@article{Wyatt2009,
volume = {25},
number = {1},
author = {Nicole Wyatt},
abstract = {It has become standard for feminist philosophers of language to analyze Catherine MacKinnon’s claim in terms of speech act theory. Backed by the Austinian observation that speech can do things and the legal claim that pornography is speech, the claim is that the speech acts performed by means of pornography silence women. This turns upon the notion of illocutionary silencing, or disablement. In this paper I observe that the focus by feminist philosophers of language on the failure to achieve uptake for illocutionary acts serves to group together different kinds of illocutionary silencing which function in very different ways.},
title = {{Failing to Do Things with Words}},
journal = {Southwest Philosophy Review},
year = {2009},
pages = {135-142},
}

philpapers.org/archive/WYAFTD

“Logic has it’s own peculiar truth and value.” – Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace

Way back in 2000 JC Beall and Greg Restall (B&R hereafter) wrote:

There are too many modal logics to hold each of them as the logic of broad metaphysical necessity. So given a particular interpretation of each of the symbols in our formalism (including consequence) we can admit that there is a great deal of scope for rivalry. For the propositional modal logic of necessary truth preservation, we think that a logic somewhere between S4 and S5 is a candidate for getting things right. Anything else gets it wrong when it comes to metaphysical necessity. There is scope for rivalry and disagreement, when the meaning of the basic lexicon is settled [2000, 489].

And only slightly less way back in 2004 I wrote:

Here is the main source of my puzzlement. Beall and Restall claim that neither classical nor relevant logic gets the logic of the sentential connectives wrong, but that S4 gets the logic of metaphysical necessity wrong. What, one wonders, is the relevant difference? [2004,413]

Now I don’t know if B&R have changed their minds about this: to the best of my knowledge* they haven’t revisited the issue, certainly it doesn’t appear in the little book. Maybe I should take silence as consent?

But I haven’t stopped being puzzled. Further in 2009 an honours student of mine, Julia Zochodne, wrote a thesis which in part address the question of what it is to be a logic. And after this I found myself thinking about this issue again. Since I am a write in order to think sort of person, I thought I would think about it publicly, here.

So a preliminary to start, with anything of real interest postponed until next time. Our topic, as described by B&R is the logic of broad metaphysical necessity. What is metaphysical necessity? Logicians sometimes use the phrase ‘metaphysical modal logic’ to pick out the logic of necessity and possibility, in contrast with deontic modal logic (obligation and permissibility) or epistemic modal logic (knowledge**), etc. Another contrast B&R might have in mind here might be with epistemic necessity (what is necessary given everything that I know) or natural necessity (what is necessary given scientific laws). But in those two cases it is prima facie reasonable to think that what we have is metaphysical necessity plus some extra axioms in the non-modal part of the logic (the known or laws), so it’s not immediately clear to me that these forms of necessity would require different logics in the pluralist sense. A final contrast they might have in mind is with pure logical necessity. It is, it is sometimes claimed, logically possible that something is red without being coloured, but (so the claim continues) it is not metaphysically possible that something is red without being coloured. Now the truth of that depends on some substantive issues surrounding the question ‘What is a logic?’ which is on the agenda for this series of posts very very soon. But it is, I have come to suspect, more central to what B&R had in mind in that comment in their 2000 paper than I (or other commentators) had thought in 2004.

*They are both rather prolific, and I admittedly have spent most of the intervening six years worrying about either empty names or illocutionary silencing, so I may have missed something.
**Modal logic is probably a terrible way to treat epistemic logic for anyone other than an ideal knower.

This is Heloise. She is seven and a half months old. She likes long walks in her stroller, tasting the world, and sitting in Daddy’s arms. Her favourite foods are bananas, dates, and hummus.

Also, she learnt to crawl last week. Crawling at seven months is early in the normal range, but not ridiculously early, and we certainly knew it was coming. She had been pushing herself backwards and falling on her face for a few weeks. Gates for the stairs had been purchased, childproofing begun.

Today Heloise and I were sitting in the living room. She looked up at the coffee table, saw my glass of water there, and started to reach for it. As I got up to get her sippy cup she reached for the edge of the table, pulled herself to her knees, and then to standing. I rescued my water glass, but she didn’t mind, as she was happily chewing on the table edge. She stood there for a good three minutes before turning to look at the nearby chair. A hand went out, feet moved, balance was lost, and onto her ass she went. But it’s coming, it’s coming.

There is a very good chance we will have a child who walks but doesn’t yet respond appropriately to ‘No!’ ‘Stop!’ or ‘Dear God don’t eat that Heloise!’

We are definitely in trouble.

(There may eventually be philosophy done here again.)

POEM: ALAN TURING

here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?

Article about the apology.

I first met Bob when I was a masters student here at Calgary during the 1995 meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. I had helped Brian Chellas organize the conference, and so when Bob did not appear for his scheduled performance I was delegated to go rouse him — it turned out he had overslept.

When scheduling talks Brian had mentioned that Bob was not a morning person, and his session had been scheduled for 4pm. No one was surprised that this was still too early. I think I knew at that moment that philosophy and I were meant for each other.

During my three years as a doctoral student at Canterbury I was at a fair number of Australasian Association of Logic talks by Bob (all of which he was on time for!) — I don’t think I ever once had the courage to ask him a question, but I enjoyed every one. He will be missed.

Reminiscences by folks who knew him better than I: Greg Restall and David Chalmers.

I am sure he will be remembered fondly by all at the SEP this week.

Syntax, and the void.

This is not because the students are awful. Of course, some students are awful. But the ratio of awful papers to awful students is not 1:1. It is (warning: totally made up statistic) more like 20:1.

The papers are awful because:

(a) Good philosophy often depends on subtleties. But the students have not yet read enough or thought about enough issues in enough depth to even begin to get the subtleties. Again, this is not because they are dumb. It’s because they haven’t had enough time.

(b) Writing argumentative papers is difficult, and most students are doing it for the very first time. In highschool students write research papers. They summarize the literature in an area. In literature classes they write interpretive or critical papers. But unless they are in one of a very small number of special programs they will have had no experience writing argumentative papers. If they do have experience with argument it is in the context of debates and political science education. But this sort of argument does not usually engage in the kind of probing examination of premises, assumptions, gut feels, and mass opinion that philosophy does. Indeed, this sort of background probably leads to worse philosophy papers rather than better ones.

Now, one can ameliorate this by having students write drafts and giving them extensive written feedback. There are two basic problems with this. One, in a first-year lecture one often has approaching 100 students (85 is the cap for our introductory classes). Which makes giving extensive feedback difficult, even with a teaching assistant. And second, doing this requires they start work halfway through the term. Papers written after 6 weeks of philosophy are even worse than papers written after 12 weeks of philosophy.

So I was standing in the shower (who doesn’t do their best work there) thinking about what to do in Sex, Love and Death in the winter term next year, and I had this idea.

What if we had a project that slowly built up over term. Say in the first three weeks they had to choose a topic. And then there could be a series of assignments (I’d need to give them lists of papers since they aren’t ready to choose their own):

1&2&2&4) Write a 300 word précis of the argument in a reading connected to your topic.

5) Write 300 words integrating what you have learnt into an analysis of the possible positions on the topic.

6) Pick a position you wish to defend, and then write 300 words outlining 1-2 objections to this position.

7) Write 300 words outlining responses to these objections.

8) Write 300 words outlining 1-2 arguments in favour of the position you wish to defend.

9) Write 300 words outlining the responses critics would make to those arguments.

Thats 2700 words all together. The problem is it would dominate the term for them — all they would write about would be things related to their project.

Currently I tend to have first-year students write ~5 300 word pieces on set topics and a ~1200 word essay (and they have a final exam). If they were writing this much for the project the set topic assignments would have to go. I guess the final would still keep them working on the course content that wasn’t project related.

But I think they would do better with these very focused tasks than they do when told to write an essay, no matter how much time I spend talking about what an argumentative essay is.

I googled, I couldn’t find anyone doing anything like this in first-year, but then maybe I didn’t search for the right things.

If it was a good idea someone else would have tried it.

Maybe it would be better to just have even more set topic papers. 8-9 of them perhaps. This is basically what I do in my second-year medieval philosophy classes. I suppose I am reluctant because first-year classes aren’t particularly about covering some specified range of topics. They are about engaging people. And folks tend to be best engaged when they have some choices.

(1) When all parts of a subject joined by or or nor are singular, the verb is singular; when all parts are plural, the verb is plural
…
The fact is that clause (1) (slightly amended, to get the person issue out of the way) is utterly uncontroversial; I’m not aware of variation on this point, and I doubt that anyone needs to be told what to do when confronted by disjunctive subjects of the same number (and person).

Am I the only person who speaks an idiolect on which:

• Neither Barbara nor Sam is able to …

is dubious and 

• Neither Barbara nor Sam are able to …

is clearly correct?

I don’t need to be told what to do, he’s right about that. But I do the precise opposite of what he thinks everyone does.

It’s out, btw. No doubt the ever prolific JC Beall will now just go write more. Encourage him. Buy the book. Get 20% off (via Greg Restall).