2007-11-24T18:31:00.000+01:00

During our last sesion on Decision theory, we were discusing on St. Peterburg paradox.

We, at least partially, agree that there is a paradox even if there is no infinite utilities. I will briefly defend that this position does not resist a simple mathematical analysis.

On the asumption that there are no infinite utilities the St. Peterburg game is perfectly acceptable:
I would bet 2utilities for getting 2utilities if the coin lands heads and 4utilities if the second time that I flip the coin it lands heads again. The game seems to be completelly fair. And so are the following games where:

The fist column represents the maximum price of the game. This would be 2utilities if the coin is flipped only once, 4 if it is flipped at most 2 times, and so on. In general 2 to the power of n where n is the number of times that the coin can as much be flipped.
The second represents the probability of each case.

The third column represents the expected utility (how many utilities should I pay to play the game).

Premium	Probability %	EU	Result
0	50,0000000000	0	-20
2	50,0000000000	1	-18
4	25,0000000000	2	-16
8	12,5000000000	3	-12
16	6,2500000000	4	-4
32	3,1250000000	5	12
64	1,5625000000	6	44
128	0,7812500000	7	108
256	0,3906250000	8	236
512	0,1953125000	9	492
1024	0,0976562500	10	1004
2048	0,0488281250	11	2028
4096	0,0244140625	12	4076
8192	0,0122070313	13	8172
16384	0,0061035156	14	16364
32768	0,0030517578	15	32748
65536	0,0015258789	16	65516
131072	0,0007629395	17	131052
262144	0,0003814697	18	262124
524288	0,0001907349	19	524268
1048576	0,0000953674	20	1048556

For the example assumme that I have a lineal utility function regarding money between 0 and 1million euro (hard to believe but assumme that that is the case) and that the utility of 100M € equals the utility of 1M for me. The function saturates at 1M. (if you are not convince, for 30€ you can earn up to 1billion €, and I think that that is enought to saturate definitely the utility function of all of us).
The fouth column shows the money I would win or lose depending on the result of the game.
If you are having doubts on whether to play the game or not is because the utility of money is not linal for you and therefore: U(1M€) is not equal to 50000*U(20€).

In this case you would pay less money to play the game, but this is completely compatible with decision theory. Think of something wich utility is lineal in this range and you accpet the game (psichological reasons to avoid betting are out of the question) as you clearly see when the game is propossed to win just 4€.
The paradox is expressed in terms of utilities so have to find something which utility is lineal between 0 and 1M.

The real problem arises just in case we consider infinite utilities (no matter whether they are lineal or not). Imagine that more money has always a higher utility, so the utility function of money is a monotonically strictly increasing function in any interval. Then there is a problem, because at the limit the price is infinite...
The expected utility of any lottery involving an infinite price cost infinite no matter what the probability is. This two lotteries has the same cost (infinite):

1,00%	99,00%
0	infinite

99,99%	0,01%
0	infinite

You should prefer the second lottery to all that you have and that is obviously unacceptable. The solution: there are not infinite utilities.

The problem with lower probabilities is just that we are not able to find any utility that satisfies that lottery and therefore it is difficult to find an interpretation of paying 250 utilities to play this lottery.

99,99%->0

0,01%->25000000

But that says absolutely nothing against the decision theory.

The St. Petersburg game is only a problematic if we consider infinite utilities.

C&R Zeman: A Closet Contextualist?

2007-11-23T16:54:00.000+01:00

According to David Lewis (1980), a context is a location (spatiotemporally centered world) where a sentence may be said (but need not contain any utterance nor speaker at the center etc.), and thus has countless features, and an index is an n-tuple of shiftable features of context. Moderate views have it that a sentence s is true at a context c iff s is true at c with respect to the index of that context i_c; and radical relativist views such as MacFarlane's depart from that.

With respect to this framework, one can characterize contextualist versions of moderate relativism endorsing the appearances of sentence s being true at c (wrt i_c) while false at c* (wrt i_c*); and in turn one can distinguish indexical contextualism (having it that this is true in virtue of s having a different content at c than c*) from non-indexical contextualism (having it that s has the same content at c and c* but that determines a different value wrt i_c than wrt i_c*.

Contexts in this sense are very rich. In particular, there is nothing as the epistemic situation (or standard or whathaveyou) of the context. There is that of the speaker at the center of the context (if one), that of the attributee of the utterance at the center of the context (if one), that which is salient in the conversation that takes place near the center of the context (if one), and so on and so forth. As Dan Z points out, this richness of contexts tends to be neglected in some discussions about knowledge attributions, and more sophisticated versions of indexical contextualism would presumably exploit this. (He still thinks that the view suffers from other “quite serious” difficulties so that it is “likely” that it will fail. I’m not convinced, but let’s discuss that in some other occasion.)

As I understand his own positive proposal, he claims that the attributions have the same semantic value across context, but are evaluated differently with respect to different indices of these context—where the epistemic standard of the context that figures as a coordinate in the index need not be that of the subject at the center of the context, nor the attributee, but is the highest (I guess among those that are relevant in the conversation that takes place near the center). But thus his seems to me to be a version of non-indexical contextualism and not radical relativism proper!

Ways of Doing Otherwise?

2007-11-21T22:15:00.000+01:00

Today, at the LOGOS Colloquium, Carlos Moya (València) presented his views on how to defend the principle of of alternate possibilities (PAP) from Frankfurt-like cases, which he published as chapter 2 of his Moral Responsability (Routledge 2006).

In a nutshell, and if I didn't misunderstand his presentation (I haven't read the chapter), the main idea was the following one. John's being responsible for murdering Smith doesn't contradict PAP, for John could have done otherwise after all: he could have merely involuntarily killed Smith.

(Carlos originally stated this in terms of unintentionally killing Smith, but as issued in discussion with Prades, the notion of intentional action in place cannot be merely that of action appropriately caused by beliefs/desires, and Carlos replied he was happy rephrase it in terms of (in)voluntary action.)

I worried, in connection with Jose's, that this seemed to be dangerously close to the following (unsatisfactory, I take it) general way of dispelling any possible counterexample to PAP: if the agent is responsible, s/he could always have done otherwise, for s/he could always have done the "corresponding" thing without being responsible. It was hard for me to see how the sense in which the act of murdering and the act of involuntary killing someone (in the Frankfurt situation) were "different actions" could fail to vindicate that same sense in the latter, trivializing case.

Imagining Scientific Models?

2007-11-15T12:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, at the LOGOS Seminar, Roman presented his views on scientific models (see also Manolo M’s discussion).

I was very sympathetic to Roman’s contention that “going fictionalist” in debates in metaphysics or the philosophy of mathematics of the philosophy of science need not help much—unless, of course, one has an illuminating general theory on fictions, and is in a position to substantiate the claim that the problematic entities are indeed fictions, in the sense of the theory.

This was indeed the aim of Roman’s paper, dwelling upon the “pretense theory.” As he himself acknowledged, there might be general problems with the view—what if the key normative notions employed ultimately make no sense—and specific problems with the intended application to scientific models—what if the sensible generation principles are relatively trivial, and the only truths in fiction are very close to the surface?—. In particular, I worried that there seemed to be a crucial disanalogy between literary works and descriptions of scientific models: although talk about imagination makes perfectly good sense in the former case, it seems to be at best metaphorical in the latter. As Roman seemed to agree in discussion, the relevant kind of act seems to be more that of considering—as opposed to imagining, I would say. But then the worry was that the contrast with the alternative so-called “formal” approaches turn out to be much less clear after all, as also pointed out by Jose.

Roman on fiction and models

2007-11-15T10:22:00.000+01:00

In yesterday's session of the Logos Seminar, Roman Frigg made the interesting suggestion that scientific models -such as ball-and-stick molecular models or simple pendula, with their massless strings and their point masses- should be understood as being similar in kind to literary fictions -such as Sherlock Holmes or Godzilla. Furthermore, he proposed that the best treatment for these is one along the lines of Walton's acts of make-believe.
I had doubts about one of the arguments he presented for treating models as fictions:

(The Semantic Argument) The simple pendulum equations are not true of anything -they would only apply to pendula with a massless string and a point mass, shielded from all forces but a uniform gravitational field, or something like that. Therefore, between the equations and real pendula we must postulate an imaginary something -a scientific model- to which the equations would faithfully applied, if it existed.

In fact, Roman's aim for the talk was to consider the relation between ourselves and the scientific model -relation he spelled out in terms of acts of make-believe- and not the relation between model and world.

But I would have said there is another option to deal with the lack of conformity between the simple pendulum equation and real pendula: the relevant singular terms in the equations do really refer to pendula; it is just that the equations misrepresent them. Actually, they don't misrepresent them that much; this is why the equations are useful. Wouldn't this get rid of models-as-fictions in the case of pendula?
A way to drive this point home, maybe, is to consider a history book in which several things are said about World War II, some of which are false: that Spain sent troops to Germany, maybe. Couldn't we mount an analogue to the Semantic Argument above to the effect that there is a fictional war involved in our understanding of the text?

(The Semantic Argument - WWII version) The sentences in the history book are not true of anything -they would only apply to a war in which Spain did send troops to Germany. Therefore, between the book and the real war we must postulate an imaginary something -a fictional war- to which the sentences would faithfully applied, if it existed.

But we feel no temptation to postulate such a fictional war: it is just that the book misrepresents WWII.

Another question in this connection: does it follow, if Roman is right, that there is a fictional model between ball-and-stick molecular mock-ups and real molecules, one in which atoms are spherical and rigidly bonded to one another? I'm not sure that it follows, but if it does, that is surely less natural than simply say that such a ball-and-stick mock-up truly represents the molecule of, say, cyclohexane, just like a map of the London Tube truly represents the London Tube.

(How) Is the Present Special?

2007-11-08T06:56:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, at the LOGOS Seminar, Sven presented his views on how to account for the intuition that the present is special, taking anti-presentism for granted.

