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x-posted at Thoughts, Arguments and Rants

• I do not think there is anything in this.
• this is just an idiotism of idiom
• ..and this is what Professor Antony Flew has aptly called a conventionalist sulk

I wonder if I can manage to use all of these in my next question session? (Though maybe they won't buy me dinner if I do.)

I asked for a small latte. The young server paused and said, "would a medium be ok?" I said ``er, sure..." and she said "because technically if it's in a cup smaller than this one (holding up a cup that would make a perfectly respectable soup bowl) then it's not called a latte. Actually, if it's like a latte but in this cup (holding up a cup that is still generous for a coffee cup) it's called a macchiato."

Having been influenced by old Language Log posts on Starbucks' (you don't say small you say tall) and Microsoft's (Microsoft has no genitive) amateurish attempts to regiment language in various ways, I'm never very impressed by this sort of thing. It's not that I'm opposed to the regimentation of language in general---in fact, I usually follow one of my old teachers in recommending that my logic students refrain from using valid in informal senses (valid point of view, valid claim etc.) and reserve the word for it's technical senses (which are tricky enough as it is, given that many books reserve one technical use of the word for first order logical truths, as well as allowing the more well-known use on which it is a property of arguments or argument schemata in general.) So anyway, that sentence got away from me. It's not that I'm opposed to the regimentation of language in general, but just that I reject the authority of just about everyone in imposing it, including Starbucks, but also including funky historical local coffee shops.

So what's the difference between what they're doing, and what I feel justified in doing in my classes? Well, I think it's just that I have a good justification for the regimentation. Reserving valid for the technical uses aids communication and understanding of the subject at hand. A regimentation that makes it impossible to request a coffee like a medium latte, but smaller, by saying "small latte'' does not. In fact, it seems like a snobbish attempt to wield power for the sake of it. Similarly for the Microsoft and Starbucks examples.

Am I right? I can imagine someone defending the Starbucks example by claiming that the justification for having special names for their coffee sizes is artistic. They want their customers to have the best, most enjoyable most interesting/mysterious/exotic coffee-drinking experience possible, and what better justification could there be for their decision to name their sizes as they have?

But even if that is so, it could only justify their introduction of the new expressions, not the outlawing of the old---and hence not the regimentation.

Anyway, though I wasn't impressed by the no-such-thing-as-a-small-latte claim, neither am I impressed by people who are rude to young service workers, so I tried to make conversation, dredging up some faint memories about what a macchiato actually was: "That's interesting. I thought a macchiato was where you just marked the expresso with foam?" "Oh no,'' she said, "a machiatto is just like a latte but with less milk." And I just shut up and smiled and handed over my 4 bucks.

Maybe Berkeley cafes are going to be more distracting than the ones in St Louis.

For more information, see http://www.phil.ucalgary.ca/jobs/.

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Paul Horwich have also purchased Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) by Randall E. Auxier...

Now. Which one of you was it?

A number of definitions or explications of analyticity have been proposed. My favourite is a proposal by Hilary Putnam. In an exposition of W. V. Quine's famous (if little understood) attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, Putnam suggests that a sentence may be termed 'analytic' if it is deducible from the sentences in a finite list at the top of which someone who bears the ancestral of the graduate-student relation to Carnap has printed the words 'Meaning Postulate'. This definition not only acknowledges the central importance of Carnap's contribution to the role of the analytic-synthetic distinction in analytic philosophy, but it has the additional virtue that it accords to those few among us who bear this special relationship to Carnap and authority that strikes me as only fitting.

Who'd have thought that an additional virtue of Josh Dever's Philosophical Family Tree is that it can help one to determine the extension of the word 'analytic'?

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.