Comments for Nate Charlow

Comment on apparently the first iteration of this post was bizarre by simon

simon — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:57:17 +0000

for those who missed it, it was titled, “happy birthday, mr. president.”

Comment on butts wynd by Otis Finley

Otis Finley — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:01:25 +0000

My family and I were there a year ago. Laughed at the name, and just found out that a wynd is an alley.

Comment on appeals to linguists by nate charlow

nate charlow — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:54:49 +0000

That would depend on whether “toturing kittens” is a rigid designator. Maybe it is. But lots of other ways of referring to actions (e.g., “how Mary treated her mother last night”) are not.

Comment on appeals to linguists by Greg

Greg — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:24:24 +0000

Re: “(unless it is one of the puzzling kinds of sentences, which, we’ll suppose language of type K is typically not)”

I’m no expert on this, but don’t a lot of people think normative claims are “potentially informative necessary truths” (which you say is one kind of ‘the puzzling kinds of sentences’)? For don’t many philosophers think that there’s no possible world in which torturing kittens for fun is morally required?

Comment on appeals to linguists by simon

simon — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:32:56 +0000

this may be because i came of age in the facebook era, but i’m starting to think that 99% of what comes out of peoples mouths/keyboards isn’t assertion-apt in the standard inflationary sense.

Comment on appeals to linguists by nate charlow

nate charlow — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:42:24 +0000

I actually don’t have a worry, as such. I’m more just voicing the suspicion that these sorts of arguments are worrying, although actually I’ve been happy to make them in the past.

Still, whatever that worry is, I don’t think it’s going to be the same as your worry, since philosophers, as such, don’t really seem to have a distinct, inflationary view about assertion. Certain philosophers hold such a view, but they’re a pretty small bunch. Another difference: linguists and philosophers seem, as far as I can tell, to be working with the same concept of assertion.

Comment on appeals to linguists by Shen-yi Liao

Shen-yi Liao — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:06:18 +0000

is the worry just one of equivocating relevant concepts/notions/terms like “assertion”? for example, say a moral philosopher wants to say something about morality and positive emotions, and appeals to psychologists who define a positive emotion as “anything that an animal has evolutionarily developed to work for”, then there clearly is something illegitimate about that appeal—that just isn’t what philosophers mean by positive emotion.

i expect your worry to be more than that, but i am not sure i see it clearly yet.

Comment on do imperatives license optimism for the viability of meta-normative non-cognitivism? by nate charlow

nate charlow — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:47:47 +0000

I think there are some different reasons to be optimistic (or at least not pessimistic), and I even agree with Alwood that those reasons are supplied by imperatives. But the semantics of mood, per se, is probably orthogonal to this.

If anything, I think it will push the noncognitivist into the sort of hybrid views defended by Boisvert and Copp.

Comment on do imperatives license optimism for the viability of meta-normative non-cognitivism? by Anders

Anders — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:16:41 +0000

If this is a reason to be optimistic on behalf of the noncognitivist, it says a great deal about the current state of noncognitivism.

At least, I won’t be holding my breath while proponents of noncognitivism try to generalize Asher and Lascarides’ arguments concerning (1) and (2).

I should probably apologize for writing such unconstructive comments.

Comment on fruitless formalism? by Craige Roberts

Craige Roberts — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:53:32 +0000

I think you’re probably onto something here. I read some of Aloni’s older stuff and was put off by the obtuse formalism. I have strong feelings about keeping the formal tools simple so that the insights shine through. Otherwise, the reader has to guess whether it’s worth her trouble to figure it all out. I guess I have struggled through too many formal frameworks in my time only to figure out in the end that they’re ill-motivated. So it’s getting harder to be patient.

And maybe more important: it’s my belief that when a theory is essentially complex (which you’re suggesting is not the case with Maria’s), something is usually missing. But because of the complexity, it’s difficult to untangle it all and see what the real predictions are. So it behooves the theorist to simplify, to assure the reader that complexity doesn’t hide problems and to permit one to see the predictions.

Sometimes formalism is said to be motivated by other assumptions in the framework, about phenomena orthogonal to what’s at issue; but then I like to follow the method of fragments, abstracting away from what isn’t relevant to get at the core.

OK, off my soapbox.