Black Friday

So I'm one of those nincompoops who woke up at 430am yesterday morning to partake of the shopping frenzy known as "Black Friday." Nothing catastrophic occurred - though I did bring a baseball bat and brass knuckles just in case that Mom of four wanted to challenge me for the latest "Tickle-me Elmo" gadget I promised to give to my niece and nephew on Christmas morning (ahhh... I feel that giddy Christmas spirit!).

Anyway, I decided to purchase a desk - yes, for myself - because my old one just wasn't cutting it anymore. The new desk is twice is large, so that I can spread out all the work I have to do on it. Now, I just have to do the work. (darnit!)

Dare I say this on blogger.com...

For the past few weeks, I've been dealing with the winding-down of the semester. The "winding-down" I speak of includes creating final exams, assuring students of their status in my class (i.e., passing/failing), and preparing for next semester's classes. On top of all this, there's my dissertation which I need to finish soon - very soon.

In preparation for next semester's classes, I've been considering the use of a blog. Subsequently, I've been tinkering with different platforms for the class, e.g., blogger.com, Wordpress's blog, and Movable Type. Movable Type costs money, so that's out. (I may be employed, but I'm not about to spend money setting up a blog for student consumption.) That leaves Blogger and Wordpress.

Blogger has been a good outlet for my thoughts. It has provided me with the tools I need to share my thoughts with the "world." ("World" here includes only those people reasonably familiar with the blogosphere and its philosophic subdomain.) But Blogger doesn't allow one to categorize posts easily and recent comments aren't posted without some additional html code. So, at least for these few reasons, I decided to take a gander at Wordpress.

I'm impressed with Wordpress's features. It permits multiple users to post to the blog, it allows one to categorize posts by subject matter, and recent comments appear on the sidebar. I'll probably end up using Wordpress for the class, so here's the class's blog address for interested readers: http://oohlah.wordpress.com. (The name of the blog is pretty lame, and I'm pretty sure the latin doesn't work the same as creatio ex nihilo. But it's all I could come up with at the time.) I welcome visitors to read, review, and comment. Also, anyone who is proficient in philosophy of religion and who would want to be a guest blogger please post a comment here or email me at joeulatowski at weber dot edu.

Tidying up

I've noticed that I've got a few posts lingering in draft form. I'd like to get those out to the public domain before the end of the week. These posts should appear very soon.

I expect that blogging will be light around Thanksgiving, so this post is just forewarning for interested readers. Have a great Thanksgiving!

Distinguishing between one's own actions

Suppose that the coarse-grained account, i.e., the Anscombe-Davidson line, of action individuation is correct. On this account, all actions are bodily movements. The description of bodily movements corefer. So, for every action description, each perfect nominal denotes the same action. For example, "Smith's arm movements," "Smith's pump operation," "Smith's replenishment of the water supply," and "Smith's poisoning the inhabitants" all refer to the same bodily movements. Thus, since all actions are bodily movements, the actions, "Smith is moving his arms," "Smith is operating the pump," etc., all refer to the same action.

Goldman and others have raised objections against the coarse-grained account. They have pointed to the fact that if different actions have different properties, then actions are distinct and action descriptions cannot corefer. (We might align fine-grained accounts of action individuation with imperfect nominals for exactly this reason.) Similarly, Goldman and others have argued that the coarse-grained account runs into trouble with regards to temporal order. If indeed all action descriptions corefer, then it seems that Smith has poisoned the inhabitants of the house well before the poison reaches the occupants. This seems awkward; perhaps we could say it sounds counterintuitive.

(Well, that is how it seems to me, Goldman, and a host of others. Someone pointed out to me in conversation recently that this is not so awkward. He mentioned a scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet where Hamlet announces, "you have killed me" before being stabbed with a poison-tipped sword. In such literary accounts, temporal order is not a problem for coreferential action descriptions. If it's not a problem for literary accounts, then it might not be considered counterintuitive.)

What if Goldman and others have missed an opportunity to deflate the coarse-grained account because it succumbs to a sort of vagueness problem? Let me explain.

If all actions are bodily movements, and if all descriptions of bodily movements corefer, then all descriptions of action refer to the same action. There may be a way of showing how my different bodily movements, say "Smith reads the newspaper in the morning" and "Smith falls asleep to the radio in the evening," corefer. If they corefer, then there's no way of distinguishing between an agent's actions. All of the action descriptions we can generate about an agent's actions from birth to death refer to the same action.

Since the agent is the common denominator of all the actions, every action the agent performs becomes virtually indistinguishable. We can just think of the agent slipping from one action to the next without there being much of a difference between the two actions. If we cannot distinguish between the agent's actions, then his entire life is one big action.