Unfortunately, I’m very unfamiliar with debates on these extremely complicated issues in the philosophy of time—so that for instance it wasn’t clear which was exactly the content of the invoked intuition, nor thus what would qualify as vindicating it, and in particular why it didn’t work the proposal that it consisted in the present time exemplifying the irreducible property of being present. In any case, I worried how Sven proposal in terms of the present times occupying the object NOW ultimately differed from the considered proposal. In discussion, some other people seemed to share this concern. (If I don’t misremember, Sven suggested that his could work without the metaphor of “occupying” that object, by invoking relations of variable temporal distance to an object (which is therefore not a time). But as it issued in discussion with Sebas, it’s not clear that the latter notion is more illuminating than the former.)

On reflection, I also share Manolo M’s other concern: there seems to be as much reason to posit NOW as to posit also TOMORROW, TWO DAYS AGO, and so on. Thus, at each moment, every time occupies one of these “transcendental” positions. The original worry would then reappear: in which sense is NOW special?

Any thoughts?

Teleology and Indeterminacy

2007-11-01T13:06:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, at the LOGOS Seminar, Manolo M presented two ideas for responding to Fodor on teleological/functional solutions to the “Disjunction Problem.”

I haven’t (re-?)read Fodor’s stuff yet, but if I followed correctly, Fodor's general point was that there arguably are pairs of distinct properties such that, nonetheless, there is no fact of the matter as to whether a given mental state has the function of signalling one as opposed to the other. (As Oscar remarked, plausible examples might be harder to come with if a restriction to natural (enough) properties is in place.)

This sounds right. But, as Sebas also worried, it’s not clear in which sense the resulting indeterminacy is not precisely one the defender of the teleological/functional proposal would independently predict and willingly embrace.

Any views?

New e-Discussion Group on Contextualism & Relativism

2007-10-19T15:50:00.000+02:00

In addition to the regular LOGOS Reading Groups, we are planning to run an informal e-discussion group on contextualism and relativism.

Following the format of last year e-RG on meta-metaphysics, the idea would be to have the discussion every two or three weeks here at The bLOGOS, so everybody is welcome to participate, regardless of whether you are sited near Barcelona.

We would be mainly discussing papers by ourselves. It is my pleasure to announce that the first paper to get this started will be Dan Zeman's 'Knowledge Attributions and Relevant Contexts'. New posts discussing this paper are to be expected around 2 November, with titles starting with ‘C&R Zeman.’

As for further e-sessions, I’d like to suggest López de Sa 2007 and Kölbel 2007 exchange (on Kölbel 2004, to which Dan Z also refers). Any other suggestions? Please give them in comments, and add links if available.

DT RG: Carcel Confusion

2007-10-11T17:28:00.000+02:00

This pertains to the reading group on decision theory, but any comments are welcome.
It's my version of the Three Prisoners Paradox. I read about the original paradox years ago in a book about the Monty Hall Problem, and I always assumed that it was created as a variant of this problem. However, Wikipedia recently taught me that it's much older than the MHP, and that it's due to Martin Gardner.
Here goes the story (I assume you know about the Monty Hall Problem; otherwise, read the wikipedia entry first):
Three prisoners, A, B and C, are awaiting their execution. It's known to them that one of them will be pardoned, but part of their punishment is that they may not know who prior to the day of the execution. They are kept in separate cells in different buildings.
One day, as the prison guard comes to check on prisoner A, A begs him to give him a hint concerning his fate. Of course the guard declines, but A keeps begging. At least, A suggests, the guard could tell him the name of only one of the others who will be executed for sure. That way A would still not know whether he will die or live, and the guard wouldn't have disobeyed his orders.
The guard thinks it through and mercifully agrees to give the required information: B will die. A thanks the guard and thinks to himself: "Well, at least I know that my chances to get out alive are 50% now."
So far, so good. Anyone familiar with Monty Hall will see that A is wrong. His chances are still 33%, the guard's revelation has gained him nothing. To draw the analogy to Monty Hall, he should switch fates with C if only he could. If we, the audience, were the type of people who bet on people's lives and deaths, we should put our money on C's staying alive.
That's the Three Prisoners Paradox as I remember reading it in the book. Now my appendix:
The guard passes by the cell of poor B, who is sound asleep, and finally comes to C. Here, a similar scene as before unfolds. C implores the guard to tell him something about his situation. The guard recalls his talk with A, goes through the reasoning once again to make sure he's not disobeying his orders, and tells C that B is going to die. "Whoopy!", thinks C, "So my chances to survive are 50%!!" But of course we know that this is false, his chances are 33%.
To sum up, we have A at a survival-chance of 33%, doomed B at 0% and C at 33% as well. But that seems a bit odd...
I've been puzzled by this for a long time, and I've asked a bunch of people and received a bunch of interesting and interestingly different answers. I think I know what's wrong, but I'm never quite sure (about 66% most of the time), so I await clarification(s)!

CFP: LOGOS Conference on Meta-Metaphysics

2007-07-20T02:28:00.000+02:00

LOGOS Conference on Meta-Metaphysics
Barcelona , 19-21 June 2008

First Call for Papers

Do numbers, sets, and other abstract entities, exist? Does mereological composition ever occur? Does it always occur? How do objects persist through time? In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the status of certain traditional debates in metaphysics such as these. Some think that some of these turn out to be genuine disputes but of a semantic or conceptual character. Some think that some of these turn out to be pseudo-disputes that should be just dismissed. (Some others think, of course, that the disputes are indeed genuine, but not of a semantic or conceptual character.) Reflection of these issues promises to shed light on the nature of philosophical inquiry in general.

LOGOS—Grup de Recerca en Lògica, Llenguatge i Cognició is organizing a conference on meta-metaphysics. Invited and submitted papers will be made available to participants one month before the conference. Participants are expected to read them in advance, as there will be no presentation of them during the conference. Sessions will start with a critical commentary (lasting 20 minutes at most), followed by a response by the author(s) (lasting 10 minutes at most) and a general open discussion period.

Proposals to participate as a speaker and/or as a commentator should be sent by e-mail to logos@pcb.ub.es by 1 April 2008. Full papers in suitable form for blind refereeing should be submitted in order to participate as a speaker, and a short CV is to be supplied as to participate as a commentator. We expect to notify accepted proposals within four weeks of the deadline.

Participants other than invited speakers will have to rely on their own institutions to defray the cost of travel and accommodation.

Confirmed Invited Speakers:

John Hawthorne (Oxford )
Amie Thomasson (Miami)
Stephen Yablo (MIT)

Organizing Committee:

Manuel García-Carpintero (Barcelona)
Dan López de Sa (NYU/St Andrews)
Pablo Rychter (Barcelona)

Scientific Committee:

Fabrice Correia (Rovira i Virgili)
Manuel García-Carpintero (Barcelona)
John Hawthorne (Oxford)
Max Kölbel (Birmingham)
Dan López de Sa (NYU/St Andrews)
Sven Rosenkranz (Barcelona/St Andrews)
Pablo Rychter (Barcelona)
Amie Thomasson (Miami)
Gabriel Uzquiano (Oxford)
Timothy Williamson (Oxford)
Stephen Yablo (MIT)

Further information:

logos@pcb.ub.es
www.ub.edu/grc_logos

Power-points to the point

2007-07-14T00:50:00.000+02:00

This video reminds me some power-point presentations I've recently seen. Enjoy!

Nussbaum on India

2007-05-20T18:16:00.000+02:00

Martha Nussbaum has written a surprisingly well-informed and insightful essay on the rise of fascism in India. Surprising, that is, for someone like me who isn't following her work very closely; she has just published a whole book about this issue. You have to give it to her, her scope is impressive.
Reading through the piece brought back memories of some downright scary discussions about this guy that I had in India. There is not much that is more distressing to a German than to be congratulated for this part of his country's history.
In case you're neither interested in Martha, Adolf nor India, read it for the sake of the good point she makes against over-pragmatically inclined educational systems.

MetaMetaphysics e-Reading Group: next session

2007-05-17T15:57:00.000+02:00

Logos’ e-reading group on MetaMetaphysics is resuming, after a short period of inactivity. During the next e-session we will discuss “Fundamental and derivative truths”, a work in progress by Robbie Williams, available here. The e-session will start around May 30, here in the bLOGOS. Posts belonging to this session should be tilted “MM Williams: your title”

UPDATE: This has been postponed until the beginning of next semester.

Call for Intuitions

2007-05-13T19:00:00.000+02:00

This came up the other day when I was talking with Brenda Laca over at the UAB. Consider:

We had lunch at twelve.

I agree (tentatively) with Prof. Laca that this means, as a matter of semantics, that the actual eating started at twelve. Thus it would be wrong to assert this sentence if the lunch went from eleven to one; in that case the right thing to say would be

We were having lunch at twelve.

Still, it seems to me that even in these circumstances, it wouldn't be right to contest the first assertion, at least not by saying something like

No you didn't!

If anyone shares these intuitions or has different ones, I'd be grateful to read about them!

Contexts and their Centers

2007-05-11T18:41:00.000+02:00

According to David Lewis (1980), in order to capture how the truth of a sentence depends on features of contexts and its contribution to the value of longer sentences in which it is embedded, we need a semantically basic two-dimensional relation of a sentence s being true at a context c at an index i. A context is a location—time, place, and possible world, or centered world for short—where a sentence might be said. It has countless features, determined by the character of the location. An index is an n-tuple of features of context, but not necessarily features that go together in any possible context. Thus an index might consist of a speaker, a time before his birth, a world where he never lived at all, and so on. The coordinates of an index are features that can be shifted independently, unlike those of a context, and are used to systematize the contribution of sentences embedded under sentence operators, such as ‘possibly’ or, more controversially, ‘somewhen,’ ‘strictly speaking,’ and so on. Given a context c, however, there is the index of the context, i_c: that index having coordinates that match the appropriate features of c. Hence the basic two-dimensional relation can be abbreviated in this special case: sentence s is true at context c iff s is true at context c at index i_c.

