Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | June 4, 2007
This three-part series is a talk I gave a while back to some ecologists and molecular biologists. It is a brief overview of the aims and relationship between science and philosophy of science, with a special reference to the classification wars in systematics, and the interface of science and the broader community. I will present my own overview of the elements of science - as a dynamic evolving entity of knowledge gathering rather than as a timeless methodology or as a purely social movement.
[Part 2, Part 3]
It isn't often that an ornithologist gets to talk to birds. It's even less…
evolvingthoughts | June 2, 2007
Well blow me down and call me a dishmop. Reed Elsevier, who I recently criticised for running arms exhibitions while publishing medical and other intellectual journals, and who were boycotted by medical authors, has folded. They are, according to this story, getting out of the arms exhibition business. And so they should.
I'd like to think my threat of philosophers boycotting Elsevier journals played a role, but then I'd also like to think that I was living in luxury in French Polynesia...
Late note: Hat tip to Grllscientist.
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up.
Now, a paper has been published in The Edge by psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg, which is a revised version of a paper in Science, May 18, 2007, which argues pretty much the same thing. I only wish the paper I have forthcoming in Synthese had got published earlier, but they have data, something philosophers must avoid according…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Are you a philosopher? Then stop reading and go think about something [else].
Neil Levy is doing a survey of moral judgments which he wants the philosophically uncontaminated to take.
Click Here to take survey
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2007
From which this wonderful quote:
There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but whenever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or television. There are no satellites based on feminist alternatives to quantum theory. Even the great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by…
evolvingthoughts | May 26, 2007
OK, I can't be hedgehogged doing a coherent post today. I'm tired and shagged out after a long talk (lecturing for others who went and had fun somewhere, the bastards!). So instead here are random links and thoughts that happen to be open in my browser right now...
The first is the notion of an "error theory". This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing,…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
The recent "What kind of Atheist" posts have led to a discussion on Larry Moran's Sandwalk blog. Go read it, because I'm being as clear there as I'll ever likely be...
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2007
In reading Jack Smart's excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Identity Theory, I was again struck by the role that the distinction between type and token plays in philosophy of mind. This distinction was originally made by Charles Sanders Peirce back in (if memory serves) the 1870s (he also distinguished "tone", but that hasn't traveled well). I think it may even apply to biological taxonomy and the species problem.
Smart says that a type of mental state may, on some accounts, have different tokens. I won't get into this here (I'm a full blown identity theorist, and if folk…
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2007
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture. I'm not mocking, as Australia hasn't seen it yet. But I got sent a review copy, so here are my thoughts, below the fold. It starts on 54 May on PBS, I'm told, so check your local schedules, as they say.
I really really really wanted to like this series. Miller is one of my TV heroes, and was famously a member of…
evolvingthoughts | April 30, 2007
Craig Miller dropped by and we got to reading some Locke, as visitors to my office are wont to find themselves doing:
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing…
evolvingthoughts | April 28, 2007
The Eight Day Adventist calendar has rotated into phase with your infidel calendar, so it is time for a sermon. Our subject today is secularism.
I noted an article about the decline in secular standards in Turkey, which of all modern societies is the one most deeply founded as a nation in secular ideals. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk wanted a society not controlled by the imams in order for Turkey to catch up to the then more secular west. But Turkey is now about to elect a Muslim leader who wants Sharia. Meanwhile, in the once-shining example of modern secularism, the United States, even the…
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2007
I don't know from framing. Until the current to-do started up, I had merely heard the term used in the context of Lakoff, whose book I tried once to read but got too annoyed and moved on. But one thing I do think I know a bit about, based on experience in public relations, publishing, journalism (a miniscule and amateur bit, to be sure) and public debates, is communication. It's a pity I can't do it as well as I ought.
But here are some thoughts about the difference between communication and "spin". Others can tell if I am dealing with framing or not.
For a start, communication involves…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
The BBC is reporting that the parchment manuscript that had a palimpsest of Archimedes' treatise on floating bodies, also turns out to have two other lost works: a text by Hyperides, a 4thC BCE politician of Athens, but much more excitingly, a 3rdC CE commentary on Aristotle's Categories, in which modern logic was first defined (along with other works by Aristotle), by Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Some, for instance Calamus, are critical of the Christian monks that, in the 13thC CE, scraped these works off the parchment to reuse it for a prayer book. But this is possibly due to the fact that…
evolvingthoughts | April 24, 2007
According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.
Thomas Henry Huxley
John Pieret, of Thoughts in a Haystack, has a nice further discussion of this excellent essay of Huxley's, doing what I didn't have the energy to do. Now that he has linked here and I back to him, expect the Internet to roll up in a recursive black hole...
evolvingthoughts | April 23, 2007
My friend Neil Levy has published yet another book (how does he do it?) entitled Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century.
Here's the publisher's blurb:
Neuroscience has dramatically increased understanding of how mental states and processes are realized by the brain, thus opening doors for treating the multitude of ways in which minds become dysfunctional. This book explores questions such as when is it permissible to alter a person's memories, influence personality traits or read minds? What can neuroscience tell us about free will, self-control, self-deception and the foundations of…
evolvingthoughts | April 21, 2007
Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism":
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
Lewis Carroll, AKA Charles Dodgson, was a philosopher's dream author. Indeed, it is almost formally impossible to complete a philosophy degree and not quote him on some subject or another. Now Strange Maps publishes the Bellman's Map from Hunting of the Snark, which accompanies the following stanzas:
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry:…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
Yesterday was Willi Hennig's birthday. Hennig invented cladistics (though he called it "phylogenetic systematics"), which is the foundation for all modern taxonomy. Frölich Geburtstag, Willi!
Via Paleoblog.
Oops, my mistake. Philosophers are not always good at math.