Congratulations to Vincent Hendricks

Congratulations to my co-editor and collaborator Vincent. He has accepted a position as Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Philosophy in August. Vincent was previously Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University, Denmark. Nice move for Vincent.

Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology

Paco Calvo and I are very pleased to announce the appearance of The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology.

Reviews

‘The essays here, by outstanding scholars in philosophy of psychology, are exemplary for their theoretical sophistication, informative explanations of empirical work, and balanced overviews of relevant research areas. Nobody interested in philosophy of psychology will want to be without this excellent volume.’ – David Rosenthal, City University, New York, USA

‘This collection provides an exceptionally wide-ranging review of recent advances and theoretical disputes in psychology, and closely related issues in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. It reflects philosophical sophistication, scientific expertise, and historical sensitivity.’ – Margaret Boden, University of Sussex, UK

‘This is a highly useful and timely collection of essays by philosophers who consider advances in cognitive neuroscience and their relevance for the philosophy of mind. This is a compendium that will help connect the two cultures and I enthusiastically endorse this volume to both communities.’ – Howard Eichenbaum, Boston University, USA

‘An excellent collection of new essays, many by major contributors to the literature. No library or individual interested in current work in the philosophy of psychology should wish to be without it.’ – George Graham, Georgia State University, USA

To order this title, and for more information, click here

PhilPapers.org

David Bourget and David Chalmers at the Australian National University are maintaining a very useful aggregator for papers in philosophy.    I just saw it today thanks to a post on Brian Leiter’s blog.

I’ve already found some papers I hadn’t known about and that are relevant to things I’m working on.  The fine-grained search is very useful.   Fills some gaps in philosopher’s index and is faster, I suppose.   It is a mighty project,  and a really cool service to the community.  Many thanks David and David.

Complexity Sciences Winter School 2009 and CFP

In conjunction with a new doctoral program in complexity at ISCTE (University of Lisbon) Rui Lopes, Jorge Louçã, and I are hosting a winter school in complexity. (January 5-10 2009) The focus of the winter school will be social structures and communications networks. If you are interested in these areas, please consider attending: More details here

On January 10th we plan to close the winter school with the second annual workshop of the ICC. The event consists of an intense series of presentations and ample time for conversation. I thought our first meeting was very interesting with lots of productive interdisciplinary conversation. The workshop, like the winter school will also cover the topic of social structures in communication networks. It would be great to have participation from philosophers and anyone interested in these topics should consider sending an abstract. More details here

Epistemology 5 Questions

Check out Vincent’s latest interview book, co-edited with Duncan Pritchard.  These projects are very useful and revealing.  Bravo Duncan and Vincent.

More info here:

El Paso in the Economist

The Economist has a brief, but accurate discussion of the situation in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez here.

Pain and Embodiment

These slides (here) outline an argument against Kripkean knowing-the-essence style arguments for dualism.  The talk makes the following claim: We don’t know the essence of a token of pain to be its painfulness (Contra Kripke) Do we know the essence of the type pain? Well, is there any way to get at the type apart from our access to the tokens? If not, then only in the most trivial and uninformative sense do we really know that pain is painful.  I’m guessing that other people have said similar kinds of things already and I’ll be revisiting the argument of this talk and rewriting the paper [which was recently rejected (no ref reports...) by some journal] when I finish up the paper for Jacob Busch and PD Magnus’ volume (as usual I’m late on that).

In any event, I’d be grateful for any critical comments on these slides.

Applying cellular automata

Like most scientific models, CA are generally conceived such that interactions with the world beyond their boundaries are excluded or tightly controlled. CA are exaggerated versions of this traditional scientific modeling strategy insofar as their objects are characterized in the most minimal form possible, such that their only relevant features are those that are subject to the rules governing the model. Günter Küppers and Johannes Lenhard (2005) note that even though a computational model may be based on theoretical models, e.g. a system of non-linear partial differential equations, “they require further steps of formal treatment because they have to be implemented into a computer. In this sense simulation models are partly independent from the underlying theoretical model.”(2005, 7) This independence partly results from the need to provide a computational implementation, but it also results from the process of abstraction and insulation that is involved in crafting a computational model. For example, the objects in a CA are cells whose behavior is determined solely by the rules of the model. In traditional scientific modeling, it would be a mistake to claim that the identity and of the objects under consideration is completely exhausted by the rules or laws governing the model. For instance, in a gravitational model, while the equations might apply to point masses in a system, the objects whose behavior is of interest are extended physical objects rather than the point masses that figure in our equations. Insofar as they are intended as models of some real physical situation, the nature of the objects treated by a gravitational model is not exhausted by the laws governing a model in which equations govern point masses. The intended application of a gravitational model is a system of extended bodies rather than a set of point masses. It would be perverse, for instance to claim that gravitational models should be evaluated by reference to their success in applying to systems of point masses. It is trivially true that the intended application of the model determines our interpretation of the objects which feature in the model itself. That the properties and behavior of the explananda are only partially captured by the simulation is what permits the possibility of improving the model.

Two senses of emergence in ‘computational emergence’

Revisiting the literature on emergence and computational models, it occurs to me that it’s worth thinking more about the distinction between the emergent features of an executable object and the emergent features of the things that modelers hoped to capture.  I discussed this in a paper on computational models of emergence and wrote more or less the following:

As far as I can tell, when computer scientists use the term ‘computational emergence’ they usually mean to mark some feature of a process which the software designer did not intentionally code into the algorithms which generate the process. As such, emergent features are sometimes described in loose terms as not having been ‘hard coded’ into the source code of an executable object. In most practical programming contexts emergent properties are either of little interest or are a nuisance to be avoided. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s computer scientists proposed actively exploiting features of emergent computing in the attempt to model emergent features of the natural world.

For example, Stefanie Forrest writes: “…interesting and useful computational systems can be constructed by exploiting interactions among primitive components, and further, that for some kinds of problems (such as modeling intelligent behavior) it may be the only feasible method.” (1990, 1) Thus, emergent computing is both a result of the unanticipated interplay of parts of an executable object and a way of modeling the appearance of putatively emergent properties. As such, on Forrest’s account, emergence is both a property of the computational model itself and a property of the objects being modeled. While the literature on computational emergence sometimes tends to conflate these two roles for the notion of emergence, the distinction is indispensable if we hope to understand the explanatory role of computational models of emergence.

This seems like a relatively simple point.

MA program in philosophy at UTEP (Deadline extended to July 15)

I know that this is a bit late, but:

We are accepting online applications for the MA program in philosophy at UTEP here . Our deadline for this Fall is July 15th. We will be offering research assistantships and teaching assistantships for outstanding applicants. This is a two-year, terminal MA program. We will make our decisions on admission and financial support by the end of July and classes begin in late August.

The cost of living in El Paso is very affordable and tuition at UTEP is quite reasonable.

See you in August!