Logic and philosophy

One of the problems that many people have with evolution is not religious, but philosophical. If evolution is true, they think, then we are at sea - nothing is fixed, nothing is determinate, all coherence is gone, as Donne famously lamented of the death of the two-sphere universe and physics. This is, I believe, a valid worry. But it is not new or due to evolution: Heraclitus worried about it, as did Parmenides, and the solutions given by Plato and Aristotle against the atomists were in effect ways to deny that what really counted was changing. They called change "degeneration" or "corruption…

Anyone who has had to order textbooks for students knows how expensive they are. Here's something that I hope may end up a trend amongst academics: Creative Commons licensed texts. P.D. Magnus wrote a logic textbook, forall x, which he made available under the CC license; and now David Morris of the University of Lethbridge has used it as the basis on which to write an abstract mathematics textbook, Proofs and Concepts. With luck, this is a new dynamic of the new media, that will benefit education even if it takes away some revenue from academic publishers. For work that is fully created (…

This is to note that u n d e r v e r s e, the blog that uses nineteenth century German emphatic spacing, has been added to my blogroll (I hope - I'm not good that these customisation things), wherein you can read deep, intelligent and Chamberlainist musings by Chris Schoen. Highly recommended.

Leiter reports that Benson Mates has died, and links to the UC Berkeley short obit: The Department announces with great sadness the death, on May 13, 2009, of Prof. Emeritus Benson Mates. Born in 1919, Prof. Mates studied at the University of Oregon, completing the B.A. degree there in 1940 (in Philosophy and Mathematics). He began work at the graduate level in Philosophy at Cornell, but his studies were interrupted by a stint during the war in the US Navy. He entered the graduate program in philosophy at UC Berkeley in 1945, completing his Ph.D. degree in 1948 after working with (among…

It is often the case that when non-academics, or even non-humanities academics, talk about my generic field, they refer to it as "arts", and mean by this the creative arts, like performing arts, crafts, and corporate accounting. So they justify the funding for the "arts" (or "the yartz", as a Barry Humpries character calls them) because we are supposed to entertain people and add to cultural life. Those who know me know this is not what I do. I have been known to sing in the shower, but that is about it. So I was very pleased to see this piece in the Australian Higher Education section…

It's called Philosophy and Theory in Biology. This is based on some heavy hitters: Massimo Pigliucci, Jon Kaplan, Alan Love and Joan Roughgarden are the editors, and the editorial board looks like a Who's Who of philosophy of biology. No apparent page charges, and it's online only (I hope they take care of the enduring archiving), but it looks interesting. How it differs, apart from being virtualised, from Biology and Philosophy, Biological Theory and the several other more specialised journals I can't yet say.

Asks MSNBC's Chris Matthews of the GOP's Mike Pence. The latter dances around it, trying to avoid asserting what science knows to be true, but this raises an interesting problem: does one have to "believe" in evolution? I mean it's a physical process (the "fact" side) which has a number of explanatory models (the "theory" side). I don't believe in facts; I deal with them. And I don't believe in explanations; I am satisfied with them (or not, as the case may be). This is not about belief, which implies that acceptance of the satisfactory nature of evolutionary explanations is somehow…

Many years ago, ians, really, I naively asked my lecturer who I thought knew everything in the field, how he kept up with the literature. He shrugged and said he couldn't, and neither could anyone else. I thought he was just being self deprecating. Experience taught me better shortly. But there are tools that help, and now, in this all-electric age, they are online. A Philosopher's Digest has just been started, which will give brief summaries of important papers, so those of us who do not follow every paper in every field can sound more intelligent and erudite. Damned nice of them, really.…

Wilkins is fragile and destablised Intellectual tourist attacks local inhabitants All happy bacteria are alike (or is that like each other?) Australian current affairs gets vaccination right! [That's not a pun, it's an act of God] The original video is here. Evolution does spreadsheets in origin of genetic code Siris and Sandwalk go head to head on the Courtier's Reply. Neither of them are dressed. Creationists misunderstand Deep Time. I'm shocked. I mean, it's only ten years since they were taken to task for it. Perhaps if they had millions of years to think it over...

