Brian

One of my quirkier philosophical views is that the most pressing question in metaphysics, and perhaps all of philosophy, is how to distinguish between disjunctive and non-disjunctive predicates in the special sciences. This might look like a relatively technical problem of no interest to anyone. But I suspect that the question is important to all sorts of issues, as well as being one of those unhappy problems that no one seems to even have a beginning of a solution to. One of the issues that it’s important to was raised by Brad DeLong yesterday. He was wondering why John Campbell might accept the following two claims.

• There is an important and unbridgeable gulf between our notions of physical causation and our notions of psychological causation.
• Martian physicists—intelligences vast, cool, and unsympathetic with no notions of human psychology or psychological causation—could not understand why, could not put their finger on physical variables and factors explaining why, the fifty or so of us assemble in the Seaborg Room Monday at lunch time during the spring semester.

I don’t know why Campbell accepts these claims. And I certainly don’t want to accept them. But I do know of one good reason to accept them, one that worries me no end some days. The short version involves the conjunction of the following two claims.

• Understanding a phenomenon involves being able to explain it in relatively broad, but non-disjunctive, terms.
• Just what terms are non-disjunctive might not be knowable to someone who only knows what the Martian physicists know, namely the microphysics of the universe.

The long version is below the fold.
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If you Google for greatest rivalry in sports today you’ll get a lot of references to the Ohio State-Michigan series (largely because of last week’s game) several references to Red Sox-Yankees, and a few other college pairings. From a global perspective, these all look faintly ridiculous. Does any of these rivalries really compare to Real Madrid-Barcelona for history, or Celtic-Rangers for intensity?

It’s probably futile to say which of these is the greatest. But I think on the list should be the series that starts in a few hours.
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I’m sure I used to be good at parking a car, but the older I get, the worse I get at it. So I was rather excessively excited to see that Lexus have invented a car that can automatically parallel park. The link is a few weeks old, so apologies to those who find this kind of news old hat.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that some propositions are self-evident recently. And it is hard to think about this without being reminded of the Declaration of Independence. But I realised when going back over it that I didn’t quite know what Jefferson meant at one crucial point. Maybe this is something completely obvious, or maybe there is some historical literature on this that I should know about. But it seemed to me to be an interesting interpretative question.
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Over at Language Log, Arnold Zwicky has been having some fun tracking the various ways in which newspapers avoid printing taboo words. The strangest instance of differing taboo standards I’ve seen was in an article in the SMH this morning. At the end of the article, we see this paragraph.

[Sienna Miller] who is in town shooting the screen adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, called the city a name that sounds like Pittsburgh, but contains an expletive.

That’s not too surprising. In fact this is one of the instances of taboo avoidance that Zwicky mentions. At risk of engaging in my own little piece of taboo avoidance, I will just link to the article and note the quote from Miller in its fourth paragraph, rather than reprint it. I’ve worked on publications with several different standards with respect to taboo language. But I’ve never seen standards quite exactly like what the SMH seems to be using.

Up here in Central New York, there are several close congressional races. So we’re being treated to a flood of TV advertising for the various candidates. You’d think it would be pretty easy to run a Democratic campaign these days. Just pick one of the many things going wrong for Republicans and run with it. In the 25th CD, incumbent Jim Walsh is running TV ads on the “Elect me because I don’t vote for what George Bush wants” line. That would be Republican incumbent Jim Walsh.
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A week or so ago, philosopher and blogger Greg Restall was on (Australian) Radio National’s show The Philosopher’s Zone talking about logical pluralism. The link to the show is here. I’m partially bringing this up because I was pleased to see a discussion of philosophical logic in on national radio, and partially as a segue into gratuitous self-promotion.

This week’s episode of Philosophy Talk features a panel discussion that was recorded at the Pacific APA. The panellists were Liz Harman, Sean Kelly and me, discussing the future of philosophy. Though I can occasionally spot short term trends, I’m pretty useless at spotting larger patterns, so I wouldn’t put much stock in much of what I say. The show will air on Tuesday at noon PST on KALW in San Francisco, and be repeated at 8pm PST Thursday on Oregon Public Radio. I’m going to be away at Bellingham the next few days, so I won’t be able to hear the show live to air, but hopefully I’ll hear it soon after. I’m not exactly sure what I said, so when I hear it I might have to scramble to come up with some justifications.

Kieran has been complaining about mixed metaphors, but at least the mixer avoids directly contradicting themselves. Which is perhaps more than can be said for Paul Kelso writing in the Guardian blog.

Few would bet with confidence against Scolari coaxing another odds-defying performance from his side.

I’m not as confident as several of the commentators here that prices in betting markets are a good guide to the truth, but even I think they are a decent guide as to what people will bet, and even bet with confidence, on.

