(b)logophile » philosophy http://www.logophile.org/blog blog of a logophile (not "logos", but "λόγος") Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 Naked mole rats http://www.logophile.org/blog/2009/02/20/naked-mole-rats/ http://www.logophile.org/blog/2009/02/20/naked-mole-rats/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:00:13 +0000 tikitu http://www.logophile.org/blog/?p=566 I’ve noted recently a certain zoological obsession on the part of formal semanticists. It’s not just formal semantics, it turns out, but philosophy of language in general. I hope, in fact, that this will turn into an irregular Friday feature (Friday being the day we usually have talks).

Today’s speaker, Herman Cappelen, told us that he could say that Stockholm is full of naked mole rats. (He didn’t, in fact, say that Stockholm was full of naked mole rats, but we all agreed that he could have said that, had he wished to.)

The link above goes to wikipedia, which has photos. And naked mole rats are quite possibly the most ugly rodents you could ever imagine. You have been warned.

]]> http://www.logophile.org/blog/2009/02/20/naked-mole-rats/feed/ 0 Who says philosophy is out of touch with the real world? http://www.logophile.org/blog/2008/11/26/who-says-philosophy-is-out-of-touch-with-the-real-world/ http://www.logophile.org/blog/2008/11/26/who-says-philosophy-is-out-of-touch-with-the-real-world/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:24:18 +0000 tikitu http://www.logophile.org/blog/?p=520 Theory:

We of the jury may wish to ignore [a particular possibility], and wish it had not been mentioned. If we ignored it now, we would bend the rules of cooperative conversation; but we may have good reason to do exactly that. [...] We would ignore the far-fetched possibility if we could—but can we? Perhaps at first our attempted ignoring would be make-believe ignoring, or self-deceptive ignoring; later, perhaps, it might ripen into genuine ignoring.1

Practise:

P: Then a reviewer was upset that we wrongly described S’s position when we called him an “externalist”.
M: That reviewer was S himself, but we’re not supposed to know that.
[... some time passes ...]
P: So I’m not sure that the reviewer, or indeed S himself, would agree with that.2

Notes:

  1. David Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge”; Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74:4 (1996): pp. 549–567.
  2. Two colleagues discussing predecessors of our paper-in-progress.
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