Close Range

American Philosophical Association Anti-Discrimination Policy Petition

I guess I feel that signing this is a no-brainer, but in any event it is something relevant to the discipline which deserves attention.

American Philosophical Association Anti-Discrimination Policy Petition.

"kind of know how"

[What follows is a quick sketch of some thoughts I've had concerning knowledge how and "incompleteness" modifiers, based on a quick look at Utpal Lahiri's book Questions and Answers in Embedded Questions. Nevertheless, I've put them down because I feel bad that Dan Korman has been carrying the load lately; well, and also it would be great to get some feedback on this line of reasoning.]

It is pretty commonplace to modify knowledge how attributions with what I will call "incompleteness" modifiers, because they in some sense indicate an incomplete knowledge state. Some examples:

1. x kinda knows how to get back to the car.
2. x sorta knows how to fix the car.
3. x partly knows how to navigate the scene.

My sense is that sentences like (1) and (2) entail the denial of the unqualified knowledge attribution. So (1), for instance, entails that x does not know how to get back to the car. What seems to be going on with incompleteness modifiers is that they function to "walk back" the bald assertion that the subjection is in a certain state (e.g., of knowing how to get back to the car) and is instead in a state which is similar to that state but which falls short of it in some way.

Now, at first this might seem like a point in favor of a neo-Rylean theory of know-how. After all, abilities (as Ryle noted) come in degrees. By contrast, propositional knowledge doesn't appear to be gradable. But on reflection, the case isn't so clear. Here is the worry. Suppose that we accept that knowledge how to attributions attribute stable abilities. Then the most natural way to think about the effect of the incompleteness modifier is to take the truth conditions of the resulting sentence to be such that x kinda knows how to get back to the car iff x can come close to getting back to the car, but can't quite do it. But that doesn't seem right. If x is missing certain crucial bits of information, she might still kinda know how to get back, but could fail to even come close to actually getting back were she to try. Similarly for fixing the car: kinda knowing how to fix the car doesn't mean that if you were to try, you would in fact come close because the place at which you fail might lead you far astray.

If that is right, then the neo-Rylean will need to do some work to explain what "coming close to, but not reaching" means. So one question is how might they try to spell this out?

I want to contrast this proposal, with John's and my intelletualist proposal. On our view, knowing how to fix a car entails having a correct and complete conception of a way of fixing the the car. So the natural proposal from our perspective (I think) is to say that knowledge how to attributions containing incompleteness modifiers are true iff the subject has a correct and largely, but not fully, complete conception of a way of fixing the car. This gets the relationship with ability right. If certain x's conception of a way of fixing the car is lacking on crucial points, then were x to act on that conception she might misfire badly. Nevertheless, she qualifies as kinda knowing how to fix the car because her conception is largely complete. [Actually, on reflection, I think we'd be willing to say of someone who had a complete and largely, but not wholly, correct conception of a way of fixing a car that she kinda knows how to fix it. Which is all to the good.]

At any rate, I doubt this settles the issue one way or the other, but I definitely think it is an interesting angle to the debate. Thoughts?

The Vagueness of the Existential Quantifier

I’m in the middle of assembling a two-piece table. The top and the base didn’t compose anything when I started, and I’m now at a point at which they’re a borderline case of composing something. Consequently, it’s indeterminate whether there is anything in addition to the top and the base. Consequently, it’s indeterminate what there is. Q.E.D..

A lot of people think it can’t be indeterminate what there is. (What part of ‘Q.E.D.’ don’t they understand??) Ted Sider argues that, if it were indeterminate what there is, then some numerical sentence -- like ‘∃x∃y(Cx & Cy & x≠y & ∀z(Cz → (x=z v y=z)))’, which says that there are exactly two concrete objects -- would have to contain some vague expression. But numerical sentences don’t have any vague expressions. 

Here’s the argument that ‘∃’ isn’t vague (see p.128 in Sider’s book; he focuses on the universal quantifier).

