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bweatherson.bsky.social
Brian Weatherson
@bweatherson.bsky.social
2.6K followers 200 following 1.5K posts
Philosopher at University of Michigan. https://brian.weatherson.org/
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bweatherson.bsky.social
Logic for equivocators
November 8, 2025 at 11:02 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
You get the same coordination issues too. Imagine Row knows that if Heads, they'll play the first game, and if Tails, they'll play the second game, and Column won't see the coin. There are equilibria that contain Middle in either game, but none that contain Middle in both.
A game table. The text is Left Right Up 10,0 0,0 Middle 1,0 1,0 Down 0,0 10,0 A game table. The text is Left Right Up 0,0 0,0 Middle 1,0 1,0 Down 0,0 10,0
October 23, 2025 at 3:53 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Not a great pair of posts to be side-by-side in the timeline.
A post saying inflation is rising, followed by a post saying jobless claims are rising
September 11, 2025 at 12:41 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
I was looking for something about the state of possibility/impossibility theorems in infinite population ethics, and I did not think I'd find a page with this much information.

It's from Pivato and Fleurbaey in the 2024 Journal of Mathematical Economics.

doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...
A graph showing various possibility and impossibility theorems in infinite population ethics. It's in three dimensions, with a box in each cell - white boxes for possibility results and black boxes for impossibility, with various grey boxes for qualified possibility results and/or uncertainties. One dimension of the graph lists Pareto principles, another anonymity principles, and another structural constraints on the pooled output. The full details are in the paper linked in the post
September 4, 2025 at 12:47 AM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Surprising zeugma from the Graun.

www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/s...
The ICC’s rankings make Keshav Maharaj officially the best bowler in the world in this format and the spinner bewitched England across 33 deliveries that brought four wickets and the home side to their knees.
September 3, 2025 at 11:05 AM
bweatherson.bsky.social
There was a push in the mid-2010s in Australia to orient crime prevention towards reducing domestic violence. The statistics are consistent with it making a big difference, but it's hard to disentangle effects of COVID.

www.aihw.gov.au/family-domes...
Graph of reduction in domestic violence (as experienced in preceeding 12 months) in Australia between 2016 and 2021. The raw numbers are Females: 2.3% -> 1.5% Males: 1.3% -> 0.6% (with huge error bars) Overall: 1.8% -> 1.1%
August 14, 2025 at 3:19 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
I started writing the abstract for a post, and this was the suggested autocomplete by VS Code. I now want to know what the post to which this is a good abstract looks like.
I present a somewhat surprising pair of games, (the subsequent text is autocomplete) one of which is a game of chicken and the other of which is a game of chicken with an extra move. I argue that the second game is not a game of chicken, and that this shows that the definition of a game of chicken needs to be revised.
June 16, 2025 at 4:01 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Did not expect a verse like this on the latest Sparks album. I appreciate the sentiment though.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hcp...
I met my Prof A Philosophic Prof "Professor Laughlin My life needs something more I'm feeling lost" "Well, son, I'm full of answers Epistemology At any cost
May 25, 2025 at 11:35 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Some more graphs from my new toy. We seem to use adverbs less than we used to.

bweatherson.shinyapps.io/t20-graphs/
A graph showing philosophers' usage of "apparently" is decreasing. A graph showing philosophers' usage of "logically" is decreasing. A graph showing philosophers' usage of "doctrine" is decreasing. A graph showing philosophers' usage of "difficulty" is decreasing, though it shot back up in 2019.
May 16, 2025 at 7:44 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
I won't delete the old posts, because I think it would break the thread, but I've adjusted how the download button works, and it should produce more normal looking graphs now, such as this one.
A graph showing that 'normative' gets used much more now than it used to, especially after 2010.
May 15, 2025 at 3:57 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Even more informatively, it can tell you something about the prominence of various philosophical debates that have distinctive keywords.
A graph showing that 'sentence' is used less and less as the years go on. A graph showing that 'description' is used less and less as the years go on. A graph showing that 'epistemic' is used more and more as the years go on. A graph that shows 'grounding' is used sharply more after about 2014.
May 15, 2025 at 3:43 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Slightly more informatively, for philosophers with distinctive enough names, you can use it to see how often those philosophers get talked about over time. This doesn't work too well for Russell, Lewis, or Fine (the latter because it's not case-sensitive), but sometimes it is informative.
A graph showing that 'Popper' is used less and less as the years go on. A graph showing that 'Sellars' is used less and less as the years go on. A graph showing that usage of 'Fodor' peaks in the 1990s. A graph showing that usage of 'Hawthorne' rises sharply after 2005
May 15, 2025 at 3:43 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
A fun but probably not philosophically significant thing to do with this is to see the changes in fashion for various words.
A graph showing that 'shall' is used less and less as the years go on. A graph showing that 'must' is used less and less as the years go on. A graph showing that 'worry' is used more and more as the years go on. A graph showing that 'challenge' is used more and more as the years go on.
May 15, 2025 at 3:43 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
As part of my (slow) project to better understand what happened in philosophy from 1980 onwards, I've got a blog post with a bunch of graphs showing the frequency of various words in *Philosophical Studies* from 1980-2019.

