About a month ago, I posted about an article that presents some interesting experiments involving perception. You don't have to click that link...here's the relevant bit.

It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. For example, they had people watch someone throw two balls. The thrower then pretended to throw a third ball. Most people think they see a third ball that suddenly disappears in mid-air. They don't even realize that a third ball wasn't thrown. Their first thought is usually that the person somehow made the third ball disappear.

I started having some vague concerns about how these findings might impact recent attempts from in experimental philosophy to undermine the claim that intuitions can yield justified beliefs.

I decided that I need to start looking more closely at some of the experimental philosophy literature. In my search, I just discovered that Ethics Etc is doing a review of a new book out called Experiments in Ethics. Here's the review of chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three. This book has just been added to my to do list. (My summer is going to be great!)

I'm want to look into this more before I really start mouthing off, but here's my vague worry.

In the case of the experiment involving perception it seems that some mechanism stepped in and yielded a false perception. The existence of this mechanism isn't enough to show that perceptions are generally unreliable. I bet there are other experiments out there involving perception. I think they're going to be worth tracking down. They're going to be relevant to fleshing out precisely what experiments involving intuitions should tell us about the general reliability of intuitions.

Many of the experiments (that I've come across) attempting to show that intuitions are unreliable seem to involve certain kinds of priming. If you prime people with certain kinds of questions or set up the cases in which they have certain expectations or assumptions about the cases, they'll intuitions will vary. Set up the cases one way - they'll have an intuition that an action is wrong. Set it up another way - they'll have an intuition that an action is permissible.

The conclusion that some philosophers draw from these experiments is that intuitions are generally unreliable and cannot justify moral beliefs.

My suspicion (and it is merely that - a suspicion) is that it will be tricky to explain why these experiments involving intuition cut against the general reliability of intuitions, but the perception experiments do not cut against the general reliability of perception. That said - I think I should wait until I've looked into both sets of experiments in more detail before I say more.

(For those of you who know more about the literature, feel free to mouth-off in the comments.)

Calling all metaphysicians! Would you like a simplified explanation of the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics? Would you like it to be presented to you using Super Mario World? Well, look no further.

Interesting Philosophical Applications
Metaphysical Modality
Some people think that the parallel universes in the multiverse hypothesis could play the role of Lewisian Possible Worlds. I have serious doubts about this. The main issue is that the multiverse that some physicists take seriously probably won't have enough universes to represent all metaphysical possibility.

The Fine-Tuning Argument for the Existence of God.
One possible response to The Fine-Tuning Argument for the Existence of God involves appealing to some kind of Multiverse Hypothesis. (Shameless plug - Check out Beebe's presentation of the Fine-Tuning Argument over at Young Philosophers)

Anyway, whatever your thoughts about the potential philosophical applications of the multiverse hypothesis - the video is pretty excellent. Enjoy.

[HT: Popsci.com - Checkout the full article here]

I just posted the video of James Beebe's introductory level talk. The talk was on an interesting version of the Fine-Tuning Argument for the existence of God.

Both of the James Beebe's talks are now up online over at youngphilosophers.org - Check them out and spread the word.

I just posted the video for James Beebe's Research Talk over at Young Philosophers. The Young Philosophers Lecture Series is officially launched!

I'll be posting the video for James Beebe's introdutory level talk either late this evening or sometime tomorrow. The video editing for that should move quickly.

We don't have QuickTime files or MP3 files, but you can download two different video formats from the website. You can also simply watch the video on the site. Enjoy!

Thanks for the prodding in the previous post. Also, thanks to the anonymous comment with that list of readings. I knew there had to be literature on this.

Here is a quick and dirty formulation of the argument that eternalism is incompatible with some robust conception of freewill. Three different people have given me something like this argument. Ultimately, I think it's unsound.

Past Entails Future Argument

1. If eternalism is true, then there is some past fact that entails all of my future actions.
2. If there is some past fact that entails all of my future actions, then I do not have freewill.
3. Therefore, If eternalism is true, then I do not have freewill.
   

Motivation for One:
If eternalism is true, then for any of my future actions A, there will be some past fact at any past time of the form Andy will A. But if that's true, then there will be an entailment relation between that past fact and my future actions.

