GAP5, day 3
I'm in Bielefeld at the GAP5 conference. The overall quality of the talks so far hasn't been very good, but I'm told it's always like that at philosophy conferences.
One of the most tedious presentations was Manfred Kupffer's discussion of arguments for the claim that we don't know a priori whether Hesperus is Phosphorus. In contrast, it was much more enjoyable to listen to Karl-Georg Niebergall who suggested that all of mathematics is in fact about certain concrete lines (straight ones, triangles, rectangles, and circles, to be precise) infinitely many of which exist somewhere in our universe. The lesson is that arguing for an obvious truth is generally much worse than arguing for something absurd. (I asked Kupffer whether anybody ever denied what he is arguing for, and he said Scott Soames did. If that's true then Soames has learned that lesson.)
Also enjoyable was Eline Busck's talk about masked dispositions, which she says refute Lewis' definition of dispositions. I don't think so, but I must admit that I'm rather confused by the entire discussion. Sometimes I believe the simple conditional analysis is just fine, and we should deal with the counterexamples in the way Brian Weatherson suggests to deal with Gettier cases. Interestingly, an empirical study I carried out with a (not very extensive and not very random) sample of non-philosophers revealed that both of them didn't see the point of finkish counterexamples: For them, a vase that is protected by an angel just doesn't count as fragile.
Question: Why are deadly nightshades deadly whereas strawberries are not, given that no doubt several people have died from eating strawberries and most people who have eaten nightshades survived it?