Monday, March 14, 2005

Whoops

I've been looking over my paper on Malebranche and Hume's Treatise 1.2.6 for the Hume Society meeting this summer before I pass it on to the commentator, and I came across a bit of a puzzle. While the anonymous reviewers who recommended the paper weren't supposed to write extended comments, some of them did write things that the organizers thought might be useful to the authors of the paper, so the organizers passed the relevant sections of those comments on to authors who were interested in reading what they had said. I was one. Looking over the commentator's comments, however, I find it addresses a problem that isn't in my final draft of the paper. This puzzled me, so I looked more closely. The commentator quotes a few lines that aren't found in that draft, either, but are found in an earlier draft of the paper. Since I haven't modified the paper since submitting it, I had the final draft ready to submit by the deadline. But the only possible interpretation of the evidences before me is: I didn't send it! I got it ready, prepared to submit it, and submitted an earlier rough draft instead! Now, that's what I call absentmindedness. The only thing I can think of that explains it would be if I mislabeled the relevant file; since I submitted by e-mail, I just uploaded the file. And apparently I uploaded the wrong one. Well, no harm done, since they accepted it anyway; but my only excuse for it is that for the entire months of October and November I was half asleep.

On the bright side, I had already fixed the problem noted by the commentator, which is a good sign of something or other.