Review essay of Richard Owen's On the Nature of Limbs: A Discourse edited by Ron Amundson, University of Chicago Press, 2007. This article reviews the recent reissuing of Richard Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs and its three novel, introductory essays. These essays make Owen’s 1849 text very accessible by discussing the historical context of his work and explaining how Owen’s ideas relate to his larger intellectual framework. In addition to the ways in which the essays point to Owen’s relevance for contemporary biology, I discuss how Owen’s unity of type theory and his homology claims about fins and limbs compare with modern views. While the phenomena studied by Owen are nowadays of major interest to evolutionary developmental biology, research in evo-devo has largely shifted from homology (which was Owen’s concern) towards evolutionary novelty, e.g., accounting for fins as a novelty. Still, I argue that questions about homology are important and raise challenges even for explanations of novelty.

This paper is concerned with neo-Fregean accounts of reference to abstract objects. It develops an objection to the most familiar such accounts, due to Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, based upon what I call the 'proliferation problem': Hale and Wright's account makes reference to abstract objects seem too easy, as is shown by the fact that any equivalence relation seems as good as any other. The paper then develops a response to this objection, and offers an account of what it is for abstracta to exist that is Fregean in spirit but more robust than familiar views.

From the website of St. Olaf College:

The Kierkegaard Library offers fellowships to scholars for from two to nine weeks in duration, usually used between June 3 and August 15. Fellowships are also available at other times of year. The award includes free housing and a $300 per month stipend for food as well as access to the libraries and other facilities of St. Olaf College. Young Scholars Program stipends are $200 per month.

To apply for a fellowship, please send a letter outlining your proposed research project and reasons for wanting to use the collection. A curriculum vitae or other description of qualifications and two academic recommendations are also required. Awards are normally made to students at graduate level or to mature scholars. Advanced undergraduates are also welcome to apply (see Young Scholars Program).

Professor Pike, who passed away on January 24, was a leading contributor to philosophy of religion and longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, where he was Professor Emeritus. The UC Irvine Department has...

News story here. This was alluded to in earlier items, and in the comments on earlier threads, but it deserves special notice, since it means the KCL bloodbath may be far from over. Administrators who think that "Digital and Visual...

If I may engage in (more) shameless self-promotion, I'd like to mention a book symposium on my collection, MY WAY: ESSAYS ON MORAL RESPONSIBILITY in the January 2010 issue of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.  Thank you so much to Calvin Normore, Randy Clarke, and Gideon Yaffe for wonderful, thoughtful, and generous critiques. 

Also, thanks to everyone for leaving out the following thought, quoted from Sunday's NY Times article on the "My Way Killings": 

“ ‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.”

I'm working on a paper about the ontology of reasons and have some questions about motivating reasons that I was hoping some readers here might help me with.  It's hard for me to say exactly what motivating reasons are for and so it's hard for me to say what they are (facts? propositions? mental states?  none of the above?  All of the above!?!).  I'd like to say that in describing someone's motivating reasons, we say what it is that they saw/knew that led them to act in the way that they did.  I'd like to say, then, that since what someone sees or knows that leads them to act as they did has to be a fact rather than a proposition or a mental state, motivating reasons are the facts we believe we're responding to.  The problem with this, I'm told, is that in cases of error I'm forced to say things that are too harsh.  If the facts don't fit the beliefs that fit in deliberation, there aren't any facts to serve as our reasons for acting and so we've failed to act for a reason.  I want to try to understand these kinder, gentler views about motivating reasons, but part of the difficulty for me is that my semantic intuitions seem to be getting me in trouble.  I can get out of this trouble by identifying motivating reasons with mental states, but there are supposed to be problems with this view that it would be a distraction to discuss here.

So, consider claims of the form 'S A'd for the reason that p', such as:
(1) Alice voted for Bill for the reason that Charlie is a crook.

My view is that (1) entails (2) and (3):
(2) Alice voted for Bill because Charlie is a crook.
(3) Charlie is a crook.

One opponent acknowledges that there's an entailment from (2) to (3) and denies that (1) entails (2).  [Maybe there's also an opponent that denies that (3) is a consequence of (2).]  The opponent I'm interested in here isn't the opponent that says that (1) could be true only if we took it to be elliptical for a longer statement that describes the agent's beliefs about Charlie.  My guess is that they are led to that view, in part, because they think that (1) entails (2) and (3) and then argues from the (alleged) fact that our motivating reasons are the same whether our beliefs are true or false to the claim that (1) is never strictly speaking true.  So, my guess is that they are led to a kind of psychologized conception of motivating reasons because they have semantic intuitions similar to mine. 

I think there's some evidence that (1) commits us to (2) and (3).  That's consistent with the claim that there's evidence against this and consistent with the claim that there's stronger evidence against this.  If you have some, I'd love to see it.  If you think my evidence isn't evidence, I'd love to know why.

Evidence of entailment.
(i) It seems that (1) entails (2) just on the face of it.  Conjunctions with negated conjuncts will come in a moment, but I take it that someone who denies that (1) entails (2) but thinks that it seems to some that (1) entails (2) will want to offer an account of the appearance of entailment that doesn't require an entailment.  Could it be that (1) pragmatically implies that something like (2) is true?  I think not.  As Stanley notes, citing Saddock and crediting Bengson, you can reinforce pragmatically imparted information, but not entailments. 

So, there's nothing wrong with, "I have a cat. Indeed, I have just one cat".  There's something wrong with, "I have just one cat. Indeed, I have a cat".  Similarly, while it's true that if you know she's in France you believe that she's in France, it's odd to say, "I know she's in France.  Indeed, I believe she's in France."    Now, it seems strange to say, "She voted for Bill for the reason that Charlie is a crook.  Indeed, she voted for Bill because Charlie is a crook."  That (to me) looks/sounds/feels a lot like, "I know that it's raining outside.  Indeed, it is raining outside."

(ii) It seems contradictory to assert (~2) and assert (1): She didn't vote for Bill because Charlie is a crook, but she voted for Bill for the reason that Charlie is a crook. (If there were merely a pragmatic link from (1) to (2), wouldn't (~2) cancel the pragmatic implicature that (allegedly) explains the appearance of an entailment from (1) to (2)?)

(iii) It seems defective to say: She voted for Bill for the reason that Charlie is a crook, but I don't believe she voted for Bill because Charlie is a crook.  It seems defective to say: She voted for Bill for the reason that Charlie is a crook but I have no good reason to believe she voted for Bill because Charlie is a crook.  Obvious explanation is to assimilate these to more familiar kinds of Moorean absurdities such as "He knows that dogs bark but I don't believe it myself".  You can only assimilate these to such cases if the speaker's commitment to (1) carries with it a commitment to belief in (3). 

(iv) It seems we can rewrite each of (1)-(3) as follows:
(1') She voted for Bill for the reason that it's a fact that Charlie is a crook.
(2') It's a fact that she voted for Bill because it's a fact that Charlie is a crook.
(3') It's a fact that Charlie is a crook.

It seems (1'), (2'), and (3') entail that Charlie is a crook.

Not only that, but I think on everyone's view, (1) entails:
(4) That Charlie is a crook explains why Alice voted for Bill.

(4) entails:
(4') The fact that Charlie is a crook explains why Alice voted for Bill.

This looks pretty good to me: 'S's reason for A-ing is that p' entails 'p explains why S A'd', which entails 'The fact that p explains why S A'd', which entails that p is a fact.  Which entails p.

If this much is right, it puts pressure on the view that treats motivating reasons as thoughts (i.e., the things that we think, the things that are the contents of our mental states).  Those who defend such views tend to eschew the psychologized redescription of (1)-(4) that makes reference to facts about mental states and it denies that motivating reasons are facts.  So far as I can tell, the above linguistic evidence causes trouble for the idea that motivating reasons are facts but then insists that correct non-factive explanations can be given and causes trouble for the view that thinks these non-factive explanations don't make sense but then insist that motivating reasons are neither facts nor mental states.  Either go more radically towards a kind of externalist, factualist account of motivating reasons or embrace the more pscyhologized version that rewrites (1)-(4) to make reference to mental states because of arguments from error.  