Two problems seem to persist in an account like this. First, it seems to me that it is fallacious. That we cannot distinguish between the agent's actions in shorter time intervals does not mean we cannot distinguish between the agent's actions in larger time-folds. We should be able to distinguish between "Mary's walking as a one year old" and "Mary's walking as an eighty year old." If we can distinguish between these two action descriptions, then surely we can distinguish between shorter time slices of Mary's actions.

Second, time is not irrelevant on Davidson's coarse-grained account. Since it seems that we would have to amend each of our actions with the locution "at time t1" (whatever t1 stands for), we could distinguish between action descriptions using the time locution. Actions that occur at such-and-such a time will have a set of descriptions that refer to it. When some action description captures something outside of that time-slice, it is not identical to the action description that designates something that occurs within that time-slice.

The Leiter Philosophical Gourmet Report and Job Placement: An Attempt (albeit a sorry one) to Defend the Report

The 2006-2008 Philosophical Gourmet Report ("PGR") is now posted. One can access it by clicking here.

I have been somewhat critical of the PGR in the past, but I've learned that it's not the best idea to be critical of something as ubiquitous as the PGR. When so many people agree that it's something worthwhile for prospective graduate students to review, critical examination is fruitless.

Some discussion is circulating in the blogosphere criticizing the PGR. It's related to this post. Keith DeRose, a member of Certain Doubts and a faculty member of a highly ranked PGR program (Yale), has begun a discussion of the critical post here. Leiter, editor of the PGR, responds here. (I gather his response is merely in jest since he commits an egregious fallacy.)

With regards to the first post, I want to respond to one of its criticisms. The criticism attempts to show a failed correlation between faculty quality and reputation and job placement. I suppose that the argument runs as follows:

1. The PGR is based on faculty quality and reputation. (premise)
2. Philosophy departments do not consult the PGR in hiring practices. (premise)
3. Thus, job placement has little to do with faculty quality and reputation. (1,2)

This is a simplified version of the argument, but I think it remains true to criticism #3. I don't think this is a charitable interpretation of Leiter's discussion of job placement.

When Leiter writes that faculty reputation and quality correlates well with job placement, I gather he's referring to the efforts of faculty members to place their students in tenure-track or permanent positions. His reference is not to whether hiring departments consult the PGR for the job candidate's institutional affiliation. So, on this account, a reputable faculty member suggesting or endorsing a particular job candidate for a faculty position may play in the candidate's favor, precisely because that faculty member is highly reputable.

From a different direction, we may argue that choosing a graduate program is important for success as a job candidate. If the student attends a program ranked highly by PGR, then s/he will obtain an excellent education from highly regarded faculty members. The reputation of faculty members comes from the quality of work they have produced throughout their career. If the graduate student attends the program where there are many reputable faculty members, then s/he has learned from the best. Learning from the best may translate into high quality work throughout the course of his/her career, including graduate school, e.g., dissertation, publications, etc. High quality work is rewarded with a tenure-track position. Thus, choosing a highly ranked graduate program is important for success as a job candidate and - dare I say - beyond.

I commend the blogger for having the courage to criticize PGR, but I think - at least with respect to criticism #3 - his argument is slightly misguided. And this comes from someone who is not at a graduate program currently ranked by the PGR.

Austin on Individuation (Take Two)

As far as I see it, the primary focus of Austin's work is exposing a problem in the way some other philosophers have assumed that descriptions correspond to a state-of-affairs or events. His discussion of various speech acts and whether they designate facts or reactions to behavior (behabitives), etc. is a critique.

In "The Happy Truth: J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words," Alice Crary says much the same as I do, but her concern is truth. She concludes that if we take Austin at his word, all truth theorists are hopelessly confused. Her interpretation depends on a view of Austin that departs significantly from orthodox interpretations of Austin's work. Current orthodoxy asserts that Austin's project is classificatory (e.g., John Searle's Speech Acts or Expression and Meaning).

I endorse Crary's alternative interpretation of Austin, and I want to apply such an interpretation of Austin to show that action theorists may be hopelessly confused, especially when it comes to the problem of action individuation.

Action theorists resist discussion of action individuation. The primary reason for resistance to discussion of action individuation is that it is merely a verbal dispute. Action theorists contend that each of the accounts fits the way action descriptions refer to some action. We can't distinguish one account of action individuation from another because they all "state and discuss the metaphysical questions about action" in equal light (Ginet On Actions, 70). In other words, all of the accounts are coherent solutions to the problem, "how many actions did some agent perform?"

