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Statistics on the Two-Body Problem

This survey on the two-body problem in physics makes interesting reading.  It’s ten years old (though I only just stumbled on it), and I suspect that there may be even more physics couples now than there were then. 

I would be really interested to see similar statistics for philosophy.  (Does anyone know of any?)  In an off-the-top-of-our-heads brainstorm this evening, I and two philosopher friends thought in particular about the percentages of married female philosophers who have a philosopher spouse.  Our estimates ranged from 45% to 65%.  I also anticipate that the percentage would go up if we included non-married female philosophers with philosopher partners.  

Cover Image Released

I’ve just been sent a draft of the cover for my book!  What d’you think?

The Nature of Normativity

I’ve just finished drafting a critical notice of Ralph Wedgwood’s book The Nature of Normativity, which I’m writing at the invitation of Analysis Reviews (the future continuer of Philosophical Books).  I’m posting the current draft; comments are welcome.  The critical notice focuses mainly on Wedgwood’s normative epistemology, though it also takes a brief look at his argument against expressivism.

Myth-Guided

Simon Blackburn’s recent Times Higher Education article Reality Check, the subject of the somewhat fierce attention of some bloggers, is also the subject of my letter to last week’s THE.  Though rarely provoked into such activities as writing letters to the THE, I really couldn’t resist this low-hanging fruit.  Simon tries to dispel ten ‘modern myths’, but can be seen actively engaging in the promotion of one of them later in the article. 

I Just Noticed Something Embarrassing

In my Philosophy Compass article on the A Priori, one of the references is wrong.

Worse, one of the references to my own work is wrong.

Worse still, it’s not just a mistake with the page numbers or something.  I got the title of my own article wrong.

In print.

How embarrassing.

Modal Epistemology Is Just Counterfactual Epistemology?

Tim Williamson thinks it is.  But I’m not convinced.  This is a little paper where I explain (some of the reasons) why I’m not convinced. 

Williamson relies heavily on (what he thinks of as) logical equivalences between modal propositions and certain counterfactuals.  But such logical equivalences (even assuming that’s what they are) could not support the claim that modal epistemology is just counterfactual epistemology.  Or so I claim. 

Compare: disjunctive propositions (A v B) are logically equivalent to negated conjunctive propositions ¬(¬A & ¬B).  But that doesn’t mean the epistemology of disjunctions reduces to the epistemology of negated conjunctions. 

The challenge to Williamson is to say why the equivalences he’s interested in are of more epistemological significance than this.  It is a challenge which, this paper argues, he has not met in his various discussions of this topic. 

Photos From Aberdeen

A few photos from the Aberdeen A Priori Workshop are now available.

A Priori @ Aberdeen

I’m currently in Aberdeen for the A Priori Knowledge Workshop, featuring a fun line-up of speakers (and me).  For people with a Phil Compass subscription, the paper I’ll be talking to is available through Blackwell Online Early.  For others a final draft is available from my publications page.

Unmanifestable Dispositions

This morning I’ve been thinking about dispositions that cannot be manifested: that is, dispositions to \phi under circumstances C, where either \phi-ing or circumstances C are metaphysically impossible.

One thing I’m interested in is whether there are any such dispositions. Another is whether anything has such a disposition. Prima facie, there are some reasons to answer yes to both questions. I think, for instance, that I have a disposition to be puzzled when presented with a round square object.

In response to this suggestion, however, Daniel pointed out that a certain amount of coarse-graining about dispositions would enable us to accommodate that disposition without believing in dispositions which cannot be manifested. My disposition to be puzzled when presented with a round square object may be identical to my disposition to be puzzled when presented with an interesting and surprising object that I didn’t think existed, and this disposition can of course be manifested.

Lewis’s counterfactual account of dispositions in ‘Finkish Dispositions’, combined with his view that counterpossible conditionals are trivially true, delivers that everything has every disposition to \phi in circumstances C for impossible C. But this does not by itself entail that there are any dispositions which cannot be manifested, since these trivial dispositions may for all we’ve said so far be identical to more familiar, manifestable, ones.

Nevertheless, for those of us inclined to be abundant with our dispositions, I think there is some reason to believe in unmanifestable dispositions (and instantiations thereof). And I don’t see any special reason why there shouldn’t be such things, given that dispositions don’t need to be manifested in order to be instantiated.

Greetings

Welcome to the new look and location of LWBM!  Any comments on the new format are welcome.

The header photo is one I took of the Cape Schanck Lighthouse on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia.