OrangePhilosophy

New Philosophy of Biology Blog

is up and running here. Check it out. Thanks to Experimental Philosophy for the info.

Double Positive

Sidney Morgenbesser, philosophy professor at Columbia University, died yesterday. NPR had a little tidbit on him this afternoon, demonstrating that a famous urban legend really happened. One of his colleagues was on the air recounting it.

J.L. Austin was giving a talk formal semantics and pragmatics or something like that, and he said something about double negatives canceling out and making a positive but that double positives never turn to a negative. Morgenbesser, under his breath and not expecting to be heard, said "Yeah, yeah..." Everyone in the room did hear and of course broke out in laughter.

I heard this story without any names and without it being said to be even related to philosophy. I think it was "Yeah, right!" instead. I had assumed it was just another urban legend like most stories about professors, but it turns out to be a true urban legend.

Syracuse Workshop on the A Priori

Well, the SWAP will occur on August 20-22, and there's a webpage on the conference available here (thanks to Brendan Murday for organizing the conference and for putting up the page). There's already a couple of the read-ahead papers posted on the webpage. Although Brian Weatherson's paper is not a read-ahead one, interested conference-goers or the jealous excluded can check out a draft version of his "From Anti-Scepticism to the Contingent A Priori". Old hands who were here when Brian was will certainly welcome him back with beer and objections.

John Edwards the Epistemicist

John Edwards is on right now talking about the two Americas and pointing to differences of degree along a wide spectrum while talking as if they're sharp lines (i.e. differences of kind). Does this mean he's an epistemicist about vagueness?

Seminar on Plurality

Tom McKay approved of my idea of posting his announcement about his seminar on plural quantification, along with related topics (such as non-distributive predication). Tom has a new book on this subject which you can check out by clicking on the departmental webpage on the links list, then clicking on faculty, then McKay [sorry, for some reason my linking feature isn't working now].

I think some local-ish non-Syracusan (e.g., Cornell, Rochester) folk might be interested in attending. Here's the announcement [note that Tom will not have computer access until the end of the month and so you should wait a bit to email him or post questions here for him until August] :

Seminar, Fall 2004, on "Plurality" (McKay)

There are lots of topics, and I want students' own interests to determine some of what we do.

My fundamental project (in a book I have just finished) has been to explore the issue of expanding first-order predicate logic to allow non-distributive predication. A predicate F is distributive iff whenever some things are F, each of them is F. Consider:

(1) They are students. They are young.
(2) They are classmates. They are surrounding the building.
The predications in (1) are distributive, but the predications in (2) are non-distributive. Non-distributive plural predication is irreducibly plural. In ordinary first-order logic, only distributive predicates are employed.

The incorporation of irreducibly plural predicates is related to a wide range of issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language, foundations of mathematics, logic, and natural language semantics. Some of the issues that we might consider:

Knowing That and Knowing How

I've begun delving into the literature recently on the difference between knowing that and knowing how (re-delving, actually, but that's neither here nor there). I've been quite surprised to find that it almost all jumps off from Ryle's discussion of the topic in The Concept of Mind which I believe was published @ 1950.

I see hardly any mention of this topic other than in response to Ryle, and not much on the topic pre-Ryle. This strikes me as odd for such an important epistemological distinction (I realize that the distinction was recognized, pre-Ryle -- I'm wondering if it was philosophically analyzed). Am I missing a mountain of books/journals/articles out there (perhaps in the non-analytic tradition)? Or did Ryle really essentially begin this discussion?