Check out Plantinga’s review of Dawkin’s book The God Delusion.
Plantinga thinks that even if there are many universes, (more…)
Archive for February, 2007
Plantinga Review of Dawkins (and my fine-tuning comments…)
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007Intuition Check (Stanley’s Ignorant High Stakes)
Saturday, February 24th, 2007In Knowledge and Practical Interests, Jason Stanley asks us to consider the following case:
Hannah and her wife Sarah are driving home on a Friday afternoon. They plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit their paychecks. Since they have an impending bill coming due, and very little in their account, it is very important that they deposit their paychecks by Saturday. But neither Hannah nor Sarah is aware of the impending bill, nor of the paucity of available funds. Looking at the lines, Hannah says to Sarah, ‘I know the bank will be open tomorrow, since I was there just two weeks ago on Saturday morning. So we can deposit our paychecks tomorrow morning.’ (p. 5)
Stanley then writes that “our reaction is that Hannah’s utterance of ‘I know the bank will be open tomorrow’ is false”. Now this just seems implausible to me. I think Stanley thinks that considerations of practical interests are supposed to make us think the utterance is false. But my reaction is still to think that Hannah’s utterance is true. (Note that Stanley thinks that in a situation in which there was little at stake for Hannah and Sarah, the evidence Hannah has would be sufficient for her knowledge-attribution to be true. See pp. 3-4.) At most, the considerations of practical interest might move me from the intuition that the utterance is true to having no clear intuition at all, but not all the way to the intuition that it is false. (This is at most - my intuition is that the utterance is true and I am unmoved by considerations of practical interest.)
I’m wondering what other people’s intuitions/reactions are and whether I’m just an outlier.  Do you have the intuition that the utterance is true, do you have no clear intuition at all, or do you have the intuition that it is false?
On the difference between analytic and continental philosophy
Friday, February 23rd, 2007The other day I was trying to explain to a friend (with a BA in philosophy, and interested in grad. school) what the difference is between analytic and continental philosophy. (I don’t think it is at all unusual for someone to get a BA in philosophy without knowing what the difference really amounts to. Insofar as I do know the distinction now, I sure as heck didn’t 2 years ago.) The following are some of the things I said in order to begin to characterize the distinction, and to characterize how analytics and continentals view one another’s respective disciplines. Nothing new or particularly illuminating here. But what do you think?   (more…)
Forced Abortions
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007Recently, a 13-year old in Torino, Italy was forced by her parents to abort her fetus (see here). This kind of case is unusual and presents a double-whammy for applied ethicists: first, the moral permissibility of the abortion and second the moral permissibility of using non-consensual force to secure an abortion.
Set the first question aside and grant that the abortion was early enough so that it was morally permissible (or whatever). The answer to the second question isn’t obvious (to me). At first blush, you might say that it is permissible to force the abortion if it is in the girl’s best interest. But this runs the risk of being too strong: if it was really in her best interest to abort, then the parents had a moral obligation to secure the abortion. That seems to strong. At best it was permissible for the parents to force the abortion. It’s tough to know what to say about this case…
Soul, Conceivability, and Possibility
Monday, February 19th, 2007Bill Vallicella, a.k.a., “Maverick Philosopher,” has an interesting post here on an argument for dualism. It may be of special interest to those taking Zach’s modal logic class. Do you think it is plausible?
Fine-Tuning and Leslie’s Firing Squad
Sunday, February 18th, 2007The evidence shows that the universe has been fine tuned for life. If the universe had expanded just a little bit faster or slower after the Big Bang, life wouldn’t have been able to exist.  This example of fine-tuning is one amongst dozens. Numerous other factors, constants, ratios, etc., had they been slightly off, would’ve made the existence of life physically impossible.
Some take this as reason to believe in an intelligent designer of the universe. Others take this as reason to believe that there are an infinite number of universes, and we happened to be in one of the few that was life-permitting. Those in the life-permitting universes shouldn’t be surprised since they had to be alive to see that their universe was life-permitting.
I always thought John Leslie’s firing squad example constituted a response to this. I am standing blindfolded before a firing squad. Fifty marksmen all shoot at me. All of them miss, each of them barely missing me. (Make it 50 billion marksmen all missing me, and we’re a little more like the fine-tuning case.) I could conclude either that there is intelligent design behind this (all of them planned to miss), or that there is an infinite number of universes, and I happened to be in one that was life permitting (specifically, my life), and so I shouldn’t be surprised that I was in one of the universes where I survived. But this is extremely counterintuitive.
Is there a response to this? I think I heard one, but I can’t remember it…
Lotteries and Closure
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007Of the four solutions to the lottery puzzle, the claim that we know lottery propositions has (arguably) the most trouble with closure. This is because in conjunction with uncontroversial principles about conjunction introduction, closure entails that we know all sorts of things that we don’t. Here’s an example. I buy one ticket in a 10,000-ticket lottery with a guaranteed winner. I also have a list of names of the 9,999 other ticket holders. Non-skeptical solutions will grant that I know the following ordinary proposition: I won’t be able to afford an African safari this year. This entails the following lottery proposition: I won’t win the lottery.
The closure-related trouble with this approach is as follows. While looking at the list of ticket holders, suppose by parity of reasoning I conclude that #1 won’t win the lottery. So by conjunction introduction I know that neither myself nor #1 will win the lottery. Ditto for #2. Etc. It looks like I can eventually know who on the list will win the lottery. But I can’t. So something’s got to go.
Below the fold I defend a solution that preserves our intuitions about closure while showing why closure does not threaten the claim that we oftentimes know lottery propositions.
The next Philosophers’ Carnival
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007If you enjoyed the most recent Philosophers’ Carnival, be sure to check out (and ideally nominate something for) the next one! (If you didn’t like it, well, then, make it better!)
It’ll be hosted by one of our distinguished alumni, Trent Dougherty, at This is the Name of This Blog.
Employment at Will
Sunday, February 11th, 2007I’m teaching business ethics this semester, and one of the big debates is over the truth of a principle known as employment at will (EAW). According to EAW, an employer bears no special moral obligations to his (non-contract) employees as such. In specific, an employer may hire, fire, promote and demote at will–he need have no reason at all, much less good reasons, for his decisions. The EAW relation is symmetric: the employee may leave the job at any time for no reason at all.
Despite the fact that something much like EAW governs our normal interpersonal relationships, the general consensus in the textbook is that EAW is false. Employers, for example, are morally obligated to offer due process to fired employees, not fire for arbitrary reasons, offer voluntary severance pay, hire according to race/gender stipulations, etc. This post is a request for arguments: why think that EAW is false?
Presentist-Friendly Account of Possible Worlds
Friday, February 9th, 2007In a recent paper, Trenton Merricks points out, interestingly, that the standard conception of possible worlds is not presentist-friendly. Many think the following:
(PW) p is a possible world iff p is a possibly true maximal proposition
where p is maximal iff for every q, p entails q or entails ~q. The world which is actual is the world which is true.
Presentists think that that there are dinosaurs is false but was once true. This implies that the actual world has not always been actual. But this is a crazy result. (See p. 11)
Merricks’ solution?  Merricks suggests the following presentist-friendly account of possible worlds:
(PW*) p is a possible world iff p is a possibly true proposition “that is maximal with respect to propositions that do not change their truth-value” (p. 12).
The proposition that dinosaurs exist at time t does not change its truth value. This presentist solution accords with our intuition that which world is actual does not change with time and it keeps our other intuitions about possible worlds intact.