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March 28, 2006

Blog Citation

I was part of an APA panel session on blogging last week (I mean to post more about the APA, but I haven't finished writing that post yet - Kenny's there already though) and one of the questions concerned whether anyone ever cited content from blogs in (proper) published work. We hummed and hawed and mentioned a few things we'd cited, but I've just come across one of Jason Stanley's footnotes from page 6 of Knowledge and Practical Interests in which the blog of one of our APA panel members gets a mention:

"Jon Kvanvig (on the blog Certain Doubts) suggested this as an account of these sorts of cases."

Posted by logican at 09:44 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 27, 2006

Roughly speaking...

I've been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus for a class I'm teaching tomorrow and the following line just kills me:

[2.0232] Roughly speaking, objects are colourless.

I think it's because, before reflection, it sounds as if it has a lot in common with these sentences:

Roughly speaking, you're going to get an F.

or

Roughly speaking, teddy bears eat people.

or

Roughly speaking, Elvis wrote "As you like it".

I think these are funny in two different respects. Firstly, the embedded sentence is so absurd that the fact that the author takes the care to say "roughly speaking" - as if you might be about to jump in and correct him on some small point - is hilarious. And secondly, it's hard to see how the state of affairs described could be "roughly" right. One wants to say: look mate, do teddy-bears eat people or not? I might have children to save! What's all this "roughly" business?

But after some consideration I suppose Wittgenstein's sentence isn't really like that. He thinks that objects are strictly property-less, and so "objects are colourless" might seem like one way to express that they don't have any colour properties. But of course to say that would strictly be to ascibe a property to them (the property of being colourless) and so it isn't strictly true either.

My German copy is in my office, otherwise I'd be checking the original of the "roughly speaking" - maybe this is a translation thing.

Posted by logican at 11:49 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 05, 2006

Over-Protected

Like many bloggers, I employ anti-spam software to keep adverts and other inappropriate comments off my site. Ideally my filters block comments from anyone who is trying to pedal viagra, violent sex, verificationism etc., and let through comments from legitimate readers.

But I was browsing through my list of banned strings (as one does - in the back of my mind I was thinking about something that Kenny Easwaran said a while ago - that he thought my site might be blocking comments containing the string "...") and I discovered that I'm also blocking the string "ucalgary.ca". Quite right too - we don't want any of Richard Zach's nonsense around here. But since I also discovered "uni-heidelberg.de" and "hw.ac.uk" (Herriot-Watt, fine Scottish institution that you are, I am so so sorry), and (crikey, talk about shooting myself in the foot) "web.mit.edu", I thought I'd better do some cleaning up. My sincere appologies to anyone who has tried to post a comment but been blocked by my anti-spam software. I'll keep a closer eye on it in future.

Posted by logican at 07:37 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 03, 2006

Logic, Logic and Logic

I've just noticed that Greg and JC's book on logical pluralism is now out in paperback.

Posted by logican at 02:16 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack