Wolfgang Schwarz

Online Papers Feed and Source

I've just replaced the Online Papers in Philosophy Feed by a newer version. Let me know if you run into any problems with that. (You may also consider switching to a feed from PhilPapers.)

Have I mentioned that the source code for the scripts that generate the feed is on github? Well, now I have.

(While I'm in the swing of mentioning, I might as well also mention (i) that my paper on updating self-locating beliefs is forthcoming in Phil Studies, (ii) that I won't be at the AAP this year, although I will be at various other events, like here, here and there, and (iii) that Holly and I are not "in a relationship" any more. In case you wondered about any of these.)

Coarse-grained meanings and impossible worlds

To some extent, one can account for semantic phenomena without assigning meanings to words or sentences or thoughts. For instance, we might say that beliefs and other attitudes are relations to sentences, i.e. to strings of symbols. Roughly, to believe a sentence S is to be disposed to utter (or assent to) S (or some translation of S) under certain conditions. When people talk to each other, such dispositions may be transferred: after hearing me utter the sounds "it is raining", you acquire the disposition to utter those sounds yourself. Apart from communication, we can also account for things like synonymy and analyticity. Roughly, two sentences are synonymous if necessarily, anyone who stands in the belief relation to one of them also stands in the belief relation to the other. There is no compositional semantics in this picture, because there is no semantics at all. But there might be recursive rules for translating from one language to another.

Lewis on updating and self-location

A lot has been written in the last 10 years or so on updating self-locating beliefs, mostly in the context of the Sleeping Beauty problem. One thing almost all of these papers have in common is that they quote Lewis's remark in "Attitudes de dicto and de se" (1979, p.534), where he says:

it is interesting to ask what happens to decision theory if we take all attitudes as de se. Answer: very little. We replace the space of worlds by the space of centered worlds, or by the space of all inhabitants of worlds. All else is just as before.

This is supposed to imply that Lewis took standard conditionalisation to be the correct update rule for self-locating belief.

Rational procrastination

Professor Procrastinate has to make an important phone call. The call is long overdue because Procrastinate has been playing Farmville all week. The problem is that Procrastinate values current pleasure higher than future pleasure. So when he applies his decision theory, he finds that it is better to play some more Farmville now and make the phone call later instead of making the call now: it doesn't matter much whether the call is delayed by a few more hours, and this way the immediate future will be much more pleasant.

Quantum physics and relative truth

There has been some discussion recently about whether propositions are true or false absolutely, or only relative to a possible world, or relative to a world and a time. What hasn't been considered, to my knowledge, is whether propositions are true or false only relative to a branch of the wave function of the universe.

For example, suppose we shoot a photon at a half-silvered mirror. It then enters into a superposition of passing through and getting reflected: these are the two "branches" of the superposition. More precisely, it is not the photon that enters into the superposition, but the entire setup, and there are actually many more branches, corresponding to various precise paths the photon can take. Moreover, these branches are only the position branches of the superposition -- there are other branches of the same superposition, corresponding to resolutions of other properties.

I'm a Humean, and I like necessary connections

In metaphysics, "Humeans" are people who believe that truths about laws of nature, counterfactuals, dispositions and the like (truths about what must or would be the case) are in some sense reducible to non-modal truths (about what is the case).

One way to be a Humean is to deny that there are any laws of natures, non-trivial counterfactuals, etc.: if there are no modal truths, then trivially all modal truths are reducible to non-modal truths. On this account, there are no "necessary connections between distinct existences": eating arsenic might in fact be followed by death, but it could just as well be followed by hiccups or anything else.

Frequentism and the end of time

This paper (recently featured on the physics arXiv blog) argues that if the universe never comes to an end, then the universe will probably come to an end within the next 5 billion years. The reasoning, as far as I can tell, goes roughly like this.

First, define the probability of an event of type A given an event of type B as the total number of A events over the number of B events. If the universe is infinite, then the total number of A events and B events will often be infinite. But infinity over infinity isn't well-defined. So to have well-defined probabilities, the relevant counts of A and B events must be restricted, e.g. to a finite initial segment of the universe.

Update

OK. We're back in Canberra. I've also finished the completeness proof that I've been working on for the last few months. More on that soon. In the meantime, here are some pictures from this year's bike trip through the Alps.

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Quick logic question

Suppose you add to the language of first-order logic a sentence operator L for which you stipulate that all instances of

(L(p -> q) & Lp) -> Lq

are valid and that validity is closed under prefixing L's:

if p is valid, then so is Lp.

For example, L could be the modal operator 'necessarily', or it could mean the same as ''. If it means the same as '', then

ANU

Last week I accepted an offer for a post-doc at the ANU, starting in September. I will be working with Al Hajek on "the objects of probability". Should be great.