Yet another book of solo piano arrangements, this time of tunes either written by or recorded by John Coltrane. The ones he wrote (most of them, at least) cannot be 'played', as of this writing, presumably due to the need to pay royalties for such 'playing'.
The arrangements in this book are by Brent Edstrom.
This paper has been on my website for a while (here). It has now been accepted for publication at Porn Studies, which is a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis. I've been wanting for some time now to publish something in a non-philosophy, gender-and-sexuality-studies sort of journal, so it looks like that will finally happen.
Abstract:
So-called ‘facial’ cumshots, when a man ejaculates onto a woman’s face, are very common in pornography. While they are frequently said to be degrading and misogynistic, the fact that women are usually shown as enjoying this act should make us think again. Facials are instead rooted in male insecurity: of a fear that an aspect of how men orgasm—semen—is disgusting to women. By contrast, the fantasy, which pornography makes vivid, is that women might not just tolerate but celebrate and eroticize both ejaculation and its product. The way mainstream pornography presents facials may often be misogynistic, but it does not have to be, and it is not always.
A collection of works by women composers, from baroque to modern, for intermediate to early advanced, edited by Melanie Spanswick. See here for more information.
Complete YouTube Playlist here.
Abstract
Donald Davidson is generally supposed to have offered an argument for the principle of compositionality in “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”. Peter Pagin, however, has argued that Davidson offers no such argument. Indeed, Pagin claims that Davidson explicitly rejects any demand that compositionality should be justified and, moreover, that the argument in question is invalid. I argue here that the first claim is mistaken and that the latter, though it offers a helpful corrective, does not undermine the interest of the argument Davidson gives. But there is a deep tension in Davidson's work here, to which Pagin may well be responding, and that tension is not resolvable.
Get it here.
New paper, forthcoming in a volume on the foundations of mathematics. Abstract:
The 'Implicit Commitment Thesis' (ICT) states that, if you accept a mathematical theory, then you are 'implicitly committed' to its consistency, and perhaps also to various sorts of reflection principles. This is meant to have various consequences, such as that consistency proofs can never be cogent: give us reason to believe that a theory is consisetent. I here consider a sampling of arguments for ICT and argue that they are all wanting. At the end, I suggest that we should, anyway, think of soundness proofs, in particular, not as attempts to justify reflection principles but as attempts to explain why they are true.
Get it here.
This is the paper for which the two short notes posted earlier, "A Note on the Strength of Disentangled Truth-Theories" and "Some Remarks on 'Logical' Reflection", are essentially appendices.
For the conference in honor of Crispin Wright held in St Andrews recently, I gave a talk that continued a discussion several of us had been having at the UConn conference a couple years ago, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects. The subject of that discussion was whether there's any plausibility to the claim that Frege's Theorem might throw light on the epistemology of ordinary arithmetical knowledge, that is, the arithmetical knowledge of the legendary queer on the Clapham omnibus. I argued in the talk that there might well be such a case to be made.
I don't know if I'll ever write up this material, so I'm making the slides available on my website.
Abstract
So-called `disentangled' truth-theories are supposed to prevent assumptions about the truth of statements in the object-language from inadvertently strengthening the background syntax. In earlier work, I proved some limitative results in an attempt to show that the strategy works, but those results leave several questions unanswered. We address some of them here. We also discuss a subtlety that has so far been overlooked in discussions of these theories.
Find it here: https://philpapers.org/rec/HECANO-6
This is another short paper that is a kind of appendix to an in-progress paper on the question whether there are or could be epistemically potent proofs of consistency. It may be submitted to a journal like Thought or Analysis at some point.
Abstract:
Cezary Cieśliński has proved a result shows that highlights `logical reflection': The principle that every logically provable sentence is true. He suggests further that this result has a good deal of philosophical significance, specifically for the so-called `conservativeness argument' against deflationism. This note discusses the question to what extent Cieśliński's result generalizes, and just how strong `logical reflection' is, and suggests that the answers to these questions call the philosophical (though not the technical) significance of Cieśliński's result into doubt.
On my website: http://rkheck.frege.org/pdf/unpublished/CieslinskiNote.pdf
On PhilPapers: https://philpapers.org/rec/HECSRO
This is a short paper, under 4000 words, which I will probably submit to Thought or Analysis. But mostly it's a kind of appendix to an in-progress paper on the question whether there can be a 'cogent' consistency proof. That one will be posted before long.
