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Announcing: Perspectives on Ontology

A major international conference on metaphysics to be held at the University of Leeds, Sep 5th-7th 2008.

Speakers:
Karen Bennett (Cornell)
John Hawthorne (Oxford)
Daniel Nolan (Nottingham)
Jill North (Yale)
Helen Steward (Leeds)
Jessica Wilson (Toronto)

Commentators:
Benj Hellie (Toronto)
Kris McDaniel (Syracuse)
Ted Sider (NYU)
Jason Turner (Leeds)
Robbie Williams (Leeds)

This will be a great conference: so keep your diaries free, and spread the word!

I just found about about Phlox, a (relatively) new weblog in philosophy of logic, language and metaphysics. It’s attached to a project at Humboldt University in Berlin. As well as following the tradition of philosophy centres with Greek names (this one means “flame”, apparently) “Phlox” is a cunning acronym for the group’s research interests.

There’s several really interesting posts to check out already. Worth heading over!

There’s some interesting conferences being announced these days. A couple have caught my eye/been brought to my attention.

First is the Semantics and Philosophy in Europe CFP. This looks really like a really excellent event… one of those events where I think: If I’m not there, I’ll be regretting not being there…

The second event is the 2008 Wittgenstein Symposium. It’s remit seems far wider than the name might suggest… looks like a funky set of topics. I reproduce the CFP below…

[Update: a third is a one-day conference on the philosophy of mathematics in Manchester. Announcement at the bottom of the post.]

CALL FOR PAPERS:
31st International Wittgenstein Symposium 2008 on

Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, 10-16 August 2008
<http://www.alws.at/>

INVITED SPEAKERS:
William Bechtel, Ansgar Beckermann, Johan van Benthem, Alexander Bird, Elke
Brendel, Otavio Bueno, John P. Burgess, David Chalmers, Igor Douven, Hartry
Field, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth Gemes, Volker Halbach, Stephan Hartmann, Alison
Hills, Leon Horsten, Jaegwon Kim, James Ladyman, Oystein Linnebo, Bernard
Linsky, Thomas Mormann, Carlos Moulines, Thomas Mueller, Karl-Georg
Niebergall, Joelle Proust, Stathis Psillos, Sahotra Sarkar, Gerhard Schurz,
Patrick Suppes, Crispin Wright, Edward N. Zalta, Albert Anglberger, Elena
Castellani, Philip Ebert, Paul Egre, Ludwig Fahrbach, Simon Huttegger,
Christian Kanzian, Jeff Ketland, Marcus Rossberg, Holger Sturm, Charlotte
Werndl.

ORGANISERS:
Alexander Hieke (Salzburg) & Hannes Leitgeb (Bristol),
on behalf of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society.

SECTIONS OF THE SYMPOSIUM:
Sections:
1. Wittgenstein
2. Logical Analysis
3. Theory Reduction
4. Nominalism
5. Naturalism &Physicalism
6. Supervenience
Workshops:
– Ontological Reduction & Dependence
– Neologicism

More detailed information on the contents of the sections and workshops can
be found in the “BACKGROUND” part further down.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTING PAPERS: 30th April 2008
Instructions for authors will soon be available at <http://www.alws.at/>.
All contributions will be peer-reviewed. All submitted papers accepted for
presentation at the symposium will appear in the Contributions of the ALWS
Series. Since 1993, successive volumes in this series have appeared each
August immediately prior to the symposium.

FINAL DATE FOR REGISTRATION: 20th July 2008
Further information on registration forms and information on travel and
accommodation will be posted at <http://www.alws.at/>.

SCHEDULE OF THE SYMPOSIUM:
The symposium will take place in Kirchberg am Wechsel (Austria) from 10-16
August 2008. Sunday, 10th of August 2008 is supposed to be the day on which
speakers and conference participants are going to arrive and when they
register in the conference office. In the evening, we plan on having an
informal get together. On the next day (11 August, 10:00am) the first
official session of presentations will start with Professor Jerry Fodor’s
opening lecture of the symposium. The symposium will end officially in the
afternoon of 16 August 2008.

BACKGROUND:
Philosophers often have tried to either reduce “disagreeable” entities or
concepts to (more) acceptable entities or concepts, or to eliminate the
former altogether. Reduction and elimination, of course, very often have to
do with the question of “What is really there?”, and thus these notions
belong to the most fundamental ones in philosophy. But the topic is not
merely restricted to metaphysics or ontology. Indeed, there are a variety
of attempts at reduction and elimination to be found in all areas (and
periods) of philosophy and science.

The symposium is intended to deal with the following topics (among others):

– Logical Analysis: The logical analysis of language has long been regarded
as the dominating paradigm for philosophy in the modern analytic tradition.
Although the importance of projects such as Frege’s logicist construction
of mathematics, Russell’s paraphrasis of definite descriptions, and
Carnap’s logical reconstruction and explicatory definition of empirical
concepts is still acknowledged, many philosophers now doubt the viability
of the programme of logical analysis as it was originally conceived.
Notorious problems such as those affecting the definitions of knowledge or
truth have led to the revival of “non-analysing” approaches to
philosophical concepts and problems (see e.g. Williamson’s account of
knowledge as a primitive notion and the deflationary criticism of Tarski’s
definition of truth). What role will — and should — logical analysis play
in philosophy in the future?

– Theory Reduction: Paradigm cases of theory reduction, such as the
reduction of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion to Newtonian mechanics or
the reduction of thermodynamics to the kinetic theory of gases, prompted
philosophers of science to study the notions of reduction and reducibility
in science. Nagel’s analysis of reduction in terms of bridge laws is the
classical example of such an attempt. However, those early accounts of
theory reduction were soon found to be too naive and their underlying
treatment of scientific theories unrealistic. What are the state-of-the-art
proposals on how to understand the reduction of a scientific theory to
another? What is the purpose of such a reduction? In which cases should we
NOT attempt to reduce a theory to another one?

– Nominalism: Traditionally, nominalism is concerned with denying the
existence of universals. Modern versions of nominalism object to abstract
entities altogether; in particular they attack the assumption that the
success of scientific theories, especially their mathematical components,
commit us to the existence of abstract objects. As a consequence,
nominalists have to show how the alleged reference to abstract entities can
be eliminated or is merely apparent (Field’s Science without Numbers is
prototypical in this respect). What types of “Constructive Nominalism” (a
la Goodman & Quine) are there? Are there any principal obstacles for
nominalistic programmes in general? What could nominalistic accounts of
quantum theory or of set theory look like?

– Naturalism & Physicalism: Naturalism and physicalism both want to
eliminate the part of language that does not refer to the “natural facts”
that science — or indeed physics — describes. Metaphysical Naturalism
often goes hand in hand with (or even entails) an epistemological
naturalism (Quine) as well as an ethical naturalism (mainly defined by its
critics), so that also these two main disciplines of philosophy should
restrict their investigations to the world of natural facts. Physicalist
theses, of course, play a particularly important role in the philosophy of
mind, since neuroscientific findings seem to support the view that,
ultimately, the realm of the mental is but a part of the physical world.
Which forms of naturalism and physicalism can be maintained within
metaphysics, philosophy of science, epistemology and ethics? What are the
consequences for philosophy when such views are accepted? Is philosophy a
scientific discipline? If naturalism or physicalism is right, can we still
see ourselves as autonomous beings with morality and a free will?

– Supervenience: Mental, moral, aesthetical, and even “epistemological”
properties have been said to supervene on properties of particular kind,
e.g., physical properties. Supervenience is claimed to be neither reduction
nor elimination but rather something different, but all these notions still
belong to the same family, and sometimes it is even assumed that reduction
is a borderline case of supervenience. What are the most abstract laws that
govern supervenience relations? Which contemporary applications of the
notion of supervenience are philosophically successful in the sense that
they have more explanatory power than “reductive theories” without leading
to unwanted semantical or ontological commitments? What are the logical
relations between the concepts of supervenience, reduction, elimination,
and ontological dependence?

