Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | January 7, 2008
Rob Helpy at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, has a post on what postmodernism was and why it came about. In it, he says he thinks it is a dying fad. Is this true?
For a start, I doubt that postmodernism was ever a coherent movement, but there were themes that are shared by many distinct schools of thought. One of these is the social influence on knowledge claims. Yes, postmodernists so-called tended to act and talk as if there were only social influences on knowledge claims, but the lesson has been learned that we cannot ignore the social causes of knowledge. Even the most analytical philosopher…
laelaps | January 7, 2008"It is the just complaint of serious men in this age of ours, which is so much more refined in letters and manners than the coarse ages of the past, that men are to be found who so heartily detest all fine literature that they would have only those arts and sciences endowed and accepted in our centers of learning which contribute to gainful employment, while they would have all others perpetually banished as vain and useless. Among the first of the latter they number the knowledge of natural things, and its most noble part, which we call Lithology; they pursue it with an especially censorious…
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2008
Some bloggable items not worth a post on their own:
George MacDonald Fraser died. The author of the Flashman series, which I loved. Creating one of the best rogues in literature, Fraser also managed to get the history right.
Peter Hare died. Hare was one of the leading moral philosophers of the 20th Century.
Bradie and Harms have updated the excellent SEP entry on evolutionary epistemology.
Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny have updated their excellent piece on biological information also in SEP. I missed this at the time (October).
evolvingthoughts | December 31, 2007
OK, so the next door party finished about 1.30, but the family disputes finished about 5 am, so instead of thinking, I'm going to let others think for me, and round up a few New Years Day links...
Wesley Elsberry at Austringer has a nice piece on why creationists use the conflict model for the relation of science and faith.
Thinking Meat asks if life was "nasty, poore, brutish and short" as Hobbes thought, or things were simply just as much about survival as they are now, in preagriculture.
PsyBlog asks how well Epicurus, one of my favourite Greek Philosophers, fares in the light of…
evolvingthoughts | December 30, 2007
This is a field in which I am largely ignorant, so I will just report it and leave the commenters to interpret.
Collider blog has a discussion of an idea reported by Charm &c. in a paper at arXiv by Bruce Knudsen, proposing that experiments should be assessed using Shannon entropy based on prior expectations.
The basic idea is taken from Shannon theory using a term - surprisal - to denote the information content of an experiment, or a paper announcing the results of that experiment. Knudsen writes:
The larger the surprisal of a particular outcome, the greater its (a posteriori)…
evolvingthoughts | December 27, 2007
The online journal Episteme has a special issue out on conspiracy theories. Examples include God as a conspiracy theory, the 9/11 WTC "controlled demolition" theory and questions of rationality of those who engage in them.
Late note: This is a subscription journal.
evolvingthoughts | December 25, 2007
It is the default opinion of those who accept evolution and those who deny it, that before Darwin, or Lamarck at any rate, everyone was a special creationist. Even Darwin implies in the Origin that if one is not a transformist with regards to species, one is a special creationist. Is it true, and what work does "special" do when affixed to "creation"?
It's important to know if only because of those interminable canards creationists of today in which science is supposed to be based on the work of creationists like Newton because they Christians, and didn't believe in evolution. As if one…
evolvingthoughts | December 22, 2007
Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters. Because that's what you are, you know, if you don't exactly believe and do what we Inventists do.
So to try to save you from your moral malaise of happy lives and families, meaningless rituals that you perform on turkeys several times a year, and other abominations that you make more or less simultaneous with the summer solstice (did I mention that Inventists use God'…
evolvingthoughts | December 20, 2007
The previous Australian government, in its ongoing quest to out-mediocre the rest of the world, had instituted a "research Quality Framework", liberally taken from a failed exercise in Britain. Now, the new government has declared it dead. It will not be missed.
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
Janet and Shelley have opened up the question of whether students and others should use drugs to enhance their cognitive performance. Janet thinks one shouldn't, and Shelley thinks that, in the absence of bad side effects, one might as well. So lacking any particular knowledge, a prerequisite for a philosopher other than Janet, I might as well weigh in.