Here is another great looking conference, this time organised by Brad Hooker. The topic is deontology and this is at the University of Reading on the Saturday 17th of April. The programme is:
10.00 David Owens (Univ. of Sheffield)
11.45 Peter Vallentyne (Univ. of Missouri-Columbia)
2.15 Philip Stratton-Lake (Univ. of Reading)
4.00 Michael Smith (Princeton)
For more info, contact Ms. Jacqui Lorraine Fletcher at J.L.Fletcher@Reading.ac.uk

Pekka Vayrynen has put together a workshop on Value Concepts at the University of Leeds on 5-6 March. The programme looks great:

Matti Eklund (Cornell)
    “Misevaluation, Moral Semantics, and Moral Realism”
Janice Dowell (Nebraska)
    “A Flexible, Contextualist Account of ‘Ought’”
Antti Kauppinen (Amsterdam)
    “A Defence of Moral Invariantism”
Simon Kirchin (Kent)
    “Determinables, Determinates, and Thick Concepts”
Daniel Elstein (Leeds)
    “Why There Can Be No Good Reason to Accept the Shapelessness Hypothesis”
Debbie Roberts (Reading)
    “Evaluation and Variability: Why Thick Concepts Are Not Determinates of
    the Thin”

The workshop is free (to register, just send an email to leedsvalueconcepts@googlemail.com). More information at: http://leedsvalueconcepts.wordpress.com/

David Shenk’s new book “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong” won’t be released until March 9, and I wasn’t given a pre-release copy.  So I’ll mostly withhold judgment until I’ve read it.  Here’s the description from Amazon.com:

Integrating cutting-edge research from a wide swath of disciplines—cognitive science, genetics, biology, child development—Shenk offers a highly optimistic new view of human potential. The problem isn't our inadequate genetic assets, but our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have. IQ testing and widespread acceptance of “innate” abilities have created an unnecessarily pessimistic view of humanity—and fostered much misdirected public policy, especially in education.

The truth is much more exciting. Genes are not a “blueprint” that bless some with greatness and doom most of us to mediocrity or worse. Rather our individual destinies are a product of the complex interplay between genes and outside stimuli-a dynamic that we, as people and as parents, can influence.

Sure, our individual destiny is a product of "the complex interplay between genes and outside stimuli." But what are genes if not a product of evolution?  Genes manifest millions of years of evolutionary experience, and transport that experience into the present time in the form of our body. The question is, can genetic differences among us lead to fundamental motivational and behavioral differences?

Everyone agrees that the human neocortex is phenomenally adaptable and plastic, but that doesn't mean our behaviors can't be genetically programmed.  Jeff Hawkins brilliantly describes in his book "On Intelligence" how the cortex is uniformly constructed of identical repeating units (called "cortical columns") whose role is to identify general patterns (from arriving experience via the senses) and make associations/predictions that drive our behavior.  Since the cortex is so uniform in its construction, says Hawkins, it can't be genetically programmed.  But Hawkins is wrong here.  The cortex is programmed indirectly via the more primitive, genetically constructed regions of the brain like the thalamus.  "Whenever two regions of the cortex directly connect to each other, " Hawkins admits, "they also connect indirectly through the thalamus" which "itself is a complicated structure and its role is not at all clear."  So even though the neocortex is a general purpose pattern recognition/prediction engine, it can't process our experience unless the thalamus concurs, and the thalamus is a much older, genetically laid out region of the brain.

Because of this overriding control by the inner eye, we can't choose which stimuli we find motivating. For example, Peyton Manning is a genius quarterback by the happy co-incidence of what innately motivates him (complex, choreographed war games) and the opportunity he found in his environment.  Once exposed to that environment, it triggered an obsession in him to actively seek more of that experience (luckily it's socially acceptable).  Obsession leads to "time on task", which leads to genius.

It's folly to assume that "our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have" is the issue. The real issue is that some people are born motivated by the "right things" that lead them to a great career, great wealth, and great power.  Motivation is what's genetic, which is to say: differences in motivation levels among us are due to genetic differences. You still have to work hard to develop your talent (you're not born with skills or expertise), but if you've got the innate motivation to stick with something doggedly and relentlessly until you've developed the talent, how is that different from saying "talent is innate"?

Everyone wants an optimistic and exciting message. Most people crave the myth, especially when someone in authority does the telling.  That’s why Dr. Phil and Martin Seligman (author of “Authentic Happiness”) are so popular.  David Shenk wants part of that action – and if he has to engage in shameless Malcolm Gladwell-style pandering, so be it. 

I am the free will editor for philpapers. So far I have resisted using my powers for evil (say, deciding that compatibilism isn't a theory about free will at all). Instead, I have been conscientiously trying to categorize papers in ways that are useful. The category system isn't very fine-grained (it seems to me that the addition of the consequence argument as a subcategory of libertarianism is a crying need), but it is what we have at the moment. Now I need your help. As I have confessed elsewhere, I am pretty ignorant of the state of the debate prior to about 1970. Since earlier papers lack abstracts, and often take forever to get to the point (when they get there at all), this makes categorization of these papers rather difficult. That's where you, oh so cultured readers, come in. Either in comments here, or directly on the site, I would like your categorical input. To take a random example, who was Patrick Proctor Alexander and where does he go? If anyone prefers to avoid searching the site, I can put up lists of some of the (roughly 250) papers that need classification.

As part of the Templeton's free will grant, Florida State will begin hosting post-docs in free will beginning in Fall 2010.  Obviously, this is of great interest to many Gardeners, and if you're interested in applying, see the JFP ad (copied below).

JFP Reference Number: 8662

Date Submitted: 02/03/2010

Ad Text: One year post-doctoral Fellowship, beginning Fall 2010. We are looking for philosophers with an AOS in free will. The Fellow is expected to teach four courses per year in the Philosophy Department. Salary: $40,000. Please send dossier (including letter of application, CV, writing sample, three letters of recommendation, and evidence of teaching effectiveness) to Post-doc Search Committee, Department of Philosophy, 641 University Way, P.O. Box 3061500, Florida State University, Tallahassee FL 32306-1500. Fax 850-644-3832. Applications must be received by April 1, 2010. Women and members of minority groups under-represented in academia are especially encouraged to apply. Florida State University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer, committed to diversity in hiring, and a Public Records Agency. Inquiries to Piers Rawling, Chair, prawling@fsu.edu, or 850-644-1483.

I have heard from good friends that this is an excellent opportunity, so I recommend applying.  The deadline for applications is fast approaching, so if you're interested, get busy.

The course will take place in Budapest, Hungary between 5-13 July 2010. Applications are accepted until 15 February 2010. Former participants can also apply.

More information is available here: http://www.sun.ceu.hu/aspects.

I’ve been writing up some thoughts on easy knowledge, but they got a little long for a regular blog post. So they’re in this PDF. But don’t think of this as a paper – it’s really a long blog post in PDF form!

Easy Knowledge and Other Epistemic Virtues

'How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot;

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd'

(Alexander Pope, Eloisa and Abelard)



Yesterday I took a class on Kafka's Metamorphosis. For those who don't know the story, it is about a salesman, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into an insect. We discussed, amongst other things, the importance of identity and how this is bound up in things, such as items that have a particular connection to oneself, for Gregor was distressed that the furniture from his room was being removed: even though this meant that, as an insect, it gave him greater physical freedom, it also meant it removed much of his humanity; the physical memories of his life previous to being an insect.

The same day, a small group watched Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind as part of the Philosophy and Film series. It gave us an opportunity to reflect once more on memory: if it were indeed possible to erase unhappy memories then why wouldn't you? Also, would such an erasure really make any fundamental difference as to what constitutes you? Is it our memories that makes us what we are?

That evening, I returned to my apartment and turned on the TV to watch a new series called Caprica. The 'functionalist' premise here is that, with such advanced technology, it would be possible to collect together all the public memories of one individual and create a copy of that person. Think about it: only one hundred years ago a person who has died would have left very little physical memory; a journal perhaps, some photos maybe, letters, a birth certificate,public records, a skeleton...But someone born today will leave behind vast megabytes of 'data', a digital memory of themselves, stored on hard drives, databases, photos, videos, text messages, emails, social networking sites, YouTube, hospital records (brain scans, x-rays), blogs...But even if you did collate this all together into some 'avatar' would this really be anything remotely like the original? Are we not made of more than our public, third-person memories? What of the 'what's-it-likeness'. of qualia, of...dare I say it...soul?

...Another day in the life of a philosopher...

Do you want to be my boss – or at least one of my bosses?

The Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science at the New Brunswick Campus of Rutgers University is searching for a new director. We are looking for an outstanding scholar with proven administrative abilities and a vision for the future of cognitive science at Rutgers. Highly desirable is experience in obtaining and administering interdisciplinary, multi-investigator grants. Intellectual breadth—an ability to understand and articulate the contributions from the principal disciplines that compose cognitive science is important, as is the ability to effectively represent the interests of RuCCS inside and outside Rutgers. Fund raising ability and community/industry outreach also desired.

