Dispositions and Intrinsicness

I’ve just finished a new draft of a paper on dispositions. It focuses on Lewis’s 1997 account, and argues for three things:

(1) Dispositions are not always intrinsic.

(2) Dispositions don’t always have intrinsic bases.

(3) It’s not the case that [if dispositions have intrinsic bases then they are intrinsic].

The first two of these claims are not new; with these I’m just building on what others such as Nolan and McKitrick have already done.  The third is where most of the interesting original action of this paper is.  Comments welcome, as ever.

Tweeting the Joint Session

Last weekend saw the 2009 Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society, which this year was hosted by the philosophers at the UEA in Norwich.  I’ve posted some photos. 

Highlights for me included seeing Hartry Field trying to extend his epistemic evaluativism (basically a form of expressivism) to (at least some uses of) the word ‘valid’. Downsides included the widespread practice of Open Session speakers chairing their own talks, which I think is nearly impossible to do well (though praiseworthy efforts were made by many).

Another notable feature of this year’s conference was the live Twitter coverage (search #JointSession on Twitter to find it). I very much enjoyed reading and contributing to this, and I would like to see the practice of livetweeting philosophy conferences continue and become more widespread. Here are a couple of the major benefits that occur to me:

(1) Philosophers who are not present can follow in real time. I’ve seen a number of people who do this report “feeling as if they were there” and expressing gratitude to those providing coverage. And I know I myself enjoyed following the recent AAP from afar in this way. Philosophers following the tweets of those present can ask someone who is there to expand on something they’ve just tweeted about. They might even in principle – though I’ve not yet (to my knowledge) seen this done – ask a question of a speaker by proxy. Although asking a question without hearing the talk could be tricky, the person channelling it could help by making an assessment of things like whether the point has been covered by the speaker already and whether the question is in other ways appropriate.

(2)  Philosophers in the audience of a talk can communicate with one another. If something goes by too quickly, reminds you of something interesting, confuses you, or whatever, you can let others present (who, presumably, are interested in reading such things) know, and they may be able to respond helpfully and/or interestingly. You can also share jokes and other fun without whispering or passing notes. Maybe this last element is less intellectually laudable, but it is no less a good-making feature of the practice in my opinion.

Of course, there are also drawbacks. For balance, I’ll mention two:

(1) I’ve had to develop the skill of staying focused on a talk whilst also tweeting; this is not something that I was able to do straight away. When I first started livetweeting philosophy talks I was undoubtedly distracted by it. But this particular multi-tasking ability is definitely improving with practice, in my case at least. 

(2) I would imagine that some speakers and other audience members might find the presence of tweeting philosophers annoying, distracting and/or offensive. Offence, for example, might be generated by the (in my impression generally inaccurate) suspicion that those tweeting the talk are not really listening, or are bored, or are checking their emails.

I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of other philosophers about this practice.

Scepticism in St Andrews

I’m just back from the Arche Scepticism Conference, and my photos are here. A very successful event with many fine talks. I was particularly interested in Crispin Wright’s offering, which tackled the topic of entitlement and included some engagement with the kind of problem that I was trying to press in this paper. That’s the problem of explaining how entitlement has anything to do with epistemic rationality (as opposed to, say, practical rationality). It’s a point Duncan Pritchard has also discussed. 

As far as I could tell, Wright’s move was a version of the kind of dominance-involving strategy I discuss in section 3 onwards: accepting certain things is epistemically rational because doing so maximizes epistemic good.

The major problem with that strategy is that one could be visited by the truth fairy.  She asks you to name your epistemic goods, then promises to maximize them all for you tomorrow if you will just accept p today. It’s pretty clear to me that her actions do nothing to make acceptance of p epistemically rational. (I think in the paper the truth fairy is some kind of goddess; her new name only occured to me while listening to Wright’s talk.)

Why not? In the paper I suggested that it has something to do with the irrelevance of maximizing epistemic goods with regard to propositions other than p. Now, I would like to say more about why that stuff is irrelevant. (I have an idea; maybe the subject of my next blog post.) And, in the light of some other remarks of Wright’s, I would like to say more about why we should think a defence of the epistemic rationality of accepting certain propositions is what’s required in response to sceptical arguments.

Scholarly Orange

Today I noticed how much more serious-looking Volume 4 of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics seems to me than  Volume 3, and especially Volumes 1 and 2. 

