There’s still a week left to submit your entires for the next, 106th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival, which I will be hosting here at ttahko.net. The submission deadline is April 3rd, midnight GMT-0500, and the carnival will go up on the evening of April 5th. I will be accepting submissions in any area of philosophy, but they should be philosophically substantial at least to a certain degree. Book reviews and surveys are very welcome. Selfishly, I will give preference to entries in my own areas of interest: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic and philosophy of science, and especially modality, metaontology, a priori knowledge, essences, natural kinds and truth. Submit your blog post here.

I should mention that I have not received very many submissions yet. Well, I have received about ten submissions that have more to do with religious fundamentalism than philosophy, as well as four barely relevant submissions from a single blogger (despite the guidelines which state that bloggers should limit their submissions to one per carnival), but obviously I won’t be including those. I suspect that there will be a surge of submissions in the last couple of days, but at the moment it looks as if any proper philosophically substantial post is likely to get accepted. I’ll probably include a few of my own picks from the blogosphere as well.

Since complaining about the current job market in philosophy/academia is such a fun and productive activity, I thought I’d highlight some recent discussions about it. This article by William Pannabacker (whose pen name is Thomas H. Benton) about how dreadful the job market in the humanities is sparked a comment from the almighty Brian Leiter, and Leiter’s rather hostile remarks are now being discussed at the The Philosophy Smoker.

Here are a couple of excerpts from these discussions, firstly from Pannabacker’s article:

I don’t think the current crop of humanities graduates can claim that they were not warned about the weak job market, but the situation is actually much worse now, if you are finishing a Ph.D., than you had any reason to expect when you started. If you once thought that a 40-percent chance of finding a tenure-track position was a risk worth taking (after maybe eight years of graduate school), then how do you feel about a 20-percent chance?

Well, I can say that I don’t feel particularly optimistic. Pannabacker goes on to criticse some of the current trends in academia, and many of his comments seem entirely reasonable to me; he for instance recommends that rather than aspiring to eventually get a tenured professorship, graduate students should pursue their degrees ‘simply out of a desire to learn’, and not succumb to the pressure. However, Leiter accuses Pannabacker of lying about the job market and goes on to effectively say that those who can’t get jobs should blame themselves, or their undergraduate teachers:

It is a shame that a lot of those who echo Pannabacker’s reckless generalizations do so under cover of anonymity. Each time the veil of anonymity has been lifted, in my experience, it turns out that the person complaining that there are no jobs for really good candidates is a graduate of a mediocre or worse PhD program. Some of these people may really be good candidates; that’s very hard to know. But what is often easy to know is that they have the albatross of a not very good graduate program around their neck, and their difficulties on the job market are, alas, predictable. It is a shame these people were misled, either by the programs in question or by their undergraduate teachers, and it has been one of my aims to make misleading students this way harder. But the fact that there really aren’t jobs for PhDs from weak programs does not mean one shouldn’t get a PhD in philosophy. It means a student should not get a PhD from a weak program.

So what Leiter is saying is that you shouldn’t do a Ph.D. unless you can do it at a top program (he quotes the placement records of seven top philosophy programs in the US). Now, there is the issue of factual accuracy here, as it’s not clear that even graduates of top programs always manage to land on a job, or a good job anyway. There’s a lot of discussion about this at The Philosophy Smoker, here’s a passage which rings true to me:

Some people are whiners, I agree. I hate people that blame their job hardship on women and minorities. And [some] people do crap work. Fine, I may be one of them. But claiming that the job market is anything other than a crapshoot is just dishonest. When places get 400 job applicants, your application is not going to receive careful review. It’s not anyone’s fault, per se, it’s just how the market is. Some people get lucky and get a lot of attention. Great for them. Most people don’t. Let’s stop lying and start realizing that the job market is just too noisy to guarantee that the best people get the best jobs, and the worst people get no jobs. Sometimes people do better than they expect, and most of the time people end up worse off than anyone would expect. But we currently have people telling us that good people don’t have to worry and they will land great jobs. This, post facto, is a great justification for those with jobs to announce that the system is very good at finding the best people. But it’s not the most honest story to tell.

