Close Range

Sabbatical Replacement at UW

UPDATE: We are pleased to say that we have filled the position. Thank you for your inquiries.

Here is an opportunity to get some low-stress teaching experience outside your home institution.

University of Wyoming. Laramie, WY: We are seeking to hire a visiting instructor (ABD near completion) for a sabbatical replacement, either for the entire AY '08-'09 with a 1-2 load or for just the Spring of '09 with a 3 course load. Teaching duties will include a section of Introduction to Philosophy and the possibility of a graduate level (M.A.) seminar in your dissertation area. There are no service or advising duties. AOS and AOC are open, though we have a very slight preference for someone who can teach a seminar on Kant's First Critique. (We are more interested, however, in simply getting somebody good who will be fun to have around for the year!) Salary is $15,000 plus benefits. The University of Wyoming is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Send dossier including a personal letter of application, vita, transcripts (unofficial), teaching portfolio including teaching evaluations, and three letters of recommendation to: Professor Ed Sherline, Head, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts & Sciences, Dept. 3392, 1000 E. University Ave., Laramie, WY 82071. Mail inquires to Sherline@uwyo.edu. We are not doing formal interviews for this position, nor are we formally advertising it. We will fill the position as soon as we find a strong applicant. For more information see: http://www.uwyo.edu/Philosophy.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly.

SEP deadline almost here

The deadline for the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy is almost here, January 31st. 

The meeting will take place here in Laramie from May 12-17. The 16th will be a day off for enjoying some of the great wilderness/cultural opportunities in the area. We also have a great line-up of speakers on metaphysics and meaning: Graeme Forbes, George Bealer, and Charles Chihara. Finally, a selection of the papers will be published in Synthese.

Intellectualism and Ryle's Regress

I want to make two points in this post about know-how and intellectual ability: one critical, one defensive.

In The Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that a certain "intellectualist" view of the mind is mistaken. According to this intellectualist view, all intelligent action consists in a two-step process of theorising about a course of action and then making use of that theorising in order to go guide one's action. Ryle is not particularly clear on either of the two crucial notions invoked in this claim, namely, "intelligent action" and "theorising". For my purposes, it is adquate to suppose that theorising consists of any sort of propositional deliberation and, in particular, propositional deliberation about ways of acting. The other notion is more difficult to pin down. The following is, I believe, a fair characterization of the class: an action is an intelligent action iff it is the sort of action which can be appropriately characterized by terms of intellectual evaluation (as I will call them). The terms of intellectual evaluation are then given be (partial) enumeration: "witty", "clever", "stupid", "brilliant", etc.

Against this background, Ryle argues that intellectualism leads to a vicious, infinite regress. The argument goes roughly as follows.

1. According to intellectualism, every intelligent act of psi-ing involvess deliberation about a way of psi-ing together with the implementation of that way.
2. Implementing a way of psi-ing is an intelligent action.
3. But then in order to impeliment a way of psi-ing one must engage in (n+1)-order deliberation about a way of implementing one's n-order deliberation about a way of psi-ing together with an implemenatation of that way.
4. But then, in order to psi intelligently, one must first run through an infinite number of theoretical deliberations.
5. This is not possible.
6. Therefore, the intellectualist theory of intelligent action is wrong

In place of the intellectualist theory, Ryle proposes the following: x is able to psi intelligently iff x knows how to psi.

Now, it is relatively easy to see that there are a large number of cognitive abilities which do not give rise to intelligent actions and which are not appropopriately described in terms of know-how. For instance, I am able to see red, but seeing red is not an intelligent action, nor do I know how to see red. For instance, it is not appropriate (generally) to say things like, "Gee Marc, that was a clever seeing of red" or "Wow, you really know how to see red!" Here then is the critical point: the fact that seeing red is not an intelligent action is a bit of an embarassment for Ryle; so is the fact that I don't know how to see red. The problem that such cases give rise to is that cognitive abilities fall into two classes, those that give rise to intelligent actions and those that don't. And the challenge for the Rylean is to say what distinguishes the two (and why) in such a way that does not entail intellectualism. From what I can see of the terrain, this doesn't look like an easy task. For instance, I doubt that it can be done simply in terms of learning. For instance, there is nothing concpetually incoherent about saying that somebody know how to psi innately (or at birth).

But these observations also provide the basis for an intellectualist response to Ryle's regress. For once it becomes clear that there are cognitive abilities associated with our intellectual lives which do not give rise to intelligent actions (or know-how), it becomes clear that there is very little intuitive support for premise (2)--the claim that implementing a way of psi-ing is always an intelligent action. But if implementation is not always an intelligent action, then Ryle's regress fails.

Survey

I’m inclined to accept the unpopular view that (i) there are tables, mountains, and pretty much all of the other kinds of material objects that we ordinarily take there to be, and (ii) there are no incars, fusions of noses and the Eiffel Tower, and other strange things dreamt up by metaphysicians. There are lots of reasons for rejecting this view. Some of those reasons get more attention than others. What I’m curious about is which of those reasons actually worry people the most -- that is, which of them, if debunked, would go the furthest toward relieving anxiety about this view. Here are some categories of reasons:

(1) Those having to do with vagueness (e.g., the Lewis-Sider argument from vagueness)

(2) Those having to do with co-location

(3) Those having to do with explanatory redundancy (e.g., Merricks’s causal exclusion argument)

(4) Those having to do with the imaginability of strange ways of carving up the world into objects

(5) Those having to do with the difficulty of specifying interesting general principles that can accommodate all or most of our intuitions

(6) Those having to do with the subject matter of material-object metaphysics (e.g., intuitions don’t matter when the object of inquiry is existence/synthetic truths/natural joints)

I’m interested to hear which of these actually make people the most nervous about the (dare I say) commonsense view of material objects. (Feel free to rank them if you find more than one compelling.)