Since action theorists concerned with action individuation provide many thought experiments about how their account of action individuation seems better equipped to handle folk observations and since some action theorists want to construct a folk account of action, it seems like we could conduct an experiment to show something about action individuation. (And I have devised as much, but the following is merely speculative.) Suppose that the results of the empirical investigation indicated that interpretations varied with different people. So, what we may conclude is that not just one account of action individuation captures exactly what an ordinary person may mean when it comes to distinguishing between actions. This is as true for different philosophical investigations as it is for a folk account.

One may be tempted to say that the action theorist is correct - action individuation is just a verbal dispute. But we could continue the argument in the following way.

In accounts of action individuation by Goldman, Davidson, Thalberg, Ginet, etc., the metaphysical notion of distinct action is introduced as a projection or correlate of sentence meaning. No sense has been made of any one "action description" over any other. Thus, action theorists have been hopelessly confused about how to distinguish between different action descriptions, especially in the case of a folk account.

There's a lot of filling-in to do with the argument, but - as I said earlier - this is just a stab at something more comprehensive.

Austin on Individuation (Take One)

I had a chance this weekend to revisit Austin's How to Do Things with Words. The book has had its share of interpreters, most notably John Searle. What I find suspect is the way some interpreters have thought the book is about classifying speech acts. From what Austin says on p. 12, one would think that he's trying to undermine the "common philosophical assumption" that we can classify things using conceptual analysis.

Perhaps we can think about Austin's project as undermining the classificatory system of speech acts many have assumed he's trying to set up.

This is a vague start, but I'll post an argument about this point soon.

pahking the kah...

This result doesn't surprise me in the least.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Boston You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don't. Of course, that doesn't mean you are from the Boston area, you may also be from New Hampshire or Maine.
North Central
The West
The Midland
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Consciousness, Conscious, Zombie, Zombies, Personal Identity and Self Identity (oh yeah and Chalmers too)

Trent Dougherty, of Counsel of Trent and This is the Name of this Blog, pointed to a new feature in Google. It's known as Google Trends.

If I'm understanding Google correctly (and I could be wrong b/c the language on the web site isn't very clear), Google Trends analyzes the search term (or terms, up to 5) you enter relative to the number of searches done on Google over time. As a part of the analysis, Google Trends gives you the top cities, regions, and languages for the first term you entered.

(Note that the search results do not necessarily coincide with the philosophical issues you're thinking of. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to limit searches to philosophical terms that overlap w/ terms of ordinary language. E.g., when you search "free will," the results seem related to "free will astrology.")

After I played around with it for a bit, I noticed that if you enter different variations of a word, the list of top cities and regions change (sometimes dramatically). Here's a flavor of what I mean:

Consciousness:
1. Chennai, India
2. Pleasanton, CA
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Austin, TX
5. Seattle, WA
6. Portland, OR
7. Philadelphia, PA
8. New York, NY
9. Vancouver, BC Canada
10. Boston, MA

Conscious:
1. Austin, TX
2. Pleasanton, CA
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Chicago, IL
5. Portland, OR
6. Denver, CO
7. Seattle, WA
8. New York, NY
9. Los Angeles, CA
10. Perth, Australia

Zombie:
1. Perth, Australia
2. Portland, OR
3. Brisbane, Australia
4. Seattle, WA
5. San Diego, CA
6. Irvine, CA
7. Chicago, IL
8. Melbourne, Australia
9. Vancouver, BC Canada
10. Montreal, QB Canada

Zombies:
1. Irvine, CA
2. Madrid, Sapin
3. Los Angeles, CA
4. Barcelona, Spain
5. Seattle, WA
6. Mexico City, Mexico
7. Philadelphia, PA
8. Chicago, IL
9. San Diego, CA
10. San Francisco, CA

Personal Identity:
1. Sydney, Australia
2. Washington, D.C.
3. Brisbane, Australia
4. Melbourne, Australia
5. Los Angeles, CA
6. Seattle, WA
7. San Diego, CA
8. Manchester, United Kingdom
9. New York, NY
10. San Francisco, CA

Self Identity:
1. Brisbane, Australia
2. Perth, Australia
3. Sydney, Australia
4. Melbourne, Australia
5. London, United Kingdom
6. Manchester, United Kingdom
7. San Francisco, CA
8. New York, NY
9. Toronto, ON Canada
10. Los Angeles, CA

David Chalmers: (what can I say, I was thinking about phil. mind and his name popped into my head.)
1. Houston, Australia
2. Melbourne, Australia
3. Sydney, Australia
4. New York, NY
5. Toronto, ON Canada
6. London, United Kingdom

Words w/ not enough search volume to show in a graph: intentional action, intentionality, possible objects, possible worlds, Monads, compatibilism, incompatibilism, hard determinism,and soft determinism.