My Synthese essay has finally been published [paywall], in which I argue that on the basis of the more realistic notion of rationality devised by Herbert Simon, called "bounded rationality", certain heuristics are liable to lead people to rationally choose to believe in creationism under the right conditions. It's a conceptual developmentalist perspective. Here's the abstract: Creationism is usually regarded as an irrational set of beliefs. In this paper I propose that the best way to understand why individual learners settle on any mature set of beliefs is to see that as the developmental…

Suppose you have a religion and are interested in science. Do you a. Have to give up your religion b. Have to abandon your effort to find out about the natural world through science c. Try to find some accommodation? Now suppose you are a member of a scientific body, and want to suggest to members of religions that they can be part of the scientific enterprise. What do you do? a. Tell them they can do so only if they abandon their religion b. Tell them they cannot be part of the scientific enterprise c. Tell them that some religions have no apparent problem accommodating science? According to…

I sometimes worry about the lack of attention philosophers pay to actual biology, settling instead for purely verbal arguments. I am travelling right now so I don't have time to carefully critique Jerry Fodor's latest attack on "Darwinism", but it seems that he is actually making the argument that natural selection is not selection because there's no agent doing selection, and it's just a metaphor and hence bad science. At the same time as this debate is occurring over on PhilPapers, this piece comes out showing that selection on trout size by bear predation is directional and hasn't yet…

Geoffrey Midgley's obit is in the Independent today. A comment online is, I suspect, from one of his sons.

This is a response to David Brooks' column in the New York Times, today: "The End of Philosophy". Other respondees include PZ Myers, Brian Leiter, James Smith, bottumupchange, Mark Liberman, and chaospet (who does a very nice cartoon summarising many of the problems with Brooks' column). Hume once wrote: "Reason is, and ought only to be, slave to the passions". By this he meant that reason is motivated by a moral sense, but at the same time Hume also wrote that one cannot derive a statement of "ought" from a statement of "is", which attempts at naturalising morality G. E. Moore called the "…

I received this via Channels: Dear Philosophers of Biology, You'll be interested in the first biennial "Philosophy of Biology @ Madison" workshop/conference that we'll be hosting in Madison a year from May. It's a ways off, but note that submitted abstracts are due earlier than you might think: September. This will help allow for the eventual dissemination of accepted papers to all attendees well before the gathering, which should make for excellent discussion at the workshop/conference. From the site: The Philosophy of Biology @ Madison Workshop is designed to provide a biennial forum for…

I'm very conflicted about this: An Argentinian professor who put Derrida's works in translation online because the published works were out of print or too expensive (way more than the European editions) has been charged with criminal copyright infringement, according to this page. While I think that publishers, especially academic publishers, who screw their market with exorbitant prices, or simply fail to maintain their catalogue are Bad Guys, I also know that the costs involved in publishing are nontrivial. Also, I tend to think that publishing Derrida is a criminal offense (I joke). But…

There's a famous anecdote about Wittgenstein and his friend Piero Sraffa by Norman Malcolm (Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir): Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?' Sraffa's example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the…

Some links and issues I have come across lately. Those who read this and my other blog know that I am deeply opposed to internet censorship. Recently, Wikileaks put up a leaked list supposed to be the list being used in Australian trials of what will be a mandatory blacklist of URLs. First the minister said it wasn't the list, then he said it had some similarities, and now he says it's substantially the right list but there have been edits, but that's not my point. Now, in Germany, a Wikileaks host has been raided at the behest of a German minister. It's even possible that the Australian…

Anthony Grayling, who does a really interesting review column in the Barnes and Noble Review, entitled "A Thinking Read", has a piece on Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True. This saves me having to read it and review it for you myself. The column title is a pun on Blaise Pascal's statement that "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed". A pun which I wish I had come up with.

Kate Devitt is so much better a teacher than I am (and she's smarter, better educated and more attractive a person, but let's deal with just one of my insecurities at a time, hey?). I wish I had thought to teach students about Turing Machines like this.