Philosophy of Mind Workshop

Never Mind

2009-09-16T09:56:00.004-05:00

As of spring of 2009, the Philosophy of Mind Workshop (2002-2009) is on indefinite hiatus.

Some classic discussions from the archives:

Sense and Sensibilia

Chapters I-IV
Chapters V-VII
Chapters VIII-IX
Chapters X-XI

Making It Explicit

Chapter 1, §§I-V
Chapter 1, §VI & Chapter 2, §§I-III
Chapter 2, §§IV-V
Chapter 2, §§V-VI & Chapter 3, §§I-II
Chapter 3, §§III-IV
Chapter 4, §§I-II

Naming and Necessity

Lecture I
Lecture II
Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference
Lecture III

(Graphic copyright Wyeth Hansen)

Remarks on Color

2009-08-09T22:42:00.005-05:00

Why do people find it intuitive to describe this kind of very powerful simultaneous color-contrast effect as an "illusion"? After all, the look of a color against a white background depends just as much on its background as the look of the spirals in the example depend on their background.

Here are some more simultaneous color contrast "illusions" from the same source as the first one.

Metamers seem to present a problem for physicalist theories of color. Make some yourself.

Another blow to the reliability of the inference from "I can't imagine the possibility of p" to "p is impossible": it might be possible for something to be simultaneously green and red all over.

Take a color discrimination test.

Skepticism Update

2009-07-02T13:15:00.003-05:00

Tijuana is a bad place to be, epistemically speaking, if you're trying to identify a Zebra (pictures). And it appears that someone found an actual barn façade not attached to a barn.

I Take A Stance; There is a World

2009-06-21T14:24:00.003-05:00

A provocative argument discussed during Zed Adams's recent presentation to the Mind Workshop, "Color Relativism".

Jay Returns

2009-03-29T23:34:00.004-05:00

Jay, former Mind Workshop Czar, is returning this week to present his paper "Self-Sacrifice".

Don't miss it: 4/1/09, 6pm-8pm, Cobb 102

Junk

2009-03-14T14:28:00.001-05:00

Avis seems committed to unrestricted composition.

1/14/09 Perry & Shoemaker

2009-01-14T21:25:00.003-06:00

The workshop resumed after the vacation this evening with our postponed discussion of Perry's 'The Essential Indexical' and Shoemaker's 'Self-Reference and Self-Awareness'. Nic Koziolek provided very helpful summaries of both articles.

Perry wants to account for the psychological change he undergoes when he realizes that the shopper making the mess is he himself. Indeed, there seems to be an important difference even between "JP is making a mess" and "I am making a mess". But according to "the doctrine of propositions", these sentences express the same proposition, and if beliefs have propositions as their objects, we can't explain the psychological change as a change of belief. We wondered why Perry felt it necessary to give up on "the doctrine of propositions" so easily -- he gives up on trying to distinguish between distinct propositions he would express with "JP is making a mess" and "I am making a mess", ultimately in favour of his distinction between objects of belief (the same for those two utterances) and "belief states", which track the differences connected to action, etc. He recognizes that the "missing conceptual ingredient" can't be captured in non-indexical descriptive terms, but what's wrong with supposing that the missing ingredient is indexical, and that the context of utterance partially determines the proposition? David objected, against Perry's "belief state" view, that if Perry believes that JP is making a mess, and them remembers that he himself is JP--and thus believes that he is making a mess--his belief (what he believes) doesn't change, just his belief state (the way in which he believes what he believes). But this seems odd, and contrary to the goal of the paper as it's set out on the first page. Jason pointed out that if Perry believes he's making a mess but doesn't believe JP is making a mess, then he believes both that JP is making a mess and that he's not, even if his belief states are consistent. But this seems problematic.

We wondered about Shoemaker's argument for the claim that the use of 'I' "as subject" has a certain kind of priority; the argument (about getting from ascribing M-predicates to oneself to having the capacity to self-ascribe P*-predicates) doesn't seem to work unless more is built in to the capacity to ascribe M-predicates in the first place. David suggested that this argument was a proto-version of an argument Shoemaker has made on several subsequent occasions against the conceivability of "self-blindness", and which appeals to considerations pertaining to being rational. Jason worried about Shoemaker's account of the difference between immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first person pronoun and the kind of IEM there is in demonstrative reference. The upshot of the discussion was that Shoemaker's definition of IEM relative to the first person pronoun doesn't work. Here's David's example: if David is crazy and thinks he's Lincoln, he might be believe "I was a great president".

The IEM stuff was interesting but difficult. So we agreed to read Jim Pryor's paper on it for next time, Wednesday Jan 28th. Jacob Swenson will present. See you then!

Comments, criticism, and further discussion encouraged!

Mind Workshop Alumni

2008-12-11T11:27:00.004-06:00

The Mind Workshop started in the fall of 2002. Some of our members have managed to graduate in those six years. Here's an incomplete list:

Zed Adams, New School for Social Research
Chris Ferro, Tulane
Ben McMyler, Texas A&M
Joe Schear, Oxford

From the Workshop Archives: Sense and Sensibilia

2008-09-26T12:50:00.003-05:00

Chapters I-IV

Chapters V-VII

Chapters VIII-IX

Chapters X-XI

From the Workshop Archives: Making It Explicit

2008-09-24T19:53:00.011-05:00

The cover of MIE in the form of various philosophical classics, inspired by John Haugeland's Critique of Pure Reason cover of MIE (of which the upper left corner in the above mosaic is a poor approximation).

Chapter 1, §§I-V

Chapter 1, §VI & Chapter 2, §§I-III

Chapter 2, §§IV-V

Chapter 2, §§V-VI & Chapter 3, §§I-II

Chapter 3, §§III-IV

Chapter 4, §§I-II

From the Workshop Archives: Naming and Necessity

2008-09-23T11:05:00.005-05:00

Lecture I
Lecture II
Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference
Lecture III

Frege Hair Color Center

2008-09-05T20:27:00.007-05:00

The philosophy of mind workshop is still on summer vacation. Walking through Westwood with Ben C., a UCLA philosophy grad student friend of the workshop, we passed the Frege Hair Color Center:

Ben said that the Color Center was founded by a Kaplan student who found the name "Frege" aesthetically appealing. The mind workshop originally documented this spot three years ago.

The World's Smallest Tractatus

2008-08-27T00:07:00.009-05:00

The title of this post, the miniaturized Tractatus itself, and the photos are from Mind Workshop member emeritus and NYC correspondent Zed Adams.

Zed also made tiny editions of Cavell's World Viewed and McDowell's review of Bernard Williams's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.

THE History of Western Philosophy?

2008-08-21T02:45:00.002-05:00

Designer Paul Sahre redesigned the cover of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy for Touchstone Press in 2002.

Last year he realized that he designed a typo onto the cover.

It's fitting that the mistake concerns a definite description.

The typo could have been worse .

(Thanks to Wyeth for the tip.)

Metaphysics Mix Tape!

2008-08-19T10:59:00.006-05:00

Muxtape is "sort[ing] out a problem with the RIAA", so this will be just be a metaphysics-themed list of songs, with no Muxtape link. But it adheres to the convention of being limited to twelve songs. The list touches on themes of universals, objects, change, time, personal identity, numbers, possibility, necessity, and free will.

Track List:

1. Universal - Blur
2. Object - The Cure
3. Something - The Beatles
4. Nothing's Changed - The Zombies
5. Cause = Time - Broken Social Scene
6. Back in Time - Prefuse 73
7. Half A Person - The Smiths
8. Time And Place - Lee Moses
9. Numbers - Kraftwerk
10. Possibilities - Papas Fritas
11. It Ain't Necessarily So - Mary Lou Williams
12. Free Will and Testament - Robert Wyatt

**UPDATE 8/20/08**

Workshop participant Nate Z. put together an ontology-themed muxtape, which overlaps the metaphysics mix in some places but has a very different overall aesthetic feel. The track list is reproduced here for your enjoyment:

01) The Shaggs - Philosophy of the World
02) Pantera - Clash With Reality
03) Faith No More - Epic
04) Buddy Miles - Them Changes
05) New York Dolls - Human Being
06) Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
07) Hüsker Dü - Actual Condition
08) Prototypes - Exister
09) Blur - The Universal
10) Kermit the Frog - It's Not Easy Being Green
11) The Cure - Object
12) Boards of Canada - From Once Source All Things Depend

Epistemology Muxtape!

2008-08-15T12:27:00.003-05:00

Here's another philosophy muxtape, this time epistemology-themed, featuring doubt, memory, perception, intuition, testimony, evidence, ignorance, knowledge how, self-knowledge, and contextualism.

Listen to the epistemology muxtape

Track list:

1. Stereolab - Doubt
2. Air - Remember
3. Field Music - Can You See Anything?
4. Orange Juice - Intuition Told Me (Part Two)
5. Steinski - It's Time To Testify (Mc5 Mix)
6. The Magnetic Fields - I Don't Believe You
7. Talking Heads - Puzzlin' Evidence (2005 Remastered LP Version )
8. Doobie Brothers - What A Fool Believes
9. Willie Mabon - I Don't Know
10. Touch - You Don't Know How to
11. Paul Simon - I Know What I Know (Remastered Album Version)
12. De La Soul - Stakes is high

Past philosophy muxtapes:

Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of Language Muxtape!

2008-08-12T08:35:00.005-05:00

Names, indexicals, sense, what is said, truth, tense, unarticulated constituents...from a logical point of view.

The philosophy of language muxtape

Track list:

1. Biz Markie - My Name Is...
2. De La Soul - Me Myself and I (radio version)
3. Missing Persons - Words
4. ESG - You Make No Sense
5. The Cure - Speak My Language
6. Sleater-Kinney - Things You Say
7. Led Zeppelin - Communication Breakdown
8. Johnny Cash - What is Truth
9. The Germs - Lexicon Devil
10. MC5 - future/now
11. Irma Thomas - It's Raining
12. Robert Mitchum - From A Logical Point Of View

Related posts:

The Philosophy of Mind Muxtape

**UPDATE 8/14/08: In response to Aidan's suggestion, I added Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown".**

Philosophy of Mind Muxtape!

2008-08-08T00:13:00.003-05:00

Zed, emeritus member and friend of the Mind Workshop, has put together a philosophy of mind muxtape. It touches on some fundamental philosophical issues--privacy, idealism, Johnson's attempted refutation of Bishop Berkeley, mind-body interaction, skepticism about other minds, physicalism, and automata.

Listen to the Philosophy of Mind Muxtape

Track listing:

1. The Chiffons - Nobody Knows What's Goin' On (In My Mind But Me)
2. Beach Boys - In My Room
3. Nas - The World Is Yours
4. James Brown - Soul Power [Re-Edit] [Mono Version]
5. A Tribe Called Quest - Can I Kick It? (Extended Boilerhouse Mix)
6. Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - I Get Physical
7. Death Cab For Cutie - Soul Meets Body (Album Version)
8. Frank Sinatra - Body And Soul
9. Peter Frampton - Do You Feel Like We Do
10. Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
11. The Creation - How Does It Feel to Feel [US Single Version]
12. Kraftwerk - The Robots

(This is the first in a series--language, metaphysics, and epistemology muxtapes will appear soon.)

Painted Leaves, Desperate Smiles and Radical Contextualism

2008-08-06T21:30:00.006-05:00

Charles Travis's attack on compositional, truth conditional semantics is built around a bunch of lively thought experiments, including cats dipped in puce dye ("Meaning's Role in Truth"), a guy named Sid who grunts when punched in the solar plexus (Unshadowed Thought), and a question about whether wearing a tie made of freshly cooked linguine would count as part of business attire (Ibid.). But one of Travis's examples has received more attention in the literature than any other. It involves one of his recurring characters, Pia, and the leaves of a Japanese maple tree. I'll quote part of the frequently cited passage:

A story. Pia’s Japanese maple is full of russet leaves. Believing that green is the color of leaves, she paints them. Returning, she reports, “That’s better. The leaves are green now”. She speaks truth. A botanist friend then phones, seeking green leaves for a study of green-leaf chemistry. “The leaves (on my tree) are green”, Pia says. “You can have those”. But now Pia speaks falsehood. ("Pragmatics")

There's a lot to say about what happens in that short paragraph, and a lot has been said about it. One thing to say about the example is that Pia's motivation for painting the leaves is odd. Who would want to paint leaves to make the world conform with the belief that leaves are green? In an unpublished paper that takes up the question of the painted leaves (which he has since modified in very interesting ways), Jason Bridges says of Pia's action and utterance, "When I imagine someone doing and saying this, I can’t help but envision her with a fixed, desperate smile".

Jason may be right about the oddity of Pia's actions as described in Travis's example. But leaves get painted for all sorts of reasons, not all of them strange. Stuck to the side of houses, they get painted inadvertently (more here and here); they get painted intentionally as a way of indicating that they are to be removed; and simply because it looks interesting.

The philosopher of language Stefano Predelli, who has a provocative paper that responds on behalf of compositional, truth conditional semantics to the example of the painted leaves, managed to find and get his picture taken next to some actual, vividly painted leaves. (His other pictures are worth seeing as well.)

Searches on Flickr also yielded pictures illustrating another one of Travis's examples, which involves ink that looks black in the bottle but which writes blue (Unshadowed Thought). It turns out that it is hard to tell what color ink will write simply by seeing it in the bottle. Almost all ink in the bottle looks black if the bottle is completely full.

Illustrations of more classic thought experiments surfaced as well, including a barn facade, a mule painted to look like a zebra, and a possible robot cat.

Demonstrative Thoughts About A City

2008-07-31T10:25:00.003-05:00

In Varieties of Reference, Evans says that a subject, sitting in a room in his house, cannot have demonstrative thoughts about the city he lives in:

"Sitting in a room in a house, a subject is not in informational contact with a city; if he believes there is a city around him, this belief cannot be based solely upon what is available to him in perception, nor can he make judgments about the city on that basis (save, perhaps, judgments which hold good of it in virtue of the condition of its parts)" (p.177).

But Evans attaches a footnote to that remark, and says, "The situation is different when we are aloft in some high building and can survey the city beneath us".

Evans thereby furnishes a reason for living or working up high: the ability to entertain demonstrative thoughts about the city you live in. There are thoughts that those in skyscrapers can have that those living close to the surface of the earth cannot.

Conceptual Art and Philosophy

2008-07-24T13:17:00.007-05:00

In the late 1960s, conceptual artists produced some artworks inspired by analytic philosophy---typically pieces of text in various media:

Art & Language, Abstract Art No. 7, which is a blown-up review of Quine's Elementary Logic (scroll to the right to view); Bruce Nauman, A Rose Has No Teeth, a statement taken from Part II, § xi of Wittgenstein's Investigations, cast in bronze and nailed to a tree; Joseph Kosuth, Art as Idea as Idea: A blown-up, lithographed definition of the word "meaning".

There is a similar, though more inspired, use of text from John Dewey and Jane Addams currently installed all over the University of Chicago. The work is Instance the Determination by Helen Mirra. Here is some text in the stairway outside the philosophy department, and here is a map showing the locations of all the other pieces of metaphysical graffiti (Jay, via the Dead Milkmen, gets the credit for the pun).

Philosophical Imitations

2008-02-11T18:03:00.000-06:00

Stanley Cavell, in "Austin at Criticism", writes:

"...it would be something of an irony if it turned out that Wittgenstein's manner were easier to imitate than Austin's; in its way, something of a triumph for the implacable professor" (114).

There are two well-known humorous imitations of Wittgenstein's manner, that might be taken to confirm Cavell's irony: Michael Frayn's "Fog-Like Sensations" and Jerry Fodor's Further Meteorological Addenda to PI. And, of course, there is Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein movie.

But Austin's manner has not completely avoided humorous imitation. There is a Beyond the Fringe sketch performed by Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller in the 1960s that parodies the style of ordinary language philosophy:

(Bennett and Miller engaging in Ordinary Language Philosophy)

A short excerpt:

Bennett: Other people have jobs to do, don't they? Um, what do people do these days... um, well, they...

Miller: Grow lawns, I believe.

Bennett: They do. They drive buses, or they sell ice cream. Or they play games.

Miller: Ah. More important.

Bennett: That's more important. Yes. We also games, you see. But we, as philosophers, we play language games. We play games with language. Language games...When you and I go onto the cricket pitch, we do so secure in the knowledge that a game of cricket is...well...it's in the offing, isn't it? It's not in progress, it's in the offing. But when we play language games, we do so rather to find out what game it is we're playing!

Miller: Ah, yes.

Philosophy of Mind Workshop Hiatus

2008-02-11T17:44:00.002-06:00

This year, I'm only occasionally in Chicago and I haven't been attending the mind workshop. Since posts have slowed down, I am going to start using this spot to start posting links of philosophical interest so the mind workshop blog does not wither away.

First Meeting of the Year!

2007-10-16T15:37:00.000-05:00

The Mind Workshop met for its first meeting of the year the other week. There are a couple of changes: instead of spending the year mixing it up between student presentations and our ongoing reading, this year we will read for the first half of the year, and then have a series of student presentations beginning towards the end of the Winter Quarter, and continuing through the Spring. Nat has handed the co-ordinator's baton on to me, so if you'd like to present later in the year (and slots are filling up fast), or have any questions about the workshop, get in touch with me (wsmall AaTtt uchicago D. O. T edu).

Our readings this year will be on the topic of disjunctivism. We'll be reading a series of classic and contemporary articles, rather than a book.

The first meeting saw a healthy mix of old faces, new faces, ex-agitators, lapsed members, and a Swede who somehow fell into apparently incompatible categories. Our first reading was McDowell's 'Knowledge and the Internal'; there was beer, but no pizza. David F kicked things off with a brief presentation. Here's a sketchy recap:

If we 'interiorize' the space of reasons, we are left with four options:
(i) scepticism;
(ii) the 'touching and naive' view that we can get from the appearances (which are consistent with falsity) to certainty [Brandom calls this dogmatism];
(iii) a thoroughgoing externalism that isn't interested in justification but instead carves the world up into those things that are reliable indicators and those things that are not [Brandom calls this gonzo externalism];
(iv) the 'hybrid view' that will be McDowell's focus. According to this view, justification is important (unlike the gonzo view), but it doesn't 'reach all the way' to the facts; when I have knowledge, it is in part due to the world doing me a favour --- this favour is external to any standing of mine in the space of reasons.