Description of Center
A primary goal of the Center is to foster research on the nature of symbolic processes constitutive of intelligent performance, emphasizing foundational and computational approaches. The goal is to understand such aspects of intelligent performance as perception, language processing, planning, problem solving, reasoning, learning and knowledge formation, in terms of the underlying computational processes. The Center’s mission is essentially multi-disciplinary. It promotes the integration of techniques and knowledge drawn from experimental psychology, computer science, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and engineering. The Center offers a Cognitive Science Certificate for graduate students and supports a minor and independent major for undergraduates. RuCCS has 22 jointly appointed faculty members at present. It also has an additional 30 associates housed in various departments who play an active role in the intellectual life of the Center. At the present time the principal contributing disciplines are psychology, computer science, linguistics and philosophy. The policies of the Center are set in consultation with an executive committee which has representation from several participating departments.

Candidates should be at the Full Professor level. Salary is negotiable. Consideration of applications will begin on March 29, 2010, but applications will be considered until the position is filled. Send a letter of interest that outlines your qualifications for the position as well as a CV to:

Search Committee Staff
Rutgers University
Center for Cognitive Science
152 Frelinghuysen Road, Psychology Building Addition
Piscataway, NJ 08854

OR

Fax: 732-445-6715

OR

Email to: dirsearch@ruccs.rutgers.edu

Andrew Ross is an extraordinarily localised artist, whose body of work has largely focused on his immediate environs of Wellington, New Zealand. He photographs a disappearing city. Andrew Ross, Lyall Bay, Wellington Ross does photograph outside Wellington: Andrew Ross, Tui Brewery, Mangatainoka, North Island...

IOZ says:

[T]he plainer truth of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is that it represents and clearly indicates that gays aren’t fighting for the right to “defend their country,” but are fighting for the right to go forth and kill foreigners in aggressive, hegemonic foreign wars, invasions, and occupations.

I am sympathetic, but I think we ought to be careful. I think most opponents of DADT are fighting for gays’ right to “defend their country.” It just turns out that much of the U.S. military’s actual activity is “to go forth and kill foreigners in aggressive, hegemonic foreign wars, invasions, and occupations.” Joining the Army to defend America is sort of like joining the World Bank to help the world’s poor. You’re probably making it worse. It is difficult, however, to decide how much blame we should lay upon those who willingly turn themselves over to the violent branches of state to do its largely immoral bidding. I don’t want to say that sincerely believing that one has enlisted to defend America absolves one of responsibility for the crimes one subsequently commits under orders. It’s not like trespassing, kidnapping, and murder aren’t trespassing, kidnapping and murder just as long as a nation-state is paying you to do it. But, at the same time, it really doesn’t seem fair to lay too much on 20 year-olds inhabiting a hyper-patriotic culture in which movie trailers make the Marines look awesome and the nobility of military service is rarely questioned. Contracting to do what the military tells you to do is a moral mistake we admire and enthusiastically encourage. To refuse this encouragement and admiration to the openly gay is to do wrong unjustly. Establishing equality of status within morally compromised institutions has the virtue of one mistake over two.

For those in and around Jacksonville, the first philosophy slam of the semester will take place Tuesday, February 9^th: “Friend Request DENIED: How Social Networks Disconnect and Damage the Individual,” featuring UNF alumnus and FSPB contributor, Dathan Auerbach. The action will begin at 7:30 P.M. at London Bridge Pub — 100 E Adams St., corner of Adams and Ocean downtown.

Readers of this blog may be interested in an upcoming workshop in experimental philosophy hosted by the University of Wroclaw in Poland. The workshop will take place from May 21-23. The following is from their website:

We invite all those interested in experimental philosophy to participate in the workshop but most eagerly encourage young scholars, graduate students, and curious undergraduates to take the opportunity and get acquainted with this new field of philosophical research.

You can find more information at their website: http://www.filozofia.uni.wroc.pl/xphi/.

The Pope has recently launched an attack on the UK's anti-discrimination legislation.

The Pope seems to be referring to certain provisions in the government's Equality Bill which is currently being debated in Parliament -- specifically, the provisions that clarify the conditions in which an employer can lawfully refuse to hire someone because of their sex or marital status or sexual orientation. According to the bill, the principal conditions in which a religious organization may do this is when filling positions that "mainly involve (a) leading or assisting in the observance of liturgical or ritualistic practices, or (b) promoting or explaining the doctrine of the religion (whether to followers of the religion or to others)."

According to the Pope, this "imposes ... unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs, [and] in some respects, ... violates natural law". I shall argue that on this point the UK government is basically right, and the Pope is wrong.

The English Roman Catholic Bishops have also complained about the bill. In their view, the Church needs to be able to discriminate on such bases as sex or marital status or sexual orientation whenever such discrimination could help to ensure that the "ethos of the Church permeates every aspect of its activities": this could be important even with "a residential caretaker post if it involves routine contact with the local Catholic community"; but it is especially important with positions that have a "representative ... role" -- which apparently includes not just "youth workers" but even "parish secretaries."

According to the Bishops, the UK government fails to understand that the ultimate purpose of religion is all-encompassing: "religion is about the whole of life and the whole person; it is not limited to formal worship and instruction." But the question is whether the state should accept this all-encompassing purpose as legitimate grounds for employment discrimination.

The problem is that this all-encompassing purpose of promoting a certain "ethos" could in principle justify any kind of discrimination whatsoever. For example, imagine a Church of White-Supremacist Misogynists, whose central religious doctrine is that all human beings other than white men are wholly despicable. It would be contrary to their "ethos" to employ anyone who wasn't a white man to do anything, even to be an accountant or a gardener!

However, freedom of religion does not mean that "religious communities" should always be permitted to "act in accordance with their beliefs", as the Pope puts it. For instance, in the famous 1990 case Employment Division vs. Smith, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was quite consistent with freedom of religion for the government to prohibit the use of the psychoactive drug peyote without allowing any exemption for its sacramental use in Native American religious practices. Fundamentally, I believe, the point of freedom of religion is that the law should not single out any religious beliefs or activities for special disfavour; it does not exempt religious organizations from being subject to the same laws as everyone else.

In general, any organization that has the long-term role of being an employer in the labour market can reasonably be subject to a range of legal requirements. Since equality of opportunity is such an important government objective, it seems reasonable that employers should be required to define every employment position as having a fairly definite and specific role or function, and that when people apply for these positions, they should be selected solely on the basis of how well they can reasonably be expected to fulfil that function.

So, we should ask, What legitimate kind of definite and specific role or function could it be that could only be appropriately performed by a person of a certain specific sex or sexual orientation?

The only relevant answer that I can think of is: a broadly expressive purpose, the purpose of expressing and communicating a certain set of doctrines or values or ideals. Certain doctrines or ideals can only be effectively communicated by someone who represents or embodies those ideals, and embodying those ideals might require having a certain sex or sexual orientation. In short, I suggest, religious organizations should be allowed precisely the same sorts of exemptions from employment non-discrimination laws as "expressive associations."

E.g. a feminist organization devoted to promoting the belief that women should have the leading role in the fight against sexism may, I believe, favour women in appointing the leaders of the organization (though perhaps not in employing its cooks and cleaners). If the doctrines of Roman Church include the idea that homosexual behaviour is contrary to "natural law", and that in consequence having a propensity towards such behaviour is an "intrinsic disorder", then perhaps they may permissibly discriminate against gay people in appointing people to promote, express, or communicate these doctrines (whether as priests or deacons or Sunday-school teachers or the like).

However, this seems more or less what the UK government is focusing on with its emphasis on positions that "mainly" involve "promoting and explaining the doctrine of the religion". Perhaps the wording is not ideal. Perhaps the formulation should allow for a larger understanding of a position's "expressive" or "communicative" or "representative" role (as well as recognizing that a post may crucially involve a certain role even if it is not the role that takes up most of the postholder's time). But if the Roman Church asserts that "parish secretaries" and "residential caretakers" have this sort of role, that assertion should not be automatically exempt from judicial review. (Otherwise, our imaginary Church of White-Supremacist Misogynists could just declare that every one of its employees, including its accountants and cleaners, had a "representative" role, and religious organizations would have carte blanche to engage in any form of employment discrimination whatsoever.)

