Elijah Millgram's paper becomes "Was Hume a Gunman?"

Autocorrect on my new phone was set to change "Humean" to "Gunman". I suppose the Gunman theory of motivation might provide sufficient conditions for when action is motivated.

2013 schedule of talks

Thanks to generous support from the National University of Singapore (and from my Head of Department, who lets me teach more classes in some semesters to get other semesters off) I'll be traveling through the US, UK, and Australia to give talks on my research in 2013. Between colloquia, guest appearances at classes, and conference talks, I've got 61 appearances scheduled so far. It'll be a great way to get feedback on a book defending a Humean account of motivation (tentatively titled Desire's Explanations) and on a number of papers. This schedule will be updated as I get more invitations and fill in more details.

January 4 - University of California, San Diego - Ethical Reductionism
January 10 - Arizona State University - Virtue and Desire
January 16 - Utah State University - Zarathustra's Metaethics
January 17 - Weber State University - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
January 18 - University of Utah - Emotional Perception of Morality
January 25 - University of New Mexico - Zarathustra's Metaethics
January 29 - University of Central Arkansas - guest lecture
January 29 - University of Central Arkansas - Emotional Perception of Morality
January 30 - University of Arkansas, Little Rock - Emotional Perception of Morality
February 1 - University of Nevada, Las Vegas - Emotional Perception of Morality
February 5 - Biola University - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
February 7 - Claremont College - Desire's Explanations
February 8 - University of California, Riverside -  Desire's Explanations
February 12 - Old Dominion University - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
February 13 - Virginia Commonwealth University - Desire's Explanations
February 15 - University of Virginia - Virtue and Desire
February 21 - George Mason University - Virtue and Desire
February 22 - William and Mary - Desire's Explanations
February 25 - Coastal Carolina University - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism
February 26 - Coastal Carolina University (class) - guest appearance
February 26 - University of North Carolina, Wilmington - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
February 28 - University of Texas (class) - The Desire-Belief Account of Intention Explains Everything
March 7 - Yale Moral Philosophy Group - Desire's Explanations
March 9 - Dartmouth College - Emotional Perception of Morality
March 13 - Williams College (class) - Humean Theory of Motivation Reformulated & Defended
March 15 - Brandeis University (graduate colloquium) - Desire's Explanations
March 19 - Brandeis University (class) - The Desire-Belief Account of Intention Explains Everything
March 21 - Bridgewater State University - Desire's Explanations (properties of desire)
March 29 - Kansas State University (faculty colloquium) - Desire's Explanations
April 1 - Kansas State University (undergraduate club) - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
April 2 - Northern Illinois University (class) - The Desire-Belief Account of Intention Explains Everything
April 3 - Northern Illinois University - Desire's Explanations
April 5 - University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee - Desire's Explanations
April 10 - Swarthmore College - Desire's Explanations
April 11 - Franklin and Marshall College - Desire's Explanations
April 12 - University of Pennsylvania - Desire's Explanations
April 16 - University College Dublin - Desire's Explanations
April 17 - Cardiff University - Desire's Explanations
April 22 - Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar - Desire's Explanations
April 24 - University of York - Desire's Explanations
April 26 - University of Sheffield - Desire's Explanations
April 30 - University of Stirling (undergraduate club) - Emotional Perception of Morality
May 2 - University of Stirling - Desire's Explanations
May 6 - University of Aberdeen - Desire's Explanations
May 10 - University of Edinburgh - Desire's Explanations
May 14 - University of Glasgow - Desire's Explanations
May 15 - University of Nottingham - Desire's Explanations
May 18-19 - Character Workshop - Virtue and Desire
May 23 - University of California, Santa Cruz - Desire's Explanations
May 30 - Portland State University - Desire's Explanations
June 4 - University of New South Wales - Desire's Explanations
June 7 - University of Auckland - Virtue and Desire
June 19 - University of Auckland - Desire's Explanations
July 7-12 - Australasian Association of Philosophy - The Humean Theory of Procrastination
July 15 - Queensland Club - Emotional Perception of Morality
July 25 - Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga - Desire's Explanations
July 30 - Australia National University - Desire's Explanations
July 31 - Australia National University - Unequal Vividness and Double Effect
August 2 - University of Adelaide - Desire's Explanations
August 7 - Murdoch University - Emotional Perception of Morality
August 9 - University of Western Australia - Ethical Reductionism

And if you're too chill about everything, you might have nonpolar disorder

Giving people bear hugs and yelling at them that they're doing everything in a way that's totally fine is a classic example of aggressive-passive behavior.

