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May 31, 2006
Upgrade in Progress
I'm about to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 in an attempt to control the massive amount of spam I'm receiving at the moment. Everything might be about to go to hell...here goes...
Update: Well, everything seems to be going ok so far. I got my ip address banned from my own weblog (so that I couldn't visit the page) because I logged in with a bad password, but that's sorted out. The problem now seems to be that when I visit what was the front page of my blog I get a page saying "please log in to movable type". That's not what I want you guys to see...but at least something is happening.
Update: OK, negotiations with Multiblog completed. Everything seems to be running smoothly enough. Easier than I thought.
Posted by logican at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2006
Ofsted: Can't get no...(no no no)
John Clare reports in the Telegraph on a bizarre report from Ofsted (a body that regulates standards in UK schools.)
What exactly does Ofsted mean by "satisfactory": good enough or not good enough?Bizarrely, it could be either - or even both. Take, for example, this Alice in Wonderland sentence from Ofsted's recent report on Toynbee School in Eastleigh, Hants: "There is too much satisfactory teaching, which has resulted in students making satisfactory progress overall." The curriculum, the report adds, is "satisfactory" as are achievement and standards and leadership and management; the school also offers "satisfactory" value for money. In which sense (if any), though, it is impossible to tell.
Even though this reads like hilarious nonsense, it's easy to see what's going on. Ofsted will have some kind of scale that goes something like "fantastic, good, satisfactory, unacceptable". The school gets lots of "satisfactory"s and the writer thinks that it should be doing better.
This is one place where some kind of local holism story about the meaning of Ofsted's use of "satisfactory" seems to make a lot of sense. "Satisfactory" here gets its meaning in part from its place in the scale. If the scale was two valued, "satisfactory, unsatisfactory" then calling teaching "satisfactory" would say something different. Similarly if the scale was "super fantasic, fantastic, very good, good, fairly good, satisfactory, poor."
I'm inclined to think the "real" (everyday, non-Ofsted) meaning of "satisfactory" does play some role in constraining where the word can appear in the scale though. A scale that reads "good, satisfactory" is not a scale in which "satisfactory" is a terrible grade, it's just a dodgy grading scale.
Posted by logican at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2006
Online Philosophy Conference
As I'm late to acknowledge, the Online Philosophy Conference has been on for the last few weeks. This week includes Brian's paper on relativism about indicative conditionals, with comments by me. Hurrah! (I won't link to the texts here - go and check out the conference.)
Posted by logican at 06:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Formal Epistemology Workshop
I'm off to FEW at Berkeley tomorrow, which promises papers by Robert Stalnaker, Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni, Tim Williamson, Adam Elga, Katie Steele, Mike Titelbaum, Edward Epsen, Horacio Arló-Costa and Rohit Parikh, Lydia and Tim McGrew, Eric Pacuit, Jon Williamson, Jan-Willem Romeijn, Sara Rachel Chant and Zac Ernst, Jonathan Weisberg and Johan van Benthem, as well as tutorials on judgement aggregation (Christian List) and "no free lunch" theorems (David Wolpert).
I'll be commenting on van Bentham's paper "Dynamic Logic for Belief Change" and the usual crowd of blogging epistemologists promises to be in attendence. See you there...
Posted by logican at 06:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack