When writing this comment, I learned that it isn’t so easy to spell “Wittgenstein.” I had to try several times. Luckily, it’s in the spell-checker so I eventually got it by trial and error. Quine’s in the spell-checker (but, oddly enough, not “Quine’s”), but Tarski isn’t.
Some others:
wittgenstein (lower-case): fails the spell-checker.
Wittgenstein’s is ok, though. As it should be. So I don’t know why Quine works but Quine’s didn’t.
Knuth. Yes.
Russell. Yes.
Whitehead. Yes.
Gelman. No.
Meng. No.
Rubin. Yes.
Hey, that’s not fair!
perhaps edit to add which spell checker.
Angrist is not: the spell-checker generally suggests Angriest an as alternative.
I don't know whether spell checkers do this, but it might make sense to be more liberal about including names like "Wittgenstein", which are unlikely to be misspellings of anything else, than about including names like "Gelman" (which might be intended to be "German") or particularly "Meng" (which might be intended to be "Men"). There might even be an argument for omitting certain real words: if, say, the number of times a word appears as a misspelling is greater than the number of times it appears correctly, then it might be worth red-flagging it for the user's attention.
Of course, applied to names, this may be one of those instances where the optimal decision-making procedure produces an injustice.
FH: It's the default spell checker when I blog. I don't know if it comes from Windows or from Firefox.
Kevin: OK, if Angrist isn't there, I don't feel bad that Xiao-Li and I aren't there.
Anne: Good point. My guess is that they didn't think it through at this level–they just happen to have a list that includes Wittgenstein and Rubin (probably not my Rubin but that doesn't really matter, I guess) but not Angrist or Tarski, but who knows. I don't think the spell-checker is context dependent: Meg Peg Peggy Peggy's Meggy Meggy's blitz Blitz noun verb verb verb ride run fly. (The above fragment produced no spelling errors, implying to me that words are checked on their own from some simple list.)
No Gelman; okay. How about Gell-Mann?
It is too bad that the discussion is about spell-checkers rather than on one of the major philosophers of all times.