For a laugh, search for Rene Descartes, John Locke (notice that John Locke's retiring after 23 years with Sysco. Congratulations John!), David Hume, and George Berkeley (in separate searches). Is Bogota, Colombia an early modern stronghold?

Anti-psychologism and Action Theory

Practical reasoning is figuring out what to do. To do is to act. Therefore, the pattern of practical inferences can be read off of actions.

On some accounts, an action is an action because it is directed at a goal. The goal-directedness of an action is derived from one being in an appropriate psychological state, e.g., wanting to do x and believing that by performing y one will attain x. So, on accounts like this, it seems that one has to figure out how the mind works for a full-blooded action theory.

Perhaps these accounts have failed because they are overwhelmingly psychologistic. The popular belief is that psychologism failed for logic and - likewise - for rationality generally. Pick your favorite anti-psychologistic argument from Frege or Husserl. Maybe what action theorists need to do then is not to look at how the mind works but to look at actions themselves.

Some bodily movements are actions. For instance, my moving my hand to depress the button is a bodily movement that is an action. Yet, if someone shocks me with an electrical currenty and my hand moves in such a way that I depress the button, then the movement of my body is not an action. We may describe actions in numerous ways. Under some descriptions, the bodily movement may be an action while under other descriptions the bodily movement may not be an action. Individuating descriptions of action may help us get clear on whether the bodily movement is an action or not. Therefore, if we're seeking the structure of action, we first need an account of how to individuate actions.

The Transparency of Hiring Practices

I don't necessarily want to complain about hiring practices because I'm not in a position to do so at this time; however, I want to point out something that I find very frustrating for those of us who are on the job market.

Here's my problem: what should job candidates think when the AOS and AOC of the job advertisement are the same as the AOS and AOC of an adjunct or a visitor currently employed by the department?

It appears to me that there are numerous ways to interpret the advertisement. First, the adjunct or visitor might fit the advertisement specializations and competencies because they had hired the adjunct or visitor to fill a person's spot with similar interests. The person for whom the adjunct or visitor is replacing has decided not to return to the university, so they want to hire a person with similar interests.

On the first interpretation, there's nothing terribly frustrating for the job candidate. It appears that an external job candidate stands an equal chance of being hired, just so long as the candidate has similar interests.

Second, the department may have a need for a person with specialization(s) and competence(s) in those areas. Regardless of whether the adjunct or visitor has similar interests, the department seeks the best candidate to fill the position. If a person in the pool of applicants has similar interests, then they will be just as likely to be interviewed and to be hired as the adjunct or visitor.

Again, on this interpretation, there's nothing terribly frustrating for the job candidate. The department has a need for those interests, and they wish to fill it with the best candidate. It's merely - some form of - coincidence that the adjunct or visitor has similar interests.

Finally, the department may be pleased with the adjunct or visitor's work, and they want to hire her/him. Since their university requires them to advertise nationally, they post an advertisement tailored to the adjunct or visitor's interests. The adjunct or visitor applies, and s/he gets the job.

This is the interpretation I find most frustrating, but I don't find it frustrating because it is morally reprehensible or because it us unfair to other candidates. I don't think one could morally condemn the action at all; I don't even think it is unfair for the department to engage in this sort of practice. I would suggest that the department should make an incredibly tight deadline for potential job candidates to meet so we would know that is our cue not to apply for the position. For example, if the JFP is due out Oct. 10th, then the department should have a deadline of - say - Oct. 17th. That would prevent us job candidates from spending our own money and our department's money sending out our dossiers.

In an ideal world, I'd like to see the following appear in the JFP when something like the last interpretation occurs: "Look buddy, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting this job. Continue reading b/c we already have someone in mind for filling this position. Your time and money would be better spent at the penny arcade than trying to apply for this job! I'm sure we would have many excellent applications if we actually read them, but we don't have to because - well - we already have the perfect candidate."

How many people share my name?

Parableman cited the following in a post; I decided to check it out myself. My name is fairly unique, so I didn't think many would share it. My suspicion is true. Only 4 people share my name. One is my dad. Since they got the data from the 1990 census, one of the other three is my grandfather. But he died in 2003. That leaves 2 unaccounted for. Also, as an interesting side note, I checked my Mom's name; there are no others in the U.S. with her name.

One has to keep in mind that the website gives out incomplete data. One need only look at the FAQ for more information. The website provides only an estimate of how many other people share your name, and it should not be considered an exact number.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 4 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

ADDENDUM: In reading comments to Parableman's blog, I've noticed something interesting about our interpretation of what we're getting from the HowManyOfMe.com website. Notice that the graphic above says, "There are 4 people with my name in the U.S.A." The statement is ambiguous. On the one hand, it could mean that there are 4 people, including me, who have my name. On the other hand, the website asks "how many share your name?" so it might be that there are 4 people, not including me.

