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  • 2010
    • September
      • Puerto Rico and the Suits payoff
        10/09/02
        In this post, I consider the game Puerto Rico as a counterexample to Bernard Suits' definition of game. This, finally, is the example that got me started blogging on the subject in the first place. For previous posts, see here, here, and here.

        In the last couple of posts, I've b

    • August
      • Suits not of cards, but of chess
        10/08/30
        Here is more about Bernard Suits' Grasshopper. It picks up where the post on RPGs and the post on Suit's definition of 'game' left off.

        Recall that Suits defines a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." As such, playing a game invo

      • Duck and drake clusters
        10/08/27
        The following post about homeostatic property clusters (HPCs) is pretty long, so I've split it into several sections. Here's the very short version: Ereshefsky and Matthen argue that the HPC approach to natural kinds fetishizes similarity and is undone by polymorphism. I argue that it'

      • Following Suits
        10/08/26
        I had meant to quickly write a follow up to my previous post on Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper, but my the ideas proved to be more tangled in the writing than they were in the thinking. Matt has pressed for the actual definition, so I should actually get to it even if I don't have anything

      • Trying on old Suits
        10/08/22
        Late in the last century, on Ryan Hickerson's recommendation, I read Bernard Suit's The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. The core of the book is Suit's definition of 'game.' Although the definition was originally laid out in a 1967 article in the journal Philosophy of Sc

      • The brew at Tazza D'oro
        10/08/22
        I am on sabbatical for the Fall and a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science. This is my first full day in Pittsburgh, and I'm writing this from a coffeehouse in Highland Park. Whether sabbatical will mean more blogging or less will have to be seen.

      • A specimen of 'performance' talk
        10/08/17
        I have argued in print that both the dated event of employing musical instruments (which is unrepeatable) and the sound structure (which can be recorded and reproduced) can reasonably be thought of as the performance, depending on context and purpose. The former sense is obvious, and the latter come

      • Slice of life, slightly stale
        10/08/10
        I only get so many opportunities for slice-of-life blogging, since I have neither cats nor kids. I wrote the following last month, but for some reason didn't post it.

        As a graduate student, I developed the habit of doing my academic writing in coffee houses. I went to the office if I

      • Further adventures
        10/08/04
        Janet's blog Adventures in Ethics and Science has moved away from the professional blog collective Scienceblogs to the amateur collective Scientopia. Some links:

        Her blog's new location

        My comparison of her old and new banners, a discussion which I decided belonged ov

    • July
      • TeX doodle recognition
        10/07/16
        Via TAR, I just discovered the group blog PhilTeX which is about technology for philosophers. And via PhilTex, I discovered Detexify. This latter item is a very clever web page for finding LaTeX symbol commands. It allows you to doodle in a symbol. Then it suggests various LaTeX commands for produci

      • Should we phone ET?
        10/07/04
        Stephen Hawking has been a great science popularizer. I first encountered his work when I was in junior high school. Before that, when people had asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my standard answer had been cartoonist. After Hawking, my standard answer was astrophysicist. I went on to be a

    • June
    • May
      • Deconstructive empiricism
        10/05/26
        I've been thinking about Bas van Fraassen's epistemology. Here are some distinct points: a clarification, an objection, and a question

        The clarification
        The usual story goes like this: Anti-realism as a semantic doctrine was seen to be a dead letter, but van Fraassen's

      • x 1.28
        10/05/26
        Last week I released a new version of forall x: 1.28. It corrects several typographical errors, some of which make a substantive logical difference.

        The blurb description on the back page still says 'assistant professor', although that is only accurate for the moment. My tenure

    • April
      • Short subject on featured articles
        10/04/15
        In my little study of Wikipedia, I initially stumbled on the difference between featured and regular articles. If I had thought about it in advance, I would not have tested any featured articles at all. I had included them, however, so I reported the results and suggested that the data about feature

    • March
      • Approaches to thinking about approaching grad school
        10/03/25
        Several undergraduates have come to me recently asking about philosophy grad school. There are several wrong approaches to take in answering such students.