According to David Chalmers (2006), there is a contextual understanding and an epistemic understanding of two-dimensional semantics. Although I am not familiar with the details of “this monster paper” (so described by his author ;-{)}), it seems to me clear that the Lewisian should be counted among the “contextual understanding” approaches, if any does: “the first dimension represents possible contexts of utterance, and the intension involved in the first dependence represents the context-dependence of an expression’s extension” (Chalmers 2006, p. 65) (This is not to say that it cannot be count as also being among the “epistemic understanding” approaches, but never mind this now.)

Notice, however, that Lewis’s contexts are worlds centered at spatiotemporal points, which may or may not be occupied by linguistic tokens, utterances thereof, thoughts, or whathaveyou. Thus, for Lewis, contexts are locations where a sentence might be uttered, but not necessarily locations which contain any utterance of any sentence. (Thus the models for contexts offered in (Chalmers 2006, p. 66) are not appropriate in general.)

One of the two general problems David Chalmers identifies against the contextual understanding of two-dimensional semantics concerns precisely the need to evaluate sentences such as ‘Language exists’ as false with respect to language-free contexts. Thus it seems to me to be directed only against particular versions of the contextual understanding which, unlike Lewis’s, restrict themselves to contexts with specific linguistic/mental centers.

Am I wrong? And anyway is there any reason why, on the contextual understanding, one should so restrict the contexts, against Lewis?

(I think Oscar will be arguing for such a restriction at the LOGOS Seminar. Maybe he’ll also share his reasons here…)

MM Chalmers: Schaffer on Furnishing Functions

2007-05-01T20:00:00.000+02:00

In a part of ‘Ontological Anti-Realism’ which I didn’t comment on (§§8-11), David Chalmers considers an objection against anti-realism based on the idea that the absolute unrestricted quantifier has an objective, determinate semantic value. I don’t want to assess his response to the objection here (see related discussion here, and references there).

In order to analyse existence assertions, however, he tentatively introduces the notion of a furnished world—an ordered pair of a world and a domain—and a furnishing function—a mapping from worlds to domains—(see the end of §8).

In his comments to the paper, Jonathan Schaffer objects:

The argument for heavyweight realism about fundamental structure: Furnishing functions are maps from a world to a domain. But a function is a map from one structure (‘the input’) to another (‘the output’). One cannot have a well-defined function without there being some articulated structure to the input. In particular we must be able to specify the arguments of the function. Any function is either complete or partial. It is either injective or not. It is either surjective or not. None of these classifications would make sense unless the input (‘the world’) already comes with some fundamental articulated structure inbuilt, to feed into the function. … I conclude that the framework that Chalmers actually supplies is at least half-realist, in the sense that it presupposes heavyweight realism about fundamental structure. (pp. 2-3)

I am probably missing something here. For I understood that a furnishing function was a map from the class of worlds to the class of domains, whose arguments were precisely just worlds. Thus I don’t see why there being such mappings requires in any sense any “articulated structure” in the items to which the function is applied. Can anyone help?

Online Graphical Dictionary

2007-05-01T16:50:00.000+02:00

http://www.visuwords.com/. Interesting ;-{)}!

(Thanks to E.B. for the link.)

2nd On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC2)

2007-04-30T16:47:00.000+02:00

...is approaching. Dates: May 14-May 27, 2007; venue: here.

Comesaña on Whether There Could Be Exactly Two Things

2007-04-24T15:53:00.000+02:00

(X-posted at GAF.)

I just read Juan Comesaña’s ‘Could There Be Exactly Two Things?,’ forthcoming in Synthèse. As Comesaña reminds us, Universalism—the view that whenever there are some things, there is something which is a sum of them—is obviously at odds with the idea that there could be exactly two things (indeed, incompatible with that idea given minimal further assumptions).

Comesaña contends (i) that we intuit that there could be exactly two things; and (ii) that this tells against Universalism. I have some doubts about (ii), and I found the discussion of it at the last two paragraphs of the paper less than completely satisfying. But, more importantly, I have not found anything in support of the assertion of the claim in (i). Everybody would agree that there are scenarios such that, in most ordinary contexts, to describe them with ‘There are exactly two things’ would be true (or true enough). Universalists typically contend, however, that this is compatible there being strictly speaking more than two things there, and familiarly invoke contextual quantifier domain restriction, in a rule-governed, independently motivated manner, or so she argues. Maybe there is something defective in this move by Universalist, but Comesaña does not say. And in the absence of this, (i) seems to me to be ungrounded, and thus unsuitable for a case against Universalism.

What do people think?

Analytic Universalism

2007-03-27T23:01:00.000+02:00

(X-posted at bleb.)

I've put toghether in the form of a very brief note the considerations against the considerations against the view I propose to call Analytic Universalism, from discussions here, here, and here. Hopefully I could get some feedback from the participants at the INPC 2007 conference on metametaphysics.

Comments very welcome!!!

MM Chalmers: On Another MetaMetaphysical Taxonomy

2007-03-06T14:47:00.000+01:00

As I understand it, David Chalmers’ ‘Ontological Anti-Realism’ has two main aims: first to explore the geography of positions in metametaphysics (§§2&5-6), and then to offer a consideration in favour of the view he labels ‘ontological anti-realism’ vis-à-vis the view he labels ‘lightweight ontological realism’ (§7). I’ve found the latter less than compelling: I hope to post on it soon, but the main source of concern is already discussed at bleb. Here I want to voice some worries about the former, taxonomical part.

According to him, (ontological) realism holds, while (ontological) anti-realism denies, that the relevant “ontological existence assertions” have a determinate and objective truth-value. Non-surprisingly, for an assertion to have a determinate truth-value is for it to be true or false. Quite more surprisingly, for an assertion to have an objective truth-value is for its truth-value not to depend on features of the context of utterance—nor of that of assessment, if this other sort of dependence ultimately makes sense. (This is surprising, for it makes the truth-value of my utterance of ‘I weight (now, here) exactly 193#’ non-objective! (See related discussion of this by Carrie Jenkins and comments at TAR.)

What is it that makes an assertion—an utterance of a declarative sentence—ontological as opposed to ordinary is, however, much trickier. I reckon that I found his gloss of the distinction—in terms of the “correctness” (truth, or otherwise) of the assertions being or not “obviously” “sensitive” to “ontological matters”—less than fully satisfactory. He himself admits that his gloss is disputable, but claims the distinction itself to be a natural (enough) one. As argued by Jonathan Schaffer (comments posted at FoC), however, the examples only seem to motivate the view that in some contexts the domain of quantifiers is restricted—in a way that is relevant for accounting for intuitions as to which assertions are regarded as conversationally appropriate (in those contexts), even if (perhaps) less than, strictly speaking, true. In any case, and as JS also emphasizes, the taxonomy only seems to require the notion of “ontological” existence assertions, or existence assertions hereafter. Thus realism holds, while antirealism denies, that the relevant existence assertions are true or false, regardless of the context(s).

A crucial subdivision within realism concerns the heavyweight vs lightweight varieties thereof. It is here that I have my main worry. Officially, the latter but not the former holds that the (determinate, objective) truth-values are nevertheless “shallow” or “lightweight.” Elsewhere, however, what seems relevant is whether they are somehow answerable to conceptual analysis. The two kinds of distinctions would not be in tension if considerations of ‘analyticity’ and the like were always “shallow” or “lightweight,” what seems far from being correct!

To illustrate, consider the view that I propose to label analytical universalism, having it that

Whenever there are two things there is something which is a sum of them.

has the same relevant form as and shares the relevant logico-semantic status with

Whenever something is a proper part of another, there is something that is part of the latter but not of the former.

but that establishing that this is so requires a great amount of substantive, everything but trivial, philosophizing (“from the armchair,” as it were). (As he observes, David Lewis might have been one such analytical universalist; I also have sympathies for this view.) A defender of this view would not regard the (genuine) dispute between herself and her opponents as semantic (or “terminological”)—although it is a matter of (substantive, non-trivial) conceptual analysis to settle which view is the correct one. Now she would be counted as a heavyweight realist, according to the letter of the official characterization, but as a lightweight one according to the unofficial one (which seems to be the one in place elsewhere, see for instance footnote 13 on Lewis).

Next MM: Chalmers

2007-02-07T02:55:00.000+01:00

The next session of the Meta-Metaphysics e-Reading Group will be on David Chalmers’ ‘Ontological Anti-Realism.’ Posts on the paper are to be expected in one or two weeks, following the usual convention—i.e. with titles starting with ‘MM Chalmers.’ (There is already discussion of this paper in the blogosphere: check here, here, here, and here.)

MM Hawthorne: more doubts

2007-02-04T16:38:00.000+01:00

Like Marta, I have also had a very hard time trying to understand the paper, and I think I have not succeeded. What I found specially difficult to understand was the status of the views attributed to the Convention Lover and the Plenitude Lover. They are initially presented as two METAontological views, i.e. two second-order views about first-order ontological disputes. More specifically, the views are presented as alternative justifications for a dismissivist attitude (to employ here the term we have been using) about the first-order dispute. As Hawthorne says, “many of us are inclined toward reconciliation, unable to take very seriously the thought that one of the communities is ontologically more attuned than the other. But there are different ways of justifying such an attitude. [the Convention Lover’s and the Plenitude Lover’s]”

But what are the first-order disputes about which we should be dismissivists, according to both the Convention Lover and the Plenitude Lover? Hawthorne considers two disputes as a way of example: the dispute over how many clocks are involved in his opening story and the dispute between Gabriel and Michael about how many things there are in their world. Now, the problem I have is this: it seems to me that whereas the Plenitude Lover can justify a dismissivist attitude towards the first of these two disputes, it cannot justify such an attitude with respect to the second dispute. In the second case, according to the Plenitude Lover, Gabriel is just wrong. The Plenitude Lover’s view implies a substantive thesis about the first order dispute, namely that there actually are three things in Gabriel and Michael’s world. So Plenitude does not afford for any reconciliation between the first-order views. It may be suggested that reconciliation is achieved by the fact that, given Plenitude, Gabriel’s claims can be understood as about a restricted sub-domain of the plenitudeous universal domain (i.e. as Timid Gabriel). But then, Gabriel’s claims are not a good analogue of the ontologist claim’s, which cannot be understood as about a restricted domain. The context in which the ontologist’s claims are made (the ontology classroom) is such that there is no sensible restrictions in the quantifiers’ domain. So, for instance, when the nihilist says that there are no tables, his claim cannot be sensibly understood as being about the restricted sub-domain of simples. And the same happens with Gabriel’s claims, if this toy example is intended to illustrate the essentials of a real ontological dispute. (In other words, I do not see how Gabriel could be understood as Timid Gabriel, if the example is intended to illustrate a real ontological dispute).

