Philosophy
omnibrain | March 29, 2007
There's an interesting debate happening at I believe, Cognitive Science, this year. Jerry Fodor has come out with a full force denial of evolutionary psychology and in the process has managed to piss off Daniel Dennett who has responded with a very nasty paper of his own.
I'll give you a couple snippets of the exciting debate as well as the papers concerned.
Fodor:This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I've addressed in print before. (see Fodor, 19xx; 19xx). But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was about what…
mixingmemory | March 27, 2007Some of you may find this book chapter interesting:
Hauer, M.D., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (in press): Reviving Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In Moral Psychology and Biology.
jrosenhouse | March 15, 2007While I am laying down the law regarding the proper usage of controversial words, allow me to express a few thoughts about spirituality.
P.Z. Myers gave this post, in which he comments on the awarding of the Templeton Prize, the following title: “Spirituality?” Another Word for Lies and Empty Noise.
Mark Chu-Carroll took a different view, in this post:
So what do I mean when I say spirituality? There's something more to my life than just a bunch of chemical reactions. I love my wife. I care about other people. I core about the way the world is, and work for things that I think will make it a…
neurotopia | March 15, 2007Yet again, another Jesus flare-up. Rob Knop posted his personal religious views and the prophetical shit hath hit the fan. I swear the science and spirituality debate is like a bad case of hemorrhoids.
Some of us just never had these problems that result from self-identification. I stress the self part because, as Chris Rowan points out, the whole discussion really is about how individuals reconcile their personal views with physical realities. We only run into problems when we start trying to pigeon-hole everybody else.
Which is why when it comes to my personal beliefs/lack thereof,…
omnibrain | March 14, 2007For those local blog readers:
CAS/MILLERCOMM2007.
Daniel C. Dennett, Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University will give a CAS/MillerComm lecture entitled The Domestication of Wild Religions.
The lecture will be given on Friday, March 30, 2007 at 4:00 p.m. in 112 Gregory Hall, 810 S. Wright St., Urbana.
All CAS/MillerComm events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the George A. Miller Committee at 333-6729 or the CAS events line at 333-1118 or web information at http://www.cas.uiuc.edu/casmillercomm.php.
Annual Philosophy/Public Lecture
omnibrain | March 6, 2007According to the court:
(The) system touted its offering of legal advice and projected an aura of expertise concerning bankruptcy petitions; and, in that context, it offered personalized -- albeit automated -- counsel. ... We find that because this was the conduct of a non-attorney, it constituted the unauthorized practice of law.
The computer program is now serving time in jail for not being able to pay the fines imposed by the courts. OK just kidding, the creator was fined and forbidden from allowing his computer program to offer bankruptcy advice.
Read the more detailed blog post here
jstemwedel | February 26, 2007On the post in which I resorted to flowcharts to try to unpack people's claims about the process involved in building scientific knowledge, Torbjörn Larsson raised a number of concerns:
The first problem I have was with "belief". I have seen, and forgotten, that it is used in two senses in english - for trust, and for conviction. Rather like for theory, the weaker term isn't appropriate here. I would say that theories gives us trust in repeatability of predicted observations, and that kind of trust counts as knowledge. In fact, already the trust repeated observations gives count as…
clock | February 12, 2007OK, this is really ancient. It started as my written prelims (various answers to various questions by different committeee members) back in November 1999, and even included some graphs I drew. Then I put some of that stuff together (mix and match, copy and paste) and posted (sans graphs) as a four-part post here, here, here and here on December 2004. Then I re-posted it in January 2005 (here, here, here and here). Finally, I reposted two of the four parts here on this blog (Part 2 and Part 3) in July 2006.
This all means that all this is quite out of date. The world has moved on, more…
jstemwedel | February 10, 2007In my basic concepts post on theory testing, I set out what I take to be a fairly standard understanding of "theory" in philosophy of science discussions:
... a theory is a group of hypotheses that make claims about what kind of entities there are and how those entities change over time and interact with each other. If you like, the theory contains claims about ontology and laws. If you prefer, the theory tells you what kind of stuff there is and how that stuff behaves.
In a comment, Lab Lemming opined:
That's a really odd way to think of theories. I reckon a theory is something that is…
jstemwedel | February 5, 2007I'm a little cautious about adding this to the basic concepts list, given that my main point here is going to be that things are not as simple as you might guess. You've been warned.
We've already taken a look at what it means for a claim to be falsifiable. Often (but not always), when scientists talk about testability, they have something like falsifiability in mind. But testing a theory against the world turns out to be more complicated than testing a single, isolated hypothesis.
