Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | July 27, 2008
Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures - which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don't, but is now, it appears, between those who know math and those who don't, and the respective attitudes. In Chad's initial post, the discussion turned to the Sokal hoax and what it is supposed to prove. So what I want to do here is a little "compare and contrast" between what is usually thought to be the main themes of postmodern philosophy (not being an expert, I may be... no I certainly am…
evolvingthoughts | July 26, 2008
In the process of maintaining the Basic Concepts in Science list I often have to make a judgement call about whether or not something is a basic enough post. For example I have a slew of rather good but to my mind very technical posts by Carl Brannen at Mass which are labelled "Elementary Science" that I cannot understand. I have a PhD in philosophy of science, so I figure if I can't understand them fully, they are pretty much not at the basic level. But then again, they are basic in that science.
So this raises (not begs!) the question of what is a basic concept...
... and this has no…
evolvingthoughts | July 19, 2008
Wow. Just... wow.
This is not the best superhero film I have seen. This is perhaps the best film I have seen for over a decade. It is replete with moral problems, Greek tragedy, farce, some serious character development, and it moves from being a crime film to a war film at some unspecified point. And it has the best film explosion I have ever seen, because it was not CGI and it actually does what it purports to do.
Below the fold are SPOILERS, so click on at your own risk.
The thing that most affected me was the Joker, not just because Ledger actually invents a new kind of character (…
evolvingthoughts | July 11, 2008
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society?
These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing of a communion wafer from a Catholic church. As a result, he got death threats, attempts to have him fired from his university position, and general abuse while the correspondents were simultaneously affirming the niceness of Catholics [see here, here and here for example]. Meanwhile, the Catholic Cardinal of Sydney, George Pell, appears not to have learned…
evolvingthoughts | July 10, 2008
Well I have done my talk at the AAP conference, and survived with ego intact (as if there was any doubt). All I need to do now is sleep for eight straight days.
Sorry but I don't have the time free to do a meet up in Melbourne, so back to Mornington Crescent.
evolvingthoughts | July 1, 2008
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with Discover magazine. Carl points out John van Whye's paper that showed that Darwin didn't "sit on the theory for 20 years" but rather followed a preplanned sequence for backing up his ideas. However, when Charles planned this research, he greatly underestimated the time it would take him (the Cirripedia…
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2008
The French have always had an affinity for developmental models of historical processes. Comte famously argued that societies had four stages to go through. Lamarck held that species were like individual organisms that had a youth, maturity and senescence. And more recently Teilhard held that evolution was heading towards a single goal. It's the philosophy of the Great Chain made temporal...
But maybe there are more general properties of historical processes that might be empirically determined to be either evolutionary (contingent) or developmental (systematically predictable)? After all…
evolvingthoughts | June 24, 2008
Well, no it isn't philosophically impossible... read on:
It is commonly thought that one cannot prove a negative, but of course I can. If I say "there are no weasels in my right pocket", all I need to do is enumerate the objects in my right pocket and find a dearth of weasels among them to prove that negative claim. So why do people think one can't prove a negative?
Negative claims are of the form
∼∃(x)(Fx)
Or, in English, "NOT Thereis an x such that x Fs"... oh, OK, it asserts that no x is F.
Now to prove this claim, you need something that logicians call "the Universe of…
evolvingthoughts | June 22, 2008Willard Van Ormond Quine was, I believe, one of the best of the 20th century philosophers, and is someone who has greatly influenced me. Here is a TV interview by Brian Magee, from the 1970s, if I am right. They discuss the nature of philosophy. This year marks the centenary of Quine's birth.
"The Ideas of Quine" on Youtube:Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Hat tip to Calculemus. The heading is a bad pun on one of Quine's most famous essays: "On What There Is".
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2008
A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it. It's what humans do. We are social apes that follow rules. Sometimes the sanctions for following rules (which turn out to be sanctions for potential defectors rather than the majority, who will tend to follow rules with or without promises of reward or punishment) rely on a god. Mostly, they don't. The famous Euthyphro Dilemma (whether something is good because God…
evolvingthoughts | June 16, 2008
Creationists and Darwinian skeptics often claim that natural selection could not produce the sort of improbability (often, for reasons that nobody is quite sure of, below 1 in 10 to the 500th power) that we see around us.