There's a question about who actually holds the hybrid view. No one is mentioned by name (Peacocke's and Blackburn's views are in the vicinity, but aren't the target); David suggested that perhaps McDowell has (or had, when K&theI was written) Sellars in mind.

The ensuing discussion focused largely on two issues:
(1) Just what objection is put to the hybrid view by this question of McDowell's: "But if there cannot be...standings in the space of reasons [that simply consist in a cognitive purchase on an objective fact, i.e., if the truth requirement on knowledge is conceived as external to the space of reasons], how can reason have the resources it would need in order to evaluate the reliability of belief-forming policies or habits?" (402-403, in the reprint in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (HUP 1998))?
Aidan insisted, for some time, that a Sellars/Davidson-style view was capable of rationally assessing the reliability of belief-forming policies by appealing to holistic considerations. (or, at least, he challenged McDowell to show that such considerations could not satisfy the demand for rational assessment). Various people tried various tacks in trying to respond. My thought was that, for any given belief, the holistic considerations that could tell for or against adopting that belief would be just the same considerations that could tell for or against revising the belief-forming practice; thus, there would not be the requisite friction between first- and second-order 'policies'. But this, like all the offerings, didn't satisfy Aidan...

(2) What is the nature of McDowell's response, if indeed he has one, to the sceptic? Is it a consequence of McDowell's disjunctivism that, though perceptual knowledge is possible (pace the sceptic), one is never in a position to know whether one is in a good or bad case (thus opening a new wedge for the sceptic)? McDowell's answer to the latter question seems to be in the second half of n.19, and seems to be 'no', though no one was quite able to articulate the argument for this convincingly. (Sebastian Roedl, in his recent book Self-Consciousness, and in his talk to the Wittgenstein workshop at the end of last year attempts to articulate this 'no', but I don't have the references handy.)

The workshop meets again tomorrow, in Cobb 101 6pm-8pm, when Stina Backstrom will kick off our discussion of Brandom's response to K&theI, 'Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons', and McDowell's response to that response, 'Knowledge and the Internal Revisited'.

As always, feel free to post comments and corrections; I'll try to get the recap of our meetings blogged more quickly in the future...

Philosophy Audio

2007-09-06T11:15:00.002-05:00

Jason Voigt has been putting up lots of philosophy in audio format. He just posted conversations between McDowell and Davidson and Dummett and Davidson, and a bunch of interviews with Quine, in addition to the Brandom mentioned in the previous post.

Davidson and McDowell, Davidson and Dummett

Quine and Block, Dennett, Dreben, Boolos, Goldfarb

Brandom

Wilfrid Sellars

Thanks again, Jason.

**UPDATE, 8/2/08: Only the Brandom link is currently active, the others are down.**
**UPDATE, 8/12/08: A Sellars Lecture has been added, hat tip to Alptekin Sanli**

Brandom's Locke Lectures

2007-09-04T17:42:00.003-05:00

Our technology correspondent, Jason Voigt, has made MP3s of Robert Brandom's Locke Lectures that are available for download here.

Jason says: "First, anyone looking for an initial point of entry can find a decent summary of each of the lectures here. Second, Brandom has also presented an overview of the new project and discussed its motivations in a lecture available here."

Thanks, Jason.

Davidson Video Series

2007-06-25T11:54:00.000-05:00

Inspired by our acquisition and viewing of the Strawson-Evans conversation on truth, Jason Voigt has suggested that the library order a massive series of interviews with Davidson. Jason sent me this blurb:

"In this comprehensive video archive, Professor Davidson defends his position in a series of intensive one-on-one conversations each scrutinizing a particular topic; he participates in a summit panel discussion with W. V. Quine and Sir Peter Strawson which explores some similarities and differences between them; and he speaks candidly in a scene-setting biographical interview with Rudolf Fara of the London School of Economics. The Davidson Series is a major resource for teaching from undergraduate upwards as well as an important research archive. The series contains nineteen VHS videos (available in all formats) and a Series Guide."

Anyone interested in finding out more about the series can check out this link.

The series is expensive, so it might require more than one request before the library buys the series. If you're interested, you can email the bibliographer for philosophy at:

bbidlack@uchicago.edu

If the library does purchase the series, we could have a contest to see who can watch the most of it. It contains about 20+ hours of footage.

Can You Have a Demonstrative Thought About a Color?

2007-05-31T15:34:00.001-05:00

Last night the workshop met for the final time this academic year to discuss Rachel Goodman's paper "Demonstrative Thoughts as a Response to Lewis". Both the paper and discussion were complicated and interesting. I'll just summarize a few central topics here.

Rachel's target was anyone who wanted to respond to Jackson's knowledge argument by saying that what Mary acquires when she leaves her black and white room is the ability to have demonstrative thoughts about colors. Jason and David tentatively suggested that they were interested in that way of describing what happens to Mary when she leaves the room during the last meeting of the workshop.

Rachel's strategy was to try to show that there are disanalogies between a paradigmatic kind of demonstrative thought that concerns objects individuated according to their location in space and time and putatively demonstrative thoughts that concern colors. If the disanalogies are great enough then it would be a mistake to say that what happens to Mary when she leaves the room is that she acquires the ability to have demonstrative thoughts about colors.

First Disanalogy

The central disanalogy that Rachel wanted to argue for involved the possibility of a certain kind of failure that is present in the case of demonstrative thoughts about spatio-temporal objects that isn't present (she claimed) in the case of (putative) demonstrative thoughts about colors. That failure is the following:

It is possible to have the thought That cup is blue, while thinking about a BOTTLE, and still successfully have an object-dependent thought about the bottle. That is, you can apply the wrong sortal and still succeed in having a thought that is about an object (as long as it is in roughly the right place in space and time). Rachel wanted to say that in such a case you still succeed in having an object-dependent demonstrative thought.

In contrast, Rachel claimed, you can't have the same kind of failure in the case of a putatively demonstrative thought about a color. So, for example, it wouldn't be possible to think That color is beautiful, while getting the sortal wrong and still having an object-dependent demonstrative thought. It wouldn't make sense to say that you managed to have a thought about a TEXTURE or a SHAPE, for example, if you took yourself to be referring to a color. It was on the basis of this disanalogy that Rachel claimed it wasn't possible to have demonstrative thoughts about colors.

Members of the workshop objected to this line of reasoning in different ways.

Jason didn't think you could have an object-dependent demonstrative thought in the case where you apply the wrong sortal to the cup.

Justin suggested that there was a corresponding kind of failure in the case of a color, if the sortal was chosen correctly. So, for example, you might think That pastel is beautiful, and be mistaken about the fact that the color you demonstrated was a pastel (maybe it was flourescent or neutral).

Second Disanalogy

At another point in the discussion, Rachel said that unlike demonstrative thoughts about spatio-temporal objects, thoughts about colors didn't involve a "mapping" of egocentric features onto objective features. When you have a demonstrative thought about spatio-temporal objects, you think about That cup both as located in space relative to you and as located in objective space. But in the case of putative demonstrative thoughts about colors, Rachel claimed that there wasn't an analogous mapping of subjective features (in this case, something like color phenomenology) onto anything objective. I objected to this suggestion because insofar as someone can recognize a difference between how things seem to him (say I'm wearing 3-D glasses and everything appears either red or green) and how those things really are colored, then there is the possibility of a "mapping" of subjective features of experience onto (more or less) objective features.

There was also discussion of McDowell's notion that having a demonstrative thought about a color involved the presence of a sample. Jason and David discussed the possibility of a thought that depended not on the presence of the object that it is about, but on the presence of some other object (the sample). We didn't make much headway on this topic, however.

After the workshop, we watched a discussion between Gareth Evans and P.F. Strawson on the nature of truth, filmed for the Open University in 1973.

This was the last meeting of the mind workshop for this year. The workshop will resume in the fall, with a new grad student organizer: Will Small.

McKinney on Biosemantics; Lewis on Experience

2007-05-19T14:29:00.000-05:00

At this week's mind workshop, Tucker McKinney presented some of his work on Millikan, and Jason presented on David Lewis's "What Experience Teaches". Jason proposed that what happens to Mary when she leaves the black and white room is that she acquires demonstrative concepts of the colors.

David Velleman

2007-04-11T15:21:00.000-05:00

Martin Gustafsson: "What is a Context?"

2007-03-25T14:06:00.000-05:00

Winter Quarter Update

2007-03-11T18:15:00.000-05:00

The Mind Workshop had its last meeting of the winter quarter last Wednesday. We discussed chapters 5 and 6 of Campbell's Reference and Consciousness. We decided that next quarter we would switch to a brand new format, based around the best papers in philosophy of mind rather than books.

The first meeting of the workshop will be March 28, when we will meet to discuss a new paper by Martin Gustafsson, of the University of Stockholm. Martin's paper is a defense of contextualist accounts of communication against recent attacks by Cappelen and Lepore and our own Jason Bridges.

Justin Shaddock, "Passive Experience and the Freedom of Spontaneity"

2007-02-08T17:11:00.000-06:00

Last night the philosophy of mind workshop met to discuss Justin Shaddock's "Passive Experience and the Freedom of Spontaneity" and the first two chapters of John Campbell's Reference and Consciousness. We started with a discussion of Justin's paper.

Justin argued that there is a prima facie problem with McDowell's Kantian theory of perception. If you accept that experience is conceptual, and you accept that the conceptual necessarily involves spontaneity, and spontaneity is a form of freedom, then it looks difficult to hold on to the idea that experience is passive. Obviously, there are a couple different options you might take to relieve this tension: you can reject the idea that experience is conceptual; you can reject the idea that the conceptual essentially involves a form of freedom; or you can do what Justin does and say that there's a way to see experience as caught up with the freedom characteristic of concepts.

Justin's main claim is that the content of experience can not only play a justificatory role, but that it can actually be changed when your conceptual capacities change. So, for example, pyrite might look like gold to someone who doesn't know the difference between pyrite and gold, but to a person who is trained to recognize the difference between pyrite and gold, pyrite will look different (to the trained eye). So a change in conceptual capacities produces a change in the content of experience.

David worried about the following possibility: If you think that the world (in some sense) contains "looks", so that it is just a fact that one of the lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion looks longer than the other, even if the illusion is so well-known that you would never judge that the lines are different lengths. So the content of your experience is just what it was when you began: one line looks longer than the other. But you're never taken in by the illusion--you know the lines are the same length.

Others, like Ben, felt that the idea that the content of our experience changed as a result of a change in our conceptual capacities was just intuitively implausible. The experience of John the tie salesman doesn't change after he learns that blue ties look green under the yellow lights of the tie-shop--he just gets better at responding to ties that look green in the shop by saying "That's a blue one". There was some argument about how best to describe what happens to John after he learns what yellow lighting does.

I wondered why Justin felt compelled to reject what he called "the standard reading" of McDowell on this issue of the conceptual content of experience and the spontaneity of concepts. I understand McDowell's view to be that the content of experience is conceptual because it can play a role (as a premise) in justifying our other beliefs. Justin proposes that not only can the contents of experience be premises, but that they can be (kind of like) conclusions of arguments, in that changes in concepts can produce changes in the contents of experience.

In the second half of the workshop, we discussed the first two chapters of Campbell's Reference and Consciousness. I will summarize that discussion in the next post.

David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason, "Introduction" (Part II)

2007-01-25T14:21:00.000-06:00

[This is a continuation of the summary of our discussion of the "Introduction" to David Velleman's The Possibility of Practical Reason, which begins in the previous post.]

Velleman's Account of What Makes Behavior Into an Action

Velleman dismisses the "standard model" and the "hierarchical model" of what makes behavior into an action. What is Velleman's model?

Velleman's striking view is the following (this, as usual, is a rough summary): what makes something an action is that it is done with the "higher-order aim of knowing what [one] is doing". The Freudian slip case isn't an action because the speaker doesn't utter "I hereby declare this meeting closed" or "I live in a building with a hated pool" in order to know what he is doing. The climber dropping his partner and the speaker's crying don't count as actions for the same reason--the person doesn't drop his partner or cry in order to know what he is doing.

The workshop consensus about this view was that it was very strange. It seems straightforwardly false that I do the various things I do in order to know myself. Jason has often used the example of saving a drowning child to illustrate the strangeness of Velleman's view. Say I see my child drowning and I jump in to save his life. A philosopher asks me, "Why did you do that?" It seems that Velleman would think it reasonable to say "So as to better know myself". But that would be a weird thing to say.

There has been some feeling among some of the members of the workshop that we're not really grasping something important about Velleman's view, because the (rough) way of presenting it that was just given looks very implausible. I think one of David's reasons for assigning this "introduction" this week was that it looked like Velleman had an account of how the desire for self knowledge was not an "agential" reason, but something "sub-agential", and so not the kind of thing that you'd cite in an action-explanation. So, perhaps with self-knowledge as a sub-agential reason, you wouldn't get strange explanations of why you jumped in the river to save your child like the one given in the previous paragraph. But after a closer look, we couldn't find anything more substantial than Velleman's claim that the desire for self-knowledge is "sub-agential", and there was not an explanation of what that means. Does being "sub-agential" mean the desire for self-knowledge doesn't, or can't, figure in ordinary action-explanations? It's not clear.

There was a fair amount of discussion of points of detail, but I will conclude with one foundational question that was pressed (like many of the others) by Jason.

The Constitutive Aim of Action
Why think that there is some one thing that is the constitutive aim of action? It looks like a specifically philosophical urge to find a single, overarching principle that holds together everything that falls within the grab bag of behavior we call actions. Maybe some of our actions aim at world peace, and others at achieving some personal satisfaction, and some aim at amassing wealth, and so on? Need there be some aim that all of these share? Jason suggested that there need not be. Giving up the search for such a single aim present in all actions might radically change the shape of a theory of action, possibly for the better.

The workshop will meet again in two week's time to discuss some portion of John Campbell's Reference and Consciousness. See you there.

David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason, "Introduction" (Part I)

2007-01-24T21:16:00.000-06:00

At the end of last meeting, David suggested that we read the introduction to Velleman's The Possibility of Practical Reason to wrap up our discussion of Velleman, since he thought it would provide the best view of the position as a whole and maybe answer some of the questions that have been raised over the past quarter about Velleman's view of action.

So we read it, and tonight we met to discuss it.

As one might expect, Jason gave a very clear and incisive introduction to Velleman's "introduction", and raised some worries about it.

Velleman is interested in answering the following question: given an event, and an agent, what makes it the case that the event is an action of the agent? More specifically, he's interested in a constitutive, non-circular answer to that question. Jason noted that thinking that question can be answered is already to make a substantial assumption.

But let's say we assume that such a constitutive account of what makes an event an action is possible. What's the best version we can give?

The Standard Model

What Velleman calls the "standard model" attempts to answer this question in the following way: an event is an action (of an agent A) provided it is caused by a belief and a desire (belonging to A). More specifically, "we want something to happen, and we believe that some behavior of ours would constitute or produce or at least promote its happening" (5). The belief and the desire are supposed to be both the cause and the reason for A's action.

Velleman says that the Standard Model (SM) "runs afoul of obvious counterexamples". In the counterexamples, "behavior is caused by a desire and a belief but fails to constitute an action performed for reasons".

Counterexample #1: Velleman gives his version of Davidson's mountain climber case. A speaker "desire[s] to win the sympathy of his audience, and his belief that nothing short of tears would suffice [to win the sympathy of his audience]" "frustrate[s] him to the point of tears" (7). So the belief and the desire cause the speaker to cry, but not in the way that is required for the belief and the desire to count as a reason for crying.

The SM could be modified to exclude a case like this, possibly in the way proposed by Davidson, where the belief and the desire have to cause the action "in the right way" (which is not meant as a non-circular way of specifying what's required to count as a reason), or in the not obviously circular way suggested by Velleman: the belief and desire have to "exercise their characteristic powers in causing the behavior".

There was some argument between Jason and Will about whether the Davidsonian way of handling this kind of counterexample was the same as the one mentioned by Velleman (the consensus reached was that they're not, because Jason said that "characteristic powers" is a phrase that has its home in reductive naturalistic accounts of action).

Counterexample #2: Even if the standard model is modified in the way proposed by Velleman (by adding the requirement that a belief and a desire have to cause behavior according to their "characteristic powers" for the behavior to count as an action), there is still another problem that shows it can't be an adequate account of what makes a bit of behavior an action.

Velleman thinks that "activity" like Freudian slips and "bungled actions" (which don't turn out to be actions at all, on Velleman's account) pose a problem for the standard model. When Dr. Katz says, in a conversation about his ex-wife, that he lives in a building with a hated pool, his utterance was caused by a desire to express his hatred of his ex-wife, and a belief that by saying "hated pool" instead of "heated pool", he would express that belief, and his motive (his belief and desire) would be exercising their characteristic powers in this case. And yet Velleman says that in the case of a Freudian slip like this, Dr. Katz's utterance "doesn't qualify as an action" (8).

So the standard model classifies things that aren't actions as actions. So we need a better account of what makes behavior action, rather than mere "activity".

The Hierarchical Model
Velleman then considers a Frankfurt-like "hierarchical model" of what makes a bit of behavior an action. Roughly, according to the hierarchical model, when a belief and a desire plus a higher-order desire for the desire cause a bit of behavior, that behavior is an action (12).

Velleman thinks that "the hierarchical model...as an improvement on the standard model, because it requires the subject to be reflectively aware of his motives in order to act autonomously. A Freudian slip takes its agent by surprise, thereby casting him in the passive role of observer...Such a lack of self-awareness would not have disqualified the resulting behavior from being an autonomous action according to the standard model, but it is indeed disqualifying according to the hierarchical model. For an agent cannot want or be content to be motivated by a desire he is unaware of having" (12).

Several people (Jason most of all) took issue with this claim. Why can't someone have unconscious second-order desires? Jason gave (a version of) the following example: In therapy, I try to understand why instead of making fun of some hapless coworker, I inadvertently protected him from ridicule by doing something unexpected (comically crashing into a cubicle, say). I reason about my behavior as follows: "I must have wanted to help my co-worker avoid ridicule, and I must have thought that that was a worthy thing to do (desired to desire it)". So it's at least not obvious that there can't be unconscious second order desires.