        The Polyanna approach would be to enthusiastically encourage them and, on the subject of job prospects, either implicitly or explicit

    • February
      • Once more the New Wave
        10/02/10
        More shilling: Here is the full text of the introduction to New Waves in Philosophy of Science. I wrote it with Jacob Busch, with whom I editted the volume.

        New Waves in Philosophy of Science
        The explicit aim of volumes in this series is to collect contributions from young researcher

      • Surfing the new wave
        10/02/08
        When Matt asked about the contents of New Waves in Philosophy of Science, I was unable to turn up anything helpful on-line. So I just cut and pasted the table of contents.

        Turns out that I had only looked on the publisher's US website and in the Amazon listing for the book. I have si

      • How to be better at fraud
        10/02/06
        We often assess claims based on plausibility of style and content. In writing about Wikipedia, I argue that these assessments can be frustrated by community editing. The implausible details can be taken out of false accounts, making the falsity harder to detect. Some people respond to my argument by

    • January
      • Tales in a subdued palette of chestnut and white
        10/01/28
        Charles Sander Peirce observed that it's a poor bet to insist that science will never be able to solve some question. Make the bet, he says, and[t]he likelihood is that it will be solved long before you could have dreamed possible. Think of Auguste Comte who when asked to name any thing that co

      • Grue on a Tuesday
        10/01/26
        My copy of Philosophy of Science* arrived today, and I've just read Ingemar Nordin's "Technology and Goodman's Paradox." The central claim of the article is that the problem of induction is primarily an issue about whether or not to believe theories and so does not arise for

      • Contents may settle during shipping
        10/01/25
        Matt asks about the contents of the recently released New Waves in Philosophy of Science. Amazon has a preview for other books in the series, but not this one yet. I'm sure it will in due time, but here's the list of contributions anyway:

        1. Juha Saatsi, Form vs. Content-driven

      • Book and Pitt
        10/01/24
        Two brief items of note.

        1. New Waves in Philosophy of Science, a volume of new essays that I coedited with Jacob Busch, has now been published. The link is to the Amazon page.

        2. I've been invited to be a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsbur

      • It's only a question
        10/01/06
        [A couple of months ago, I was invited to join the giant group blog It's Only a Theory. This post is the first one since then that's been suitable for that venue, so I've cross posted.]

        Although there is not consensus about what would make a natural kind natural, most tradi

  • 2009
    • December
      • 2009 in review
        09/12/03
        Here's the annual bullet-point summary of my blogging for 2009. The crude algorithm takes the first sentence from the first post of every month; cf. 2006, 2007, and 2008.

        I. Via daring fireball and makkintosshu, I learned that the URL http://www.apple.com/hypercard now redirects to t

      • How to be a pluralist about art
        09/12/02
        Christy Mag Uidhir and I coauthored a paper on art concept pluralism. It's now forthcoming in Metaphilosophy. Although their backlog of papers means that it won't be in print for over a year, I have posted a preprint.

        Link: Art Concept Pluralism

    • November
      • Alarm clock belief change
        09/11/30
        Suppose I wake up one morning and find that I believe something (call it Q) that I had not believed before. Of course, this might happen if I discover some new evidence for Q when I wake up; for example, Q might be 'There is a dog in the street' and I am woken up by its barking. It may als

    • October
      • In the kingdom of the abstruse
        09/10/31
        I am teaching a course in metaphysics this semester. After starting with 'On What There Is', we've been working through The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics. I used a book from the same series in my epistemology class a couple of years ago. They strike a nice balance between including c

      • The skinny on the brief
        09/10/08
        A paper is either good or it is not. A good short paper is better than a good long one, because it gets right to the good stuff with hemming and hawing; if Gettier had buried his examples deep in some other discussion, the problem might not have been named after him. A bad short paper is better than

      • Brown on me on d-cog
        09/10/07
        Matthew Brown has a forthcoming paper on science as distributed cognition (d-cog). He gives a generous amount of attention to my discussion of the issue.

        In my paper, I characterize d-cog as meaning that a cognitive task is implemented by a process which is not contained inside one thinke

      • Happy fourth blogiversary!
        09/10/04
        Thus concludes year four of the blog. The statistics stand at 171 entries using 83,750 words. That's 34 entries and 24,882 words accumulated in the past year. This reverses the year-over-year trend of decreasing blogging.

