The submission deadline is December 31, 2009.  The whole call for papers follows below.

Final CFP: FEW 2010

Call for Papers: Seventh Annual Formal Epistemology Workshop
Konstanz, September 2-4, 2010

Organized by Franz Huber (Konstanz) and Branden Fitelson (UC Berkeley)

Kindly funded by the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz and the German Research Foundation.

Program:

September 2, 2010: FE Meets Traditional Epistemology

Invited Speakers: Elke Brendel (Mainz), Hartry Field (NYU)

September 3, 2010: FE Meets Philosophy of Science

Invited Speakers: David Atkinson (Groningen), Peter Milne (Stirling), Jeanne Peijnenburg (Groningen)

September 4, 2010: Ernest W. Adams Memorial – FE Meets Logic and Philosophy of Language

Invited Speakers: Dorothy Edgington (Birkbeck), Hannes Leitgeb (Bristol), Vann McGee (MIT)

Funding is available for up to 23 participants: there will be 5-8 slots for presenting participants and 15-18 slots for non-presenting participants. Everybody else is cordially invited to attend, though we ask for registration by e-mail to formal.epistemology@uni-konstanz.de by July 31, 2009.

Participants will be reimbursed for travel expenses. Presenting participants will also be reimbursed for lodging expenses. Non-presenting participants are offered accomodation from September 1-5, 2010, for a total of EUR 80.-

Presenting participants are required to submit a paper by e-mail to formal.epistemology@uni-konstanz.de

Non-presenting participants are required to submit a letter of motivation (at most 1 page) plus CV by e-mail to formal.epistemology@uni-konstanz.de

Deadlines:

Submission of papers: December 31, 2009

Notification of acceptance for presentation: February 28, 2010

Submission of letter of application plus CV: March 31, 2010

Notification of acceptance for participation: May 31, 2010

3rd Formal Epistemology Festival: Learning From Experience & Defeasible Reasoning
University of Toronto, May 11-13, 2010

This is the third of three small, thematically focused events in formal epistemology, organized by Franz Huber (Konstanz), Eric Swanson (Michigan), and Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto). This year’s festivities coincide with the 30th anniversary of Ray Reiter’s “A Logic for Default Reasoning” and the 15th anniversary of John Pollock’s Cognitive Carpentry. The event is dedicated to the memory of John Pollock. Confirmed participants include Thony Gillies, John Horty, Mohan Matthen, Jim Pryor, Susanna Siegel, and Scott Sturgeon.

We welcome submissions of papers on topics related to learning from experience, defeasible reasoning, or both. Please send a pdf prepared for blind reviewing to FEF3@utoronto.ca.

The conference website is http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~weisber3/3FEF/. Some funding for travel expenses may become available.

Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2010.
Notification of acceptances: March 21, 2010.

His argument is basically as follows.  Some state of affairs S disconfirms the hypothesis that the system was evolving due to chance only if the probability of S on the chance hypothesis is less than the probability of S given the negation of the chance hypothesis.  (This is just a theorem of probability, together with the claim that disconfirmation is a decrease in probability.)  Further, S can be less probability on the chance hypothesis than the negation of the chance hypothesis only if S is more probably on at least one of the specific alternatives to chance than it is on chance.

Then he considers what the specific alternatives to chance are that are available, and divides them into “intentional bias” and “non-intentional bias” hypotheses.  He rejects intentional bias as a hypothesis that would increase the probability of S (in this case, the origin of life), because of what he calls the “preference problem”.  Clearly, if some agent were able to bias things in the relevant way, and preferred that the universe contained life, then there would be a higher probability of life emerging.  But White points out that we have no particular insight into what the preferences of a being capable of biasing things the right way would be, and thus can’t assume that the existence of such a being would give the right kind of bias.

He then goes to make a similar argument that we have no reason to think that there was any non-intentional bias in favor of the existence of life.

