Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | August 27, 2007
So they're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still? So what? I have more respect for Keanu Reeves after seeing the recent film A Scanner Darkly, and anyway he's much better an actor than Will Ferrell, who did such a good job in Stranger than Fiction to my surprise.
But why angst over a remake? The 1950s version was wooden, didactic and naive. Michael Rennie played it like a cheap TV actor. Sure it was fun and imaginative in its premise, but whoa, dude, it ain't art. So I say go for it. There are only a dozen or so SF plots anyway, so there's no harm in redoing it.
But then, I also thought…
evolvingthoughts | August 23, 2007
The "angry atheist" debate has broken out again, like a fire that smolders on until it finds new fuel. I am moved to make a few points, which are worth all you paid for them.
1. There is an assumption that reasonable people can only come to one conclusion. To theists this is theism of some kind. To atheists this is atheism. It presumes that people who are reasonable in one domain (say, science) are reasonable in all. But I know atheists who are libertarians, and a more irrational faith in rights I haven't found, and I know theists who are absolutely in line with all the social, scientific…
evolvingthoughts | August 21, 2007
... I'm teaching. First years. Cognitive science.
It turns out that a lot of what I thought was common knowledge isn't common at all. And what I count as a simple introduction leaves a lot of folk behind.
Now I know I'm not that ordinary in many senses - the obsession with complex concepts may give it away if the lack of social skills don't - but it is a big shock to me how under-educated these kids are. I find myself having to explain simple argument skills, and many of them have already done the critical reasoning course! This is no excuse, of course - it's my job to see they…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
I'm home sick, so I'm shirking duties and came across one of my favourite film scenes of all time:
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
Kate Devitt, a PhD student at Rutgers, as a rather wonderful blog, Mnemosynosis, on matters relating to memory. She's got at present a very interesting post on bacterial cognition worth reading.
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
I have a soft spot for Herbert Spencer [see also here]. Supposedly the founder of social Darwinism and the precursor to American libertarianism and justifier of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he has been the whipping boy of progressives and anti-evolutionists alike. Ever since Richard Hofstadter fingered him as the source of rough individualism and eugenics in his Social Darwinism in American Thought in 1943, Spencer has been the evil demon of philosophy, political thought, and evolution. But a recent article in The New Yorker occasioned by a new book Herbert Spencer and the Invention…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2007
So I'm home from Ish, and the front part of my brain is giddy and tired while the rest has just shut down. I don't travel well, I'm afraid.
One thing that I came back fired up over are the unfinished projects I have running. So I intend to finish them. They are, in no particular order:
1. Denying that genes have information [heresy #1] Status: Written and needing to be submitted.
2. Denying that functions in biology exist outside models [heresy #2] Status: Written but badly in need of a rewrite.
3. Denying that essentialism ever existed in biology [#3. Four more and I get a free auto…
evolvingthoughts | July 12, 2007
It occurred to me as I was chatting to a friend (KiwiInOz) that I actually have a philosophical method. It comes as a surprise. I thought I just meandered along, but as I yet again did a semantic space diagram to outline the issues (in this case in biodiversity measures that my friend and I are working on) it hit me that this is my method - analysis of issues in terms of axes determined by the active variables in a given situation, discourse or debate.
This led me to think of why it is my method, though. And the answer is to do with the nature of explanation.
My first paper (1998) came…
evolvingthoughts | July 9, 2007
I probably agree with Christopher Hitchens on many substantive points. But I won't be reading his book. Instead, we can thank this reviewer for their critical, ascerbic, and I suspect in the end accurate review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
evolvingthoughts | July 4, 2007
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.
One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that - apart from anything else - prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers.
Another, in no particular succession, is whether we…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2007
Run by Matt Haber at Utah, it's a forum for discussions of work in progress, student matters like employment, tech issues and biology and society topics, to mention only a few. It's in alpha form now, but expect it to grow. The sidebar blurb is this:
Thank you for visiting the Philsophy of Biology Cafe. Our forums are currently under construction and are in ALPHA testing stages.