Now, one issue that hasn’t come up here is that even if you’re roughly aware of how the philosophy job market works and would be able to get into a top program in the US, this doesn’t mean that everyone would want to do this, or that it would be anything like the best choice for them in terms of their philosophical development. And this is a key issue: shouldn’t we be looking into getting the best possible philosophical education rather than choosing a program because it has a good placement record? For one thing, not everyone can, or wants to, go to the US (or Oxbridge etc.), for obvious reasons. Secondly, I’ve always felt that what matters for doing a Ph.D. is who you work with, that is, you go where the person is who is the best expert in the area of your primary research interest.

For me, the choice was obvious: I wanted to work with E. J. Lowe, and he is here in Durham. Ok, with hindsight, maybe I should’ve gone to NYU to work with Kit Fine, since it happens to be the number one department in philosophy in the world and I’d really like to work with Kit Fine as well. But there were other things to take into account too: the UK is much closer to Finland than the US, and perhaps a nicer place to be anyway. So it seems to me that the discussion here is ignoring some rather relevant factors for choosing where to do a Ph.D. — if all you care about is getting a high paid position at a top university in the US, then listen to Leiter. But if you’re looking to do philosophy, the kind of philosophy that you want to do, then you’d better think in terms of the best possible supervisor for you rather than the placement record of the program.

I’ve uploaded a few photos to the Whitby album from a coastal walk a week ago on Saturday. The new photos are from number 23 onwards. I was a bit lazy this time, as I’ve already got some nice photos from that area from two previous years. I’ve also created a new album for Brighton, where I spent a couple of days last summer. Nothing amazing there as the weather wasn’t ideal for photography, but I thought I’d upload the few shots that I have. Hopefully there will more photos coming after Easter when I return from a road trip in Devon & Cornwall!

Right, so I wasted way too much time on the whole obesity/discrimination debate (see my previous post, as well as my addendum in the comments), so here is something completely different: what is philosophy good for? There was a link to an article in Newsweek from a couple of years ago circulating on Facebook recently, and I thought it would be worth sharing: ‘I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood’ — a philosopher discusses the dreaded question that all of us philosophers have to face from time to time: what is it that you do, exactly?

I’ve got a few other links that I’ve collected about philosophy in media, here’s one in The Guardian which is related to the previous one (and also uses cogito as a basis for the title, what originality!): ‘I think, therefore I earn’. This one is about a sudden increase in demand for philosophy graduates.

But wait, there’s more! CareerCast reports that philosophy is the 12th best job in the US in ‘A Comprehensive Ranking of 200 Different Jobs’. Not too bad given that lawyers and medical experts are way below that.

Finally, if it’s money you’re after, the Payscale College Salary Report tells us that the mid-career median salary of a philosopher is a fairly respectable $76,700. Engineering and computers will earn you more than that, but might not be as good in other respects. Both mathematics and physics seem to be good choices though, as mathematicians top the CareerCast survey, while physicists are at number 13; they both also pay better. Of course, first you have to actually land on a job…

Well, I better go and do some actual philosophy for a change!

An online version of the so called Trolley problem recently sparked discussion on one of the philosophy mailing lists. The discussion concerned the reference to a ‘very fat man’ in the description of the problem. The Trolley problem concerns moral philosophy, which I know very little about and have very little interest towards, but I was rather irritated by the angry replies from some parties that found the reference to a ‘fat man’ prejudiced. I’m not going to discuss this issue as such, but I’m concerned about a more general problem, which is evident in this recent article in the New York Times as well: ‘For Obese People, Prejudice in Plain Sight’. The position at issue here is that obese people are being discriminated against and that this is wrong. However, this position completely ignores the moral issues associated with obesity in the first place, and seems to me to be a sign of red herring argumentation that one sees all too often. Now, the author of the online version of the Trolley Problem has commented on the discussion here, and I decided to participate in the discussion. You can see my comment at that blog, but what follows is a summary of how I see the issue.

Firstly, let’s exclude cases where obesity is caused by factors that are clearly beyond the individual’s control, such as certain illnesses and perhaps psychological factors as well. We should also exclude those who have bigger bodies strictly due to genetic reasons. No doubt this still leaves a huge number of obese people who have chosen to ignore early warning signs and continue to eat in a manner that contributes to obesity. Ok, they may regret that now and it’s probably not helpful to make them feel guilty about it, but there are a number of straightforward utilitarian (and other moral) reasons to think that these people are doing something wrong.