Now let’s suppose that the process by which these complex molecules arose was not just a matter of chance, but rather was (non-intentionally) biased towards certain molecular configurations. Are self-replicating, life-producing molecules more likely to appear on this assumption? I am unable to see any reason to think so. We can think up any number of ways that the process could be biased. We can speculate about a range of possible laws and physical conditions such that simple atoms and molecules tend to cluster in certain ways rather than others. Some of these may favor life’s emergence; others will disfavor it. As in the cosmological case, what makes certain molecular configurations stand out from the multitude of possibilities seems to be that they are capable of developing into something which strikes us as rather marvelous, namely a world of living creatures. But there is no conceivable reason that blind forces of nature or physical attributes should be biased toward the marvelous.

It’s clear that many features of the flow of energy are of fundamental physical importance, given the status of thermodynamics in modern explanations of the universe.  The fact that life plays an important role in apparently resisting the second law of thermodynamics, but only by greatly exploiting every source of energy available to it, seems to me to suggest something natural and fundamental.  At least, it seems to be more than just the parochial bias of some living thing finding life “wonderful”.

And I think this idea helps make sense of some of the examples White considers.

For instance, on p. 470, he uses Fred Hoyle’s metaphor that “the random assembly of the very simplest living system would be like a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747”.  White says, “obviously part of what makes something complex in this sense is that it has a heterogeneous structure, being made up of very many parts of various shapes and sizes. But any pile of 747 parts meets this condition.“  He then considers the suggestion that the plane meets a very specific functional specification, but points out that any other collection meets another very specific functional specification, which we can call the specification of what it means to be a “schmane”.  “Any considerations which make planes stand out as special as compared to schmanes, are intentionally related—whatever intuitions we have about the case have to do with what we think an agent is likely to do.”

But I don’t think this is correct – one important thing that distinguishes planes from schmanes is that they distribute energy in complex, highly efficient, and long-lasting ways.  A schmane where all the pieces of the plane are arranged as dominoes would demonstrate a relatively long-lasting distribution of energy if triggered in the way to knock them down.  Similarly, a schmane where certain interactions trigger sparks that detonate the fuel in the tank give highly efficient uses of energy.  But very few arrangements utilize the very large amounts of chemical energy in the fuel in ways that last longer than a quick burn.  An actual plane is one of the very few arrangements that does very interesting things with the distribution of energy.

Compare the plane to the tornado itself that is involved in the metaphor.  There are all sorts of distributions of heat and moisture in the air, but very few of them are as long-lasting and highly efficient in use of energy as a tornado.  And in fact, phenomena like this do arise all the time even in purely non-living nature.  In reading something about the discovery of rivers of liquid methane on the solid H2O surface of some moon, I realized that the very existence of rivers seems to be something fundamental, but that I wouldn’t have initially predicted just given the thought that liquid can evaporate and recondense.  But once there’s a solid landscape, it turns out that some regions of it will tend to have large catchment areas and will thus end up as rivers.  Similarly, we get things like weather patterns, plate tectonics, and geysers, not to mention the very small and very large phenomena of chemical atoms and stars.  (Think of how many more ways there are to arrange lots of hydrogen and oxygen molecules than as liquid water, and how many arrangements of hydrogen atoms fail to produce nuclear fusion as in stars.)

White also considers a final example, of someone throwing Legos at random off the top of a skyscraper, and the pieces happening to bounce around and assemble themselves into a working model of a cell nucleus and ribosome.  Everyone has the immediate intuition on imagining seeing such a phenomenon that they would think that there had to be some kind of intentional bias.  This leads us to discard the chance hypothesis, and assume there must be some non-chance explanation.  The idea that science requires a search for non-intentional explanations over intentional ones at all costs therefore leads us to assume there must be some non-intentional bias here.  But as White (rightly) points out, this is just a non sequitur – if the example motivates us to believe in an intentional bias, this gives us no reason to believe in a non-intentional bias.  So if we reject the intentional bias hypothesis, then we have no reason not to stick with the chance hypothesis.

