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.

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.