If neurobiology, and indeed all of biology, is right, then we are the sum of the capacities of our chemical constitution arranged as cells in a coherent organism. What brains can do is in large part dependent upon what chemical signals are…
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
A little while back I published an article on species concepts in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and I just discovered that it is available on the web. This is actually abetter format than the published version, which has weird columns and layout. The citation is
Wilkins, John S. 2006. Species, Kinds, and Evolution. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 26 (4): 36-45.
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is a sociologist philosopher* of science who seems to dislike science intensely, unless he does it. At the Dover Trial, he got a lot of money to write a fairly incoherent defense of ID, which seemed only to exacerbate the judge's final decision, and it seems he is cashing in again by putting out a book based on his "expert witness". Read Levitt's deflation of…
evolvingthoughts | December 17, 2007
Sorry I haven't blogged for a bit - I've been on the road, err, sky for a while.
So it turns out that Texas, which seems to be the source of much antiscience reaction these days, has yet another problem, and it turns on what a species is. Texas named the Guadalupe bass its state fish in 1989. Now it seems that overfishing, and restocking waterways with another species, has led to the probable extinction by interbreeding of the state icon.
kxan is reporting that the restocked fish, the small mouthed bass, was assumed to be infertile with the Guadalupe bass because it was a different…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2007
It's a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I do try to communicate clearly when it is needed. My kids indicate that maybe I am not so successful as I might think, but this is a letter I received yesterday from a student that I thought might be useful for others. Named have been erased to protect the innocent (i.e., not me).
Mr. Wilkins,My name is Alex ***** and I am a junior in high school. I'm doing a research paper on the moral…
evolvingthoughts | December 10, 2007
Let's suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is, or can point to an example of it.
Along comes someone, however, who notes that there is a formal resemblance between baseball and what some ants do in some hitherto undiscovered nest. So, they start to call it "ant baseball". So far, no harm. Then someone else comes along and starts making inferences about what ants do in terms of the rules of the game as…
evolvingthoughts | December 9, 2007
For those who wish a copy of Gosse's famous Omphalos, I have uploaded it to Internet Archive. It's still only a PDF, but I hope that the IA folks will do an OCR.
Many thanks to Noelie Alito for buying me the copy. Now that it's scanned, I'll have it rebound, one day.
evolvingthoughts | December 8, 2007
Courtesy of Brian Leiter's blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it's better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to find out what people actually think before launching into the sorts of armchair theorising for which philosophers are famous (or infamous).
X-phi was started by, among others, Stephen Stich, at Rutgers, as a way to see whether the sorts of intuition pumps philosophers use in their arguments really hold true. It has become very hot in ethics, with undergraduates being…
evolvingthoughts | December 7, 2007
Anyone who has access to COSMOS magazine, published in Australia, will be able to find an article of mine on what good philosophers of science are for science. If you have a copy, scan it and send it to me, will you? I haven't seen it yet.
Also, I have submitted a piece to Auckland Museum magazine MQ entitled "Buffon: An evolutionary thinker?". Kiwis should rush to the stands immediately.
I have to say that I value opportunities to write for non-academics (or else, why would I blog?). Suffice it to say that I think that philosophers are to science as ornithologists are to birds. We study…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2007
I love a good academic stoush, so long as I'm just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which was subsequently reviewed by Patricia Churchland, in Nature. Unfortunately, Churchland ascribed a hypothesis to Pinker, which Pinker was, in fact, attacking. Now Pinker has responded. I trust Nature won't mind my reproducing it here:
Patricia Churchland's review of my book The Stuff of Thought ('Poetry in motion' Nature 450, 29–30; 2007) says virtually…
evolvingthoughts | December 1, 2007
[Australian politics: look away]Oh dear. It took only seven days for the shine to wear off the Labor victory. Julia Gillard has outlined the priorities for education: computers and trades training centres in schools. Yep, that's right, the single most important aspect of education in Australia is trade education and toys.
Never mind that the past 20 years has seen a decline in tertiary education funding by governments of both stripes, so that universities now have to attract overseas students in full fee paying courses to survive. It's all about trades. And toys.
Now I do not think that…