May 2007 Archives

Leiter initiated a discussion about AOSs and AOCs that should be of interest to anyone (like me) either going on or on the job market. 

The Alabama Philosophical Society will be having their Fall conference Sept. 21-22 in Orange Beach, Alabama.  See their site for details.  Here is their CFP - deadline of Aug. 7.

[It's such a short distance away for me that I'll definitely be there--hopefully presenting.]

2nd Conference
Society for Analytical Feminism  
April 4-6, 2008
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

Sponsored by
the University of Kentucky
Office of the Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
and the Vice President for Research

The Society of Analytical Feminism is sponsoring a conference in Lexington, KY, April 4-6, 2008.  The Society invites the submission of papers that address feminist issues in any area of philosophy, including philosophy of language, philosophy of science, metaphysics, race theory, normative ethics, metaethics, Kantian ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, Ancient philosophy, rational choice theory, and epistemology.  The general theme of the conference is an examination of the relationship between analytical feminism and these areas of philosophy, including contributions that analytic feminist philosophy has made to these areas and ways in which it may have changed approaches to problems in these areas.

It's official, my Chair, Sandy Goldberg, has accepted a tenured offer from Northwestern.  While a tremendous loss for UK, it is a big move and I congratulate him.  Leiter posted the news here.

Epistemicism is, broadly, the view that while many or most of the terms of natural language are indeed vague, this vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon. That is, our vague terms do possess absolutely precise boundaries, but our epistemic limitations are such as to prevent us from coming to know the location of these boundaries. Thus, to rely on a standard example from the literature (which, it ought not be forgotten, involves enormous oversimplification), there is a specific number of hairs such that ‘bald’ applies to a person if and only if that person’s head has that many hairs or fewer. (In fact, as Michael Horton has pointed out to me, a truly precisely bounded meaning will be much more precise than even that; but let us suppose for the purposes of this example that such a boundary is precise.) Epistemicism often suffers the objection that use simply cannot accomplish this feat; our coarse linguistic practices cannot call out a single precisely bounded meaning as the correct meaning of ‘bald’, and since nothing other than use seems able to do the job either, epistemicism is suspect. Put another way, if “’bald’ =_df ‘having 2,713 hairs or fewer’” fits the relevant linguistic data and accords with use, then it is simply incredible to suppose that “’bald = _df ‘having 2,727 hairs or fewer’” does not fit the data equally well, thereby constituting an equally good candidate for the appropriate meaning of ‘bald’. Put a third way, there are simply too many possible choices for a precisely bounded meaning in the vicinity of the appropriate meaning of ‘bald’. And put a fourth and final way, for any precise meaning B₁ of ‘bald’ that is proposed to be the correct meaning of the term, there will be a neighboring meaning, B₂, that is either indistinguishable or nearly indistinguishable from B₁, such that use cannot possibly discriminate between B₁ and B₂.

Ok, I had a good break from blogging and got to visit UofK in the meanwhile.  But, back to the intense discussion of minutiae you have come to expect.  To that end, Carl Ehrett (currently a grad student at UK, but soon to be moving to Northwestern) has contributed a post on vagueness--the topic of his dissertation.  Let's welcome him by giving him twice as many comments as I usually receive.  N.B.: I'll go ahead and register that I'm aware that twice as many as zero is still zero.  But one can hope.

This looks really good, and organizers will attempt to assist with lodging.  Call for Abstracts Italian Society for Analytical Philosophy (SIFA) Call for Abstracts 1st National Graduate Conference:Language, Knowledge and Metaphysics Padua, 10th-12th September 2007

Webpage of the conference:

http://www.filosofia.lettere.unipd.it/analitica/grad-conf/