Some Roman Catholics appear to believe that the Equality Bill would force the Church to ordain non-celibate gay priests. My legal friends assure me that "in no jurisdiction where there is similar legislation have the courts required a church to employ gay priests, deacons, religious teachers....; nor is it likely that the English courts would do this." So I conclude that the Pope is quite wrong to call for "missionary zeal" against the Equality Bill.

Today is Ayn Rand’s birthday! What better way to celebrate than to apply the cold light of reason to her philosophy?

Below is a cleaned-up version of an email I sent to the participants in this month’s Cato Unbound on Rand’s moral and political thought in an attempt to stir the pot a bit.  When Doug Rasmussen wrote a post replying to my pot-stirring, I realized it would be helpful to readers to see just what it is that he is replying to. So here you have it…

As the discussion at Cato Unbound has developed, it has become fairly clear that Douglas Rasmussen, Neera Badhwar, and Roderick Long all share a similar neo-Aristotelian interpretation of Rand’s ethics. Or perhaps “reconstruction” would be a better term. In any case, it seems fairly clear to me that this form of eudaimonist virtue ethics, however attractive it may be, simply was not Rand’s stated theory. The theory she stated in “The Objectivist Ethics” is ambiguous between the “survival” and “flourishing” interpretation. But her later (more mature?) essay, “Causality and Duty” isn’t ambiguous at all. It is perhaps the most adamant brief for rationality-as-instrumental and morality-as-prudence ever written.

Back when I was a grad student and an Objectivist, I found the squishy Aristotelian flourishing types incredibly frustrating. (I say “squishy” with love.) “Can they read!?” I’d shout at my computer screen incredulously. Now that I find what I take to be Rand’s moral theory simply implausible, I find the squishy Aristotelian flourishing types admirably charitable. But I still consider the neo-Aristotelian line a revisionist interpretation or rational reconstruction. Is it really helpful to posterity to represent Rand as a laissez faire Bill Bennett?

Let me say a little something about one reason I drifted away from Rand. Starting from a morality-as-rationality, rationality-as-instrumental-to-survival interpretation of Rand (the interpretation obviously supported by the relevant texts!), I started to find contractarian theorists of morality-as-instrumental rationality, such as David Gauthier, pretty interesting. And through Gauthier (and James Buchanan) I came to better grasp the deep problem involved in getting just two instrumentally rational individuals to cooperate and capture the valuable surplus therefrom. It then occurred to me that there really may be a point after all in talking about morality as an institution separate from prudence. And that’s when I abandoned Randian egoism for David Schmidtzean “moral dualism” (a convenient half-way house for recovering non-neo-Aristotelian Randians). The rest is history!

Anyway, the point isn’t my intellectual biography. The point is that Rand seems to me to have missed something totally fundamental to morality: a concern for it’s social, coordinating function. The well-known social dilemmas that emerge from what Deidre McCloskey usefully calls a “Prudence Only” view of human behavior draws our attention to the need for an institution that brings separate and often conflicting interests into harmony. I don’t think there’s any denying that Rand brought much-needed attention back to the profound ethical importance of the cultivation of personal virtue in pursuit of excellence and happiness. But didn’t she sort of miss the social point of morality?

Russ Shafer-Landau has the 2010 Workshop announcement up. Here is Russ's note:

Dear Colleague,
I’m pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the Seventh Annual Metaethics Workshop, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 24-26, 2010. Stephen Darwall (Yale) will be this year's keynote speaker. Abstracts (of 2-3 double-spaced pages) of papers in any area of metaethics are due by May 1. There is a limit of one submission per person. Speakers in the 2008 or 2009 workshop are not eligible to submit abstracts for this year’s event. A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by early June.

Questions may be sent to Russ, whose contact information is on his website.

A widespread tactics in war consists in using civilians as shields, eg by taking the fight into densely populated areas, or by more or less forcibly placing civilians in the line of fire - in the hope that the enemy will hold fire, take fewer risks, etc. Most people believe that resorting to such tactics is morally wrong (as well as unlawful as per the Geneva Conventions.) Yet, there are some other, widely held intuitions which seem to conflict with that view - in particular the intuition that military conscription is permissible. In one-to-one cases, forcibly using someone as a shield in self-defence clearly is impermissible. The same applies in war, one might think.

But perhaps this is too quick. Take the case where B uses its own non-combatants. However, S’s case might be thought to differ in one crucial respect from the case of human shields, to wit, that non-combatants(B) are asked to incur high risks of harm, not for the sake of other persons, but for the sake of prosecuting a war in the success of which they, as members of B, have a strong interest. And in some cases, one might argue, conscripting individuals into the army to fight such a war is permissible. Might that also apply to shields?

A standard case for conscription appeals to the principle of fairness. As a rough sketch, here is how the argument might go: In so far as a just war is one which is fought for a just cause such as blocking serious rights violations, the benefits it confers are such that one is under an enforceable duty to contribute to it, whether or not one has consented to having those rights secured for oneself, and provided that one stands a higher chance than not, not merely of surviving the war, but of enjoying a minimally flourishing life after the war.

If there is an enforceable duty to contribute to the war effort, as the case for war-time military conscription suggests, then is there not an enforceable duty to contribute as a shield? There is a further twist here. For quite often, B will use non-combatants as shields in the expectation that its enemy will, as a result, desist from shooting, or at least exercise greater caution than if they were not faced with human shields. It might well be, then, that the risks incurred by shields would be lower than the risks incurred by conscripts on the battlefield. If individuals are under a duty to incur a given risk R whilst fulfilling combating roles, it seems hard to object to holding them under a duty to incur R-n, which would thus help justify conscripting them into ‘shielding’.

This is all speculative as yet…Three loose ends need tying (at the very least.) First, I would say that not everyone should be used as a shield: infants, the very elderly, etc. But I am not sure how I can support this intuition.Second, more work would need to be done on penalties for dereliction of duty (a conscript who absconds is usually sent to jail; what of a shield?) Finally, there is the problem of intervening agency: suppose that B's enemy do not desist from shooting, as a result of which shields incur a greater risk of harm than they are under a duty to incur. To what extent does this affect the moral status of B's resort to the tactics?

Hi folks,

I wanted to draw your attention to our new manuscript that reports on a study of Joshua Knobe's famous 'Chairman case'. I conducted the study with my colleague Sara Konrath, and we used a method called structural path analysis to uncover some pretty surprising things about people's intuitions in the Chairman case. In short, we argue that normative factors do not drive asymmetric intuitions in the case, though people think they do. The methods used in the study are relatively new in X-Phi, and we hope that people will be receptive to our approach.  We would absolutely love comments and criticisms.

The paper is here.  And here is the abstract reprinted below.

Thanks,
Chandra

---------------------------------------

Abstract

Recently, a number of philosophers have advanced a surprising conclusion – people’s judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally are pervasively influenced by normative considerations. In this paper, we investigate the ‘Chairman case’, an influential case from this literature and disagree with this conclusion. Using a statistical method called structural path modeling, we show that people’s attributions of intentional action to an agent are driven not by normative assessments, but rather by attributions of underlying values and characterological dispositions to the agent. In a second study, we examined people’s judgments about what they think drives asymmetric intuitions in the Chairman case and found that people are highly inaccurate in identifying which features of the case their intuitions track. In the final part of the paper, we discuss how the statistical methods used in this study can help philosophers with the tracking problem, the problem of figuring out which features of hypothetical cases our intuitions are responsive to. We show how the methods used in this study have some advantages over both armchair methods used by traditional philosophers and survey methods used by experimental philosophers.  

An homage to Galen Strawson at The New Republic

We are pleased to announce that Cécile Fabre has accepted our invitation to become a contributor to PEA Soup. The author of numerous books and articles on a variety of subjects, including justice, rights, bioethics, and the ethics of war, Cécile is a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Her recent article on just war was the focus of PEA Soup's first discussion in the collaboration with Ethics. Welcome aboard, Cécile!

As part of our ongoing mission to enrich your minds (see the Film series on Ning for current students), we are planning an RPE Day Out…

The plan is to visit the newly refurbished and reopened Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. (http://www.ashmolean.org/ )

There is some great material there – esp on Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, but also a range of other things of interest to RPE students – we hope you will make the effort to join the staff and explore the museum.

Students - details have been sent out via Ning...

Barbara Mensch is best known for her photographs of the old Fulton Fish Market, to which two books have been devoted. She has also photographed the Brooklyn Bridge for nearly 30 years. Barbara C Mensch, "Waterfalls 1," 2008 From windows facing west and from the roof of her loft, Mensch...