Merry Christmas!

If the Ghost of Christmas Past had let Scrooge convince his younger self to be more generous, and the ghosts hadn't bothered to visit the newly generous older Scrooge as a result, it'd be a paradox of Christmastime travel.

A volume of sausage

I believe the German term for a collection of papers written by men to honor an old famous man is "Wurstfestschrift". 

Promising Researcher

I just won a Promising Researcher award from my university, and it comes with $5000 SGD which I'll be spending on the upcoming trip. I'm not a Kantian, so I would've considered making false promises to get the money, but my department head helpfully explained to me that the award didn't work that way.

The problem of other minds is that they get there first

I was excited when I thought up this refutation of external-world skepticism: if there's no external world, there's not enough stuff to realize belief, so there's no danger of false belief. So skepticism doesn't save you from error in any world.

Wrote it up, sent it out, discovered that Daniel Greco had made the same argument way more thoroughly in the July issue of Philosophical Review, canned the paper. It's given me more of an appreciation of skepticism about other minds -- it allows you to have beliefs, and as far as you know, they're all original.

All human cultures bite the red part of a watermelon slice first, suggesting an innate Universal Gastronomy.

Nate Silver and philosophy: at NewApps

Since the 2012 elections, I've been compiling the predictions of major pundits and ranking them for accuracy. Catarina Dutilh Novaes asked me to post about the philosophical issues surrounding election prediction for the philosophers at NewApps. The post includes a table of 25 people's state-by-state predictions, from the successes of Markos Moulitsas and Nate Silver to the abject failures of Michael Barone, George Will, Steve Forbes, and Dick Morris. 

It better be free with contract though -- I'm parsimonious

I don't imagine that I'll ever buy a cell phone because a celebrity is pitching it. But if Motorola ever markets their simplest Razr model with Occam's endorsement, they've got me.

I try to keep up with the empirical stuff, but...

I've never turned down a referee request from a journal before. The request from "Science Journal Publication" to referee "Influence of Warp Yarn Tension On Cotton Woven Fabric Structures" will, thus, be the first.

Happy Nousday!

October 15 is the day Nous and (I think) PPR start accepting papers again. I just sent a paper to Nous that I'd been waiting to submit for over a month.  I propose "Nousday" as a name for this occasion.

10 obols (pbk), ISBN 000000000001

On the right-hand side of the NDPR "Recent Reviews" page, there are images of the oldest known manuscript of the Republic, Augustine's Confessions, Descartes' Meditations, and Hegel's Phenomenology. I clicked to see if they had posted reviews by Glaucon or Princess Elisabeth or Schopenhauer or someone, but apparently the images are just there for decoration. I should've known; NDPR gets reviews up a lot quicker than that.

Planning world tour 2013

I'm on research leave in the first half of 2013, thanks to my department head's generosity in letting me teach extra classes in some semesters in exchange for time off in others.  The plan is to go on another huge talk tour like I did back in 2011, when I ended up giving 51 talks.  I got awesome feedback on papers, met lots of interesting philosophers, and in general had a great time.  So I'm eager to do it again!

The big project will be defending desire-belief accounts of motivation and the phenomenology of deliberation.  That's the side of my work that's gotten the best reception (the Nous and Phil Review papers are on that).  It may be time to turn it into a book, laying out the view, dealing with all the proposed counterexamples to the view one after the other, and drawing out the consequences for moral theory.  I'll also be doing some moral epistemology, and a maybe a Nietzsche paper or two.

The basic plan is to be in the warmer part the US from January through March, and take off from the Northeast to the UK sometime in April.  Then in late May I'll go to Australia and stick around for the AAP.  If you're up for having me make a stop at your department, send me an email!  

Ben Blumson's "Metamicrofiction" appears in Microliterature

Congratulations to my colleague, Ben Blumson, who has published a zero-word story.  I posted an equally short comment at the site.  

"The Desire-Belief Account of Intention Explains Everything" appears in Noûs Early View

You can get the paper here at the Noûs site, or download the nearly final version from my PhilPapers account.