But this isn't a serious objection to Velleman's overall project, because Velleman doesn't think the hierarchical model suffices as an account of action. But we had a worry about why Velleman thinks it is insufficient. Velleman's view that the hierarchical model is insufficient rests on a version of Freud's case of the president who opens the meeting by saying "I hereby declare this meeting closed". If the president was depressed about the opening of the session, he might thereby have desired to close the session, and so had a second-order desire to desire to declare the session closed. But in such a case the president, according to Velleman, would not have been "autonomous"--his utterance would not have counted as an action: "If anything, [the cause of the president's behavior] would have expressed a lack of will on his part, under the weight of a psychic force that is usually regarded as pathological or alien" (13).

The worry (again raised by Jason) about Velleman's account of the inadequacy of the hierarchical model was that it seems like Velleman is committed to the odd view that behavior that is caused by depression isn't action. This reflects a recurring tendency of Velleman's to say certain things people do (Freudian slips, bungled "actions", behavior at least partly caused by depression or ennui) are "alien", when it seems intuitive that they are still kinds of actions.

to be continued...

Second Meeting of the Winter Quarter

2007-01-24T21:11:00.000-06:00

The Mind Workshop met tonight to discuss the introduction to David Velleman's The Possibility of Practical Reason. This concluded our quarter-and-a-half-long discussion of Velleman's theory of action. I will post a summary of the central concerns that have been raised during our discussions soon.

In two weeks, we will meet to read and discuss some portion of John Campbell's Reference and Consciousness.

First Meeting of Winter Quarter

2007-01-07T14:59:00.000-06:00

The Philosophy of Mind Workshop will meet on Wednesday, January 10th to discuss David Velleman's "From Self Psychology to Moral Philosophy". The workshop meets from 6-8pm in Cobb 101.

See you there.

Philosophers on Film: Strawson and Evans Chat

2006-12-30T13:19:00.001-06:00

Zed brought this to my attention. I will look this up next time I'm in Oggsford.

There is also a video recording of Evans and Strawson discussing the nature of truth.

"Self to Self"

2006-11-29T10:40:00.000-06:00

On November 1st, the workshop met in Cobb 103 to discuss David Velleman's paper, "Self to Self".

PART I

Jason introduced the paper by pointing out how Velleman distinguishes the psychological sense of self from the metaphysical sense of personal identity. Velleman is concerned with conditions of selfhood through time. Roughly, what makes a future or a past self mine is my ability to anticipate certain experiences or have certain intentions or memories without needing to identify whose experiences, intentions, or memories they are. That ability is distinguished from the activity of imaginitive identification with someone else, e.g. Napoleon.

I can imagine that I am Napoleon by imagining certain experiences as being had by Napoleon from a first-personal point of view: how the smoke and noise of Austerlitz must have seemed to him, for example. This kind of imaginitive identification requires imagining having his experiences first-personally. But in so doing, I have to additionally think of these experiences as being had by Napoleon. My imagining that I am Napoleon would therefore involve thoughts of the following kind:

I see that the allied center is weak.
I am going to ask Marshal Soult how long it will take the troops to reach the Pratzen Heights.
I am ordering the attack on the Austrian & Russian forces.
"I" here refers to Napoleon.

The final thought ("I" here refers to Napoleon) is what distinguishes "imagined seeing" from memory or anticipation, which are more intimate relations I have to my own selves. What accounts for the special kind of relation we have to memories or anticipated experiences or intentions that is missing in the case of mere imaginings? It is some kind of (special?) causal relationship:

"I don't have to specify a person from whose point of view I am trying to frame my intention, because the future point of view is fixed by the future causal history of the intention itself" (71).

"I do not center the memory on any past subject--it is just presented to me as having been copied from a visual impression, and it consequently represents things as seen by the subject of the impression from which it was, in fact, copied. Who he was is then determined by the image's causal history" (59-60).

Velleman thinks that with the distinction between self and personal identity in place, he can make better sense of what we are interested in in splitting cases. We care about being able to anticipate experiences and frame intentions without having to have the additional thought that the self having the experiences is, e.g., David Velleman. If I know that my brain is going to be split and implanted in two different bodies, I can't anticipate experiences without also specifying which of the recipients is going to have the experience, the thought goes.

PART II: Discussion was wide-ranging. The following is a small selection of the topics we covered:

1. Jason asked whether it's correct to say that a memory "purports to be a copy of a visual impression". What does this copy purport amount to? Is it part of the content of the memory? It seems that usually, I can just remember an event, or an object, without there being any sense that my memory is a "copy" of a visual impression.

2. It struck the workshop as odd that Velleman is happy to say that given a suitable causal history, I can have Napoleon's memories in the same sense in which I can have my own, as presented to me as being mine without any additional thought of identification. So, for example, if Napoleon's memories were somehow transferred to me, it would be true to say that I remember being at Austerlitz and giving the order to attack the Allied forces. [Would this be any consolation to Rachel, the replicant in Bladerunner who finds out that her childhood memories are implants, supplied by the niece of the person who programmed her? It seems that Deckard, equipped with Velleman's account of selfhood, could say that those memories are Rachel's, even though the experiences that are their source were had by a different person.]

3. I asked about Velleman's account of intention. Velleman says "I don't have to specify a person from whose point of view I am trying to frame my intention, because the future point of view is fixed by the future causal history of the intention itself" (71). But what about a surprise splitting case, where on November 29th I frame an intention to write and drop off a check at the housing office tomorrow, but while I'm sleeping, my brain is split and implanted in two different bodies. The intention survives the split, and on November 30th, both recipients of my brain halves write a check and drop it off at the housing office. If the future point of view is fixed by the causal history of the intention, then which of these two points of view was the one that I had in mind in framing my intention? It doesn't look as if there is an obvious answer to that question. So it appears that the "future causal history" of the intention is not enough to fix the person from whose future point of view the intention will be carried out.

First Velleman Reading

2006-10-30T08:50:00.000-06:00

This week the workshop will discuss David Velleman's essay "Self to Self", which is collected in his book Self to Self.

We will meet on Wednesday, November 1st in Cobb 103.

First Meeting of the Year

2006-10-04T21:10:00.000-05:00

Tonight the workshop met to discuss readings for the upcoming year. We quickly narrowed the field to Campbell's Reference and Consciousness and Velleman's Self to Self. There were some outside agitators (Dan G. and Micah L.) who threw their support behind the Velleman. Mind Workshop regular Will S. argued for the Campbell. A couple die-hards held out unsuccessfully for the Chalmers. The arguments weren't nearly as vehement and the votes were not as close as last year. We decided to do both the Velleman and the Campbell, starting with the Velleman.

The workshop meets again in two weeks.

Mind Workshop, Fall Quarter

2006-09-20T12:01:00.000-05:00

The Philosophy of Mind Workshop will meet in even weeks this quarter, beginning Wednesday, October 4th. We will meet in Cobb 103 from 6-8pm.

(Pictured above are some of the sources for past readings discussed by the workshop.)

Mind Workshop Logo (Prototype)

2006-08-29T01:36:00.000-05:00

A new look for the new academic year.

Late Summer

2006-08-28T01:12:00.000-05:00

Summer is nearing its end. Or at least it as most places. Here at the U of C we still have another month or so.

Back in the spring, at the final meeting of the 2005/2006 workshop year, we decided on a shortlist of books to vote on in the fall. The shortlisted works are the following:

Reference and Consciousness, by John Campbell.

Self to Self, by David Velleman.

What's Within, by Fiona Cowie.

The Conscious Mind, by David Chalmers.

I've also added some new features, including a new list of philosophy links and a list of previous workshop readings. They're over on the sidebar. Enjoy.

Mind Workshop: Summer Vacation

2006-06-11T18:35:00.000-05:00

(The image above is the result of plugging the mind workshop into the website Websites as Graphs.)

The Philosophy of Mind Workshop is now on summer vacation. Any posts here will be infrequent and short until school starts back up again in the fall.

Enjoy the summer.

Final Workshop Meeting of the Year: Sense and Sensibilia, Chapters X and XI

2006-06-01T00:41:00.000-05:00

Tonight the workshop met for the last time this academic year. We discussed the last two chapters of Sense and Sensibilia and what we might read in the fall.

I will post a synopsis of our discussion of Austin shortly.

We decided on four possible books for the fall:

1. John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness
2. Fiona Cowie, What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered
3. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
4. David Velleman, Self to Self

-------------------------------------------------------------
Sense and Sensibilia, Chapters X and XI

David F. was on point tonight for the workshop. He got things going by asking three questions about the penultimate chapter in S&S:

When Austin is arguing against the view that there are kinds of sentences that are incorrigible, he says that it is possible to have "complete confidence" in statements that one makes, but that the confidence is due not to the kind of sentence that is uttered, but to the "circumstances" when one makes them (114). He gives the following example of such a statement: "...if I watch for some time an animal a few feet in front of me, in a good light, if I prod it perhaps, sniff, and take note of the noises it makes, I may say, 'That's a pig'; and this too will be 'incorrigible', nothing could be produced that would show that I had made a mistake" (114). But, hold on--in what sense (if any) is it true to say, as Austin does here, that nothing could be produced that would show that I had made a mistake?
When Austin considers Ayer's claim that "'material object' statements are as such not conclusively verifiable" (117), he argues that, in general, "statements about 'material things'" don't need to be verified. He gives as an example that a speaker who knows that he lives in Oxford cannot even count as verifying that he lives in Oxford (117-118). Fine, David said, but is this just something specific about verification? That is, would Austin's criticisms still be relevant if Ayer had said "justifiable" in place of "verifiable"?
One of Austin's primary targets in chapter X is the idea that there is a class of sentences that have some kind of incorrigible status. These sentences, if they existed, might serve as a foundation for the rest of our knowledge (105). David asked whether, granting that there isn't a special class of sentences that have a special incorrigible status, is there still room for a foundation for knowledge? Maybe not an incorrigible foundation, but a foundation nevertheless? (David then quoted W. Sellars to the effect that without an empirical foundation our knowledge would be classed with rumors and hoaxes as support for the idea that we may want a foundation even if it isn't an incorrigible one.)

We discussed these questions in reverse order.

I said, in response to David's third question, that I thought Austin would be equally suspicious of a non-incorrigible foundationalism of the kind David attributed to Sellars. Why should there be a special kind of knowledge (observational knowledge) that is what all of our other knowledge rests on? Consider Austin's Oxford example (117-118): does my knowing that I live in Oxford "rest" on some foundation of observational knowledge? I think Austin would say that it is incorrect to say that it does. David suggested that self-knowledge (that one is in pain, for example) might also be a case where the idea of the knowledge as resting on an observational foundation seems out of place.

(There was some discussion at this point of McDowell's epistemological views, and whether he counts as a foundationalist (in some sense or other). I don't think we reached any substantial conclusions about that topic.)

Jason asserted, in response to the second question, that Austin has scored only a minor victory over Ayer by showing that not all statements must be "verified" to count as knowledge. He hasn't established the more interesting result that not all statements about 'material things' need to be justified if they're to count as knowledge. Jason went on to say that whenever we know something (like that we live in Oxford, say), we know it in some particular way (or ways). That way (or those ways) constitute a justification for what we know.

Will in particular argued against this point, claiming some inspiration from McDowell, but it seemed that by the end of the discussion Jason's assertion about there always being a way in which we know something hadn't been knocked down.

We then spent some time trying to figure out what Austin could have meant by saying that "nothing could be produced to show that [he] had made a mistake" in the situation he describes with the pig. We thought that actually it was pretty easy to come up with ways in which things could be produced to show that Austin had made a mistake even when he's been watching the animal a few feet in front of him, prodding it, sniffing it, and so on. Maybe it's a warthog in a pig-costume, for example. It would certainly be true that nothing could be produced to show that Austin had made a mistake if he knows that the animal he's looking at is a pig. But he doesn't give that as his reason for saying that nothing could show he had made a mistake. So we wondered about what was going on here, and we suggested some possible things Austin might mean by "nothing could be produced that would show I had made a mistake". But the most plausible was pretty underwhelming: we thought maybe Austin just meant "could" in some practical sense of "could", where for most practical purposes, you couldn't convince me that the thing in front of me wasn't a pig. Only in odd philosophical situations would that be possible, and this isn't such a case.

We then wrapped up the discussion of the Austin and concluded the workshop for this academic year. Huzzah.

Sense and Sensibilia, Chapters VIII and IX

2006-05-24T22:35:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday the workshop met to discuss a short paper of Russell Rolff’s on Timothy Williamson and chapters VIII and IX in Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. What follows is a summary of our discussion of Austin.

Jason was our lone faculty representative because David was off giving a paper in Scandinavia. He (Jason) began discussion by focusing attention on Austin’s argument against Ayer’s claim that there are “different senses” of “’perceive’ and other verbs designating modes of perception” (87). Ayer wants to argue for the claim that sense-data talk is just a “clearer and more convenient” way of talking about the objects of perception (87). How does he reach that conclusion? Austin presents Ayer’s argument as follows:

1. There are several different senses of the word “perceive”: In one sense of the word, saying that I perceive an object means that “it is necessary that what is seen should really exist, but not necessary that it should have the qualities that it appears to have”; while in another sense, “it is not possible that anything should seem to have qualities that it does not really have, but also not necessary that what is seen should really exist”.

2. Some philosophers use the word “perceive” or “see” as a kind of mongrel version of both senses of “see” just described. That is, they use “see” and “perceive” in such a way that it has the sense that what is seen must exist, and that it must have the properties that it appears to have (86). But since in delusive situations, what is “seen” either doesn’t really exist or doesn’t have the properties it appears to have, they are thereby obligated to find an object that both exists and has the relevant properties. That object is a sense-datum.

3. Next, these philosophers “find it ‘convenient’, Ayer says, ‘to extend this usage to all cases’, on the old, familiar ground that ‘delusive and veridical perceptions don’t differ in ‘quality’” (87).

4. So, in all cases of perception, “the objects of which one is directly aware are sense-data and not material things…[this] enables us only to refer to familiar facts in a clearer and more convenient way”.

Austin fastens on Ayer’s claim that there are different senses of “perceive” and “see”. Austin denies that the evidence that Ayer offers in support of this claim establishes that there are different senses for “perceive” and “see”. discusses a number of different examples given by Ayer in support of the claim that there are different senses of “perceive”. For each example, Austin tries to show that instead of finding different senses of “see” or “perceive”, there are other perfectly acceptable ways of avoiding apparent incompatibility.

For example, Ayer says “If I say that I am perceiving two pieces of paper, I need not be implying that there really are two pieces of paper there” (89). Interestingly, Austin agrees with Ayer on this point, that we can say that we are perceiving two pieces of paper without thereby implying that there really are two pieces of paper we are seeing, as in a case of double vision (90).

But Austin stops short of finding a different sense of “perceive” in this case. He says that in normal circumstances, saying that you perceive two pieces of paper entails that there are two pieces of paper, but “we may have to stretch our ordinary usage to accommodate” the “exceptional case” of double vision (90-91). He then says that to say “I am perceiving two pieces of paper” in the case of double vision is to say that faute de mieux (for lack of something better), and that “the fact that an exceptional situation may thus induce me to use words primarily appropriate for a different, normal situation is nothing like enough to establish that there are, in general, two different, normal (‘correct and familiar’) senses of the words I use” (91).

Jason was quick to point out that this line of handling the different senses of “perceive” seems at odds with the way that neo-Austinians like Charles Travis want to handle similar situations by saying that words do have different senses (truth-conditions) in different circumstances.

That is part of Austin’s response to Ayer’s claim that there is a sense of “perceive” that does not require that the object that is said to be perceived actually exist. He then takes up Ayer’s claim that there is a sense of “perceive” that does not entail that the object seen has the characteristics (properties) it appears to have.

Austin then discusses Ayer’s case of a man, gazing into the starry heavens, says both (a) “I see a distant star which has an extension greater than that of the earth”; and (b) “I see a silvery speck no bigger than a sixpence”. Since nothing can both be a silvery speck no bigger than a sixpence and have an extension greater than that of the earth, Ayer says that “one is tempted to conclude that one at least of these assertions is false” (92). Of course, Ayer (like Austin) thinks that both assertions can be true, and he tries to make room for the truth of both statements by saying that there are two different senses of “see” at work in this case, one which does not require that the thing seen have all the properties which it appears to have (this is the sense present in (a)), and one according to which “it is not possible that anything should seem to have qualities that it does not really have, but also not necessary that what is seen should really exist” (94). This second sense is supposed to be the sense operative in (b), above—the case of the silvery speck.

What does Austin say about this case? Though he finds the first sense “a bit obscure”, he thinks it is “probably all right”. He focuses his attention on the second sense. He first observes that saying that you see a silvery speck “of course ‘implies’ that the speck exists” (94). And then he says that there is no legitimate distinction that can be drawn between merely seeming to be no bigger than a sixpence and being no bigger than a sixpence (95-96). I take the point of Austin’s observation to be that the best way to understand “I see a silvery speck no bigger than a sixpence” is as “I see a silvery speck that appears no bigger than a sixpence” (if I remember correctly, Will suggested something like this in the workshop). So it looks like Austin is saying that rather than find multiple senses for “see”, we find different senses of “is” here. Austin takes this to show that there is no second sense of “sees” as suggested by Ayer.

Jason then asked about the intriguing footnote on p. 95. Austin says:

“What about seeing ghosts? Well, if I say that cousin Josephine once saw a ghost, even if I go on to say I don’t ‘believe in’ ghosts, whatever that means, I can’t say that ghosts don’t exist in any sense at all. For there was, in some sense, this ghost that Josephine saw. If I do want to insist that ghosts don’t exist in any sense at all, I can’t afford to admit that people ever see them—I shall have to say that they think they do, that they seem to see them, or what not”.

Jason thought this was odd. If you say that cousin Josephine once saw a ghost, why not say that you’re saying something that is obviously false and implicating that she believes that she saw one? That way we needn’t have to say, even in some sense, that there was a ghost that Josephine saw. That sounded reasonable enough—those who believe in ghosts, even in some sense, don’t need any aid and comfort from ordinary language philosophy.

