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July 18, 2005
Postcard from Sydney
Once again, I'm back from my travels and snatching another 30 seconds with my email and weblog. I think it is ok for me to call these notes - written from Melbourne after my return - "postcards" because I never seem to post ordinary postcards until after I get home either.
And so from 2nd-8th July I was at the conference of the Australasian Association for Philosophy at the University of Sydney. The AAP lists the following quote from Bill Lycan on their website:
Here is a revealing comparison. For the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association the Program Committee sifts submissions carefully and rejects 80 percent. The Australasian Association of Philosophy does not sift submissions. Yet every year the AAP program is better overall than the APA program.
I can't speak for the APA, but having been to the AAP 6 years in a row now, I can say that it is always a fantastic conference. Bill Lycan himself was back to talk about the Gettier problem, David Chalmers talked about verbal disagreements, Ted Sider presented his own version of conventionalism about necessity, Karen Bennett told us why she isn't a dualist, Andy Egan sorted out relativism, Daniel Nolan (Professor Nolan to you now) made me feel bad about my non-theoretically supported beliefs (but gave me a menu of remedies to select from,) and Charles Pigden took on conspiracy theorists' detractors. In dialogue. Written in Shakespearean language. With volunteer actors, who included one of his oponents on this topic. It gave a whole new meaning to "putting words in someone's mouth." There were also papers from other well-known philosophers like Michael Smith, Steve Yablo, Jack Smart, Alan Hajek, Richard Swinburne, John Heil, Laurie Paul...I should never have started this list - there is no way it was ever going to be complete, or even representative...there's a link to the schedule here.
Man, does David Armstrong know how to throw a party.
One of the nice things about the conference this time was that many of the attendees were staying at the University's International House, which provides meals. That meant that I was always running into someone I wanted to talk to at breakfast, and it was easy to have lots of casual interaction with other philosophers. One snippet which I picked up this way was that I should be careful to distinguish intrinsic/extrinsic property distinction from the relational/non-relational property distinction (and not casually conflate them, as I did at the beginning of my conversation with suppering metaphysician Josh Parsons) because some properties are relational but intrinsic, e.g. I have the property of having a nose, and that is intrinsic to me (unlike the property of being an hour's flight from Canberra,) even though I have it in virtue of my relation to something else (my nose.)
A number of bloggers were there including Antimeta's Kenny Easwaran, and David Chalmers, who has photos from the conference up on his website.
When I get round to sending my postcard from Canberra I'll tell you about my meeting with Jon Cohen, who writes that logic blog, That Logic Blog. (He's got blogger pictures up already.)
Posted by logican at July 18, 2005 12:19 AM
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Comments
Hmm... I think that means that I don't understand the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction at
all then. It was great to see you again the past two weeks!
Posted by: Kenny Easwaran at July 23, 2005 10:30 PM
Here's what Brian Weatherson says in his Stanford Encyclopedia article:
"I have some of my properties purely in virtue of the way I am. (My mass is an example.) I have other properties in virtue of the way I interact with the world. (My weight is an example.) The former are the intrinsic properties, the latter are the extrinsic properties."
It might seem natural to gloss the extrinsic properties as relational, since they are the ones which I have in virtue of the way I am related to other things (e.g being taller than Kylie, being between Hobart and Sydney) wheras paradigmatic intrinsic properties don't seem to be as transparently relational (e.g. being awake.) But that gloss would be wrong because it ignores the class of intrinsic properties which I have in virtue of the way I am related to my parts (e.g. having black and red stripey hair, having two legs etc...)
I suppose this claim rests on the claim that I have two legs in virtue of the way I am, rather than in virtue of the way anything else is. Could I object that I have two legs in virtue of the way my legs are (certainly I am not my legs), rather than in virtue of the way that I am? Perhaps.
But that worry aside, I wonder, if the world were entirely simple (so that no things with parts existed, as Cian Dorr has claimed), could there be any properties which were instantiated, intrinsic and relational?
(By the way, Kenny, I accidentally deleted that last comment of yours when I was clearing out the spam, and reinstated it from email. Sorry if there was any delay.)
Posted by: Gillian Russell at July 23, 2005 10:56 PM
"Could I object that I have two legs in virtue of the way my legs are (certainly I am not my legs), rather than in virtue of the way that I am?"
Perhaps the principle of strong "composition as identity" would help us avoid this objection. On that view, you are your legs, torso, head, etc. (taken as a plurality, of course -- you are not your legs-only). I guess it's not a huge difference from simply including part-relations as intrinsic. But it does tie parts and wholes together somewhat more closely than the standard picture, and so to that extent weakens the force of the "in virtue of my legs, not me!" objection. *shrugs*
By the way, it was nice to meet you at last week's methodology conference. (If you're not quite sure who I am, don't worry about it. We only met briefly, when I was following Kenny around during one of the lunch breaks.)
Posted by: Richard at July 25, 2005 06:17 AM
Hi Richard,
Thanks for the comment - I do remember you! (Or at least I did once looked at the photo on your Blogger page.) It was nice to meet you too. Maybe we'll run into each other again in the years to come...
I'm not sure whether composition as identity is going to help here. Presumably that's the doctrine that wholes are identical to the things which compose them, but on any plausible interpretation of that view, I'll be (as you say) a distinct object from my legs. So, assuming Brian's intuitive "in virtue of the way I am/in virtue of the way other things are" characterisation of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, there still seems to be room for someone to maintain that the property of having a leg is an extrinsic property on the grounds that I have it in virtue of my relation to something which is not me - my leg.
Posted by: Gillian Russell at July 26, 2005 02:27 AM