New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

WTF: John Perry is one of the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

[Thank you Erik Angner for the pointer on Facebook.--ES] One of my philosophic heroes (about which some other time more), John Perry is one of the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Winners in the LITERATURE category (shades of Russell, Camus, etc) for "his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important."

"what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the effects of another?"==John Perry.

On Esoteric philosophers...

And “While I was at Cambridge a letter from a friend in Vienna assured me that in certain circles the existence of Wittgenstein is debated with as much ingenuity as the historicity of Christ has been disputed in others. I have seen Wittgenstein, though only casually, and therefore feel competent to decide that question. I did not receive his permission to attend his lectures, and since except to small, exclusive groups at Cambridge and Vienna his present views are not accessible, I feel extraordinarily hesitant in reporting on the doctrines he holds. For various reasons Wittgenstein refuses to publish; and even among his students of years' standing there is considerable doubt as to what his beliefs are on crucial issues. My information about Wittgenstein's views depends upon certain notes on his lectures which are in circulation and upon conversations with students and disciples both at Cambridge and Vienna. Mystery and a queerly warped personality lend charm to many a philosophy which otherwise is not very significant; but in spite of the esoteric atmosphere which surrounds Wittgenstein, I think his views are both interesting and important.” (Ernest Nagel, 1936a, 16-17) [Gregory Frost-Arnold has urging me to look at this piece; cf. my discussion here.-_ES]

Epictetus and Stoicism at RIT, April 2012

Rochester Institute of Technology Department of Philosophy announces a conference:

Epictetus and Stoicism: Continuing Influences and Contemporary Relevance

Thursday 26 April and Friday 27 April 2012

Keynote speaker: Katja Vogt (Philosophy, Columbia University)

Call for Papers: The RIT Philosophy Department invites papers that address any topic on or related to Epictetus and Stoicism, including, but not limited to: happiness, tranquility, detachment, reason, fate, volition, agency, what is (and is not) under our control, our moral purpose, virtue, cosmic order, divine providence, death, the Stoic sage, Epictetus as teacher, influence of earlier thinkers on Epictetus, Epictetus’s influence on later thinkers (including writers of our own time), the “practical” philosophy of Stoicism, and comparisons and contrasts with other traditions (such as Buddhism, Epicureanism, Christianity).

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2012. Papers should be 4,500–5,500 words in length (35–40 minutes reading time), and prepared for anonymous review. Please submit full papers as email attachments to (and direct inquires to): [email protected].

due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. Government is now a reality

Glenn Greewald is sobering, as always.

On the very first time...

I had high school and college experience speaking in front of large audiences, but the very first "professional" talk I gave was on Huygens' empirical argument against Newton's claims about universal gravity in the Summer of 1995 just before I went to graduate school at an international Huygens conference in Leiden, the Netherlands. My parents (and some of their friends) were in the audience. It was a co-written paper with George Smith (one of my ongoing academic mentors), and, while I had done not trivial archival work in researching it, it was at that stage of drafting really his paper. (George was a keynote at the conference, so he had decided I should present this material.) We had made photo-slides (you know the ones you put in a projector). I practiced the talk (i.e., reading George's paper) on somewhat crappy overhead sheets. (You know, the ones that Brit dropped in front of her 200 classmates.) The night before I couldn't sleep, and even checked out of my hotel to a different one with more comfortable beds, I thought. The next day, during the break before my talk I discovered to my horror that the slide projector in my room had burned its lens (or something like that). No other projectors were available, so on the spot we decided that I would use the practice transparencies. As I started speaking (rather rapidly and nervously) to a crowded, standing room audience (George had been talking up the topic--we were, in fact, presenting about 25 different discoveries), I was loudly interpreted by three elderly guys in the front row (think of Stattler and Waldorf from the Muppets)--they were protesting to the chair of the session that my talk should be in Dutch (because, after all, we were in Leiden). After some back and forth they were overruled by the Chair (it was an INTERNATIONAL conference after all). I later learned they were antique dealers interested in Huygens clocks. ONE OF THEM FELL ASLEEP DURING MY TALK in the front row.

