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the boundaries of language the boundaries of language put conventional logic to one side and enjoy well i say enjoy garth marenghi s darkplace monday september 08 2008 politicians logic over at leiter reports brian leiter has publicized a spot the logical fallacy party to happen during the build up to the election it s obviously time to air this old gem again then labels misc posted by aidan 11 57 am 0 comments tuesday august 26 2008 fetishes proving that xkcd still has it labels xkcd posted by aidan 11 52 pm 1 comments monday august 18 2008 the man who told everything i ve never understood this video and i probably never will it s somewhat disturbing in places but the song is a classic from one of my favourite bands and there s definitely something quite beautiful about the video even its darker images here s doves labels manic monday music posted by aidan 5 11 pm 1 comments sunday august 17 2008 ut methodology workshop pictures the ut methodology workshop is finally over we had sessions from jeff king marc moffett ernie sosa josh dever dan bonevac roy sorensen derek ball dan korman and john bengson plus round table discussions on the place of data about natural language in philosophy paradoxes and thought experiments it s been an exhausting five days but i ve learned a lot from it and the visiting speakers were great to have around colleen has put up some really good photos of the event on her flickr site so check those out if you want a flavour of the event there were a bunch more photos taken last night by other people and hopefully some of those will be online at some point labels conferences posted by aidan 10 59 am 0 comments tuesday august 12 2008 ut methodology workshop well it s finally that time i ll be spending the next 5 days at the methodology workshop which kicks off today with roy sorensen s what makes something interesting and our own josh dever s linguistic idealism alex g and alex b have done a fantastic job putting this all together and i m anticipating it being a really fun event labels conferences methodology posted by aidan 9 00 am 0 comments monday august 11 2008 and i was a boy from school i heard this being played really loudly in fopp on union street last time i was back in glasgow and fell in love with it immediately i was hugely surprised to learn it was by hot chip since i d really detested what i d heard by them previously anyway great song interesting video good combination labels manic monday music posted by aidan 12 16 am 0 comments sunday august 10 2008 knowing how to hold your booze in this post i d like to bring together a couple more thoughts about knowledge how that have been bouncing around my dome for the past eight months or so as those of you who have read my previous posts on this topic will know i tend to find myself torn in two directions on the one hand the linguistic evidence and my intuitive reactions to several cases discussed in the literature push me towards holding that contra neo ryleans who hold that possession of the corresponding ability is necessary and sufficient for knowing how some kind of propositional attitude is necessary if this isn t intellectualism it s damn close on the other hand i ve been reluctant to accept despite some of the linguistic evidence clearly pointing in this direction that the propositional attitude one must have must be knowledge moreover i ve found the suggestion that knowledge how attributions don t entail the corresponding attribution of ability or success in action hard to swallow in particular i ve expressed some sympathy for no ë and hawley s suggestions that knowledge how attributions entail some kind of counterfactual success condition my earlier posts on knowledge how were part of my ongoing attempts to balance these competing considerations another source of reluctance towards accepting any version of intellectualism is that to me it intuitively mishandles particular cases for example i find it very hard to buy jane knows how to speak english is true in a given context iff for some contextually relevant way w jane stands in the knowledge that relation to the proposition that w is a way for her to speak english and jane entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation now i don t have any specific argument against this and stanley and williamson would quite rightly be unimpressed by the mere fact that i find it implausible but i do find it implausible and that fact plays a role in my own thinking even if it s rightly considered dialectically ineffectual a perhaps more interesting example is this one jane knows how to hold her booze is true in a given context iff for some contextually relevant way w jane stands in the knowledge that relation to the proposition that w is a way for her to hold her booze and jane entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation again i find this pretty hard to believe similarly with john and marc s account jane knows how to hold her booze just in case jane knows for some way w that w is a way for her to hold her booze and she minimally understands w where to minimally understand a way w is to have a correct and complete possibly implicit conception c of w and reasonably mastery of the concepts in c and their mode of combination and where one has reasonable mastery of a concept just in case one is able under normal conditions to correctly apply that concept in core cases i guess the worry i had before was that these accounts of knowledge how