Another EEG

Josh Rasmussen encouraged me to run the toy EEG while I was writing book chapter, presumably as a way to get me to make more progress on our joint book arguing for a necessary being.  So, here it is.

Looks to me slightly intermediate between the graphs for blogging and for feeding in the earlier EEGs.

The topic of the chapter is the same as that of the post I was doing in the earlier EEG.

In case anybody is curious, here's how raw data (not from the above, just from some software testing I was doing) looks like.

Amusingly, one can also touch the electrode to one's chest, put one's fingers in the ear clips, and get an ECG.  I think I got my $21 worth of fun. :-)

Book indexing script

I had to index my modality book, so I wrote a little perl script to help me (it also needs the Roman module from CPAN) and it generated this index.  The idea is that one inserts special plain-text codes in my Microsoft Word file for the book which mark the ranges to index for each term and that mark where the page breaks in the galleys are (actually, Logan Gage, my TA, marked the page breaks), and then one runs the perl script which generates an html file with the index (which one can then import into Word if one so sees fit).

The main special codes are these:

• {{entry name:}} This is put at the beginning of a passage that will be indexed under "entry name"
• {{:entry name}} This is put at the end of the passage
• {{nickname>official name}}  This specifies that any entries flagged with the nickname get re-indexed under the official name.  For instance, to save myself typing, in the body of the text I would use codes like {{EMR:}}...{{:EMR}}, and then I'd put an entry that says {{EMR>Extreme Modal Realism}}
• {{synonym~entry name}}  This generates a "see entry name" entry in the index, under synonym.
• @@n@@  This marks the beginning of page n.

There are no special facilities for generating an "n" after a page number for a footnote--one just surrounds the footnote superscript marker with {{entry name:}}...{{:entry name}} and gets a reference to the page it's on.  This won't be good for endnotes that need to be indexed.  There is no facility for "see also".

I also used a Word macro so that I could highlight some text, and it would surround it with the {{entry name:}}...{{:entry name}} codes (getting the name of the entry from the clipboard).

If you want to use the script for something and need help, email me.

Writing about propositions

After reading up on the truth literature last fall, I've discovered some embarrassing problems in my past writing, which I've also seen in student writing, when propositions are used. Now when I see these, I cringe. It's mostly just a matter of grammar. Here are some cases of the sort of error I mean:

1. "If p is a true proposition, then someone could know that p."
2. "Given the truth that p, we can ask whether p is contingent or necessary."
3. "If p explains q, and p explains r, then p explains (q and r)."
4. "If someone knows that p, then p is true."

The easy way to see that these are ungrammatical is to substitute "that snow is white" and the like for variable letters that range over propositions and to substitute "snow is white" for variable letter that abbreviate sentences or that should be understood via substitutional quantification. If one does that, one gets ungrammaticalities:

1. "If that snow is white is a true proposition, then someone could know that that snow is white."

(The antecedent is fine, but the consequent is ungrammatical.) And sometimes one realizes that one doesn't know how to interpret a variable letter. For instance, in (4) we could take p to be a substitutionary sentence variable, in which case the antecedent would be fine ("If someone knows that snow is white") but the consequent would be ungrammatical ("then snow is white is true"), or we could take p to be a proposition, in which case the antecedent is ungrammatical.
Many cases of this grammatical error are easy to fix. For instance, in (1) and (4), one should simply change "knows that p" to "knows p". (This introduces an ambiguity between knowing p in the "to be the case" sense, and being acquainted with the abstract proposition p, but context should take care of that.) In (2), one changes "the truth that p" to "the truth p". Alternately, in (1), (2) and (4), one can use sentential variables instead, perhaps changing p to s to mark this, and making the requisite changes ("If that s is a true proposition..."; "... whether it is contingent or necessary that s"; "then it is true that s").
However, (3) is trickier to fix up. The problem is that "and" is a sentential operator, while q and r are propositions, so we get "(that snow is white) and (that grass is green)", say. An easy thing is to use sentential variables, and then say a little more verbosely:

5. If that s explains that u and that s explains that v, then that s explains that s&v.

However, this limits the generality of (3) to those propositions that can be expressed by a sentence. Maybe that's all propositions, but this is not obvious. (This is a general problem with using sentential variables instead of propositional ones.) Another move is to replace "p and q" with "the conjunction of p and q". This fine in this case, and may be stylistically the best solution, but it won't work well with more complex logical forms.
I think the right move to take is to make "&" not be a connective, but a function that takes a pair of propositions and returns their conjunction. If one uses this convention, then one can replace "p and q" with "p & q", and all is well. One may not even need to be explicit about using this convention.
Poor writing as in (1)-(4) may lead to philosophical problems, though hopefully usually it doesn't. Here is a somewhat more serious issue. One way that some authors—and I am pretty sure I've done this myself—handle the problems in (1)-(4) is by using truth. Thus, they might replace (4) by:

6. "If someone knows that p is true, then p is true."

