Clayton Littlejohn, a grad student at Nebraska, runs a good blog focussing mainly on issues to do with epistemology. He also thinks that the unelectable one is One of Satan’s Lesser Imps.

In the latest TNR, Simon Blackburn reviews Richard Dawkins’s latest. It’s much more positive than I expected, making me wonder just why I expected what I did.

I got sent a link to Sophists.org. It’s not exactly on topic for this site – there’s some things called philosophy there but little I’d recognise as such. On the other hand, I did learn from there that the new Stephen Rea/Angeline Ball movie of Ulysses has been released. I also learned that the 1967 film that I have in my DVDs-to-be-watched file was banned in Ireland until 3 years ago. Now I’m really curious to see what it’s like.

This semester I had a Tuesday-Thursday schedule and I was able to use it to go to a few long weekend conferences. But it seems I may have been better having this schedule in the spring. Here’s the latest great conference announcement I’ve seen.

Content and Concepts: A Conference on the Philosophy of Mind
February 13-16, 2004, University of California, Santa Barbara

Event Speakers: Steven Pinker, John Campbell, Kevin Falvey, Christopher Peacocke, Michael Rescorla, Jerry Fodor, Katalin Balog, Alva Noe, Benj Hellie, James Pryor, Aaron Zimmerman, David Chalmers, Susanna Siegel, Tyler Burge, Daniel Stoljar, Sydney Shoemaker, Sean Kelly

I already have one west coast swing lined up in March, and two in May – it couldn’t be that hard to budget the time and $$ for another in February could it?!

I normally don’t link to Crooked Timber posts because I assume most people here are reading them already, but Daniel Davies’s post on The War On (some kinds of) Theory is so good I have to break that rule. Here’s just one of the money quotes.

[I]n the construction of arguments of this kind, there are certain kinds of mistake which it is fearfully easy to make. It’s easy to spot particular benefits and miss the fact that their counterparts are costs elsewhere in the system. To come up with arguments which, if true, would imply that people systematically allowed others to impoverish them without changing their behaviour. To miss the fact that your model requires the build-up of debts forever that never get repaid. Etc, etc. The bestiary of really bad economic commentary is full of all sorts of logical howlers. And the good thing about building mathematical models is that, in general, it acts as a form of double-entry book-keeping, to make sure that, if you’ve followed the rules of the game, your economic argument will not have any of these most common and most egregious flaws. It doesn’t mean that it won’t be bad or misleading for other reasons, of course, but it does mean that you’ll at least be saying something that makes sense, if only to other experts.

Exactly the same kind of defence can be given for the use of jargon, and for technical work, in philosophy. There’s a reason that you can’t find easy holes in any argument by, say, Tim Williamson. It’s because the formalism he’s using either up-front or on his notepad is designed to catch little holes. Well maybe that’s not the best example, because Tim being Tim there’s a possibility he could catch plenty of those in his head. But in general it’s true that the very same things that raise barriers to entry can, when used properly, mean avoiding the very errors that it is the business of philosophy to expose.

From Brian Leiter.

(1) The Department of Philosophy at Yale has voted offers to John Hawthorne (metaphysics, philosophy of language, Leibniz) and Ted Sider (metaphysics, philosophy of language) at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, and to Jason Stanley (philosophy of language) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

(2) Rutgers has also voted an offer to Jason Stanley as well.

It’s one thing to not hear about job offers to strangers before Brian does, but to not hear about offers to friends – I must be living in a hole 😉

Having said that, I would be moderately amused to hear about a job offer to me through Brian. My slight annoyance at such an impersonal approach would be offset by my admiration for how well this new information distribustion system is working.

By the way, no, this wasn’t the news I was hinting at last week – though I think this episode will convince me to not even try getting in the gossip game.

Two new sites up in the papers blog today: Henk bij de Weg and Danny Korman. I’ve never really figured out a policy for what to report on the first entry of a new site. Today I just put the lead paper from each site, but in each case there’s quite a few things to look through.

I expressed a half-formed thought about Geoff Pullum’s paradoxical claim about appearances, and next thing I knew up pops confirmation that I was right to worry about one direction of the paradoxical argument. Isn’t blogging great!

Now that’s out of the way, I wanted to mention one other aspect of Geoff’s original post that I thought was very interesting, namely this quote from G. K. Chesterton:

The real trouble with this world of ours is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, I’ve been reading one or two philosophy of science job files in the last few weeks. Actually I’ve been a little ill-mannered about it, because really it’s interesting work – it’s just hard to always be sufficiently grateful for that. Hopefully as we get towards the finalists and I get to closely read papers rather than trying to make judgments based on first appearances it will be even more interesting. One of the things that came out of a few of the better files (I hope I’m not giving anything excessive away about individual candidates by this, because this was a theme across a few pieces I read) was that something like Chesterton’s claim might be right.
Continue reading →

This is just a test to see if I can post blog entries from my new Treo. Since I’m doing this from right in front of my home computer it’s not the best use of resources, but I’ll be happy if it works.