Also, since the website does not share with the reader the statistical test it uses to determine how many people "share" your name, it is difficult to determine the reliability of the data. Some statistical tests are better than others when it comes to demonstrating the frequency of some outcome in a population set.

Blog's acting funny...

I've noticed some instability in writing comments for blog entries. If you have trouble writing comments, i.e., blogger.com kicks you out b/f you submit the post, please let me know offline at joeulatowski at weber dot edu.

How is this not copyright infringement?

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau posts excerpts from Thoreau's works. I'm a fan of Thoreau, and I'm glad to see another fan of his works. But I don't understand how the blog hasn't violated copyright laws.

(Let me admit that I don't know copyright laws well enough to comment any further than I already have. But if somebody has knowledge of these laws, please explain. I've always thought that reproducing en masse the works of another author constitutes copyright infringement.)

A short argument for the importance of ordinary intuitions

I've been thinking about the importance of folk intuitions for metaphysical analysis, and I guess this is indicative of my joining the ranks of a popular trend in the past few weeks to attend to metaphilosophical arguments (see here, here, here, here, and here for much better attempts at metaphilosophical arguments). This comes up because it's a part of my dissertation. I've got a few arguments up my sleeve, but I want to try this one first. Let me start by providing some context clues for why I need the argument, then I'll provide the brief (but perhaps powerful) argument.

A popular reason to dismiss folk intuitions is that they are useless when it comes to metaphysical analysis. For example, in the exploration of concepts like "action" or "identity," folk intuitions are too imprecise to be useful, so it is up to the analyst to prescribe normative features of the concept, i.e., the necessary and sufficient conditions. The folk lack the ability to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions of concepts like "action" or "identity." So, if the analyst seeks a folk theoretic account, it is not enough to describe the folk concepts. Folk responses are not enough to settle metaphysical issues.

Why ought we reject this argument?

The concepts of action and identity seem to be mute, indistinct, and inaccessbile to analysis until they have emerged in discourse capable of intersubjective communication. There is nothing beyond language that we can use as a common meeting ground or reference point for intersubjective communication. After all, individual experience is private. The ordinary language of the folk has already proved itself as an effective means of expression of the principal aspects of reality as constantly experienced by people. Had ordinary language not succeeded, it would have given way long ago to more adequate terms of linguistic expression. Hence, the folks' ordinary language is peculiarly fruitful, reliable, and stable as a ground for metaphysical reflection.

(The starting point of all conceptual analysis is to be found in the fundamental structures of the terms of ordinary language.)

Some have asked, so I'll tell ya...

Some folks have been emailing me recently to find out what clubs and what type of ball I'm playing now. So, let me take this opportunity share it publicly. (For those of you not interested in golf, I would stop reading now.)

Amazingly enough, I'm still playing the same clubs I was playing in college and high school. This is partially due to the fact that I've been constrained by my economic position. A graduate student stipend is barely enough to live on. But, more importantly, it is because the clubs I have were fit to my swing (thanks to Drew Pierson of the Landfall Club), and it is because the quality of my game hasn't diminished very much, even if I haven't been able to play as often as I would like.

What am I playing?

Driver: Callaway WarBird 9 degree (firm); this is one of two clubs not fit for my swing by Drew Pierson. (acquired 1995)
Spoon: Taylor Made Raylor 14 degree (acquired 1994)

2-PW: Lynx Tour Ltd. (acquired 1991)
SW: Lynx 58 degree (Dynamic Gold, X-100); this the other club not fit for my swing by Drew Pierson. (acquired 1995)
Putter: Wilson TPA XXIV 35-inch (acquired 2005); when I was in high school, I played the Taylor Made TPA XXIV 35-inch putter. Either I lost it or I sold it when I was in college. I went to a used golf shop in Murray in 2005, and I found one there for $10. I had to buy it. The Wilson TPA XXIV was popular in 1988, 89, 90, so I assume that that is about how old my putter is. Occasionally, I'll put with "The THING" by Natural Golf (the weird putter Paul Azinger used to win the Tour Championship a few years back) or a Ping Anser 3. I'm not very accurate with "The THING" outside of 10-feet, so I don't use it very often. The Anser 3 is a great putter, but I have to play the Wilson - it's a matter of tradition and accuracy.

Ball: anything by Bridgestone; usually Precept Distance. If I had a deep bank roll, I'd play the B330.