Motivation for Two:
The freewill literature is loaded with premises that fit this form. The idea is that if past facts entail what you do in the future, then what you do in the future is somehow not under your control. So, learning that the past facts entail what you do in the future should be sufficient to think that you're not free in the future.

My Main Problem:
Premise 2 - is only plausible if you're thinking like a presentist. If eternalism is true, it may be true that there is an entailment relation between some past fact and what you do in the future, but that past fact is made true by what you do in the future.

It's only true in the past that you will do some future action (according to the eternalist) because you're future self is there freely doing it in the future doing it.

If we learn that past facts entail our future actions, we're inclined to think that this entails we don't have freedom because we're inclined to think that we simply cannot have any control whatsoever over the past facts - but we can have control over the past facts if eternalism is true. It's our engrained presentist way of thinking that (I submit) inclines people to accept (2).

I've had some other versions of the argument presented to me, but I'm going to hold off for now.

In other news:
I've been reading Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge and Timothy Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy. Interesting stuff in both. I may be posting something about this soon.

I thought it was obvious that libertarian freedom was compatible with eternalism, but I'm starting to realize that this isn't true across the board. Some colleagues here think that the two are likely incompatible. After talking with some folks at the Pacific APA, I discovered others who thought that the two are obviously incompatible.

I was also told that there isn't much in the literature on this - so I think I'm going to start posting some more thoughts on this.

First, let's get some terms out of the way.

Eternalism - The past, present, and future all exist and are equally real.

Libertarian Freewill - While there is little agreement about how to define freedom, the Libertarian Conception of freedom is supposed to be the robust notion of freedom that we're after. A cluster of concepts get thrown around as part of this robust notion including - could-have-done-otherwise, and not-caused-by-events-that-are-not-under-your-control.


(...more on this soon...)

Sometimes computer companies bloat the computer with a bunch of software that you don't need and will never use.

Sony realized the error of its ways, and now offers you a computer without all that junk - the catch - they charge you $50 to NOT put their junk on the computer....awesome.

I saw a great session on bootstrapping today. James Van Cleve gave a great talk, and he basically argued that any non-skeptical view will allow for bootstrapping.

Bootstrapping involves cases where a person is in a position to justify the conclusion that an evidential source is reliable by relying on that source (e.g., using perception to justify perception). This looks like it's epistemically circular, and we're all taught that epistemic circularity is supposed to be bad, right?

Van Cleve's point was that any non-skeptical view will allow for the possibility of bootstrapping - he then argued that bootstrapping must be (at least sometimes permissible) This stuff is all directly related to a paper that I am currently revising. I may post that paper soon (and beg for feedback).

(...I know I haven't fleshed out the contrastivism argument from the previous post...there's just so much good philosophy going on here...)

Jonathan Schaffer presented a paper (just a few hours ago) on a view he favors called contrastivism.

Contrastivism is the view that knowledge ascriptions express a ternary relation - S knows that P rather than Q.

The more traditional view is that knowledge ascriptions express a binary relation between a person and a proposition.

According the Contrastivist an utterance like "I know that is a canary" really expresses some proposition like "I know that's a canary rather than a raven"

What that contrastive proposition is will vary according to the context. Jonathan Schaffer presented an argument for contrastivism today. Here's a quick and dirty presentation of the argument. This will be overly simplified.

An Argument for Contrastivism (quick and dirty version)

1. Whether or not it is permissible to assert P depends on the context, and the permissibility will depend on some relevant contrastive proposition that the assertion is ruling out.
2. Knowledge is a norm of assertion.
3. If (1) and (2), then contrastivism is true.
4. Therefore, contrastivism is true.
   

This doesn't quite do justice to the more complicated way of fleshing out the argument, but it captures the basic spirit of his argument (in an overly simplified way). I don't expect these premises to make any sense to someone not familiar with the knowledge is the norm of assertion literature (or this business about contrastive propositions), but I wanted to get this argument down somewhere. I thought this would be a good place to get it down.

I may come back to this and discuss his motivations for these premises, but I won't go into that now. I'm off to dinner. Philosophy conferences are awesome.

I’m in Pasadena with another former Rochester graduate student, Andrei Buckareff. I forget how good it is to talk to Andrei. We ran the gamut last night on LEMMing issues.