Over at The Business Ethics Blog, Chris MacDonald has a very interesting post on ethical issues surrounding the labor dispute at the Westin St. Francis, the site of the 2010 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.  Specifically, he asks what obligations the existence of such a dispute might impose upon consumers.  Should consumers stay away from businesses when unions are calling for a boycott, or are on strike?

Chris raises a number of good points in his post, and I won’t repeat them here.  And I won’t try, just yet, to answer the big question of what consumers have all-things-considered reason to do in such situations in general, or in the situation faced by the APA in particular.  But I do want to set out a few questions that I think are worth addressing in the course of trying to answer that larger question.  I’d be curious to hear what PEA Soupers think about them, as well as what they think about the other issues Chris raises.

First, one might ask whether in the absence of any specific information regarding the details of the particular dispute, there is any prima facie reason to suppose that one side of the dispute is correct.  That is, do we think that unions or management are, as a general matter, more likely to have the right stance on whatever empirical  or moral issues are at stake.

Second, do we have any prima facie reason to take a side that is independent of our beliefs about which side is correct on the particular empirical and normative issues at stake?  Perhaps we might think that because union members are more vulnerable, as a rule, than stockholders, we should take the side of the union when we don’t have any information about which side is correct (or perhaps even when we do have such information but our uncertainty about the correct resolution of the issues falls short of a certain threshold).

Third, just what constitutes taking a side, anyway?  It seems clear that deciding to stay at a hotel just because the union is boycotting it would constitute taking sides against the union.  But what about an agent who, antecedent to the boycott, made plans to stay at the soon-to-be-boycotted hotel?  Would his failure to cancel his reservation after the initiation of the boycott constitute taking sides against the union?  Would, as Chris thinks, cancelling your reservation in such circumstances constitute taking sides with the union?  Is there anything one can do that wouldn’t constitute taking a side?  I tend to think that there are distinctions between causing negative consequences for B, being morally responsible for causing negative consequences for B, and taking sides against B.  But it’s not clear to me how much rides on these distinctions in these kinds of cases.

The 2010 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference will be held Aug. 1-5.  The call for papers, commentators and chairs can be found here.

Suppose you believe in both truthmaking and metaphysical dependence. That is, you believe both that for some true proposition p there is some thing or things which make p true, and that for some true propositions q and r, q is true in virtue of r. Neither relationship, you think, is to be analysed modally: the truth of ‘Necessarily, if A exists then p’ is a necessary condition for A’s making p true, but it is not a sufficient one; likewise for ‘Necessarily, if q then r’ and ‘r is true in virtue of q’.

If you believe all that, it’d be nice if one of truthmaking or in virtue of could be defined in terms of the other, so that we only have one primitive here rather than two. I think the prospects of defining truthmaking in terms of in virtue of are better than vice-versa, and I’d welcome thoughts on this.

How might one define the in virtue of relation that can hold between two true propositions in terms of the makes true relation that holds between a thing and a true proposition? Here are some of the obvious things that come to my mind, and why I don’t like them.

(1) p is true in virtue of q iff q makes p true

Okay, this one is obviously hopeless. For starters, if propositions are necessary existents, this entails that no contingent truth is true in virtue of anything. But even if propositions are contingent existents, presumably their existence is not contingent on them being true; they can exist and be false, and so this definition is still hopeless. Suppose 'X is wrong' is, as the consequentialist says, true in virtue of 'X has bad consequences'; the definition tells us that the latter proposition makes it true that X is wrong. But that proposition can exist and be false (X might have had good consequences), so now we’re committed to thinking that in a world where X has good consequences, X is still wrong, which is exactly the opposite of what the consequentialist wants.

(2) p is true in virtue of q iff the truth of q makes p true

This solves the above problem, but at the cost of admitting weird entities. What type of entity is the truth of q? A truth trope: the particularized truth of the proposition q? Nasty.

(3) p is true in virtue of q iff the state of affairs that q makes p true

That might be okay if there were a state of affairs that p for every true proposition p. But there’s not.

(4) p is true in virtue of q iff (necessarily) whatever makes q true makes p true

No: it’s no part of the definition of truthmaking that every truth has a truthmaker, and we should allow for the possibility that one proposition is true in virtue of another even though neither have truthmakers, as well as the possibility that two propositions lack truthmakers but where one is not true in virtue of the other. And if every truth does have a truthmaker, the definition will entail the wrong result that is true in virtue of any true negative existential, such as , since whatever makes the negative existential true necessarily makes it true that there is something, since everything that makes anything true necessarily makes it true that something exists, since it makes it true that it itself exists.

It doesn’t look to me like there’s a good way of defining in virtue of in terms of truthmaking; but I think truthmaking can be defined in terms of in virtue of. Truthmaker theory says that what is true is grounded in what there is: as I understand it, this is the claim that the totality of truths are ultimately true in virtue of just those truths that are concerned solely with ontology – that is, that any truth at all is ultimately true in virtue of some truth(s) concerning (solely) what there is.

Call the set containing all and only the brute propositions – that is, those that are not true in virtue of anything – BRUTUS. Consider also the set – call it EXISTS – of propositions whose entire content is that some thing, or some things, exist(s): call these propositions pure existence claims. (Pure existence claims will be expressible by sentences of the form ‘a exists’ or ‘the Xs exist’, where ‘a’ is a rigid designator and ‘the Xs’ a rigid plurally referring expression (i.e. it plurally refers in every possible world to the things that are actually the Xs if they exist, and it fails to refer if any of the actual Xs fail to exist.)

We can define truthmaking as follows.

(*) A proposition p is made true by X, or the Xs, just in case either (i) p belongs to BRUTUS & p belongs to EXISTS & p says that X (or the Xs) exist(s) or (ii) There is an x such that (p is true in virtue of x & x belongs to BRUTUS & x belongs to EXISTS & x says that X (or the Xs) exist(s)).

That is: a proposition is made true by some things, the Xs, if and only if it is the brutely true pure existence claim that the Xs exist or it is true in virtue of the brutely true pure existence claim that the Xs exist.

I’d welcome any thoughts on this. Especially if you think there’s a problem with the proposed definition of truthmaking in terms of in virtue of or if you think there’s a good way to define in virtue of in terms of truthmaking.

University of Colorado, Boulder 
August 5-8, 2010 
Boulder, Colorado

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Center for Values and Social Policy in the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder is pleased to invite paper proposals for the third annual RoME congress.  Papers from all areas of ethics and political theory are invited.  To encourage the participation of junior scholars, the University of Colorado will be awarding a Young Ethicist Prize of $500 for most meritorious submission.  The prize competition is open to any participating untenured philosopher (including, but not limited to, tenure-track faculty, instructors, and graduate students).

DEADLINES

Submission of abstracts: Feb 15, 2010.   
Notification of acceptance: March 25, 2010.
Full paper submission for Young Ethicist Prize Consideration: June 1, 2010.

FORMAT

Abstracts only (750-1000 words).  Shorter or longer abstracts will not be accepted.  Double spaced, prepared for blind-review.
     
(Anticipate full papers at half-hour reading time or 4500 words, whichever is shorter.)

In order to be considered for the Young Ethicist Prize, complete papers must be submitted by June 1, 2010 and abstracts must have already been accepted for participation.  Announcement of a winner will be made at the event.

Indicate in your submission whether you would consider being a commentator on another paper, should your paper not be accepted to the conference for presentation.

Please submit abstracts electronically (in Word format) to Benjamin Hale (bhale@colorado.edu) and Alastair Norcross (Alastair.Norcross@colorado.edu).   

Visit our website at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/center/rome.shtml 

I tried to find a live video feed of Apple's launch of the iPad in San Francisco early this morning but there was none working. Twitter, however, was full on and I followed the live blogs of the event. Is there actually room for a multitouch screen tablet device between...

I was reading this article this morning, and the following passage caught my attention:

"When Mr. Obama presents his first State of the Union address on Wednesday evening, aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame, for failing to deliver swiftly on some of the changes he promised a year ago."

What is the distinction between "accepting responsibility" and "accepting blame" that White House aides are relying on here? Is this just political wordplay or can we make something substantive out of it?

Please join me in congratulating Al on receiving a very impressive grant from the John Templeton Foundation for the project: "Free Will: Human and Divine--Empirical and Philosophical Explorations."  For more information on the project please see this website.  This is very exciting for Al, as well as for future research on free will.