over intellectualize knowing how to hold one s booze the charge of over intellectualization is considered and rejected by jenn john and marc in the folk on knowing how on the grounds that folk attributions of knowledge how seem to be sensitive to whether the subject possesses a certain item of propositional knowledge rather than whether she possesses the corresponding ability but i wonder if we d keep getting those kinds of results if we focused on a different set of examples in particular i suspect that people will judge that one knows how to hold one s booze only if one is able to hold one s booze i can at the very least report my intuitions here it doesn t matter what a subject knows or believes if they invariably pass out in the fetal position after one smirnoff ice they don t know how to hold their booze of course sometimes one will be ill and so on but if one would pass out after one drink even when there are no mitigating factors of this sort one does not know how to handle one s booze let me offer a new reason for regarding this example as particularly interesting before anticipating an objection one might have the counterfactual i just invoked can seem suspect because of cases in which a subject can manifest her knowledge how without exercising the corresponding ability as snowdon writes p9 to construct such examples we need to describe cases in which the subject can show teach or tell or otherwise convey to us how to do something and hence must be credited with knowing how to do it but is for some reason or other unable to do it the paradigm here is jeff king s ski instructor who is in great demand to teach particular stunts but who is unable to perform them himself we don t it will be claimed need to regard him as meeting any reasonable counterfactual success condition in order to regard him as knowing how to perform the stunts there is i think much to be said about this case but for now i want to just suggest that the possessive pronoun in jane knows how to hold her booze seems to block an analogous move here jane might be able to teach steve to hold his booze michael to hold his booze and sarah to hold her booze but none of this would remotely incline me to think that she knows her to hold her booze again my intuition is that she can teach people left right and center but if she s the one singing sweet caroline after one drink she doesn t know how to hold her booze let me turn as promised to the consideration of an objection that might have occurred to a reader by now one might think that holding one s booze shouldn t be considered as falling in the scope of a proposal about the nature of knowledge how just as we re not interested in the digestion of food to take an oft discussed example but it s wrong to assimilate holding one s booze to digesting one s food knowing how to hold one s booze usually requires practice and it is something one can systematically work towards indeed i have a good friend who did just that the summer before he started college it s not just something one s body does under normal conditions like breathing or digesting one s food of course that s vague but there does seem to be a world of difference here this manifests itself i think in the fact that that we re uncomfortable attributing knowledge how to breathe or how to digest food while it s perfectly natural to speak of someone knowing how to hold their booze this asymmetry doesn t seem to be due to gricean effects notice that jane knows how to breathe not that i mean to suggest that was in question seems weird suggesting that the asymmetry is not explained by our typically assuming people know how to breathe but not that they know how to hold their booze we just don t naturally think or speak in those terms at all moreover there are other examples which don t seem at all like the case of digestion of food but which display the same behavior consider for instance jane knows how to handle herself now one worry i do have is that these examples both seem a little idiomatic so i end with a couple of questions i m unable to answer first of all if they are idiomatic does that mess up the points i ve been trying to make with them here second are there any examples which don t feel so idiomatic but which can be used to make those points to try to be clearer the crucial features of such examples seem to be this 1 it is very plausible that one possesses the relevant know how only if one meets a counterfactual success condition 2 one cannot construct counterexamples to the necessity of the counterfactual success condition by focusing on instructor cases since a possessive or reflexive pronoun gets in the way of successful instruction being a mark of possession of the relevant item of knowledge how how about jane knows how to look after herself labels epistemology knowledge how posted by aidan 10 31 am 1 comments about me name aidan location austin texas united states graduate student in philosophy at the university of texas at austin view my complete profile recent comments recent comments no javascript detected aidan mcglynn s facebook profile links homepage university of texas at austin philosophy department university of texas at austin linguistics department arche ut austin philosophy graduate conference 2007 ut austin philosophy graduate conference 2006 xkcd archives december 2005 january 2006 february 2006 march 2006 april 2006 may 2006 june 2006 july 2006 august 2006 september 2006 october 2006 november 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