Abstract: At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (forthcoming) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question about an ordinary concept here is one apt for empirical investigation. Our plan is to evaluate Mele’s studies and report some experiments of our own in order to investigate what in the world the ordinary concept of weakness of will is. We conclude that neither Mele nor Holton (previously) was quite right and offer a tentative proposal of our own: the ordinary notion is more like a prototype or cluster concept.
It’s already almost a month into 2010, but I usually like to take a moment to list my top 10 or so favorite albums from the previous year. To limit the toil it takes on my mind, I’ll just throw out my favorite 10 without worrying too much about the order. So here they are in alphabetical order:
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion (9.6)
Basically, this is the list of albums I listened to most this past year. I highly recommend them! I’m sure there are great albums I’ve missed, though. So any recommendations are much appreciated!
(Note: I also like to see what Pitchfork said about the albums I’ve liked, so their scores (out of 10) are in parentheses. And, no, I wasn’t that into the albums by Girls or Grizzly Bear this year, despite Pitchfork’s acclaim.)
I read Tamler Sommer’s new book, A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain, recently and really liked it. So I wrote a short review of it for Metapsychology. It’s posted here, open access and all:
I just set up the details for publication of an article (“Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions”) I and my fellow co-authors have coming out in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Springer, like many journals now, has an option for the authors to pay to have the article open access so it’s free for everyone to read. I was aware of this option but not that they have agreements with some libraries in which the libraries pay for the article to be open access. Luckily, UCSB is one of them. So the article will be free to all and I didn’t have to pay, which is nice since open access costs around $3,000! This also means I didn’t have to transfer the copyright either. All very cool!
Update: Here’s the link to the open access article on Springer’s site (no page numbers yet because it’s only currently published online, not yet in print):
The funny thing is… I found the acceptance email in my junk mail folder in Gmail. And I hardly ever check that folder. I just happened to check it because I accidentally marked an email as junk and went to the folder to un-junk it. I wonder what would have happened if I never looked in that junk mail folder…