    (S1) In order for ‘∃’ to be vague, ‘∃’ has to have multiple precisifications
    (S2) In order for ‘∃’ to have multiple precisifications, ‘∃’ has to have multiple candidate extensions.
    (S3) ‘∃’ doesn’t have multiple candidate extensions
    (C) So, ‘∃’  isn’t vague

Let’s grant S1 and S2 (though I’m happy to hear worries about these). Sider’s argument for S3 runs as follows: In order for there to be multiple candidate extensions for ‘∃’, there’d have to be something, x, that’s in one but not the other. But whichever extension doesn’t contain x isn’t even a candidate for being an extension of ‘∃’, since a constraint on any candidate precisification of ‘∃’ is that it ranges over everything.

Here’s a way of resisting the argument, which occurred to me after re-reading Katherine Hawley’s very nice paper “Vagueness and Existence”. (It’s not entirely clear to me whether this strategy for blocking the argument is just a straightforward application of what she already says in §5, or whether the strategy requires some substantial further assumptions.) Sider’s argument for S3 works just fine if we suppose that the candidate semantic value of ‘∃’ has to be a first-order property. But suppose (as some think, right?) that ‘∃’ expresses a second-order property. In that case, the candidate extensions of ‘∃’ are going to be sets of properties. Indeed, they'll be the same sets of properties that are candidates for being the extension of ‘has at least one instance’. Because the top and the base are a borderline case of composing something, the property being composed of the top and the base will be a borderline case of having an instance. (NB. It does *not* follow that there is an object that's a borderline case of being an instance of this property.)

We can now specify the different candidate extensions of ‘∃’: one includes the property of being composed of the top and the base, and the other doesn’t. And it certainly doesn’t follow from the fact that the latter extension doesn’t include this property that the corresponding precisification doesn’t range over everything. That’s because, on this understanding of the semantic value of ‘∃’, the extension of ‘∃’ doesn't consist of the things ‘∃’ ranges over, but rather the properties that have instances. So the argument fails if we take quantifiers to express second-order properties.

So ‘∃’ does have different precisifications on this picture., which differ with respect to whether they map the property of being composed of the top and the base onto T or F. A further question (which I’m having trouble thinking clearly about) is whether this opens the door to existential vagueness without ontic vagueness. After all, we can blame the vagueness of ‘∃’ on linguistic indecision with respect to the aforementioned candidate precisifications of ‘∃’. But perhaps ontic vagueness sneaks in in some other way.

CFP: Society for Exact Philosophy

The 37th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy will be held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. May 7-9, 2009.

Call for Papers

Paper submissions in all areas of analytic philosophy are welcomed. A selection of papers from the conference will be published in a special volume of Synthese, guest edited by Marc Moffett.

Paper submission deadline: January 31st, 2009.

"The SEP is dedicated to providing sustained discussion among researchers who believe that rigorous methods have a place in philosophical investigations." Information on the Society and its previous meetings is on the web at SEP Home.

Submission Instructions

Authors are requested to submit their papers according to the following guidelines: 1) Papers should be prepared for blind refereeing, 2) put into PDF file format, and 3) sent as an email attachment to the address given below -- where 4) the subject line of the submission email should include the key-phrase "SEP submission", and 5) the body text of the email message should constitute a cover page for the submission by including i) return email address, ii) author's name, iii) affiliation, iv) paper title, and v) short abstract.

Electronic submissions should be sent to <sep-conference_AT_phil.ufl.edu>

Nota Bene: All submissions will receive email confirmation of receipt. If your submission does not soon result in such an email confirmation, please send an inquiry either to the above address or to the local organizer.

Length

You should plan on having 40 minutes presentation time. We suppose this to be the principal guide in judging the length of the paper you send. It is the norm at SEP meetings for speakers to present rather than read their papers (and this is a virtue), so it is to be expected that presentation time and page length will only loosely correlate.

That said, do please bear in mind that a referee needs to both grasp the content of your paper and be able to readily envisage how you could present it in the available time. So, if your paper runs long, you might for this reason what to prepare a shortened version.