Now, compare the situation to someone who chooses to smoke: this is something that is openly being discriminated against and not many people would be willing to argue that it’s not right to do so, because there are clear utilitarian (and other) reasons to think that smoking is bad. How is the limited case of obese people different? Smokers are addicted and may have little control over smoking, and it may not help to make them feel guilty (or maybe it does in both cases!). In any case, we choose to make smoking more difficult, we encourage people to stop it and we openly discuss the harms of smoking for both the smokers themselves and for people surrounding them. Why would we not be entitled to do the same in the case of unhealthy eating (not just if it leads to obesity!)? I see no reason to think that this is an unjustified prejudice.

There are of course subtle issues here about what is the best social and political approach to minimise the harms of obesity, and it is certainly not appropriate to insult obese people. However, the discussion should not lose sight of the fact that most obesity is by the choice of the obese individual and it comes with a great cost both to the individual in question as well as the society. Rather than focus on how not to insult or discriminate against obese people in any way, we should focus on reducing the number of obese people and the causes for obesity as best we can. In this regard it might very well be a good thing that there is a social stigma associated with obesity in a similar manner that there is with smoking — in regard to smoking this has proved to be effective. Not that I’m suggesting that the analogy goes all the way, this is of course a complex issue. Also, as a commentator pointed out at the Talking Philosophy blog, it may be impossible to tell whether obesity is due to issues beyond the individual’s control, or whether they are taking reasonable measures to change the situation.

I should mention that the worry here generalises even further: groups that are — at least by utilitarian and perhaps other grounds — doing something wrong, and then defending these activities by complaining about discrimination, seem to be doing something rather questionable: this is the red herring. Shouldn’t they rather be discussing the moral problems associated with these activities and how to alleviate the situation?

So, this is why I don’t do moral philosophy: the debates are often full of red herrings and there’s a constant risk of being accused of bigotry.

I will be hosting the next, 106th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival here at ttahko.net. The current edition is here. The carnival will go up on April 5th. I will be accepting submissions in any area of philosophy, but they should be philosophically substantial at least to a certain degree. Book reviews and surveys are very welcome. Selfishly, I will give preference to entries in my own areas of interest: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic and philosophy of science, and especially modality, metaontology, a priori knowledge, essences, natural kinds and truth. So get blogging and submit your blog post here! The submission deadline is April 3rd, midnight GMT-0500.

I have been using the Garmin Forerunner 405CX GPS-enabled sportswatch and heart rate monitor for about a month and a half now, so I thought it’s time to post a review. I got it mainly for running, and I think that it is essential gear for runners, but I’ve also used it on hill walks and just casual walks — although I only wear the heart rate monitor when running. I’ve covered almost 300km and climbed nearly 12km in just under 60 hours of activity time with the device, so I’ve got a pretty good idea about it. It also comes with advanced calorie calculation based on heart rate, gender, age, weight and activity level. It’s impossible to determine how accurate the calorie calculation is, but it claims that I’ve used about 17,600 calories in the mentioned activities. The device retails for about £235 with the heart rate monitor at Amazon, although I managed to get mine for a bit less.

You can see the link above for detailed specifications, but here is a list of the most important features:

• Measures distance, time, laps, elevation gain, heart rate, calorie usage and pace/speed
• Four customisable data screens with up to three elements, including a virtual training partner
• Stores all data in internal memory and uploads it wirelessly to you PC or Mac
• Comes with the Garmin Training Center software where you can view previous activities and design workouts etc.
• Garmin Connect online Training Center for sharing and comparing your data
• There are some built-in workouts such as heart rate zone training and interval training, which are fully customisable
• Alerts for heart rate, pace, reaching goal etc.
• Bike mount and foot pod (for indoors training) available as optional accessories

The device is very easy to set up and using it is straight forward. The wrist band is customisable, but I haven’t tried to do anything to it. Although the watch is not very bulky, the rigid part is fairly long, which can be a bit of an issue in terms of having it in a comfortable position. I prefer to wear it over my shirt, but that only works if you’ve got long sleeves, which will not be an option when it gets warmer. Still, it’s not too uncomfortable. The heart rate monitor, which you strap around your chest, is surprisingly comfortable; most of the time I don’t even remember it’s there.

The user interface is fairly intuitive, with a bezel system not unlike the one familiar from iPods; you slide your finger around the bezel to change options, and tap it to confirm. It has a major advantage compared to the iPod wheel though: it works even when you’re wearing gloves. The menu system is simple and works, although some options are quite deep in the menu.

My personal experiences from using the device have been very positive. It’s very useful to know the exact distance you’ve covered as well as the time of course. The best thing is being able to keep track of your pace though: you can get this as a simple km/h input, average lap pace, current lap pace, average pace for the whole run, and so on. The distance of a lap is customisable, but the default is one kilometer. Incidentally, you can get everything in miles as well if you prefer. Anyway, whenever you complete a lap, the device beeps (but you can disable this) and gives you the lap time. This is extremely useful for pacing yourself and seeing the effect of hills and such on your pace.

Then there’s the heart rate monitor. The first few times that I used the device, I quickly discovered that I was running much too fast, that is, my average heart rate was too high (well over 160bpm). When you upload your data to the Garmin Training Center, you get a graph of your pace and heart rate. You have to set up the device so that the heart rate zones apply to you — you can do this by entering your age, gender, and maximum heart rate — but after that you get a good idea of the level of exertion for your activity. There’s a lot of research about heart rate zones and the guidance varies a bit, but basically you can divide it into five zones: Zone 1 being 50-60% of your max. heart rate, Zone 2 is 60-70% … and Zone 5 is 90-100%. The vast majority of your training should be somewhere around Zone 3. So, like I said, I discovered that I had been running way too fast, namely in Zone 4. So one of the first things I did was to try to pace myself and stay mostly in Zone 3. After only a couple of weeks of doing this, I was able to cover my normal 10k route in the same time or a bit faster than previously while staying within Zone 3. So that was a major improvement strictly due to the use of a heart rate monitor.

I should say something about the GPS itself. It appears that the distance is measured very accurately, as far as I can tell, but the same is certainly not true of the elevation gain. Also, you can’t access data about total elevation gain during the activity; this is possible only after uploading the data to your computer. Now, the data for elevation gain seems rather unreliable because my normal 10k route has varied between something like 400-600m, while it should be pretty much the same each time. This doesn’t make much of a difference for running, but for hill walking it would be nice to see the accurate elevation gain. Having said that, when the elevation gain is steady, as it tends to be when climbing a mountain, the accuracy seems to improve. I’ve also checked the reported elevation while up on a mountain against the map value, and it seems to be accurate within 5 meters or so. Anyway, the best way to do this would be to include a separate barometric sensor for elevation gain. Unforunately this unit doesn’t come with one of those. Incidentally, there is a separate menu in the device for GPS accuracy, you can also check how many satellites it can find. A final issue concerning accuracy: the maximum speed sometimes goes haywire. So, when you upload your data, you might find that you managed to run at a pace of 18,000km/h for a fraction of a second, which sounds rather unlikely. Something of the sort has happened to me a couple of times.

The accuracy issues are not very serious, but there is one clear flaw: battery life. When not in use, the device remains on standby for a good few weeks, and Garmin promises 8 hours in training mode. I’ve gotten close to this, but the unit has died on me after 6 hours. This is not an issue for running of course — unless you’re doing two marathons back to back — but hill walks could easily take longer than that. The device isn’t designed for that of course, but I’d like to be able to use it for that as well. Not to mention that you’re out of luck if you hope to use the device for several days without having the opportunity to recharge it. Recharging itself is simple and quick though: it only takes an hour or so from empty to full battery.

Finally, a few words about the Garmin Connect online Training Center. I find it to be one of the best features. Not only does it give you some more accurate information than the Training Center Software, such as good map/satellite/terrain/Google Earth view of your route, it also works as an online library of all your activities, which all get a permanent link. This makes it very easy to share data with people you might have been running/hiking with, or anyone else for that matter. If you’re interested, you can find a full database of my activities with the device at my Garmin Connect page. This gets automatically updated whenever I have completed an activity and bring my Garmin device within the range of the wireless USB receiver connected to my PC. So you can spy all my running/hiking routes from here! Well, I might regret advertising this if I start seeing creepy people lurking behind trees on my runs…

Let’s end the review with a summary of the positives and negatives of the unit:

Positives:

• Accurate data on distance/pace
• Built-in workouts
• Indispensable data on heart rate and exertion levels
• Easy data synchronisation with your computer
• Garmin Connect online for sharing your data

