Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | December 1, 2007
[Australian politics: look away]
Oh dear. It took only seven days for the shine to wear off the Labor victory. Julia Gillard has outlined the priorities for education: computers and trades training centres in schools. Yep, that's right, the single most important aspect of education in Australia is trade education and toys.
Never mind that the past 20 years has seen a decline in tertiary education funding by governments of both stripes, so that universities now have to attract overseas students in full fee paying courses to survive. It's all about trades. And toys.
Now I do not think that…
evolvingthoughts | November 29, 2007
The term "radical" is a very loose term. It basically means "something that differs wildly from the consensus" in ordinary usage. So I hope David Williams and Malte Ebach won't take offense if I say that they have a radical interpretation of the nature of classification. In a couple of recent posts - one on Adolf Naef, and one on Molecular Systematics - they have presented some views on classification that do, indeed, differ from the received consensus. So, I need to blather a bit...
The nature of classification is highly contested in biology, let alone the ancillary philosophical…
evolvingthoughts | November 26, 2007
This little piece by netfriend Richard Harter, who apparently predates coal, serves to demonstrate that philosophers really aren't clever enough at thinking up counterexamples...
The sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", was presented by Chomsky, as a great example of a series of words strung together randomly. Not only is it grammatical according to the lexical classification, and non-sense on a semantic level. Or so goes the claim. But is the claim correct?
A green idea is, according to well established usage of the word "green" is one that is an idea that is new and untried…
evolvingthoughts | November 24, 2007
I have a rule (Wilkins' Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times.
Davies wants to argue something like this:
Premise: there are laws of the universe and we cannot explain the existence of laws
Premise: the assumption that laws are to be found is the basis for doing science
Conclusion: Ergo, science rests on an act of faith
Can anyone spot the enthymeme? That's very good, children. You spotted the easy mistake. Davies moves from "assume…
evolvingthoughts | November 6, 2007
The saying that "man is a wolf to man" comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or "Man is either a god or a wolf to man". I'm beginning to wonder if there is a difference between gods and wolves.
Ask yourself this: why did we domesticate wolves instead of cats the way we did? Why don't we have pet tigers? The answer has to do with the social structure of wolves. They have a pack-mentality. Each wolf is subordinate to some other wolf unless it is the alpha male. This instinctual behaviour, typical of the species and its…
evolvingthoughts | November 6, 2007
I can't believe Laelaps beat me to this (shows how on the ball he is) but he's just noted a paper that I watched getting written, and discussed in detail with Chris Glen, a very smart and talented young paleontologist, before I got to. So I will now, before he goes and does a better job.
Chris and his advisor Michael Bennett have come up with a possible way to test the "trees down or ground up" controversy about the origins of flight. That is, they have some independent evidence that early birds were basically ground dwellers, but that there was, as there is now, a mix of lifestyles…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
In a famous essay Borges wrote of an infinite library that contained all possible books (and most of it nonsense at that). The mind is not like that. It has only a few books in it.
In the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, there are competing views of the nature of the mind. One school, the evolutionary psychologists, hold that the mind is composed of a large number of special purpose modules, each designed by natural selection to do one thing well (enough) and no more. Another school, represented by Jerry Fodor, holds that the central part of the mind (excepting the sensorimotor parts…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
What with Hollywood archetypes of "animal rights activists" coming out of the woodwork lately, Ryan Gregory and Larry Moran pose the following question:
And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between "humans" and "animals", "human rights" and "animal rights", "us" versus "them"? What rational argument do you bring in defense of speciesism? Perhaps you argue that only humans are capable of suffering, or that our intellectual capabilities are of a different kind from those of other animals. As Dawkins has noted, neither is compatible with what we understand about…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
Sorry about that pun - it's been around for a while since Antony Flew, quandam philosopher and "Darwinian", announced he was converting to a kind of deism. Jon Pieret, who often comments on this blog when he should be writing for his own, covers the facts as far as we can ascertain them.
I am deeply sympathetic to Flew here. I too suffer from nominal aphasia. I tell my students that I forget my own kids names, and I only have two. Of different sexes. They laugh, but it's true...
evolvingthoughts | October 29, 2007
The above are icons to be used when blogging on actual peer-reviewed research (as opposed to popular reports or kookery). I had a marginal involvement in this (I made some passing comments early on) so it is with great pride... no, actually, it's all down to Dave Munger, who was a champion. I had nothing useful to do with it.
