euro is over and since i don’t want to mention anything about how spain’s midfield completely dominated germany’s, i’ll instead put up a shiny new paper. even though the paper is empirical, there are some philosophy-ish bits in it.

so here’s the skinny: i’ve been filling my days doing some work with mary on cooperation in behavioral game theory. we’ve been looking at a new way of segregating classes of social preference models, pinning commitments on them based on what information certain players have about the payoffs and about what the others know about that distribution of information. the facts are really stark, and bad news for some pretty famous people.

my counterfactuals paper has finally appeared in l&p. i’m pretty stoked about that.

it’s odd, though, that it was published “online” in november but the issue is june 2007. But, wev, as the kids say.

one other thing: a few typesetting errors managed to sneak in after i corrected the proofs … nothing major, though. you wouldn’t have believed the corrections. seriously. makes me happy about s&p’s launch. those guys have some typesetting skillz. mad skillz.

If is a pretty cool little world. The biggest little word, really. It’d be super if the simplest story of it — taking if to be a strict conditional over a set of contextually determined possibilities — were right. So here are two (still drafty, beware!) papers that make a (modest) case for superness: Iffiness and On truth conditions for if (but not quite only if).

Both of these papers develop a strict conditional story in way that is faithful to the Ramsey test — well, at least the version of the Ramsey test I learned on the playground. That means that conditionals are both index-shifty (they shift the point of evaluation) and context-shifty (they shift the context relevant for that evaluation). So if is both strict and shifty (twice over).

Kai and I took our sweet time getting a semi-publicly-viewable draft of our paper ‘Might’ Made Right up. So, in the spirit of procrastination, I hereby announce said paper some 3 months after we posted it over at semanticsarchive.

The final pre-final version of “CIA Leaks” is up at semanticsarchive.

The good folks at Philosophical Review have informed Kai and me that our paper “CIA Leaks” will be gracing their pages. Once we’ve made a few changes — tiny cosmetic things, mostly — I’ll post a pre-final draft.

I’m also happy to report that googling “cia leaks” turns up more hits than you might expect on the first page that link to our paper rather than to, say, The National Review. I’m all for the semantics of epistemic modals pushing political issues off the front page, but I kind of doubt that will happen.

I’ve clearly been lazy about updating this site. Or busy. Anyway, Kai and I finished drafts of some of our thoughts about epistemic modals: “Epistemic modality for dummies” is a kind of survey paper, and “CIA leaks” is where we throw down our gauntlet for relativist semantics for epistemic modals. (Of course, you can get these papers from Kai’s much slicker site, too.)

I’ve managed to dig out from under the zillion job files long enough to finally finish a draft of a paper on counterfactuals. The paper is mostly about two kinds of stretches of counterfactual-talk:

If Sophie had gone to the parade, should have seen Pedro dance; but of course
if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she wouldn’t have seen Pedro dance.

and

If If Sophie had gone to the parade, should have seen Pedro dance; but of course
if Sophie had gone to the parade, then she might have been stuck behind someone tall — and so she wouldn’t have seen Pedro dance.

Each sequence is consistent, but their ugly cousins got by reversing the order of the conjuncts aren’t. That’s a puzzle for just about everyone…except me. Or so I argue.

Anyway, here is the paper. The thing I like most about it is that the letters H-e-g-e-l occur, in that order, quite a lot in it. You might think I lost some kind of bet with someone; but I didn’t.

My paper on ‘might’ and belief revision is now out. Well, sort of. Springer journals now publish papers “Online First” — papers appear in their final form and can be downloaded before the print version hits the shelves. This seriously reduces the lag between when a paper is accepted and when it appears, so I am in favor. Plus, the official publication date is the online publication date. That isn’t terrible when you’re on this side of the tenure divide.