This has nothing to do with the contents lists.  It is entirely due to the fact the colour of the jacket of volume 4 is what I’m henceforth going to call scholarly orange.  Slightly dusky, library-ish orange.  The colour of the iconic jacket of Naming and Necessity.  The colour used to great effect in the cover of (what my cohort used to call) Boolos Boolos and Boolos.  A colour that crops up on surprisingly many academic book jackets, in fact.  (Have a look at your bookshelf; my money’s on there being a fair bit of scholarly orange there.)

How – my subconscious thought to itself – could any book that colour be anything other than important and influential? 

Maybe I should be worried about this epistemic failing of mine.  And maybe others share it, in which case I shall begin to regret not having chosen scholarly orange for the cover of my own book.

Merely Verbal Disputes

The long-awaited (by me, mainly) draft of my merely verbal disputes paper is now in a sharable form.  Comments are welcome as always. 

In the draft I set out to argue against some existing approaches to mere-verbalness, whilst drawing morals from what is right about them.  Then I try out my own account.

MVD: Parties A and B are having a merely verbal dispute iff they are engaged in a sincere prima facie dispute D, but do not disagree over the subject matter(s) of D, and merely present the appearance of doing so owing to their divergent uses of some relevant portion of language.

A Priori Workshop

My colleague Greg Currie is organizing a workshop on the a priori, to take place here in Nottingham on October 9th. Further details here. Please contact Greg if you would like to attend.

The workshop is timed to coincide with the visit of Nottingham Special Professor Michael Devitt, whose forthcoming volume Putting Metaphysics First includes some work (check out the title of essay 13) attacking the a priori (a popular pastime of late).

Facebooking One’s Students

The discussion over on The Philosophy Smoker got me thinking on this. I used to have a no-friending-undergrads-I’m-teaching policy. But now it’s so easy to use friend lists to make sure nobody sees things you don’t want them to see, I’ve changed my policy.

I still think the policy should be not to discriminate between students, so recently I have friended any student (current or past) that asks. But I don’t send requests: I can’t ask everyone, so that would be discriminating again.

Moreover, this seems like just the obvious policy to pursue (unless you decide to friend none of your students, but that seems unnecessarily unfriendly given the alternatives available).

Is there anything wrong with my policy?

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

There’s a NIP in the Air in Aberdeen

Some very big news for British philosophy.  From 1st September there will be a new philosophy research centre at Aberdeen founded by Crispin Wright.  Its provisional name is the Northern Institute of Philosophy.  The centre will have the following remit (with areas of envisaged mid-term focus in brackets):

• Epistemology (formal epistemology, entitlement, epistemic externalism, perception)
• Formal Logic, including the history of logic
• Philosophy of Logic (logical consequence, the paradoxes, inferentialism and model-theory, the epistemology of logic and the a priori)
• Philosophy of Language (rule-following, propositions, vagueness, semantics and pragmatics, contextualism and relativism, content externalism)
• Philosophy of Mathematics (foundations, neo-logicism and structuralism)
• Metaphysics (value, taste, meaning, intentionality, time and truth),
• Philosophy of Mind (the metaphysics and epistemology of the self, rationality and rational explanation)
• History of Analytical Philosophy, and its methods, scope and limits

A number of appointments are planned, including 2-3 Institute professors and 6 quarter-time professorial fellows.  There will also be funded PhD places and postdoc positions, as well as funding for networks and workshops.

Exciting times!

New Web Site

My web presence has moved from its old Google Pages address to www.carriejenkins.co.uk.

I’m still working on the new site, so apologies for the things that aren’t operational yet (mainly links).  I had intended to keep my Google Pages site up and running for a little longer, and then get it to redirect, but Google currently won’t allow me to do either.  (They’re closing the popular and successful Google Pages in favour of the - in my view - unworkable Google Sites, and the transition seems to be going very messily.)

Any feedback on the new site is welcome.

UPDATE: I think the redirect is now working, at least partially and for some browsers (?!)

Philosophy, Short and Tweet

I’m holding a competition for the best Twitter tweet-length philosophical argument.  Winner gets their tweet on TAR, and much kudos.  Tweet-length means max. 140 characters (that’s characters, not words).  The topic is completely open. Originality is great but neat renderings of existing arguments are welcome too! 

I’ll choose a winner from among the entries received by noon (BST) a week from today (i.e. Thursday 16th April).

Enter by tweet (@carriejenkins) or to get the full use of your 140 characters enter by leaving a comment here or sending me an email.  Anyone at all is welcome to enter.  Looking forward to reading yours!

UPDATE: The results are now available!