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September 30, 2005

Want my job?

The University of Alberta is inviting applications for the Killam postdocs again. There is a lot of advice for philosophy job-seekers in the blogosphere, but I haven't seen much that stresses the worth of postdoctoral fellowships and I suspect that a lot of job-seekers don't place much importance on them in their search. But if you want to do research in philosophy, it makes sense to apply. One's success as a researching philosopher depends upon how much time one has for research. Teaching and service in a tenure track job can consume a lot of time - all your time, if you let them - so that in seven or eight years time you can find yourself not having done any major new work since your dissertation. If you don't get the job of your dreams, a 2 year postdoc might be a much better bet than a position with a high-teaching load somewhere you plan to leave anyway, and - and this surely the clincher - if you DO get the job of your dreams, they may well let you take the postdoc as well.

Postdocs are good.

Posted by logican at 03:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 27, 2005

Natural Kind Terms

Sometimes people object to the thesis that languages contain natural kind terms on the grounds that there are (or might be) no natural kinds in nature. In doing this, they often point to interesting and substantive discoveries in the sciences, e.g. they claim that there is nothing distinctive which all and only members of the species tiger possess, or that, given the discoveries of various isotopes of water, there is is nothing distinctive which all and only samples of water possess.

That there is nothing common to all and only tigers would certainly be a surprising and interesting discovery, but I think the objection to natural kind terms is mistaken. And I think it's a bit like suggesting that languages cannot contain singular terms on the grounds that there are (or might be) no objects.

Frege considered just such an objection from idealists in "On Sense and Reference". He responded:

I reply that when we say 'the Moon,' we do not intend to speak of our idea of the Moon, nor are we satisfed with the sense alone, but we presuppose a reference. To assume that in the sentence 'The Moon is smaller than the Earth' the idea of the moon is in question, would be flatly to misunderstand the sense. If this is what the speaker wanted, he would use the phrase 'my idea of the Moon.' Now we can of course be mistaken in the presupposition, and such mistakes have indeed occurred. But the question whether the presupposition is perhaps always mistaken need not be answered here; in order to justify mention of the reference of a sign it is enough, at first, to point out our intention in speaking or thinking. (We must then add the reservation: provided such reference exists.) (Max Black's translation, p. 61-2 of the 1977 edition)

I tend to think of languages as a kind of publically available technology which people learn to use (rather than of everyone speaking their own language, to which they impart their own intended meaning, which everyone else has to figure out), so I'm less inclined than Frege to say that it is individual speakers' intentions which make it the case that, say, the first person indexical is a singular term. But I think something similar to Frege here anyway. Even if there are no objects, it still seems to me that there are expressions which (to speak loosely) try to refer to objects; things like names, indexicals like `I', definite descriptions and the like. Maybe they fail sometimes. Maybe they fail always. But that's still what they're about. And similarly, natural kind terms try to pick out kinds. Even if there weren't any kinds, it wouldn't follow that an account of language which said that some terms were natural kind terms was false.

(There's a secondary confusion here as well. For historical reasons we still call such terms "natural kind terms'' but the way the expression is usually used in the philosophy of language, the "natural'' is misleading. What matters is that the kind is out there in the world, waiting to be talked about, independently of language. Even if there were no natural kinds (in the sense the philosophers of biology and chemistry mean), there could still be natural kind terms (in the way philosophers of language mean) which picked out artificially constructed kinds. Perhaps "chair'', "coin'' and "badge'' are examples?)

Posted by logican at 03:02 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 19, 2005

Support Analytics Anonymous!

A message from the U of A undergrads:

Analytics Anonymous, the undergraduate philosophy club at the University of Alberta, is preparing to host the annual Prarie Provinces Undergraduate Philosophy Association (PPUPA) conference from January 27-29, 2006. The conference, Philosophy and the City, will take an interdisciplinary perspective on issues relating to urban issues. For more information on the conference and Analytics Anonymous, please visit http://www.ualberta.ca/~mburney/.

