Trump Is A Racist President

Couldn't have said it better.

PS Does anyone understand how George Conway and What's Her Name are a functional couple? Is one of them just playing us?

New Paper: The Birth of Semantics (with Robert May)

Abstract

We attempt here to trace the evolution of Frege's thought about truth. What most frames the way we approach the problem is a recognition that hardly any of Frege's most familiar claims about truth appear in his earliest work. We argue that Frege's mature views about truth emerge from a fundamental re-thinking of the nature of logic instigated, in large part, with a sustained engagement with the work of George Boole and his followers, after the publication of Begriffsschrift and the appearance of critical reviews by members of the Boolean school.

Download it here.

Essays on Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic

I'm not usually that excited to get proofs, but in this case.... I just got the proofs for my contributions to Essays on Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic (here) which is being edited by Philip Ebert and Marcus Rossberg, the main translators of said book. It looks absolutely fantastic, with contributions from most all of the people you'd expect. OUP is saying it'll be out at the end of August (at least in the UK). Can't wait!!

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO₂ produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there. The estimated recoverable reserves of fossil fuels are sufficient to produce nearly a 200% increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. ...The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO₂ content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.

From Restoring the Quality of Our Environment: Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President's Advisory Committee, November 1965, Appendix Y4: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (PDF). The authors credit T.C. Chamberlain and Svante Arrhenius with the first speculation about the phenomenon, in 1899 and 1903, respectively.

New Paper: Pornography and Accommodation

Abstract

In 'Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game', Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simpified model of that phenomenon. I argue further that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges.

Download it here.

New Paper: Against Disquotation

Abstract

Disquotationalism is the view that the only notion of truth we really need is one that can be wholly explained in terms of such trivialities as: “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. The `Classical Disquotational Strategy' attempts to establish this view case by case, by showing that each extant appeal to truth, in philosophical or scientific explanations, can be unmasked as an appeal only to disquotational truth. I argue here that the Classical Strategy fails in at least two cases: attributions of truth to context-dependent utterances and uses of truth psychological explanations of behavioral success or, more fundamentally, appeals to falsity in psychological explanations of behavioral failure.

Find it here.

As a side note, I tend to sit on papers a long time, working them over until I'm really satisfied with them. This one might set a record. I first delivered it as a lecture, in St Andrews, in June 2019: almost ten years ago. I've given it as a lecture several times since, and I only got around to writing it in Spring 2018. It wasn't just laziness. There was always this one objection I couldn't quite see my way past. But I did finally figure it out a couple years ago. I always knew that the case of false beliefs (or other mental states) would prove crucial, but it took me a long time to figure out why.