Philosophy
mixingmemory | December 31, 2006In lieu of an effortful post on cognitive science while I'm relaxing for the holidays, I thought I'd say a few things about religion and Dawkins again. If you hang around ScienceBlogs, you've probably noticed the spat between the two biggest (traffic-wise) SBers, PZ Myers and Ed Brayton. Ed criticized Dawkins for signing a petition that read:
In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians. At the age of 16, as with…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006Raymond Smullyan is name that is probably familiar to a lot of readers of this blog. In addition to being a mathematician and philosopher, he is known for being a master of using brainteasers and other puzzles to illuminate sometimes deep ideas in logic, especially Godel's theorems. He is perhaps best known for his knight/knave puzzles. Those are the ones where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie. Remember those?
Anyway, I've recently been browsing through his book 5000 BC and other Philosophical Fantasies. In one section he has a series of short vignettes containing…
hrynyshyn | December 22, 2006The advent of the release of an official government study warning that robots will soon be demanding their civil rights is a sure sign of the Christmas season. Senior editors and reporters are either at home with the family or spending too much time at the eggnog trough to bother with real journalism. But I managed to find a more serious angle to the story, thanks to the near-simultaneous discovery of a piece of research that suggests we mortals are probably already primed to give said machines the benefit of the doubt.
The study, commissioned by the UK government, puts the likelihood of the…
clock | December 22, 2006So, why do Creationists and other quacks try so hard to sound all 'scienc-y'? (June 15, 2005)
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Check this guy out - Jim Pinkoski - in the posts AND in the comments here, here and here.
OK, he's a creationist, but he is not even trying to be consistently within ONE version of creationism. He freely switches between YEC and OEC and IDC and when asked ONLY for internal logical consistency, not even evidence, he starts using all caps and bold and calls everyone stupid and liars and exhibits all symptoms of a persecution complex. What gives? He appears…
mixingmemory | December 16, 2006OK, the last two posts with quotes from philosophers were at least remotely relevant to recent discussions on this blog. These quotes will be completely irrelevant, but they've stuck with me since I first read them at least a decade ago, and have been on my mind recently, so I thought I'd post them. They're from letters by Nietzsche to friends Cosima Wagner, Richard Wagner's widow, and Jacob Burckhardt, a historian, written in January, 1889, soon after his "psychotic break." The translations are from here (where you an read other January, 1889 letters).
Letter from January 3, 1889 to Cosima…
jstemwedel | December 15, 2006I'm sure I'm not the only academic who receives final exams with doodles (as well as "thank you for the class" and "please don't fail me!" messages). But I need to share a piece of exam artwork that transcends the bounds of doodling.
Indeed, it is a cartoon illustration that demonstrates good mastery of the concept about which the student was asked on that exam page. (In addition to the drawing, the student presented a perfectly correct and crystal clear written answer to the question. The drawing was an added bonus.)
Let me set up the cartoon with a brief explanation of the question so…
mixingmemory | December 13, 2006Here are two pretty lengthy passages from two Ortega y Gasset essays, both published in History as a System (one of my favorite books), and translated by Helene Weyl. I'm posting them because I think they're relevant to our recent discussion on religion and science. Specifically, I think they're relevant to the attitude towards science that some atheists take. The essays were written in the 1930s (most of them during the Spanish Civil War), but as is often the case with Ortega y Gasset, they're infused with a prescience that insures that they're still relevant today, and will continue to be…
hrynyshyn | December 9, 2006One of the best things about the Science Blogs collective is that so little of what gets posted concerns the mundane and prosaic details of the authors' lives. We write substantial, serious stuff, posts that deal with public figures and weighty issues. No what-I-had-for-breakfast claptrap for us, no siree.
So I didn't think twice when my wife and I set up a separate blog to detail, for the benefit of our friends and family, her pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our first child. Neither did I give any thought to the ethical implications of another incarnation of that blog, one dedicated to…
mixingmemory | December 7, 2006Since it's come up a lot, here's a recent discussion of Anselm's Ontological Argument in the philosophical literature (via OPP).
Millican, P. (2004). The one fatal flaw in Anselm's Aagument. Mind, 113, 437-476.
Anselm's Ontological Argument fails, but not for any of the various reasons commonly adduced. In particular, its failure has nothing to do with violating deep Kantian principles by treating 'exists' as a predicate or making reference to 'Meinongian' entities. Its one fatal flaw, so far from being metaphysically deep, is in fact logically shallow, deriving from a subtle scope ambiguity…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006... Page 3.14 shares the transcript. Go read what we said when Ben Cohen and I shot the cyberbreeze about Karl Popper and the allure he holds for scientists.
