Brian Weatherson has set up a weblog to track changes of online papers in philosophy, similar to my diffbot, but of course much more useful for other people.
It would actually be easy to create an even more useful tracking system, which would not only update itself automatically but also provide a flexible interface so that you could, for example, list all changes to Richard Heck's papers in the last 5 months. A possibility to search for papers on a specific topic would also be helpful. Maybe I'll think about setting up such a system when Brian gets bored with his manual updates.
My logfiles indicate that people are more interested in silly
logic puzzles than in pointless remarks on footnotes in the
metaphysical writings of David Lewis. Let's see if I can get my readership
down to zero with this one.
Besides perfectly natural properties, Lewis also needs somewhat less
natural properties in his philosophy of language and elsewhere. What
determines how natural a property is? Lewis gives three different
answers, in four different places, none of them longer than two sentences.
Sometime before christmas, Greg Restall spotted a bug in my tree prover and noticed that it didn't work with Internet Explorer on MacOS X. These problems should now be fixed. I've also started working on an implementation of proofs with identity and function symbols, but I'm not sure if I'll ever finish it.
I actually wrote the tree prover to check the results of another script, which is what I vaguely talk about in the Feedback section. This is what that other script would calculate if I'd ever get it done:
David Lewis offers a lot of work for natural properties in his semantics,
his theory of mental content, materialism, supervenience, causation, laws
of nature, etc. Strikingly missing in this list (as opposed to the list of
Anthony Quinton, "Properties and Classes") is the solution of Goodman's New
Riddle of Induction. I don't know why Lewis never mentions this. Two
suggestions:
1) He thought it was just too obvious, and he disliked repeating arguments
of other philosophers (none of the items on Quinton's list occurs on
Lewis').
Happy new year everybody. I'm still alive, and I still have questions and
comments on the metaphysics of David Lewis. This one is about Lewis'
philosophy of mathematics.
In "Mathematics is Megethology", Lewis argues
for structuralism in set theory: There is no particular relation of
membership, connecting particular things with particular classes. Instead,
there are just two sides of Reality, ordinary individuals on the one side,
proper-class many mereological atoms (called 'singletons') on the other.
Set theory is about all relations on this Reality that satisfy certain
constraints, like 'every individual stands in that relation to a singleton'.
Things are counterparts iff they are sufficiently similar to each other.
They needn't be similar intrinsically: For example, in "Individuation by
Acquaintance and by Stipulation" (§2), Lewis allows for counterparts that
are similar in standing in a particular relation of acquaintance to some
person. In fact, they needn't be similar at all: In On the Plurality of
Worlds (§4.4), Lewis accepts that, speaking unrestrictedly, everything
is an individual possibility for anything. However, in "Things qua
Truthmakers" (§5), he denies that things could be counterparts by living in
a world in which there are no unicorns. I wonder why. Lewis says that
such a respect of similarity would be too extrinsic and strike us as too
unimportant. But other eligible respects are extrinsic too, and what
strikes us as important certainly depends on the relevant context. I can
imagine theists who believe that there is a big difference between
living in a world where there is a God and living a duplicate life in a
Godless world. So in some special contexts, those of our counterparts who
live in Godless worlds might be excluded as being too different. Conversely, an atheist might exclude counterparts that live in worlds with Gods a being too different.
Well, what do I mean by "extended"? If "extended" means
"having parts", nobody thinks that extended things lack parts. I guess
what I mean is "existing at several different (space-, time- or spacetime-)
coordinates". For instance, I find it hard to understand how something
could cover all of Berlin without having any part that covers Kreuzberg. I
see that this is precisely how immanent universals are supposed to exist,
but that doesn't help me much, because I find it equally puzzling here.
Perhaps I was wrong when I said that those who
claim that perdurantism is contingent think that things could undergo
intrinsic change without having temporal parts. I've just reread
Haslanger's and Lewis' remarks, and these appear to be compatible
with the view that only things that don't change might endure. For
example, Lewis only mentions the possibility that the spatial parts of a
spinning sphere might persist by enduring. And maybe those parts don't
ever change their intrinsic properties. Probably even the entire sphere
doesn't, because if you copy a particular sphere stage and rotate the copy
by 180 degrees, you still have an exact intrinsic duplicate of the original
stage. This would explain why Lewis doesn't announce a big change of view,
because he always accepted that some special entities, namely universals,
might endure.
My only complaint then is that this doesn't turn perdurantism into a contingent theory of intrinsic change (rather than persistance). And I still find it difficult to understand how extended things could lack parts.
I am not an expert on modal fictionalism, so probably something is obviously wrong with the following objection. But anyway, here it is.
Modal fictionalism claims that any statement S about possible worlds (and other possibilia) is to be analysed as "According to the possible-world-story, S". Now possible worlds are used in reductive analyses of all kinds of concepts: modality, counterfactuals, causation, laws, properties, propositions, meanings, probabilities, supervenience, fictions, etc. For instance, an analysis of indexicals usually talks about extensions in possible contexts of utterance. If fictionalism is right, then this analysis must in turn be analysed in terms of extension in possible contexts according to the possible-worlds-story. And this seems rather odd. Suppose I propose some theory T of indexicals (or laws or whatever). If fictionalism is right then T is correct iff it is implied by some story about possible worlds. Firstly, intuitively this is not at all what I would have thought my theory was about. Secondly, which possible-world-story is relevant here? If we take the five or six claims about recombination and other worlds being of the same kind as ours usually presented by fictionalists (e.g. Rosen 1990), all the analytic projects mentioned above appear to be doomed: That simple story will not imply anything at all about indexicals, or laws, or causation. Unless of course we extend it by some analysis of these notions. Which analysis? The obvious candidate is the analysis we believe to be true, that is, T. But then all the analytic projects mentioned above come out as trivially true: Even the craziest theory will be good enough to imply itself.
The principle of recombination states what other possible worlds there must
be, given the existence of some possible worlds. In sec. 1.8 of On the
Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis suggests something like this:
L) For any parts of any worlds there is some world containing
any number of duplicates of all those parts, and nothing else , provided that they all fit
into a possible space-time.
Daniel Nolan argues in "Recombination Unbound" that the clause 'and
nothing else' should be dropped, because if some thing B consists of two
duplicates of A, there couldn't be a world containing one B, one A, and
nothing else. Unfortunately, without the clause the principle doesn't
exclude the necessary coexistence of distinct possibilia. In fact, it is
even compatible with all possibilia having duplicates in all worlds. I
think it would be better to leave the clause and instead restrict the
principle to distinct parts of worlds.