I’ve been to good hill walking trips again, a nice and fairly sunny walk to Ambleside in the Lake District, doing Helvellyn and Fairfield among others, and a weekend away in Snowdonia National Park in Wales. Click the links to check out the photos in my gallery. The first half of the Snowdonia photos are from a previous trip there a couple of years ago. This time we had very different weather with huge amounts of snow — up to our waists at best! Managed to climb Tryfan on the second day despite the snow, which was really the one peak I wanted to do, as I had already done Snowdon on the previous trip. Next up in a couple of weeks will be a walk in the Lakes again, Coniston to be precise. Here a couple of teaser shots from the Gallery, one from each trip:

Ambleside

Snowdonia

I’ve just revised my paper on Euclidean Geometry and the A Priori. According to my statistics, the previous version has been downloaded a good few times, so apparently there is some interest regarding this topic. It might still require some further work, but my argument should be easier to follow now — the paper previously suffered from a lack of a clear target. My target is effectively contemporary views on a priori justification, such as the ones familiar from Albert Casullo and perhaps Laurence BonJour. I don’t tackle their views in any detail, but rather argue generally against the idea that a priori justification and knowledge are empirically defeasible, that is, the idea that further empirical evidence could defeat a priori justification. The single most influential problem for the opposing view, namely that such empirical defeaters are not possible, is the case of Euclidean geometry. A fairly commonly accepted view at the moment is that Euclidean geometry was indeed justified a priori, but once it turned out that the actual geometry is Riemannian rather than Euclidean, the original justification was defeated by empirical evidence. My argument can be outlined as follows:

1. A priori justification (and knowledge) is empirically indefeasible.
2. Cases like Euclidean geometry appear to suggest that this is not the case, hence the commonly accepted conception of a priori justification takes it to be empirically defeasible.
3. I want to keep (1), so (2) needs to be addressed somehow.
4. To do this, we must distinguish between the apriority of a proposition and the truth of a proposition.
5. Even though the judgements that we make concerning the truth of a proposition are empirically defeasible, a priori justification is not.
6. A priori justification concerns the metaphysical possibility of the proposition.

In motivating my case, I use some material which I developed in my draft ‘The Notion of Logical Truth’; mainly in the form of an analogy between the distinction of pure/applied geometry and truth in a model/truth in the world. Anyway, see the actual paper for the details of the argument. The ideas that I develop here go back to my very first published journal article, ‘A New Definition of A Priori Knowledge: In Search of a Modal Basis’, where I used Euclidean geometry as an example. This time I’ve actually looked at the details of Euclidean geometry to back up my case.

I’ve uploaded new photos to my Gallery from two recent hikes, they are from Osmotherley, North York moors, and Braithwaite, Lake District. I’ve also changed the organisation of the Gallery a bit.

I’ve been to Braithwaite before and there are a couple of old photos in that album as well. We had great weather for both hikes and especially in Braithwaite that amounted to some nice photography too. I haven’t been shooting quite as much recently, but regular hill walks are a good place to do it, as long as the weather is decent. I’m heading to the Lakes again this Saturday, to Ambleside, and the weekend after that I’ll join the Durham Uni hill walking society for a weekend away in Snowdonia National Park in Wales, where I’ve been once before.

Here are two shots from the recent walks, one from each, see the rest in the albums.

So far I haven’t really used this blog to publicize conferences or events, as I figured that most people who are interested follow the major blogs and mailing lists that list these events anyway. However, I figured that I might as well do it when I come across something interesting and worth publicizing. I believe that this conference might be such a case: Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. June 30 – July 3 2010, Prague, Strahov Monastery (Czech Republic). Prague is a lovely city, and a great place to have a conference.

The primary reason why I chose to publicize this event is my forthcoming volume on Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. The idea is of course that this is the perfect event to publicize my book. In fact, two of the contributors, E. J. Lowe and David Oderberg, are among the keynote speakers. Michal Loux has also been invited, and I should’ve really asked him to contribute to my volume as well. Unfortunately I already had too many people when that occurred to me.

Here is the actual CFP:

Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, both in the analytic and continental traditions, metaphysics was deemed to be passé. The last few decades, however, have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest among analytic philosophers in various traditional metaphysical topics, such as modality, truth, causality, etc. which resulted in the emergence of various forms of analytic metaphysics. The new forms of metaphysics differ from its traditional forms mostly in their methodology (we may notice various applications of contemporary formal logical techniques) and in the range of proposed solutions to particular problems. Besides these and other differences, however, there are also many similarities and there are even some who intentionally develop traditional metaphysical themes using the contemporary analytical methods. All these developments call for detailed exploration, which is the general goal of the conference Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. The conference aims to bring together leading analytic philosophers working in metaphysics and willing to explore relations between the traditional and contemporary concerns. The specific focus of the conference is a re-examination of Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics in contemporary setting. It is organized by the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University under the auspices of the Czech Academy Foundation. It takes place in the historical parts of the Strahov monastery near the Prague castle from June 30 to July 2, 2010.