As part of our fundraising campaign, we are looking for donations of bottles for recycling, and books that we can sell to used book stores. The money will be used to bring our two prominent key-note speakers from Toronto and New Hampshire, book conference rooms, and cover operation costs of the PPUPA 2006 conference. If you have any books and/or bottles that you are willing to donate, please contact ppupa2006 - AT - gmail - DOT - com (Subject: Book/Bottle Drive) to have someone come pick them up. Any donations are appreciated. Thank you!

Mary Butterfield
VP External
Analytics Anonymous

I think it is particularly amusing, given the club's name, that they're collecting empty bottles.

Posted by logican at 03:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Avast!

Another linguistic holiday rolls around: it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day once more. Aarrrh. Make mine a rum and...er, lime.

(Update 20/9/05 Richard Zach has a similar post, but much cooler. Make sure you click through.)

Posted by logican at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 17, 2005

Gallop in Vienna

The website of philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh contains a picture of what looks like a very old fashioned computer-graded multiple choice examination, with the followining caption:

Carnap's record of the Vienna Circle members' votes about certain important philosophical propositions and how their positions were changed after reading the Tractatus of Wittgenstein.

The sentences are in German and have been voted on by Schlick, Waismann, Carnap, Neurath, Hahn and Kaufmann. Each circle member has three votes on each thesis, and the rows for these votes are marked "vor Tract" (this probably represents how he voted before reading the Tractatus), "Tractatus" (this might be either what he thought while reading the Tractatus, or what he thinks the verdict of the Tractatus is on the thesis,) and "nach Tract" (probably what he thought after reading the Tractatus.) The acceptable votes are represented by different colours: blue for "ja", red for "nein", green for "sinnlos" (meaningless), an empty circle for "fehlt" (could this be failure of reference?, or just failure to give a coherent answer to Carnap?) and a questionmark for "unbestimmt" (undetermined - maybe this is the agnostic's vote?)

The first sentence is "Die Philosophie will durch Aufstellung von Regeln die Begriffe und Regeln der Wissenschaft klaren" (philosophy aims to clarify the concepts and rules of science through the estabishment of rules). Before reading the Tractatus this gets a "fehlt" from Schlick, Waisman, Carnap, Neurath and Hahn, but Kaufmann's answer isn't clear. But after reading the Tractatus Schlick and Waisman have both switched to ...er, yellow, which I think must be a faded "nein". Neurath has decided the sentence is meaningless (I can hear Gellner tutting from here....), and Carnap, Hahn and Kaufman have answered "ja".

Wittgenstein was unavailable for comment on the results at this time, but Carnap is rumoured to be arranging a press conference at which the Circle will sing "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" to the tune of Good King Wenceslas...

The Pittsburgh department has more of this stuff on other pages of their website, including a page from one of Frank Ramsey's notebooks, and some notes of Reichenbach's so it might be worth a look.

Posted by logican at 11:05 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 16, 2005

Reality Check

I have never forgotten a conversation from graduate school, in which a vocal and very confident-seeming professor admitted to having suffered crippling anxiety over question sessions after talks when they were a graduate student - not over having to answer the questions, mind you, over asking them.

If you rarely attend philosophy talks, you might not be familiar with the format, which is different from that in most sciences. (Rob Wilson tells me his recent talk in the biology department had a 10 minute question session.) The speaker generally speaks for an hour, and then there will be a further hour of questions from the audience. The tone of these questions varies a lot from department to department, and from questioner to questioner, but it isn't unusual for such questions to be aggressive, and a speaker who has become defensive can be quite dismissive of a question which he or she sees as having no merit. Add to this the ordinary anxiety a student might feel about drawing the attention of 40-50 people, including their professors, advisor, peers, friends and rivals while issuing what a defensive speaker can easily interpret as a challenge, and you have a situation that might be expected to cause anxiety in ordinary human beings. So it didn't surprise me that anyone was scared about asking questions after talks - as a grade A introvert, I was utterly petrified myself. I only had to form the intention to ask a question and controlling my breathing would begin to seem difficult, never mind using my breath to speak. But it it did take me aback that this professor - young, confident, stylish, and at the top of their profession, a professor who often asked aggressive questions and even appeared to enjoying themselves - had ever been in the same boat.