So, I guess my doubt is this: can Hawthorne be understood as making the point that Plenitude is a particular substantive view about “fundamental ontology” (to use Sider’s term) that helps to justify a dismissivist attitude toward some other metaphysical debates (like those about the nature of clocks)? So understood, Hawthorne’s general position is more or less like Sider’s in the text we have discussed before.

Another related point that I found difficult to understand is this: Hawthorne presents Sider’s “argument from eligibility” as an argument for understanding Gabriel as quantifying unrestrictedly rather than restrictedly (from the perspective of the Plenitude Lover). The argument would be that the universal unrestricted domain gives “existence” a more eligible meaning than any restricted sub-domain. (Hawthorne thinks this argument is not completely satisfying and goes on to give an alternative justification for understanding Gabriel as quantifying unrestrictedly). But as I understood Sider, the argument from eligibility was intended to decide among candidate meanings for a quantifer that is univocaly unrestricted. The candidate meanings are such that each of them gives “existence” a domain that is somehow all-inclusive and therefore not a subdomain of the other. In other words, Sider’s original argument is not intended to make a point of the sort that Hawthorne makes here, namely that Gabriel should be understood as Bold rather than Timid. This relates with my previous doubt. I seems to me that in a real ontological debates (such as universalism vs nihilism), each party intends to be speaking unrestrictedly about everything. When the nihilist says that there are no tables, he cannot sensibly be understood as a Timid nihilist who is talking only about simples. And it seems to me that this (i.e. that the nihilist is not being Timid) is not the point that the argument from eligibility is intended to make.

MM Hawthorne: doubts, doubts, doubts...

2007-01-28T15:37:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

I have to confess that I have had a lot of difficulties to understand the text. Now, I have a lot of doubts. I expound them here. I guess I have not enough background to follow the discussion; my fault, sorry.

DOUBT 1:

At a certain point Hawthorne asks: wouldn’t it be more charitable to interpret allegedly Bold Gabriel as Timid Gabriel? And he answers: Gabriel’s commitment to Ref. puts considerable pressure on us to interpret him as Bold.

Ref. Sentences of the form ‘That is F’ as uttered by Michael, are true only if Michael refers to something by ‘that’.

My doubt: If we accept that one can elaborate a semantic theory about a foreign language (in the relevant sense of foreign language that is in play here), what are the restrictions in our theorizing? For example, why cannot I use something like Ref* instead of Ref:

Ref*. Sentences of the form ‘That is F’ as uttered by Michael are true only if Michael refers to something-on-Michaels-domain-of-objects by ‘that’.

This way here there would be no reason to interpret allegedly Bold Gabriel as Bold Gabriel and not as Timid Gabriel.

DOUBT 2:

Hawthorne describes his Convention Lover as saying that: when thoughts were conceived of hyperintensionally, neither Gabriel nor Michael could express the thoughts of the other on account of the fact that the quantifiers of each were semantically alien to the other.
This leads to the non-acceptance of Ref 2. by a Convention Lover.
Ref 2. If Gabriel utters a truth by a sentence of the form ‘That is F’ then E(m)x(m) (‘that’ refers to x(m))
Doubt: But even if in general the Convention Lover might say this kind of things I do not see why in the specific case Hawthorne postulates he cannot say that Michael will be able to express the thoughts of the other because Gabriel’s language seems to be just a sublanguage of Michael’s language; a restriction of it.

DOUBT 3:
Hawthorne says that: The Convention Lover will happily speak of the truth and falsity of sentences with superficially more restrictive ontologies. But she will not use the familiar kinds of apparatus to describe how those sentences get to be true; she will not use the concepts of domain, reference, extension, property, and so on in this connection. One normally thinks of the concept of sentential truth as forming part of a family, linked integrally to such concepts as reference, being true of, and so on. Retain the family and one will inevitably favour the Plenitude Lover over the Convention Lover.
Doubt: But then, it seems like HaWthorne has chosen the Convention Lover easy to fight with. What are his reasons not to choose a Convention Lover of the kind that defends there is no transcendent truth predicate (he says Quine and Carnap were of that sort.)

DOUBT 4:

Hawthorne says: Suppose we take the Convention Lover is speaking a language in which she is right to say of the central claims of her mereology –formulated in her language- that they are analytic. How would she then be situated vis-à-vis the Plenitude Lover?
And he adds: Let us suppose that the Plenitude Lover is speaking a language in which quantifiers and variables are deployed in such a way that the central tenets of his mereological theorizing are neither analytically true nor analytically false.
Doubt: it is my fault, but I have the following basic doubt: if one is a Plenitude Lover, is there some reason not to claim that the central tenets of mereology are analytic?

Is it possible to have two dossiers with exactly the same information?

2007-01-07T14:21:00.000+01:00

This is the question that raised a bitter discussion in the last session of the reading group on propositional attitudes. We were reading Kripke’s (1979) A puzzle about belief, and we end up talking about the antidescriptivist argument in pp. 260-2. According to Kripke: “The puzzle can arise even if Pierre associates exactly the same identifying properties with both names” (p. 260). Now, this is hardly convincing for a modern description, someone who would accept a version of metalinguistic causal descriptivism (the reason being that the identifying properties for a name will contain the name itself; for a name N we will always associate the property of being the bearer of N.)

The discussion began when someone conceded that it’s possible something close to that: that it’s possible to associate to a given proper name two mental dossiers with the same information. Part of what’s at stake here is what a dossier is, and I don’t want to start begging the question in my favour. But what I can say is that the dossier for a given proper name comprises the information we associate to that name and that we have more than one dossier for those proper names we use to refer to more than one object (like ‘Aristotle’.)

So is it possible to find examples of a proper name with two dossiers containing the same data about the referent? Manuel Perez Otero came up with one of the best examples. Let suppose that 20 years ago you hear about a Brazilian football player called ‘Socrates’ and about a physician football player with the same name. They happen to be the same person, and so we got a case in which there are two dossiers for the same name and person. Later you forget some of these things; some information is eliminated from these two dossiers. You forget that the first ‘Socrates’ was Brazilian and that the second one was a physician. Now, do we still have two dossiers?

My answer is that none. After we forget those things we just believe that there were two football players called ‘Socrates’ and we cannot meaningfully say anything about none of them. We cannot say ‘Socrates was a football player’ because we just belief that there were to Socrates and we don’t know anything that would possibly distinguish one from the other. This would have been different if at the beginning we just had one dossier…

This answer makes perfect sense if you treat dossiers as individuated by the information they contain. A dossier will be just a set of beliefs that are believed to be by the subject about the same object. But, is it possible, for those who defend that we still have two dossiers, to provide a plausible elucidation of the notion of dossier that would render their claims true?

The nature of possibilia in Peacocke’s (2002) Principles for Possibilia

2006-12-22T10:41:00.000+01:00

In the reading group on modality we discussed about Peacocke’s (2002) Principles for Possibilia, but we couldn’t finish the discussion about Peacocke’s ontological commitment to possibilia.

According to Sonia’s interpretation, Peacocke is committed with objects (possibilia) that are contingently non concrete (they are not concrete, but they could have been concrete.) So, a possibile exists in a possible world just in case that possible world involves certain non concrete object. That possible world would involve a singular Russellian proposition containing that object.

According to my interpretation (which corresponds to the theory that anyway I would like to favor), the principle-based account wasn’t committed with such mysterious entities. That a possibile exists in a possible world simply means that the existential quantification of its individuating condition holds in that world. So, a possibile exists in a possible world just in case that world involves the existential proposition that there’s something satisfying certain property (certain individuation-condition). But this world won’t involve the singular Russellian proposition that certain (non actual) object satisfies that property.

Now I’m not so confident about this interpretation, because in pp. 501-2 he seems to hold that he is not trying to resolve this issue. In any case, it would be interesting if someone could provide more textual evidence and/or an opinion about this issue.

MM Sider (and Bennett): Whether 'exist' admits of precisifications

2006-12-19T11:19:00.000+01:00

I would like to object to Sider’s claim (with which Dan appears to agree) that “questions of fundamental ontology … are not susceptible to the non-fact-of-the-matter argument since there are no multiple candidates for ‘exists’ to mean” (206); the standpoint from which I make the objection has some connections with the Carnapian view of existence, but they also differ significantly. I would object on a similar basis to Sider’s argument for 4-D in “Against Vague Existence,” Philosophical Studies 114, 142-144.

Sider assumes that there is a non-arbitrary meaning for the logical expression ‘there is’ or its formal counterpart ‘∃’ – non-arbitrary unlike the alleged meaning he envisages (204) on which it has to do with what Nelson Goodman says – such that it ranges “unrestrictedly over absolute everything, except perhaps non-“concrete” things” (204). He also thinks that non-arbitrary meanings such as this for the more basic logical constants are determined in part by eligibility, given the “existence of logical joints in reality” (205). I am happy to grant all of this (although later I will come back to discuss to what extent one should grant the latter assumption).

