Colloque international sur Langage, Pensée et Action

Daniel Vanderveken has organized a meeting on the themes of his edited volume Logic, Thought and Action in Quebec City.  I’ll be presenting a paper called Propositional Attitudes and Identity which evaluates different ways of handling multiple modes of identification.  The event is set up in the form of a series of round-table discussions, so we should see some fruitful conversation.

Here’s the program for the meeting: http://www.acfas.net/programme/c_634.html

Sortition

Tomorrow evening (April 25th) 5-8pm I’ll be the speaker in the seminar on Domination in Organization at UACJ in Ciudad Juarez.   The topic will be sortition as an alternative to current kinds of representative democracy.  I’m strongly in favor of sortition and will argue for it tomorrow.  The venue is the central library at UACJ, the Autonomous University of Juarez, which is located at the social sciences campus (ICSA).  The room, which is called “Sala Dual”, is at the entrance of the library to the right.  This talk will be in English, with Spanish simultaneous translation.  It’s open to the public and of course it’s free.

I’ll be talking about problems that arise when we try to aggregate preferences (Arrow’s theorem and the like) and will try to explain why I think random sampling of representatives from the general population makes sense as an alternative to the current models of representative democracy.  This is a first shot at trying to say something meaningful about sortition.

Philosophers and their Pains

Haven’t been posting to this blog due to a very heavy work schedule over the past few months.  The good news is that Paco Calvo and I have nearly finished editing The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (we’re still waiting on one last contributor to send us his chapter) and we hope to have the book out very soon.  This has been a mammoth project.

This Friday I’ll be presenting to the neuphi group at BU.  I’m looking forward to seeing lots of old friends and colleagues.  The topic is pain and I’ll post some slides shortly.

Lost knowledge and future cosmologies

An interesting piece on the idea that the universe will develop in such a way as to make epistemic access to its past impossible.  The video summarizing the idea is here.  Skeptical worries about induction and inquiry usually concern themselves with possible futures.  This is a nice reminder that epistemology needs to consider possible pasts too.

Intuition and Philosophical Methodology

Quick plug for my paper on intuition, which was just published in an interesting looking issue of Axiomathes. (here)

Astract: Intuition serves a variety of roles in contemporary philosophy. This paper provides a historical discussion of the revival of intuition in the 1970s, untangling some of the ways that intuition has been used and offering some suggestions concerning its proper place in philosophical investigation. Contrary to some interpretations of the results of experimental philosophy, it is argued that generalized skepticism with respect to intuition is unwarranted. Intuition can continue to play an important role as part of a methodologically conservative stance towards philosophical investigation. I argue that methodological conservatism should be sharply distinguished from the process of evaluating individual propositions. Nevertheless, intuition is not always a reliable guide to truth and experimental philosophy can serve a vital ameliorative role in determining the scope and limits of our intuitive competence with respect to various areas of inquiry.

If you don’t have access to Springer journals, I have a draft of the paper here

Claytronics

Seth Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon works on the practical side of the idea of progammable matter or what he’s calling claytronics. I like how simple and homemade it all looks in the videos. There are some nice videos of his ‘catoms’ in action here.

Pretty cool applications are easy to imagine. Here’s the story from Computerworld which sketches the promise and peril of shape-shifting robot swarms in the living room. There’s an eerie corporate-style video here.

Tons of material here for philosophers.

Modeling Communications Flow

Some of our work on discovering emergent properties in communications networks is posted here on this draft website. If you’re interested in emergence, multi-agent systems and the like, some of our work may be useful to you. Please send us any comments you have. This is very much a work in progress.

Congratulations to Vincent Hendricks

Vincent  has won an extraordinary honor in his home country.  Brit and Leiter carry the details.   Very well-deserved.   If you haven’t read it yet, this should encourage you to read Vincent’s Mainstream and Formal Epistemology

We’re looking forward to his visit to old El Paso in April.

Boltzmann’s Brain

Very nice article in NYT to boggle the brain. I haven’t digested the thing fully and don’t have anything sensible to say about it, but here it is. Tip of the hat to Larry Hardesty who says that this proves that Swampy the swampman is more probable than you and I.

Happy 2008!

It’s embarrassing to confess that (as predicted by older and wiser colleagues) I’m growing to like the eastern APA more as the years go by.  That’s a really bad sign, no?

I’m not supposed to like it and I know the philosophy job market bloggers will be pissed, but I had a really great time.  Alas, I saw relatively few of the actual sessions because of my duties torturing people at the interview table.  I was able to catch a few of the talks though.  Appiah’s experimental philosophy paper was superb and put just the right perspective on things.  The story about Naess’ surveys and interviews of the Norwegian public concerning the word ‘true’ was  delivered brilliantly. Very funny stuff.  It’s hard to know what Appiah meant by history being a source for experimental ethics, but I suppose he makes the case for that in his new book.  The talk was a presidential address and will be published and easily available, strongly recommended.

Van Fraasen’s Carus Lectures had some interesting historical insights but nothing that would cause this naturalist to become an empiricist.  Interestingly, he didn’t mention Susan Haack’s paper ‘Two faces of Quine’s Naturalism’ which makes a stronger case for the point about the inherited scientific world view as an unexamined starting point and unpacks the idea that Quine uses ’science’ in two incompatible (?) ways in the articulation of his naturalism.

Putnam’s Dewey Lecture was a bit odd, I thought.  The Dewey lectures are meant to provide something like an intellectual autobiography, so he discussed 12 philosophers who had influenced him.  Strangely he never mentioned Goodman or Dreben.  Also absent were Kripke and Lewis.  But leaving out Dreben, given his influence on Representation and Reality, seems very strange.    There is something philosophically interesting about the twists and turns in Putnam’s intellectual life that I can’t quite pin down and I was expecting to hear something about what it means for a philosopher to change his mind so fundamentally and with relatively high frequency.  Not just the shifting attitude to functionalism, but the internal realism and normativity stuff, the worries about scientism, his attitude towards religious belief, etc.  It would also have also been interesting to know how he sees the connection between his career as a mathematician and his career as a philosopher.   Anyhow, the Lisbon conference on Complexity in Social Systems is coming up next week and I’ll be talking about models of emergence.  The link to the event is here. These guys are pretty high-tech and will have a video stream of the talks up soon after the conference.  Then, if you’d like, you’ll be able to say what I should have talked about.