brian.weatherson.org/quarto/blog/...
A graph showing that the word 'grounding' appears much more often in recent years than before 2010. A graph showing that the word 'worry' appears much more often in recent years than before 2005. A graph showing that the word 'his' appears less and less often in philosophy journals. A graph showing that the word 'her' appears more and more often in philosophy journals.
May 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Does this post @dailynous.com mean that no one was turned down for tenure in the last two years across US philosophy departments?

dailynous.com/2025/04/24/a...
Faculty Employment, Tenure, & Hiring Philosophy departments employed 8,620 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2023, with an average of 12 faculty members per department (and a median of 8). Approximately 63% of philosophy faculty members either had tenure or were on the tenure track in fall 2023, compared to about 69% in 2012. About 34% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure during the previous two years. Averaging over these two years, 130 faculty were granted tenure per annum nationwide. None were denied tenure [in the picture this phrase is highlighted], though 50 left prior to a tenure decision. While 31% of philosophy departments had made at least one new hire for the 2023–24 academic year (compared to 37% across all of the humanities departments), amounting to 410 new permanent faculty, the departments collectively had lost an average of 620 faculty per annum over the previous two years. Among the faculty who left, 58% had retired. Women constituted 23% of the chairs in philosophy departments in fall 2023 (the smallest share among the 14 disciplines surveyed), and 85% identified their race/ethnicity as white (one of the largest shares).
April 24, 2025 at 1:37 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Sadly we’re not in the room with this view. If you can go to talks on the 12th floor I recommend it.
Union Square and other San Francisco buildings.
April 17, 2025 at 3:32 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Trying to find where the morning sessions are at the Pacific, and the APA app looks like this
A screen with a spinning wheel saying Downloading Artwork
April 16, 2025 at 2:13 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
The first picture is Politico yesterday. The second is The Age this morning.

Takes that age like milk in the desert.
POLITICO MAGAZINE WASHINGTON AND THE WORLD Opinion | Populists Are Gaining Power and Keeping It. What Comes Next? Donald Trump is helping galvanize an international movement of the nationalist right. Exclusive Australia votes Trump backlash shifts voters from Dutton to Albanese: poll The shift has cut support for the Coalition to 46.5 per cent in two-party terms, while Labor is within sight of holding majority government.
April 14, 2025 at 11:35 AM
bweatherson.bsky.social
The stats in the previous post I did were just about citations to books published since 2015.

So as a follow up, here are the works most cited in articles published in some selected philosophy journals since 2020.🧵