So it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that UK skeptic and magician Derren Brown (his homepage is here) has effectively explained it. Brown follows the fortunes, rather literally, of a woman who he tells 24 hours in advance the name of the winner of a horserace. After 3 successful predictions, he tells her to bet, and she wins several hundred pounds; Brown calls this…
evolvingthoughts | June 14, 2008
I don't have a very positive experience of the State of Queensland's education system. Two children I brought here from Victoria when I took up my present position were doing well until they got here. Now both left before completing school amidst confusion and boredom to my great dismay. It's not that there aren't well intentioned teachers, or that Victoria was replete with Poet's Society-type teachers, but that Queensland insists on doing things its own way, meaning that the curriculum is impenetrable to an outsider.
An example of this has come to light, as evidenced by a couple of…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2008
A blog that I have just come across is Deric Bownds' Mindblog. He covers issues of standard and evolutionary psychology and is well worth reading. One of his posts is this: Social heirarchy, stress, and diet, in which he presents recent evidence that stressed primates (in this case humans) eat lower quality, high sugar and high starch, food (crisps and M&Ms).
Why? I can think of several reasons. One is that this gives immediate energy release to deal with the stressors. But what if you are constantly stressed, by, say, being of low status on the social dominance hierarchy? Then you…
evolvingthoughts | June 4, 2008
This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work.
Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters, using morphometric criteria to do a hominin phylogeny. This is not the first such attempt to use continuous characters in cladistics, and I would be interested if those who understand this topic comment on this attempt. It seems to me that the main difference between discrete and continuous data would be that the continua are an ordered set of otherwise discrete data points, so…
evolvingthoughts | June 2, 2008
The idea of philosophers having a carnival, literally a celebration of the flesh, is somehow fitting and faintly disturbing, but this time they had the good taste to refer to a post of mine. But thats not [entirely] why I mention it. The Uncredible Halq has an Introduction to Philosophy, which is well worth reading even if you know what philosophy is, which you don't. Oh, and my definition? "Philosophy is what you argue about when facts don't fix the conclusion."
evolvingthoughts | May 31, 2008
MOUSEBENDER: Good Morning.
WENSLEYDALE: Good morning, sir. Welcome to the National Cheese Emporium.
MOUSEBENDER: Ah, thank you my good man.
WENSLEYDALE: What can I do for you, sir?
MOUSEBENDER: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmond Street just now, skimming through History of the Inductive Sciences by William Whewell, and I suddenly came over all peckish.
WENSLEYDALE: Peckish, sir?
MOUSEBENDER: Esurient.
WENSLEYDALE: Eh?
MOUSEBENDER: (In a broad Yorkshire accent) Eee I were all hungry, like.
WENSLEYDALE: Ah, hungry.
MOUSEBENDER: In a nutshell. And I thought to myself, '…
evolvingthoughts | May 30, 2008
I have for a long time now been very dissatisfied with the metaphysical categories bequeathed to us from Aristotle via a multitude of commentators and philosophers ranging from Boethius to Ockham to Locke to Hume to Kant. It seems to me that they are based on a prescientific notion of what sorts of things exist. In particular, the notion of substance strikes me as questionable: it is based rather explicitly on the distinction between the clay a potter uses and the properties of a particular piece of pottery. By starting with a human-centric activity, Aristotle inverted the way things are:…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
The Scientific Misconduct blog has identified a case of censorship based on fear:
Briefly, a postgraduate student (Rizwaan Sabir) was conducting research (into terrorism). He was arrested after downloading material (related to terrorism) from a US government website. I believe that the material is here - take a look. His Nottingham University supervisors insisted the materials were directly relevant to his research (which is on terrorism). A university administrator and previous student at Nottingham University (Hisham Yezza) printed some of the (publicly available) material for him. Both…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
Two of my favourite philosophers, Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love, have just published an extremely useful and relatively complete summary essay on "Reductionism in Biology" at the Stanford Encyclopedia. They clearly identify the issues and confusions, which is what an encyclopedia article ought to do.
If I have a criticism, it is that they do not attend, as most modern philosophy doesn't, to the nineteenth century origins of this debate. I mean not only Mill, but Whewell, Jevons and all those who debated the relationship between scientific theories. Those who began the twentieth century…