Conference Fear and Fear of Public Speaking

Every reasonably neurologically healthy person has some fear of public speaking. How much varies hugely from individual to individual. But I suspect that it is very common among philosophers. Why? Because the majority of people who enjoy receiving a lousy salary in return for an insane amount of work have got to have some very good reasons. One good reason, I believe, is that they enjoy working in the comfort of their own home and enjoy the solitude and the control they have over their own time and direction of their work. They are good old-fashioned introverts, who don't really truly enjoy large assemblies of people but who may have adjusted to them and who may even come across as extroverts on a good day. Do introverts fear public speaking more than extroverts? I don't know. But I believe that they do. If you dislike large groups of people or prefer your own company to that of other people, it is not likely that you by nature are super-comfortable speaking to a large group of people. That said, I don't want to rule out that some people went into the profession because of the possibility of fame and attention.

As for my own case, I started out with an extreme fear of public speaking. I recall taking a large lecture class in molecular biology the first year of college. Despite it being a large lecture class, we were all expected to do a presentation. I hadn't spoken in front of a lot of people before, so I had no idea that I had a fear of public speaking. I was assigned a topic, and over-prepared. I made about 50 slides. This was before the age of Powerpoint. So my slides were the old-fashioned transparent kind that you put on an overhead projector. They were all lying in my lap in the correct order when I was sitting in the lecture hall waiting for the professor to call my name. I felt my heart pump very fast and hard even before he called my name. When he called on me, I stumbled down the steps to the front of the lecture hall. My hands were shaking. My legs felt like rubber. Then as I was about to put the first slide on the overhead projector, I dropped all the slides on the floor. The 200 students in the lecture hall were not making a single noise. It was so quiet that I could hear my heart pound. I had no idea what to do. Like an idiot, I hadn't numbered the slides and now they were all lying in a big mess on the floor. No one said anything, not even the professor. I collected the slides from the floor in a big messy pile in my arms, mumbled that I just couldn't do this and then went back to my seat. No one said anything. The professor started lecturing like nothing had happened. I felt terrible.

Princeton going open access

Yesterday, I came across a very inspiring article (via Andrew Cullison on G+), on how Princeton has adopted a new open access policy for the scientific production of its faculty.

At a September 19 meeting, Princeton’s Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy adopted a new open access policy that gives the university the “nonexclusive right to make available copies of scholarly articles written by its faculty, unless a professor specifically requests a waiver for particular articles.”

Readers may recall that a few weeks ago we had a post discussing commercial academic publishing (prompted by an article by G. Monbiot). At that point, it hadn't occurred to me that yes, universities are ideally placed to exert the kind of pressure for open access that we seem to be badly in need of, especially prestigious universities such as Princeton. Authors will have a much stronger position to negotiate the terms of their copyright transfer if backed by open access policies in their institutions.

What a brilliant idea! How fantastic it would be if it became more widely implemented.

Splendid Philosopher of the week: Wendy Parker

This week's splendid philosopher of the week (cf the rules), Wendy Parker, an associate professor at Ohio University in Athens, OH, was 'nominated' by my some-time co-author, Chris Smeenk, who has known Wendy since at least graduate school. Wendy has been a pioneer among philosophers of science systematically engaging with the role of computer simulations in the sciences (now becoming a more mature niche within GPOS [see yesterday's discussion on NewAPPS), more generally, and climate modeling, in particular. Her earliest philosophy publication, became a classic in the field. It investigated how in the context of the "messy" nature of climate modal evaluation conflicting complex models persist side by side. On re-reading, I was particularly struck by the sensitivity to the potential for systematic error in the whole family of models in her discussion. (She develops that argument in far more technical detail in a superb, recent paper, which critically examines various strategies/arguments in favor of robustness, including those favored by two earlier splendid philosophers of the week, Kent Staley and Jay Odenbaugh. ) I wish Parker could teach economists on how to live and even measure underlying uncertainty by working with such a portfolio of potentially conflicting models! [I may write about this in my philo eco weekly post in near future.]

Wendy is a role model because she is not afraid to enter in ongoing controversy within the sciences. (I believe that this ought to be one of the missions of philosophy of science.) Her work exhibits a healthy (and among philosophers of science too rare) skepticism about quick technical fixes. A very nice example of both these virtues in action is this recent paper in which she critically evaluates competing ways to handle the presentation of uncertainty to policy-makers. She offers her own proposal based on some criteria that she has developed.