But even this example I think is somewhat misleading.  The fact that we see all sorts of phenomena in the universe that are amazing in ways similar to life in their highly structured dispersal of energy (like the tornadoes, rivers, and geysers mentioned above) suggests a slightly different thought experiment.  Imagine not just that one person had thrown Legos off the top of a building and they spontaneously assembled into a model of a cell nucleus and ribosome, but that many people had thrown Legos off the tops of buildings, and some of them had formed working models of tornadoes, geysers, rivers, and other phenomena with similar patterns of energy dispersal.  Even though we are considering the emergence of the first living organism, that single entity is hardly unique in the universe in many of the interesting features of its behavior.  Given the existence of all these things, we might be led to postulate something like the ideas of Ilya Prigogine, or perhaps something a bit less far-fetched, as an explanation for the existence of all these interesting structures, rather than just relying on chance to have produced each separately and spontaneously.

Even if I’m totally wrong in thinking of these facts about the use and distribution of energy as reasons to think of life as special, there are other proposals for why the universe might be expected to be biased towards life.

And in fact, at least some cosmologists respond to the fine-tuning phenomenon (which White mentions on pp. 465-7) in this way. White says about this phenomenon:

While there is at least room to argue that a rational agent is likely to influence the physical parameters in order to allow for the evolution of life, to suppose that impersonal physical laws are likely to constrain the constants in this way can only be based on a confused anthropomorphism. What makes the particular narrow range in which the actual values of the physical constants fall stand out among the full range of apparent possibilities, is that just that they permit the existence of something that strikes us as special or interesting or valuable, namely life.

Thus, although I think Roger White’s individual arguments about what it should take to disconfirm the chance hypothesis are right, I think he’s wrong about the claim that we should have no reason to favor a non-intentional bias hypothesis over chance.  There are several features of life that seem to be of objective interest, and not just anthropomorphic interest, that could be used in exploring the fundamental physical laws to see how they might be biased in favor of the existence of life.

Consider a submicroscopic simple harmonic oscillator with a characteristic frequency. (I believe a natural example would be a molecule of H₂, where the bond between the two hydrogen atoms can roughly be seen as a vibrating spring, so the two atoms are bouncing closer together and farther apart – if this example is bad for some reason, please let me know in the comments so I can understand this stuff better!) An important discovery in quantum mechanics is the fact that the oscillations in such a system can’t be of just any size, but that the sizes are separated by a constant amount. The energy of the system is proportional to the size and frequency of the oscillations, and thus it too is quantized. By adjusting the units of energy if necessary, we can arrange that the possible states of such an oscillator have exactly 0, 1, 2, … units of energy.

Now consider a set of three identical such oscillators, arranged in a fixed lattice, so that the three can be distinguished by their position in the lattice. The first calculation, on p. 4 of the book, is figuring out how many different states such a system can be in if the total energy of the oscillations is 3.

With a bit of counting, one can see that the total number of different available states of such a system is 10. If you don’t want to try to write them all out for yourself, note that there are 3 possible states where one of the oscillators has energy 3 and the other two have energy 0; 6 possible states where one of the oscillators has energy 2, one has energy 1, and the other has energy 0; and 1 possible state where all three of the oscillators have energy 1. It’s easy to see that these are all the possibilities, because there are no ways for any oscillator to have negative energy, or non-integer energy, and we’re ignoring states in which there is any more energy, or some other aspect of the system has any relevant energy.

Now, there are other ways one might have tried to calculate this value, and gotten the wrong answer. For instance, one might have supposed the following – there are three units of energy, and three possibilities for the location of each of them, so there are 3³=27 possible states of the system. But it’s clear what’s gone wrong in this calculation – we’ve counted the state where the first oscillator has the first unit of energy and the second oscillator has the second and third as distinct from the state where the first oscillator has the second unit of energy and the second oscillator has the first and third, when in actuality these are just the same state – the first oscillator has oscillations that are slightly larger than the base state, the second has oscillations that are twice as large, and the third oscillator is in the base state. The units of energy aren’t really distinct objects that can be located differently in the system – thinking in terms of units of energy is just a useful metaphor that helps draw attention to the fact that total energy can be conserved by an interaction in which one oscillator switches smaller vibrations while another oscillator switches to larger vibrations.