Negatives:

• Short battery life in training mode
• Inaccurate for measuring elevation gain
• Occasional glitches in max. speed

In my opinion, the positives far outweigh the negatives and I have certainly not regretted buying this device. It has completely changed my training. I had been thinking about running a half-marathon some time this year, I’ve never done one before. However, I’ve been running distances up to 20k in training now without any trouble, and I’m starting to feel that a half-marathon is not such a big deal. I’d be happy to run one, but there aren’t any organised races near me and it feels a bit silly to go somewhere just to run a half-marathon. Consequently, I’m now considering of doing a full marathon instead. I’ve got my eyes on the Helsinki City Marathon, which takes place on August 14th this year. Still plenty of time before that, but I’ll probably do it if I’m in Finland then and manage to keep training.

There are still a few more days before the deadline to submit abstracts for a workshop on Scott Soames’ philosophy in Cologne, Germany this May. The conference is aptly titled Meaning, Modality and Apriority, and involves both a Graduate Conference with a keynote from Soames as well as a research workshop with Soames. The call for the graduate conference has passed some time ago, but the deadline for the research workshop is 15th March. There are only four slots though, so I expect that there will be a bit of competition for those. Anyway, since I have commented on Scott Soames’ work before, for instance in my paper ‘On the Modal Content of A Posteriori Necessities’, I thought that I should submit something. I’ve come up with an abstract for a paper in which I plan to show that Soames’ case against the linguistic account of modality supported by people like David Chalmers, Frank Jackson and Alan Sidelle suffers from the fact that his own, supposedly metaphysical story about modal statements, is remarkably close to the one offered by deflationists such as Sidelle. My abstract follows, but please don’t steal it!

The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements
ABSTRACT

In his Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (2005), Scott Soames puts forward an influential critique of the framework of two-dimensional modal semantics and the interpretation of a posteriori necessities proposed by proponents of the framework, especially Frank Jackson (1998) and David Chalmers (1996). While I agree with much of what Soames has to say about the topic, I am concerned that ultimately both Soames and the two-dimensionalists fail to see the fine-grainedness of the metaphysical status of modal statements. This is partly due to the short-comings of Kripke’s (1980) original treatment of a posteriori necessities, and partly due to the contemporary deflationist trend, which takes modality to reduce fully to linguistic or conceptual content. The latter is familiar especially from the work of Jackson and Chalmers, as well as Alan Sidelle (2002).

On the face of it, Soames is clearly opposed to this trend, as he thinks that Kripke’s most important achievement was to break the illusion that the a priori can be identified with the analytic, and that modality is merely linguistic (Soames 2006: 307). Soames claims that any kind of interesting philosophy will not fit into this deflationary, linguistic model. I very much sympathise with this idea, but it seems to me that Soames fails to fully commit to it himself. E. J. Lowe (2007a, 2007b) has raised similar concerns about the shortcomings in Soames’ metaphysical story, but so far Soames has not replied to them in any detail (cf. Soames 2007). The closest that Soames comes to addressing the metaphysical status of modal statements are the last three chapters of his earlier book, Beyond Rigidity (2002, ch. 9-11). We are especially interested in his analysis of the difference between the following identity sentences:

[1] For all x, x is a drop of water iff x is a drop of a substance molecules of which contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
[2] For all x, x is a drop of water iff x is a drop of the substance instances of which fall from the sky in rain and fill the lakes and rivers. (Soames 2002: 272.)

Presumably, (1) is metaphysically necessary, while (2) is contingent. Soames takes a point from Nathan Salmon (2005), which I believe to be of crucial importance for this analysis: what makes (1) a metaphysical necessity, if anything, is the underlying assumption concerning chemical substances, namely, that they have their molecular structures essentially (Soames 2002: 273). Now, Soames goes on to ask ‘What exactly are substances, and how do we arrive at our modal intuitions (pretheoretic beliefs) regarding them?’ (ibid.). This is of course where one ought give the metaphysical story, but the story that Soames gives is remarkably close to the one familiar from the deflationists. Soames describes how we introduce a natural kind term such as “water” with the intention that it is a ‘substance term’, i.e. applies to everything that shares the molecular structure in the original sample that we decided to call “water”. However, we do not need to know what that structure is when we introduce the term, all that matters is that we intend to use the notion in a way that respects the original intuition. We may subsequently learn more about the substance in question, e.g. that water is H2O, but this is the point where the metaphysical story about (1) ends (cf. Soames 2002: 273-275).