We have the practice of, and the freedom for, ascribing new “temporary” meanings to expressions with specific literal meanings, under certain constraints. This is what we do when we convey implicatures, and (perhaps just a particular case of the former) when we produce new metaphors. We apply this freedom to expressions whose literal meaning is fundamentally determined by eligibility, such as natural kind terms. Thus, perhaps ‘to swallow’ has a basic meaning such that it refers to natural events; but nothing stands in our way to use it “temporarily” for what ATMs sometimes do with our credit cards. I see no reason why we cannot do the same with more “abstract” or “formal” expressions, like the apparatus of reference – the quantifiers, the referential expressions which may occupy the “positions” in logical form “occupied” by the variables they bind, the identity sign. To provide a philosophical account of how this is implemented, we would need at the very least an account of how those “temporary” meanings are created, and one of what exactly is the literal meaning of the referential apparatus (even if Sider is right about the role of eligibility considerations, there might well be more to it, such as its cognitive and inferential role). But we do not need such accounts to accept the possibility of extending the practice to such a case.

A plausible case in which this applies to the apparatus of reference, granting Sider’s assumptions, is in my view that of explicit reference to, quantification over, and identification of, fictional characters; given a sufficiently elaborated philosophical account of the kind envisaged in the previous paragraph, we could develop along these lines a figurative view of fictional characters, close, I think, to views put forward by Stephen Yablo for abstract entities.

Now, a complication for Sider’s claim results from the fact that “temporary” meanings such as the metaphorical meaning for ‘to swallow’ turn easily into standard, conventional meanings. It is no easy matter to contend that afterwards they are still not “literal”, even if the meanings are related (so that the resulting ambiguity is not like the one in ‘bank’). Obviously, the figurativist about fictional characters I have envisaged would acknowledge that the “extended use” of the referential apparatus he posits is a fully standardized one.

Let us now apply this to Sider’s discussion. Here are three different candidates for ‘exists’/’there is’ to mean, granting his assumptions: (i) the nihilist is right about an “ontologically fundamental” core given solely by the eligibility considerations Sider mentions, and a figurative account along the sketched lines applies to the use of the referential apparatus that both the chaste endurantist and the friend of 4-D invoke. (ii) it is the chaste endurantist who is right about the core. (iii) it is the friend of 4-D who is right. Now, one could think that the availability of these candidates does not contradict Sider’s claims, such as those quoted at the beginning, because it will still be the case that “eligibility” considerations as a matter of fact select one of the candidates, no matter what it is and independently of whether or not we can come to know what their verdict is. But I think this would be to quick; it is here that I need to go back to this assumption I said before I was granting to Sider.

Eligibility considerations, as pointed out by Sider, have to do with sensible replies to Putnam’s “model-theoretic” argument, and similar arguments with an anti-realist basis for the indeterminacy of reference, translation or meaning. They come to the fact that causal-explanatory relations between language use and the objective extra-linguistic world by themselves contribute to determine meaning, independently of whether or not they are part of our linguistically stated beliefs. But they should be applied with care, and holistically. To go back to the analogy I have been repeatedly using, perhaps they can be invoked to argue that expressions such as ‘to put’, ‘to walk’, ‘to swallow’, ‘on’, ‘in’, etc., have, among their equally standard/conventional meanings, an “ontologically fundamental” core (the “more physical” meanings) distinct from more “figurative” ones; although it is not clear how exactly they do.

Now, as I said I am prepared to grant that the objective world comes equipped with “logical” or “formal” features, contributing as part of the global eligibility considerations to determining the correct semantics for a given language or representational system. But given the unclarity concerning their nature, and even more about how exactly they intervene in the global eligibility considerations, I do not find at all out of the question that neither facts about linguistic use, not facts about eligibility properly understood in this global way, give any verdict on the three meanings envisaged before for ‘exists’. In any case, I think the model I have sketched provides a conceptually coherent possibility that suffices by itself to refute Sider’s claims quoted at the beginning, rejecting a “dismissive” attitude (to use Bennett’s term) towards questions of fundamental ontology, in Sider’s own terms.

This discussion has, I think, consequences for the Bennett’s paper. I guess the form of dismissivism I envisage here is, in her taxonomy, a form of semanticism; although the view that there is no fact of the matter whether, say, the 4-D position is just a legitimate figurative extension of the referential apparatus, or is rather rendered correct by pure eligibility considerations applies to the natural kind existence, sounds also close to her “anti-realism”. I share with others that posted before on this blog the concerns about her objections to the analyticity of existentially committing claims. My main concern is whether there is room for a distinction between real believers and hermeneutic nihilists.

MM Sider: question about different sorts of dependencies

2006-12-18T10:35:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

I have a doubt I would like to discuss:
Sider says that 'whether multiple candidate meanings for talk of personal identity exist, and what they are like , depend on what the true ontology of persistence turns out to be'. I know this is an example but I guess Sider would say the same for the other cases.
So, in Sider's view, the true ontology of persistence (of persons, too) determines whether multiple candidate meanings for 'person' exist and what they are like.
But, on the other hand, one would say that what the true ontology of persistence (of persons, too) is depends on our semantic intuitions about, for example, persons, or, at least, that to respect these intutions is a point in favour of competing theories.
But then the position seems to be quite unstable.
What do you think about that?

Manolo P-O on Williamson on Possibilia

2006-12-16T18:30:00.000+01:00

Manolo P-O’s reply to Williamson’s argument for the validity of the Barcan Formula (BF) in his contribution to the LOGOS Seminar last Wednesday appears to depend on taking a sort of instrumentalistic attitude deflating the ontological commitments incurred in building an account of relations of logical consequence (in his language L4). However, he grants that (i) L4 does have explanatory commitments, in that it is intended to account for consequence relations among modal statements. Here I would like to raise some concerns that, prima facie, (i) is inconsistent with (ii) Manolo’s rejection of the validity of BF, together with (iii) his crucial “material” contention in section 7, that there are objects not in the domain of D(w*). Let me elaborate.

(i) Firstly, consider Manolo’s analogy with the first-order case (section 4). Granted that “there is a model with respect to which Socrates is human” is a very misleading way of putting the L4 way of stating the non-validity of ‘Socrates is human’. However, unconstrained talk of functions and interpretations will not do to properly reflect the explanatory commitments of the relevant L4 statements. For, appealing to that unconstrained talk, we could also establish that ‘Socrates is identical to himself’ is not valid. The functions and models of which we talk in L4 must be restricted by a correct theory capturing that, whatever it is, in virtue of which some statements and arguments are first-order valid and some others are not. According to many, this means that they must preserve the meanings of the first-order “logical constants”; in the case of ‘Socrates is human’, the semantic categories to which ‘Socrates’ and ‘is human’ belong, i.e., that they must be assigned, respectively, object-like meanings and monadic-property-like meanings. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, when we move to the modal case; and here we must assume that the modal operators, ‘possibly’ and ‘necessarily’, count among the logical constants.

(ii) Now, Manolo rejects BF, i.e., he thinks that while, e.g., ‘it is possible that there is an object that LW fathered’ is true, ‘there is an object such that it is possible that LW fathered him’ is false; while (iii) he accepts that there are objects not in the domain of D(w*), WHICH ARE PRECISELY THOSE WE NEED AS WITNESSES for the non-validity of BF, i.e., for ascriptions of truth and falsity exactly like the previous ones. Thus, (*) THERE IS an object that contributes to making ‘it is possible that there is an object that LW fathered’ is true. My main concern is now this: Given the explanatory commitments granted for L4 in (i), how is it that (*) is consistent with counting ‘there is an object such that it is possible that LW fathered him’ as false? Given those explanatory commitments (particularly, that of respecting the meanings that the modal operators like ‘possibly’ do have), how is it that (*) does not commit us to the existence of a-possible-entity-fathered-by-LW? But this appears to be to grant that ‘there is an object such that it is possible that LW fathered him’ is, after all, true.

I think that M P-O needs to say more about the commitments and lack thereof derived from the explanatory endevours associated to L4; merely gesturing towards a distinction between “structural” and “material” issues is not enough for a reply to Williamson’s argument for possibilia.

MM Sider: The Taxonomy of Positions

2006-12-13T16:26:00.000+01:00

As I understand it, I very much agree with the taxonomical part in Ted Sider's ‘Criteria of Personal Identity and the Limits of Conceptual Analysis.’ Actually, as I understand it, his fits nicely with the three-fold classification I’ve been suggesting in previous posts ;-)! Let me elaborate.

On the one hand there are genuine semantic disputes, where participants dispute as to whether which is the correct analysis of a given target term or concept (of the sort of Karen’s martini case we have already discussed here). These are cases “under the scope of conceptual analysis” where premise 2 fails (see p. 201): “use” fits one of the proposal better than the alternatives.

On the other hand there are merely apparent disputes, in a certain sense to be dismissed—what Siders calls ‘no-fact-of-the-matter’ cases. He seems to characterize them as cases where there is there is semantic indecision between the alternatives: nothing in “use” (nor in the “eligibility” of the options) settles one option as the semantic right one. I think I agree that this is a sufficient condition for (true) “dismissivism” (actually, something like this seems what is argued in Sidelle 2001), I am curious about whether it is also necessary.

Finally, there are genuine metaphysical disputes, where none of the former applies (and I side with him against Karen that composition provides a nice example.)

Sider illustrates this with the case of ‘person.’ Let ‘person*’ be the entities individuated by psychological conditions, and ‘person#’ be the entities individuated by the bodily conditions. Every (relevant) disputant would agree that a description in terms of persons* and persons# is complete with respect to which (relevant) facts there are. The remaining issue is how there are to be described in terms of the older ‘person.’ If there is a semantic fact of the matter, then the dispute is genuine, though semantic. Otherwise, the dispute turns out not to be genuine after all, and all subsequent discussion should, I guess, be dismissed. Sider thinks the latter is the case, I tend to think that the former seems more plausible (see discussion in section 4), but this is another matter.

MM Sider: what kind of dismissivism is this?