        Admittedly, a great many of the words were William Leue's

    • September
      • Hectic days make light blogging
        09/09/30
        When I have teach logic to one or two hundred students, the class is in one the university's lecture centers. All the LCs have digital projectors, so I can put up tables and charts as needed. Mostly I work through examples which I adapt on the fly, however, so I use the board.

        The o

    • August
      • What I say about theories
        09/08/14
        I just posted a new draft of my paper arguing for theory concept pluralism.

        It is as good an occasion as any to comment on this blog post by Ron Giere, which I meant to comment on back in March. Giere says that the big motivation for the semantic view of theories was to better reflects ho

      • Swamp menace threatens omnipotent god
        09/08/04
        I have always thought that the Swampman thought experiment is analytic philosophy at its worst. I recently came up with a variant of it that might steal the title.

        Explaining the idea requires that I explain the original Swampman and whinge a bit about how terrible it is. So, details belo

    • July
      • Historical echoes, part 6
        09/07/10
        This is the final part of William Leue's history of the UAlbany Philosophy Department. For context, see part I, part II, part III, part IV, and part V.

        The final chapter includes the foreshadowed revolution, and the pseudonymous poetry becomes moreso.

        This installment is f

      • Historical echoes, part 5
        09/07/08
        This is the penultimate part of William Leue's history of the UAlbany Philosophy Department. For context, see part I, part II, part III, and part IV.

        This chapter is mostly about Bill Reese, who was still around as a professor emeritus when I came to Albany in 2004. He had the large

      • Historical echoes, part 4
        09/07/06
        This is the fourth part of William Leue's history of the UAlbany Philosophy Department. For context, see part I, part II, and part III.

        Leue gives us more of his thinly pseudonymous poetry along with the rumblings of the coming revolution.

        This installment is from Phib v 1

      • Go for the gold
        09/07/03
        Open Access (OA) publication seems like a no-brainer for scholarly articles. We are not paid directly for our writing; we act from the altruistic motive of adding to human knowledge and from the selfish motive of furthering our own careers. Both motives are thwarted if the articles are locked up in

      • Publishing in the echo chamber
        09/07/02
        In these two related items, Wikipedian prose appears in print:

        1. Dublin student Shane Fitzgerald invented a quotation and attributed it to the recently-deceased composer Maurice Jarre in the latter's Wikipedia entry.* The quote was subsequently printed by several major newspapers in

    • June
      • Vanity searches and scholary productivity
        09/06/11
        Poking around on Google Scholar, I can check how often my publications have been cited.* Subtracting instances of me citing myself, my most cited papers are Epistemology and the Wikipedia (with 7 citations) and Distributed cognition and the task of science (with 6 citations).

        In science s

      • Meet the new book, same as the old book
        09/06/04
        I uploaded the first new version of forall x in over a year. There are plenty of corrections, but no substantive changes. For uninteresting reasons, this new version is 1.27 - three increments later than the previous version 1.24.

    • May
      • In other forms, forall x
        09/05/18
        I wrote forall x primarily for use in my own logic course, to fit my syllabus in a way that was affordable for students. I made it available under a Creative Commons license primarily in hopes that other instructors might adopt it.

        I get occasional e-mails from people who are using forall

      • Berkeleyfest
        09/05/14


        I was at Cornell last weekend for the Berkeley Bonanza, organized by Andrew Chignell and Melissa Frankel. I have worked on Reid and taught Berkeley, but I was surprised at the extent to which I had things to say about Berkeley once I was in a room full of Berkeley scholars.

        I

    • April
      • Historical echoes, part 3
        09/04/26
        This is the third part of William Leue's history of the UAlbany Philosophy Department. For context, see part I and part II.

        Leue mentions offhand that the philosopher of science John Winnie got his undergrad degree from UAlbany. For some reason, I like this bit of trivia.

      • Historical echoes, part 2
        09/04/25
        This is the second part of William Leue's history of the UAlbany Philosophy Department. For context, see part I.