The symposium will also include two workshops on:

– Ontological Reduction & Dependence: Reducing a class of entities to
another one has always been regarded attractive by those who subscribe to
an ideal of ontological parsimony. On the other hand, what it is that gets
reduced ontologically (objects or linguistic items?), what it means to be
reduced ontologically, and which methods of reduction there are, is
controversial (to say the least). Apart from reducing entities to further
entities, metaphysicians sometimes aim to show that entities depend
ontologically on other entities; e.g., a colour sensation instance would
not exist if the person having the sensation did not exist. In other
philosophical contexts, entities are rather said to depend ontologically on
other entities if the individuation of the former involves the latter; in
this sense, sets might be regarded to depend on their members, and
mathematical objects would depend on the mathematical structures they are
part of. Is there a general formal framework in which such notions of
ontological reduction and dependency can be studied more systematically? Is
ontological reduction really theory reduction in disguise? How shall we
understand ontological dependency of objects which exist necessarily? How
do reduction and dependence relate to Quine’s notion of ontological
commitment?

– Neologicism: Classical Logicism aimed at deriving every true mathematical
statement from purely logical truths by reducing all mathematical concepts
to logical ones. As Frege’s formal system proved to be inconsistent, and
modern set theory seemed to require strong principles of a genuinely
mathematical character, the programme of Logicism was long regarded as
dead. However, in the last twenty years neologicist and neo-Fregean
approaches in the philosophy of mathematics have experienced an amazing
revival (Wright, Boolos, Hale). Abstraction principles, such as Hume’s
principle, have been suggested to support a logicist reconstruction of
mathematics in view of their quasi-analytical status. Do we have to
reconceive the notion of reducibility in order to understand in what sense
Neologicism is able to reduce mathematics to logic (as Linsky & Zalta have
suggested recently)? What are the abstraction principles that govern
mathematical theories apart from arithmetic (in particular: calculus and
set theory)? How can Neo-Fregeanism avoid the logical and philosophical
problems that affected Frege’s original system — cf. the problems of
impredicativity and Bad Company?

If you know philosophers or scientists, especially excellent graduate
students, who might be interested in the topic of Reduction and Elimination
in Philosophy and the Sciences, we would be very grateful if you could
point them to the symposium.

With best wishes,

Alexander Hieke and Hannes Leitgeb

********************************************************************************************

Announcing a one-day conference….

Metaphysics and Epistemology: Issues in the Philosophy of Mathematics
Saturday 15 March 2008

Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre, University of Manchester

Speakers to include:

Joseph Melia (University of Leeds)
Alexander Paseau (University of Oxford)
Philip Ebert (University of Stirling)

For registration details, see
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/philosophy/events/conference/index.html

This conference is organised with financial support from the Royal Institute of
Philosophy.

If you’re in London on a Tuesday evening, what better to do than to take in a talk by a young philosopher on logic or metaphysics?

Spotting this gap in the tourist offerings, the clever folks in the capital have set up the London Logic and Metaphysics forum. Looks an exciting programme, though I have my doubts about the joker on the 11th Dec…

Tues 30 Oct: David Liggins (Manchester)
Quantities

Tues 13 Nov: Oystein Linnebo (Bristol & IP)
Compositionality and Frege’s Context Principle

Tues 27 Nov: Ofra Magidor (Oxford)
Epistemicism about vagueness and meta-linguistic safety

Tues 11 Dec: Robbie Williams (Leeds)
Is survival intrinsic?

8 Jan: Stephan Leuenberger (Leeds)

22 Jan: Antony Eagle (Oxford)

5 Feb: Owen Greenhall (Oslo & IP)

4 Mar: Guy Longworth (Warwick)

Full details can be found here.

As Brian Weatherson reports here, there’s a metaphysics/phil physics conference at Rutgers this weekend (26-28th). I’m in Rutgers for the week, and am responding to one of the papers at the event. I’m looking forward to what looks like a really interesting conference.