All of Wendy's work is based on an awareness of how hard it is to do empirical science and how hard it is to get high quality data that really is evidence for anything. (No doubt she is drawing on her experience as a working scientist.) A very important contribution to this topic is this paper in which she shows that data "do not confirm climate models; what they might confirm, however, are hypotheses about the adequacy of climate models for particular purposes." Wendy offers informed, critical distance on science in order to improve science and how it relates to policy and policy-makers. Meanwhile, a large number of papers are in the pipeline, so there is much to look forward to!

Brazilian music on Fridays: More Brazilian Soul

This week's column will be 'lazy' on the writing side of things, but the music will be awesom, I promise. After talking about Tim Maia and Brazilian soul last week, I figured it might be nice to post some additional Brazilian soul songs, so here they are. The first one is 'Na rua, na chuva, na fazenda' (1975), the first and biggest hit of otherwise fairly unknown singer Hyldon. This one is on the Top 10 list of most played songs in my iPod. The second one is 'Noite do Prazer' (1983) by a band called Brylho; it was a big hit when I was a kid, and it aged really well; it's a great song.

For next week I promise a real column again :)

Philosophy and Its History A Workshop on Methods, Aims, and New Directions in the Scholarship of Early Modern Philosophy Concordia University, Montreal, Canada October 29-30, 2011

This should be great fun!

Maybe this is the best interpretation of Conatus doctrine thus far...

Thanks to Keith Allen for the pointer.

Lisa Guenther is off to a flying start at NewAPPS!

The brilliant Maiden post of our very own Lisa Guenther got picked up and reposted here by Caleb Smith, the author of Imagined Prisons.

Living history?

One of the many things people do with the past is to “recreate” it. In a piece on “digital humanities”, a project by Heidi Rae Cooley, presented at an NEH symposium on Tuesday, described a game called Desperate Fishwives (see Steve Kolowich, “The promise of digital humanities”, Inside higher ed). The game

“intends to introduce students to the kinds of social and cultural practices that would have been in play in a 17th Century British village,” Cooley explained. Students will be tasked with accumulating resources, completing social rituals, and solving some social ill “before church or state intervene,” she continued. Afterward, students would render a prose account of their experiences — “and thereby learn of the nature and complexities of historiography.”

A second item comes from that esteemed journal The Daily Mail. The headline is: “The amazingly detailed ‘living pictures’ that show how scenes throughout history may really have looked”. The reporter, Lauren Paxman, describes Red Saunders’ “living tableaux” (a genre seldom mentioned, by the way, in the philosophy of art).

At his behest “dozens of actors […] recreate moments from British history including the English Civil War, the Chartist movement and the Peasants' Revolt”. The results are impressive, and whoever wrote the captions for the photos in this story very effectively recreates the responses of certain nineteenth-century critics: “The detail Saunders goes to—and the number of models he uses—is inspiring. […] You could spend hours in front of each photo […] admiring the different characters”. The tableaux resemble historical paintings of 150 years ago, when wall-sized depictions of famous moments were among the staples of academic painting. That’s what history “really looked like” to a nineteenth-century audience, and what it still often looks like now.

You would never know from Saunders’ tableaux alone that the Levellers he depicts wanted to end corruption, introduce religious tolerance, and expand the franchise. Likewise if the students playing Desperate Fishwives merely re-enact village life, they may learn a little bit of “what it was like” to be a seventeenth-century villager. But no more than we do as we enact our village lives will they gain the kind of insight the historian hopes to arrive at concerning the structures underlying the village way of life, or the long-term changes that led to the extinction of many of the characteristic features of rural existence.

The point here isn’t to criticize. Rather I’m interested in re-creation as an instrument of knowledge. It’s clear, first of all, that it is at best a secondary tool. Saunders and Cooley got the information they needed to re-create the past from primary and secondary sources that were not re-creations. Similarly I, in trying to get inside Leibniz's head, read his works along with others, primary and secondary, that help me grasp the intentions with which he wrote the texts I’m studying. Having done so, I sometimes think I can answer questions of the form “What would Leibniz have said in response to X?” I have built a Leibniz simulator in my head with which I can extend his discourse in various ways. Historians of philosophy do this regularly.