We also talked about his work on The Problem of Hell. If you're interested in philosophical theology, his work is well worth reading. Andrei wrote a paper with another Rochester alumn, Allen Plug, called “Escaping Hell: Divine Motivation and the Problem of Hell” (Religious Studies 2005.)

They basically argue that an all-loving God that allowed for the existence of some kind of Hell would also allow for the possibility of post-death escape.

The paper has already has two published responses. One by Russell Jones - “Escapism and Religious Luck” and another by Kyle Swan – “Hell and Divine Reasons for Action”

Andrei and Allen have written a response to both Jones and Swan. Here it is.

They’ve also been invited to contribute an essay in a book called The Problem of Hell, but that is still in the proposal stage.

If you want to read about possibility of escaping Hell, you should check out the above exchanges.

(...more posts about yesterday coming soon...)

Here is the must see session of the day.

		II-A.	Author-Meets-Critics: Jennifer Lackey, Learning from Words
				4:00-6:00 p.m., Location TBA
					Chair:	Peter Graham (University of California–Riverside)
					Critics:	Jonathan Kvanvig (Baylor University)
						Matthew Weiner (University of Vermont)
					Author:	Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University)

All three of the speakers are fun presenters to watch, and they're great philosophers. This should be good.

When Northwestern decided they needed a bunch of LEMMings - Lackey was one of the hires. Kvanvig, as many of you know, runs Certain Doubts. If you haven't, check out Weiner's blog.

I'm in Phoenix. First blog post from an airport. I'm rushing, so it's got me thinking about typos. Which is really awesome given the main thing I want to post about here.

One worry about blogs is that you may rush yourself and publish too quickly. You're bound to miss typos. Sometimes I'm bad with the typos. I try to tell myself that this is OK. Most of my substantive blog posts are rough drafts anyway, and I've already managed to throw together a couple of rough drafts from philosophy posts on this blog. Which is awesome awesome because I've only had this blog running for about 3 months now.

So I think, "Get the ideas up here, and worry about the typos later."

It's OK to have some typos in your blog posts (or so I tell myself).

Now for my real point. Below is not an OK context for typos.



[Link to the PhotoBasement page]

A reputable physics journal withdrew an offer to publish an article because the scientists posted some of their findings online.

This is yet another reason to push open-access.

I'm off to the Pacific APA in a couple of days. The following week is our spring break. I assume that I'll have decent internet access while in California, so posting should continue.

I'm commenting on a good paper on causation by Jonathan Matheson. Here's the abstract (pulled from the Pacific APA website).

Fragile Events and the Causal Relation by Jonathan Matheson In this paper I defend the claim that maximally-fragile-events are the proper relata of the causal relation. In other words, the things that are causes and effects are maximally-fragile-events alone. Call this thesis the Fragility Thesis. It is standard, though not uncontroversial, to take events as the relata of the causal relation; but it is highly contested that maximally-fragile-events alone play this role. In this paper I show how a counterfactual account of causation coupled with FT can provide a simple conceptual account that avoids the problems that have faced other counterfactual accounts of causation, as well as suggest that the consequences of adopting such an account are not as outrageous as they may seem.

Two weeks ago, I finished a fun time-travel novel, and it's still haunting me.I thought I'd blog about it. The book is a little slow-going and long, but worth the read.

The main character, Kivrin, is a history student at Oxford in about 2054. In 2054 they send history students back in time to study history. (Yes way, Ted!)

However, Kivrin's journey is far from excellent. They intend to send her back several years before the first outbreak of the plague, but they accidentally place her at the start of the outbreak. I won't tell you how things go awry, but massive viruses start breaking out on both ends.

The obvious philosophical issues that crop up are metaphysics of time issues and a host of problem of evil worries. At the end of the novel there is even a Gettier case! Well...it will be contentious whether it's actually a Gettier, but even if it's not actually a Gettier case, it may raise some interesting epistemological issues for religious belief. I haven't quite fleshed that out yet. I'll wait to post about that.

The person who recommended this book told me that medievalists love it because it's loaded with little bits of information about life in Medieval England. Since I'm not a medievalist, I can't know for sure which tidbits are historically accurate. If most of it is accurate, then you'll learn a lot of cool stuff about medieval life.

Bottom-line: If you're a philosopher into metaphysics of time, time-travel stories, and medieval stuff, you should read Dooms Day Book by Connie Willis.

