So I'm back.

I got in about 8 last night, after a pretty sleepless night and hurried packing. Got off the plane, blearly eyed, to 50 degrees warmer than it was in Lansing that morning, with balmy ocean breezes whipping around the night. My housemate and fellow Philosophy grad student very generously gave me a ride from the airport, which is good, since that way I managed to make it to the free dinner for grad students who were helping out with this weekend's conference. Which was pretty much the perfect way to get a little "welcome back to Miami" moment, since the restaurant was an absurdly expensive Greek place in South Beach called Taverna Opa, complete with bellydancers and free-flowing liquor. Sat down, had about ten people come up to say 'hi' and--despite the fact that I really did enjoy Winter Break and the chance to see and hang out with everyone a lot--it felt really, really nice to be back.



Went out later with visiting keynote speaker Jason Stanley and a bunch of other folks to The Clevelander, which is kind of the epitome of touristy South Beach bars--outdoor seating, good mojitos, live music, swimming pool, girl walking around selling cigars, etc., etc., and then got up early this morning to go to the conference. I finally got my one big moment of the whole weekend, presenting five minutes of commentary after a paper, this afternoon. The paper was "Lotteries, Knowledge and Vagueness" and it was presented by Julien Murzi, a grad student at the University of Sheffield. Without boring anyone with the details, it was, basically, about "closure", which is the principle that if you know that P and Q can be logically derived from P, then you know that Q. This leads to problems in cases like the following...

A: "Where's your car?"
B: "It's in the parking garage on 8th street."
A: "How do you know?"
B: "I parked it there this morning."
A: "Do you know that it wasn't stolen?"
B: "No, I guess I don't."
A: "So how do you know that it's there?"

...where, intuitively, it seems reasonable to say that B knows that the car is in the garage, because he parked it there. (And, on standard definitions of knowledge, if (1) he believes it, (2) it's true, and (3) he has a good reason for believing it, that counts as knowing.) But if that's true, and closure holds, then it follows that he knows that the car wasn't stolen, because "the car isn't in a chop shop somewhere" logically follows from "the car is in the garage." Here's where the problem comes in because it seems, intuitively, like A *doesn't* know that the car wasn't stolen. How could he? The paper was basically devoted to presenting one possible solution to all of that.

Anyway, it was an interesting paper, I think I came up with some good objections, and there was a pretty lively discussion, so I think both of us earned last night's festivities.

It's possible, though I think this post may have destroyed my hopes of getting excused on grounds of sympathy for how busy I am, that I'll even get some writing done over the weekend. I opened up the laptop for a few minutes on the flight over and jotted down some notes (nothing that counts as JaNo wordcount, sadly). Between taking last chances to hang out with everyone in East Lansing before I left, transitioning back to Miami and doing the conference, though, my time management has sucked this week in terms of setting aside time to write. Which is intensely frustrating, because every day I don't, I always feel really unhappy with it, but at least everything else has been fun.

Better next week, I hope. Meanwhile, it's nice to be back.