This forum is a place to come, sit down, and have a hearty swig of the many topics concerning philosophy and biology.
We try to keep things in a coffee-house theme (in case you didn't notice) so if you have any…
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
What happens when you put journalists in contact with scientists? To hear some people tell it, it results in an antimatter-matter explosion that destroys careers and causing black holes of ignorance in the general population, particularly when the density is already great, as in political circles.
Tara, from the scientists' perspective, gave a list of rules for science journalists. Her commentators broadly agreed, ranging from gentle to vociferous. Chris Mooney leapt to the defence of what is, after all, his profession (and one he's damned good at if his book is anything to judge by), and…
evolvingthoughts | June 13, 2007
At the end of August 1932 Einstein wrote "My Credo" in Caputh. The original text was written in German. At the beginning of September he read it for a recording by order and to the benefit of the German League of Human Rights.
"My Credo
It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet…
evolvingthoughts | June 12, 2007
Marc Ereshfsky's entry on "Species" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been updated, though not to remove the classic "Essentialism Story" that has been called into question by a number of scholars lately. Under the fold, I will quote Marc's comments and critique them. [I can do this because Marc is a hell of a nice guy, and not at all precious about such stuff, at least not so far. I will test him, though. I should stress that Marc is not the originator of the Essentialist Story - it was developed between 1958 or so and 1982 largely by Mayr.]
Since Aristotle, species have been…
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2007
So the record for the "world's largest organism" has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay "A Humongous Fungus Among Us" back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack.
The previous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is now replaced by a related mushroom stand, Armillaria ostoyae, in Oregon's Blue Mountains. But I have my doubts. The term "organism" here has a meaning rather different to "relatively undifferentiated mass of related stands". In fact, I want to talk about the notion of an organism, and…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2007
The world is divided, runs the old joke (which I heard when it wasn't so old), into two kinds: those who divided the world into two kinds, and those who don't. [There's actually an interesting feature of the history of logic here that... never mind. Later.]
We all, or very nearly all, like to divide the world into those who are like-minded to us and those who are not. It is not just a matter of religion, but of sport, music, politics, ethnicity, and tastes in literature. And although we do not express it out loud, we think that we have chosen the best of all these alternatives. Of course…
evolvingthoughts | June 9, 2007
Bertrand Russell, a leading philosopher in his prime, was also a wonderful writer. And, it appears, many of my views were formed when I was but still Young in the Discipline of Philosophy by reading Russell. Here is an essay (stolen from here) from 1953, when I still was not, in which he expresses quite clearly what the differences and implications of being an agnostic are relative to atheists. He steadfastly refuses to call atheists rabid dogs or militant terrorists, however, though he was no milquetoast.
I think, re-reading this after 40 years, that we might suggest that those who think…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2007
The Leiter Report has a brief obit. Richard Rorty was a significant thinker, although I must say that what I learned from his work Philosophy and the MIrror of Nature, I had to unlearn later on. But that is the way of philosophical discussions.
More from Telos, courtesy of Mixing Memory.
I just heard from those who knew him that he died after a 15 month battle with pancreatic cancer. Until shortly before his death, he was quite active.
evolvingthoughts | June 6, 2007
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science.
[Part 1; Part 2]
There are three major phases in the philosophical view of science. The first was around in the nineteenth century - science is the use of inductive logic based on data to draw conclusions about the laws of nature. Thick books described this in detail, and they are still worth reading, in particular a book by W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, published in the 1870s. But induction, as anyone who has studied Hume knows, is problematic. You simply…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2007
Philosophy of science deals largely with two general topics: Metaphysics and Epistemology. These are general topics of philosophy, and in the philosophy of science they deal only with the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So there are no overarching debates about how you can tell if you're dreaming, or whether we are all brains in a matrix-style vat. But there are local issues, as it were, that reflect these general concerns of philosophers.
[Part 1, Part 3]
Metaphysics covers many things
Metaphysics is a hard field to define. It is named after the book of Aristotle, which…