Now, if the three oscillators weren’t in a fixed lattice, then even the count of 10 states would be too many. If the oscillators were free to change position arbitrarily, then there would really only be 3 states – the one where one of them has energy 3 and the ohter two have energy 0; the one where one has energy 2, one has energy 1, and one has energy 0; and the one where all three have energy 1. In this case, one might say that the only reason 3 is the appropriate count rather than 10 is that we can’t tell apart the situation where oscillator A is the one with energy 3 and the one where oscillator B is the one with energy 3, because there’s no way for us to tell which is oscillator A and which is oscillator B. However, such an argument makes use of a particular metaphysical assumption, namely the idea that there is a fact of the matter as to which of the three oscillators is which. If we’re willing to help ourselves to this assumption, then we can get the answer to be 10 rather than 3.

But once we make this assumption, we might wonder again about the count of 27 – our only argument that 10 was the right answer rather than 27 is that there’s only one way for all three oscillators to have the same energy. But we could only justify this by the fact that we can’t detect any distinctions among states of this sort. Perhaps the units of energy really are distinct (if unobservable) objects, in which case 27 would be the appropriate count, even though we can only distinguish 10 of them, just as we standardly think that 10 is the appropriate count in the case of mobile oscillators, even though we can only distinguish 3 of them.

So at this point we are stumped – if we want to count the possible states of such a system, we can get the answers 3, 10, or 27 (and maybe others), but knowing which is right depends on knowing some facts about the metaphysics of the situation, and whether there are states that differ in unobservable ways, and if so, what sorts of unobservable ways they can differ.

Fortunately, there is a well-developed theory of statistical thermodynamics that uses these numbers of states to explain observational properties of very large systems of this sort. For instance (roughly speaking), the particular wavelength distribution of light emitted by a glowing-hot object tells us whether the energy is all concentrated in a few particles in the object (like the states in which one of the three oscillators has all three units of energy) or scattered evenly (like the states in which each oscillator has exactly one unit of energy). If there are really only 3 states for us to be counting, then systems should be equally likely to have each of the 3 possible emission spectra. If there are 10 states, then one spectrum should account for 30% of the systems, one for 60%, and one for 10%. If there are 27 states, then one spectrum should account for 3/27 of the systems, one for 18/27 of them, and the other for 6/27 of them. Thus, the statistics of large systems can tell us what the underlying states are like, so by counting the frequencies of large systems with various emission spectra (or other properties that can be correlated with the different macroscopically distinguishable states) we can figure out what the microstates are like, and thus figure out what the metaphysics of these systems is really like, even though there are no directly observable differences between the microstates, and the metaphysics is not directly observable.

Now strictly speaking, this inference is mediated by a further assumption, namely that an equal frequency of large systems will be in each of the microstates, whatever the microstates really are. If we grant this assumption, then frequencies of macrostates can tell us something about the microstates. And this assumption seems like a perfectly natural one – it seems to be the assumption of the Principle of Indifference, which many people have taken to be a basic principle of rationality. (Well, these are only the same assumption if we elide the distinction between frequency of systems of a certain type and one’s credence that a given individual system will be of that type.)

However, the Principle of Indifference has come under lots of fire over the past century or so. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice to say, most (or at least a very large minority of) people who think there are credences that obey rational constraints think that the Principle of Indifference is at best licensed in special cases, if ever.

In the case of thermodynamics though, we have a nice test – if we count the frequencies of systems in various macrostates, then we should either get frequencies in ratios of 1:1:1 or 3:6:1 or 3:18:6 (or whatever the relevant numbers are if we’re dealing with systems larger than three oscillators with three units of energy). If we regularly get frequencies that aren’t proportional to any of the ways we can think of counting distinct microstates that go with a system, then we’ll have to give up the relevant instances of the Principle of Indifference. Just as there doesn’t seem to be any conceptual necessity to a particular one of these three distributions being the empirically observed one, there doesn’t seem to be any conceptual necessity that the empirically observed distribution will be one of them, rather than, say, 4:183:29.

But as a matter of fact, in every situation where this has been tested (I believe) we actually do observe distributions that correspond to one of the ways of specifying microstates. Since the number of conceivable distributions is astronomical, the fact that we always get distributions that correspond to one of the small number we can conceive of seems to give strong evidence both that the relevant instances of the Principle of Indifference are correct (at least in their frequency form, if not as principles of rationality) as well as that the metaphysical assumptions made in carrying out that particular count are correct.

