Modeling atmospheric effects of the September 1859 Solar Flare

We have modeled atmospheric effects, especially ozone depletion, due to a solar proton event which probably accompanied the extreme magnetic storm of 1-2 September 1859. We use an inferred proton fluence for this event as estimated from nitrate levels in Greenland ice cores. We present results showing production of odd nitrogen compounds and their impact on ozone. We also compute rainout of nitrate in our model and compare to values from ice core data.Comment: Revised version including improved figures; Accepted for publication in Geophys. Res. Lett, chosen to be highlighted by AG

Interpretivism and "Canonical" Ascriptions

This paper investigates the crucial notion of a "canonical ascription statement" in Bruno Mölder's /Mind Ascribed/, and argues that the reasons given for preferring the book's approach of canonicallity to a more common understanding of canonicallity in terms of the ascriptions we would "ideally" make are not only unpersuasive, but also leave the interpretivist position more open to skeptical worries than it should be. The paper further argues that the resources for a more compelling justification of Mölder's conception of canonicality are already in Mölder's book itself

Prejudice, Humor and Alief: Comments on Robin Tapley’s “Humour, Beliefs, and Prejudice”

In her “Humor, Belief and Prejudice”, Robin Tapley concludes: "Racist/racial, sexist/gender humor is funny because we think it’s true. We know the beliefs exist in the laugher, there’s no way to philosophically maneuver around that." In what follows I’ll be trying to do some philosophical maneuvering of the sort she thinks hopeless in the quote above

William James on Conceptions and Private Language

William James was one of the most frequently cited authors in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but the attention paid to James’s Principles of Psycho- logy in that work is typically explained in terms of James having ‘committed in a clear, exemplary manner, fundamental errors in the philosophy of mind.’ (Goodman 2002, p. viii.) The most notable of these ‘errors’ was James’s purported commitment to a conception of language as ‘private’. Commentators standardly treat James as committed to a conception of language as private, and the most notorious instance of this commitment can purportedly be found in his discussion of the feelings associated with logical terms like ‘and’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ in the Principles’s chapter, ‘The Stream of Thought’. However, the received view stands in need of serious re-evaluation. In particular, there is little reason to think that James’s notorious discussion of the ‘if-feeling’ should be understood as an attempt to give an account of the meaning of ‘if ’ (indeed, there is little reason to even think that Wittgenstein interpreted him this way). The picture of our ideas developed in ‘The Stream of Thought’ sits badly with any theory that identifies meanings with ideas in this way, and while James’s chapter on ‘Conception’ (as well as some portions of Some Problems of Philosophy) has also been portrayed as committing James to the in principle privacy of language, it will be argued here that James’s account of our ‘conceptions’ is radically different from that of the private linguist

Jamesian Pluralism and Moral Conflict

While most pragmatists view themselves as pluralists of one sort or another, Talisse and Aikin argue thatthe two views are, in fact, "not compatible". However, while their charge may be true of the types of pluralism that they consider, these pluralisms all presuppose a type of realism about value that the pragmatic pluralist need not accept. In what follows, I'll argue that the 'non-realist' account of value that one finds in James underwrites a type of pluralism that is both substantial and compatible with pragmatis

Ordinary Language, Conventionalism and a priori Knowledge

This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to face serious problems of their own

Externalism, metasemantic contextualism, and self-knowledge

This paper examines some of the interactions between holism, contextualism, and externalism, and will argue that an externalist metasemantics that grounds itself in certain plausible assumptions about self- knowledge will also be a contextualist metasemantics, and that such a contextualist metasemantics in turn resolves one of the best known problems externalist theories purportedly have with self-knowledge, namely the problem of how the possibility of various sorts of ‘switching’ cases can appear to undermine the ‘transparency’ of our thoughts (in particular, our ability to tell, with respect to any two occurrent thoughts, whether they exercise the same or different concepts)

Investigating the Relationship between Residential Construction and Economic Growth in a Small Developing Country: The Case of Barbados

With the ongoing global financial crisis ¡V which began with the collapse of the US sub-prime market in 2007 ¡V the Barbadian economy is expected to contract in 2009. As a means of stimulating economic activity and providing job opportunities, the government has committed itself to completing 572 houses during the 2009/10 financial year. However, the arguments in favour of allocating more resources to residential construction have not been based on the existence of empirical analyses. This paper empirically investigates the relationship between residential construction and economic growth for Barbados. The historical data suggests that there is bi-directional causality between economic growth and residential construction. Hence, a policy that stimulates the housing market may boost economic activity.Residential construction; Growth; Granger causality; Barbados