Both Kinds of Philosophy: Country and Western

More updates from the Arizona Ontology conference. Our pictures are on our Facebook. Carrie Jenkins has great pics on her page.

John MacFarlane, seen here, defends a paper co-written with Niko Kolodny, in which they argue that there isn't a subjective 'ought' for deliberation and a separate objective 'ought' for advice. Rather, there is just one assessment-sensitive 'ought' that can explain it's dual role in deliberation and advice.

Daniel Nolan argued that, of nomological necessity, there are no quantities in between the fixed quantities that quantum physics deals with. There is a physically important sense in which the hydrogen atom, jumping from -13.6eV to -3.4eV, couldn't have passed through states -10eV or -5.1eV. The fundamtental quantities of quantum reality are discrete.

The thesis of Ted Sider's paper was that neither existence monism nor priority monism has legs. For instance, priority monism, the thesis that no natural features are had by any object other than the world-object, entails that every sub-world object has all the same natural features, both intrinsic and extrinsic. To make a long story short, priority monism can't explain the rich structure of the universe.

Jenann Ismael gave an exciting paper arguing that the notion of objective chance appears in physics much earlier than most philosophers suppose. It is implicit even in classical mechanics! Indeed, it was argued, that one can't do physics without ruling out various possibilities in a way that is guided by objective chance.

Berit and I discussed essence, limit assumptions about relevance, and our impossible worlds approach to counterfactuals. Overall, the conference was philosophically very rich and a great deal of fun.

Ontology Western Style

This is a live post from the Arizona Ontology Conference, hosted by the department of philosophy at the University of Arizona and organized by Laurie Paul and her assistant Sara Bernstein. Thomas Hofweber is currently defending his "Ambitious Yet Modest Metaphysics", which attempts to explain how to do ontology without deferring completely and reverently to the sciences and without embracing the special technical notions from metaphysics.

Earlier in the conference. Brian Weatherson offered a view prescribing that we not explain causative relations (e.g., those expressed by 'opened', 'killed', 'broke', 'saved', etc.) in terms of causation but rather explain causation in terms of such causative relations. The disjunctive account says that c causes e iff either (1) e counterfactually depends on c or (2) an agent of c stands in a causative relation to an e state. There was much discussion about how to demarcate the class of causatives, including persuasive commentary from Elizabeth Barnes.

Hilary Greaves gave us an education in physics while defending a paper that she co-authored with Frank Arntzenius. The paper explores some of Richard Feynman's ideas in the context of a recent debate about time reversal in classical electromagnetism.

Andy Egan argued that disputes about taste hang on self-attributions of dispositional properties. The function of disagreements about taste is to get one's interlocutor to self-attribute such properties. The thesis was to explain why disputes about taste are defective (when they are defective) in terms of this key role played by taste claims.

The after dinner talk last night was given by Robin Jeshion She argued that, in the context of naive realism, descriptivism can't work since it does such a lousy job at capturing spatial representational content.

More to come, including pictorial evidence of the festivities.

"God bless us, every one!"

Berit says I should get my ass back on my blog. So here's the update. Christmas in Jersey with the family. There are rumors of a reunion with the Brooklyn side. They usually like to add a little coffee to their sambuca, so I expect it to be colorful. Giving commentary about intuitionistic truth at the APA. Will post on that soon. Looking forward to catching up with friends in Baltimore, although I'll be pretty busy with my department's metaphysics hire. May spend some time in NY and then off to Tucson for what I expect to be a very intense ontology conference. Berit and I will ride horses across the desert in the rain and discuss our counterfactual theory of essential properties.

ANU offers to Schellenberg and Southwood

ANU recently delivered offers to Susanna Schellenberg (Pittsburgh) and Nicholas Southwood (ANU).

Schellenberg currently holds a postdoc at ANU. Her paper "The Situation-Dependency of Perception" is forthcoming in JPhil and "Action and Self-location in Perception" appeared in Mind. Her book in progress is titled, Perception in Perspective.