(I may post more about that Gettier case later)

Today Dr. James Beebe will present his research talk - A Priori Skepticism. He's giving an introductory level talk - Fine Tuning Arguments for God's Existence tomorrow.

The Young Philosophers Lecture Series is something I've wanted to try and do for a while, and last semester we received generous support from the Carnahan-Jackson Fund for the Humanities.

You can learn more about the series at our website - www.youngphilosophers.org

You might be thinking, "I'm not at Fredonia - why should I care?"

Because we're videotaping the talks. A few weeks after each talk, you'll be able to watch it on our website (or download it to your ipod and watch it on the go).

I've been ranting about Open Access Journals - Here and Here.

I just found out about a discussion on Leiter's Blog from a couple of years ago called "Time For An End to For Profit Journals," - [HT: Philosophy, et cetera]

Also, there are three recent posts out there in the blogosphere on this issue. Here's recent post from Crooked Timber. Philosopy, et cetera has two recent posts about this issue- one about open access journals and one about other ways to move away from the old style publishing model.

The good news is that I'm going to the Pacific APA next week. The bad news is that I'm flying with Southwest Airlines.

There's now a website called Rate My Cop. This had some people so furious that groups were seriously seeking legislation to have the site shut down.

I thought, "Nothing will come of this."

The site publishes publicly available information (the names of police officers), and gives people a chance to voice their opinions. (...free speech etc...)

Imagine how weird it would be if professors banded together, and the UUP started trying to lobby for legislation to shutdown Rate My Professor.

Now accusations are circulating that GoDaddy.com pulled the site.

The internet has transferred a lot of power to the little guy. It's harder for news stories to get squashed because the powers that be don't like it. If somebody wants the world to know about something, it's much easier to let everyone know.

This story, however, highlights a possibility that I think we should watch out for. The information age still has a lot of people who stand to lose money if they host sites that say unpopular things, and this gives them financial incentive to censor.

...the April 2008 edition of Analysis just posted to my RSS feed. Here's the Blackwell Link. Here's the Link for those of you with Ingenta Connect. This edition looks like it is simply loaded with good stuff.

Also, I just noticed that the January 2008 edition of Analysis is available for FREE at Blackwell.

In a previous post, I argued that philosophy should push toward publishing in Open Access Journals. Here's a list of things I think we need to start doing to realize that shift. Some of these will seem quite obvious, but we might as well have the list anyway.

1. Everyone Start Submitting to Open Access Journals

I think everyone should start submitting to open access journals, but the issues for junior faculty are tricky. A good open access publication will surely count for tenure. (See how Philosophers' Imprint fairs in Brian Weatherson's survey of journals). However, there simply are not enough Open Access Journals of Philosophers' Imprint caliber for a Junior Person to put together a successful tenure file based solely on Open Access Publications. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this).

Another issue for junior faculty is there aren't any open access journals that have Mind, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, or Nous level prestige. Until we have an open access journal that is one of the top two or three journals in the field, it may not be in a junior's interests to submit to an open access publication (until they've been rejected by all of the top journals). In many cases, it's in a junior's interests to submit that Mind caliber publication to Mind.

Perhaps juniors with a lot of papers in the works can afford to submit their best work to open access journals. Perhaps juniors at departments that weigh all peer-reviewed publications equally can afford to send their best work to open access journals. But juniors at schools with stringent tenure requirements, or juniors concerned about mobility cannot. Until there are two or three online journals that are clearly in the top ten, it will be difficult to make the shift.

(However, the bottom line is that anyone who can afford to should start submitting more to open access journals.)

2. Big Names Start Submitting to Open Access Journals

The real issue with the shift to open access journals is that we need to get an open access journal to the point where it is widely regarded as one of the top two or three journals in the field. The push to Open Access will have to come from people who are already secure in their career. One of the best ways for an online open access journal to rocket to the top is for people already secure in their career to forgo that 18th top journal publication and start sending their best work to Online Open Access Journals. Moves like this will eventually push open access journals to the top.

3. Create More Open Access Journal

Of course, a big issue with (1) and (2) is that there aren't many Open Access Journals. We need more of them. One way to get more is for people to start them, but I recommend that the new journals be started by leaders in the field at some of our top research institutions. I'm not saying that a quality journal can't be started by good, serious philosophers at a non-research institution - but it may be a longer up hill battle to have the journal acheive a level that would encourage juniors to submit that Mind publication. People will be more likely to take a chance on a start up journal that is housed at a top research institution and run by familiar names. The quickest route to the top for a new journal is on the backs of scholars who are top in the field.