Soames goes on to refine the account somewhat, but this picture is effectively what he ends up with. Now, it seems that we could sum up Soames’ account roughly as follows: ‘Nothing counts as water in any situation unless it has the same deep explanatory features (if any) as the stuff we call “water”’, which I have quoted from Sidelle (2002: 319). But as Sidelle argues, this is an analytic principle concerning the linguistic usage of the the term “water” rather than a metaphysical a priori truth! The way Soames sometimes puts this is almost exactly as in the passage quoted from Sidelle:

‘”Water” was stipulated to designate whatever underlying physical characteristic it is that is shared by (nearly) all members of the class of paradigmatic water-samples that explains their most salient features – the fact that they boil and freeze at certain temperatures, that they are clear, potable, and necessary to life, etc.’ (Soames Forthcoming: 7).

According to Soames, when this stipulation is combined with our empirical information about water, it follows that water is necessarily H2O. So, it seems that Soames has given us little more than what the deflationary picture offers, and hence we are still at risk of identifying the a priori with the analytic and reducing modality to linguistics. In fact, Soames explicitly opts for a linguistic analysis rather than a metaphysical one, although he claims that this helps us to narrow down ‘the range of feasible ontological alternatives’ (ibid., 1).

In addition to an inquiry into Soames’ account of modal statements, I will offer a more detailed analysis of the metaphysical assumptions associated with modal statements and argue that the metaphysical story is much more fine-grained than Soames suggests. The elements of the metaphysical story are indeed already familiar from Salmon (2005), but there is much more to be said about e.g. the status of chemical substances, and it seems to me that Soames does not do justice to Salmon, who did recognize the complexity of the underlying metaphysical story (p. 176 ff.). Relying on recent work in the philosophy of chemistry (e.g. Hendry 2006, Needham 2008), I will attempt to give a more satisfactory account about the underlying metaphysical assumptions concerning chemical substances. We will see that there are some good reasons to think that the assumption according to which chemical substances have their molecular structures essentially may even be mistaken.

The upshot is that although Soames is on the right lines in challenging the deflationary approach to modal statements, his own account fails to fully accommodate their metaphysical status.

References:

• Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Hendry, R. F. (2006) ‘Elements, Compounds, and Other Chemical Kinds’, Philosophy of Science 73, 864–75.
• Jackson, F. (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Lowe, E. J. (2007a) ‘Does the Descriptivist/Anti-Descriptivist Debate Have Any Philosophical Significance?’, Philosophical Books 48, 27-33.
• Lowe, E. J. (2007b) ‘A Problem for A Posteriori Essentialism Concerning Natural Kinds’, Analysis 67.4, 286-92.
• Needham, P. (2008) ‘Resisting Chemical Atomism: Duhem’s Argument’, Philosophy of Science 75, 921–31.
• Salmon, N. U. (2005) Reference and Essence, 2nd ed. (New York: Prometheus Books).
• Sidelle, A. (2002) ‘On the Metaphysical Contingency of Laws of Nature’, in Conceivability and Possibility, ed. T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 309-336.
• Soames, S. (2002) Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Soames, S. (2005) Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
• Soames, S. (2006) ‘The Philosophical Significance of the Kripkean Necessary Aposteriori’, Philosophical Issues 16: Philosophy of Language.
• Soames, S. (2007) ‘The Substance and Significance of the Dispute Over Two-Dimensionalism’, Philosophical Books 48: 34–49.
• Soames, S. (Forthcoming) ‘What are Natural Kinds?’, Philosophical Topics.