The workshop will meet again on May 31 to discuss the rest of Sense and Sensibilia and a paper by Rachel Goodman.

Tom Baldwin: Perception, Reference, Causation

2006-05-09T11:57:00.000-05:00

Professor Thomas Baldwin (University of York) will give a talk, "Perception, Reference, and Causation" to the Mind Workshop tomorrow night.

J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, Chapters V-VII

2006-05-04T18:43:00.000-05:00

Last night the workshop met to discuss chapters V-VII in J.L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, after Jay and I talked about McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time.

David F. was at bat tonight. He started discussion by pointing to Austin's discussion, in chapter VII, of the word "real". Austin convincingly shows that for sentences containing the word "real", "you can't tell what I mean just from the words I use; it makes a difference, for instance, whether [certain other contextual conditions hold]" (65). Austin makes a point of contrasting this feature of sentences containing the word "real" (a feature it shares with certain other words, like "good") with sentences like "This is pink". Austin says that "whereas we can just say of something 'This is pink', we can't just say of something 'This is real'" (69).

But is the contrast that Austin draws correct? That is, is it right to say that we can just say of something that it is pink? If you say "The book is pink", is there only one way that the world has to be in order for the sentence to be true? It doesn't seem so. The book might have a pink dust jacket, pink pages, a pink title on the spine, and so on. And merely supplying a substantive for "real" to attach to, e.g., "That is a real duck", doesn't yet pick out only one way that the world could be make the sentence true. For example (adopting an example from Travis), an utterance of "That's a real duck", said while demonstrating a decoy duck, would be false if the speaker was trying to distinguish decoys from living ducks; but an utterance of the same sentence, said while demonstrating the same decoy, might be true if the speaker was trying to distinguish decoy ducks from decoy coots (duck look-alikes).

David pointed to Austin's discussion of the statement "That isn't the real colour of her hair" (65). David said that you could delete each occurrence of "real" in the passage without any change in the significance of the passage. For example, consider the passage with every occurrence of "real" omitted:

"But suppose (a) that I remark to you of a third party, 'That isn't the colour of her hair.' Do I mean by this that, if you were to observe her in conditions of standard illumination, you would find that her hair did not look that colour? Plainly not--the conditions of illumination may be standard already. I mean of course, that her hair has been dyed, and normal illumination just doesn't come into it at all. Or suppose that you are looking at a ball of wool in a shop, and I say, 'That's not its colour'. Here I may mean that it won't look that colour in ordinary daylight; but I may mean that wool isn't that colour before its dyed."

There was some dispute about whether David's bold claim was correct, but it does seem correct to think that "real" does not contrast as clearly with other terms like "pink" or "colour of her hair" that Austin wants to contrast it with. There was some discussion of how best to characterize the difference between sentences containing "real" and sentences not containing it.

Next, we found fault with Austin's treatment of the "cricket" example on p. 64. Austin compares the word "real" with the word "cricket", and says that "words of this sort have been responsible for a great deal of perplexity". He then says,

"Consider the expressions 'cricket ball', 'cricket bat', 'cricket pavilion', 'cricket weather'. If someone did not know about cricket and were obsessed with the use of such 'normal' words as 'yellow', he might gaze at the ball, the bat, the building, the weather, trying to detect the 'common quality' which (he assumes) is attributed to these things by the prefix 'cricket'. But no such quality meets his eye; and so perhaps he concludes that 'cricket' must designate a non-natural quality, a quality not to be detected in any ordinary way but by intuition."

But, it was pointed out (by Jason or David or Jay), if someone didn't know about any topic, including "yellow", then the person might gaze at yellow teeth, a yellow book, a yellow lightbulb, etc. and find no 'common quality' which is attributed to these things by the preflix 'yellow'. Of course, not knowing anything about cricket or yellow, a person might find the common quality shared by yellow things or all things cricket mysterious! Whereas, someone who knows about cricket or yellow would be able, presumably, to identify the shared quality involved--something having to do with the game of cricket, on one hand, and with yellowness, on the other.

As the workshop wound down, Jason and David were interested in finding out what our assessment of the book was. They both related stories from their grad student days where prominent philosophers (McDowell, Stroud) expressed their respect for the book. Jason and David said that they thought the book may be of more historical than lasting philosophical significance. There was some debate about that--Ben was the most eloquent defender of the book's lasting significance. He said that Austin demonstrates an admirably assiduous approach to philosophy that, instead of racing ahead and generating "results", stops and tries to work out what problems, if any, are actually being solved by the philosopher, and whether they are worth solving.

Lowe on McTaggart's Argument for the Unreality of Time

2006-05-04T11:13:00.000-05:00

Last night, Jay and I presented some material on McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time. What follows is part of what we talked about.

McTaggart’s Argument
1. Time essentially involves change.
2. Change can only be explained in terms of A-series expressions.
3. A-series expressions involve contradiction and so cannot describe reality.
4. So time is unreal.

Lowe wants to resist (4). He does so by denying (3). But his denial of (3) requires altering McTaggart’s account of (2) to explain how change can only be explained in terms of A-series expressions. Lowe’s argument can therefore be broken down into two parts. Part I: Denying that A-series expressions involve contradiction. Part II: explaining how change essentially involves A-series expressions.

PART I: Denying that A-series expressions involve contradiction

1. McTaggart’s argument for (3) involves the following claims:

a. The predicates “is past”, “is present” and “is future” all apply to all events

b. These predicates are inconsistent

2. An initial response: “past”, “present”, and “future” do not apply to all events at the same time.

3. Two versions of this response:

a. A-series version, second-level tenses: Event e is present (in the present), is future (in the past), and is past (in the future).

b. B-series version, indexing tenses to dates: Event e is present in 2006, is future in 1978, and is past in 2034.

4. Traditional problems with each response:

a. Traditional problem with A-series version (given by Dummett): The contradiction is not eliminated. Event e is not only present (in the present), it is also past (in the present) and future (in the present); or it is not only future (in the past), but past (in the past) and present (in the past). Each group of higher level A-series expressions is contradictory.

b. Traditional problem with B-series version: The contradiction is eliminated, but the A-series is reduced to the B-series. “Event e is present in 2006” is equivalent to “Event e is simultaneous with 2006”; “Event e is future in 1978” is equivalent to “Event e is after 1978”; and “Event e is past in 2034” is equivalent to “Event e is before 2034”.

5. Lowe’s new problems with each response:

a. A-series version: Higher-order tenses are incoherent (66). Tenses function like indexicals. Indexicals get their content from the context of utterance. The context of utterance cannot be shifted. David Kaplan says that attempts to shift the context in which indexicals get assigned their contents generate “monsters”. It doesn’t make sense to say that in the future, it is the present, just as it doesn’t make sense to say it is here over there or To you, I am you.

b. B-series version (Sorabji): Indexing A-series expressions to times is also incoherent, for the reasons just given. Saying “Event e is future in 1978” attempts to shift the context of utterance for “is future” back to 1978. But we can’t do that.

Jason worried that Lowe's intuitions about the incoherence of utterances like "In the future, 2006 will be past" were wrong. It seems perfectly possible to say something like, "Back in 1984, my college years were still in the future" without lapsing into incoherence.

PART II: Explaining how change essentially involves A-series expressions

7. McTaggart explained change in terms of future event e becoming present and receding into the past (68). But Lowe can’t use this explanation of change, because the idea of an event going from being present to being past is what generated the contradiction in the A-series. So how does Lowe explain change?

8. Lowe’s explanation of change in terms of sequences:

a. Lowe thinks he can show how change is essential to time in a way that it isn’t for space: “In all the possible space-time routes a person may take, the order of temporal positions will be the same, while the order of spatial positions may vary” (69).

i. A Worry: How does this show that change is essential to time, and not to space? It seems if anything it shows that change is essential to space, since the temporal sequences of the routes a person may take are always the same.

9. But granting that Lowe has shown that change is essential to time, why does he think that change essentially involves A-series expressions?

a. Lowe has explained how change is essential for time in terms of possible variations in space-time sequences: an active person may take sequence <(s1, t1), (s2, t2), (s3, t3)>, or a couch-potato may take sequence <(s1, t1), (s1, t2), (s1, t3)>, but both the active person and the couch potato will have sequences that must have the form <(-, t1), (-, t2), (-, t3)>. What about these sequences involves anything about the A-series? We could, for example, fill in the time variables with B-series dates: <(-, May 2, 2006), (-, May 3, 2006), (-, May 4, 2006)> (69). If the sequences that explain how time essentially involves change don’t essentially involve the A-series, then Lowe has rejected premise (2) in McTaggart’s argument, which he doesn’t want to do (63).

b. Lowe’s response: Routes are sequences of “spatio-temporal perspectives” (69). What does this mean? It means that routes can’t rely on anything like non-perspectival, non-tensed, non-indexical ways of specifying times (and locations?). Perspectival sequences would look like this: <(there, yesterday), (here, today), (there, tomorrow)>; <(here, yesterday), (here, today), (here, tomorrow)>.

Mind Workshop This Week: J.L. Austin and The Indexical Fallacy in McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time

2006-05-01T19:18:00.000-05:00

This week, the workshop will meet in Cobb 104 on Wednesday from 6-8pm to discuss pp. 44-77 of J.L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, as well as the following (short) papers on McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time:

E.J. Lowe, "The Indexical Fallacy in McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time"
Michael Dummett, "A Defense of McTaggart's Argument for the Unreality of Time"
Peter Geach, selection from "Time" in Truth, Love, and Immortality

I'll send out the Geach as soon as I get it scanned.

What They're Searching For

2006-04-26T00:18:00.000-05:00

The philosophy of mind workshop blog is roughly one year old. In that time, we have become a destination for those doing google searches on the following topics (these are just a few examples from the past couple of days):

"functionalism and anomalous monism"

Brandom+beliefs+knowledge

Donnellan phenomenon

philosophy naming and necessity what is in a name

jl austin other minds

q-memory parfit

kripke on donnellan's counterexamples of russell

Speaker's reference and semantic reference

Quine's "Word and Object"

Sellars game of giving and asking for reasons

Dennett philosopher criticizes Descartes

We also occasionally get visitors who want to know things about:

Insurance Poets

One of the damn things is enough

globula

pickledork

Zed Adams

"Believing What the Man Says About His Own Feelings" and Chapters I-IV in Sense and Sensibilia

2006-04-19T21:45:00.001-05:00

Tonight the workshop met for a double shot of J.L. Austin.

First Ben McMyler offered his revisionary reading of Austin's "Other Minds".

Then we discussed chapters I-IV of Sense and Sensibilia.

Jason gave a characteristically lucid and provocative account of Austin's way of responding to the argument from illusion.

The Argument From Illusion (As reconstructed by Jason)

(1) An example of a deceptive or illusory experience of an F is given.

(2) In such a case you see or experience something F.

(3) In such a case you're not seeing/experienceing a material F.

(4) Therefore, in such a case, you must be experiencing an F-ish sense datum (you must be experiencing something that is F or F-like).
------------------------------------------------------------

This first stage of the argument from illusion does not yet purport to establish the more ambitious claim that a subject is always experiencing a sense-datum, even in non-deceptive/illusory cases. To get to that conclusion, we need to add the following:

(5) A deceptive experience of an F can be indistinguishable from a veridical experience of an F.

(6) The deceptive and the veridical experiences, when indistinguishable, must have the same content (be of the same thing).

(7) Therefore, what we see/experience in both cases is a sense datum.

(8) Therefore, you only ever see an F indirectly.

Obviously, there are various problems with the argument as outlined above. Jason eventually wondered why Austin picks on the argument in the particular way(s) that he does in S&S. But first Jason said that he thought that the primary motiviation for invoking sense data is anti-skeptical, and that the argument from illusion is meant only as a secondary move to "buttress" the introduction of sense data.

How does Austin criticize the argument from illusion? Jason suggested two possible ways of reading Austin's criticisms. Either Austin simply tries to show that one or more of the premises of the argument is false, or, more ambitiously, he tries to show that all attempts to formulate the argument from illusion are confused.

I said that in his discussions of the bent stick, the mirror, and the mirage, Austin seems to criticize different parts of the argument. For example, Austin agrees that when one sees a straight stick placed in water, it makes sense to say that it looks bent. But, in the following passage, Austin seems to take issue with both (2) (3) in the argument given above:

"...we are told, in this case you are seeing something; and what is this something 'if it is not part of any material thing'? But this question is, really, completely mad. The straight part of the stick, the bit not under water, is presumably part of a material thing; don't we see that? And what about the bit under water?--we can see that too. We can see, come to that, the water itself. In fact what we see is a stick partly immersed in water..." (p.30).

In the mirror case, Austin clearly rejects (3), that when it "appears [that my body] is some distance behind the glass" (p.31), "I am not seeing a material thing". He also says that I see the mirror, and I see my body in the mirror, which suggests (to me, at least), that Austin is also rejecting premise (2), that when it appears that F (that my body is behind the glass), I must experience something F-ish (something behind-the-glass-ish). No--what I'm experiencing/seeing is the mirror and my body "in" the mirror.

Austin seems to grant (1-3) in the case of the mirage, but denies that it follows that the person experiencing the mirage is "experiencing sense-data" (p.32).

After I described the different ways Austin approaches the examples, Jason asked whether the key premise in the argument from illusion is (2). It seems possibly the least plausible premise in the argument. Focusing on it might have made shorter work of the argument from illusion. Why spend time picking apart the language of those arguing for sense-data rather than going straight to the heart of the argument?

Zack then said that he thought he could modify the argument to make premise (2) more plausible. If (2) is changed to read:

(2') In such a case you see or experience something

(2') might be something that Austin accepts. In each case Austin discusses, Austin clearly thinks that we are seeing something: a stick submerged in water; our reflection in a mirror; and a mirage. So it might turn out that rejecting premise (2) isn't enough to bring down the argument from illusion.

Jason then said that he thinks Austin's way of criticizing his opponents is excessively uncharitable. Instead of trying to give a rational reconstruction of Price or Ayer's arguments, Austin is content merely to point out their mistakes.

Jay, sympathizing with Jason, contrasted Austin's philosophical method with Wittgenstein's. While Wittgenstein treats the confusions of the philosopher as confusions that we are all prone to, Austin treats them as careless mistakes.

(This difference was disputed, to some extent, by some members of the workshop, including I think Ben and maybe David F.)

We meet again in two weeks to discuss more of Sense and Sensibilia.

J.L. Austin & Ben McMyler

2006-04-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

This week, the workshop will meet on Wednesday, at 6pm in COBB 104 (note room change) to discuss a paper by Ben McMyler and the first 43 pages of Sense and Sensibilia.

Prinz Dinner at Lao Sze Chuan

2006-04-13T00:14:00.000-05:00

Jason, Zed, Erica, (prospective student), Josef, Jesse, (psychology grad student), Melody, Roscoe.

Not pictured: Gary, Will, and me.

Jesse Prinz Workshop

2006-04-02T03:11:00.000-05:00

Philosophy of Mind Workshop, Spring Quarter

2006-03-29T08:29:00.000-06:00

The first meeting of the Philosophy of Mind workshop will be Wednesday, April 5th.

We will meet in Cobb 119 from 6pm-8pm.

Zed Adams (pictured above) will be presenting his paper, "A Defence of Colour Primitivism". (He insisted on "color" being spelled with a "u", and "defense" with a "c".) Zed has asked us to read the following two things in preparation:

(1) Byrne and Hilbert, "Color Primitivism"

(2) Austin, "Sense and Sensibilia", pp. 65-68 (beginning with "Let us begin, then with a preliminary ..." and ending with "not a real duck". (The page numbers may vary from edition to edition. Zed has the 1976 edition.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the second half of the workshop, we will discuss pp. 1-43 in Austin's Sense and Sensibilia.

Jesse Prinz

2006-03-13T09:07:00.000-06:00

Jesse Prinz, Associate Professor at UNC Chapel Hill and U of C alum, will give a paper to the workshop on April 6:

"Hume's Brain: How Cognitive Science Supports British Moral Psychology"

The event will be co-sponsored by the Contemporary Workshop and by the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

Here is a link to Jesse's homepage.

The talk will be in Cobb 107 from 6pm to 8pm.

See you there.

Nat & Contextualism

2006-03-08T21:19:00.000-06:00

Tonight we talked about my paper on contextualism. We concentrated on MacFarlane's non-indexical contextualism. You can get MacFarlane's paper on his website here.

Brandom Reading for February 22

2006-02-20T21:45:00.000-06:00

The reading for this Wednesday's meeting of the workshop is ch. 8, pp. 495-547.

Making It Explicit, Chapter 4, Parts I and II

2006-02-13T10:44:00.000-06:00

Last Wednesday the workshop met to discuss parts I and II of chapter 4 of Brandom's Making It Explicit.

Part I

Jason kicked things off again with a short intro to Brandom's account of observational knowledge and knowledge in general. Brandom wants to give an account of both in terms of the varieties of his deontic statuses of commitment and entitlement. Ascribing knowledge is taken as the basic explanandum.

Brandom takes knowledge to be an amalgam of belief, truth and justification, and assigns particular deontic statuses to correspond with each feature of the traditional analysis of knowledge. (He says that if the Gettier counter-examples show that knowledge cannot be analyzed as justified true belief, then what he is giving an account of is knowledge*, which just is justified true belief.) Here is how the three elements are translated into Brandomese:

1. Belief

When I ascribe knowledge to someone, e.g., "Aidan knows he is undefeated at squash", I attribute certain commitments to Aidan. For Brandom, that means Aidan is prepared to make certain assertions and draw certain inferences.

2. Justification

In ascribing knowledge to Aidan, I not only attribute a commitment to him, I attribute entitlement as well. This corresponds to justification in the traditional picture of knowledge.

3. Truth

Finally, I myself undetake a commitment to make those assertions and draw those inferences that I attributed to Aidan in (1). This is supposed to correspond to the truth element in the traditional model.