I can't promise it will leave you ROTFLYAO, but it might make you :-)
TTFN.
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006I posted these long ago on the old blog, but I was reading Studies in Pessimism, and when I came across them, I decided to post them again. The parables are all from the last chapter of the book. At the end is one of his "Psychological Observations," which is from the fifth chapter.
A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered…
clock | December 3, 2006Sandra Porter is having fun collecting all the new-fangled biological subdisciplines that end with "-omics". The final product of each such project also has a name, ending with "-ome".
You have all heard of the Genome (complete sequence of all the DNA of an organism) and the Genomics (the effort to obtain such a sequence), but there are many more, just look at this exhaustive list! In my written prelims back in 1999, I suggested that sooner or later there will be an organismome...until someone whispers that the term "physiology" already exists.
There are a couple of things that strike me…
jstemwedel | December 2, 2006Revere stirs the pot (of chicken soup) to ask why alternative therapies are presumptively regarded as pseudo-science. The reflexive response of the quackbusters has been that alternative therapies fall on the wrong side of some bright line that divides what is scientific from what is not -- the line of demarcation that (scientists seem to assume) Karl Popper pointed out years ago, and that keeps the borders of science secure.
While I think a fair amount of non-science is so far from the presumptive border that we are well within our rights to just point at it and laugh, as a philosopher of…
mixingmemory | November 29, 2006In a comment at the end of the Religion and Science post, Brandon of Siris mentions Peter King as a source for discussions of Anselm's ontological argument. If you're interested, here's a link to his encyclopedia entry on Anselm, and this paper discusses the logic of the argument in more detail.
Readers of this blog might find some other papers by King more interesting, though. He's written pretty extensively on medieval philosophy of mind and language. Since we've already mentioned Anselm, you can start with his paper "Anselm's Philosophy of Language." After that, you should check out "…
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006One more short post before we return to your regularly scheduled long-winded cog sci stuff. Greece vs. Germany on the soccer field. Enjoy.
mixingmemory | November 19, 2006A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on the unification of psychology, in which I addressed (rather critically) a paper by Gregg Henriques. Dr. Henriques was kind of enough to reply in comments, and because it's a two-week old post, I didn't want his comment to languish in obscurity as a result of the blog world's short attention span. So with his permission, I'm giving his comment a post of its own. Here it is, in its entirety:
Hi Chris,
You wrote:
'In the 12 years that I've been studying psychology, I've been asked no more than 5 times what psychology is, and each time, I struggled and…
jstemwedel | November 13, 2006Yeah, I'm grading. (Maybe you would be too if you weren't reading the blogs, hmm?) But I wanted to check in.
I pulled my back loading the car for the last soccer game of the season. What's the proper inference to draw from that (besides the obvious: that I'm getting old and all this grading is doing nothing for my muscle tone)?
How is it that if I make assignments at school they often are left undone, whereas if I make assignments on my blog, people do the work and turn it in? (Are we now awarding ScienceBlogs course credit?)
As much as I hate feeding capitalism (seriously, ask these guys…
jstemwedel | November 9, 2006Pencil ready? To mark the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, here's a brief quiz (essay format, of course) on the epistemology lesson embedded in his comments from a February 12, 2002 Department of Defense news briefing. The comments, poetically transcibed by Slate, are as follows:
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
Questions:
1. From this passage, can you draw any…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2006Chad Orzel has an excellent post up about good ways to use PowerPoint for a presentation. In a similar vein, I'd like to offer some reasons for academics in disciplines (like philosophy) in which it is the convention to read papers to each other at professional meetings to consider breaking with tradition and not just reading the papers they are presenting.
First, for those of you in science-y fields puzzling over that last sentence: Yes, a great many philosophers really do go places and read their papers to other philosophers. Yes, when I saw it the first time, coming to philosophy via…
jstemwedel | November 6, 2006
ScienceBloggers meet in the three-dimensional world: (from left) Janet Stemwedel, John Lynch, Prof. Steve Steve, John Wilkins, David Ng, Ben Cohen.
I managed to get back home last night from the PSA meeting in Vancouver, although just barely. My co-symposiasts got a rental car and headed off to see mountains, an expedition I'd have joined were it not for my plane-missing paranoia. ("You realize that flying home from Vancouver is essentially a domestic flight, so you probably don't need to check in until about 90 minutes before flight time," the field trip organizer assured me. But I…