Philosophy

... and, if that philosopher is Brian Weatherson, you'll get a detailed consideration of cost, benefits, and rational strategies like this one: Voting is a lot like playing an n-player Prisoners Dilemma with the other people who (loosely speaking) share the values that underlie your vote. I'm taking values to be defined loosely enough here that it includes most people who vote the same way you do. You'd prefer that all of you vote to all of you not voting. Given turnout rates in the U.S., that's pretty much always the difference between winning and losing. But conditional on what the other…
Eric Schwitzgebel, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and Fiery Cushman, a psychology post-doc at Harvard, are conducting an online experiment which involves comparing philosophers' and non-philosophers' responses to questions about moral dilemmas. They got plenty of philosophers to do the experiments, but they need more non-philosophers for the comparison group. Their "Moral Sense Test" asks respondents for their takes on various moral dilemmas. They say that people who have taken other versions of this test have found it…
Over at Effect Measure, Revere takes issue with a science educator's hand-wringing over what science students (and scientists) don't know. In a piece at The Scientist, James Williams (the science educator in question) writes: Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology. So how can these hopeful young trainees possibly teach science to children so that they become scientifically literate? How…
We're nearly to the halfway mark (in terms of time) on Blogger Challenge 2008 and the mommy bloggers are still leaving us in their dust. We've told you about the school kids you could help by donating to our challenges, we've offered small incentives (and big incentives). Today, the news comes from our benevolent overlords at Seed that they'd like to help us coax some donations from you by offering more prizes. How to win great ScienceBlogs prizes: First, make a donation (from $5 on up) to any of the challenges mounted by ScienceBlogs bloggers. After donating, forward your email receipt to…
If the trolley problem is not known to you, I would recommend Kwame Anthony Appiah's Experiments in Ethics. It is one of those works which combines brevity with density, a feast of ideas laid out before you which is nevertheless consumable in a minimal span of time. And Appiah is an engaging writer to boot, switching seamlessly between informal and elevated registers. I suspect the last is a reflection of his interactions with younger people in the form of graduate students in concert with his British philosophical training. In Experiments in Ethics Appiah takes the tack of an…
Well? It's a good question! Answer it! Every one of you!
One of the big things philosopher-types like to do with their students is work on extracting arguments from a piece of text and reconstructing them. This can be useful in locating sources of disagreement, whether they be specific premises or inferences. But some chunks of text that seem like they ought to have arguments that can be extracted and reconstructed end up being ... opaque. For example, this question and answer between Katie Couric and Sarah Palin (transcript by way of Shakesville): Couric [on tape]: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class…
From The National Humanities Center: The National Humanities Center will host the third and final conference on "The Human & The Humanities," November 13 - 15, 2008, once again attracting scientists and humanities scholars to discuss how developments in science are challenging traditional notions of "the human." Events will begin on the evening of November 13 with a lecture from noted neurologist and author Oliver Sacks at the William and Ida Friday Center in Chapel Hill, NC. This event is free, but guests must register in advance to guarantee seating. Other speakers and special guests…
Alex, Dan and John Wilkins have wise things to say about metaphors in biology, Big Biology and a recent article by Sir Paul Nurse.
I doubt whoever chose today's "quote of day" as it appears on my RSS-fed personalized Google homepage, was thinking about the recent climate-denying nonsense at the American Physical Society. But the timing was impeccable. First, the quote: My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared. - PJ Plauger When it comes to the climate crisis, that's bang on. Of course, there is always room for dissent on scientific issues, but the key to making sense of any resulting debate is to know who is qualified to weigh in and who isn't. The…
There's a question I've been thinking about intermittently (over the course of several years) that I thought I'd lay out here, on the theory that you all have a track record of sharing smart and insightful things (including related questions of your own) in the comments. One of the things that potentially makes a human life good (at least, from the point of view of the person living it) is setting aims and directing one's efforts toward meeting those aims. For many people, these aims run along the lines of making the world a better place for others in some particular way - by reducing…
Ronald A. Howard and Clinton D. Korver (with Bill Birchard), Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life. Harvard Business Press, 2008. I fully embrace the idea that ethics should not just be a subject of esoteric inquiry in philosophy departments but rather a central feature of our lives as we live them. Yet how exactly that's supposed to happen in a world where lots of people have been able to avoid ethics classes altogether presents a bit of a puzzle. Sure, we are presented with lessons about ethics outside the classroom, by family, friends…
Blogging has been a bit light lately, in part because I was persuaded to teach half of a graduate seminar during the summer session. The first half of the seminar looked at philosophical approaches to epistemology (basically, a set of issues around what counts as knowledge and what could count as reasonable ways to build knowledge). The second half, which I am teaching, shifts the focus to what scientists seem to be doing when they build knowledge (or knowledge claims, or theories, or tentative findings). In the course of our reading for this week, I came upon a couple passages in a chapter…
From page 33 of Brian Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper: I came to realize, then that what matters above all else in politics is what happens, not what people say about it. And for the most part what happens is independent of my wishes. In politics especially, people tend to allow their wishes to influence their assessment of reality, and to mix up the two even at conscious levels of thinking. For instance, all my life I have bet on elections, and all my life I have found that many people assume that what I am betting on…
Over at Philosopher's Playground, Steve Gimbel asks why the philosophy of chemistry is such a recent discipline given how long there has been serious activity in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of physics. He floats a few possible answers -- as it happens, the same options those of us who actually do philosophy of chemistry encounter fairly regularly. After responding briefly to these possible reasons for thinking that there shouldn't be a distinct philosophy of chemistry, I'll offer a brief sketch of what a philosophy of chemistry might be about.* (1) There are no big questions…
In his book Indiscrete Thoughts, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota spoofed a certain style of book reviewing: The bane of expository work is Professor Neanderthal of Redwood Poly. In his time, Professor Neanderthal studied noncommutative ring theory with the great X, and over the years, despite heavy teaching and administrative commitments (including a deanship), he has found time to publish three notes on idempotents (of which he is justly proud) in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. Professor Neanderthal has not failed to keep up with the latest developments in…
Will Wilkinson takes anarchist Crispin Sartwell over the proposition that an illegitimate state is therefore a morally indefensible state: The point is: Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because "If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible" is a false premise. The existence of a moral justification, in terms of flourishing, say, doesn't entail final moral justification, since there is no fact of the matter about the final authoritative moral vocabulary. Read the whole thing. Hat-tip: Marginal Revolution
Steven Wiley, writing in the Scientist, discusses the contradiction of the recent fad for "hypothesis-free" research: Following a recent computational biology meeting, a group of us got together for dinner, during which the subject of our individual research projects came up. After I described my efforts to model signaling pathways, the young scientist next to me shrugged and said that models were of no use to him because he did "discovery-driven research". He then went on to state that discovery-driven research is hypothesis-free, and thus independent of the preexisting bias of traditional…
Michael L. Anderson emailed to inform me about this forthcoming event: Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology June 26-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PARegistration is now open; deadline Thursday, June 5 -- 12:00pm EST Note that early registration is suggested, as the reserved hotel block is likely to fill quickly. The 2008 conference will feature presentations by: George Ainslie, Michael L. Anderson, Louise Antony, Peter Carruthers, Louis Charland, Anjan Chatterjee, David Danks, Felipe De Brigard, Michael Devitt Marthah Farah…