Yet they told me that as the end of a talk neared, and the moment at which the chair would ask "any questions from the audience?" - the moment at which my professor would have to raise their hand to signal that they indeed had a question - they got so anxious that their arm would begin to feel heavier and heavier...until it seemed almost physically impossible to raise it.

That was just one conversation in grad school, but it meant a lot to me because I tended to think of good philosophers as more than human. And of course, I knew that I was not superhuman, because I had these ordinary mortal weaknesses like social anxiety. So, very occasionally, it's nice to hear good philosophers admit their weaknesses, (and I do see such social anxiety as a weakness - I'd give it up in an instant if I could) because then it shows that it is possible to be a good philosopher in spite of such ordinary human frailty. If you can't see that, then it becomes harder to see why you should be staying in graduate school.

I felt a similar way on reading Greg Restall's confessions regarding the recent issue of the Australasian Journal of Logic. They're on his weblog, so I'm sure he won't mind you reading them. He writes:

As the managing editor, there was a period in this last semester where I wasn’t managing very well, and things piled up and got the better of me for quite some time. To speak overly frankly for a moment, I got quite depressed over the state that things were in and over my own disorganisation. Unfortunately, being depressed is not a good condition in which to be motivated to do anything about that which you’re depressed about.

Now most graduate student philosophers, most students even, let work get on top of them at some point. They put off doing it, they miss deadlines, they get depressed about the whole mess, and, as Greg notes, depression is a motivation-sapper, so the situation only gets worse. So why was I amazed to read that Greg had been in this situation? Because he's an astonishingly successful philosopher and logician and I secretly believed that it's the superhuman few who don't get distracted/behind/depressed who succeed. And how else had he managed to start and run an entire online logic journal, apparently in his spare time, get elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and run one of the best kept websites in the discipline? By exercising his superpowers, thought I.

So his post is a good wake up call in two ways. First the encouraging way: not being superhuman is no reason to give up. But of course, there's a demanding point too: not being superhuman is no excuse for giving up either.

Posted by logican at 10:52 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 13, 2005

Cute Fact of the Day

"In the original German, the last and culminating tantalising-mystical proposition [of Wittgenstein's Tractatus] can, as is well-known, be sung to the tune of Good King Wenceslas. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." (p.10 of Gellner's Words and Things)

This is good news, as the original lyrics cannot.

UPDATE 17.22, 13/9/05: Everyone's reading this book. No wait, every Kieran is reading this book.

Posted by logican at 03:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Restaurant Culture

Five serious problems:

One seriously promising solution

Posted by logican at 02:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 12, 2005

Self-Appreciation

Logicandlanguage.net got a good review. (yay!)

Posted by logican at 11:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 11, 2005

Toscar on Titan

Twin Earth for real?

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Images of Titan courtesy of Nasa Image eXchange
"Titan is perhaps the most Earth-like place in the Solar System other than Earth, in terms of the balance of processes," says Jonathan Lunine, of the University of Arizona, who is an interdisciplinary scientist for Cassini-Huygens.
"Wind-driven processes, river channels, evidence of rain, possible lakes and geological features that may have to do with volcanism and tectonism."
But the chemistry that drives these processes is radically different between the two worlds. For example, methane seems to perform many of the same roles on Titan that water plays on Earth.
PIA02290.jpg PIA06228.jpg
Images of Titan courtesy of Nasa Image eXchange

Posted by logican at 02:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 09, 2005

εὐδαιμονία

The BBC, in an article entitled "Philosophy Students 'a happy lot'", reports on a survey which suggests that philosophers (and theologians, bless 'em) "are the most satisfied in higher education." Excitingly, the survey results were leaked to the Times Higher Ed Supplement, and their article is online too. They write:

Philosophy and theology students are the most satisfied, rating their courses 4.3 for overall satisfaction, and the most happy with the quality of their teachers, awarding them a score of 4.2.
Robin Cameron, chair in philosophy at Aberdeen University and former secretary of the British Philosophical Society, said he was delighted.
"Students do not undertake degree courses in philosophy lightly, so they are committed to their subject," he said. "We have small departments with an open-door approach."

