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.
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.)
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
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
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".**
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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**
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
