Objects and Arrows

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.

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.

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.

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.