Southwood currently holds a postdoc at ANU and was a Fulbright Scholar at Princeton University. His book Contractualism and the Foundations of Morality is forthcoming with OUP.

With the recent hire of Jonathan Schaffer, acceptances from Schellenberg and Southwood would really add to the strength of the department.

UPDATE: Schellenberg and Southwood have accepted.

Mindpapers

Dave Chalmers and his assistant editor, David Bourget, have launched Mindpapers, which is a bibliographic database of over 13,000 papers in the philosophy of mind. Dave discusses the new tools over at Fragments---among them, highly flexible search options and statistical information. For instance, based on Google Scholar data, we find the top 100 most cited works in Mindpapers.

Here are the top 10 most cited by philosophers:

1. [3060] Jerry Fodor (1983). The Modularity of Mind. (More) [7.2b. Modularity]

2. [2608] Daniel Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained. (More) [1.4c. Dennett's Functionalism]

3. [2469] Gilbert Ryle (1949). The Concept of Mind. (More) [4.3a. Logical Behaviorism]

4. [1974] Saul Kripke (1972). Naming and Necessity. (More) [1.3c. Kripke's Modal Argument]

5. [1750] David Chalmers (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. (More) [1.1a. Consciousness, General Works]

6. [1612] Daniel Dennett (1987). The Intentional Stance. (More) [2.1b. The Intentional Stance]

7. [1451] Jerry Fodor (1975). The Language of Thought. (More) [2.1a. The Language of Thought]

8.[1388] Jon Barwise & John Perry (1983). Situations and Attitudes. (More) [2.3a. Information-Based Accounts]


9. [1266] Jerry Fodor & Zenon Pylyshyn (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture. (More) [6.3a. Connectionism and Compositionality]

10.[1257] John Searle (1980). Minds, brains and programs. (More) [6.1c. The Chinese Room]

Here are the top 10 most cited overall:

1. David Marr (1982). Vision. Freeman. (Cited by 5170 | Google | More links | Annotation | Edit) [7.4d. Levels of Analysis]
Defines computational, algorithmic and implementational levels.

2. James Gibson (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin. (Cited by 4886 | Google | More links | Edit) [7.2e. Embodiment and Situated Cognition]

3. Antonio Damasio (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam. (Cited by 4670 | Google | More links | Edit) [5.1c. Emotions]
Additional links for this entry:

4. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic & Amos Tversky (eds.) (1982). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press. (Cited by 3476 | Google | More links | Edit) [7.2d. Rationality]

5. Jerry Fodor (1983). The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press. (Cited by 3060 | Google | More links | Annotation | Edit) [7.2b. Modularity]
Perception happens in informationally encapsulated, domain-specific modules. Central systems aren't encapsulated, and so may be impossible to understand.

6. Edwin Hutchins (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press. (Cited by 2764 | Google | More links | Edit) [2.4h. Collective Intentionality]

7. Terry Winograd & Fernando Flores (1987). Understanding Computers and Cognition. Addison-Wesley. (Cited by 2756 | Google | More links | Edit) [6.6. Philosophy of AI, Misc]

8. Daniel Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained. Penguin. (Cited by 2608 | Google | More links | Annotation | Edit) [1.4c. Dennett's Functionalism]
Argues against the "Cartesian Theatre", advocating a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness. Presents a detailed model of processes underlying verbal report, and argues that there is nothing else (e.g. qualia) to explain.

9. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. (Cited by 2522 | Google | Edit) [8.3j. The Stream of Consciousness]

10. Gilbert Ryle (1949). The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson and Co. (Cited by 2469 | Google | More links | Annotation | Edit) [4.3a. Logical Behaviorism]

How do they compile such a massive resource...you ask? Apparently, the software harvests JSTOR and other archives and personal websites for papers, and recognizes and parses bibliographic information. Then if the program determines that the entry is highly likely relevant to Mindpapers, it is automatically categorized based on further Bayesian programming. The statistical information is automated as well. Pretty cool!