Jason raised a couple questions about Brandom's way of handling knowledge. First, for Brandom, the three elements out of which knowledge is composed are separable. One could attribute commitment and entitlement to Aidan without oneself undertaking a corresponding commitment. Jason said that this meant that Brandom was committed to the possibility of reducing knowledge into justification, belief and truth components. (Though, to be fair, Brandom does make the remark about his giving an analysis only of knowledge* mentioned above. But one might object to that move by just saying Brandom has left knowledge untouched.)

Second, Jason worried that Brandom's account of knowledge in terms of ascriptions of knowledge made knowledge far too external to the knower. It seems possible, on the face of it, to be a knower without there being any other subjects around. Brandom clearly thinks that knowledge is a status that one has only in virtue of being part of a certain kind of social practice. If there aren't any attributers around, then how can I count as believing truly or being justified? David and Jason both raised the possibility that Brandom might respond by saying that we could understand such a situation by saying that it would be appropriate to attribute entitlement and undertake corresponding commitment, and what would be appropriate would constitute my status. But that option seems unavailable to Brandom, since the way "appropriateness" would have to be understood here would require saying something about how what I believe is true, and he has himself said that he isn't entitled himself to that all-important norm yet.

(But, I wonder, thinking about the objection now as I write it down, whether there isn't a simpler response for Brandom to make to Jason's objection. He might simply say, in the situation where there aren't any other attributers around, that the knower himself ascribes knowledge to himself. The only odd feature of this suggestion is that such a subject would attribute a commitment to himself and then undertake the same commitment, which seems a bit superfluous. But, presumably, the same situation would arise in a social situation where I want to ascribe knowledge to someone and I already am committed to what I attribute to him.)

Jason then turned to Brandom's account of observational knowledge.

There is a picture of observational knowledge according to which when I experience that p, I don't thereby immediately come to believe that p. The content of my experience is something like an appearance that p. An appearance that p can serve as a reason to form the belief that p, and when I have good enough reasons in support of the belief that p, I count as knowing that p.

That picture of observational knowledge is not Brandom's. For Brandom, experience plays no role in the constitution of observational knowledge. Observation consists simply in forming a belief in the right way. Brandom inherits this picture of observational knowledge from Sellars, though he "socializes" Sellars's picture in the following way. Sellars holds that observational knowledge consists in a reliable belief-forming process yielding a belief that a knower can then explain in the right way by giving reasons in support of his belief if challenged. Brandom amends Sellars's view by saying that it needn't be the knower himself who is in a position to give reasons in favor of the belief if challenged. It can be someone else speaking on the knower's behalf. A knower need not be aware of his own reliability at all. (Thus the strange case of Monique and the hornbeams. Even though she disavows knowledge that the tree she sees is a hornbeam, she can count as a knower if someone is able to give reasons on her behalf.)

Jason's third and final question concerned the distinction between (1) what you observe to be so and (2) what you experience to be so. He said that it was questionable whether the physicist observing the bubble chamber actually experienced the mu-meson, or merely came to know it via observing it. Jason felt that there was a big difference between experiencing that p then inferring from what one experiences to q, where q can count as observational knowledge. And Jason said that he thought Brandom was in trouble because he wouldn't be able to draw this intuitive distinction between experience and observation. There was a great deal of debate about this claim over the course of the workshop.

We wondered what a bubble chamber looked like. I found a picture of one:

And here is a picture (how it was made, I don't know) of some collisions in a bubble chamber:

At this point, we couldn't contain ourselves any more and discussion began.

Part II

I asked if Jason's last objection was a version of the familiar "blindsight" objection to Brandom's account of observational knowledge. That objection, roughly, is that Brandom's account of observation can't distinguish between, e.g., normal seeing and blindsight (if blindsight were a reliable belief-forming mechanism). Jason seemed to think that yes, his objection was a version of this worry. I then formed a version of the blindsight objection based on the fact that for Brandom, what distinguishes the beliefs that form part of the status of observational knowledge from other beliefs is that they are non-inferentially acquired. But beliefs might be non-inferentially acquired without being observational. For example, you might be wired up so that someone implants beliefs in you about some distant location. Would such a non-inferentially acquired belief count as observational? It seems intuitive that it would not. But it seems that Brandom would not have the resources to deny that it was. Jason seemed sympathetic to this kind of worry.

Aidan defended Brandom on this point, claiming that he never understood why people thought these kinds of blindsight objections were effective against Brandom or Davidson. He said that given a suitably coherent enough set of beliefs suitably related to one another, observational (perceptual) beliefs might perfectly well be distinguished from other kinds of belief.

Jason replied by saying that a series of beliefs that were arrived at by way of some non-observational process, like some implanted device, might be coherent and connected and yet they still wouldn't count as observational.

David then defended Aidan. He said (citing Dennett, I think), that "taken far enough", the requirements of suitable connection and coherence would amount to what we would recognize as observation, and that experience would at that point just be a superfluous add-on.

Jason seemed unconvinced, but we moved on (though Jason and Aidan sparred over this issue again at the end of the workshop).

Part III

Since Jason wasn't feeling well, David helped out with a short presentation.

David began by asking if anyone could explain Brandom's talk of "gerrymandering" that appeared in Brandom's rejection of regularism in chapter 1. I thought I had some idea of why he was using that term, having to do with the drawing of arbitrary boundaries, but I had to admit that extending it to the case of failed solutions to the rule-following argument always seemed a bit of a stretch. But David then answered his own question by giving a superb explanation of the metaphor of gerrymandering as it appears in chapter 4 and in chapter 1.

The gerrymandering metaphor, David explained, has its natural home in Brandom's discussion of reliabilism. Brandom thinks that there is a gerrymandering problem that afflicts reliabilist accounts of knowledge that is analogous to the gerrymandering problem for the regularist response to the rule-following problem. The problem is that whether or not one counts as reliable depends on what one considers relevant possibilities. So, in Goldman's example, the subject correctly identifies a barn. But if the barn is the only real barn in a county full of fake barn facades, our intuitions incline towards rejecting the subject's claim to be a reliable reporter of barns. But if we widen our view a bit, and take in the whole country, where barn facade county is an anomaly, then it seems that the subject does count as a reliable reporter of barns, and so does count as knowing that he's viewing a barn. But then maybe in the whole universe there are many more worlds that are full of fake barns and in such worlds the subject wouldn't count as a reliable reporter of barns. So it appears that depending on how we demarcate the relevant domain within which the subject has to identify barns, we get different assessments of his reliability. Brandom's gerrymandering charge against the reliabilist amounts to the claim that there is no way for the reliabilist to justify treating one way of drawing the boundary as more appropriate than any other. So it looks like we have no reason to say that the subject in Barn Facade County is reliable as opposed to unreliable.

In the case of Goldman's barn facade county thought experiment, the effect of drawing arbitrary boundaries (in this case, geographical boundaries) becomes apparent, and the metaphor of gerrymandering makes good sense.

How does the metaphor apply to the rule-following argument?

The regularist, dispositionalist reponse to the rule-following argument has a boundary problem as well. Say we try to give a dispositionalist account of a concept like "horse". We say that the concept consists just in my disposition to call certain things horses. But then we have a problem because not all the things I'm disposed to call a horse are actually horses. So how do we rule those cases out? Even if we say that a horse is what I am disposed to call a horse in favorable conditions, there will still be situations in which I call something that isn't a horse a horse. The upshot is that to actually draw the appopriate boundary, it looks like I'm going to have to cheat and bring in the concept horse, which is what I was trying to give a reductive account of.

In both the regularist response to the rule-following argument and in the reliabilist account of knowledge, we want a non-arbitrary way of drawing the relevant boundary that doesn't simply rely on our intuitive grasp of the concept we're trying to get a handle on.

I liked David's explanation of the gerrymandering metaphor, but I had a question about Brandom's "solution" to the gerrymandering problem for the reliabilist. Roughly, his solution to the problem, his way of fixing the relevant boundary, is to rely on the attitudes of subjects--basically, if I have understood him correctly, that we decide what the relevant boundary is:

"What in practice privileges some of the reference classes with respect to which reliability may be assessed over other such reference classes is the attitudes of those who attribute the commitment whose entitlement is in question" (p. 212).

I worried that this wasn't a real solution to the boundary problem, since there is nothing to suggest that the attributers will agree on where the boundary should be drawn. Should the subject's reliability then be attributer-dependent? Maybe, but then whether a subject counts as reliable depends completely on the vagaries of his attributers. It would sure help here to be able to simply say that the boundary should be drawn according to the attitudes of those attributers who correctly assess where the boundary should be, but of course Brandom can't take that route.

The workshop wound down with a debate between Jason and Aidan on the role of experience in observational knowledge, which I'm afraid I can't accurately reproduce here. I'd be happy to add anything to this report that they suggest.

We agreed that instead of reading Brandom's account of action, we would jump ahead to chapter 8 next time, in order to silence once and for all the constant response to any tough questions:

"Wait until chapter 8".

See everyone in two weeks.

This Week's Workshop

2006-02-06T08:27:00.000-06:00

The workshop will meet this Wednesday, at 6:30pm in Cobb 104 to discuss pp. 199-229 in chapter 4 of Brandom's Making It Explicit.

Making It Explicit, Chapter 3, Parts III & IV

2006-01-26T08:29:00.000-06:00

Last night the workshop met to discuss the last two sections of chapter 3 in Making It Explicit.

Thanks again to Russell for taking me to get the provisions for the workshop.

Part I

(Pictured: three dimensions of assertional significance)

David F. gave the introduction tonight. His raised a number of different questions for consideration.

1. He began by drawing our attention to the central role that Brandom thinks assertion plays in the "game of giving and asking for reasons". Assertions, unlike actions and perceptions (reliable acquisitions of assertional commitments (RAAC)), can both stand in need of and be offered as reasons. Actions cannot (according to Brandom) serve as reasons (p.171), and perceptions (or RAACs) cannot stand in need of reasons. Later in the workshop, Jason asked whether this gloss on what assertion is amounted to a definition of assertion. It seems far too sketchy to count as a definition, since one might reasonably think (for example) that actions can be offered as reasons for assertions or further actions, as well as standing in need of reasons. (A secret handshake, for example, might be a reason for letting you-know-who into you-know-what.) To say that actions don't amount to assertional reasons is obviously to beg the question.

2. David said that there are three ways for a subject to be entitled to an assertion: (i) he can give a reason for p; (ii) he can defer to a person who asserted p; (iii) he can be entitled to p on the basis of perception. (This picture of entitlement was also called into question later in the workshop, because it looks like Brandom is committed to the idea that one can be entitled to assert p if no one challenges the assertion. More on that later.) David pointed out that many philosophers think that if the only ways that subjects were entitled to assert p were (i) and (ii) (which correspond to inference and testimony, respectively), there would be a vicious regress of entitlement. Sellars, for example, thinks we need perception to entitle (justify) us to assert p in order to halt the regress. But, interestingly, it looks like Brandom isn't too concerned with this kind of traditional worry about a regress of entitlement. On p. 177 Brandom says that "the worry about a regress of entitlements is recognizably foundationalist", and that he responds to the worry by introducing the idea that "if many claims are treated as innocent until proven guilty...the global threat of regress dissolves". Jason raised a worry about this purported dissolution of the regress by asking how a simple fact about the structure of the game of giving and asking for reasons was supposed to alleviate any worries about justification. (Though, to be fair to Brandom, the fact about the game of giving and asking for reasons is supposed to be constitutive of entitlement. But, to be fair to Jason, this just raises the question we kept asking last week: how are norms (like genuine entitlement) supposed to arise out of mere practices? We still haven't got an account of that yet, and without one, Jason's question is a serious challenge.)

3. David asked whether Brandom's view of interpersonal, intracontent scorekeeping consequences didn't involve a blurring of the difference between how we entitle addressees of an assertion to themselves assert p and how we entitle (if we do at all) mere overhearers of what we assert (see the last full paragraph on p. 186). Ben, our resident expert on all things testimonial, pretty much agreed (with some reminders about how there are more and less inclusive notions of address).

4. David next gave a quick rundown of the deontic scorekeeping project. Someone asked how many scoreboards there would have to be for such a project to work. David said that each participant would have a scoreboard, on which he would keep tabs of the scores of everyone else in the practice (presumably including a row or column, or whatever, for himself). "The force of an utterance, the significance of a speech act, is to be understood in terms of the difference it makes to what commitments and entitlements are attributed and undertaken by various interlocutors" (p. 188). David asked whether Brandom should have said ought where are is in the quote just given. Shouldn't it be the case that what significance and force an utterance of mine has depends on what effects my utterance should have, and not on those effects it happens to have? It looked like this was another place where what should be normative statuses of various kinds are being constituted by brute regularist patterns of activity.

5. After Brandom explains David Lewis's "Scorekeeping in a Language Game", he goes on to say how his appropriation of the idea of scorekeeping differs from Lewis's. Brandom says: "...the notion of linguistic scorekeeping is intended to play a more fundamental explanatory role here than Lewis has in mind for it. For he is happy to think of conversational scores as kept track of in 'mental scoreboards', consisting of attitudes he calls 'mental representations' of the score (representations, presumably, whose content is that some component of the score is currently such and such). Clearly he does not envisage a project such as the present one, in which both the nature of mental states such as belief and their representational contents are themselves to be understood in terms of their role in scorekeeping practices, rather than the other way around". Now thinking about this comment caused some consternation in the workshop, because it isn't at all clear how we are to understand how we keep score on one another without assuming some role for content. Is it supposed to be obvious what it means to "keep track" of one another's scores, attributing entitlements and commitments, without using anything like a (content-involving) that-clause?

Part II

The floor was now open for general discussion (some of which I have already penciled in, above).

1. I added to David's list of concerns by raising a worry about holism. The significance of a speech act is determined by the difference it makes to the commitments and entitlements attributed and undertaken by participants in the practice (p. 188). So, it seems, the significance of an assertion I make depends on the vagaries of those around me--how they respond, what kind of entitlement they attribute to me, and so on. How, then, can two subjects make an assertion that has the same significance? It seems overwhelmingly likely that the overall difference your assertion of p makes to the sum total of commitments and entitlements attributed and undertaken by the participants in the practice will be different than the overall difference my assertion of p makes. And there will be similar problems about how I can count as making the same assertion at two different times. David responded by saying that the holist shouldn't accept the idea that any difference of commitment or entitlement anywhere in the whole makes for a difference of significance. The holist should claim that while significance depends on, or is a function of, the whole range of commitments and entitlements undertaken and attributed, appropriately adjusted differences can correspond to the same overall significance. For example, you and I may have received different scores on every quiz taken over the course of the semester, but still end up with the same grade. So while our overall grades depend on how we do on each quiz, that doesn't mean that lower-level differences amount to a difference in significance. Jason asked whether the situation would be any different with numerical grades (the answer, I think, was: not really).

2. Ben then asked how we should understand Brandom's claim that "...issuing an asssertional performance can warrant further commitments, whether by the asserter or by the audience, only if that warranting commitment itself is one the asserter is entitled to" (p.171). Ben thought that it was odd to talk about warranting or authorizing my commitment to q by my assertion that p. He cited Brandom's earlier "Asserting" paper, saying that Brandom thinks of asserting p as just the issuing of an inference license. It struck Ben (and others) as incorrect to say that by asserting p, you thereby license or authorize yourself to be committed to q (so long as you're entitled to p). I think (though I could be wrong) that there were two different reasons offered to explain this feeling of incorrectness: (i) talk of "licensing" or "authorizing" oneself to believe q on the basis of one's asserting p looks like one is licensing one's transition from p to q on the basis of giving oneself testimony, which looks like a distortion of the epistemic relations among one's commitments and entitlements (we don't have to take our own word for p in order to be authorized to assert q); (ii) more generally, it looks awkward to say that it is the social attitudes of acknowledging commitments and attributing entitlements that constitute epistemic entitlement, for reasons discussed above (in short: how do you precipitate the norms out of the social attitudes?).

Jason offered an analogy to elucidate Brandom's picture of asserting p (so long as one is entitled to do so) as authorizing one to assert q: imagine you are volunteering to go on a dangerous quest (you assert p). Volunteering entitles you to sit at the head of the table (you're authorized to assert q). The appropriate question at this point was: to what extent is it appropriate to understand asserting on this "quest-dinner table" model? (The answer mooted was "not very".)

(At this point I should register the fact that I didn't completely follow the discussion of assertion and authorization--the account given in the last two paragraphs is the best reconstruction I could manage.)

Part III

The workshop wound down with some worries about the overall project in Making It Explicit. Jason pointed out that Brandom says in the preface that "Chapters 3 and 4 present the core theory--the model according to which a pragmatics specifying the social practices in which conceptual norms are implicit and a broadly inferential semantics are combined. It is here that sufficient conditions are put forward for the practices a community is interpreted as engaging in to count as according performances the pragmatic significance characteristic of assertions--and hence for those practices to count as conferring specifically propositional contents" (p. xxii). This claim was worrying, because, as far as we can tell, the only attempt to give "sufficient conditions" for assertions consists of Brandom's remarks about how assertions differ from perceptual reports and actions in that assertions can both serve as and demand justification by reasons. And that seems a pretty meager defense of this core part of the theory. And the worries that have been around since chapter one about what "norms implicit in practice" really amount to, if they aren't full-blooded rules, and also aren't just social regularities, have not been assuaged. As far as we can tell, Brandom hasn't really said how he avoids both of those positions he regards as unacceptable. Again, maybe we've just missed it.

Browse previous summaries of Making It Explicit here, here, here, and here.

Workshop Mailing List

2006-01-25T11:11:00.000-06:00

Zeke prodded me into creating a workshop email list. Which I did, and all of you can now sign up for. To do so, visit here.

And sign up.

Brandom Reading for January 25

2006-01-23T13:56:00.000-06:00

David has assigned the rest of chapter 3 of Making It Explicit for Wednesday's workshop meeting.

See you there.

Brandom, Making It Explicit, Chapter 2, Sections V and VI, and Chapter 3 Sections I and II

2006-01-12T00:12:00.000-06:00

Last night the workshop met to discuss the last two sections of chapter two and the first two sections of chapter three of Brandom's Making It Explicit.

Thanks to Russell for helping me pick up the pizza and beer and Perrier.