Of course my ability to simulate Leibniz is just one application of an ability I use elsewhere, an ability we depend on quite a bit in everyday life. I’ll end with a query, to which I don’t have a definitive (even for me) answer:

• Can the results of a simulation count as knowledge for the historian? as evidence for historical claims?
• Or is re-creation better regarded as a rhetorical device by which to present vividly claims known by, or supported by, other means?
• If so, is it nevertheless the case that a spectator or participant in a simulation can be said to gain knowledge in seeing or taking part in it (so that it might the case that what would not be evidence for me, the historian, on behalf of a claim might nevertheless be evidence for you)?

Brian Leiter hasn't forgotten the Synthese scandal.

Have you? In hindsight, I don't know what really is more disturbing:

a) The General Editors' caving to Alvin Plantinga, who can apparently get respected journals to include papers by his buddies without refereeing, and boast about it in the NYT;

b) The General Editors' giving Beckwith a free publication in Synthese to recycle his nonsense;

c) The General Editors' letting Beckwith publish a smear article that blatantly abuses their disclaimer (and creates a nice performative contradiction on how concerns about "tone" can be abused without civility) in order to blacken the name of a courageous scholar, Barbara Forrest;

d) The General Editors' willingness to execute a-c behind the back of their guest editors (despite assurances to the contrary);

e) The General Editors' inability to frankly admit that they screwed up and apologize to Barbara Forrest and the philosophical community;

f) The unresolved/unexplored role of Springer's lawyers in all of this.

Update: I am not allowing anonymous posts if your identity is not be revealed to me (privately). Final Update: This post is now closed for comments.

Academic Miscreants Remain Anonymous (Almost)

From an editorial in Nature:

[H]eavily censored documents, released by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the country's science-funding agency, described a case in which a researcher had faked data, then moved to another institution that may have known nothing of the episode. . .

Hiring Best Practices: Equality

One of the most important things in a search is to treat applicants the same. Included in this, of course, is that you don’t disadvantage women, racial minorities, disabled people, sexual minorities, parents, older people, and so on. Some practices systematically disadvantage entire groups. Some of these have been commented on, on this blog and elsewhere.

For example, you don’t make candidates uncomfortable by making jokes they may be sensitive to because they belong to groups of the above kind. Again, in social situations connected with hiring—at APA receptions and dinners during campus visits—you keep the conversation general. You do not get into an animated conversation about college football. (Some candidates have no idea about this; others are avid.) You don't air your views on same sex marriage, or the Tea Party, or the death of Osama bin Laden, to a candidate for an epistemology position. Even if you are talking philosophy, you don't push your position on, say, naturalism aggressively. It’s better to let the candidate guide general conversation, whether s/he knows it or not. (Applicants, please note.)

But the scope of equal treatment is broader than this. . . .

Slavery by Another Name? (Or is it by the same name?)

The New York Times reports that an Alabama inmate, Mark Melvin, is suing prison officials at the Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Alabama Commissioner of Corrections for the right to read a book.  According to prison officials, this book is "too incendiary" and "too provocative" to be allowed within prison walls.  It might incite "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality, or disobedience toward law enforcement officials or correctional staff."  What is this incendiary book, and why is it so dangerous?

The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon, a senior correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.  It documents the history of the Convict Lease System, which sprang up across the South after the formal abolition of slavery in 1865.  Through this system, thousands of inmates were leased to private and public corporations.  They built railroads; they worked in coal mines; they even worked on plantations planting and picking cotton, sometimes for the same planters who used to own them as slaves. When their bodies were spent, they were sold to medical schools for dissection; their urine was collected and sold to tanneries.

Historian David Oshinsky has called the convict lease system “worse than slavery” because it granted white property owners access to a ceaselessly-renewed source of labor while removing the incentive to provide even a minimal degree of care for the workers.  The inmates were not paid for their labor; they were leased at a flat rate from the prison.  Often, inmates were not even fed but rather left to scrounge in the woods for food after a full day of heavy labor.  Mortality rates were extremely high, with many prisoners dying before they could serve out their full sentence.

Convict lease systems sprang up in every former slave state; they operated between 1868 (with Georgia as the first state to institute such a system) and 1928 (with Alabama as the last state to outlaw it).  During its period of operation, incarceration rates in those states skyrocketed, with a 10-fold increase in the prison population in Georgia from 1868–1908, more than a 10-fold increase in North Carolina from 1870-1890, an 8.5-fold increase in Florida from 1881-1904, a 4-fold increase in Mississippi from 1871-1879, and a 6.5-fold increase in Alabama from 1869-1919 (see Sheldon 2005).  A vastly disproportionate number of these inmates were black, charged under the new Black Codes and later under Jim Crow laws.

How could such a thing happen after the abolition of slavery?  To this day, the Thirteenth Amendment continues to this day to hold open an exception for prison inmates: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (emphasis added).  By leaving open the possibility of treating convicted criminals as slaves, the Thirteenth Amendment did not simply abolish slavery, it relocated and reinscribed slavery within the prison system, and within the legal limits of the constitution.

Slavery by Another Name is indeed an incendiary book; it takes as its very subject-matter a "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality."  But this violence is only compounded by the censorship of reading material available to prisoners who remain caught in the space of exception held open by the Thirteenth Amendment.

Joy James has argued that, by leaving open a loophole for the enslavement of convicted criminals, the 13^th amendment did not abolish slavery, but rather "resurrected social death as a permanent legal category in U.S. life, yet no longer registered death within the traditional racial markings.  Breaking with a two hundred-year-old tradition, the government ostensibly permitted the enslavement of nonblacks.  Now not the ontological status of “nigger” but the ontological status of “criminal” renders one a slave" (James 2005, xxix).

Mark Melvin is white; he has been in prison for almost twenty years, since he was convicted at the age of fourteen for helping his older brother commit two murders.  What does it mean to deny him access to this book?  What would it mean to let him read it?

 

New APPS Interview: Paul Livingston

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Paul Livingston, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. His latest book is The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (Routledge, 2011).

Hello, Paul, thanks very much for doing this interview with us. What’s your personal practice of philosophy?

I’d say that the practice of philosophy is, for me, actually quite impersonal. In certain ways I try to remove myself from what I write, to aspire to a kind of objectivity.

How so? Objectivity is quite a heavy term, isn’t it?

It isn’t the objectivity of natural science or the attempt to take a “view from nowhere” (which, as we all know, is problematic), but it’s related, maybe more like the impersonality of mathematics. That’s because, as Badiou would say, philosophy is somehow related to truth. And truth is, in some sense, impersonal. Or maybe better, it’s something like what Wittgenstein says in the foreword to the Philosophical Remarks, that he’s trying to grasp what is essential, and that this is opposed to the technological and constructive spirit of the dominant culture of his time.

Do you do any collaborative writing?

Are children intuitive mathematical Platonists?

For parents who are philosophers and/or cognitive scientists, children are a constant source of wonderment. Also, the temptation of drawing tenuous one-shot inductions on child cognition on the basis of conversations with one's children is very high (although, if properly cultivated, as in Piaget's case, it can lead to some genuine insights). So what I write here should be taken too seriously, but here goes.

Today I was talking to my daughter about the existence of numbers. She is currently seven, and has been for some years intrigued by numbers and their properties. She was demonstrating her abilities for calculating big numbers today by saying things like "one billion plus two billion is three billion". So I challenged her and asked: "can you be sure about that?" "Yes, of course, she replied, it's just one plus two and a bunch of zeroes". "But nobody has counted it", I countered. "It doesn't matter", she said, "because in maths the numbers always add up, no matter what people do". So, intrigued, I asked, "Do you think then that even if there were no people, 2 + 2 would still be 4"? "Of course", she replied. "And very long ago", I continued, "When two dinosaurs met two dinosaurs, was the result 4 dinosaurs?" (she knows that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist). "Of course", she said: "numbers exist, it doesn't matter what humans think about them". (The example of the dinosaurs comes, I think from a book by Sal Restivo, but I can't find the reference anymore). 

Perhaps children are intuitive mathematical platonists? This is not as far-fetched as it may sound at first. After all, developmental psychologists argue that children are also intuitive essentialists (see e.g., work by Susan Gelman) and entertain something akin to Aristotelian teleology, as studies by Deb Kelemen point out.  If that's the case, Platonism might be more intuitive than other positions on the ontology of mathematical objects, such as fictionalism. 

 

[punkrockmonday #???] Drive By Truckers - Three Great Alabama Icons; Ronnie and Neil

From their great album Southern Rock Opera ("Ronnie and Neil", actually a much better song, is after the jump). The narrator could be me, at least with respect to growing up in Bear Bryant era Alabama and having no appreciation for football.

After the jump, a picture of Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant in a Neil Young T-Shirt (which he wore often in concert) and a picture of Neil Young in a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-Shirt, as well as an embed and lyrics to one of the Truckers' masterpieces, "Ronnie and Neil."

To hell with democracy...let the experts rule!

Another economist for hire offers his wisdom. (Thanks for the pointer to a more judicious economist, Roger Koppl, via Facebook.) Of course, the experts have been doing just swell at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank...engineering the greatest financial collapse in living memory, and letting the bastards keep their gains while pushing the losses onto hapless citizens....

In Defence of Public Higher Education

James Ladyman has called attention to how The Guardian has "launched" In Defence of Public Higher Education, a document co-signed by the British Philosophical Association and signed by prominent UK academics in order to protest the UK Government's plans for higher education. You can read the article here. It is co-signed by a number of philosophers. But reading between the lines, I wonder if there isn't a split between the so-called Russel Group (older, prestigious research universities) and the so-called 1994 Group (another group of UK research universities, also prestigious), and -- to confuse things -- a further split within these among the the natural sciences (over-confident they won't be cut off from funding) and some of the social sciences and humanities. (I suspect a further complication is that it is a bit hard to predict who will be financial gainers/losers over the medium term.) Do UK readers want to comment?

CFP: Spinoza, the Infinite, and the Eternal 11-12 May 2012, University of Dundee, Scotland

Keynote speakers: Clare Carlisle (King's College London) and Alan Nelson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) More info here.

The 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books

Today the shortlist for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books was announced. As it turns out, I’m a big fan of popular science books; when they are good, they are not only entertaining to read, but I often find insights and ideas that I then go on to use in my academic philosophical work. Of course, they are mostly a starting point, as you still need to do your homework and check the actual scientific articles/sources, but comprehensive overviews can be a valuable source of insight and inspiration.

The nominated books are:

· Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos (Bloomsbury)

· Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher (William Heinemann)

· The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (Doubleday (UK); Little, Brown and Company (USA) )

· The Wavewatcher’s Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney (Bloomsbury)

· Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample (Basic Books (USA); Virgin Books (UK))

· The Rough Guide to The Future by Jon Turney (Rough Guides)

In the official announcement you can read short descriptions of each of them, and download the first chapters of each. So far, I’ve only read Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, which I very much enjoyed (as reported on this M-Phi post), but pretty much all the others look like they could be really interesting. 

And speaking of math, a few months ago I reported on Fields medalist Voevodsky apparently questioning the consistency of Peano Arithmetic. Well, now somebody else has gone even wilder: Edward Nelson, professor of mathematics in Princeton, claims to have a proof of the inconsistency of Peano Arithmetic! Details can be found here.

 

58 Jobs up at Phylo Jobs

It's moved well beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Joe Bob says check it out.

Weekly Philo of Economics: "*controlled* hallucinations," or Andy Clark meets Adam Smith

[I am resuming my weekly philosophy of economics posts. This Fall I am on Sabbatical at Santa Barbara where I am teaching a course on Spinoza's Ethics and drafting a monograph on Adam Smith. So, expect a lot of Spinoza and/or Smith, but I'll try to engage with more recent economics, too.--ES]

Friday, Andy Clark, who is a Sage Fellow here in Santa Barbara, gave a lovely talk to the philosophy department. I quote a few lines from the abstract: "Perception, according to an emerging vision in computational cognitive neuroscience, is largely a matter of prediction. Full-blown visual perception, if these approaches (for a wide-ranging, non-technical review, see Kveriga et al (2007)) are correct, involves meeting incoming visual information with a matching flurry of top-down predictions that match (and thus ‘explains away’) the evolving visual signal across multiple spatial and temporal scales." Clark's account relied on recent work in Bayesian modeling of neural networks. In Q&A, I pressed Clark on the extreme inductivism of these Bayesian networks. But here I want to share another train of associations; Clark's model of the brain is partially anticipated in a passage in Adam Smith that has long fascinated me. (This past year I gave a number of talks about it.)

Adam Smith is often treated as a follower of David Hume. The first two sentence in the passage below, (which is from Smith's The History of Astronomy [first published in 1795]--one of my favorite works in the history of philosophy--), are straight out of Hume. But then Smith adds a further thought that is un-Humean in at least three respects. I quote in full before I end with a brief comment

"When two objects, however unlike, have often been observed to follow each other, and have constantly presented themselves to the senses in that order, they come to be so connected together in the fancy, that the idea of the one seems, of its own accord, to call up and introduce that of the other. If the objects are still observed to succeed each other as before, this connection, or, as it has been called, this association of their ideas, becomes stricter and stricter, and the habit of the imagination to pass from the conception of the one to that of the other, grows more and more rivetted and confirmed. As its ideas move more rapidly than external objects, it is continually running before them, and therefore anticipates, before it happens, every event which falls out according to this ordinary course of things. When objects succeed each other in the same train in which the ideas of the imagination have thus been accustomed to move, and in which, though not conducted by that chain of events presented to the senses, they have acquired a tendency to go on of their own accord, such objects appear all closely connected with one another, and the thought glides easily along them, without effort and without interruption. They fall in with the natural career of the imagination; and as the ideas which represented such a train of things would seem all mutually to introduce each other, every last thought to be called up by the foregoing, and to call up the succeeding; so when the objects themselves occur, every last event seems, in the same manner, to be introduced by the foregoing, and to introduce the succeeding. There is no break, no stop, no gap, no interval. The ideas excited by so coherent a chain of things seem, as it were, to float through the mind of their own accord, without obliging it to exert itself, or to make any effort in order to pass from one of them to another.

"I heard Mr. Young sing about her. . ."

I was going to do a long blog extolling Carson McCullers, Flannery O Connor (whose niece in-law I worked with for a decade), F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose Montgomery house I landscaped in high school and who plagiarized whole paragraphs from the weirdly brilliant letters of his native Montgomerian wife Zelda), Harper Lee (whose niece taught me American History), Walker Percy (who had a reading group with two of my colleagues), Tennessee Williams (whose table you can grace at Galatoire's in New Orleans), William Faulkner, etc. etc. etc.

But this is much less work and more fun:

 

One thing I should note is that the members of this band were actually really good friends with Neil Young, and were in fact going to go on tour with him prior to the fateful plane crash. This fact alone provided sufficient justification to get many a high school friend to jam on Neil Young songs with me (including "Southern Man"!). Once in a Montgomery, AL. Waffle House parking lot Southern Man and Freebird one after the other brought out such a crowd that after an hour the police ended up shutting us down.

Despite arduous efforts of many good people, Sweet Home Alabama has not yet been made the state song of Alabama. It probably never will be, and almost certainly because the lines about the governor are so blankedly anti-Wallace, which should go a long way torward letting us forgive them for the ignorant display of the confederate battle flag (further mitigating factors- (1) songs such as "The Ballad of Curtis Lowe," and (2) it was the 1970s). Maybe some day. . . though if you'd met Wallace (who lived in the subdivision "Zelda Place" next door to a high school friend of mine) decades after the shooting and seen what acute misery his life was (constant agony always threatening to break through the methadone haze) you might have a little sympathy. But still, as another great southern song says, the Devil's got a Wallace sticker on the back of his car. I can't argue with that. Lyrics after the jump:

The White House cares about gender balance in academia

For reals; check out this article from Science Insider.

The White House today announced a series of steps that NSF will take to keep women from having to make a choice between work and home. "Too many women give up because of conflicts between their desire to start a family and their desire to ramp-up their careers," said John Holdren, the president's science adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He said that flexible workplace rules are good for the economy because they attract better workers, reduce turnover, and increase productivity. "It's not just the right thing to do, it's also the smart thing to do," noted Tina Tchen, chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama and head of the White House Council on Women and Girls.

Wow, pretty cool!

Truth is a boy thing...in Munich and Edinburgh

Munich and Edinburgh. For more info on the Gendered Conference Campaign, go here.

Colour Fundamentals: Escaping the Paralogisms

Two facts about colour strike me as obvious, profound, overlooked, and philosophically puzzling.

1. Colour is Real It is literally true to say that some of the squares above are red and others green. Moreover, red and green are stable properties of these objects. Never mind how ‘X is red’ is to be analysed: whether in terms of dispositions, relations, physical properties, simple properties, whatever. Whatever way you analyse colour, it had better be true that it is a real property of things in the external world.