Blogging the APA Central: Days 1 & 2

After the first two days of this year's Central APA, I should probably jot a little note here about the proceedings.


Thursday afternoon I sat in on Michael Tooley's John Dewey Lecture, which, after a brief bit of biographical detail, wound up being on one of my favorite philosophical problems. Tooley offered the conclusions, at least, of proofs of the following two premises: (i) if we have a reductive (e.g., Humean) conception of natural law, there's good reason to think we'll never be able to justify induction, and (ii) if we have a strong (i.e., Armstrong/Tooley) conception of natural law, we get a reasonably straightforward justification of induction -- probabilities climb fairly simply with observed instances. I'm looking forward to going through these proofs in fuller mathematical detail.

After the talk, I got a chance to meet Prof. Tooley, as well as famed Spinoza scholar Edwin Curley and Iowa's Evan Fales. I also got the chance to talk with Stephanie Lewis, wife of the late David Lewis, who is both an astute philosopher (far moreso than her self-description as "amateur metaphysician" would imply), and, perhaps more importantly, an incredibly kind and genial woman whom it was a joy to chat with.

After a set of quick talks on reduction, multiple realizability, and complex systems, it was back to South Bend for the night.

Today started with a nice set of talks on causation; my personal favorite being Luke Glynn's discussion of how we might salvage orthodox theories of probabilistic causation (by accepting conditional probabilities as primitive and being careful about our synthesis of objective chance and determinism). After lunch there was an interesting session on the relationship between human freedom and brain and behavioral science, which, for me, mostly served as a primer on the current state of compatibilism, since the free will literature is somewhere I have close to zero experience.

Finally, I attended Peter van Inwagen's Presidental Address. It was mostly combinations of various arguments of Peter's that I'd heard before -- in particular, his claim that the existential quantifier is univocal due to its relationship with counting, combined with his insistence that metaphysical claims, like the truth or falsity of mereological fusions, are valid, non-trivial philosophical problems worth being solved. In this instance, he was defending himself against arguments of van Fraassen -- that many metaphysical problems turn on vagueness in language -- and Putnam -- that the way we count (i.e., whether or not to include fusions in our counts of what there is) is a convention that determines (changes) our use of the existential quantifier. A good paper, very much in van Inwagen's style.

Watch this space tomorrow evening for a report on the Dennett-Plantinga debate on science and religion!