Amazing luck in terms of weather for hill walking doesn’t seem to end, as last Saturday’s trip to Coniston with the University hill walking society was once again a very nice day. Did about 22k with 1400m height again, covering most of the interesing peaks in the area. I’ve been to Coniston a couple of times before, but until now I hadn’t posted any photos from there. There’s now a bunch of photos from Coniston in my Gallery. There’s only one walk left this term, which will be to Whitby. However, I have a road trip planned during the Easter break with a couple of mates; we will be driving around Cornwall and Devon for a few days. Hopefully I’ll get some nice shots from that trip! Here’s a teaser from Coniston:

Firstly, if you haven’t seen my previous post, go there now and leave a comment. I’m hoping to get some feedback about what people would like to see on this blog. In the meanwhile, here is another post in the ‘Work in Progress’ series. This time a survey article of sorts based on the lectures that I gave in Geneva last December, entitled ‘Varieties of Modality’. I was hoping to get this published somewhere like Philosophy Compass, but it seems that I entered the party a bit too late, as they are not intending to commission any more modality stuff at this time. It may be difficult to find a home for this, as it is really a survey article, although I do entertain some rather wild ideas towards the end of the paper…

The question that I pursue in the paper is how many different kinds of modality – different realms of possible worlds – are there? Philosophers commonly talk at least about metaphysical, conceptual, epistemic, logical, physical, mathematical, biological, technological, normative and natural modality. It is not always clear how these different types of modality are related, or whether some of them are more fundamental than others. The relationships between metaphysical, conceptual and logical necessity and possibility are particularly interesting. The paper is a survey of our options in this regard. We can distinguish four approaches which are currently widely discussed: the Kripkean approach, the conservative approach, the conceptualist approach, and the essentialist approach. The differences between these approaches are best described by comparing their takes on the distinction between metaphysical and conceptual modality. The Kripkean approach holds that this distinction is genuine and that we are dealing with two different kinds of modality. The conservative approach, which is familiar for instance from Bob Hale’s work, challenges the role of metaphysical modality and suggests that logical necessity is the most fundamental type of modality, it is absolute. The conceptualist approach, most forcefully argued for by Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, also questions the distinction and suggests that metaphysical modality can be fully accounted for in terms of conceptual modality. Finally, the essentialist approach, defended especially by Kit Fine, suggests that conceptual and logical modality can be seen as species of metaphysical modality. I will also consider an alternative approach based on the essentialist approach, which takes metaphysical modality to be absolute in Hale’s sense.

You can download the paper for the survey bits, but what’s this crazy alternative approach..? Well, if we take the cue from the essentialist approach and consider logical and conceptual necessity as subspecies of metaphysical necessity, as Kit Fine suggests in his ‘Varieties of Necessity’ (2002), then I think we already have the tools for something a bit more radical. Firstly, we can rule out all extra-metaphysical possibilities — that is, possibilities such as water being XYZ, when we consider water to be essentially H20 — as pseudo-possibilities. What this means in practice is that there is no stronger type of necessity than metaphysical necessity; in fact, metaphysical, conceptual and logical necessity would all seem to be equally strong. But I think that we can go even further, and indeed that we must go further if we wish to maintain that conceptual and logical necessity are useful notions at all: otherwise it seems that we might just as well talk only about metaphysical modality. But if we reserve the notion of metaphysical modality to those modal truths which are not true in virtue of either the definitions of concepts or the laws of logic, and similarly for conceptual and logical modality, we get a rather surprising picture about the relationships between different kinds of possibility:

What makes this interesting is that, according to the line suggested above, the picture for necessity is exactly the same. This is obviously a rather strange and seemingly contradictory result, but there may be a way to accommodate it. The idea is that only metaphysical modality is fundamental, but there is still use for the notions of conceptual and logical modality exactly in the same sense as there is use for the notions of physical or biological modality. So, according to this picture, different subspecies of metaphysical modality should be considered as concerning the natures of specific subsets of the set of all things. Hence, conceptual modality concerns things that are possible or necessary in virtue of the natures of concepts, and only them. Specifically, although it would commonly be considered that something like ‘It is possible to travel faster than light’ is conceptually possible, according to this picture this is not strictly correct: the possibility of travelling faster than light is not ruled out by the natures of concepts, but nor do the natures of concepts make it possible to travel faster than light. For something to qualify as a conceptual possibility, it has to be made possible by the nature of concepts in this positive sense. A similar analysis applies to logical possibility.

Well, this doesn’t really do justice to the idea, and I’m not quite sure that it even works, but the survey of other approaches that precedes this alternative picture in the paper might motivate the approach somewhat. There’s also a lot more to say about the status of logical modality here and I do go into it in some detail in the paper. If the idea is at all feasible, it would seem to require revamping modal logic as well — that’s something that I will not attempt.