I don’t know anything at all about science studies (there was a war there right, or is a war, or something?) but the following conference looks like it might be interesting to those, er, interested in the field.

bq.. *Science for Sale?*: The Public Communication of Science in a Corporate World
Call for Papers

15-17 April 2005

Organized by the Department of Science & Technology Studies and the Department of Communication, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

bq.. “Science for Sale?” is an interdisciplinary weekend conference for exploring the mediation of science in a corporate environment. As public presentations of science merge with marketing and as corporate research organizations do more of the work that university researchers conduct, these kinds of observations raise timely questions about the public understanding of science with respect to authorship, ownership, and relationships of practice in science and media.
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There are 240 jobs in the November JFP, but that doesn’t mean much without an analysis of how many are new jobs as opposed to repeat ads from the October JFP, and how good the jobs are. Hopefully I’ll do that soon, but for now I have a million (actually just 125) applications to read so it might take a while.

The potential bad news for Cornell from this JFP is that Harvard, NYU and Stanford are now all advertising potential junior jobs. It would make a lot of sense for a junior candidate to take a job at Cornell over Harvard in most circumstances because of tenure considerations, and the Stanford job is in logic which narrows the field. But the NYU job is open and I worry that if we get into a bidding war for a candidate with them we’ll have about as much chance of winning as the Sox had of coming back from being behind in the 9th inning of game 4 of the ALCS to win the world series. (That’s now my standard for a reasonable possibility – about a 1 in 300 chance if I’ve done the sums correctly.) Did I mention that Ithaca is very pretty in fall and very attractive houses are more or less being given away up here?

Brian Leiter has posted the “speciality rankings for epistemology”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/how_to_read_the_1.html in his upcoming survey. They mostly seem reasonable, though I was struck by one of the rankings.

Michigan was not in the top 30 for epistemology, if one goes by median scores. This seems a little ridiculous to me, if one understands epistemology suitably broadly. It is true that Michigan isn’t as strong as some of its rivals in some core areas of epistemology, particularly theory of knowledge and theory of justification. But it’s as just about as good as anywhere in the world I’d think on other areas of epistemology, in particular work on the nature of epistemic values and on formal epistemology. It’s a matter of taste how much weight you want to give to these areas, but they seem relevant to me.

The interesting point here isn’t whether there are outliers on Leiter’s survey. It’s a survey, so there will always be outliers. The interesting point rather is what this says (if anything) about what is regarded as epistemology these days. If the work of people like Allan Gibbard and Jim Joyce isn’t regarded as epistemology, and very important epistemology at that, I’d regard that as a damaging development for the field.

(Disclaimer: If you’re a grad student in epistemology trying to decide between Michigan and Cornell, disregard everything I’ve said here. The survey is right: they suck.)

Richard Heck’s wonderful papers site, “PhOnline”:http://phonline.org/index.php is buzzing along, with 52 authors signed up. That’s a lot fewer than there should be though. If you have philosophy papers on your website, “register”:http://phonline.org/register.php with PhOnline and post links to them there. It will get you more readers and it will be a service to the philosophical community.

I’ve taken a few nuclear measures to get rid of some of the comment spam.

I’ve removed the links from author names in comments. So now the email addresses you post on comments just get sent to me (in case I need to check something about a comment) and appear nowhere on the site.

More importantly, I’ve banned all links to .com sites within comments. Links to .edu, .net and .org sites should still work fine. If you want to inform someone about a .com link, you’ll have to spell out the address because any live link will be automatically banned.

It’s sad to have to do this, but given the alternatives were (a) spending hours a week on cleaning up spam or (b) letting the blog be used for people advertising everything from illegal gambling sites to rape porn, I think these measures seem quite reasonable.

UPDATE: Well 24 hours later no spam has gotten through the new net. On the other hand, nor have any legitimate comments. So it’s hard to tell how well this is working.

SECOND UPDATE: OK – it seems to be working tolerably well. If you’re the person using a server at Emory (IP address 170.140.188.96) to try and send banned messages to the blog, then let me know that you’re doing something legitimate. But from where I sit it looks like you’re trying to send out spam from a university server, and that’s a very very bad idea.

Stephen Stich just did a talk here at Fribourg where he encouraged people to take the following survey.

bq. “Four-Minute Moral Survey”:http://www.xba-ucla.com/Eng/study4/

I haven’t taken it because I’m just about offline, but I can pass along Stich’s encouragment that you do so. So I’m doing that.

Stephen Stich just did a talk here at Fribourg where he encouraged people to take the following survey.

bq. “Four-Minute Moral Survey”:http://www.xba-ucla.com/Eng/study4/

I haven’t taken it because I’m just about offline, but I can pass along Stich’s encouragment that you do so. So I’m doing that.

I’ll be away until Sunday, so nothing on either blog.

In the meantime, Bob Stalnaker will be talking at Cornell 4.30 this Friday on “On What There Isn’t (But Might Have Been)”. “Details here”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/phil/events_schedule.html. I hope lots of people from the area can make it.

[Image removed for quality control reasons]

From ESPN.

Random notes from around the web.

Brian Leiter has posted “preliminary survey results”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/the_pgr_for_200.html with the highlight being the jump in Cornell’s ranking. A jump I like to note that coincides with their hiring of ex-Syracusans. (Just like Rutgers in the last survey!) There’s a lesson in that somewhere.

Given that they seem to be about all of time, I’m not sure how the “free will awards”:http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2004/10/the_willies.html will be annuals. But maybe that was part of the joke.

Meg Wallace has invented “Acutetarianism”:http://www.unc.edu/~megw/Acutetarian.html.

“Dan Moller”:http://www.princeton.edu/~dmoller/philosophy.htm at Princeton has added his dissertation abstract to his webpage. I was especially interested in this bit.

bq. Suppose you have considered all of the arguments you know purporting to show that abortion is wrong and have concluded that they all fail. Are your deliberations about the morality of abortion at an end? The first essay of my dissertation, “Abortion and Moral Risk,” argues that the answer is _No_: you must proceed to consider the possibility that you are mistaken in your assessment. Ignoring the possibility that you are mistaken about the morality of abortion involves taking a risk – the risk of unwittingly committing serious wrongdoing – that I show may itself be impermissible.

As it turns out, I’ve “written on this”:http://brian.weatherson.org/lockhart.pdf, actually the only bit of normative ethics I’ve published. (There’s some normative stuff in the “pie paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/prank.pdf too, though that’s mostly Andy’s doing – from memory I stuck mainly to the applied side there.) The main points were that (a) the kind of view Moller is sketching is bound to be _very_ demanding and (b) it’s very hard to motivate this kind of constraint unless you regard doing the right thing _as such_ to be among one’s obligations. I tend to like non-demanding and (to use Michael Smith’s terminology) non-fetishistic moral theories, so I’m ill-disposed to the project. But that’s why they write the dissertations. I’ll be interested to see whether Moller’s arguments change my mind.