Papers Blog – May 28

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up with several new sites for you to peruse. In most cases when I get new sites I don’t link all the papers I find there, because some might not be that new and it would be an enormous amount of work to process all of them, but you should click through to the sites if you are interested to see more.

Papers Blog – May 27

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is posted, though I managed to forget to add four new pages I was supposed to add. Maybe I’ll do a supplementary post tonight, or more likely they’ll go in tomorrow’s post.

Two new philosophy blogs worth noting. Soon there will be too many for anyone to keep track of!

bq. “Richard Zach”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/
“Joe Shieber”:http://philonous.typepad.com/musings_from_the_lehigh_v/

Papers Blog – May 27

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is posted, though I managed to forget to add four new pages I was supposed to add. Maybe I’ll do a supplementary post tonight, or more likely they’ll go in tomorrow’s post.

Two new philosophy blogs worth noting. Soon there will be too many for anyone to keep track of!

bq. “Richard Zach”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/
“Joe Shieber”:http://philonous.typepad.com/musings_from_the_lehigh_v/

Epistemology Conferences

In the last four weeks I’ve been to two epistemology conferences on (or about) the west coast – the INPC conference _Knowledge and Scepticism_ at Washington State/Idaho, and _Formal Epistemology_, or FEW, at Berkeley. First a couple of quick sociological notes.

The male/female ratio at each conference was about 5:1. I might have mentioned this before, but epistemology, formal or informal, seems to be the least gender-balanced of all subfields of philosophy.

Last fall there were two philosophy of language conferences on the east coast with minimal overlap between the attendees. And the same thing has happened with the two west coast(ish) epistemology conferences. I was the only person at both INPC and FEW. Now this was in part coincidental. Some of the people at INPC (such as John Pollock or Jonathan Schaffer) could easily have fitted in at FEW. And plenty of people at FEW do stuff with a tight enough connection to traditional epistemology that they could have fitted in nicely at INPC. Peter Vranas and Sherri Roush are the most obvious candidates for this, but many of the philosophers of science and probabilists there would have had useful things to say to the traditional epistemologists.

In fact, it was too bad that there wasn’t more mixing between the groups, because they could learn a lot from each other. The advances in formal methods in recent years are really quite stunning.
Continue reading

Epistemology Conferences

In the last four weeks I’ve been to two epistemology conferences on (or about) the west coast – the INPC conference _Knowledge and Scepticism_ at Washington State/Idaho, and _Formal Epistemology_, or FEW, at Berkeley. First a couple of quick sociological notes.

The male/female ratio at each conference was about 5:1. I might have mentioned this before, but epistemology, formal or informal, seems to be the least gender-balanced of all subfields of philosophy.

Last fall there were two philosophy of language conferences on the east coast with minimal overlap between the attendees. And the same thing has happened with the two west coast(ish) epistemology conferences. I was the only person at both INPC and FEW. Now this was in part coincidental. Some of the people at INPC (such as John Pollock or Jonathan Schaffer) could easily have fitted in at FEW. And plenty of people at FEW do stuff with a tight enough connection to traditional epistemology that they could have fitted in nicely at INPC. Peter Vranas and Sherri Roush are the most obvious candidates for this, but many of the philosophers of science and probabilists there would have had useful things to say to the traditional epistemologists.

In fact, it was too bad that there wasn’t more mixing between the groups, because they could learn a lot from each other. The advances in formal methods in recent years are really quite stunning.
Continue reading

Papers Blog – No Entry

No papers blog today because my home computer is currently in several pieces while I arrange for things to get packed. If everything goes to plan it will be back up tomorrow. Fortunately I can post to this blog from anywhere, so it will remain operational during the messing around.

Papers Blog – May 25

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is posted with many new links, each of them with a representative paper. Apologies that the postings have been getting so late in the day – I’ve been rather busy with packing and preparing to move, so blogging (and everything else) is being put somewhat on hold.

INPC Followup

The “INPC Program”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/program.html is now being used as a repository of papers that were presented at the conference. It might not be completely obvious, but when the presenter’s name is a live link, it’s a link to the paper.

This post is partially intended to advertise those papers, but is also meant for presenters who are reading this site. The collection Joe and Michael are hosting will be much better if more presenters get their INPC papers to them. So send along your papers!

Break

I’ll be away until at least next Monday at “FEW”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Efitelson/few/, so no papers blog or (probably) this blog until then. A link and a request first though.

The request is for anyone who has their papers from the INPC online to either leave a comment here linking to them, or email the paper to the INPC organisers to host on their site. It would be good to have a central place to review the many good papers that were presented there.

The link is to “Shieva Kleinschmidt’s blog”:http://emiratio.typepad.com/. Shieva is a philosophy undergrad at WWU who many readers here will have met through BSPC or some other conference, and she looks to be posting quite a bit of stuff, so go check out the blog.