The semester has now ended and I've returned to working on some long overdue stuff. (More on that soon.)
One thing that has kept me busy during the semester was the philosophy of language course (German) that I've taught. Obviously, this got way out of control. (I wrote 100 pages of handouts because I was so dissatisfied with the available textbooks. I missed two things in particular: applications of results from semantics and philosophy of language to other areas of philosophy (e.g., how the discovery of rigid designation and a posteriori necessity provided the basis for things like type-B materialism and Cornell realism), and an intelligible sketch of how all the different parts of the subject fit together: Grice's analysis of meaning, Kripke's observations about names, Lewis's theory of convention, Montague's model-theoretic semantics, etc. I'm not sure if in the end I did that better, but I've definitely learned a lot in that seminar.)
Peter Menzies and Huw Price, in their forthcoming "Is Semantics in the Plan?" have spotted a mistake in Lewis's "Psychophysical and theoretical identifications". But they don't spot that it's a mistake, and rather think it shows that the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis-account of theoretical terms is severly limited.
The mistake is that Lewis identifies "theoretical role" with "causal role":
Sentences aren't just about the things they name. You can write an
entire book about the Second World War without ever mentioning the
whole war by name.
Very roughly, a sentence is about something X iff the way X is
matters for the truth value of the sentence. "It's raining" is about
the weather because differences with respect to the weather affect the
truth value of the sentence. By contrast, "it's raining" (or at least
"it's raining in Berlin on July 11, 2006") is not about the Second
World War because any way the Second World War might have been is
compossible with (just about) any state of the current
weather. (Arguably, the current weather counterfactually depends on
details about the Second World War. But what counts is compossibility,
not counterfactual dependence.)
I've learned a lot at the Lewis workshop, which was also enjoyable in every other respect. One thing I've learned is that my views about theory strength in Lewis's account of laws were rather naive.
Lewis defines a law of nature as a consequence of the best theory, where what makes a theory good is simplicity, strength, and fit (of assigned probabilities to actual occurrences). I claimed that objective standards for strength aren't hard to find: one could, for instance, use something like number and diversity of excluded possibilities (with a meaningful measure for 'number', these two criteria might coincide). But in the discussions, it turned out that this doesn't work, for at least two reasons.
It just took me two hours to put slides created with the LaTeX beamer class onto A4 pages as handouts. This is the solution I came up with (4 slides per page):
pdftops -paper A4 -expand original.pdf
psnup -4 -b2mm original.ps > handouts.ps
ps2pdf handouts.ps
(Not entirely unrelated to this: the next few days I'm at a Lewis workshop near Heidelberg. I'll try to catch up with my emails next week.)
I'll move all my stuff to a new server in a few days. I expect all kinds of unexpected problems coming up. So perhaps this site (and everything else on any of my domains) will suddenly be down towards the end of the week. In this case, emails to whatever@umsu.de also won't reach me. You can then still contact me via wolfgang dot schwarz at gmail dot com.
[Update 21 June:] Oops, the new hosting company was faster than expected. I've set up most of the sites and services on the new server now. Some stuff that nobody ever looks at is still missing. If something you need is broken, please let me know. If your mails to whatever@umsu.de are bouncing back with a "can't relay" message, that's most likely because some DNS records out there still haven't noticed the move. Not much I can do about it, sorry. (Try the gmail address.)
I wonder about the best treatment of the following kind of
context-dependence, and its relation to analyticity and
apriority.
| 1) |
Mozart's piano sonatas are difficult;
France is hexagonal;
there is no more beer;
it is impossible to travel from Berlin to London in less than 3 hours;
Tourists from China are always friendly.
|
Whether such a sentence is true in a given context depends on the
contextually determined domains of quantification, standards of
difficulty, of precision, etc.
Colours are physical properties of external objects. One such colour
is Pure Green: the shade of green that looks not at all yellowish or
blueish. However, if people are asked to identify the shade of green
that looks not at all yellowish or blueish, they come up with
(slighly) different shades: what looks pure green to me looks slighly
blueish to you; what looks pure green to you looks slightly yellowish
to me. What shall we make of this?
We could claim that one of the groups is simply right about Pure
Green and the other wrong, even though there is no way to find out which is which. That is incredible.
I've just noticed that I don't understand those who do not base semantics on use, so I'm asking you for hints or pointers.
Here, very roughly, is the position I don't understand:
Speakers of a language have tacit knowledge of its syntax and semantics. Take Karl. As a competent speaker of German, he tacitly knows that, say, "Berlin" denotes Berlin, "pleite" denotes (or expresses) the property of being broke, and "x ist y" is true iff the thing denoted by x has the property denoted by y. Thus he knows that "Berlin ist pleite" is true iff (or expresses the proposition that) Berlin is broke. That explains why he comes to believe that Berlin is broke upon hearing trustworthy people utter "Berlin ist pleite", and that's why he himself utters "Berlin ist pleite" to tell people that Berlin is broke. The object of semantics is this tacit knowledge of speakers. It has nothing intrinsically to do with use, conventions and the like.
I hope this sounds familiar. I think it's a pretty common position, so I'm a little worried that I don't understand it.
Since 2006, state employees here in North Rhine-Westfalia receive their monthly salary at the end of each month. This looks like an interesting way for the state to get a lot of money without taking it away from anyone.
Suppose for simplicity that we get our salaries exactly one month later than before. Then from the point of view of the state, it's like they just didn't pay anyone for a month: we got our payment in December, January was skipped and we got the next payment in February. But from our point of view, it's not at all like we didn't get paid for a month. Ater, say, my one-year employment, I will have earned the same amount I would have earned without the change. Likewise for everyone else, except for those who are employed infinitely long. OK, we have small loss in convenience and interest revenues, but that loss is worth far less than a monthly salary.
So in effect, despite the fact that North Rhine-Westfalia didn't pay any salaries for one month, all employees of North Rhine-Westfalia get payed for each month they work. Clever.