Happy Australia Day, everyone.
John Heil just came by my office (in St Louis, Missouri) and presented me with two frozen pies that he picked up in an Australian shop in Florida. They’re vegetarian.
(respectful silence in which to consider this state of affairs)
Is it better to think of the deaf positively as those who speak America Sign Language, rather than negatively as those who have a distinctive kind of impairment? Sounds good perhaps but here’s Lennard Davis on the reasons not to:
The central problem with defining deaf people as a linguistic group is that to do so, you have to patrol the fire wall between the deaf and nondeaf in very rigid ways. If deaf people are defined as only those who are native users of ASL, you have to define all nonusers of ASL as “other.” That excludes, or at least marginalizes, deaf people who are orally trained — that is, who were taught to eschew ASL for speech alone; have cochlear implants; or never had the chance to learn sign language. Many people who grew up in non-ASL settings in the 1950s and 1960s and who have quite happily thought of themselves as deaf would have to reassign themselves to some other camp. Likewise, the strict linguistic-group definition expels hard-of-hearing people who have not learned ASL. Ironically, the model also stigmatizes those who have been educated orally; they are seen as victims of oral education rather than as victims of audism. Since it is hearing parents who usually make the decision to educate their deaf children orally, rather than with ASL, or to give them cochlear implants, it doesn’t seem fair to define those children as not deaf. The other flaw in the model is that it defines hearing, signing children of deaf adults (CODA’s) as deaf, since they are native sign-language speakers. One could argue that CODA’s aren’t discriminated against by the hearing world, but if one takes that tack, then one has to abandon the idea that language is the key defining term.
To which we can add the following against the specific suggestion considered: it would be crazy to think of the deaf as the community of native speakers of ASL because lots of the deaf speak OTHER sign languages instead.
Another conference, this time a little further afield…
Call for Papers
Eleventh Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XI)
June 25-27, 2007
Brussels, Belgium, http://www.tark.be
As you’ve probably heard, there was a fire at the APA hotel this year. As if job candidates’ experiences weren’t bad enough already, they had to wander around a ballroom containing a few hundred philosophers in their pyjamas, clutching soot stained damp facecloths and making light conversation with the people who’d interviewed them earlier in the day. Top 5 conversation starters:
S.E.P. 2007 — Vancouver, Canada. May 17-20, 2007.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 35th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy will be held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, May 17-20, 2007, organized by Prof. Paul Bartha (UBC). Paper submissions pertinent to the conference theme, “Time, Logic, and Exact Philosophy”, are especially encouraged, but papers in all areas of analytic philosophy are welcomed.
Guest Speakers–
* Richard Healey (U Arizona)
* Jeff Horty (U Maryland)
* John Woods (UBC)
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 7th, 2007. (Notifications: by Jan 31st.)
National Geographic has pictures of the first living giant squid captured on film here. There’s video footage here. The always excellent SquidBlog (run by philosopher Jeremy Aarons) has been a bit quiet recently, but perhaps the news will revitalise it.
(One last thing: those of you who are not (yet) obssessed with giant squid might not have come across Baterz’ astonishing squid song. Put that right immediately.)
I had a dream about one of my co-bloggers last night. I dreamt that Andy Egan (whom I haven’t seen since Canberra in July) came to stay in my apartment in St Louis. Shortly after he arrived, a woman claiming to be Adam Elga’s ex-wife knocked on the back door, along with two small boys, demanding to see their father. (To the best of my knowledge, Adam’s never been married and doesn’t have any small children, although what do I know? Anyway, I just mean: don’t take my dreamt up family for Adam to have any bearings on his real life situation.) I told her that Adam wasn’t there, (although the other AE was) and then one of the children tore up the place looking for him.
I was reading this light article on chess (thanks to Arts and Letters Daily) and it occurred to me that even though chess is loosely based on the idea of going to war (sacrificing pawns, protecting the king etc.), people hardly ever complain that chess is bad for people or bad for society. In fact, unlike with many violent video and computer games, parents celebrate when they get their kids to go to chess club.
I expect that part of the reason chess is so inoffensive is that what representation of violence it contains is very stylised and abstract. You don\’t – unless you\’re playing wizard chess – get to hear the squelch as a pawn dies, (or is captured), the explosions as a castle goes down, or the screams of the queen.
I’m teaching an advanced philosophy of language course next semester, and I’ve decided to focus on issues in the philosophy of language where it helps to have some technical background. The idea of the course will be to alternate between time spent doing techie stuff – which will be assessed by way of problem sets – and time spent doing philosophy that relates to the techie stuff, which will be assessed by way of papers.
We’re going to start out with some modal logic, and I’m wondering about textbooks. I’ve actually already put my request in to the bookstore to get some copies of the latest Hughes and Cresswell, but since then my collegue José has suggested that I switch to this book by Fitting and Mendelsohn instead. And at a first glance, it does look pretty promising, and it contains exercises and – this is important, I think – among the proof systems it employs are axiomatic systems. I remark on this because in the last couple of years there have been several logic textbooks – by authors who I otherwise love and respect – which use tableaux as the main proof method. And that isn’t what I want.
But it’s hard to know whether a logic textbook is good from a cursory glance. (They’re kind of like universal statements; you can know that one is bad from a single data point, but knowing that one is good is very difficult.) So I was wondering, have any of you used the Fitting and Mendelsohn book? Do you have any thoughts about it, or other similar books?
A physicist holds forth on the boundries of science.
(Wait a minute, that’s not physics…)