Thermodynamics, as a result, seems to let us use merely statistical evidence to support both some broad assumptions about the role of frequencies in observation, and to support metaphysical principles about unobservable distinctions that exist in the world.

The really interesting idea about this that came to me when I was considering the examples in the book is that we might use this to test certain traditional positions in metaphysics. Consider a system with three oscillators and five units of energy, and the macrostate where two of the oscillators each have two units of energy, and the third has one unit. If there really are distinct units of energy and distinct oscillators, then we get 90 states of this type. If there are distinct units of energy but no distinct oscillators, then we get 30 states. If there are distinct oscillators but no distinct units of energy then we get 3 states. If there are no distinct oscillators or units of energy then we get 1 state. (I believe there are types of actual systems where each of these accounts ends up being the appropriate one, depending on whether they’re made of fermions or bosons, and whether it’s units of energy or something else that are being shared.)

But the answer of 3 states in the case of distinct oscillators but no distinct units of energy depended on the thought that all that matters is which oscillator has the property of having one unit of energy, and which ones have the property of having two units of energy. A metaphysician who believes in tropes will have to say that this is the wrong way of thinking about things – there’s not just one property of having two units of energy, but two particular tropes of having two units of energy. So if we believe in tropes, then the proper count here may turn out to be 6, because either of the two high energy oscillators could have either of the two high energy tropes. So theoretically, it seems that thermodynamics should be able to give evidence for or against the existence of tropes, and possibly other theoretical posits of analytic metaphysics.

Now perhaps if I were to work out the full set of counts, the trope theorist would double the count for all the other macrostates as well – in such a case, the trope theorist and the non-trope theorist would get different counts, but the same proportions, and thus no different predictions. However, I don’t think this will be the case for all systems, so there should theoretically be some test cases available.

Of course, different trope theorists will also endorse different ways of counting – perhaps this system shouldn’t be thought of as having only six possibilities, because there’s no reason to limit consideration to just the two high energy tropes there actually are in any realization of the system. There are infinitely many possible distinct high energy tropes that could have been used, and not just two, so there are really infinitely many possible microstates corresponding to a given macrostate. This would be an unpleasant result, because it would make the frequencies impossible to calculate (they’d be ratios of infinity to infinity), but the trope theorist of this sort may be able to save things by considering ratios of “3 times infinity to 6 times infinity to 1 times infinity” to be the same in some sense as 3:6:1, so that she gets the same predicted frequencies as the non-trope theorist.

Thus, it might turn out that people with different metaphysical theories would have several different ways to come up with the same predicted ratios, but they’d need to work out what the math actually looks like. Prima facie, it looks like there might actually be different empirical predictions the different claims might make, even though the individual distinctions are unobservable, just as in the case of the units of energy and the distinct oscillators.

• Call for Papers ***

The 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology

June 12-14, 2009

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

http://www.socphilpsych.org/CFP.html

Submission deadline is February 2nd, 2009.

(From <A href=http://cognition.berkeley.edu/Home.html>Tania Lombrozo</a>.)

<A href=http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2009/01/19/cartoons_20090112?slide=2#showHeader>(From next Monday’s New Yorker magazine.)</a>

Are there such things as constellations?  I’ll presume that there are such things, which then of course raises the question of what they are.  The natural thought is that a constellation is a collection of stars, which means that it’s a bunch of balls of hydrogen and such, each glowing from the heat of its fusion, scattered across large expanses of space.

But this seems to give the wrong persistence conditions.  Consider the constellation of <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(constellation)>Orion</a>, which is probably the most easily recognizable and visible constellation in the northern hemisphere (unfortunately, at this time of year in the southern hemisphere it doesn’t rise until about 1 am, and whenever it does appear it’s upside-down).  If <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Orionis>the middle star in his belt</a> were to suddently cease to exist, it seems that we wouldn’t say that Orion has ceased to exist (as would be the case if Orion were just a set of stars), but rather that Orion’s belt is now missing a buckle.  Similarly, if a new, extremely bright star were to appear in the vicinity of <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_Orionis>Orion’s head</a>, we would say that Orion’s head is now brighter, and not that we’re looking at a new constellation.  So we might suggest that a constellation is not a set of stars, but is rather an object composed of them.