Note: If any of you readers are confident that you've got the connections to start up a journal - I'd like to see an online journal like Analysis. Analysis gets about 500 submissions year, and only accepts about 10%. I bet you the next 5%-10% are pretty good. Many of them might require some work before they fit another journal's style. Wouldn't you like to see those in an Open Access Journal? I sure would. I would start that journal today if I thought I had enough clout.

Note: The new journal wouldn't have to be run by leaders in the field, but it would have to be widely known that the start-up was taken very seriously by leaders in the field if the journal was going to quickly rocket to the top.

4. Top Tier Journals Move to Open Access

An even quicker way to get a Top Tier Open Access Journal would be for the top journals in our field to migrate to an online open-access format. There are legal issues here. Fortunately, I suspect there are two main scenarios, and either way there we can quickly get a top tier journal that is open access.

Scenario One - The Editor/Board Can Switch Publishers
If the editor has the authority to migrate the journal from one publisher to another, then surely they can migrate the journal to an open access format. Moving a top journal to open access format should be EASY if the editor has what I'll call migration authority.

Scenario Two - The Publishing Company Owns the Journal
If the editor doesn't have migration authority, then here is my radical proposal - Walk out! Take your editorial skills, take your editorial board, take your list of great referees and leave. Start your own Open Access Philosophy Journal with your current editorial crew. The philosophical community will know what the deal is. They'll know that this new journal Schmilosophical Studies is the same great journal they've always known and loved.

Note: Rock Bands do this all the time. Rather than kick out the annoying guy and risk a legal battle over the name, they simply disband and start up a New Band without the annoying guy.

5. Mid-tier Journals Move to Open Access

Another option to get the ball rolling would be if mid-tier journals with migration authority migrate to open access. Note that a mid-tier journal with migratory rights has some incentive to move to Open Access. They could attract submissions from big name philosophers who feel the moral impetus for open access. A mid-tier journal could easily rocket to being a top journal by switching to open access.

6. Somebody Create An Open Access Version of Analysis!

I know I pretty much covered this one in (3), but an Open Access Online Version of Analysis is so important to me that I want it this issues to have its own number in my list. Will someone please create an Open Access competitor to Analysis! I'll referee articles for you. I'll cough up server space. I'll make you coffee. I'll make sure your office is always stocked with a bowl of green M&Ms. Whatever it takes for you to get this off the ground, I am ON BOARD!

There's a lot of talk in philosophy about gender. Most of the focus is on how weird gender expectations/norms affect women. But there are weird gender expectations/norms for men too. For example, the Man Hug.



This is pretty funny, but it is also a pretty accurate description of the norms that seem to govern man hugs.

This is a very interesting article in Seed Magazine that should definitely be of interest to LEMMings and anyone interested in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

They're trying to build a model of the brain from the bottom up. Each neuron in the model is an IBM microchip. It's pretty fascinating stuff, and it may help shed some light on issues concerning the possibility of thinking machines and the possibility of reducing mental events to brain events.

Jon Cogburn has been on a roll with some interesting posts discussing the ethics of blind review. Here is his most recent installment. He argues that blind reviewers ought to take what he calls The Good Samaritan approach to reviewing (as opposed to the Professor Angrypants or Joe Friday approach).

What are those approaches? Read his blog and find out.

UPDATE [3/9/2007] - How To Make the Move To Open Access Journals
UPDATE [3/8/2007] - I just thought of Pro #12 this morning. See below.
UPDATE [3/8/2007] - I just thought of Pro #13 this afternoon. See below.
UPDATE [3/8/2007] - I'm also addressing - Con #6. See below.

In a previous post, I claimed that philosophy journals should push to open access publishers and eliminate the publisher middle-man. Philosophy editors work for free. Reviewers work for free. Philosophers have their articles published without getting paid. Why in the age of internet and computers do we have publishers play the role of circulation middle-man?

It used to be that there were no other means of circulation, type-setting, or binding. There were many very expensive processes that publishers provided, but now with computers and the internet - anyone can create a professional looking journal that is widely-circulated. So why don't we push away from publishers?