brian.weatherson.org/quarto/blog/...
Rank Citations Author Title 1 961 Timothy Williamson Knowledge And Its Limits 2 758 Miranda Fricker Epistemic Injustice 3 656 John Rawls A Theory Of Justice 4 394 James Woodward Making Things Happen: A Theory Of Causal Explanation 5 319 David Lewis New Work For A Theory Of Universals 6 312 Timothy Williamson The Philosophy Of Philosophy 7 285 Herman Cappelen Fixing Language 8 283 Theodore Sider Writing The Book Of The World 9 271 Ruth Garrett Millikan Language, Thought, And Other Biological Categories 10 259 José Medina The Epistemology Of Resistance 11 258 John Hawthorne Knowledge And Lotteries 12 249 Kit Fine Guide To Ground 13 247 Bas C. van Fraassen The Scientific Image 14 243 Robert Nozick Anarchy, State, And Utopia 15 242 Ernest Sosa A Virtue Epistemology 16 239 James Ladyman, Don Ross, with David Spurrett and John Collier Every Thing Must Go 17 237 D. M. Armstrong A World Of States Of Affairs 18 236 Saul A. Kripke Naming And Necessity 19 234 Sally Haslanger Gender And Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be? 20 231 Gideon Rosen Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding And Reduction 21 230 Thomas Kuhn The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions 22 228 Helen E. Longino Science As Social Knowledge 23 226 Christine M. Korsgaard The Sources Of Normativity 24 222 Sally Haslanger Resisting Reality
March 24, 2025 at 7:24 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
While waiting for the cricket to start, I thought I'd see what the citation data said about this question. Which new-ish books have been cited at the highest rate in philosophy journals in recent years.

brian.weatherson.org/quarto/blog/...
Author Title Year Citations Rate Herman Cappelen Fixing Language 2018 240 34.3 Ned Block The Border Between Seeing and Thinking 2023 47 23.5 Errol Lord The Importance of Being Rational 2018 130 18.6 Nicholas Shea Representation in Cognitive Science 2018 130 18.6 Angela Potochnik Idealization and the Aims of Science 2017 140 17.5 Édouard Machery Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds 2017 136 17.0 Richard Pettigrew Accuracy and the Laws of Credence 2016 152 16.9 Kate Manne Down Girl 2017 127 15.9 Ernest Sosa Judgment and Agency 2015 158 15.8 Karen Bennett Making Things Up 2017 125 15.6 Andy Clark Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind 2015 150 15.0 Benjamin Kiesewetter The Normativity of Rationality 2017 118 14.8 Catherine Z. Elgin True Enough 2017 108 13.5 Quassim Cassam Vices of the Mind 2019 76 12.7 Sarah Moss Probabilistic Knowledge 2018 88 12.6 Christine Tappolet Emotions, Values, and Agency 2016 112 12.4 Karen Neander A Mark of the Mental 2017 99 12.4 Matthieu Queloz The Practical Origins of Ideas 2021 49 12.2 Ernest Sosa Epistemic Explanations 2021 47 11.8 Neil Levy Bad Beliefs 2021 45 11.2
March 22, 2025 at 2:02 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
The Conservative vote is about where it was 2 years ago, when they were comfortable favourites to win. But the opposition is no longer as fragmented.

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Op...
Graph of opinion polls on the Canadian election. The Conservative vote goes steadily up until early 2025, when it falls. The Liberal vote goes down just as steadily until early 2025, when it shoots well upward. More details at the link in the post.
March 18, 2025 at 3:41 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
I just found out that the pathway alongside Cascadilla Gorge is on Google street view.

maps.app.goo.gl/scQ2u99wPmMv...
A screenshot from the linked map. Some stone steps rise to the left of the picture. On the right is white water running over rocks.
February 27, 2025 at 2:27 AM
bweatherson.bsky.social
"Intuitions" is mostly associated with the bubble in meta-philosophy in the late-2000s. "Language" tracks the steady decrease in focus on philosophy of language from the time when reference and description were so central.
Chart for the use of 'intuitions'. It peaks sharply around 2010. Usage chart for 'language'. It goes down, especially when looking at papers that use the word 10 or more times.
February 11, 2025 at 3:54 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
As a follow up on last Friday's post on changes in word usage in philosophy journals, I have a shorter post on how much longer philosophy articles are getting. They are getting so, so much longer, though a few good journals are holding the line.

brian.weatherson.org/quarto/blog/...
A graph of word lengths over time. There are three lines representing the 75th, 50th, and 25th percentiles of lengths. They rise steadily - by the end the 25th percentile is half way between where the 50th and 75th were at the start.
February 10, 2025 at 3:44 PM
bweatherson.bsky.social
Oddly it seems to be falling. As you say at the end, this is one where I'd be really sceptical about the data.
Reference data for 'x'. It's mostly flat, with maybe some decrease.
February 7, 2025 at 2:56 PM