2006-12-13T03:02:00.000+01:00

Ok. It seems that I will open our second session of the Logos’ e-reading group on MetaMetaphysics. The text to be discussed is Sider’s “Criteria of personal identity and the limits of conceptual analysis”. In this paper, Sider tentatively defends the view that “there is no fact of the matter” as to which criterion of personal identity is right ---i.e. a ‘dismissivist’ position about this issue, to borrow a term from Bennett’s paper previously discussed here. However, the main aim of Sider’s paper is not to defend the dismissivist claim about personal identity but rather to clarify with the help of this example which form a dismissivist argument could have (sections 1-6) and argue that this kind of argument does not apply to disputes in ontology like the 3D-4D debate, the debate over composite objects, etc. (sections 7-8). The main idea seems to be that the dismissivist argument outlined in the first part of the paper could apply to those disputes which are decided on the basis of conceptual analysis (though he thinks that it actually applies to only some of them), and ontological disputes are not like these. I have doubts about several points of the paper, and hope to discuss all of them during this e-session. I start with two points on the first part of the paper, which relate to our previous discussion on Bennet’s paper.(I save for later some other points about more central issues in the paper)

(1) Which of Bennet’s three types of dismissivism suits best Sider’s position about the debate on personal identity? I would say that it is epistemic dismissivism. Though Sider repeatedly says that his view is that “there is no fact of the matter” as to which criterion is true (which could suggest antirealist dismissivism), he acknowledges that future philosophical inquiry could resolve the issue between bodily continuity and psychological continuity. Thus, it is not that there is no fact of the matter. It is only that, if there is one, we do not know yet which it is. But then, Dan’s point about Bennett’s epistemic dismissivism applies here as well: rather than dismiss the debate, we should keep trying and not be discouraged by the long standing epistemic impasse. (Sider acknowledges something like this, though, in pf. #7 of section 7).

(2) Can Sider’s view be considered as an instance of “semantic dismissivism”? I do not think so. And I think that the reasons why not will help to understand the semantic dismissivist’s position –a point we were discussing before here and here. I propose the following characterization of semantic dismissivism, which I think is in the spirit of Bennett’s official characterization and differs from the one given by Dan here:

Semantic dismissivism about the debate over ‘there are Fs’ is the view that the parties in the debate disagree about the meaning of some term in the disputed sentence and fail to perceive this disagreement is taking place. (Equivalently: they are not aware of the analytic character of the “linking principles” over which they disagree). As a consequence, they talk past each other when they argue about whether there are Fs, i.e. the dispute is merely verbal. The dispute could be resolved simply by first exposing the unnoticed semantic disagreement and then finding out who is speaking ordinary English and who is not.

So construed, the view is not simply that the debate should be dismissed because it involves a semantic disagreement (which could be relatively easy to resolve), but rather that something is wrong with the debate because the semantic disagreement is not being noticed by the participants.

On Siders’s view the debate on personal identity is much like the case in which the sorority girl and the purist disagree as to whether there is a Martini on the table; on both debates, the parties agree on “all the facts” (namely, that there is, say, a mindless body in a coma in front of us, and that there is an alcoholic beverage in a V-shaped glass in front of us, respectively). They only disagree about how to “describe” these “facts”. But this is not enough for the disputes to be a target of semantic dismissivism, as I propose to understand it. In addition to there being a semantic disagreement, semantic dismissivism requires that this disagreement goes unnoticed, with the consequence that the participants of the debate “talk past each other”. And this is what happens when they do not acknowledge the analytic character of the linking principles over which they fight ("there is a human body --> there is a person, there are simples arranged tablewise --> there is a table. etc). In the case of the debate over composition, what makes people talk past each other, on the dismissivist`s view, is that they are not aware of the alleged analycity of the principles they defend. In contrast, in the case of personal identity as described by Sider, this clearly does not happen. On Sider’s picture of the debate, the participants are well aware of the analyticity of their principles and cannot be described as being talking past each other (I am bit puzzled about the second paragraph in section 7, where he introduces the issue of ambiguity without explicit connection to the previous discussion). Thus, his view about this particular debate is not an instance of semantic dismissivism, as I am proposing to understand it (in consonance with Bennett, I think, and dissonance with Dan).

The Problem of the Many, Supervaluations, and the Sorites

2006-12-09T15:39:00.000+01:00

(Cross-posted at bleb.)

These days I am revising this paper, once again :-(! There I argue against the so-called ‘supervaluationist’ solution to the problem of the many, which is often the one favored by fellow defenders of the view of vagueness as semantic indecision.

In a nutshell, I claim that the feature of precisifications that such a solution requires—selecting just one of the many candidate-mountains in the vicinity of paradigmatic mountain Kilimanjaro—render them inadmissible. In my paper I focus on the penumbral truth that if something is a paradigmatic mountain, and something else is very similar to the former in that which is required for something to be a mountain, then the latter is also a mountain. One other main difficulty, emphasized by McGee 1998, is that such precisifications fail to preserve clear cases of application of the predicate, in that there is no entity that is determinately a mountain—at least, on standard ways of characterizing what it is for something to satisfy a 'determinately'-involving matrix.

In Williams 2006, Robbie claims that, in virtue of nothing determinately satisfying ‘is a mountain,’ the solution undermines the explanation offered by defenders of the view of vagueness as semantic indecision such as Keefe 2000 of the persuasiveness that the (false) sorites premise certainly has. According to her,

“Our belief that there is no true instance of the quantification gets confused with a belief that the quantified statement is not true. … The confusion … is a confusion of scope, according to whether the truth predicate appears inside or outside the existential quantifier” (Keefe 2000, 185).

Insofar as I can see, however, the difference in scope in truth- (or determinate-) involving existential statements appealed to here is compatible with nothing determinately satisfying ‘is a mountain’—disturbing as the latter might be for other reasons, of course.

Conceivability

2006-11-23T16:09:00.000+01:00

Yesterday's LOGOS-seminar saw Manolo M. give a talk on conceivability (indeed, on ideal conceivability, but I don't want to focus on that here). As Roman pointed out, conceivability is a somewhat loose term. However, it seems that most LOGOS-members share a very similar conception of conceivability, differing only in the details (I also encountered signs of this fact in the RG on Fictionalism).

My question is simply, what is that common conception? (...) It is part of another project that this blog can be used for, that is making the common ground of the group explicit such that new members, like me, can position themselves relative to it (I take the essentialism-discussions earlier to be part of that project).

Maybe you don't think that you in fact share any view on conceivability in the group. To illustrate, let me briefly tell you what I think of conceivability, and I think most of you (except for the other newcomers) will have similar objections to make.

I can make sense of three ways to explicate conceivability:
1) The first is very close to imaginability, and in that sense an object that is green and red all over is inconceivable, but so is an object displaying a billion different colours, because that's just too much for my imagination.
2) The second includes, but is not exhausted by, anything that can be expressed by a sentence I can understand. In this sense, it's perfectly conceivable that 1=0.
3) And then there is conceivability relative to a set of ex- or implicitly stated assumptions. In that sense a proof for the continuum hypothesis from ZFC is inconceivable; it's also (in most contexts) inconceivable that Spain will invade Iran over the next few months.

So, straighten me out!

MM Bennett: analyticity and extension to the 3D-4D case

2006-11-21T05:16:00.000+01:00

Hi,
following with our e-reading group on MetaMetaphysics, here I have a couple of comments/questions about Bennett’s paper. The first is about verbal-non verbal disputes and the second about how to extend the framework to the 4D-3D debate, which was the original concern of this e-reading group.

1) In section 5, Bennett decides to focus in this question: “what makes a dispute count as ‘merely verbal’? We must have a criterion at hand in order to decide whether or not the disputes about composition and constitution are verbal disputes”. She then criticizes a proposal by Hirsch (condition H), which is presented as an allegedly sufficient condition for something being a verbal dispute. She first shows that H is not really sufficient. Rather, it is Ha (which invokes the notion of analyticity) which does capture the notion of a verbal dispute. Second, she argues that Ha does is not satisfied by the disputes over composition and colocation.

I agree with all this. I think it is clear that the participants in the ontological debates do not take the linking conditionals (if there are simples arranged tablewise in front of us, then there is a table in front of us) as analytic. To simply assume that they do is to misunderstand the debate. (I’ve seen people doing this!).You can give an argument to the effect that they are wrong, i.e. to the effect that despite the appearances, they are committed to the principles being analytic. But for what I understand, Hirsch does not offer such an argument.

Now my worry is this: whereas it is clear that the “believer” and the “multi-thinger” (and for that matter, the 4D) do not claim that their linking conditionals are analytic, I wonder whether it is best for them to assume that some conditionals are in fact analytic. In other words, I wonder which of the following two is better as a response to the charge that their debates are merely verbal:

“Our dispute is not merely verbal. It is unlike the debate about whether there is a martini on the table, which is merely verbal”.

or rather

“Our dispute is not merely verbal, because there are not merely verbal debates. The dispute about the martini is not merely verbal either, it is substantive. It is not true that the participants in the martini debate ‘agree about all the facts’. There is on fact about which they disagree, namely whether a martini is (or is not) a beverage made of gin or vodka and dry vermouth. This is not, or not only, a fact about English but also about martinis.”

Do you think that this second response is too confused, or somehow obviously wrong, or unnecessary? (Bennett’s view seems to be that the first response is the appropriate, and that the martini case and the sceptic vs. phenomnalist case are cases of merely verbal and not substantial disputes.) I am not sure of what the consequences of the second response are, but I think it could amount to an alternative view about what these debates are. Someone who gives this response is not a semanticist. But he could be misdiagnosed as a semanticist because he is likely to look into ordinary English for the answer to the question whether there is a martini over the table, i.e. he will look into how we use the word “martini” (and our best beliefs about martinies) and try to determine on that basis whether the existential question is true or not.