Posted by logican at 12:59 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Maven!

Most web-active philosophers will already be aware of Philosophy cosmetics (possibly as a result of receiving their stuff as a joke from a desperate relative.) And for the whiffy logician there is Truth or Contradiction Eau de Parfum (I have to call it that; I used to sell this stuff as a Saturday job when I was in secondary school) and in Australia, Invalid Stout. But have you seen Maven lipsticks? (Yes, MAVEN, as in "language maven".) They come "in rich hues named after exotic languages." Shades include Farsi (shimmery sienna brown, according to the, er, gloss), Maori (shimmery pink beige), and my favourite, Buluba-Lulua (shimmery sheer pink.)

Once they get away from lips the language theme is lost (which is a shame, because it could have continued into the manicure line - ASL polish anyone?) But then philosophy makes a come-back with Tabula Rasa concealer...

So, frivolous, yes, but perhaps it is also a sign that Maven marketers think women (and other make-up users) want to think of themselves as educated, intelligent or even academic. 'bout time, say I.

Posted by logican at 12:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 01, 2005

Gellner's Words and Things

I've been meaning to link to this for a while. It's Kieran Setiya's review of Ernest Gellner's recently rereleased (that's what they used to call it on TOTP) Words and Things (which I've now added to the "to read, possibly on the subway" pile under the window in my apartment.)

Kieran begins ominously:

Philosophy has never recovered from the damage done to its image around the middle of the last century: it came to seem dull, insipid and mechanical, a pedantic exploration of how language works.

I found this ominous because I've always been drawn to linguistic philosophy. I remember, as an undergraduate, reading Tarski's "Semantic Conception of Truth" and Hempel's "Studies in the Logic of Confirmation" and being stunned by the way in which analysis and attention to language allowed progress to be made on apparently intractable problems. Where Kieran saw philosophy as in danger of being "dull, insipid and mechanical, a pedantic exploration of how language works", I saw it as exposing a gap in the armour of every tough problem. Exploration of how language works need be neither pedantic, nor trivial, but questions about language often look more tractable than questions about free will, or induction or consciousness or values and it's common for results in the philosophy of language to have application in other areas (recent examples have included externalism, possible world semantics and context-sensitivity.) When Al Hájek gave his Heuristics paper at the ANU a few weeks back (it's a paper that lists heuristics for coming up with philosophical ideas) I thought that one thing that could be added was "do some philosophy of language and try using what you've learned when working elsewhere."

Yet Gellner's book sounds fun anyway:

you can see why it was explosive, with its combination of wit and flagrant disavowal of interpretive charity. Gellner is happy to attribute bad motives, bad ideas and sheer confusions to the philosophers he dislikes, and he is often very funny in doing so.

And there's often more need for us to read the work of our critics than that of our friends. This was a little close to the bone, for instance:

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.(Gellner)

I find it so tempting to think of myself as just having higher than average standards for the application of the word "understanding", but then i) wouldn't that make me rather like some whiney old behaviourist, asking for behavioural criteria for the application of words before they'll admit them to polite company and ii) if everyone else was using "understand" differently, wouldn't it be me that was mistaken about what the word means? I'd be like one of those students that defends their paper by saying "I know I wrote the crazy thing, but what it meant was the correct thing." Damn.

Well, the weather is closing down already here in Alberta - I'll be spending some time on the subway with Words and Things.

UPDATE: Dave Chalmers has pointed out the following critique of the book which makes, as Dave says in the comments, good companion reading.

Posted by logican at 01:45 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack