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.

The Tumblr Porn Ban

Yes, there are a lot of other horrible things going on in the world these days. But the recent decision by Tumblr to ban 'adult content' from the site is still extremely depressing. For one thing, as Violet Blue put it, it's clear that there's now a full-blown war on sex on the internet. And it's not going to make sex on the internet go away. What it's going to do is solidify the dominance of large corporations like MindGeek (the owners of PornHub, etc, etc).

What Tumblr and its ilk offered was an opportunity for people whose sexuality is usually marginalized, fetishized, or denied to express and explore that sexuality on their own terms. Stories abound of young, disaffected, confused, lost people who discovered who they were in large part because of their discovery of people like them on Tumblr. No one has given better expression to that than the wonderful and inimitable Vex Ashley, in this piece on Medium.

Among the 'marginalized' groups in question we find, frankly, women, who seem to have made up a large percentage of various Tumblr porn communities. Mainstream pornography rarely troubles itself to portray women's sexuality except as it serves men's. (We'll explore that and related issues in my graduate seminar this spring.) And it's not just men directors who are responsible. Most women directors struggle to break out of that mold, too. Among many other things, Tumblr provided a place for people to share the alternative pornographies they'd discovered and to try to construct some kind of counter-narrative to what's being peddled by PornHub (now that they've killed and then swallowed much of what used to be the mainstream pornography industry).

Probably all of that will migrate to some new location. (See here and here for some reporting on this.) But in so far as Tumblr's decision was a reaction to the imminent activation of FOSTA/SESTA, it's hard to know whether any platform that allows freely posted adult content can survive.

It's a lesson that's been taught over and over, but that never seems to be learned: Restrictions on sexually explicit expression always affect most directly and immediately sexually marginalized people. In part, that's because it's always up to some authority or other to enforce those restrictions, and the discretion that's built into the system makes it inevitable that they'll clamp down first and hardest on the already marginalized. But, in part, it's just because the marginalized are always the folks who get screwed (and not in a good way).

When Canada implemented MacKinnon-inspired restrictions on pornography in the early 1990s, for example, they were immediately used to shut down gay and lesbian bookstores, while the sex shops catering to straight men were left untouched. When Britain implemented new restrictions on online content a few years ago, they banned any display of female ejaculation while permitting 'facials'; banned women sitting on men's faces for oral sex while permitting rough fellatio to gagging; etc, etc. And whom did the agencies tasked with enforcing the law decide to go after? Women who ran BDSM sites. Anyone want to guess who age verification laws will actually affect? Not the big corporations that can afford the exorbitant fees the credit card companies stand ready to charge for the service.

Depressing? That barely scratches the surface.

UPDATE: Another excellent piece on this, from HuckMag.

Kids These Days

A few weeks ago, a student at Brown, Lauren Black, interviewed me for a podcast she was doing about children's beliefs about the universe. The result is here, at Now Here This. The one I'm in is titled The Conference Room in the Sky.

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett

A wonderful email I got from a past student reminded me of how much I miss my old BPhil supervisor, Sir Michael Dummett. I won't say much about him here. Philosophically, my work speaks to his influence, I hope, and I had my say, among many others, in the remembrances that Ernie Lepore assembled when Michael died. I also wrote about his impact on philosophy of mathematics for Philosophia Mathematica.

Michael was way ahead of his time, in so many ways. To mention just a few: His distinction between ingredient sense and assertoric content; his emphasis on indefinitely extensible concepts; his insistence, way back, that theories of meaning (for natural languages) must be theories of truth; that both must be theories of understanding; and that those in turn must be theories of what competent speakers know. Dummett, despite himself, was a neo-Davidsonian a decade or more before James Higginbotham, another of my teachers, would bring that sort of view into the center of philosophy of language and, for that matter, natural language semantics.

Anne Koedt, "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm"

Anne Koedt's essay "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" (1970) is a classic of second wave feminism, an important example of the concern feminists of that era had with sexuality, but also an intellectual precursor of political lesbian and the divisive debates that surrounded that topic. One can find 'reprints' all over the web, and the essay was reprinted in a collection of essays, Radical Feminism, edited by Koedt that was published in 1973. But the version published in that book, and (from what I can tell) 'reprinted' elsewhere, is not quite the same as the original.

I know this because I was fortunate enough to find a copy of the original on abebooks.com. It was published by the New England Free Press (operating out of Boston) on two double-letter (8.5"x22") pages, printed both sides, and folded into a letter-sized (8.5"x11") pamphlet (with no staples, at least in mind). Cost: 10 cents, about 70 cents in 2018. It's the kind of thing one would have found in 'radical' bookstores back in those days.

Because of the historical importance of this work, it seems worth making a copy available online. So here's a DjVu and a PDF.

(If anyone should have good reason to object to my making this available, please let me know, and I'll be happy to remove it.)

Corner Quotes in LaTeX

I'm posting this just because I had a hard time, today, finding the original source for a macro I've been using for a while in LaTeX. The macro in question typesets 'corner quotes', such as:

⌜A ∧ B⌝

The corners themselves are not hard to create, since LaTeX has \ulcorner and \urcorner macros. That will usually work fine, but there are issues involving the height and spacing of the corners that can arise in some cases. A macro due to Sam Buss solves these problems. (I discovered it here.) I've put the macro in a style file, godelnum.sty, which you can download here. Here's the contents:

\newbox\gnBoxA
\newdimen\gnCornerHgt
\setbox\gnBoxA=\hbox{$\ulcorner$}
\global\gnCornerHgt=\ht\gnBoxA
\newdimen\gnArgHgt


\def\Godelnum #1{%
       \setbox\gnBoxA=\hbox{$#1$}%
       \gnArgHgt=\ht\gnBoxA%
       \ifnum \gnArgHgt<\gnCornerHgt
               \gnArgHgt=0pt%
       \else
               \advance \gnArgHgt by -\gnCornerHgt%
       \fi
       \raise\gnArgHgt\hbox{$\ulcorner$} \box\gnBoxA %
               \raise\gnArgHgt\hbox{$\urcorner$}}

Usage is just: \Godelnum{A \wedge B}, and the like. Note that one can do this outside math, since the macro inserts $s around the argument. (Probably \ensuremath would be better.)

Newly Published: Logicism, Ontology, and the Epistemology of Second-Order Logic

In Ivette Fred and Jessica Leech, eds, Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 140-69 (PDF here)

Abstract:

In two recent papers, Bob Hale has attempted to free second-order logic of the 'staggering existential assumptions' with which Quine famously attempted to saddle it. I argue, first, that the ontological issue is at best secondary: the crucial issue about second-order logic, at least for a neo-logicist, is epistemological. I then argue that neither Crispin Wright's attempt to characterize a `neutralist' conception of quantification that is wholly independent of existential commitment, nor Hale's attempt to characterize the second-order domain in terms of definability, can serve a neo-logicist's purposes. The problem, in both cases, is similar: neither Wright nor Hale is sufficiently sensitive to the demands that impredicativity imposes. Finally, I defend my own earlier attempt to finesse this issue, in "A Logic for Frege's Theorem", from Hale's criticisms.

And from the acknowledgements:

It is the peculiar tradition of our tribe to express our respect for other members by highlighting our disagreements with them. So, in case it is not clear, let me just say explicitly how much I admire Bob Hale’s work. I learned a lot from him over the years—both in conversation and from his written work—and greatly enjoyed the time we were able to spend together. Bob’s enthusiastic support for me and my work, early in my career, was particularly important to me. So I am honored to be able to contribute to this volume and thank Ivette and Jessica for the invitation.

I'm particularly sad, for myself, that Bob passed before we had a chance to discuss these issues one more time....