First, we need to set out what counts as a theory. For the purposes of this discussion, a theory is a group…
omnibrain | February 1, 2007You're kidding me right?
Kabbalists have attained them all. But don't take Perceiving Reality's word for it... Test the method of Kabbalah upon yourself, and discover the higher states of consciousness for yourself.
But wait... it gets better - they prove their point by using a random dot stereogram saying it comes from a higher dimension or something nonsensical.
Enjoy the video below the fold...
What a waste of 4 minutes... haha..
jstemwedel | January 31, 2007Here's another basic concept for the list: what does it mean for a claim to be falsifiable, and why does falsifiability matter so much to scientists and philosophers of science?
Actually, it's not just falsifiable claims that the science crowd cares about, but also falsifiable theories. Let's start with claims because they're easier.
Claims make assertions about how things are (or were, or will be, or could be under different circumstances). Here's a claim from my post on arguments:
Britney Spears is from Mars.
A falsifiable claim is one for which there is some observation (or set of…
jstemwedel | January 29, 2007As my first contribution to the growing list of basic terms and concepts, I'm going to explain a few things no one asked about when I opened the request line. But, these are ideas that are crucial building blocks for things people actually did ask about, like falsifiability and critical thinking, so there will be a payoff here.
Philosophers talk a lot about arguments. What do they mean?
An argument is a set of claims. One of those claims is the conclusion which the other claims are supposed to support. While logicians, geometers, and that crowd customarily give you the conclusion as the…
jrosenhouse | January 19, 2007Larry Moran has weighed in on the question, raised in yesterday's post, about whether it is fair to criticize Richard Dawkins for lacking the theological and philosophical chops to discuss the topics raised in The God Delusion. I especially like his closing paragraph:
The onus is on believers to convince us non-believers to adopt their faith. I'm not convinced, and I think my opinion about the existence of God is just as valid as that of C.S. Lewis, Ted Haggard, or Francis Collins. Instead of whining about whether Dawkins has mastered the subtlety of the Eucharist or the relationship of the…
jrosenhouse | January 19, 2007In the comments to yesterday's post Josh Rosenau has left a lengthy response to my criticisms. I have now left an equally length reply to that response. Just wanted to let you know it was there, in case you are interested.
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2007Since I have the sad task of criticizing my fellow science bloggers today, we may as well have a look at this post, from John Lynch.
He is responding to this post from P. Z. Myers, which discussed this review of The God Delusion written by Steven Weinberg.
Lynch takes issue with the following statement from Weinberg, quoted approvingly by Myers:
I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on…
jstemwedel | January 12, 2007Chad and Tara have spilled the beans on a highly classified backchannel discussion we ScienceBloggers have been having. Since the cat is already out of the bag (presumably a bag of beans), I suppose I'll chime in.
What basic concepts would you like me to explain here?
The idea, of course, would be for me to take a basic concept from my area of expertise and explain it in such a way that an intelligent non-expert would be able to grasp the important bits. As well, I'd want to explain why it matters to get clear on the concept, what it's good for, etc.
I'd be happy to entertain requests…
mixingmemory | January 5, 2007Here's an article from Physics Web (via 3 Quarks Daily) that seems appropriate, in the context of the last two posts. Here's the conclusion of the article:
But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One reason is that it implies the existence of an ultimate coherent truth - a complete text or "final theory". While many scientists may believe this, it is ultimately only a belief, and it is far likelier that we will endlessly find more in nature as our concepts and technology continue to evolve. Furthermore, the image suggests that the "text" of the book of nature has a divine…
mixingmemory | January 5, 2007Comments on the last post make it clear that my use of the label "scientism" is far from clear. It does not mean a rejection of science, or its methods (though I do have to roll my eyes when someone talks of the scientific method), within their sphere. It's not, for example, a rejection of methodological naturalism, which has been the topic of much discussion in the debate between ID creationists and scientists with which I'm sure many of you are intimately familiar. Instead, it is a rejection of an idea that is both old and new (by new, I mean about a century old), which states, in essence,…
mixingmemory | January 4, 2007When science replaces religion, it becomes more and more like religion, and in the minds of its worshipers, can justify the same sorts of inhumanities. Witness Richard Dawkins, todays leading worshiper of science, calling for deposed dictators to be used as guinea pigs, rather than executed (via John Hawks). He writes:
But perhaps the most important research in which a living Saddam Hussein could have helped is psychological. Most people can't even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient…