Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a stack yay high of books to review. To impress you all and disgust my editors, they include the following:
Books
Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
This continues Sober's general project of giving a…
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
... to his doctors. Here.
Late Note: Ronan in the comments points out this was in 2006. I think I was sleeping that year...
evolvingthoughts | November 21, 2008
Phil Plait linked to this guy, Louis CK, on why it's alright for the world to go back into the dark ages, but I rather like this one, in which it becomes clear that philosophers are, after all, just persistent two year olds:
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
I'm introducing a new category - the Trashcan. This is a term used in systematics to identify a group that comprises "everything else" once you have done the identification of the real groups of some taxonomic grouping.
I will be using the Trashcan to group together all and only those links that have one common property - that they caught my eye. No other property is necessary or sufficient for inclusion. It has no rank, either.*
Under the fold is the Inaugural Trashcan.
Some work on the simplest vision system, of a marine worm, suggests how complex vision got started. Just two cells…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
... has it still happened? Anyway, the BBC, bless 'em, has had philosopher David Bain pose four philosophical questions to mark the epistemologically problematic day:
1. Should we kill healthy people for their organs?
2. Are you the same person who started reading this article?
3. Is that really a computer screen in front of you?
4. Did you really choose to read this article?
Or in more traditional terms: Utilitarian ethics, personal identity, perception and illusion, and free will and determinism. Sneaky. Get 'em in with a condundrum and then pervert the minds of those who stay to…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2008
As I have argued before, there is a class of objects in the biological domain that do not derive from the theory of that domain, but which are in fact the special objects of the domain that call for a theoretical explanation. The example I have given is mountain, which is a phenomenal object of geology, and yet not required by the ontology of any geological theory, which does include overfolds, tectonic plates, upthrusts, the process of differential erosion, and so on. At the end of the theoretical explanation, the mountains have not disappeared so that we might now drive from Arizona to Los…
evolvingthoughts | November 12, 2008
So wrote the renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam: Man is to man either a god or a wolf. Here, courtesy of Leiter, is an article in The Telegraph, in which philosopher Mark Rowlands describes his life with a wolf, and how he ended up learning, as he puts it, how to be a human from the wolf.
Few animals are as similar in their social behaviour to humans as wolves. The domesticated dog is subordinated to human breeding goals, but the wild wolf is itself - a pack animal with dominance psychology, capable of identifying intentions in other agents, of exploring, teaching and playing. And…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2008
There have been several attempts to produce an ontology of biology and the life sciences in general. One of the more outstanding was Joseph Woodger's 1937 The Axiomatic Method in Biology, which was based on Russell's and Whitehead's Principia and the theory of types. In this, Woodger attempted to develop a logic system that would account for all the objects of the theories of biology, especially of embryology, physiology (including cell theory) and genetics. It was hard going even for logicians (Tarski himself wrote an appendix), and the theory thus elucidated seemed to be very post hoc - it…
evolvingthoughts | November 9, 2008
I was very pleased to receive today my copy of this book:
A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, edited by A. Tucker. Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
I got it because on pp 405-415 is my essay "Darwin", which I am rather proud of. I have long thought that Darwin as a philosopher of history is undervalued, but much more interesting than Hegel or Marx. Anyway, if you don't tell anyone, I have made a rough scan available here, although you really ought to make your library buy a copy.
evolvingthoughts | November 9, 2008
...the albino silverback blinks once or twice, says knowingly "Yes, yes", and sends those who do understand math to these two posts at The n-Category Café: "Entropy, Diversity and Cardinality" post 1, post 2. If I read it aright, it means that diversity is measured as the entropy of some metric space, or the probability distributions of that space. Since this is roughly the same thing as Shannon entropy, it is no surprise to find that ecologists have tricked upon the same equations to deal with this problem. More than that I am not competent to say (curse my teenage lack of interest in…
evolvingthoughts | November 8, 2008
It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have noticed this tendency of computer technology for decades, ever since I got hopelessly muddled when doing database programming in the early 80s until I realised that they were using some terminology of formal logic in exactly the wrong way (I forget what it was now). A database ontology is not an…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
I am keen to jot down whatever I can about the ontologies of biology - not just evolution, but also molecular, developmental, taxonomic, ecological and other domains of biology. I want to do this in a relatively systematic manner, so I would appreciate readers noting in the comments the sorts of things/classes/objects that they would like to see discussed, and the domains in which these objects are objects. General categorials rather than specific objects like "humans" or "angiosperms" and the like, please. When we have enough requests I'll sketch out the topics in a later post. Thanks
evolvingthoughts | November 4, 2008
At the time of writing the vote was evenly split four ways between A Moose, Immanuel Kant, Saul Kripke, and any Four Dimensionalist. Beat the tie now by voting.
[Hat tip to Leiter]
evolvingthoughts | October 31, 2008
An essay in Nature recently, titled "A question of class" (by Jeffrey Parsons and Yair Wand) puts the case that classification is crucial to science and needs to be understood. They hold, as I do, that a poor understanding of classification - particularly of the concepts/words "class" and "category" - lead to unproductive and dangerous conclusions within science. But I don't think they get there quite yet...
Classification - the act of putting things into classes - is something that every science does, ranging from elements and planets, to diseases, taxa and functions. The authors make the…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2008
One of the downsides to being old is that your favourite teachers die. I learned most of what I know about the Empiricists, in particular John Locke, from a book by C. B. Martin, who passed away recently. Hat tip to Leiter. I didn't know he spent so much time in Australia.
John Lynch is tantalising me with a workshop I very much want to go to but can't: The 2009 ASU-MBL History of Biology Seminar: Theory in the Life Sciences. It looks like enormous fun (hey, I'm a philosopher: I use philosophical values of "fun"). I Have Views on what counts as a theory in life sciences, and I'd love to…
evolvingthoughts | October 15, 2008
It occurred to me that some readers may be interested in the grant project, so I put the details beneath the fold. I am funded for an Australian Postdoctoral (APD) research fellowship for three years.
DP0984826 Dr JS Wilkins; Prof PE Griffiths
Approved Project Title: Contemporary scientific explanations of religion: A methodological and philosophical analysis
2009 : $ 87,195
2010 : $ 88,506
2011 : $ 88,446
Primary RFCD 4401 PHILOSOPHY
APD Dr JS Wilkins
Administering Organisation
The University of Sydney
Project Summary
The idea that religion is an evolved feature of…
evolvingthoughts | October 9, 2008
As some of you may have figured out by now, my overarching Evil Plan is to get people thinking about their basic assumptions. Even when those people are the "good guys" and free thinkers. So in service of that I am giving a public talk for the Secular Freethinkers society on Tuesday next (details below the fold) on why secularism does not require the end of religion, and in fact why the religious ought to support it to protect their future standing in society. Anyone who's in Brisbane is free to attend and heckle, and if anyone asks "What about the workers!?" I have a Sellarsian response…
evolvingthoughts | October 6, 2008
I get so tired of comments like this:
The Grim Reaper is taking a rest, and inherited differences in the ability to withstand cold, starvation or disease no longer power Darwin's machine. Those who die from such killers do so when they are so old that natural selection has lost interest.
Right. Tell the folk in Darfur that. Tell those in Bangladesh after a cyclone. Tell folks in New Orleans, or Indonesia, or native populations in Nunavit, Australia, New Zealand, the Amazon, South Africa and Tierra del Fuego. Tell those whose access to health care is patchy at best. Even in the UK that is…