Nice discussion here: http://mindhacks.com/2013/12/03/are-men-better-wired-to-read-maps-or-is-it-a-tired-cliche/

Just happened to notice that "Dark was the night" was on Ry Cooder's very first album (1970).

Diego, no one is suggesting you are responsible for the decision of those who turn down invitations. It may be true, for a variety of women, that one needs to try extra efforts to get women to contribute than men (possible explanations: being in a minority means the bigger name women get more invitations, women may take family, committee and teaching commitments more seriously than men and a result have greater burdens, women may less confident about letting work be published before they have polished it longer... I have heard anecdotes along these lines, but I don't know if they are true). That entails that people like you who make some effort to invite women will end up with unbalanced volumes. The solution: try harder! Invite more women. If you can't think of more women (as you say) ask other people if they know any. There are helpful list of women working in various areas which a quick google will turn up. There is philpapers as a resource to find people. Why isn't it enough to do what you did? Because women are underrepresented in philosophy and that's a burden for those women who are working in it and a problem as a whole, and we all have an obligation to do something about that.

Exactly. The precedent gave Marois the opportunity to exploit this as a wedge issue. This is dog whistle politics: you are able to say one thing explicitly ("this is about safety, not religion or race") and know that another message is heard by segments of your constituency. It allows you to play to prejudice while disavowing it.

That is to say, the banning of garments on safety grounds has some precedent. It was silly in the English case: I am not defending it; I am saying that the Quebeckers can cite FIFA precedent. Of course, to right thinking people having FIFA on one's side would be an embarrassment.

Has some precedent: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1363404/Snoods-banned-Football-chiefs-finally-time-neckwear-designed-powder-puffs.html

On your worries about 8. It seems to me - partly on the basis of my own experience with acceptances and rejections - that at least some of the very best journals are more open to quirky, left-field papers than some of those slightly lower down the food chain. I think Nous for instance is more likely to look favourably on a quirky paper that is interesting but lacking in rigor in various ways than, say, Phil Stud. Clement, I don't want to try to exhume the history of any of my papers. But - echoing the advice Jore quotes - I get a lot of rejections. Sometimes a rejected paper gets published at a journal of similar quality, sometimes better, though usually I resubmit to a journal a tier down.

Hi Bruce, I tried to comment previously but my comment seems to have disappeared. Trying again. I was actually going to blog about this issue next month: now I'll have to try to think of something else... I've been thinking about this issue ever since I read your book. The move you make there, distinguishing between free will and moral responsibility and reserving scepticism for the latter alone is quite attractive (not least because if I adopted the view my life would be simplified, insofar as I could defend compatibilism without all the hedging I now have to do). Here's why I continue to resist. In a recent paper, David Chalmers gives the free will debate as an example of a dispute that is merely verbal. Once we produce appropriate subscripts, there is not a lot more to say. Do we have free will (subscript libertarian)? Well that's an empirical question (as Mark Balaguer has pointed out): is the brain indeterministic in the right kind of way? Do we have free will (subscript Fischer)? Well, yes, we do. Debate over; at least for philosophers. If the dispute is not to be merely verbal, there had better be some substantive question remaining, The obvious one is: is free will (subscript Fischer, or subscript Frankfurt, or..) sufficient for moral responsibility (in the post I was going to write, I was going to ask whether there are other candidates besides MR to make the issue substantive). Of course we can ask that question while distinguishing fw and mr, but at the cost of making the latter question merely verbal. By the way, a similar kind of issue arises wrt theorists who make mr very insubstantive. I need not be a skeptic about responsibility (subscript Scanlon) but that's because nothing hangs on that kind of responsibility.

I'm having trouble understanding the supposition. Is a "motivated biasing mechanism" a mechanism that has function of biasing reasoning? Why would we have such a mechanism? How would it evolve? It seems more likely that motivated reasoning is the product of an interplay of mechanisms: independent signals of costs alter the workings of whatever mechanism is involved. Neuropsychologically, almost all reasoning is the product of interacting mechanisms. It is open to Fischer to identify the relevant mechanism with the set of (neuropsychological) mechanisms that are involved in a token piece of reasoning, though I suspect that would entail that no mechanism is actually moderately reasons-responsive (because if we hold fixed that mechanism, we will see some weird reasoning).

Chandra, I think you may be right that there are epistemic conditions that are not control conditions; that's what Philip's case establishes. But there are also epistemic conditions of control, I contend. The mom knows that she is exposing her child to vaccines, and thereby satisfies the control relevant epistemic condition. I certainly lack surgical know how, and that may excuse me. But I also lack surgical knowing that; just where is the gall bladder anyway? If I had the first but not the second - quite possible, so far as I can see - I would lack control over the fact that the gall bladder is removed.

Damn you autocorrect: I do know your name, Clayton.