2) I have been thinking about how Bennett`s ideas could apply to the 3D/4D debate. I think this debate is different from her two running examples in some important respects. First, notice that in the 3D/4D debate the “high ontologist” side is occupied by the 4D and the “low ontologist” side is occupied by the 3D. (The 3D thinks that there are chairs, and the 4D thinks that there temporal parts of chairs in addition to chairs). This makes for the following superficial difference: in the two cases considered by Bennett, it is the high ontologist side wich, for right or wrong, is generally thought to be closer to common sense and therefore it is the low ontologist side which is generally charged with the burden of proof (at least this is clearly the case in the composition case). For right or wrong, this is the other way around in the 3D/4D debate. On the other hand, in the 3D/4D debate, it does not seem that the high ontologist attempts to downplay the significance of their extra entities. (I do not remember seeing an argument for the idea that temporal parts are “easier to come by” than the endurantist think they are). Quite on the contrary, the 4D sometimes up-play the significance of their extra entities (see for instance Sider´s remarks about temporal parts not being merely “ersatz parts” in p 61 of his book). And it is hard to identify any attempt to up-play expressive power in the 3D side, except maybe for the move of taking “bent” and “straight” to express relations to times rather than monadic properties. Despite these differences, it does seem that the debate is “difference-minimizing” in the sense that “each side will try to play down their differences from the opponent. Everyone wants to minimize the gap in order to ensure that their view does not sound crazy, and that they too get the advantages of the other side”. What do you think? I guess at least Dan thinks it is difference-minimizing....

MM Bennett: "Existential" but Analytic Statements

2006-11-21T00:12:00.000+01:00

I would like to post now about (ii). Although Karen Bennett suggests (p. 2) that she would argue against semanticism in general, in effect she seems to argue just against one possible way of implementing one possible semanticist position with respect to one particular debate—in particular against the analyticity-involving way of implementing Hirsch 2005’s semanticist position with respect to the composition debate. Even when so restricted, I have some doubts about her argument.

In essence, her claim is that what she calls ‘linking principles’ of the sort of

(*) if there are simples arranged tablewise in R, then there is a table in R that is numerically distinct from the simples arranged tablewise.

cannot be analytic. She offers the following reason for this claim:

Saying that (*) is analytic … amounts to saying that we can define things into existence. But surely an analytic claim cannot be existence entailing in this way; surely the existence of a new object cannot follow by meaning alone. Who knew ontological arguments were so easy? (p. 19)

I find this reasoning puzzling. The relevant sentences involve existence claims, but as consequents in conditionals. And we seem to be familiar enough with existential statements of that form being, sometimes, analytic. The following seems to me to have quite a good claim to be one such:

Whenever something is a proper part of another, there is something that is numerically distinct from them which is part of the latter but not of the former.

(I am having some discussion with Ross Cameron at bleb on this, as it seems to me to be relevant also against his argument that principles of composition need not be necessary.)

MM Benett: A Taxonomy of Dismissivist Positions?

2006-11-20T00:22:00.000+01:00

It is a great pleasure to get this first LOGOS e-Reading Group on MetaMetaphysics started ;-)!

If I understand it right, Karen Bennett in her ‘Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology’ aims three different things: (i) to distinguish three different dismissivist positions; (ii) to argue against one possible way of implementing one possible “semanticist” position with respect to one particular debate; and (iii) to motivate a claim that is a consequence of, among others, the “epistemicist” position. In my view, it is not clear that she succeeds with respect to any of these three. In this post, however, I will focus just on (i).

Most think, I guess, that some disputes in metaphysics are genuinely ontological. In my view, the dispute between universalists and restrictivists wrt composition is a case at hand—and I think that the former are right :-)! Most think, I guess, that some disputes in metaphysics are genuine all the same, but of a semantic character. In my view, the dispute between defenders of the many and of the supervaluationist solution wrt the problem of the many is a case at hand—and, again, I think that the former are right :-)! Now some think that some apparent disputes in metaphysics are just merely apparent: in a certain sense—that need not be easy to specify (hopefully, we’ll have some discussion of this here!)—the views are just “variants of each other”, “equivalent”, or something along these lines. One candidate case at hand is of course the dispute between 3D/4D, and so it has been claimed to be by Sidelle 2002, Miller 2005, McCall & Lowe 2006, among many others. I take this to be characteristic of the attitude that Bennett aptly proposes to call dismissivism, see the introductory pages, the first remark at section 9 etc.

Unfortunately, this seems to be none of the three positions she considers:

(1) Antirealism is characterised as the position that ‘There are Fs’ does not have a determinate truth-value. This lacks the appropriate generality—which would be the candidate ‘F’ for the 3D/4D debate?— and anyway is something dismissivists need not endorse: more likely they would hold the views are all equally true, or equally false but having a shared true kernel or …

(2) Semanticism (although attributed also to Sidelle) is characterized as the position that the disputants assign different meanings to their terms. More plausibly, I take it, that they differ as to their views about the semantics of a certain disputed terms (this is in effect the case at the Martini example and with Hirsh 2005). But then the dispute is certainly genuine, nothing there to be dismissed!

(3) Epistemicism is characterized as the negation of the preceding plus the contention that there is little justification for believing either of the views. Again, on the face of it, a situation like does not look as one for dismissing inquiry, but rather precisely calling for further investigation! (Maybe the thought could be elaborated like: there couldn’t be justification for believing one as opposed to the other, given their… “equivalence”? This might be closer to dismissivism after all, but the required elucidation is still missing.)

Fiction Science

2006-11-18T18:52:00.000+01:00

After an almost solipsistic group experience in the Fictionalism RG, I thought that maybe some more incentives for thinking about the relationship between fiction and philosophy are in order.
Here is some info on recent literature on the subject, along with a some reflections on how to make money as a philosopher (talk about Fantasy!).
And here are some great ways to make our own make-believe-philosophy games much more fun! If "Hurt'em Hume" won't get you theorizing, noone will...

More literature on Tenor-Turnips.

2006-11-18T06:06:00.000+01:00

This is just a short advertisement for those who got interested in Varzi’s problem of the many tenors, which I discussed in the Logos seminar this year. I found out that Thomas Sattig’s brand new book (on persistence, 3D, 4D and related issues) offers a very detailed discussion of the problem. (Actually, he discusses a more general problem, which he calls the problem of predicational overkill, that has Varzi’s problem about Tenor-Turnips as an instance). Varzi’s problem was this: given the alleged 4D principle that x is F at t iff x’s instantaneous temporal part at t is F simpliciter (plus some other assumptions), sentences like ‘Some tenor was a turnip’ come out true. Sattig discusses related problems for the alleged 4D principle. For instance, take a “uniqueness sentence”, like “Zoe and only Zoe is happy at t”. Prima facie, the 4D principle makes this sentence impossible. If Zoe is happy at t, her temporal part at t is also happy, and so are her many other temporal parts overlapping her temporal part at t. Sattig argues that even if this case can be handled by the 4D, things become more intractable when "cross-counting sentences" are considered (sentences like “Zoe and only Zoe is happy at t1 and sad at t2”). He offers different attempts to solve this problem on the 4D’s behalf, but concludes that none of them is satisfactory. Among these discarded 4D strategies, there is the appeal to quantifier domain restriction, which some of my audience at the Logos seminar seemed to favour prima facie. Another solution he considers and rejects draws on an idea that I had thought to be on the right track, namely to allow extended temporal parts to do the job that the 4D principle reserves for instantaneous temporal parts. I still have to think about his arguments against these views (I am not completely convinced).

On the other hand, the book also offers a very sophisticated and original framework for discussing the issues about persistence. Something that I found particularly interesting about this framework is that it makes clear the importance of linguistic considerations for assessing the views about persistence. That is to say, the framework justifies why the nature of persistence (or the “temporal dimension of reality”, more generally) should be studied in connection with the language about persistence (or “the temporal dimension of language”). If I got it right, the idea is this (very roughly and in my terminology rather than his): our ordinary conception of the world (as expressed in ordinary judgments about ordinary objects) is generally right and therefore supervenes on how the world is really like (as described by the metaphysician). Thus, any account about how the world is really like (3D, 4D, etc) must be such that the ordinary conception supervenes on it. Moreover, this supervenience cannot be taken as a large-scale brute fact. Rather, is must be possible to sate the facts about supervenience by means of specific bridge principles like the problematic 4D principle stated above (or more sophisticated versions of this). Thus, the correct view about the nature of persistence must be compatible with some “analysis” of the ordinary facts of persistence in terms of what persistence really is. Failure at offering such analyses (because of predicational overkill, etc) is a decisive reason against the view (or at least, it has much more weight than it would have under different assumptions). I like this view about methodology, but I suspect that most people working on the metaphysics of persistence will find it controversial. (Though I think they should not). I hope we will be discussing and clarifying these methodological issues in our up-coming e-reading group on metaontology.

A Post On Postmodalism or It Feels Good To Could Have Been A Zebra

2006-11-16T23:01:00.000+01:00

The other day, my discussion with Oscar about vague essential properties (see the Comments section to his "RG Modality"-post turned into a nice beer-fuelled evening of talk, laughter and goodnatured name-calling. The topic soon expanded to the venerable question whether there are essential properties at all, with a bunch of people split quite nicely over the issue. Oscar was joined by Manolo M. on the "of course there are" front, while I was joined by Sanna on the side that was soon called "the Postmodernists", which I still find very amusing. Jose C., Pepe and Guido took up various positions in the middle, and off we were.

I won't try to record the whole thing, but here's a taste of the strange arguments that were produced (that's the nice thing about writing a post, by the time the others get to quote the strange arguments you yourself came up with after your third beer, they're already in the relatively obscure Comments section...):

In the case of the discussion whether Pluto and Sedna (or how that thing was called) were planets, what was at stake was to find a definition that captures the essential property "to be a planet". That is to say, either it was (at that time) objectively false to call Pluto a planet five years ago, or it is objectively false to deny that Pluto is a planet today.
If you find that bizarre, it might be because you're a postmodernist as well, or, as Oscar later suggested, a postmodalist.

Formatting posts and comments at The bLOGOS

2006-11-15T15:01:00.000+01:00

I thought it might be of interest for some LOGOSians (or should it be LOGOSers?) to post here on this.

Regarding new posts, formatting is straightforward, given the user-friendly semi-WYSIWYG environment. (Incidentally, this gives ‘quasi-technical’ support for the following rule, which I think can also be motivated on independent, purely e-philosophical grounds:

If something is a borderline case with respect to comment to an existing post or thread-creating new post, do post it!

