groan
April 9, 2008Bainbridge waxes ridiculous:
You want to help make society a better place? You want to eliminate poverty? Become a corporate lawyer.
It’s all downhill from there.
not proud of posting this
April 8, 2008But I can’t help myself ^-^
Y-C and I saw them in Chicago a few weeks ago. I’m ambivalent about Stephin Merritt, but the show was a knockout.
take nothing for granted
March 25, 2008An entirely new draft of an old paper, here. Comments would be nice. Here’s the introduction:
This paper is a brief plea for the relevance of linguistic phenomena (specifically, the phenomenon of semantic presupposition) to epistemological theorizing about the a priori. In particular, I propose, explain, defend, and apply the following constraint on knowability a priori (with ‘KA’ abbreviating ‘it is knowable a priori that’).
(AK) For all φ, ψ such that φ semantically presupposes that ψ: if KAφ, KAψ.
Roughly, (AK) claims a sentence’s content is knowable a priori only if its semantic presuppositions are too. §2 defines the notion of ‘semantic presupposition’ invoked by (AK). §3 makes use of this definition (and some plausible assumptions about the closure of knowability a priori under a priori knowable entailment) to argue in favor of (AK). The rest of the paper is devoted to exploring the (mostly negative) implications of
(AK) for the a priori. Well-known arguments for the contingent a priori and a priori knowledge of logical truth founder when the semantic presuppositions of the putative items of knowledge are made explicit. Likewise, certain kinds of analytic truth turn out to carry semantic presuppositions that make them ineligible to be items of a priori knowledge. On a happier note, I argue that (AK) offers an appealing, theory-neutral explanation of the a posteriori character of certain necessary identities, as well as an interesting rationalization for a commonplace linguistic maneuver in philosophical work on the a priori.
P.S. This is a very drafty draft. I haven’t put in the acknowledgements yet, but I will when I’ve had a chance to make the paper a bit stronger.
john stossel?
March 13, 2008Is this really the best University of Michigan libertarians could do? Actually, don’t answer that…
iz not charlie buckett
March 4, 2008
Working on a paper (a succinct rewrite with some new twists of the presuppositions/a priori stuff). I’ll post a draft when I’m done.
I’d be curious to know places where people have pointed to sentences like (1) and (2) as examples of the analytic a posteriori. Thanks in advance.
(1) The queen of England is a queen of England
(2) The queen of England is the queen of England
questions about relativism and contextualism about epistemic modals
February 16, 2008All of these are minor questions, probably stemming more from ignorance than any sort of insight. Let me stress I’m not trying to push any sort of objection — my puzzlement here is genuine.
why a priori knowability is closed under semantic presupposition
February 15, 2008I encounter all kinds of interesting but, I think, misguided objections to my endorsement of (AK).
(AK) For all Φ, p, q: if Φ expresses p and semantically presupposes q, then p is knowable a priori only if q is too.
In this post, I’ll present my favorite formulation of the argument for (AK). I’ll start by explaining what the notion of semantic presupposition invoked by (AK) amounts to.
congrats to simon
February 11, 2008He’s going to be giving a talk entitled “Free and bound pro-verbs: A unified treatment of anaphora” at SALT 18! Here’s the program, and here’s a link to his abstract.
I hear he’s also having some luck with graduate admissions.
coordination in combinatory categorial grammar
February 11, 2008I’ve always had a “weakness” for Lambek’s treatment of coordinative conjunction, which, in a basic CCG system, amounts to assigning and the following syntactic type:
(X\X)/X
Where X is a metavariable over well-formed syntactic types. Because there is no special syntactic type for the coordinating conjunction, there are no special rules for coordination. Coordinating two sentences, for example, is just a matter of successive function application.
Mark Steedman (circa “Gapping as Constituent Coordination”) isn’t really a fan. Instead of assigning the conjunction a recursive type, Steedman elects to assign it a primitive type, conj, supplemented with the following special combinatory rules:
1. conj X → [X]& (Forward coordination, FC)
2. X [X]& → X (Backward coordination, BC)
The FC rule effectively marks a right conjunct as a right conjunct, while the BC rule allows a marked right conjunct to coordinate with an unmarked left conjunct. In order words, Steedman regards coordination as a special phenomenon, requiring a complication of both our basic stock of rules and of our base syntactic types.
There’s a slight problem with this approach, which Steedman’s aware of. Consider the following sentence.
hey cool
February 7, 2008Ann Arbor, from, I guess, the apartment complex on William. (The columned building on the left is where the Philosophy Department is located.)
millianism and a posteriori identities
January 16, 2008A while back, I wrote about how endorsing (M) seems like it prima facie commits you to endorsing (A)…
(M) The semantic value of a proper name is the entity it refers to. (Millianism)
(A) It’s knowable a priori that Cicero is Tully.
…but it’s not immediately obvious how the argument from (M) to (A) should go. Some auxiliary premise — ideally something with a certain amount of antecedent plausibility — is required, but what?
happy new semester
January 3, 2008Michigan’s starts today. Really!
My courseload’s a lot lighter this semester than last, so I plan to do a bit more writing here. I’m excited.
some smiths for your midweek
December 5, 2007Since I’m not posting or anything. (Sorry, I don’t think I’ve ever been this busy in my life.)
some stuff
November 16, 2007I’m growing to despise Apple. My 30 gig iPod has recently bit the dust, and there’s a huge cluster of I-don’t-know-what-the-f**k in the middle of my MacBook’s screen that’s making it impossible to do any writing. (I’ve recently switched to writing in LaTeX, which makes it difficult to compose stuff on a different computer.) Most Apple users I know have had similar sorts of quality control issues. Emma’s laptop is on its third hard drive this year, Simon’s is on its second. What is the deal with this company?
But speaking of LaTeX, it’s absolutely brilliant. I’m not going to turn into one of those LaTeX evangelizers or anything, but personally I can’t imagine ever going back to Microsoft Word. Here are the slides of the talk I gave in Oxford this past week, done with the Beamer add-on.
butts wynd
November 12, 2007I wanted to comment on this when I was in St. Andrews, but I thought someone might think that was crass.
(Via Brian Weatherson)