Consider this a France v Portugal open thread. Everyone else I know is cheering for France, with good reason, but I still feel a little bad for the Portugese fans after they missed what must have seemed like a golden opportunity to win Euro 2004. So I’m probably going to feel bad for whoever loses, which is always a great way to watch a football game.

The domain name under which I keep my philosophy blog and personal webpage seems to have been taken over by a domain name hijacker. (You might wonder how this could happen; there are a few details below the fold.) So I’ve had to move everything around. For anyone who links to those sites, or read them, the domain name is now weatherson.org rather than weatherson.net. Similarly the domain name of my email address has changed so it now ends .org rather than .net.
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The LA Times reports on the Philadelphia cheesesteak place that refuses to serve customers who don’t order in English. The message to customers is This is America. When Ordering “Speak English”. Just a few observations.

1. I’m not sure what rule of English requires, or even permits, quote marks around the last two words in that sentence. I’m no prescriptivist, so I’m happy to be shown that this falls under some generally followed pattern, but it’s no pattern I’m familiar with.
2. I’m very pleased that no place had a similar sign when I was trying to get fed in Paris using what could, charitably, be described as schoolboy French, as long as the schoolboy in question spent every class watching football rather than, say, studying French. And that pleasure is not just because if I had seen such a sign I’d have been like, Holy Cow, the Americans have captured Paris.
3. This being the LA Times, they have to describe what a cheesesteak is: “a cholesterol-delivery device consisting of grilled strips of beef, melted cheese, onions and peppers on an Italian roll.” They also misquote the sign by removing the errant quote marks and adding a ‘please’. Those polite Southern Californians!

The BBC currently has a discussion of famous thought experiments in ethics, including Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case, and a few variants on runaway trolley cars. As of this writing, over 12000 people had sent in their votes on the moral status of actions in the examples, and it is interesting to see what this (self-selected, non-random) sample of the folk think. I’ve got some comments on the results below the fold, but I’d rather everyone here went and voted before seeing the votes, so I’ve put them below the fold.
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Language Log is having a book published of their best posts for the last few years. Although there won’t be anything new in this, it should be a fun record of what has long been to my mind one of the best academic blogs around.

I’m sure there are other examples of blogs turning into books, though I think this is the first time it’s happened to a blog that I read regularly. To be honest, it’s hard to think of many other blogs I read that would be even suitable for this treatment. (Perhaps CT is the only one, though not for my contributions!) Most political blogs are too focussed on the day to day aspects for there to be much value in a print publication. And most philosophy blogs tend to publish snippets, thoughts in progress and the like, which need a lot of polishing before they are ready for print. When I started blogging it was with the hope that it would genuinely be an alternative publishing source. That is, it would be a place where I put things that were finished pieces, but which wouldn’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t end up in traditional print journals. But in fact it has turned into a repository for transient thoughts, not a publishing place. Language Log has, to a large extent, gone the other way.

Which other blogs do people think are worthy of commemoration in dead-tree format?

I really don’t have anything to add to it, but I wanted to highlight this very nice post on thanking by Roger Shuy over at Language Log.

Brad DeLong quotes Paul Krugman on income inequality in America. (Note the Krugman link is behind the TimesSelect firewall.)

One of the truly strange features about discussions of inequality is the way people shy away from talking about the extent to which the gains from rising inequality have gone to a tiny, wealthy elite … A few days ago Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post—a good guy, and sensible—wrote about income inequality. As I did in my column just a few days earlier, “Feeling No Pain,” he emphasized the “retrospective income” distribution data released by the I.R.S. (Paper at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf. Tables at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.xls.) As he pointed out, those data show that the share of income received by the top 10 percent of taxpayers rose from 33 percent in 1979 to 44 percent in 2003 … But Pearlstein stops there, leaving the impression that everyone in the top 10 percent was a big winner. In fact, there was hardly any rise in the share of income going to people between the 90th and 95th percentiles: almost all the gain went to the top 5 percent. And most of the gain went to a very small elite. The income share of the top 1 percent went from 9.6 to 17.5 percent, accounting for more than 70 percent of the top decile’s gain. The income share of the top 0.25 percent went from 4.9 to 10.5, accounting for a bit more than half the total gain.

Today this story about income inequality in Australia was on the front page of The Age online.

Appearing to contradict claims that Australia is now a more egalitarian society, research by the Australian National University and Oxford University has concluded that the richest 1 per cent of the population has almost doubled its share of national wealth. The report, by ANU economist Andrew Leigh and Oxford’s Sir Anthony Atkinson, found that the wealthiest 1 per cent of Australians now took 9 per cent of national income, compared with a 5 per cent share in 1980.

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