As the title suggests, it's a defense of desire-belief accounts of intention. Opponents of my view like Kieran Setiya and Michael Bratman claim that such accounts can't explain our knowledge of our intentional actions, the way we can sometimes decide which among several reasons to act on, and the role of intentions in deliberation. I respond that desire-belief accounts can explain the presence and absence of these phenomena even better than their own accounts can. The strategy is to use features of ordinary desire, like the way that our desires direct our attention at things we associate with their objects, to explain why we typically have immediate knowledge of our own intentional actions and why intentions have the degree of stability that they do. You don't need to invoke irreducible intentions or motivationally potent beliefs to explain motivational and deliberative phenomena. Simple explanations that leave out these mental states and do all the work with desire fit the data just fine.

People have said nice things about the writing, and I'm very proud of that.  Here's one of the examples in the paper, which is about the limits of our ability to choose which of our reasons we act on.  The point is that even if you take something as a reason for action and have perfect self-knowledge and want it to be your sole reason for action, you might fail to make it your sole reason for action:

Jane has received a marriage proposal from the King. She is poor, and she knows his wealth gives her a good reason to marry him. She also knows he is very kind, and she takes that as a good reason to marry him too. But he is old and grey, and had he been a commoner, she would’ve politely turned him down. She knows this, and sighs as she thinks about it. For it means a lot to her that her reason for marrying be something about her husband himself, and not his money. Something like his kindness! What a wonderful girl she would be if she could marry him for that reason! She wishes she could find a witch to cast a spell on her increasing her love for kind men, so she could marry him for his kindness, but all the witches were burned long ago.

The desire-belief view explains the limits on our power to choose which of our reasons we can act on.  Even though she accepts that it is a reason, Jane can't make the king's kindness her sole reason for marrying because her desire to marry a kind man isn't strong enough. The only way to make it her sole reason would be to (magically?) increase the strength of that desire.

Anyway, if you thought that was kind of nifty, feel free to read the rest of the paper!  It's fun stuff.  I'm thinking that after this and the paper defending the Humean theory of motivation in Phil Review, it's time for me to write a book taking on all the objections to Humean explanations of motivational phenomena.  If you've got a favorite objection, let me know!

It's harder to come up with a good canola joke

Traveling through the Czech Republic for a conference two months ago, I saw many fields full of yellow flowers. I asked if it was mustard, and the organizer told me it was rape -- the plant from which one makes rapeseed oil. (Canola oil is a more happily-named variety.) He recounted a conversation with some Americans years ago when he spoke worse English. They were discussing social problems like rape and he brightly said, "Yes, rape! It is all over my country!"

I guess that's a "rape" joke rather than a rape joke, but anyway, Daniel Tosh was doing it wrong.

Distinguishing Belief And Imagination

...now accepted in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly!  Here's the abstract:

Some philosophers (including Urmson, Humberstone, Shah, and Velleman) hold that believing that p distinctively involves applying a norm according to which the truth of p is a criterion for the success or correctness of the attitude. On this view, imagining and assuming differ from believing in that no such norm is applied. I present counterexamples both to the sufficiency and the necessity of applying a norm of truth for distinguishing between believing on one hand and imagining and assuming on the other. Then I argue that the different functional properties of these states are enough to distinguish them.

It's available on PhilPapers.

Unequal Vividness and Double Effect

It's forthcoming in Utilitas, and downloadable at PhilPapers.  Here's the abstract:

I argue that the Doctrine of Double Effect is accepted because of unreliable processes of belief-formation, making it unacceptably likely to be mistaken. We accept the doctrine because we more vividly imagine intended consequences of our actions than merely foreseen ones, making our aversions to the intended harms more violent, and making us judge that producing the intended harms is morally worse. This explanation fits psychological evidence from Schnall and others, and recent neuroscientific research from Greene, Klein, Kahane, and Schaich Borg. It explains Mikhail and Hauser’s “universal moral grammar” and an interesting phenomenon about Double Effect cases noted by Bennett. When unequally vivid representations determine our decisions, we typically misjudge the merits of our options and make mistakes. So if Double Effect is a product of unequal vividness, it is likely to be mistaken. This argument, I claim, fits Berker’s specifications for good empirically grounded arguments in ethics.

It was loaded with Frankfurt cases

I was excited when the example in a recent x-phi paper began, "A trolley problem is hurtling down the tracks..."

I was kind of hoping that Judith Jarvis Thomson had unleashed it and Peter Singer would switch the track so it'd run over 1 deontological theory rather than 5 consequentialist theories. Unfortunately, the example turned out to be an ordinary trolley problem rather than a trolley problem problem.