PART I

Jason B. introduced the readings for this session. He first outlined some "reminders" of what's going on in MIE:

1. Brandom's project is to give a reductive account of semantic, representational, conceptual content. His variety of reductionism is peculiar, however, because his basic explanatory materials are normative.

2. Brandom's overarching commitment is to "strong inferentialism". Strong inferentialism is the view that content is to be explained in terms of inference and inferential articulation. An obvious assumption of strong inferentialism is that inference can be understood without relying on the notion of content.

3. Semantics is the philosophical study of content. Inferential semantics is semantics that presupposes strong inferentialism.

4. Pragmatics is the philosophical study of the relation between contentful items (speech acts, propositional attitudes, etc.) and the larger practice in which they are embedded.

5. Brandom's normative pragmatics involves taking normative (rather than merely descriptive) characterizations of practices as primitive. This is a basic difference between Brandom's project and naturalistic attempts to explain content.

6. Brandom's pragmatism involves a commitment to the claim that semantic concepts can be reductively explained in terms of pragmatic concepts (MIE, p. 143). In keeping with his commitment to normative pragmatics, Brandom wants to build up semantic content out of basic normative practices.

7. The key normative notions for pragmatics are commitment and entitlement. But these notions are not primitive. They are explained in terms of attributions: that S has a commitment to do A is, "in the first instance", a matter of having that commitment attributed to her.

We didn't contest any of the reminders Jason assembled. But we did contest how the basic normative pragmatic concepts (attributions of commitments and entitlements) were supposed to be understood.

Part II

Brandom says that attributing a commitment to A to subject S is, "in the first instance", to be disposed to sanction S if S fails to A. How should sanctioning be understood here? Brandom says that "sanctioning responses (for instance admitting versus ejecting) and the performances they discriminate (enterings of the theater) can be characterized apart from and antecedent to specification of the practice of conferring and recognizing entitlement defined by their means" (162). This is to define sanctioning "externally".

Jason then asked the following questions about the basic normative pragmatic concepts Brandom employs:

Is Brandom saying that being a sanction can be understood in non-normative terms? If so, how is a sanction supposed to be distinguished from mere bad consequences of an action? It seems that to distinguish sanctions from mere bad consequences requires norms: it seems a sanction is applied in response to a violation or deviation from some rule or standard. So we need some antecedent notion of rule or standard in order to understand any behavior is a sanction. Why does Brandom talk about "external" sanctions here at all? Doing so seems to conflict with normative pragmatics, his commitment to taking normative characterizations of practices as primitive.

The floor was then open for discussion.

Part III

Joe S. got things rolling by standing up for Brandom. He said that he didn't think that Brandom was engaged in reducing his basic pragmatic concepts to non-normative, "external" sanctioning.

Jason responded to Joe by developing the second horn of what became a dilemma for Brandom. If Brandom is not reducing attributions of entitlement and commitment to applications of external, non-normative sanctions, then how does he avoid introducing content at this early stage in his (supposedly reductive) explanatory project? Jason said that it was hard to see how you could attribute commitments or entitlements to someone without the use of a content-involving that-clause. And if attributions of commitment or entitlement can't be made without assuming a notion of content, then Brandom's reductive project, which aims to explain content in more basic terms, has stumbled as it takes its first step.

Jason asked again for an explanation of just what purpose the talk of "external" sanctions plays at this part in the book. If Brandom is really committed to normative pragmatics, why try to reduce basic normative concepts to non-normative concepts?

These questions struck me as raising issues that we had already discussed when we read chapter 1. In maybe the most well-known discussion in the whole book, Brandom explains how "applying a negative sanction might be understood in terms of corporal punishment; a prelinguistic community could express its practical grasp of a norm of conduct by beating with sticks any of its members who are perceived as transgressing that norm" (34). He uses Haugeland's complex behaviorist account in "Heidegger on Being a Person" as an illustration of a view of a "purely descriptive" (i.e., non-normative) account of sanctioning and social relations. Brandom dismisses the Haugeland proposal on the grounds that it is susceptible to the "gerrymandering" criticism levelled against regularism in Brandom's discussion of the rule-following argument. Briefly, Brandom claims that even Haugeland's complex version of regularism does not succeed in capturing correctness and incorrectness, and so "ought not to count as genuinely normative" (36).

But if Brandom objects to Haugeland's behaviorist account because it does not yield genuine norms, then why does Brandom introduce a similar account of "external" sanctions in chapter 3?

David F. said, somewhat half-heartedly, in response to my comment about chapter 1, that maybe Brandom starts with a Haugelandy view and it slowly becomes un-Haugelandy as he goes along.

Will S. agreed with Joe's original comment that it was wrong to say that Brandom was interested in a reduction of attribution to non-normative sanctioning. He pointed to Brandom's remark that "discursive practice is implicitly normative; it essentially includes assessments of moves as correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate" (159). Will said that this, and other remarks suggested that Brandom doesn't conceive of his project as Haugelandy at all.

I don't think anyone would disagree with the claim that Brandom often represents his project this way, as normative all the way down.

But Jason responded to Will by saying that Brandom thinks that norms have to be instituted by something, and it appears that what he ultimately thinks they are instituted by are "external" sanctions.

David asked if it would help Brandom if he could help himself to a brute fact about whether someone should do A or not. If he was able to help himself to that idea, then obviously no reduction of attributions to non-normative sanctions would be required.

But if Brandom could help himself to a brute fact about correctness or incorrectness, it looks like he would be impaled on the second horn Jason developed: he would have to be assuming what he aims to explain--content.

Joe then asked what Jason meant by content.

Jason said that anything that was specified in a that-clause counts as content, as well as "seeing-as" or "taking-as".

David outlined the position that Brandom wants to occupy, but which we didn't yet seem to have a clear picture of: he needs a normative, but not contentful, attitude. He can't provide a merely dispositional account of his basic attitudes, and he also can't give a "fully normative" account of them, either. Jason challenged the very possibility of such a position by claiming that any attitude (and, a fortiori, any attribution of attitude) will involve content. If that's so, then Brandom's project cannot get off the ground.

During the last part of the workshop, Aidan G. tried to work out whether a complex dispositional account like Haugeland's could yield lower-level (not "fully objective") norms that would suffice to get Brandom's project off the ground, to which "fully objective" norms could later be added. It was hard to see how that kind of proposal avoided either the non-normative horn or the assuming content horn of the dilemma, but it at least held out the hope of success for Brandom's project.

With that (slightly flickering) hope in mind, we will meet again in two weeks to continue discussion of Making It Explicit.

Browse previous summaries of Making It Explicit here, here, and here.

Brandom Reading for Jan. 11

2006-01-05T18:04:00.000-06:00

Dear workshoppers,

The reading for the next meeting of the workshop will be up to p. 166. That takes us into chapter 3.

Note that the registrar has changed our classroom to Cobb 104 and our start time to 6:30.

I believe I'm only allowed to put 20% of the total book on e-reserve (which comes to about 150 pages). So I think that it is reasonable to expect that anyone who is continuing to read the Brandom should go ahead and buy a copy of the book.

Welcome Back

2006-01-04T21:20:00.002-06:00

Welcome back from winter break.

The Mind Workshop will be getting back to business next Wednesday, January 11th.

A short update before the Brandom reading is posted:

I have been updating the list of graduate philosophy conferences and will continue to do so. There are a bunch. You should apply. They are fun. Zed (an emeritus member of the workshop), for example, will travel to sunny L.A. in February to give a paper on supervenience and eat at In-N-Out.

Mind Workshop, Winter Quarter

2005-12-14T10:28:00.000-06:00

The first meeting of the Philosophy of Mind Workshop in the Winter Quarter will be Wednesday, January 11th.

As soon as I know what pages Jason is going to assign, I will post that info here.

Prof. Thomas Baldwin, of the University of York, has agreed to speak to the workshop on May 10. His topic will be direct realism in perception.

Making It Explicit, Chapter 2, Parts IV & V

2005-12-03T17:09:00.000-06:00

It has turned wintery in Hyde Park.

Wednesday was the last meeting of the Philosophy of Mind Workshop this quarter. After discussing Chris Ferro's paper "The Normativity of the Mental", we turned to Making It Explicit, Chapter 2, parts IV and V.

PART I: The Set Up

We had a full workshop tonight. David F. got things moving with a quick summary of the most important topics in the sections we read:

1. Conceptual content: Brandom wants to understand conceptual content as inferential role, and he claims both Sellars and (more surprisingly) the early Frege as inferentialist forebearers. This way of understanding conceptual content is meant to contrast with a "representationalist" understanding of content, which would have us understand content as deriving from some relation between the constituents of content and things in the world (objects and properties, for example).

2. The inferences that are constitutive of content should be understand as material, rather than formal, inferences. There are inferential transitions between sentences we make in ordinary practice whose goodness does not need to be underwritten by a supressed conditional. For example, "If it's raining, the streets will be wet" or "Today's Tuesday, so tomorrow will be Wednesday".

3. Logic should be understood as playing an expressive role, making explicit the commitments that we implicitly undertake in our pre-reflective inferential practices. We shouldn't think of formal logic as somehow "standing behind" or already implicitly involved in our ordinary inferences. Logic is the device of semantic self-consciousness (and not, e.g. a necessary condition for thought as such).

David F. then raised two questions for the Brandom (not necessarily corresponding to the three central points just described):

Q1. Two of the examples Brandom gives of material inferences are (i) "Today is Wednesday" so "Tomorrow will be Thursday" and (ii) "Pittsburgh is to the west of Philadelphia" to "Philadelphia is to the east of Pittsburgh". Both of these examples look like "grammatical" inferences--intuitively, one could make them simply in virtue of knowing the meaning of the terms involved, and the inferences are necessarily (logically?) true. But Brandom's other example, "Lightning is seen now" so "Thunder will be heard soon" doesn't (seem to) have these features. I might understand the meaning of "lightning" (it's a certain kind of electrical discharge), but I might be a kind of creature insensitive to sound, so I wouldn't be disposed to conclude from seeing a lightning bolt that I will hear anything soon. Or it is possible that I see lightning but that I and everyone within earshot is struck dead--so no one hears any thunder. So, David F. asked, just what is a material inference?

Q2. Brandom says that conceptual content is inferential role. But an obvious concern for such an inferentialist account of conceptual content is how to explain the content of observational concepts, like "red". These concepts are sometimes invoked non-inferentially. Is their content then exhausted by their "downstream" inferential consequences? Brandom takes up this issue on p. 119, and says that with observational concepts like "red", "one is (among other things) committed to the propriety of the inference from its circumstances to its consequences of application". What exactly does it mean to infer from the circumstances of application of a concept like "red"? As Brandom says, the "circumstances of application need not themselves be linguistic" (119), and inferences (I would think) are transitions between linguistic (or sufficiently linguistic-like) things. So how can the circumstances figure in any inferences at all?

PART II: Discussion

I asked a question related to David's Q1. I pointed out that Brandom says that "It is the concepts 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'today' and 'tomorrow' that make the second inference correct, and the contents of the concepts 'lightning' and 'thunder', as well as the temporal concepts, that underwrite the third" (98). While it seems correct to say that it is the content of the concepts "Wednesday", "Thursday", "today" and "tomorrow" that make the first inference correct, it seems odd to say that the content of the concepts "lightning" and "thunder" make the inference about lightning and thunder correct. Following Rumfitt (1997), I asked whether it wouldn't be better to say that it is something about the world itself that makes the inference about lightning and thunder a good one. I think Jason B. was sympathetic to this question--arguing with David F. later, he glossed my (inarticulate) question as a worry (roughly) about frictionless spinning: "What is it about the facts that will fix content, when content is fixed by inference?"

An oh-so-very-philosophical moment occurred when Will S. asked how necessary the inference from "Today is Wednesday" to "Tomorrow will be Thursday" really is. He said that if the world were to explode, then tomorrow wouldn't be Wednesday. David and Jason simultaneously cried out, "Yes it will!" (But if time itself came to an end before midnight today [a scary thought], then would "tomorrow" even refer?)

There was some concern expressed by Zeke R. about Brandom's "K-vocabulary" (logical vocabulary). Jason B. shared the concern. He saw no principled way for Brandom to distinguish logical from non-logical vocabulary.

David F. and others tried to work out Brandom's account of observational concepts from the meager resources in the sections we read today, by thinking about how Sellars accounts for the content of observational concepts. But Zeke R. sensibly pointed out that even Brandom says we will have to wait until chapter 3 to get his account of the content of these concepts.

And wait we will. The Workshop will return during the first week of winter quarter.

Happy holidays.

Ferro on Anomalous Monism

2005-11-30T22:43:00.000-06:00

Tonight, the first hour of the workshop was devoted to discussing Chris Ferro's paper on Anomalous Monism ("The Normativity of the Mental"). Chris wrote a provocative paper. He claimed to have a short, intuitive argument for anomalous monism that was in sympathy with McDowell's claims in "Functionalism and Anomalous Monism".

I'll post a summary of our discussion of sections IV and V of chapter 2 of Making It Explicit soon.

Brandom Reading, Chapter 2, sections IV & V

2005-11-20T15:38:00.000-06:00

The workshop will meet on November 30 at 6pm in Cobb 103 to discuss pp. 94-121 of Making it Explicit. You can get the readings here and here.
We will also be talking about Chris Ferro's paper on Anomalous Monism.

Making It Explicit, Chapter One (part VI) & Chapter Two (parts I-III)

2005-11-09T21:47:00.000-06:00

Tonight the workshop met in Cobb 103 to discuss the last part of chapter one and the first three parts of chapter two of Brandom's Making It Explicit.

David F. wasn't at the workshop tonight because he was sick, but Jason B. did an admirable job steering the workshop in the direction of the truth. Or at least the truth about Brandom.

PART I: INTRODUCTION

Jason B. said that he would open discussion by raising three potential topics to discuss arising out of the sections of Making It Explicit we read for this workshop (Chapter 1, part VI, and Chapter 2, parts I-III):

1. Jason B. claimed that Brandom was offering a transcendental argument to the effect that a certain conception of norms implicit in practice was required to fix a certain interpretation or application of a rule. Jason reminded us that there are nagging questions about whether Wittgenstein would endorse such a project: John McDowell and David F. and others (possibly many members of the workshop, including Ben M.) would say that Wittgenstein would want us to stop the regress from even getting started, so there is nothing to stop, and no need for any theoretical apparatus to do the stopping. And Brandom's appendix to chapter 1 indicates that his notion of a "rule" is much more restrictive than Wittgenstein's notion of "rule". This by itself suggests that Wittgenstein has something different from Brandom in mind when he talks about the interpretability of rules.

2. Brandom wants to endorse a kind of interpretationism akin to Dennett's "stance stance", while rejecting Dennett's view that there is no original intentionality, only derivative intentionality. But if all intentionality is (in some sense) dependent on interpretation, then how can there be original intentionality (understood as a kind of intentionality that something has in virtue or something already with intentionality)? On the face of it, this looks paradoxical.

3. On Brandom's understanding of pragmatics and semantics, "semantics must answer to pragmatics" (83). We work out the content of subjects' utterances and mental states by paying attention to how subjects act and infer. Because the pragmatic attitudes (belief, desire, intention, etc.) matter for action and inference, we therefore cannot have an independent grasp on the propositional content of those attitudes without understanding their pragmatics. Brandom wants to contrast this view of content with "representationalism", an attempt to explain pragmatics in terms of propositional content. Jason B. asked who, if anyone, would count as a representationalist. Who is Brandom arguing with here? Surely no (or very few) contemporary philosophers count as representationalists in Brandom's sense. Jason B. also asked whether Brandom's arguments targeted only the designative version of representationalism (an extreme version of representationalism that holds that content should be understood on the model of the designating relation between singular terms and the objects they stand for).

PART II: INTERPRETATIONISM AND THE COMMUNITY

Jay E. opened discussion with a characteristically intelligent observation concerning topic #2, Brandom's version of Dennett's interpretationism. Recall that Jason B. said that Brandom's position seems prima facie paradoxical because he accepts (i) Original intentionality (which Jason glossed as the claim that not all intentionality depends on something already with intentionality) and (ii) Interpretationism (which was glossed as the claim that all intentionality depends on being interpreted). How are (i) and (ii) supposed to hold together? Jay suggested that Brandom suggests another "implicit" social response to this problem analogous to the solution he proposes to the rule-following paradox (the presence of the word "interpretation" here as in the rule-following considerations might also lead one to think such an analogy holds). Maybe, if the interpretations that are constitutive of intentionality are implicit in practice they can somehow constitute original intentionality? Though this sounded plausible as a description of what Brandom is up to here, no one felt this move was very satisfying. I could feel everyone wanting to say, with furrowed brows: "but how is making the interpretations implicit supposed to help anything?" Those members of the workshop more familiar with Brandom's work pointed out that the answer to this question is something that gets worked out "later in the book". So, we'll have to wait and see how norms implicit in practice are supposed to help avoid the seeming paradox that comes with accepting both original intentionality and interpretationism. (Ben M. was perhaps the least optimistic member of the workshop about the possibility of making these claims consistent.)

Will S. then raised a question about Brandom's comment on p. 61 that it is the community that is assigned original intentionality. What about Brandom's earlier comments about not assigning mental states to super-personal entities? Don't these remarks look inconsistent?

I feebly responded that Brandom does distinguish between the I-we and the I-thou understandings of the community, and he criticizes only the former for assigning mental states to a collective. So maybe the community he thinks can be ascribed original intentionality is some arrangement of I-thou relations. Jason B. criticized this proposal: either the thou in the I-thou relation is another individual, in which case there is no community, or the community is the I-thou relation itself, in which case we are still assigning intentionality to a collective, rather than an individual.

At this point, Jason B. gave a taxonomy of four different possible views of the proper role of the community in relation to intentionality (all of these are rough thumbnail sketches, obviously):

Crispin Wright's "regularism": Whatever the community agrees is correct action is correct action. Deviations from the normal way of going on count as mistakes.
John McDowell's "community as background condition": A necessary condition for intentionality is being a member of a community of a certain sort, where there are normal ways of going on, forms of life, agreements in judgments, etc. How people do in fact act is not all there is to correctness and incorrectness, however, but that they act in regular ways is a necessary condition for mindedness.
Dan Dennett's community of interpreters: in order to have intentionality, a thing must be fruitfully interpretable (that's shorthand for: it must be intentionally interpretable in a way that more effectively predicts its behavior than physical or design interpretation predicts its behavior), which requires an interpreter (though might not that interpreter be the thing itself?). The "community" here seems to play a much less substantial role than it does for Wright and McDowell.
Bob Brandom's "social intepretationism": The location of original intentionality is the community, but there will be (at least an attempt to generate) objective norms that outrun mere norms of communal agreement.