Here's what Dave said:
We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2007
Michael Ruse has a new article up on creationism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There's not much new to those who know his work, but the following comment resonates - dare I say thunders - in the Science Blogs Atheism Wars:
Unfortunately at the moment, those opposed to Creationism are spending more of their energies quarreling among themselves than fighting the opposition. There is a new crop of very militant atheists, including the biologist and popular writer Richard Dawkins (2006) and the philosopher Daniel Dennett (2005) who are not only against religion but also…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2007
I now turn to the question of explananda - what is it that explanations of religion are adduced to explain?
Similarly to the general classification I gave before, there are several things that seem to need explaining.
1. The sociological explanandum: the existence of organised religion
Religions are salient objects in modern and historical societies. All of them have social structure, and it is that which calls for explanation. There are basically two approaches here, one tied to Weber's sociology and the other tied to Durkheim's. Weber believed that religion was symbolic, and founded…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2007
David Chalmers and David Bourget of the Australian National University have a great new resource up of online papers on mind:
We (David Chalmers and David Bourget) are pleased to announce the launch of MindPapers, a new website with a bibliography covering around 18,000 published papers and online papers in the philosophy of mind and the science of consciousness. This site grew out of a combination of David Chalmers' old bibliography in philosophy of mind and his page of online papers on consciousness, but it is much larger and has many new capacities, programmed by David Bourget. The site…
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2007
According to a book mentioned by Greg Dahlman at blog.bioethics.net. He notes that this makes Stephen Colbert Plato. I think it makes Hilary Clinton Aristotle, and Richard Dawkins Epicurus, although the sequence is a bit messed up.
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2007
An article at Wired by Clive Thompson notes that the antievolutionists use rhetorical ploys, playing on the ambiguity of language to imply that "theory" just means "wild-arsed guess" (or words to that effect). He proposes that we should stop calling evolution a theory, and start calling it a "law".
I disagree:
The term "theory" has much wider application than "law", and in any event, the very same sorts of rhetorical ambiguity will be used for that too (a law requires a lawmaker, doesn't it? Hmm? So evolution is false, blah, blah, blah). In fact, "law" is the term that should be, and…
evolvingthoughts | October 6, 2007
Does anyone who reads this blog have access to JFP from the American Philosophical Association? None of the locals or my usual contacts do, and by the time I can get a subscription going, I'm likely to have missed the deadlines this year. Drop me a note if you do. Thanks
evolvingthoughts | October 3, 2007
The estimable and overproductive Neil Levy* at CAPPE at my alma mater, has sent me Terry Pratchett's and Stephen Brigg's book/diary Lu-Tse's Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008, with a note "To help you chart your course into unemployment". For which I give much thanks, as it also contains many analects of the Way of Mrs Cosmopilite. Of course, I read the title as "Lu-Tse's Yearbook of Enplightenment", which no doubt says much more about my mental state right now than the universe (assuming there's a difference). For which, Neil, many thanks. I have achieved wisdom.
* Yes, I know, it's being…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2007
As a silverback, I am always intrigued when you humans start to debate our nature, or put us in silly films (not that the one with Sigourney was silly - any film she's in is fine by me. We don't get much film out here in the wild, anyway). But, courtesy of Jason Grossman, alpaca farmer extraordinaire, here is one of the funniest argumenta ad Google I have ever seen. It proves that because we are all Sigourney Weaver, you humans ought to be vegetarians. I'm sure Jason, who moonlights as a philosopher in his spare time at the ANU, will be able to use this for his critical reasoning classes.
evolvingthoughts | September 10, 2007
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online, but highly regarded, source of review articles on philosophical topics, edited by Ed Zalta. Three new articles have popped up lately that have attracted my attention:
The first is on Metaphysics, by Peter van Inwagen. Metaphysics is a hard discipline to define, by van Inwagen does a good job of presenting it for first time philosophers.
The second is Causal Processes by my colleague Phil Dowe. Dowe is a leading light in the topic of causation, which itself is a topic of metaphysics, and he has proposed a "conserved quantity" account…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
Continuing on from my last post, let's consider the modes of speciation that are called into account for the existence of species.
Here is a list taken from Sergey Gavrilets, which I put in my most recent paper in Biology and Philosophy (2007).
Vicariant – divergent selection and stochastic factors like drift after division of a population by extrinsic factors such as geographical changes;
Peripatric – a small subpopulation, mostly isolated, at the extreme of the parent range. The idea is that it will have both a non-standard sampling of alleles, and also be subjected to divergent…