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Spring 2003 (Talks begin at 3:30 pm in 1115 Skinner)
February 19, 2003 Abstract: This paper presents the beginnings of a contextualist account of vagueness. A central thesis is that in some situations, the meaning of the words and the non-linguistic facts allow competent speakers to go either way with borderline cases of a vague predicate. The extension of the predicate thus varies with the calls of competent speakers in the course of a conversation. I call this open-texture. The key theme of David Lewis's classic paper "Scorekeeping in a language game" illuminates the proper function, and extension, of vague terms. The structure of the resolution of the sorites paradox is similar to that of Diana Raffman's "Vagueness without paradox", but the focus is on conversational record rather than the psychological states of competent speakers. With Raffman, vague term are response-dependent, or, better, judgement-dependent, at least in the borderline area.
March 5, 2003 Abstract: This paper critically examines the claim that cognitivist neo-Davidsonian accounts of semantic competence can help settle ontological questions. I distinguish a variety of strategies an ontologizing semanticist might employ and their differing roles in drawing positive vs. negative ontological conclusions. And I identify some of the various commitments of, and thus possible points of resistance to, these varying strategies. In addition to noting some more familiar objections, I suggest that it's unclear why a truth-theory correctly ascribed to account for aspects of linguistic behavior must be either believed or true.
March 12, 2003 Literature: Chapters 1 and 2 of Achinstein, The Book of Evidence (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2001).
April 2, 2003 Abstract: Morality, or at least a central portion of it, seems to be about meshing our own interests with those of others, sometimes consonant with ours and sometimes conflicting. The best developed theoretical framework within which questions about conflict and congruence of interest are addressed is the mathematical theory of games. But the small group of philosophers taking advantage of this framework have conceived the relation between ethics and game theory differently. Three simple games provide challenges that such conceptions must meet. The impure prisoner's dilemma may require that morality endorse randomizing behavior. Evolutionary versions of "scissors, paper, rock" may have morality endorsing behavior that cycles over time. Evolutionary asymmetric chicken, (which has been persuasively presented as a model for the evolution of property norms) may sanction inappropriate discrimination on the basis of sex and color. I will explain these three examples and begin to speculate on the lessons that might be drawn.
April 9, 2003 Abstract: The propensity account of fitness has recently faced criticism from its previous defenders due to Gillespie’s (1974 & 1977) findings that variance can affect selection and Finsen’s and Beatty’s (1989) similar finding with respect to skew. Some believe that these results merely require a revision of the mathematical formulation of fitness (Beatty & Finsen 1989; Brandon 1990). Sober (2002), however, argues that these revisions actually have profound implications for the metaphysics of fitness attributions. Given that the revised definition requires reference to population size, Sober argues that “an organism’s fitness is not a propensity that it has,” since populations size is extrinsic to the organism (2002, 320). In the first part of this paper, I argue that Sober’s concerns are misplaced. Sober mistakes the role that the reference to population size plays in Gillespie’s revised measure of fitness. There is, however, a fundamental problem with the propensity account of fitness, which is the focus of the second part of the paper: its inability to deal adequately with the reference class problem. Brandon (1990) attempts to resolve this problem. I argue that this attempt is unsuccessful. The problem results from the fact that the factors that are relevant for natural selection are only a subset of the factors that are causally relevant to the number of offspring produced. Therefore, when attributing fitness values to individuals or types, some features of the environment that are causally relevant for reproductive success, but not relevant for natural selection, are ignored. The question is whether ignoring causally relevant features makes sense on a propensity account of probabilities. If we only specify the selectively relevant features, there seems to be no fact of the matter about how probable each outcome is. Therefore, the probabilities associated with fitness would have no objective basis in the world.
April 23, 2003
April 30, 2003 |
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