The Self and Spatial Perception

They are not necessarily (in the epistemic sense) related, but they are the themes of the two conferences interesting me most in this semester. The former is the topic of the 62nd Northwest Philosophy Conference, with Galen Strawson and Richard Moran as keynote speakers. I presented a paper on self-identification and somatoparaphrenia there, and now it is also accepted as a poster by the Pacific APA 2011. I defend a minimal version of "immunity to error through misidentification" in that paper, but now I am not sure I like it. As for the keynote addresses, they are far too difficult and abstract for me to summarize here.

I look forward even more to the Harvard conference on spatial perception. Philosophers I would like to meet there including Michael Tye, Brad Thompson, Robin Jeshion, Sean Kelly, and Susanna Siegel, among others. This topic is not very available in my current intellectual niche, so I am really excited about it. I will post the afterthought later, since the conference is on Halloween!

Reminders

Don't think that you can become an expert of something through one or two seminars.

Don't be hurried; philosophy just can't be.

Desperate, So Far

I cease to attend Kripke's Frege and Pryor's Lambda seminar, as expected. I will keep Longuenesse's Third Critique; it is even better than I expected. And Mind&Language is fantastic as well, especially they have a preparation seminar for students.

Still, I am even more desperate about applications. First about the letters. Last year I really thought my letters were going to help me, but that was a big mistake. Now I even suspect that they hurt my applications. But what can I do? For one thing, I have no way to confirm my hypothesis, and secondly, even if we assume it is correct, how can I repair the situation? Before this round I only have one complete semester or less, and that will not help me too much as far as the letters are concerned.

And I am worried about the sample as well. My best try is to use the term paper for "Linguistic Pragmatism" (Devitt), but the time is just not enough. Worse still, recently I am reading Insensitive Semantics by Cappelen and Lepore, and try to meet some of their challenges. They are tough. These days I finally came up with some ideas, with a tentative title "Context Sensitivity and Indirect Discourse." Unfortunately, when I randomly browse the latest PPR I found there is an article "Context Sensitivity and Indirect Reports," and the author is also arguing against C&L at exactly the same point. What an unhappy coincidence for me.

The only thing I can be happy about is that I thereby avoid a possible plagiarism accusation.

Fall 2010 Schedule: Language, language, and Language

So finally I pick the following three:

The Nature of Semantic Content, Nathan Salmon
Linguistic Pragmatism, Michael Devitt
Modal Logic, Melvin Fitting and Richard Mendelsohn

I am determined to force myself into philosophy of language this whole term. These days I started to read/re-read some materials, and still find them hard. Philosophy of language always makes me like a novice, no matter when I come back to it. This time, however, I will be more strict to myself.

I might want to sit in Kripke's Frege seminar, and I will definitely attend the Mind & Language seminar at NYU by Ted Sider and David Chalmers. Also, I will attend the Cognitive Science Symposium led by David Rosenthal. Maybe too much, but I really want them all.

There are two I will go for the first week, but probably the first week only. They are Beatrice Longuenesse's Kant (Third Critique), and Jim Pryor's Lambda seminar, co-taught with Chris Barker (http://lambda.jimpryor.net/). The former is only remotely related to my interests, and the latter is too advanced. Another one I really want to attend is Akeel Bilgrami's seminar on self-knowledge. Time just doesn't allow me to do so.

And at the beginning of Oct., I will present a paper at the 62nd Northwest Philosophy Conference, with "The Self" as the annual theme (http://www.willamette.edu/cla/philosophy/nwpc/). I am not sure whether I can be accepted by more conferences, but we will see.

Hard-Core Philosophy of Language

I need it, but I am also afraid of it. In this coming semester, I might take Professor Nathan Salmon's "Topics in the Nature of Semantic Content" and Professor Michael Devitt's "Linguistic Pragmatism." The former will concentrate on the various puzzles about substitution and belief ascription made popular by Frege, Putnam, Church, Kripke, Soames, and Salmon himself. The latter will concentrate on another strand in philosophical studies in language, namely the Grice-Austin tradition. These two can give me quite balanced education, I believe.

But I am afraid of philosophy of language, narrowly construed. To be sure, it was philosophy of language that led me to academic philosophy in the first place (another urge was provided by Kant's first Critique). However, whenever it goes to certain level of complexity, I get lost. I hope this only shows I have not wrought hard enough, but I am not sure. I am interested in those puzzles, but I am quite content with the solutions provided by the transparent/opaque readings distinction. I guess this is out of my naivete. This coming semester is crucial to me, since I want to know how far I can go, and I need guidance.

And I also need it anyway. My primary interest has always been philosophy of mind, and after these years I have come to believe that deep ideas concerning philosophy of mind have to come from either philosophy of language or natural sciences. I might be wrong. But assuming its truth, then I have no choice. I am too old to start doing serious sciences, so all there left is philosophy of language. I don't know how much I will need, but I know what I understand is so far from the goal. Without deep understandings and commitments in certain issues in philosophy of language (or sciences), it is practically impossible to have deep thoughts in philosophy of mind, or so I believe.