In addition, there are so many good reasons to have the top philosophy journals be open-access journals. Below is a list of those pros. After that, I address a a list of potential cons.

I imagine many of these pros and cons are obvious. It's just so striking to see them laid out side-by-side that I thought it was worth posting about.

Note: I intend to update this list when new pros or cons come to mind. Let me know if you think of any I should add.

Pros
1. Free

This is obvious. Free philosophy for everyone (with internet access).

2. Wide-Circulation

Anyone with internet could access the journals. You can't get much wider than that.

3. Tracking

The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy allows authors to track can track how many times their article is downloaded. If the top philosophy journals were online with this feature, we would have a new powerful instrument for measuring impact of professors and departments. Professors could track their impact which they could use to make tenure and promotion cases stronger. We could also assess the impact of an entire department. I have my worries about factoring impact into tenure decisions (or ranking philosophy departments), but if we're going to do it - this would be great data to have.

4. Professors and Students At Low-Budget Schools Can Research With the Big Dogs

There are a lot of small colleges out there with good, serious philosophers doing good, serious research. However, these colleges don't have the budgets that larger research institutions have. This would make it easier for everyone to stay current and informed.

5. Independent Scholars Can Research With the Big Dogs

There are good, serious philosophers who don't have teaching positions, and they don't have access to even a meager selection of philosophy journals.

6. Professors Can Post Their Actual Articles!

When philosophers post articles to their published material, they often post penultimate drafts to avoid crossing the publishers. If we want to write responses to these papers, we have to track down the article to get the pagination. Open Access would eliminate this silly dance. (Also, wouldn't it be great if you could go to your favorite contemporary philosophers' website and read ALL of his or her actual journal articles)

7. More Specialty Journals

Start-up costs for journals are, I suspect, prohibitively expensive. I suspect that if the norm were open access online journals we could expect to see more specialized journals (e.g., Lewisian Studies, Chisholmian Studies, the Journal of Contemporary Analytic Epistemology, The Journal for Metaethics, The Journal of Experimental Philosophy, or LEMMings: The Journal for LEMMings)

8. Lower Student Costs

If the highest quality philosophy were being published in Open Access journals, most philosophy classes could be taught using cheaper resources. Even if you were to require your students to print all of them out, or get them bound via some PDF-binding service - it would still be remarkably cheaper.

Note: This one might take awhile. We'd need a lot of high quality, accessible research to build up. But over time we would start to see this benefit.

Also note: There is certainly no getting around the fact that we need our students to read some of the really good philosophy that has already been published in proprietary formats. But the sooner we can get the really good philosophy in non-proprietary formats the better.

9. Research From Anywhere

Think about it. If most of the high-quality philosophy research is available for free online you've got access to high quality philosophy - anywhere you have internet!

10. Take Strain Off Library Budgets

It is REALLY expensive for libraries to pay for journal subscriptions. This would free up already strained library budgets for other resources.

11. Philosophy For the Masses

Part of the reason philosophy doesn't impact everyday life as much as some philosophers would like has to do with the difficult, abstract nature of some of the puzzles. But part of the problem is that even the accessible stuff is largely in formats that the masses simply don't have access to. For those of you who wish what we did had more impact on non-philosophers - open access journals would be a huge step in that direction.

12. Data-Mining and Article Recommendation

You know how when you browse Amazon.com, they always give you a list of recommendations that is magically geared toward your interests. A non-proprietary version of that data-mining software could be put to good use to find journal articles you didn't even know were out there. The software would recognize that people who download articles A, B, and C also tend to download articles X, Y, and Z. When you download A, B, and C, it could recommend X, Y, and Z.

13. More Money For Philosophers

It is certainly a rare occasion, but every now and then a philosopher who publishes a book might actually make some money. Open Access Journals might make this a bit less rare. If Open Access Journals would make philosophy more accessible and widely read, we could expect to see increase market demand for the kinds of publications that actually might actually earn a philosopher some money. Some may think this is unlikely, but it is certainly a possibility worth considering. If the masses have regular access to high quality, accessible philosophy - there are going to be more lay persons who are into reading philosophy on a regular basis. It seems that would broaden the market for philosophy books.

