Certain Doubts

Has anyone working on knowledge attributions looked into the expression “common knowledge”? It’s different than a lot of uses of “knowledge” because it takes a ‘that’-clause (as compared to”knowledge of” a domain, as in: “She has knowledge of physics”). So aside from questions about what I have to know to have knowledge of a domain, there’s a question of what has to be the case for it to be common knowledge that p (or for it to be proper to say that it is common knowledge that p). I’m more interested in the “knowledge” part than in the “common” part, since there’s nothing at all defective about saying “It was common knowledge that p, but not-p.”

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On the subject of graduate study, here is an option that might be attractive to students with interests in logic and its application. The European Master of Science Program in Computational Logic is a two year program run in collaboration with five universities, the technical universities of Dresden, Vienna, and Madrid, the Free University of Bolzano, and the New University of Lisbon. Instruction is in English. Students interested in moving from mathematics or philosophy into theoretical computer science may find this rigorous program to offer an attractive bridge. The prerequisites are listed here. Although ours is a young program, we are seeing good success placing our graduates in top PhD programs in computer science, in both the US and in Europe. Moreover, I would anticipate that formal epistemology programs would be interested in philosophically oriented students with a strong background in computational logic.

Another nice thing is that the “European Master” designation allows us to offer funding for non-European students, including a yearly travel stipend to and from your home country. I encourage interested students to check the links, including a promotional video on the first linked page, or contact Professor Stephen Holldöbler at TU Dresden. I’d be happy to field questions, too.

Some prospective graduate students in philosophy have faculty advisors at their undergraduate institutions who work hard at keeping current about the state of the various graduate programs and who can give the students excellent advice in choosing which graduate programs to apply to, and, supposing the students are accepted by more than one program, which one to actually go to. But many prospective students will find that their faculty advisors have quite limited knowledge. For instance, their advisor may not know much about which graduate programs are good in certain areas that are of interest to the student but not that particular advisor. And some do not have advisors who know much at all about the various programs.

Fortunately, these days there are some extremely helpful tools to help in making these key choices: Most philosophy departments that have graduate programs have helpful and informative web sites, and students have instant, free on-line access to a good set of rankings of graduate programs: The Philosophical Gourmet Report. These tools can greatly help students in their deliberations, however knowledgeable their faculty advisors are. What follows are my suggestions as to how to best use these tools, together with other sources of information, in choosing programs, whether or not one also has access to a knowledgeable faculty advisor.

These are all just one person’s opinions, so take these suggestions for what they’re worth. Perhaps some others will express other ideas in the comments…
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Thirteen newly commissioned papers are collected in a volume edited by me, Perspectives in Contemporary Epistemology, a special, fiftieth anniversary issue of the Brazilian journal Veritas (vol. 50, no. 4, December 2005, published by PUCRS in Porto Alegre). The publisher is now making the papers individually downloadable for free, in PDF format, here:

http://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/veritas/ojs/index.php/veritas/issue/view/178

Some of the most influential philosophers in the field are among the

Contributors

Fred Adams
Jonathan E. Adler
Anthony Brueckner
Julio Cesar Burdzinski
Elvo Clemente
Earl Conee
Richard Feldman
Tito Alencar Flores
Stephen Hetherington
Peter D. Klein
Jonathan Kvanvig
Alexandre Meyer Luz
Felipe M. Müller
Doris Olin
Roberto Hofmeister Pich

Synthese – An International Journal for Epistemology, Logic and Philosophy of Science hosts its first annual conference at the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen, October 3- 5 , 2007. The conference is sponsored by PHIS – The Danish Research School in Philosophy, History of Ideas and History of Science and Springer.

Between Logic and Intuition: David Lewis and the Future of Formal Methods in Philosophy

More info below the fold, with website link here.
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Rae Langton (”Elusive Knowledge of Things in Themselves,” Australasian Journal, 2004) and Jonathan Schaffer (”Quiddistic Knolwledge,” Phil. Studies, 2005) have recently argued that the ’skeptical’ thesis defended by David Lewis in “Ramseyan Humility” is no different, when it comes to the applicability of standard anti-skeptical proposals, from Cartesian skepticism. It seems to me, though, that Lewis – at least on a charitable reading – could not have meant what Langton and Schaffer take him to mean.

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The new (2006-08) Philosophical Gourmet Report has been out for a few days now; it’s available here. Especially relevant to this blog is the PGR’s rankings of programs in the area of epistemology.

In the near future, I hope to be able to post some thoughts on how I think the the PGR can best be used by prospective graduate students. For now I just have a few words about a recently blogged argument that the PGR is a “Pointless Waste of Time”….

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There is a story in today’s New York Times about the Web 3.0, otherwise known as the W3C Semantic Web.

The idea behind the semantic web is to link content or data rather than to link syntactic strings. This is better illustrated by an example. Typing ‘Spaniard logicians’ into Google turns up pages on centuries-old dead guys. Why? There are far more historical pages on the web using the syntactic string ‘Spaniard logician’ than there are (if any at all) that list current logicians from Spain. So, if you are looking for a Spanish logician, or looking for how many logicians are from Spain, typing either ‘Spanish logician’ or ‘How many logicians are from Spain’ will not return pages that answer your question. The reason is that search engines don’t understand the content of your question. The ambitious aim of WC3 is to tackle this problem by developing tools to “understand” the content of web pages, and to “understand” the meaning of search queries.
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