I will try hard. I am not very young, so I do not have much time running away from the truth. I need to be more sophisticated in philosophy of language. And I need to be quick.

I still need to register another seminar for the status of full-time student. Professor Kripke's one on Frege would be suitable for my purpose, but I don't know.

McDowell in Person and McDowell in Print

They are very different. In what follows I shall describe three salient discrepencies. The differences are so drastic that even people who are very familiar his works feel surprising.

Let me start with disjunctivism. McDowell makes clear that his disjunctive conception is epistemological, but he seldom says explicitly about his attitudes towards other versions of disjunctivism. He grants that the good case and the bad case can be phenomenally indistinguishable, so presumably he rejects phenomenal disjunctivism. How about the version concerning state? He is not clear about this, but some passages in "Sungular Though and the Extent of Inner Space" can be read as proposing state disjunctivism. Now the most controversial one is the content version. In defending "object-dependent" thought and de re sense, he seems to commit that the good case and the bad case cannot share the same kind of content. However, in discussions he said that they can. I am sure that he said this in Taipei, London, and Canberra. Many people are surprised by this point, including his former students and experts of disjunctivism. I think he is drawing the distinction between constitution and entertain: object-dependent thoughts constitutively depend on acqaintance of relevant objects, but after the constitution, those thoughts can appear in bad cases. Consider the Twin Earth Scenario: the idea of "water" constitutively depends on water substances, but this does not imply that whenever we think about water, there must be water around.

The second is about the idea of the conceptual. McDowell holds that the rational and the conceptual are co-extensive, and this co-extensiveness is entirely stipulative. He is explicit about "conceptual -> rational," but not clear about the other direction. I think the other direction should be a substantial claim (as opposed to stipulative), or the co-extensiveness will be empty, and he does not really need to take issue with non-conceptualists. However, in discussions he insisted that the entire co-extensiveness is stipulative, and this is not a change of mind. I find this hard to be reconciled with many passages in print.

Finally, the relations between the following three distinctions: the space of reasons/the realm of law, second nature/first nature, and world/environment. McDowell writes that mature human beings are in the space of reasons (by being initiated into second nature), so they can have the world in view. This seems to imply that the other side of those distinctions also go hand in hand, i.e. the realm of law, first nature, and environment are the so-called "physical world." But in discussions McDowell refused to identify environment with physical world. I think this move is odd. Do we want our picture to have physical world/environment/ world in McDowell's sense? This three-layer structure seems to be too excessive. I think we can still identify environment with physical world, if we understand the latter as containing affordances, solicitations, and even reasons (though lower animals cannot be responsive to reasons as such).

The general difficulty is this. When we write about McDowell, we need to refer to specific passages. But McDowell in person and in print are so different. Besides, to cite conversations with philosophers is a bad practice. It is not clear to me how not to misinterpret McDowell if we take his works in print at face value. But anyway, it is still fruitful to engage McDowell. I think I learned very much from the discussions in Australia in the past two weeks. Special thanks to Huw Price and David Chalmers for organizing the two conferences.

Some Non-Philosophical Thoughts on the AAP 2010

I am luckily enough to be able to participate this event, along with "Engaging McDowell" and "Themes from McDowell" at U. of Sydney and ANU respectively, before my new semester in NYC. In what follows I record some miscellaneous thoughts that are not really focused or philosophical. I will postpone those concerning McDowell, since there will be more interesting things to say after the two conferences next week.

This is my first AAP experience. I attended the Eastern APA once (2006 at D.C.) and the Pacific APA once (2007 at S.F.). My feelings about conferences are mixed. For the positive side, I like conferences for obvious reasons: exciting thoughts, high-quality intellectual atmospheres, etc.; for the negative, linguistic and cultural differences are especially salient in this kind of circumstance. It is not that I am "bad" in English, I hope: one semester visiting in U.C. Berkeley with an A and an A- in graduate seminars, 96% in GRE's verbal section, and 99.5% in TOEFL, several publications in international journals, to name some "objective" scales. The trouble remains, however. People are just talking too fast everywhere: presentations, Q&As, tea times, banquet, and what have you. I feel mentally exhausted during and after conferences. Besides, to have so many incredibly good graduate students around all at once is killing me.

So why am I here this time? First, I think I still need to learn to live with this, second, I want to present a paper on McDowell and have his comments in person, and finally, I want to meet some philosophers, and conferences make this easier. This time I met again some ANU fellows, including Alan Hajek, Daniel Stoljar, David Chalmers, Jonathan Shaffer, and Susanna Schellenberg. And I met Howard Robinson, Jessica Brown, Laura Schroeter, and William Lycan for the first time. I also met some wonderful graduate students, including Lachlan Doughney, Lyndal Grant, and Rachael Briggs. I did not get to know terribly many people this time, since I am getting tired of this; I mean, to get to know many people, but have nothing interesting to share with them, is embarrassing. What I really want to do is to lock myself in the room, and get some works done.

Oh, but I will need to engage McDowell first, at least for the following few days!