4. Critique of Relativization

4.1 Is this relativity compatible with realism? I think not. For if realism is true, in cases of veridical perception we perceive things just as they really are. But if Strawson is right, we cannot speak of “the way things really are” independently of some standpoint. What then can it mean to say that there are cases of veridical perception? It can only mean that we perceive things as they really are in a certain standpoint. The question now becomes, “What is it for things to be a certain way in a certain standpoint?”

4.2 Let us elaborate on this a bit. To make things clearer, suppose that instead of saying, e.g., “That mountain is really blue”, we turn ‘really’ into a sentential operator and say: “It is really the case that that mountain is blue.” Now we can ask, for all sentences P, does “It is really the case that P” entail P? If it does—and it certainly seems to—how can divergent property ascriptions in different standpoints not be inconsistent? For then the sentence “It is really the case that that mountain is blue”, asserted in whatever standpoint you please, entails “That mountain is blue.” Thus, if someone asserts “It is not the case that it is really the case that that mountain is blue” in any standpoint, this entails “It is not the case that that mountain is blue”, and that clearly contradicts “That mountain is blue.” And this is problematic for Strawson’s view, for according to his view these seemingly inconsistent sentences could be truly asserted in different standpoints.

4.3 Strawson could reply that there is no trouble here, for we have failed to index our sentences to the different standpoints. Since on his view sentences are only true in a certain standpoint, we should add in indexes to standpoints to make this fact explicit. Thus, instead of plain old “P” we have “P-in-standpoint-S”. So what we can say is that “It is really the case that P-in-standpoint-S” entails “P-in-standpoint-S”, and Strawson would say there is nothing wrong with the latter sentence. For him “P-in-standpoint-S” and “not-P-in-standpoint-R” are not genuinely inconsistent, because P and not-P are indexed to different standpoints. But I think such indexing makes sense only if the indexes make sense. Can we make any sense of a sentence’s being true only in a certain standpoint? I think the answer is “no”, as I will now argue.

4.4 As we have seen, Strawson thinks that divergent ascriptions of properties, when relativized to different standpoints, are not genuinely inconsistent with each other: “The appearance of both volatility and conflict vanishes when we acknowledge the relativity of our reallys” (Strawson p. 107). If that is so, why do ascriptions of properties need to be relativized? For there are statements in different standpoints that do not even seem to contradict each other. I can say, concerning the very same chair, both “That chair is wooden” and “That chair is made of quarks.” These sentences, though they may be relativized to different standpoints, could also be truly asserted in a single standpoint. Yet, if Strawson is right, the sentence “That chair is brown” can be truly asserted in the human perceptual standpoint and the sentence “That chair has no color” can be truly asserted in the scientific standpoint, though presumably they could not be truly asserted in a single standpoint. While Strawson does say (p. 108) that we can combine two standpoints in a single sentence, I think he means that different aspects of the sentence belong to different standpoints, not that the whole sentence does. As I understand Strawson, one can say something like: “Considered from the scientific standpoint, that chair has no color, but considered from the human perceptual standpoint, that chair is brown.” This combines two standpoints in a single sentence. But surely one could not say something like: “Considered from the scientific standpoint, that chair has no color, but considered from the scientific standpoint, that chair is also brown.” So the fact—if it is a fact—that we can combine two standpoints in a single sentence does not entail that we can truly assert inconsistent sentences in a single standpoint.

4.5 Now, suppose someone utters the sentence “That chair is brown” in a common-sense perceptual context and then utters the sentence “That chair is brown” again, this time in a scientific context. That sentence either has the same meaning in both contexts or a different one, assuming that it is not meaningless in either of them. If it has the same meaning, in cannot be true in one context and false in the other, on pain of contradiction. Thus if “That chair is brown” is true in the human perceptual standpoint it is also true in the scientific standpoint, and so it cannot also be the case that “That chair has no color” is true in the scientific standpoint. Conversely, if “That chair has no color” is true in the scientific standpoint, it is also true in the human perceptual standpoint, assuming it is uttered with the same meaning in a common-sense perceptual context. And if that is so it cannot also be the case that “That chair is brown” is true in the human perceptual standpoint. So if these sentences have the same meaning in both standpoints, they must have the same truth value in each of them, and Strawson’s view falls apart. If they have different meanings in the different standpoints, it is no surprise that each could have a different truth value in different standpoints; for the fact that the same sentence can have different truth values if it is assigned different meanings is a truism, and is something that can hardly resolve the conflict between the standpoints of human perception and science. And that means that Strawson’s account cannot do what it was meant to do.

5. Conclusion

5.1 In conclusion, Strawson’s account simply will not work. If one finds it appealing, I think it is because the notion of relativization to a standpoint has a certain charm, for it gives one the thrill of flirting with a contradiction. But we have seen that ascriptions of properties are either consistent or inconsistent: If they are consistent there is no need to relativize to a standpoint, and if they are not consistent, no relativization can reconcile them. Thus Strawson’s view is contradictory, and for that reason it is consistent neither with realism nor with anything else. Its aim to reconcile science and the common-sense view of perception is certainly praiseworthy, but it remains a noble attempt to do the impossible.

References

Strawson, P.F., “Perception and Its Objects”, in Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Alva Noe and Evan Thompson (eds.). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England 2002.

As some of you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging much for the last several months. This is due to the fact that I was pretty busy--I was taking five classes-- and also to the fact that I've had what I'll call philosopher's block--the inability to come up with anything new or interesting to say on philosophical subjects. I hope to overcome that soon and start posting (fairly) regularly again. In the meantime, here's one of my papers from a class I took on the philosophy of perception.

1. Introduction

1.1 In his article “Perception and Its Objects”, P. F. Strawson defends a common-sense standpoint on the nature of perception against its scientifically-inspired opponents. In order to do so, he must establish that these standpoints, despite appearances, do not really contradict each other. However, I think that in this case the appearances are not deceiving. First, I explain the apparent conflict between the scientific standpoint and the common-sense human perceptual standpoint. Next, I outline Strawson’s attempt to reconcile the two via the notion of relativization to a standpoint. Finally, I argue that Strawson’s attempt fails because in the end the notion of relativization to a standpoint is incoherent.

2. Opposing Standpoints

2.1 In the last few pages of his article “Perception and Its Objects”, Strawson tries to reconcile two opposing standpoints: the scientific standpoint and the common-sense human perceptual standpoint. According to the first, objects do not possess any properties except those which our best physical theories attribute to them (Strawson, pp. 98-9)[1]. Physical objects do not, for example, have sensible properties such as colors. According to the second, in cases of veridical perception physical objects really do possess the sensible properties they seem to have (Strawson, p. 100 and p. 103), colors being a prominent example. Because perception is direct according to the common-sense standpoint (Strawson, p. 106), colors cannot be properties of perceptual intermediaries such as sense-data. So if there are any cases of veridical color experience, at least some colors must be properties of the external, physical objects of our perception; otherwise all color experience is illusory.

2.2 It would thus seem that we face a dilemma. If the scientific standpoint is correct, we are the victims of a massive amount of perceptual error. If the common-sense standpoint is correct, our best physical theories are radically incomplete, for then there is a large class of properties that they cannot account for, and do not even acknowledge to exist. Yet it seems that one or the other of these views must be right: Either colors are “out there” waiting to be perceived in the external, physical world, or they are not. Is there any way out of this? Can we have our chromatic cake and eat it too?

3. Strawson’s Aim: Reconciliation through Relativization

3.1 Strawson apparently thinks that we can. In order to do so, we must take a cue from the way we talk when we ascribe visual properties to things. For the same thing may look one way to Jones in one circumstance, another way to Smith in the same circumstance, and still another way to Jones in a different circumstance. The same mountains might look red at a certain distance in a certain light and blue at a different distance in a different light (Strawson, pp. 106-7). And the same fabric that looks purple in one light may really be green (Strawson, p. 107). Such property ascriptions are relative to a perceptual point of view that is regarded as standard, and we only recognize the relativity when things deviate from this standard (Strawson, p. 107). Sometimes, though, we can change the standard: “Magnified, the fabric appears as printed with tiny blue and yellow dots. So those are the colors it really is. Does this ascription contradict ‘it’s really green’? No; for the standard has shifted” (Strawson, p. 107). And of course we can also shift the standard back (Strawson, p. 107). Strawson thinks that we can give a similar account of the apparent conflict between the scientific and common-sense standpoints. The difference is that in this case we do not shift from one perceptual viewpoint to another, but from a perceptual viewpoint to a scientific one. Thus ascriptions of color are, for example, true relative to the common-sense human perceptual standpoint, and false relative to the scientific standpoint. As Strawson rightly notes, “This method of reconciling scientific and common-sense realism requires us to recognise a certain relativity in our conception of the real properties of physical objects” (Strawson p. 108).