After Jason B. situated Brandom's project in relation to Wright, McDowell and Dennett, there was some concern about how Brandom's view differed from Crispin Wright's. After some discussion, we concluded that at the "ground level", Brandom's norms are Wright-like, in that they are constituted by communal agreement. But Brandom has a more ambitious project of "precipitating" objectivity out of "the social soup of norms that are whatever the community takes them to be" (54). That is supposed to be the project of the distant chapter 8.

PART III: ??

Then began a long discussion of how social an interpretationist has to be, which I feel I have only a tenuous grasp on. But I will try to reproduce the discussion as best I can.

Aiden G. initiated the discussion by pointing out that an important constraint on Dennett's intepretationism is its predictive success. Aiden then asked whether it was fruitful to think of Brandom as replacing predictive success with communal proprieties as a constraint on his interpretationism.

Jason B. raised what I took to be an objection to Aiden's suggestion about Brandom (though I'm still not sure about this). He said that there were two ways of understanding interpretationism, one which required a community and one which did not:

(1) Having intentionality consists just in correctly being interpreted and having one's behavior successfully predicted by someone adopting the intentional stance.

vs.

(2) Mere interpretability and predictability by someone adopting the intentional stance.

Jason B. said that only (1) requires an actual community of interpreters (though, again, I wonder whether even that is true: one could interpret and predict one's own behavior).

Jay E. said, in response to Jason, that one might think that even (2), mere interpretability, was something that was "socially conditioned", that is, dependent on the existence of a community to be so much as possible.

Jason said that Jay's suggestion was "clever" (meaning something like "sophistical"). Jason then said that Jay's route wasn't available to Brandom, because for Brandom interpretability just is actual interpreting.

This continued for some time.

I confess that still have trouble seeing what the significance of this dispute was for our understanding of Brandom.

PART IV: INTERLUDE

We chided Jason for pronouncing Pufendorf's name as "Puffendorf", rather than "Poofendorf", though both sound equally ridiculous to 21st century American ears.

Someone, I think Chris F., asked how we were intended to read the epigraph from Hamlet on p. 67:

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.

Chris suggested that Brandom had this passage at the beginning of chapter 2 because he was reading it as meaning "no discourse without use". But I wondered about the suitability of such a reading, because (just from considering the passage as it appears in the Brandom), it seems that the "large discourse" belongs to "he that made us", not to us. So I think the better reading of Brandom's intention here is something like "no reason without use".

PART V: SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

At this point in the workshop, we turned to Jason's third concern raised at the beginning of the workshop: who counts as a representationalist? Remember that a representationalist is someone who "envisage[s] an explanatory strategy that starts with an understanding of representation and on that basis explains the practical proprieties that govern language use and rational action" (p.69). While Brandom says that this is a "common response" to the insight that intentionality has a representational dimension, we could only find a handful of examples of philosophers who would count as such: Descartes (p.73), Meinong (p.71) and maybe Fodor (though it was pointed out that in the Elm and the Expert Fodor develops a view of inference that might even disqualify him from counting as a representationalist in Brandom's sense). And Jason B. said that charging Descartes with failing to clarify the "the content of the representational commitments to which the mind's entitlement is at issue" (p.73) is a bit anachronistic.

I pointed out that even if you think almost no contemporary philosophers are representationalists in Brandom's sense, so everyone is in some sense a pragmatist, Brandom's own inferentialist view (p. 94) according to which the representationalist order of priority is reversed, will be something that almost everyone disagrees with. So there will be plenty of fodder for discussion in weeks to come.

PART VI: DECLINE OF THE WEST

We ended the workshop by considering the question: Who is Rebecca West? She is credited with the irritated response to the "mind as a mirror of nature" that "one of the damn things is enough" (p. 74).

The quote that "one of the damn things is enough" also appears on p. 3 of Goodman's Languages of Art, but as a part of the phrase: "Art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough". Goodman says in a footnote that the phrase appears in an "essay on Virginia Woolf" but that he has "been unable to locate the source".

Rebecca West was an English critic. I think Brandom has managed to track down the source of Goodman's quote. But searching the web, I only find the less elegant quote "A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample" attributed to West.

As far as I can tell, none of the quotes attributed to Rebecca West makes any claims about the "mind as a mirror of nature" as Brandom claims--she's talking about art.

The workshop will meet the week after Thanksgiving to discuss the rest of Chapter 2 in Making it Explicit.

Want to Review Some Philosophy?

2005-11-09T16:12:00.000-06:00

There is an open call for reviews for the journal Philosophy in Review.

Brandom, Reading: Chapter 2 (updated Nov. 7)

2005-11-01T23:51:00.000-06:00

I will drop off my copy of Making it Explicit at the library tomorrow, November 2nd, so that chapter 2 can be put on e-reserve. It will be a couple of days before it is up.

The readings for next time are up: Part 1 and Part 2.

You should read the rest of chapter one (including the appendix) and up through p. 94 of Chapter two (i.e., sections I-III of chapter two).

Graduate Philosophy Conferences

2005-10-31T12:42:00.000-06:00

A couple fellow students have asked me about graduate philosophy conferences. I try to keep up with upcoming deadlines for my own use, but it seems the rest of you might benefit from my efforts. So I will post information here for conferences that are relevant or at least not irrelevant to the content of this workshop. If anyone knows of anything that I'm overlooking, let me know.

The dates are the submission deadlines.

Columbia/NYU, January 18

Texas, February 1

Princeton/Rutgers, January 15

CUNY, January 26

Iowa, January 20

Intermountain West, January 31

Waterloo, February 1

Semantics and Philosophy in Europe, February 15

Making It Explicit, Chapter One

2005-10-27T15:00:00.000-05:00

Last night the workshop met to discuss chapter one of Brandom's Making it Explicit.

PART I

David F. opened the workshop with a story from his grad student days at Pitt. It involved Brandom stroking his beard and lecturing about his account of who we are in terms of saying 'we', and a Monty Python based pun.

David then suggested three broad ways of approaching intentionality that differ from Brandom's approach:

(1) Skepticism
(2) Naturalistic Reduction
(3) Naive acceptance (after suitable therapy, presumably)

In contrast, Brandom is going to offer an account of intentionality that reduces it to social norms of a certain kind.

After proposing these options, David asked: "Who is Brandom's account for?" Meaning, I think, "What philosophical anxieties is this meant to relieve?" or "What problem is this book supposed to solve?" That is where discussion began. There were several different proposals for how to answer David's question.

1. Jay E. said that he had asked John H. the same question about Making it Explicit in the preliminary essay workshop three years ago. John replied, "He was going for the brass ring". There was a pregnant pause in discussion while we waited for an explanation of what this meant. Jay said he thought John simply meant that Brandom thought that his account was true. I take it the upshot of Jay's comment was that saying true things is a perfectly legitimate goal for a philosophical project to have.

2. Nat H. said that the fact that the first chapter was set up in terms of the problem posed by Wittgenstein's rule-following argument and various failed (regularist) solutions to it indicated that he was looking for a genuine solution to the regress problem. The solution would be found in norms implicit in practice, rather than either in normless practices or hierarchies of explicit rules. Aiden G. raised an objection to this proposal (but I can't remember what it was).

3. Ben M. said that Brandom was looking for a solution to the regress problem but didn't consider the possibility that the regress shouldn't be allowed to begin. (In conversation with Ben before the workshop, we found p.45 n. 56, which suggests Brandom is aware that one way to respond to the problem of the regress of interpretations is to not let it get started. Brandom writes: "The division of explanatory strategies arises over the question of whether the practices invoked to halt the regress can be analyzed in terms of regularities and dispositions characterized without the use of normative vocabulary". The footnote, says: "Typically, though not in every case, by not letting [the regress] begin--since in the commonest cases we understand explicit claims, rules, principles, orders and so on without interpreting them".

4. Another workshop participant suggested that Brandom's project was to "render norms less mysterious" (p. xiv) or "render less mysterious" "the normative dimension of linguistic practice" (p. xiii). I take it that what is to be made less mysterious is the "fanciest sort of intentionality", that which is involved in propositional content (p. 7). David F. asked what was supposed to be so mysterious about this kind of intentionality. Brandom doesn't say anything (or report anyone as saying anything) that makes it sound particularly mysterious.

5. Jason B. suggested that maybe Brandom was engaged in a transcendental project--one of finding the necessary conditions for the possibility of thought (or "sapience") as such.

6. There were also suggestions that Brandom was engaged in a kind of "descriptive" metaphysical project, of showing the complex but interesting interconnections between concepts like "entitlement" and "acknowledgement". This seemed the least popular account of what he was up to.

PART II

Jason B., David F., Robert B. and Aiden G. argued about norms and the constitutive ideal of rationality. Robert B. said something about Davidson that made Aiden G. nearly jump out of his seat.

PART III

At the end of the workshop, we set about trying to determine what to do next: Quine or Brandom? Or both? We voted on whether to read the Quine or the Brandom, and Brandom won by a couple of votes. Then we voted on whether to read just the Brandom or read both the Quine and the Brandom, alternating from week to week. Reading just the Brandom won by a single vote. But there was some concern about this result, so Nat H. proposed that we vote again after reading chapter two of the Brandom in two weeks.

Brandom Reading (Updated)

2005-10-21T12:50:00.000-05:00

The next reading for the workshop will be pp. 1-46 of the first chapter of Brandom's Making it Explicit. You can get the first part (pp. 1-36) of the reading on e-reserve here, and the second part (pp.36-) here.

You can also check out a recent collection of papers on Brandom and read a less recent interview.

(I ripped off the idea for the cover on the left from John Haugeland, who made a cover for Making it Explicit based on the Norman Kemp Smith translation of the Critique of Pure Reason.)

Word and Object, Chapter One

2005-10-19T23:18:00.000-05:00

The promise of pizza, beer, and talk about whether philosophy is continuous with science drew the largest crowd in workshop history to Cobb 103 tonight.

Jason B. opened with a short introduction to some central Quinean themes: Naturalism, empiricism, stimulus meaning, holism, the social character of meaning, and meaning behaviorism. He introduced the familiar central worry about Quine's epistemology: how can surface irritations be "clues to an external world" (22)? My rough reconstruction of the central worry goes as follows:

1. For something to count as a clue, to count as evidence, it must be capable of justifying claims.
2. Only something with "content" (conceptual, propositional?) is capable of justifying claims.
3. Surface irritations have no content.
4. So surface irritations cannot count as clues, as evidence.

We started discussion by taking up the issue of Quine's naturalism. There was some debate about what it meant to say that philosophy and science were "continuous". Chris F. claimed that there was a difference between Quine's naturalism and physicalism of a type- or token-identity sort. Aidan G. said he liked science though he thought he wasn't supposed to. Chris F. said that people he has talked to in CHSS didn't see how it was possible to deny the "philosophy is continuous with science" claim. David F. observed that one could do it simply by saying that philosophy was discontinuous with science. For example, one might think, with the logical positivists, that the job of philosophy is to clear away conceptual confusion and let the scientists get on with their important work. Or one might think, with Wittgenstein, that the job of philosophy is to expose latent nonsense as patent nonsense.

So in response to the question, "Is philosophy continuous with science?" we concluded: it depends on what one means by "science" and "continuous with". No one asked what "philosophy" or "is" meant.

Nat H. asked about Quine's analogy between the sharing of "sensory supports" between sentences with the arch (p.11). How, when the arch is "tottering on an earthquake", is a "base block...supported now and again, only by the other base blocks via the arch"? Isn't the base block supported primarily by the ground? Jason B. pointed out that in asking this, Nat H. was neglecting Quine's footnote to the analogy, which says:

"The analogies of the fabric and the arch are well supplemented by the more detailed analogy of the net which Hempel develops..."

Several workshop participants (including, I believe, Tucker M.), explained that we were not supposed to imagine the ground dropping away from underneath the arch, in which case the other blocks clearly would not be of any help, but instead to imagine the ground merely shaking. In such a case one of the base blocks might be held in place by the weight of the other blocks pressing down on it. That sounded plausible.

Stina B. then asked for an explanation of how Quine's argument against sense data (pp. 2-3) was supposed to be understood. Was it merely a worry about memory, or something more significant? Chris F. said he was going to ask just the same question. David F. glossed the question as asking whether Quine comes close, in his criticism of sense data, to an insight that would have helped him detect the problems with his own account of sensory irritations. Quine's comment that "immediate experience simply will not, of itself, cohere as an autonomous domain" might be turned against his own notion that sensory stimuli count as the basic clues we have of the external world. Robert B. asked if David's proposal was part of a Resolute Reading of Word and Object.

Chris F. then recalled a possible reading of Quine from John H.'s class on Quine and Davidson five years ago. What if, Chris F. asked, Quine's sensory irritations were token identical with contentful experiences? The contentful experiences would be bound up with man's conceptual sovereignty, holistic, and so on, while the irritations, qua physical events, would remain unchanged through reconfigurations of the conceptual scheme. Jason B. objected that this wasn't consistent with Quine's statements that the irritations (qua irritations?), not conceptually contentful descriptions of the irritations, were supposed to be clues (cues?).

At this point, Chris F., the Dionysian force animating the workshop, had to leave to catch the beginning of Lost. So we wound up discussion and proposed that we read the preface and the first chapter of Making it Explicit for next week.

Quine on Maps and Dictionaries

2005-10-19T15:47:00.000-05:00

In 1963, Quine wrote a review of the National Geographic Atlas of the World.

Here is an illustrative exerpt:

"I shall keep the old loose National Geographic maps for trips. And, since the National Geographic omits counties, I shall keep my old inferior book for counties. Grudgingly. It is before me now, a 1948 Hammond of even larger format than the National Geographic Atlas, and it is open at south central South America. The polychrome two-page spread is something between a poster and an imposture. Its detail is sparse and irresponsible. Part of Brazil is elaborately misplaced within Paraguay, and part of Paraguay in Argentina, as a glance at other pages bears out; the name of the Paranà is applied by mistake to the Iguassù, as well as to the Paranà; Aconcagua is omitted, though lesser mountains are marked; and two provinces of Chile are shown in a way that conflicts with another page. The 1954 Hammond is better, but I disagree. The point of my sad example is that such ineptitude is neither to be found nor imagined in National Geographic maps. They have an air somehow of selfevident accuracy, they are visibly as real as earth itself."

He also reviewed dictionaries.

Quine Reading

2005-10-04T18:44:00.000-05:00

I have posted the first chapter of Word and Object to the workshop's e-reserve. It is listed as "Language and Truth".

Michael Kremer on The History of Analytic Philosophy

2005-09-30T07:42:00.000-05:00

What are the subjects of difference that cause irritation and anger? The history of 20th century analytic philosophy.

Michael Kremer reviews both volumes of Scott Soames's Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century.

A developing thread discussing Michael's review, including a comment by Soames.

Plan for the Fall Quarter

2005-09-29T00:42:00.000-05:00

Tonight we met to discuss the plan for the upcoming quarter.

Jason B. and David F. instituted some small, justified changes in the workshop format. These are: (1) Student presentations will take an hour, no more; (2) David and Jason will give short, 10-15 minute presentations at the beginning of each workshop.

Revision (1) met with no opposition, while Tom L. questioned whether (2) was possible given the garrulous character of the workshop participants. David F. and Jason B. responded by observing that they could defer questions until after they had finished lecturing if they felt like it.

In order to accommodate Jay E., we pushed the meeting time of the workshop back to 6pm.

We then discussed what text we should read. The one inviolable ground rule was that we had to read a book. Articles or collections of articles were out of bounds. David F. was in favor of reading the first four chapters of Making It Explicit. Nat H. Suggested Anscombe's Intention and Ryle's Concept of Mind; Chris F. suggested Fodor's Psychosemantics, Putnam's Representation and Reality, Kim's Mind in a Physical World, and Chalmer's Conscious Mind; Rachel G. suggested Quine's Word and Object, which turned out to be the closest competitor with the Brandom.

After a preliminary vote, we narrowed the field to the Brandom and the Quine, with Quine very slightly edging out the Brandom. We then decided to read the first chapter of each and only then decide what to continue with.

Next session we will read the first chapter of Word and Object. I will put a copy on E-Reserve at the library as soon as I can.

It was good to see everyone again.

Fall Quarter First Meeting

2005-09-26T18:29:00.000-05:00

The first meeting of the philosophy of mind workshop will take place on Wednesday, September 28th in Cobb 103.

The agenda will be roughly the following:

1. What should we read?
2. What should we do with our money?
3. Should we begin each meeting with a student-lead introduction to the reading?
4. Should we / can we move the workshop to 6pm to accommodate Jay?

Philosophy of Mind In L.A.

2005-07-04T19:57:00.000-05:00

While walking around the UCLA campus, guided by UCLA philosophy grad student Ben C., we spotted this salon:

I'd like to return and get the Dedekind cut.

Summer Vacation

2005-06-13T11:29:00.000-05:00

The next meeting of the Philosophy of Mind Workshop (and the next full post to this site) will be in the first weeks of the fall quarter.

If I come across anything interesting I will post it as a comment to this entry. Feel free to do the same.

See everyone in the fall.

The Waterfall Illusion

2005-05-31T17:24:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, May 26, Nate Z. presented his paper dismantling Crane's argument for non-conceptual content. Not only did Nate give good reasons to think Crane's argument doesn't go through, he also made some provocative claims about differences between the content of experience and the content of belief.

Jay E. provided his camera so we could document the last meething of the workshop this year, and the last meeting of the workshop in the Anscombe Lounge.

Below: Nate Z. demonstrates the sprial version of the waterfall illusion.

Justin S., Rachel G. and Aidan G. are transfixed by the illusion.

David F. taxis down the runway.

Jason B. makes a claim and David F. looks on in despair.