You can always add a link back to the triggering thread. Similarly, if something is a borderline case with respect to borderline case with respect to comment and post. And similarly if it is borderline borderline… Ok, I shut up :-X.) (BTW, the indent effect can be obtained by pasting from a .doc file with altered margins.)

Regarding comments to existing posts, some mini-use of HTML tags is required. Hence, writing (with '<' and '>' instead of '[' and ']')

[i]italics[/i]

gives you

italics

and writing

[b]boldface[/b]

gives you

boldface

and writing

one [a href="http://www.ub.edu/grc_logos"]link[/a] to a website

gives you

one link to a website.

Formatting, and particularly linking to named people, papers, and so on may make things nicer for the average potential eventual reader. And, anyway, it is c o o l, don’t you think? (I was going to write instead: ‘And, anyway, I think it is cool.’ But Kit Fine is arguing that this would not have changed the content. And this is the only NYU seminar that I am attending… Ok, ok, this was way too much ;-{p}!)

I suggest that whoever wants to experiment with comments, comment to this post, which is hereby declared jUNk.

Update (17 Nov 2006): When posting new posts as opposed to commenting, one is more free to use further HTML tags. Hence, for instance,

[strike]strike[/strike]

gives you

~~strike~~

and so on. See discussion in the comments section below.

Disjunctions, Conjunctions, and Their Truthmakers

2006-11-14T15:15:00.000+01:00

(Cross-posted at bleb.)

A truthmaker for a given truth is something in virtue of which the truth is true. One plausible thesis about truthmaking is that it is closed under entailment, in the sense of obeying the so-called entailment principle:

If something makes a certain truth true, then it also makes true all of this truth’s consequences.

Though plausible, the principle seems to have some undesirable consequences: the explosion of truthmakers for necessities—every thing is a truthmaker for every necessary truth—, and indeed the truthmaker triviality—every thing is a truthmaker for every truth whatsoever—.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra in his ‘Truthmaking, Entailment, and the Conjunction Thesis’ has recently argued against attempts to preserve (perhaps, a restriction of) the entailment principle while avoiding these results. In so doing, Gonzalo crucially both defends the disjunction thesis—if something makes true a disjunctive truth, then it makes true one of its disjuncts—, and rejects the conjunction thesis—if something makes true a conjunctive truth, then it makes true each of its conjuncts—.

I have written a short reply to his paper. I first provide plausible counterexamples to the disjunction thesis, and contend that Gonzalo’s general defense of it fails. Then I defend the conjunction thesis from Gonzalo’s case against it. I finally conclude that the envisaged attempts have not been proved, by Gonzalo’s considerations, to be at fault.

(My note originated from the discussion I had with Gonzalo here.)

All comments welcome!!

Purpose of this blog

2006-11-14T14:55:00.000+01:00

I suppose it would nice if we used this blog to foster the interdisciplinary character of the Cognitive Science and Language programme, rather than focus on purely philosophical questions only (after all, I have recently enrolled on the aforementioned programme, my expertise is within linguistics and some philosophy/psychology and I don't think I'd be able to contribute otherwise).
A nice first topic could be last week's Workshop. I'm not really sure what people thought of it, and I'd be interested in that. I had a brief chat with some people last Thursday but this blog could provide the right medium to have an in-depth discussion.
Who would like to start?

DJL

For the RG on modality: properties that are neither necessary nor contingent (by themselves)

2006-11-12T19:25:00.000+01:00

About ten days ago Sònia asked in a message for the reading group of modality: "How intuitive is it that the very same property can be essential for some, and only accidental for others?" Though then I didn't give a public answer now I'll take advantage of this blog. My answer is that there are indeed examples of properties that are necessarily possessed by some objects but contingently possessed by others. Just consider the following examples:

(a) The (sort of) shape is an essential for the statue but not for the piece of matter from which it is made (since the statue cannot have a completely different shape.)

(b) 'having a body that contains (atoms of) gold' (or just:' containing gold') is a property necessarily possessed by a bar of gold, but not by a table that just contains 8 atoms of gold.

Let's say that properties that can be necessarily or contingently possessed are "modally neutral properties". These are some questions raised when we consider possible examples of such properties:

Which are plausibles examples of modally neutral properties? Are there any other examples of this kind? (In Sònia's e-mail she suggests that Linsky and Zalta are committed with the view that "being abstract" would also be a modally neutral property, but that's a weird example.)
Which is the class of properties for which that's true, and why this properties behave like that?
If Pb is the claim that the object b has the modally neutral property P then we might fail to known a priori that (If Pb, then Necessarily Pb). So, once we know that Pb is true, what else must be known in order to conclude that Pb is necessary? (This is relevant for the question of the a priori passage in modal rationalism)
Any further interesting implication of the existence of modally neutral properties?

What kind of thing is the 3D/4D debate?

2006-11-11T17:35:00.000+01:00

For a little while, Marta, Manolo, Pablo and myself—and I guess many others as well—have been worrying about which is the status of some apparent disputes in ontology—paradigmatically exemplified in the 3D/4D debate. Are they genuine metaphysical disputes? Or are they genuine all the same, but disputes of a semantic character? Or rather they are merely apparent disputes, and the views turn out to be, in a certain sense (love these hedges ;-)!), notational variants of each other, as it were (here again ;-)!).

There is a huge literature on this issue, particularly in the last couple of years. We thought that one other purpose bLOGOS might serve is to allow a sort of e-reading group on this, suggesting readings and then discussing them here.

How about starting with Karen Bennett’s ‘Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology’? A very cool draft in progress!

Watch out, this is NOT a test!

2006-11-11T12:41:00.000+01:00

I guess this is the famous first sentence that takes longer to come up with than the last 50 pages (posts). What should the first topic of the LOGOS-Blog be? "Canonical models for S2"? "The meaning of life"? "The most-cited footnotes in analytic philosophy"? "The amazing fact that noone in Barcelona seems to think of Spock when they hear 'Vulcan'"?
Well, as nothing of that sort quite strikes me as appropriate, I'll ask the obvious (and therefore a bit boring) question: Now we have this thing, what can we do with it?
I'll give it a quick shot, and then I hope you guys will pick up on it (try if you can directly edit the post instead of adding comments; it'd be much more fitting if we wrote the first post as a joint effort. If you can't, write comments and I'll copy it into the main post later)(New plan: write comments and I give references in the list).

- First of all, we should try to free us from all pretentions and all academic shame. The point is to swap half-baked ideas, ask stupid questions, tell that funny story about two brains sharing the same vat (you know, what your normal friends would take as a good reason to pretend not to know you) and so on. Not that brilliant thoughts should be forbidden, but if everyone sits at his desk waiting for a flash of genius this blog will never get going. And after all, your stupid question might not have been all that stupid.
(That last sentence sounds unbearably cheesy, no? I'll walk the walk [as opposed to only talk the talk] and post it anyway)

- What is cool about all this is that we get an idea of what the others think about. This of course comes through the posts, but maybe we could encourage that further by publishing our personal reading lists etc. (please substitute 'etc.')

- Comment 1: E-reading groups (the first one seems well on it's way!)
- Comment 4: Feedback on one's work

The bLOGOS

We have moved!

On Properties of Sets of Properties

Are King's propositions too fine-grained?

Philo-Surveys

Easy “Difference-Making” Properties?

Schaffer's Permissivism

Lasersohn as a Truth Relativist, MacFarlane style

Kaplan and the shotgun

Epistemological Nightmare

Anti-Extensionalists?

Illocutions, Perlocutions and Metaphorical Content

On the distinction between positive and negative conceivability in Chalmers

Do you think that there is anything it is like to have a visual experience in general?

Indeterminacy Problem or Fact?

Phenomenal Properties and Epistemic Access

"Discursive Dilemma"

MM Lowe and McCall: two incompatible requisites on sums-at-a-time

Against Causal Decision Theory?

Limitations vs Generality Constraint?

On inference relations and constituents of representations

St. Petersburg Paradox -Where are you?

C&R Zeman: A Closet Contextualist?

Ways of Doing Otherwise?

Imagining Scientific Models?

Roman on fiction and models

(How) Is the Present Special?

Teleology and Indeterminacy

New e-Discussion Group on Contextualism & Relativism

DT RG: Carcel Confusion

CFP: LOGOS Conference on Meta-Metaphysics

Power-points to the point

Nussbaum on India

MetaMetaphysics e-Reading Group: next session

Call for Intuitions

Contexts and their Centers

MM Chalmers: Schaffer on Furnishing Functions

Online Graphical Dictionary

2nd On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC2)

Comesaña on Whether There Could Be Exactly Two Things

Analytic Universalism

MM Chalmers: On Another MetaMetaphysical Taxonomy

Next MM: Chalmers

MM Hawthorne: more doubts

MM Hawthorne: doubts, doubts, doubts...

Is it possible to have two dossiers with exactly the same information?

The nature of possibilia in Peacocke’s (2002) Principles for Possibilia

MM Sider (and Bennett): Whether 'exist' admits of precisifications

Suggested Readings for the MM e-RG

MM Sider: question about different sorts of dependencies

Manolo P-O on Williamson on Possibilia

MM Sider: The Taxonomy of Positions

MM Sider: what kind of dismissivism is this?

The Problem of the Many, Supervaluations, and the Sorites

Conceivability

MM Bennett: analyticity and extension to the 3D-4D case

MM Bennett: "Existential" but Analytic Statements

MM Benett: A Taxonomy of Dismissivist Positions?

Fiction Science

More literature on Tenor-Turnips.

A Post On Postmodalism or It Feels Good To Could Have Been A Zebra

Formatting posts and comments at The bLOGOS

Disjunctions, Conjunctions, and Their Truthmakers

Purpose of this blog

For the RG on modality: properties that are neither necessary nor contingent (by themselves)

What kind of thing is the 3D/4D debate?

Watch out, this is NOT a test!