This neatly avoids the ambiguity of "knows p". However, (6) does not say that if someone knows a proposition p, then p is true, which is what (4) was intended to say. Rather, (6) says that if someone knows the second-order proposition that p is true, then the first-order proposition p is true. This is, of course, true, but does not capture (4). For instance, from (4) one should be able to derive:

7. If someone knows that snow is white, then it is true that snow is white.

But this does not follow from (6), since someone who knows that snow is white might not know that the proposition that snow is white is true (e.g., a small child or a philosopher). In general, one cannot in a non-extensional context replace a first order proposition p with the second order claim that p is true.
This is all obvious, but somehow it wasn't taught to me when I was in grad school.

Novels, art and collaboration

I am reading R. Austin Freeman's Eye of Osiris which so far is a pretty decent mystery. The quality of the writing is not bad, though not so great. It is unduly prolix at some times (I suppose one could say that that makes for some character development of the narrator, though, but that could still be done otherwise), and occasionally at the beginning there is a lack of clarity. This brought home to me the obvious fact that the skill of story-making is very different from the skill of story-telling. While there may be some correlation between the two skills, I do not know that the correlation is very strong. In any case, one would expect that there are a number of people who would be excellent at story-making but whose story-telling is subpar, and a number of people who would be great at story-telling but only if someone else made up the plot. But now the puzzling fact is that there are very few co-authored novels, and off-hand I can't think of any famous ones written by two authors working together (a number of works do draw on older texts or traditional elements, and maybe that should count co-authorship, but I don't want to count that as "working together").

There are artistic genres where collaboration is routine. Film, theater and music perforances are obvious cases. I do not know if Greek statues were carved by one person and painted by another, but it certainly would make sense to have that sort of division of labor. On the other hand, my sense is that painters, writers and contemporary sculptors tend to work alone.

Here is a hypothesis: The artistic vision tends to be hard or impossible to communicate except by means of the genre of art in which it is to be embodied. But collaboration would require communication of the artistic vision. And that artistic vision cannot be communicated except by the work being produced, which presents a vicious circularity in the case of collaborative works.

This argument can't apply always, because there are collaborative works. But maybe we can say something about these exceptional cases. I don't know if the painting and the sculpting were separate in Greece. But if they were, we might say that the sculpting was to some degree an independent work of art, which communicated its vision by itself. After all, most of the Greek statues we see in museums have lost their paint, and yet the sculptures appear to us to be complete works of art—so much so, that in times past people didn't seem to know they were originally polychrome.

The case of directors and conductors is a bit different. But there we can take the director or conductor as in some important sense the author of the performance as a whole. There is a communication between the director and conductor and collaborators, but in an important sense this communication is itself essentially a part of the genre (cases of films written, directed and starred in by one person are defective cases of the cinematographic art), in a way in which communication between authors is accidental to the novel. Moreover, note that the director and conductor only communicates to each individual collaborator a part of the artistic vision.

So this might explain why a superlative novel is unlikely to be produced by two or more authors. But still, a decent novel could be, and sometimes is.

Statement numbering in Microsoft Word

Many people already know this hint, but I was corresponding with a colleague who didn't, so I thought I'd post it.  Analytic philosophy papers often have numbered statements, which are then referred to by number.  It would be a big nuisance if after removing one of the numbered statements or inserting another, one had to manually or semi-manually (search and replace for every higher number) update all the relevant statement number references in the text. 

One way to solve the problem is to use TeX.  But TeX is hard to learn, and not so nice for on-screen proofreading.  But good old Microsoft Word has a cross-referencing feature.  I am using Word 2003, so the newer versions with command ribbons will be slightly different.  Instead of typing a reference number into the text by hand when you want to refer to a numbered statement, you just choose Insert | Reference | Cross-reference (alt-I, N, R on my version) from the menu.  Make sure that in "Reference type" you have "Numbered item" and under "Insert reference to" you have "Paragraph number".  Then you choose the statement from the list, and click on "Insert".  Word should eventually update these references if the numbering changes (assuming you've numbered the statements using a numbered style--normally, Word will change hand-numbered statements into a numbered style), maybe at printing tme.  If it doesn't, you can select all (ctrl-A), right-click, and choose "Update fields".

The UI feels a bit clunky and imperfect (e.g., the next time you choose the reference list, the highlight moves to the top, rather than staying where it was--a big nuisance if one is writing a book and there are tons of numbered statements--but it is usable.

Similar methods can be used for referencing chapter and section numbers.  One can even cross-reference by page number.