Potential Cons (with responses)
1. Legitimacy and Prestige

Con: Some might argue that when a journal comes packaged by an established publisher you've got some guarantee that this journal is quality. On the internet, any hack can put together a journal. This tarnishes electronic journals. Electronic journals lack the seal of legitimacy that a publisher would give it, and they are less prestigious.

Response: Regarding the claim about legitimacy, universities are also well-established institutions. As long as the journals were being housed by established good Universities and Colleges they could have the same seal of legitimate scholarship that publishers might give a journal (if publishers even can do that at all).

Regarding the concerns about prestige: I already think this is a concern that some are starting to shed. Whether a journal is prestigious or not is a function of how good the editorial staff is, the quality of the material they publish, and the selectivity. The transition from print to open access will be gradual, and this will be less and less of a concern. (I intend to post an entry with recommendations for how to push philosophy into an open access format - some of those recommendations would help address this concern even more)

2. Risk Losing Our Best Philosophy

Con: Some will argue that it's easier to lose something on a computer server than it is to lose something that's printed thousands of times and circulated all over the world. If there were one con that I think seriously has the potential to stall open access - this is it.

Response: I think we can alleviate this worry with proper backups. A good open access journal should indicate precisely what it's doing to ensure proper backup. They should secure more server space, and perhaps even contract with an outside proprietary backup company.

A better option, would be for journals to partner up with other Universities and have several mirror sites. A journal could be updated by a single university, but hosted by several hundred.

Keep in mind that server space is so cheap (See #5 below) that it would be so easy for a university to foot the bill for a journal, especially if doing so kept the subscription costs down. In fact, most Universities probably pay enough for server space and bandwidth that most universities already could house at least one journal without incurring any additional costs.

Also note, I think publishing companies are already trying to push content online to maximize profits. The content may well be moving online, whether we like it or not. Why allow publishers to continue to charge for it?

[UPDATE: The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy has a clause in the Editorial Policy that explains their backup procedures and that they are supported for the indefinite future.]

4. I like the LOOK and FEEL of paper journals.

Con: Some people simply like the look and feel of a paper journal, and don't want to give that up for aesthetic reasons.

Response: Regarding the LOOK...
It's easy to have an electonic journal that look just as clean and professional as a PDF of a print journal. Philosophers' Imprint and the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy have nice PDF layouts of all articles that formatted to look just like a print journal.

Response: Regarding the FEEL...
If by FEEL you mean simply have a paper copy to make notes on, then print the article.

If by FEEL you mean having a bound copy of the recent issue...there are several PDF-binding services that will mail you nice paperback bound volumes of whatever you PDF give them at super-low costs. Journals could even put together a custom volume with these services and you could have an automatic arrangment to have this sent to you.

BONUS: You could give your students custom readers for your classes via these services.

SUPER BONUS: Philosophers could easily put together a BEST OF THE YEAR volume with these PDF-binding services. Imagine at the end of the spring semester, a volume delivered to your door chock-full of the best philosophy articles for the previous academic year. You wouldn't be limited to a single journal. You could select from all of the top journals a la carte.

5. There's Still a Cost

Con: Online journals take up bandwidth and server space. This costs money.

Response: This is true, but it's a cost that universities already absorb. Chances are Universities already pay for enough server space and bandwidth to house a journal. Even if they don't, buying the extra space is CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP compared to journal subscription fees. It really is a drop in the bucket. Example - (At bluehost.com you can get 1,500 GB of server space and 15,000 GB of transfer for 6.95/mo.)

6. No Stable Citations

Con: Online URLs are always subject to change. Given standard citations styles for online content, this would make citation a messy affair. What if you cite an online journal and the URL changes?

Response: This is why journals like Philosophers' Imprint and JESP continue to publish their journals in PDF format so that they look like an online copy of a traditional print journal. They even adhere to the traditional method of indexing their journals with Volume Numbers. To cite Philosophers' Imprint, you need not cite the URL - you can simpy cite the volume # and page# like you would any traditional print journal. Even if those PDFs are housed under a different URL 100 or 200 years from now - the Volume # and Page # will always remain the same.

So there's the case, as I see it. All things considered, I just can't see why we don't start pushing in this direction. Hopefully, Philosophers' Imprint and JESP are a sign of good things to come. I've got some ideas about how we could push in this direction, and I'll probably post about that soon.