In A Life More Photographic in Photographies (March 2008) Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis say about an online digital Kodak or Nokia photographic culture that: The distribution and sharing of snapshots online highlights a paradoxical condition that characterizes snapshot photography: it is both ubiquitous and hidden. Since the beginning of...

Revd Dr Harriet A. Harris (Wadham College, Oxford), ‘Philosophy and Prayer’

at 5.30 on Tuesday 26^th January

Francis Close Hall Campus (Cheltenham)

in room TC006b

All Welcome

Harriet A. Harris is Chaplain of Wadham College, Oxford and teaches Theology and Philosophy in the University of Oxford. She has written Fundamentalism and Evangelicals for Oxford University Press, numerous articles on Protestant fundamentalist thought and activity, and some comparative reflections on fundamentalisms across the world faiths

[Warning to the reader: the remarks that follow cite no-one and do not attempt to engage with details; but they are in part a response to the first two essays in this book.]

What is called "experimental philosophy" is diverse and does not admit of unified treatment. Some of it enlists the existing work of empirical scientists where it might be relevant to the questions of philosophy. While I may not always agree about the relevance, this seems innocent enough.

But there are more radical threads. One is a variety of "naturalism" that entails the complete rejection of a priori knowledge and non-empirically justified belief. Let the armchair blaze.

It is sometimes claimed by advocates of "naturalism" that the armchair method rests on a hopeless view of philosophy as conceptual analysis: what could one discover from the armchair, if anything, but the shape of one's conceptual space? (Can one discover even that? See below.) But whatever we make of the rest of it, the sociology of Williamson's recent book is sound when he denies that this view is orthodox. Many philosophers reject the conceptual analyst's account of a priori knowledge.

Some do not, of course, but others give other accounts, and there is a silent majority. Moreover, the pressure to countenance the a priori and to do so in a way that outstrips conceptual analysis or "epistemological analyticity" can be seen in the traditional problem of induction. According to a tempting principle,

One of the grave threats to the development of mankind in general, and philosophy in particular, is the assumption that the objects of propositional attitudes can be expressed by that-clauses. The assumption is often smuggled in via a definition, e.g. when propositions are defined as things that are 1) objects of attitudes and 2) expressed by that-clauses. No effort is made to show that anything satisfies both (1) and (2) -- let alone that the things that satisfy (1) coincide with the things that satisfy (2).

One of the many places where this hinders progress is the introduction of centered (de se) contents. Take Lewis's suggestion that the objects of attitudes are properties. What kind of that-clause would express, say, the property of living in Berlin? On the assumption that the objects of attitudes are expressible by that-clauses, Lewis's suggestion is a non-starter.

Philosophers who are sympathetic to Lewis's proposal (including Lewis himself) sometimes put it in terms of self-ascription: I self-ascribe the property of living in Berlin. What is it for me to self-ascribe this property? Presumably it is to believe that I live in Berlin. Here we have our that-clause! On this interpretation of Lewis's proposal, the object of attitudes are expressed by that-clauses of the form "that I am F".

But this leads to trouble. In chapter 28 of his book Perspectival Thought (2007), Francois Recanati wonders:

How can I (pretend to) self-ascribe the property of being Napoleon and fighting the battle of Waterloo, if those are properties that it is impossible for me to instantiate?

Daniel Nolan raises similar worries in his "Selfless Desires" (2006): can't I desire that there be no sentient life, or that my parents never met? But then the content of my desire is not adequately expressed by any clause of the form "that I am F".

In either case, the problem is that self-ascription turns a perfectly harmless property into something impossible. It doesn't help to say that people can believe and desire the impossible. Even if that is true, a desire that there be no sentient life is surely not a desire of something impossible.

When I say "I wish I was never born" or "I wish there was no sentient life", I express a desire that is satisfied at worlds where I was never born. On Lewis's proposal, the content of my desire is a property that applies to various things in worlds where I do not exist. This is a perfectly consistent property, and there is no reason why it couldn't be the content of a desire.

It would be better to avoid talk of self-ascription. If the content of beliefs and desires are properties, then they just aren't things expressed by that-clauses -- not even by that-clauses of the form "that I am F".

Clement Greenberg's late Homemade Aesthetics (circa 1971)--roughly the time of the Conceptual Art movement----rests upon upon the substantial body of his earlier work. One of the assumption of this body of work was his claim about aesthetic judgments and the nature of taste. Greenberg held that taste was involuntary and...

The ABC prime time sci-fi series FlashForward deals entertainingly with free will, fatalism, time and the future, even if the starting premise is a tad implausible: the whole world blacks out for 2 minutes 17 seconds, during which people see glimpses of their lives 6 months in the future. Question: will these “flashforwards” (some pleasant, some horrific) necessarily come to pass? Can we change the future? You can see the first 10 episodes online at ABC or Hulu, the second season starts up again March 18 according to ABC.

The producer David Goyer says, not too ambitiously: "That is sort of the bulk of what we'll be dealing with philosophically over the second half of the season. It's not determinism, and it's not free will. We never intended it was either/or. There is a philosophical model of the universe that combines them, and we do deal with that head-on in the second half of the season."

From the first season:

 

Newspaper headline following the suicide of someone who saw himself *alive* in his flashforward: “The Future Can Be Changed”.

 

Two physicists haggle over their responsibility for an experiment that might have caused the blackout:

 

Simon: Fate is fate, we’re not responsible, Lloyd.

Lloyd: What about free will?

Simon: No such thing.

Lloyd: Oh since when did you become such a hard determinist?

Simon: Simple quantum suicide theory. I will win this hand and every subsequent hand we play, ad infinitum, QED.…

Lloyd: You’ve upended the whole world and you hide behind determinist rhetoric.

 

Newscasters discussing the blackout: “Let’s get back to the big question: do we have free will… that’s the big question, possibly the central question of human existence for millennia” (fades out)

 

My take on the FlashForward problem set is here. I predict that because it must cater to folk libertarianism on free will and the metaphysical openness of the future, the show will give short shrift to the “block universe” view of things (accepted by many physicists as a consequence of special relativity), in which all events, past, present and future, are immutably fixed in spacetime. But of course the producers might falsify my prediction. Stay tuned!

In Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation in October Vol. 12 (Spring, 1980) Robert Morris says: The production of art works in this late industrial age has for the most part been circumscribed and structured by the commodity market. Beyond this, most artistic careers follow the contours of a consumer-oriented...

Here.

I've always had a soft spot for David Bowie's post Ziggy Stardust title track from his Diamond Dogs album. Thgis Bowie the rocker. The album, the last wheeze of Bowie's glam rock period, is not much as a 1984 concept album. However, —“Diamond Dogs” along with a “Rebel Rebel”—have all...

No mention in the article about determinism, but the details are here. 

Behold, the cover of my new book with OUP. Rather nifty, don't you think?

I’ve recently become puzzled about the best way to formulate the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). Almost everyone follows Frankfurt (1969) who puts it like this: “a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise”.  This is often sharpened like this: “for all persons S and actions A, S is morally responsible for doing A only if S could have done something other than A.”

But there seems to be an obvious problem with this formulation. Frankfurt, as everyone knows, claims that PAP is false; that is, he asserts the negation of PAP. But the negation of PAP (as formulated above) comes out as: “there is a person S and an action A, such that S is morally responsible for doing A and it is not the case that S could have done something other than A.” But this clearly isn’t what Frankfurt (or any contemporary ‘Frankfurtian’) has in mind. This is both too weak and too strong. Too strong: because Frankfurt isn’t claiming that any actual person is responsible. (Despite being a compatibilist about responsibility and determinism, he might think there are other actual considerations that universally rule out responsibility.) Too weak: because Frankfurt isn’t trying to say anything about the actual facts of responsibility; rather, he’s saying something about the conditions for responsibility.

Rather, in denying PAP, Frankfurt means to say that moral responsibility doesn’t require the ability to do otherwise; in other words: it is possible to be responsible despite lacking alternative possibilities. This suggests that PAP is best formulated as follows: “necessarily, for all persons S and actions A, S is morally responsible for doing A only if S could have done something other than A.”  The negation of this is: “possibly, there is a person S and an action A, such that S is morally responsible for doing A and it is not the case that S could have done something other than A”, which seems closer to the mark.

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

There's a very interesting discussion going on at the Experimental Philosophy blog, here.

