But enough about Schlafly. Those more familiar with her will provide a better rapsheet. D's description of the up-coming ceremony as the worst graduation ever made me try to remember who had been honoured at my own undergraduate graduation ceremony. And the person who sticks out most in my mind is the actress Helen Mirren, who was then famous for playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the TV-series Prime Suspect. And I remember, not just because my dad was rather awed to see Mirren in real life, but because of the speech one of the St Andrews officials gave to introduce her. He talked about how, when he had been growing up, and a girl his own age had been asked what she wanted to be when she grew up she had usually replied with one of the few professions that were thought of as suitable to women at the time: nurse, air-hostess, etc. But last week when he asked his own young daughter what she wanted to be, she'd replied, to his surprise: "Detective Chief Inspector".

I wonder what my students will remember about their graduation ceremonies this year.

It's called Truth in Virtue of Meaning and it's basically a new account of the analytic-synthetic distinction (one which is designed to fit better with phenomena like contextualism and semantic externalism than pre-Quine conceptions of the distinction did), and a defence of that distinction against about 7-zillion arguments (ok, maybe more like 15 arguments) against analyticity.

I'm going to post a bit more about the content of the book later in the week, but what I thought I'd do right now is tell you a bit about the photograph on the cover. The photo is by a Maldivian photographer called Shazeen Samad. He has a beautiful website and some of my favourite images of his are here, here, here and here. If you are looking to procrastinate while you should be grading/writing that final paper, and you won't be depressed by images of incredibly beautiful people hanging out in what appears to be the most beautiful place on earth, then the site comes highly recommended.

The photo that Shazeen very kindly let me use is called "Maldavian Reflection" and it is an image of the ocean at sunset, when the water is so still that the entire sky (which has lots of cool clouds) is reflected in it. A couple of people have remarked that the picture is beautiful, but doesn't have much to do with the topic of the book. But to those people I say two things: first, off, what did you want? pictures of bachelors? of one concept containing another? and second: not so! when you first look at the photograph it can seem pretty chaotic and hard to work out what it is a picture of. But then you look harder, and you realise that it is in two halves, with the horizon down the middle and that everything below the horizon is water, and everything above it is sky. What could be more appropriate?

One of those things that I think good logic students quickly realise is that it's one thing to be able to follow a proof in class, and quite another to be able to reproduce it yourself in homework or on a test. Well one of the things that I've learned from teaching logic is that it is one thing thing to be able to scribble a proof out on a notepad, and another to be able to present clearly on a blackboard during a lecture.

Why? Well, it has something to do with the fact that one's notepad is uebersichtlich - scrawling out some complicated instance of an axiom isn't that hard if the axiom is at the top of your page, but it can be a bit harder when that axiom is 2 blackboards back, or on the other side of the room. (My logic classroom has 6 huge boards that scroll past each other - I rather like that, but it can make it easy to loose the first part of a proof.) So I think that for me to write a proof on the board requires that I know more of the proof off by heart than when I'm just writing it on paper. Second, of course, there's just more pressure when 30, or 60, eyes are on you, all waiting to be reminded what the induction hypothesis 2 boards ago actually was. And third, when I'm putting a proof on the board I'm often talking at the same time. And as teachers everywhere know, talking goes faster than writing, so you're basically running two trains of thought at once anyway.

So I'd been yearning for a blackboard in my office, and then I found this stuff. . It consists of flexible blackboard tiles that stick to your wall (they're removable and re-positionable- they come off my white-painted wall easily, without leaving a mark, and stick right back on, and, surprisingly, it's really easy to write on them with chalk and clean them off. (I imagine if your wall is a different colour from your chalk you'll end up with a chalk-coloured "halo" around the board though.) They're a bit smaller than they look in the photo - each tile is about the size of a US letter sheet of paper - and I ended up buying 2 packs of 4. Also, I think the tiles are a little prone to getting scratched by the chalk - I can imagine having to buy some more after a couple of years or so. But they look great on my wall and they do the job (every Tuesday and Thursday morning before my logic lecture...)

In this case study, our interest in giving a clear and critically reflective answer to a simple, non-technical, non-metalinguistic, non-metaconceptual question forced us to adjudicate between complex, technical, metalinguistic and metaconceptual theories. This phenomenon seems to have been overlooked by those who complain about the "arid" technical minuteness of much of philosophy in the analytic tradition. A question may be easy to ask, but hard to answer. Even if it is posed in dramatic and accessible terms, the reflections needed to select rationally between rival answers may be less dramatic and accessible. Such contrasts are commonplace in other disciplines; it would have been amazing if they had not occurred in philosophy. Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention spans.

I think I might have to read that out in my philosophy of language class today.

The main experiment Demmett cites in support of this goes more or less like this: you keep a subject awake for 3 or 4 days, so that they build up a large sleep debt, making them liable to fall asleep quickly. Then you clip their eyelids open (yes, it does sound torturous) and sit them in front of a bright flash, like that of a camera, which goes of randomly, but on average every 8 seconds or so. Then you ask them to push a button every time the flash goes off. Here's what happens. For the first couple of minutes they push the button diligently every time the flash goes off. But after a couple of minutes, there is a flash and they fail to push the button. The experimenters ask them why they didn't push the button, and the subject replies that there was no flash. But of course, there was a flash, the experimenters all saw it, and the subject is sitting there with their eyes pinned open in front of the flash bulb. The electrodes attached to the subjects scalp (which you can use to measure electrical activity in the brain) show that the subject actually fell asleep for 2 seconds.