Nat H. in the Logical Positivism shirt: Cruisewear for Neurath's Boat.

Nate Z. reads his paper.

Farewell to the Lounge.

The Standard Meter Bar

2005-05-23T13:04:00.000-05:00

standard meter bar,
originally uploaded by Nat Hansen.

This is the American standard meter bar. I didn't expect it to look like this--I thought it would look like a meter ruler (with centimeter marks, e.g.) but, you know, made of platinum.

Below is the picture of the similar looking French standard meter bar (together with a standard kilogram). Thanks to an anonymous commentator for the reference.

Naming and Necessity, Lecture III

2005-05-16T13:57:00.000-05:00

[Note added Dec 21, 2005: The second half of this post has been lost. I reconstructed the first half from notes that I made in preparing the original post.]

Last Thursday the workshop met to discuss lecture III of Naming and Necessity.

David F., Jason B., Jay E., Nat H., Chris F., Nate Z., Aidan G., Rachel G., and Will S. were present.

Discussion did not stray far from Kripke's treatment of the contingent a priori and its relation to the way reference is "fixed" or "determined" for proper names and natural kind terms (NKTs).

If there was a theme to this workshop, it was precious metals (gold, platinum) and diamonds.

Before we began, David F. asked about the parenthetical reference on p. 139 to "anti-scientific fundamentalists [such] as Bryan" casting aspersions on the "natural scientific curiosity of Man". Jay E. pointed out that the reference must be to Williams Jenning Bryan's role as the prosecutor of John Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925). John Scopes was a biology teacher who was arrested for teaching the theory of evolution in Dayton, TN. (The character based on Bryan ["Matthew Harrison Brady"] in Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind is an anti-science Christian fundamentalist).

Jay pointed out another connection (probably unintended by Kripke) between Bryan and the passge from Kripke. Kripke says,

...the 'original sample' [used to fix the reference of a NKT] gets augmented by the discovery of new items. (In the case of gold, men applied tremendous effort to the task. Those who doubt the natural scientific curiosity of Man should consider this case. Only such anti-scientific fundamentalists as Bryan cast aspersions on the effort.

Besides his role in the Scopes trial, Bryan is most famous for his "Cross of Gold Speech" opposing the gold standard ("You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold"). As far as my understanding of the politics of the 1896 election go (not very far), Bryan represented farmers for whom higher inflation would be beneficial. Keeping the dollar on the gold standard would keep inflation in check.

Once we had the Bryan allusion sorted out, David F. started the workshop by asking why a speaker can know the identity "Heat = that which is sensed by sensation S" a priori (p. 136).

Obviously, Kripke cannot think that a speaker knows that identity simply in virtue of the meaning of "heat", because there are counterfactual situations in which heat is not sensed by sensation S (there are no conscious creatures, for example). But in those situations, we would not say that heat does not exist, only that there are no creatures that can sense it. So the meaning of heat cannot be tied to the sensation S.

We thought that Kripke here must be saying something about heat that was analogous to what he says about the Standard Meter Bar (p. 56). The contingent a priori is a way of knowing something that essentially involves "definition" or stipulation. Kripke says of this way of knowing something that one knows it "automatically, without further investigation" (back when we talked about this remark in lecture I, many of us worried that that was not the best way of describing the a priori).

Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference

2005-05-02T14:35:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, April 28, the workshop met to discuss Kripke's paper "Speaker Reference and Semantic Reference".

Attending the workshop were David F. (though he was feeling sick), Jason B., Jay E., Nat H., Chris F., Ben M., Will S., Aidan G. and Rachel G.

The workshop fell into roughly three different stages. I'll post them separately.

Stage I: Pre-Workshop Banter

Chris F. was reading a book of Wallace Stevens essays in preparation for Stanley Cavell's talk on Friday. Someone asked why Stevens was interesting and David F. said something about Stevens's poetry being about conceptual and non-conceptual perceptual content. David F. then told the story of Stevens's employment at an insurance agency (vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company), and how a literary agent who was trying to track Stevens down caused a stir at the insurance agency by mentioning a book of his poems to an oblivious co-worker. According to David F., his co-workers could not believe that "Wally" Stevens was an accomplished poet.

Jason B. later showed up and also told a story about Stevens, which began, "It's interesting how it's not very interesting that Stevens was an insurance salesman". Nat H. was interested in hearing more, since David F. had just reported that fact as if it were interesting.

Jason B. said that he heard a talk (at the Franke Institute?) given by someone who had done research on early 20th century New England insurance agencies and found that it was not uncommon for them to produce in-house literary journals. So there would have been lots of insurance-salesman-poets when Stevens was writing.

"Why haven't we heard of all these other insurance poets?" someone asked.

"They weren't very good" Jason B. replied.

Discussion then moved on to a thought experiment raised in a class on perception involving a lasers, a flesh-colored bodystocking and a heliotrope sweater. There was some dispute about what color "heliotrope" was. The OED says that it's a shade of purple. Follow this link to a picture of the flowers the color is named after:

http://www.swallowtailgardenseeds.com/annuals/heliotrope.html

Stage II: More Discussion of the Causal Theory of Names

Jason B. got discussion moving by asking if we thought Kripke's methodological claim about purported counterexamples to linguistic analyses was right.

The methodological principle goes as follows: If you imagine a language in which the analysis is true, and the purported counterexamples still occur in that language, then the analysis (e.g. Russell's analysis of definite descriptions) has not been refuted by the counterexamples.

Chris F. bravely took a stab at assessing the correctness of the methodological principle. He got as far as describing Kripke's argument against Donnellan: (1) that Donnellan's phenomenon is meant as a counterexample to Russell's theory of definite descriptions, but (2) it is only a counterexample if it counts as a semantic distinction; and (3) it does not count as a semantic distinction--only a pragmatic one.

During this discussion there was some confusion over the proper pronunciation of "teetotaler", a word Kripke uses in describing the purported champagne quaffer in the corner in Donnellan's example. Chris F. preferred "teeto-taler" (said like "teeter-totter"), others demurred.

The methodological question not yet resolved, discussion then turned to the causal theory of names. Nat H. tried to link the topic of this paper with David F.'s worry from last time.

David F.'s worry was that I might, according to the causal theory of reference, count as satisfying the conditions for referring to the island typically referred to as "Globula" with my use of the word, but have a consistent personal use of the word to refer to Will S (say I keep a diary where I record lots of observations about what I think is Globula). Should we say, with the causal theory, that I am saying and thinking a large number of things about the island that are absurdly false (such as that it has a distinctive haircut and is a snappy dresser), or that I am saying and thinking a large number of true things about Will S.? To David F. (and others) it seemed obvious what the answer would be: I am referring to Will S., not the island.

In David F.'s case, the causal chain connecting my use of "Globula" with other members of my community seems unimportant. What is important is my consistent name-using practice.

There was then some extended discussion of the "interpretationist" (Davidsonian) alternative to the causal theory of names. Roughly, the interpretationist holds that a speaker refers to a particular object with his use of a name just in case taking him to refer to that object with that name makes the best overall sense of his behavior.

The interpretationists among the workshop attendees were Kripkean in the following way: they would include reference to causal chains in the relevant features one could rely on in making sense of a person's utterances. So, for example, if I say things like "I wonder what Feinman's favorite breakfast cereal was", when I don't have any beliefs about Feinman other than that he's a famous physicist, I should be interpreted as referring to Feinman in virtue of having acquired the name from some other users of the language. I shouldn't be interpreted as believing that the description "the famous physicist" is uniquely satisfied and wondering about whoever uniquely satisfies that description. To that extent, then, the interpretationists agreed that Kripke was right to suggest the importance of causal connections to our name-using practices.

Jason B. worried that the interpretationists were also individualists--that they would deny the importance of pre-existing linguistic institutions to our name using practices. But Aidan G. and Nat H. objected--why wouldn't an interpretationist want to make use of every possible resource in making sense of a speaker, including the speaker's participation in all kinds of institutions and his causal imbeddedness in his social and physical world? David F. had our backs on this one.

At this point, Nat H. observed sotto voce to Jason B. that this kind of interpretationism that wants to accommodate all of Kripke's insights without embracing a causal theory of names is Evans's view in "The Causal Theory of Names".

David F. felt sicker. He said, "It was fun" and left.

At some point in the discussion after David F. left, Jason B. said that Naming and Necessity was perhaps unique among philosophical books in that it was 99% true.

Stage III: Return to the Methodological Question

Once we had gotten to the bottom of the causal theory of names, we returned to Jason B.'s original question: is Kripke's methodological principle in "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference" right?

Will S. and Chris F. had some concerns that the Strong Russell Language would not be susceptible to the Donnellan counterexamples, but as I left to use the bathroom during their discussion I can't reproduce their arguments.

Jason B. wondered what result Kripke's methodological principle would give if we introduced a language in which a particular analysis (e.g. Russell's) were true, and the purported counterexamples happed less often than in English (rather than never). Would the analysis be a little bit false?

At the end of the workshop we debated the merits of staying with the names discussion and reading either Evans's "Causal Theory of Names" or Davidson's "Nice Derangement". Nat H. argued that we had roughly reproduced the conclusion of Evans's paper, and that since we only had two sessions left we should move on to lecture III.

Which we will, in two weeks time.

Naming and Necessity, Lecture II

2005-04-18T12:44:00.000-05:00

Last thursday the workshop met to discuss lecture II in Naming and Necessity.

In attendance were Jason B., David F., Jay E., Nat H., Zed A., Chris F., Ben M., Aidan G., Rachel G., Will S. and Justin S.

David F. bought Stella Artois, which was good, but a smaller number of beers than normal, which was bad.

Chris F. volunteered to recap what we learned last session and lead us into lecture II. In essence, he claimed that lecture I offered arguments against thesis (6) on p.71 and that the first part of lecture I consisted of arguments against theses (2-5).

There was some brief debate about the importance of Kripke's emphasis on individual speakers in thesis (2). Jason B. wondered whether there might be a way of generating a social account of the cluster of properties believed to correspond to a name. Such a view would be a modified description view akin to Strawson's view discussed on p. 65, n. 27. We agreed that this proposal was slightly more plausible than the individualist view Kripke is attacking but not a good enough improvement to warrant much attention.

Discussion then concentrated on whether Kripke's causal-historical "picture" of names was an improvement on the descriptivist "picture". Zed A. quickly grew irritated with the need to constantly affix the caveats "Kripke's not offering a theory", "Kripke's only proposing an alternate 'picture'", "Kripke's not giving necessary and sufficient conditions for anything" to any criticism of Kripke's account. He proposed that we all acknowledge that all our talk for the rest of the workshop would be picture-talk.

We adopted the convention, but Zed A. remained irritated.

What about the causal-historical account of how names refer? We started out with a discussion of a thought experiment proposed by Zed A, similar to some of Gareth Evans's examples in "The Causal Theory of Names". The example was described as follows:

1. I overhear you talking about something called "Globula".

2. I intend to participate in your conversation by saying various plausible-sounding things about Globula. For example, I say "I bet Globula is one sharp dresser". Since you and the other interlocutors are referring to Globula, I count as referring as well according to Kripke's picture.

3. But what I say about Globula is not only false, it is seriously mistaken in the following way. Globula as used by you and the other interlocutors refers to a small Hawaiian island. So what I'm saying about Globula is near incomprehensible ("Globula is a sharp dresser").

4. What to make of such a situation? Do I count as referring to Globula when I say "I bet Globula is one sharp dresser?" Zed A. and Nat H. (and some others) shared the intuition that I would not be referring to Globula, so the example seemed like a problem for Kripke's picture (a problem rather than a counterexample since, presumably, a picture can't be counterexampled).

Jason B. was unimpressed. His intuitions pulled him in the opposite direction and he offered the following variation on the Globula case.

1a. Suppose I find myself in a culture where talking about Globula is taboo on certain occasions (say at dinnertime).

2a. I have overheard you using "Globula" in other contexts, and one night at dinner, I utter some sentences with the word "Globula" in them, intending to use the word to refer as you have in the past (and not knowing about the taboo).

3a. Everyone at dinner listening to me is horrified by my gross breach of etiquette. A couple of my friends pull me aside after dinner and whisper, "You fool--what were you doing all night going on and on saying all those weird things about Globula? Don't you know you're not supposed to talk about it at dinnertime?"

4a. The intuition in Jason B.'s version of the example is supposed to be: I am referring to Globula, even though I am grossly mistaken about what it is and say strange, possibly incomprehensible things about it.

So, we determined (unsurprisingly) that there can be conflicting intutions about odd cases in Kripke's picture.

David F. then offered a different example, slightly different from the previous two, to suggest that Kripke's picture fails to take account of our name using practice. His example went as follows:

1b. Like the previous cases, I don't know how others are using "Globula", but I intend to use it as they do. But unlike the previous cases, I mistakenly apply it to some other object. (This case is like Evans's Madagascar example, except that it can involve only one person).

2b. I apply "Globula" consistently not to an island, but to a person. I keep a diary where I record all sorts of information about Globula--what he's wearing, what he says to me, etc.

3b. In David F's version of the example, should we say that I am constantly referring to the Hawaiian island and saying radically false things about it (like that it was rude to me and was sharply dressed)? Or that the causal historical chain leading up to my use of the name is irrelevant and what matters is actually my coherent use of the name to refer to the person?

David F. and Aidan G. both emphatically endorsed the overriding importance of our use of the name.

Jason pointed us to a footnote (pp. 85-86 n. 36) where Kripke offers what looks like his response to this kind of case. It will involve the speaker reference / semantic reference distinction. With that in mind, we decided to read Kripke's "Speaker Reference Semantic Reference" paper for next time before going on to lecture III.

This account leaves out discussions we had of Swamp Man, the general nature of offensive language, and Terry Schiavo's ability to participate in a name-using practice.

Naming and Necessity, Lecture I

2005-04-05T12:16:00.000-05:00

On Thursday the largest group of students in workshop history assembled to discuss lecture I of Naming and Necessity. The group included several prospective graduate students. We had nicer beer this time to complement the larger numbers--Becks and Heineken instead of the usual Schlitz and Old Style.

David F. placed N&N in its philosophical context and Jason B. used his "Socratic" teaching method (which involves posing a difficult question point-blank to the group as a whole) to get discussion started. The most interesting moments of the discussion were the following:

1. David F. asked whether "That's Chris F." states a necessary truth. Answer: yes. This was the least contentious example of a necessary truth known a posteriori. Even the Kantians present could not muster a compelling response to this example. There was a brief discussion of whether propositions themselves are a priori or a posteriori or whether it is justifications of propositions that are a priori or a posteriori.

2. There was a long discussion of the contingent a priori. Several people worried that stipulation does not extend our knowledge. We focused on one footnote in particular, n. 26 on pp. 63-64. As far as I can remember, we didn't come to an agreement about why Kripke dismissed this worry.

Next time we will discuss lecture II of N&N.

Statistically Improbable Phrases

2005-03-29T15:32:00.000-06:00

Zed drew my attention to a feature on Amazon that lists "statistically improbable phrases" (SIPS) that occur in certain books. I have organized some selected SIPS that feature in works we have read in the workshop into haikus. See if you can identify which books the SIPS haikus belong to.

1. same landmark, same ship
feline tissue, china bits
old ontology

2. invented the zip
relevant sheep, tense judgment
immune to error

3. introduce their terms
purely auditory world
descriptions, cat slice

Naming and Necessity Link

2005-03-28T13:17:00.000-06:00

Jay has posted the first lecture of Naming and Necessity to the workshop e-reserve site.

We'll see everyone on Thursday.

Final Chapter of Sameness and Substance

2005-03-11T17:06:00.000-06:00

Last night we (David F., Jay E., Nat H., David H., Nate Z., Tom L., Chris F., Will S.) had a spirited discussion of the final chapter of Wiggins's Sameness and Substance. The main threads of conversation were the following:

(1) David F. demanded an account of how Wiggins's argument against Q-memory was supposed to go. Tom L. and David H. favored an interpretation of Wiggins that involved the purported inability of Q-memory to be mistaken. Valiant efforts to push this interpretation through eventually failed, though David F. said that there was "something to" this criticism. Nat H. and Jay E. demurred.

(2) A second possible line of criticism that was considered involved the idea that the Q-memory advocate might not be entitled to certain kinds of theoretical and practical inferences: One might, observing rain falling outside, find oneself wanting one's raincoat. If one only has a Q-memory of someone hanging someone's raincoat on some peg, one cannot directly use the content of that Q-memory in an inference that concludes (for example) with going to get one's own coat, or knowing where to look for it if one wanted it. This was meant as one way of fleshing out the idea that Q-memory doesn't appropriately capture the epistemological role that memory plays in our lives--that it cannot place knowledge of the past in relation to our understanding of our lives as a whole. But this line of criticism was not fleshed out in detail.

(3) Two additional comments that were made about the definition of Q-memory.

First, David F. wanted to strike the word "accurate" from Parfit's definition. Wiggins makes heavy weather of the presence of "accurate" in the definition. We couldn't determine why Wiggins cared about it so much, and it didn't help that most of his discussion of its significance was taken up with a speculative psychological explanation of why Parfit included "accurate" in his definition. ("Mere verbiage" according to Jay E.)

Second, Nat H. pointed out that there could be memories that did not seem to be memories. For example, one could have a recurring, vivid image of (e.g.) falling off a swingset that one is convinced is merely imaginary, but which counts as a memory because it is caused by an actual experience in the right way. So, Nat H. asked why Parfit needed the "seem to be memories" condition in his definition of Q-memory (condition (1)).

This is not a complete report of conversations that took place last night. Comments from other workshop attendees should help fill this summary out.

Mind Workshop Website

2005-03-07T17:10:00.000-06:00

This is meant as a place to continue discussions started in the Philosophy of Mind Workshop at the University of Chicago.

Previous Readings in the Workshop

2005-03-07T15:14:00.000-06:00

2002: Peter Geach, Mental Acts
2003: Gareth Evans, Varieties of Reference
2003: Jonathan Bennett, Rationality
2003-2004: Various articles on animal thought by Donald Davidson, Susan Hurley, and Jose Luis Bermudez
2004: P.F. Strawson, Individuals
2004-2005: David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance

We will begin reading Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity in the spring.