2ND COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE IN EPISTEMOLOGY:
THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
AUGUST 19-20, 2010

We tend to think of liberal democracy as providing the most ethically defensible way to set up a modern society. A separate yet highly relevant issue is whether liberal democracies also are preferable from an epistemological perspective, i.e., from the point of view of promoting true over false belief, knowledge over ignorance, and so on. The purpose of this conference-and of the research project that it is part of-is to investigate the norms, practices, and institutions that determine how belief and
knowledge is acquired and transmitted in liberal democracies. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

- Under what conditions is free speech a truth-conducive social arrangement?
- When can we trust each others’ testimony?
- What is the proper response to disagreement, including disagreements among experts?
- What is the proper role of scientific expertise in democratic decision making?
- How is the need for expertise to be balanced against the desire for adequate representation?
- What are the epistemological properties of social deliberation?

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Speakers include David Christensen (Brown), Jerry Gaus (Arizona), Stephan Hartmann (Tilburg), Rainer Hegselmann (Bayreuth), Vincent Hendricks (Copenhagen), Michael Lynch (UConn), Erik J. Olsson (Lund), and Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh).

CALL FOR PAPERS
We cordially invite you to submit a 500 word abstract on any topic relevant to the conference theme. Please prepare your abstract for anonymous review. Abstracts should be submitted (as a plain text, MS Word, or PDF file) to cph.epistemology@gmail.com no later than April 1, 2010. Decisions regarding acceptance will be made within two weeks.

REGISTRATION
To register, please e-mail kappel@hum.ku.dk with your name and affiliation. There will be a registration fee of 200 DKK ($40, or €25) for faculty, and 100 DKK ($20, or €12) for students. There will also be an option to attend the conference dinner on the evening of August 19 at a cost of 400 DKK ($80, or €50). Please indicate in your registration if you wish to attend. All fees are due in full on the first day of the conference.

ORGANIZERS
The conference is organized by the Social Epistemology Research Group (SERG) at the University of Copenhagen as part of the research project, the Epistemology of Liberal Democracy: Truth, Free Speech and Disagreement, conducted with generous support from the Velux Foundation.

WEBPAGE
http://epistemology.ku.dk/

I see that Steven Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory argues for the relevance of the beautiful rather than the sublime (and Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique. He reverses the postmodern preference for sublime over the beautiful by privileging beauty over the sublime. So what is meant...

CONF: De se attitudes + Self-Knowledge & Rational Agency, Oslo, June 2010

Arché (St Andrews) and CSMN (Oslo) are pleased to announce two major events on first-person thoughts to be held in Oslo from 6th to 11th June, 2010.

(1) Arché/CSMN Mini-course & Workshop: De se attitudes
Sunday June 6, 2010 - Wednesday June 9, 2010
Confirmed speakers:
• Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz)
• Andy Egan (Rutgers/Arché)
• James Higginbotham (USC)
• Daniel Morgan (Oxford)
• Dilip Ninan (Arché)
• François Recanati (Institute Jean-Nicod (CNRS)/Arché)
• Seth Yalcin (Berkeley)
Website: http://www.csmn.uio.no/events/2010/De-Se

(2) Conference: Self-Knowledge and Rational Agency
Wednesday June 9, 2010 - Friday June 11, 2010
Confirmed Speakers:
• Quassim Cassam (Warwick)
• Fred Dretske (Duke)
• Adrian Haddock (Stirling)
• Pamela Heironymi (UCLA)
• Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck/CSMN)
• Richard Moran (Harvard)
• Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
• Crispin Wright (NYU/Aberdeen)
Website: http://www.csmn.uio.no/events/2010/self-knowledge.xml

Call for participants / respondents:
We invite postgraduate students and junior researchers (within 5 years of completing Ph.D.) to come as participants to the De Se Mini-course, and as respondents to one of the plenary speakers at the Self-Knowledge conference.

(1) Mini-course & Workshop on de se attitudes
The Workshop and Mini-Course is intended for graduate students and younger researchers (postdocs and junior faculty) working on related topics. Participants from outside St Andrews and Oslo need to apply; see details below.

(2) Conference on Self-Knowledge & Rational Agency
Invited respondents will present brief replies (c. 10 minutes) to one of the plenary talks, to open the question and discussion sessions. Accommodation in Oslo and travel expenses within Europe (or a subsidy of similar amount for invitees outside Europe) of respondents will be paid for by CSMN.

To apply for either event (or both), please send by email:
- Your name and institutional affiliation;
- A brief CV, inc. year of your Ph.D. (if any, 2007 or after);
- Name of a referee;
- A brief statement of up to 200 words for *each* of the event(s) you are applying for (so 2 x 200 words if you are applying for both), explaining the relevance of the themes of the workshop/conference to your research.
- For the Self-Knowledge conference only, names of up to 3 speakers, in order of preference, you would like to respond to. (Please base your choice on the speakers’ relevant published works, as the talks are not yet available at this stage.)

Email your application to:
(1) For De Se Mini-course: dilip.ninan@st-andrews.ac.uk
(2) For Self-Knowledge conference: t.h.w.chan@ifikk.uio.no
and to both of us if you are applying for both events.

Deadline for application: *1st April, 2010*
Notifications of acceptance: By 27th April, 2010

Registration:
In addition, the conference on Self-Knowledge & Rational Agency is open to all interested philosophy students and researchers (at any career stage) from around the world as (non-speaker) participants. Registration is FREE. Please fill in the online registration form at the conference website http://www.csmn.uio.no/events/2010/self-knowledge.xml by *15th May, 2010*.

For more information please contact:
Dilip Ninan (dilip.ninan@st-andrews.ac.uk ) for the De Se event; and
Timothy Chan (t.h.w.chan@ifikk.uio.no ) for the Self-Knowledge event.

As we have seen in an earlier post Sontag's early formalist position was that the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. n a culture...

This may interest those of you in RPE301 (Love, Sex and Death) - and others. You may want to skip to http://academicearth.org/lectures/death-intro and move to the others in the series (a lot if this is introducing his class) - but I thought I'd start at the start...

I liked this; but note - it does have that notable American philosophy standard item: cross-legged prof sat on desk, in Converse. I say this fondly - it is a cliche - but it also made me smile.. which is a good start for a lecture on death.





See the rest of the series at http://academicearth.org/lectures/death-intro with loads of great resource links...

d.

This is a short interview for The Oxford Student on Brittain's Department for Culture, Media and Sport's recent proposal on the implementation of the 2003 Legal Deposit Act as regards websites (http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/consultations/Digital_legal_deposit.pdf).

Tendai Musakwa:
In the proposal, the department suggests deposit libraries such as the Bodleian be legally empowered to archive freely available websites to document Britain's history.
1. What is your view on allowing deposit libraries to archive websites?

Luciano Floridi:
It is an excellent and timely idea. The online and digital nature of most of our data means that we can easily rewrite, lose or erase vast amounts of irreplaceable information. We need to use our technologies at their best in order to cope with their forgetful memories.

Tendai Musakwa:
2. The British Library has expressed dismay at the delay in implementing website deposit regulations since the 2003 act, warning that earlier versions of websites are usually deleted such that the UK has lost millions of pages recording events such as the MPs' expenses scandal, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the Iraq war because the websites were not archived. In your view, is there an urgent need to implement regulations on e-deposit?

Luciano Floridi:
Absolutely. The Museum of the Moving Image, for example, has a very valuable record of the web-based campaigns for the 2008 Presidential Election in the US (http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/). Without such projects, future generations will have limited access to their historical past, cultural heritage and hence self-understanding.


Tendai Musakwa: 
3. What are the potential implications of implementing the 2003 Legal Deposit Act as regards the archiving of websites on intellectual life and the UK's cultural heritage?

Luciano Floridi:
I'd like to select two in particular. We need to ensure that the archiving is fair, because what will not be archived might disappear forever; and that the accumulation of memories will not be a burden for the future, because, sometimes, forgiving requires a bit of forgetting. We should beware of what we wish to remember, because it might be a way of keeping our wounds forever open.

The health impact or effects of the proposed expansion at BHP's Olympic Dam open cut uranium mine in South Australia is explored in "A Hard Rain" by independent documentary filmmaker David Bradbury of Frontline Films, 2007. This exploration of the radiation effects of the exposure of radioactive materials in the...

What is the role of the (photographic) critic and their task in late modernity? We can find some suggestions in G.F. Mitrano's The photographic imagination: Sontag and Benjamin in Post Script, Wntr-Spring, 2007 I am interested in this because photographic criticism is devalued in Australia and there is little reflection...