In some of the old-time sense data literature you’ll read people saying that if you look at a coin held at an angle to you, it looks elliptical. It’s not clear what relevance this would have to debates about perception even if it were true, but the fact is that for most people it isn’t true. A coin held at an angle to you looks like a circular object held at an angle to you. It takes quite a bit of effort, if it is possible at all, to see it as elliptical. The general point is that the kind of correction that is needed for a coin to look circular (even though its retinal impression is elliptical) happens very early on in processing, so we have little or no conscious access to any elliptical impression the coin makes.

I’m sure there’s actual data on this, but it’s interesting to test how far this extends. The other day I was staring at the (circular) logo on a Starbucks cup and I noticed something rather odd. If you hold the cup with the logo facing towards you, tilt the cup towards you (as if you were drinking from it) and look down at the logo, I think it won’t look circular. To my eyes at least the bottom half of the logo looked like a semi-circle (being viewed at an odd angle) while the top half looked very flattened. The overall impression was sort of like a shield with curved corners.

Now there’s two features of the Starbucks cup that could be causing this distortion. First, the cup is curved. Second, the cup tapers in towards the bottom. (So overall it is, I think, a cross section of a cone.) I wonder which of these is responsible for the distortion effect here. Careful inspection of a Nantucket Nectars bottle (which is cylindrical in the crucial section) makes me think it is the first.

Evolutionary explanations for why we are able to make one kind of correction but not the other would be welcome. I think it’s evidence that we did have two dollar coins in the savannah, but we didn’t have Starbucks then.

It’s basically consumer week here at TAR, so don’t expect much philosophy. Not even an answer to the puzzle Geoff Pullum raised for me. (Right now I’m too zonked to see why something that’s clearly true, that if (1) is false it is true, is true. So I better leave that one for the morning.)

I decided to become a mobile high-tech kinda guy this week. So I bought an iPod and a treo phone/organiser/go-everywhere-email-thingy.

Naturally I didn’t buy the right cable for the iPod, but luckily I was able to borrow the right cable from linguistics whiz and all round good guy Chris Barker while I ordered another in, so now iPod works. Much thanks to Chris – may you be blessed with counterexamples to all your enemies’ hypotheses! I really like the iPod, unsurprisingly, but it does have a small design flaw. It is much too easy for the controls, especially the next track button, to get pressed accidentally. You can override this with the hold button, but then you can’t do something as simple as change the volume. Maybe there’s a reasonable workaround for this. In any case, it’s a pretty spectacular bit of equipment. A device capable of storing and playing 2500 songs, and counting, that fits in a shirt pocket is pretty wild.

The phone isn’t yet hooked up to a network (that should happen later tonight, I hope) but after that I’ll be back in the world of cell phone connected people. It’s really intolerable to be at conferences without a cell phone, and since I’ll be at a dozen or so conferences in the next few months I really needed the upgrade. Why I needed to buy an imitation BlackBerry I’m not sure, but hopefully I’ll get some use out of all the features I’ve paid for.

Does anyone know exactly how the ‘Personal Network’ at Friendster works? It says it includes all the people that stand in the transitive closure of the ‘Friend of’ relation to me, but if that’s true the actual number of people in it, 3755, seems rather unlikely. I would have thought that once the network reaches a critical mass, say a hundred, it would extend to basically everyone in Friendster. (And I guess Friendster has many more than 3755 users.) If there’s some limit to the length of chains between me and any one of these people (e.g. that the shortest chain has to be at most length 20) this number would be more plausible. But it seems really surprising that all these people are only connected to each other, not to anyone else in Friendster. (I probably shouldn’t do a priori sociology, but a priori science is a hard habit to break.)

In general I think it’s a good thing that I don’t use TAR to report breaking news about hiring decisions and the like. For one thing it would mean constantly having conversations like “Is this on the record?” and I don’t want to be doing that. But there could be some big news coming down the pipe shortly that I can’t resist covering. If you’re interested in that stuff, stay tuned. If you’d rather read about actual philosophy, er, you might be better off changing channels and heading over to Wo’s, because he’s had a bunch of great metaphysics posts up recently.

is finally posted. Sorry about the delay – it was (a constituent) of a botch-up on my part.