Tonight (24th) I’m giving a talk to a phil language group at Rutgers. I’m going to be presenting some material on modal accounts of indicative conditionals (a la Stalnaker, Weatherson, Nolan). This piece has evolved quite a bit during the last few weeks as I’ve been working on it. A bit unexpectedly, I’ve ended up with an argument for Weatherson’s views.

Briefly, the idea is to look at what mileage we can get out of paradigmatic instances of the identification of the probability of a conditional “If A, B” with the conditional probability of B on A (CCCP). We know that in general that identification is highly problematic, due to notorious impossibility results due to David Lewis and more recently Ned Hall and Al Hajek. But I think it’s interesting to divide the issue into two halves:

First, what would a modal account of indicative conditionals that obeys (a handful of paradigmatic) instances of CCCP have to look like? I think there’s a lot we can say about this: of the salient options, it’ll look a lot like Weatherson’s theory; it’ll have to have a particular take on what kind of vagueness can effect the conditional; it’ll have to say that any proposition you know should have probability 1.

Second, is this package sustainable in the face of impossibility results? Al Hajek (in his papers in the Eels/Skyrms probability and conditionals volume) does a really nice job of formulating the challenges here. If we’re prepared to give up some instances of CCCP in recherche cases (like left-embedded conditionals, things of the form “if (if A, B), C”, then many of the general impossibility results won’t apply. But nevertheless, there a bunch of puzzles that remain: in particular, concerning how even the paradigmatic instances can survive when we receive new information.

I’ll mostly be talking about the first part of the talk this evening.

First, I’ve finished a (much extended) draft of the reply I gave to Hugh Mellor’s paper “Microcomposition” at the Leeds RIP Being conference (the name still amuses: that’s the Royal Institute of Philosophy, folks, not a metametaphysical jibe). The paper’s called “Working parts” and presents some arguments against the view that mereological relations are metaphysical primitive. Hugh’s position is that they should be analyzed in terms of locational and causal relations, and I think there’s a lot to be said for that view. Comments, as ever, very welcome. The paper is available here.

Second, from the end of this month I’m going to be taking over as secretary of the Analysis Committee. The trust does all sorts of good things: from awarding Analysis studentships to giving out conference grants, and of course, and are the figures in the background of the fantastic journal Analysis. I’m really excited to be involved.

Just to note that there are currently a bunch of jobs in philosophy/history and philosophy of science being advertised at Leeds. These are fixed-term (one year) lecturerships, and are pretty nice. While some places make temporary positions into teaching drudgery, Leeds has a policy of appointing full lecturer replacements, and so people appointed to these posts have in the past got exactly the teaching/admin load as the rest of us. Importantly for people looking to get out publications and secure permanent jobs, this means you got the same time to do research as a permanent lecturer. (Recent occupants of these roles have just secured permanent jobs and postdoc positions in the UK).

And of course you get to hang out with the lovely Leeds folk. So apply!

I write (most) of my research in LaTeX format. But journals often demand .rtf or even .doc formats for the final version of my paper. Sometimes by speaking to them very nicely you can get them to accept tex versions (Phil Studies and Phil Perspectives both did this). But sometimes that’s just not an option.

This leads to hours of heartache and potentially lots of typos, as I try ten ways of transferring the stuff over to my word processor. And I have to deal with getting logic into word, which is never nice. I used to use a special compiler to get it into html format, and then “save as” word. But that didn’t actually save much time, so I’ve recently begun to just cut-and-paste the raw tex file, and reformat it and rewrite any code I’ve put in. I’ve downloaded a couple of trial applications that promise to convert stuff directly into doc, but with no success (they throw a wobbly whenever they meet any dollar signs, it seems).

Does anyone know what the best way to do this is? Would it help to get scientific word (more money to the man, I know, but at this stage I’m desperate).

earths
Originally uploaded by blue sometimes

Hee hee