Demmett argues that sleep is total cut-off of normal perceptual processes: basically the brain drops a wall between the subject and the outside world, such that the sleeper simply doesn't perceive the outside world at all. The difference between sleep and unconsciousness, coma or death is that certain things can prompt the removal of the wall (sounds, shaking the sleeper, etc). But still, either the wall is there or it isn't---the subject is either asleep or he isn't---and if he's capable of paying attention to anything in the outer world (groggily attending to nearby conversations, for example, or some language learning tape) then he isn't asleep at all.

All of which makes sleep seem really strange. It's clear from the book that nearly everything we know about sleep has been discovered very recently, and that a lot of falsehoods about sleep are still very widespread. Some of the new data about sleep has been achieved-unsurprisingly enough-through new ways of studying the brain, but there's also been plenty discovered that could have been discovered much earlier if only someone had looked. In fact, it's completely amazing, and in need of explanation, that no-one every noticed these things before. For example, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) during sleep is strikingly obvious to anyone who'd care to look. And it is ubiquitous: everyone - babies, old people, animals, men, women - has hours of REM sleep every night (well, in the case of nocturnal animals, it might be during the day, and hibernation and the like turn out to be special cases. And it takes a few weeks before the sleep of babies is consolidated into longish alternating periods of wake and sleep..but you get the point - REM sleep is all over the place.) And it isn't as if no-one ever watched anyone else sleep. And yet pre-20th century theories of sleep (Aristotle apparently thought vapours arising from one's stomach after eating put one to sleep) make no mention of it, and it wasn't discovered and studied until a few years ago. Why?

Is it just that people assumed sleep was uninteresting? It seems to me that there are a bunch of issues that could be of interest to philosophers here, but the philosophy of sleep book I've found on Amazon is Robert Macnish's The Philosophy Of Sleep, which is a 2006 reprint of the 1830 book. Here's his description of waking from a healthy night's sleep:

The sleep of health is full of tranquility. In such a state we remain for hours at a time in unbroken repose, nature banqueting on its sweets, renewing its lost energies, and laying in a fresh store for the succeeding day. This accomplished, the slumber vanishes like a vapour before the rising sun; languor has been succeeded by strength; and all the faculties, mental and corporeal, are recruited. In this delightful state, man assimilates most with that in which Adam sprang from his creator's hands, fresh, buoyant and vigourous; rejoicing as a racer to run his course, with all its appetencies of enjoyment on the edge, and all his feelings and faculties prepared for exertion. (2)

So, no need for coffee then! And no beta-waves. There is some mention of eye movement in the index, so I'm going to order a copy of the book (I got this stuff from the Amazon "search inside" feature) and see if there's anything that could be construed as early observation of REM. There might be a few more posts about sleep in the next few days or so.

I suppose I can imagine someone arguing that the ability to get through it is a sign that a candidate has some of the qualities they want in a colleague (organisational skills, ability to push on and keep working under stressful conditions, ability to cope with difficult people and formal situations etc.), but when I was reading Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained recently, and he described a coming of age ceremony in which adolescent boys are subjected to a terrifying ritual in which their deaths are faked (they are held underwater and it is made to look as if a spear is plunged into their bellies) before they are taken away from the village by the older men and basically hazed for an extended period of time, I couldn't help being reminded of the APA. Good luck keeping your heads, guys.

(N.B. Just to clarify, I haven't actually heard any stories about APA interviews involving water-boarding. And there is a rumour that girls are sometimes interviewed too.)

(p. 96 of Naming and Necessity)

Hat tip to experimental philosopher John Doris for this one. I'm still working out what the lyrics are, but I think the title and visuals speak for themselves...

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The Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, invites applications for a tenure-track position in Philosophy, with a specialization in Logic. Other areas of research and teaching specialization and competence are open. The appointment will be made at the rank of Assistant Professor, effective July 1, 2008. Responsibilities include undergraduate and graduate teaching and maintaining an active research programme. Tenure stream faculty normally teach four one term courses per year. Candidates should hold a PhD in Philosophy and provide evidence of scholarly and teaching excellence. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience, and the benefit package is comprehensive. Applicants should arrange to send a letter of application indicating the position applied for and describing areas of research interest, curriculum vitae, all university transcripts, a sample of written work, letters from three referees, and, if available, a teaching dossier and teaching evaluations to Bruce Hunter, Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA, T6G 2E5. CLOSING DATE: November 10, 2007. The University of Alberta hires on the basis of merit. We are committed to the principle of equity in employment. We welcome diversity and encourage applications from all qualified women and men, including persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities, and Aboriginal persons. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority. For further information concerning the Department, please consult http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/philosophy/.

The Online Philosophy Conference is well worth supporting of course, and this week it also features papers from Derek Pereboom, Jeff McMahan, Caspar Hare, John Martin-Fischer and Jonathan Dancy.