‘Structure and Categoricity: Determinacy of Reference and Truth-Value in the Philosophy of Mathematics’ by Tim Button and Sean Walsh has been posted on academia.edu. The paper nicely organizes the various options in a very clear and revealing way, and throws light on a number of discussions in the literature. Very good, very useful.
Unfortunately, http://www.academia.edu makes you share information about your google account — including contacts! — before it will let you download it. I leapt through that particular hoop, because it looks like a very interesting paper, but I’m not happy about it. I think it’s wrong to gather that sort of information about people who just want to read a paper.
More generally, why do people make academic papers difficult to access, especially by people who aren’t in a university? There are many papers I can access via my university account, but not otherwise. Perhaps in some cases there’s a fee that the university pays, but it still seems wrong to me.
Yes, I am coming to think that there are some real issues about academia.edu. But that’s for another time.
However, as for signing up via a Google account, surely the thing to do (because this isn’t the only case where the easiest way to register for something goes via a FaceBook or Google account) is to have a subsidiary, minimal, account — with no contacts or anything else attached to it — which you use only for signing up for this sort of thing. Or if you want, you can have many Google accounts, using one for each sign up! If you use a password manager — which you should do anyway — then you can manage multiple accounts as easily as one. No?