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July 19, 2005
Wish you were here
This post comes live from hut D at the RSSS in Canberra. It's about 40 minutes until the start of the Philosophical Methodology conference but yesterday we had an appropriate trailer in the form of Al Hájek's "Heuristics" paper, which is about heuristics for coming up with philosophical ideas, for papers, questions about other people's papers and the like.
Suggestions included:
"see definite descriptions in neon lights" - whenever someone claims that Y is the X, try to make a case that X isn't satisfied uniquely, or that in some cases there is no satisfier for X, e.g. when Stahlnaker claimed that A[]->B is true just in case at the nearest world where A is true, B is true, Lewis claimed that in important cases there is no nearest world where A is true, e.g. consider the counterfactual "if Bizet and Nietzsche were compatriots, they would both be French." Intuitively there are two equally close worlds (neither such that there is a closer one) in which they are compatriots - one where they are both French, and one where they are both German. (Or, going by one of Nietzsche's crazy early autobiographies, both Polish.) Or consider the nearest world in which "if I were taller than 7 feet tall, I would be better at basketball." There's no closest world at which I'm taller than 7 feet tall, since a world at which I am 7 feet 1/2 inch is presumably closer than one in which I am 7 feet 1 inch, but then 7 feet 1/4 inches is closer still...
"try applying the analysis to itself"
Al has a friend who devised Baker's Laws:
Baker's Law 1: everything tastes better with either chocolate or garlic added.
Baker's Law 2: everything tastes worse with both chocolate and garlic added.
But what about chocolate? And garlic? Each violates law 1, and a mixture of the two violates law 2.
Al gave this talk at the undergraduate philosophy conference yesterday afternoon, and in the talk immediately afterward Kate from Melbourne Uni was trying this second technique out on David Chalmers. Pretty cool.
Posted by logican at July 19, 2005 06:13 PM
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Comments
Chocolate with chocolate *does* taste better! Dark choco smothered in white choco--mmmmmmmmmmm...
Posted by: lumpy pea coat at July 20, 2005 05:33 PM