(If you prefer a page number specification to this human guideline: fifteen double-spaced pages is a common norm for forty minute talks.)

Why Must the Facts about Parthood be Systematizable?

I’m writing a review of Horgan and Potrč’s new book, Austere Realism, and I thought I’d float some of the ideas here first. Their big project is to defend a totally stripped-down ontology, in which (among other things) there are no tables, mountains, or other ordinary composites, but all the while insisting that ordinary utterances like ‘there are tables’ are strictly and literally true. I’m planning to have a second (and possibly third) post on their strategy for reconciling their revisionary metaphysics with ordinary discourse, but first I want to talk about one of their arguments against “naive commonsense ontology.”

The idea behind their “argument from arbitrariness” (§2.3, if you have the book) is that naive commonsense ontology is too messy and unsystematizable to possibly be right. Here I think is a fair reconstruction of the argument:

(P1) The correct answer to the special composition question, “under what conditions are some things the parts of a further thing?”, must be general and systematic.
(P2) There is no general and systematic answer to this question that accommodates the bulk of our intuitive judgments about when composition does and does not occur.
(C) So a great many of our intuitive judgments about when composition does and does not occur must be incorrect.

Anyone who’s attempted to give even a rough-and-ready answer to the special composition question that accommodates our intuitive judgments about composition is going to feel the force of P2. But why accept P1? Horgan and Potrč suggest that if indeed the compositional facts do not conform to some general and systematic answer to the special composition question, then they would have to be explanatorily basic (or “brute”), which surely they are not.  It is far from obvious, though, that one who embraces the bruteness of composition—i.e., that there is no general and systematic account of the conditions under which composition occurs—is thereby committed to the brutality of compositional facts—i.e., that facts about whether composition occurs are explanatorily basic. To deny that there are interesting general principles governing the conditions under which composition occurs seems entirely compatible with maintaining that, in each case, there are noncompositional facts in virtue of which the compositional facts are as they are.

Now for the ad hominem: Horgan and Potrč themselves defend just such a particularist claim later in the book. For reasons having to do with their revisionary semantic theory, they wind up embracing a semantic particularist thesis on which there are no general and systematic answers to a certain range of questions about the semantic facts (§6.4). But of course they don’t think that the unsystematizable semantic facts are explanatorily basic; rather, they’re explained by specific (nonsystematizable) facts about the speaker’s context together with facts about intentional mental states (§7.4.3).

One last thing: It’s worth comparing the special composition question to the “special inheritance question,” that is, under what conditions does a composite inherit properties from its proper parts? (I’m borrowing this case, and most of the examples, from Dave Liebesman’s very cool paper on generics.) Hard question. In order to have the property of touching the wall a chair only has to have a single part that’s touching the wall. But, in order to have the property of being plastic, the vast majority of its parts have to be plastic. And in order to have the property of being red, only the parts on its surface have to be red. And it may be 5.7 pounds even though none of its parts are 5.7 pounds. In other words, good luck trying to find a general and systematic answer to the special inheritance question! But we don’t find that intolerable; we don’t take that as grounds for skepticism about our “naive” intuitive judgments about inheritance. We don’t then become universalists about inheritance (all of thing’s parts have to be F in order for it to be F) or nihilists (inheritance never occurs) or god forbid organicists (composites only inherit properties from their living parts), for fear of being stuck with an unsystematizable mess. And notice that here, the bruteness of inheritance certainly doesn’t entail the brutality of inheritance facts: the table inherits the property of being red from its parts because the parts on its surface are all red.

First question: is there any reason why one who denies the bruteness of composition also has to deny the brutality of compositional facts?

Second question: is there any reason to think that bruteness of composition (without brutality of compositional facts) is worse than bruteness of semantics (without brutality of semantic facts)?

Third question: why is the lack of a systematic answer to the special composition question any more reason for skepticism about our intuitive judgments than the lack of a systematic answer to the special inheritance question?