Now, when I say “in the vicinity of”, it doesn’t actually matter how close this new star is to the star that already exists there – the star that currently serves as Orion’s head is about 1000 light years away, while <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_Orionis>Orion’s right shoulder</a> (the less bright one) is only about 240 light years away.  A new bright star could count as an addition to Orion if it was over 1000 light years away (like the head and middle of the belt), or if it was closer to the shoulder, or if it was only 1 or 2 light years away, in which case it would be much closer to the stars in <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux>the Southern Cross</a> than it would be to most of the other stars in Orion.  The important thing is just what angle you’d have to look at to see it from Earth.

Thus, I suggest that rather than being composed of stars (as in the actual glowing balls of gas), a constellation is composed of beams of light reaching Earth. [UPDATE: see comments for a modification of the “beam of light” view.]  To be part of Orion, it doesn’t matter where the ball of gas is in relation to the other balls of gas (after all, a few of those balls of gas are closer to stars in constellations that can’t even be seen from most of the northern hemisphere than they are to most of the other balls of gas in Orion), but it does matter what angle the beam of light reaches Earth.  As further confirmation of this view, note that if the middle star in Orion’s belt were to explode right this instant and stop shining, we wouldn’t actually say that Orion has lost his belt buckle yet – that wouldn’t happen for another 1300 years.  Although the ball of gas would no longer exist, the beam of light reaching the Earth still would for quite a while.

This suggestion then raises another question – if constellations are composed of beams of light rather than of balls of gas, then are constellations really made of stars?  I think the natural answer here is that the word “star” is actually ambiguous between a glowing ball of gas and a beam of light reaching the Earth, and that constellations are composed of the latter but not the former.  As it turns out, a few “stars” aren’t really beams of light from individual glowing balls of gas at all.  Some of them are <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_star>binary star systems</a> (for instance, <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius>Sirius</a>, which is the brightest “star” in the sky, and which you can find conveniently by following the line of Orion’s belt down and to the left (reverse the directions in the Southern hemisphere of course).  And the bright middle “star” in Orion’s belt [sword] is actually <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula>the Orion Nebula</a>, which is a cloud of gas that is giving birth to many stars in the other sense.

Of course, not just any beam of light coming down to Earth counts as a star – some are planets, some faint ones are asteroids or moons of planets, and some are man-made satellites.  (For instance, a few weeks ago I was able to spot the International Space Station using a guide <A href=http://heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=0&lng=0&loc=Unspecified&alt=0&tz=CET>here</a> – you’ll need to input your own location and time zone for that to be helpful.)  Presumably, for a beam of light to count as a star in this sense, it must be bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, but also stable enough that it doesn’t noticeably move from year to year, and must come from far enough away that it doesn’t noticeably move as the observer moves from point to point on Earth.  But constellations in the ordinary sense I would say are composed of these sorts of stars, and not of balls of gas in space.

Thus, I think it’s incorrect to say (as we standardly do) that stars are glowing balls of gas in space, and that constellations are made of stars.  This involves an equivocation on the word “star”.  Stars in one sense tend to be created by stars in the other sense, but the examples pointed out above show that one can exist without the other.

(Astronomers do have terms for certain natural collections of balls of gas, like <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_cluster>star clusters</a>, which are balls of gas of the relevant type that are gravitationally bound to one another.  They also have a<A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation>technical use</a> of the term “constellation” to refer to one of 88 specific regions of the sky and all the stars in them – thus for instance, the astronomical constellation of <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux>Crux</a> consists not just of the five stars of the Southern Cross seen on <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Australia>the Australian flag</a> (for some reason the <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_New_Zealand>New Zealand flag</a> has only four stars) but actually has <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_in_Crux>at least a dozen</a> stars.  However, they use the technical term <A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(astronomy)>“asterism”</a> for something very much like the ordinary term “constellation”.)