CALL FOR PAPERS

* Papers are welcome on any of the topics indicated below.
* A short abstract of cca. 2500-3500 characters should be submitted to the Organizing Committee by April 15, 2010, by e-mail (if possible – see contacts above). The Peer-Review Board will select the papers to be presented at the Conference.
* Papers should be written in the English (preferred) or German language.
* The length of a paper should not exceed 25 minutes of reading time.

Papers selected by the Peer-Review Board will be edited and published as a supplement volume of the journal Studia Neoaristotelica.

TOPICS

* being and existence
* realisms vs. antirealisms
* truth, truthmaking, predication
* particulars and universals
* hylemorphism vs. mechanicism
* persistence through time
* the necessary and the possible
* the actual and the potential (powers, dispositions)
* propositions and states of affaires
* causes and explanation
* God

I do have one reservation about this conference: it is organized by the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University, and the peer review borad as well seems to consist of people working in theology departments. The suggested topics are clearly good though, and the keynote speakers are excellent, so I’m willing to give it the benefit of doubt. Anyway, I’ll probably submit something, if for no other reason then because it will be a great chance to let people know that there is a volume dedicated to this type of metaphysics coming out.

I have once again revised one of my papers which has been looking for a home for quite some time. It’s called ‘Truthmaking and Realism’, and it’s getting longer and longer: now at 11k words. The motivation comes from recent literature concerning truthmaking, especially the OUP book Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate, edited by Helen Beebee and Julian Dodd (2005). Several authors in the volume suggest that truthmaking is not compatible just with realism, but also with pragmatism and idealism, and thus does not help in defending realism in general. I take this point and suggest that in fact the wider applicability of the truthmaker principle only strengthens the realist’s case, for all that is needed is a plausible way to account for our realist intuitions concerning truth.

To defend this conclusion, I take one of the most influential critiques of realism, which has been advocated by Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, and Nelson Goodman; they all share some basic assumptions about realism and its problems. The objection is essentially that realism cannot account for truth. There is an important background assumption here, which is that realism is committed to the correspondence theory of truth. Putnam’s famous model-theoretic argument challenges the correspondence theory by claiming that there will be infinitely many correspondence relations between words and things, and hence indeterminacy ensues as we cannot pick out the intended correspondence. Michael Devitt, in his Realism and Truth (1997), has forcefully argued against the connection between realism and truth, and I take his point, but my argument goes roughly as follows:

1. Let us assume that the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection against realism combined with the correspondence theory holds.
2. This does not mean that realism automatically fails, because it is independent of the correspondence theory, as Michael Devitt has argued.
3. We still need an account of truth which is compatible with realism and does not succumb to the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection.
4. Truthmaking is such an account of truth, as it is compatible across ontologies, including realism.
5. The combination of realism and truthmaking can stand against the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection.

The part that I have revised mostly concerns the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique. I’ve added several passages that support my analysis. I still have some reservations about Dummett’s role in all this, because I found passages which suggest that he doesn’t consider realism to be committed to the correspondence theory, such as the following:

The correspondence theory of truth is often claimed as essential to realism. This is evidently false, since Frege was undoubtedly a realist but rejected the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory is also often confused with a truth-conditional meaning-theory, which is the natural extension of the classical two-valued semantic theory that we have taken as characteristic of realism. A properly constructed meaning-theory rightly seeks to characterise the concepts of truth and meaning simultaneously, whereas the correspondence theory took meaning as already given. It is an analogous mistake to regard the principle that, if a statement is true, there must be something in virtue of which it is true, is peculiar to realism. On the contrary, it is a regulative principle which all must accept. (Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, 1991: 331).

Still, Dummett here endorses a ‘regulative principle’, which bares remarkable similarity to the truthmaker principle, and this is really all I need for my argument: if the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique does not undermine truthmaking, and we have some independent reasons to think that truthmaking is a good starting point for a theory of truth, then the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique loses its strength.

I will not go into the details of truthmaking here, and in fact I don’t go very deeply into them in the paper either, but my preferred formulation of the truthmaker principle is as follows:

(TM*) Necessarily, in all possible worlds where [p] is true, there exists something alpha that makes [p] true.

The angled brackets indicate a proposition. The idea is that this principle is compatible across ontologies, but still manages to capture the core idea and plausibility of truthmaking. See the paper for details, any comments are welcome.