        This installment is from Phib v 1 (1972-1973), n 13, pp 55-6.
        [more]
        THE HISTORY OF OUR DEPARTMENT (II)
        Late in February of 1961 I took the Santa Fe from de

      • Historical echoes, part 1
        09/04/24
        A few weeks ago, I posted about back issues of the department bulletin which I discovered while moving furniture into a department storeroom. In them, William Leue wrote a series of articles on the history of the SUNY Albany Philosophy Department. The articles are of interest to me personally, as a

      • Further indeterminate fallout
        09/04/12
        Thinking more about indistinguishable spacetimes has led me to think about the contrast between underdetermination and indeterminacy. Somehow, I wrote a dissertation on the former without clearly thinking through the latter.
        [more]
        In a discussion note that he wrote for the workshop but di

      • Fallout from Pittsburgh
        09/04/09
        A few weeks ago, I participated in a workshop on underdetermination at the Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science. The conference was fabulous, both socially and intellectually. Here's a post growing out of that, specifically about John Manchak's work on global features of spacetime.<

    • March
      • A blog before the internet
        09/03/30
        We have been rearranging our department lounge. Previous efforts have made it less of a cluttered dump, and efforts are now directed at making it less clinical.* Today we got new chairs from university surplus, green relics which were probably purchased for an administrative office in the 1970s.
      • Now with fifty percent more bupkis
        09/03/09
        I recently stumbled across Forbes' America's Best Colleges, which was published last year. The assessment is explicitly intended to break the hegemony of U.S. News & World Report's rankings of American colleges, which seems like a good thing whether or not ratings are ultimately a

      • Two dead senators and an extra Wilhelm
        09/03/08
        Some people have suggested to me that I should try my hand at writing some newspaper op-ed pieces. One natural topic for me, given where my research intersects with the interests of the guy down at the Dairy Queen, is nattering about the Wikipedia. So last month, in response to then current events,

    • February
      • Pluralism takes all kinds
        09/02/28
        A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk to the UNLV philosophy department. I extend a belated thanks to Greg for inviting me and to everyone else for vigorous discussion.

        I presented on theory concept pluralism. There's a woefully old version of the paper here.

        The gist of my

      • What I'll say to the Russians
        09/02/26
        Our department is in the middle of a two-day video conference with philosophers at Moscow State University. The whole thing is pretty freewheeling, with people presenting on the possibility of progress in philosophy and on what they think about the last several decades in their specialty.

      • forall x feedback, gold edition
        09/02/23
        Today I got the student comment forms from my teaching last Fall. Again I asked students about the textbook I wrote for intro logic.*

        The raw data looks like this:

        Did the textbook explain matters clearly?
        yes 69
        meh 6
        no 3
        <

    • January
      • There is no 'you' in 'Wikipedia'
        09/01/26
        As the NY Times reports, the free-wheeling days of Wikipedia editing may be over. The crackdown follows a recent incident in which Wikipedia entries reported Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were reported to be dead. As the Washington Post admits, the false claims only persisted for a few minutes. Nevert

      • Nozick's gedanken machine
        09/01/13
        A propos of nothing, I've been thinking about Nozick's experience machine argument. In the SEP, Roger Crisp summarizes the argument in this way:Imagine that I have a machine that I could plug you into for the rest of your life. This machine would give you experiences of whatever kind you t

      • Popping the stack
        09/01/08
        Via daring fireball and makkintosshu, I learned that the URL http://www.apple.com/hypercard now redirects to the Wikipedia entry for Hypercard. This is a counterpart to the more common sin of bloggers linking uncommon terms in their prose to the Wikipedia entry for that term.* So I'll talk abou

  • 2008
    • December
      • Another essence for existentialism
        08/12/31
        [This post is part of a series; see pt 1. and pt. 2.]

        In the previous installment, I discussed my favorite way of characterizing existentialism: Existentialists believe that human beings are importantly made up of both being (facticity, temporality) and becoming (transcendence, eternity),

      • 2008 in review
        08/12/31
        Here's the bullet-point summary of my blogging in 2008. In accord with tradition, I've taken the first sentence from the first post of every month; cf. 2006 and 2007.

        I: Three items related to papers and publication...

        II: Bridget and Janet both made note of Blogroll

      • An essence for existentialism
        08/12/11
        [This post is part of a series; see pt 1.]

        Here is one concise way of characterizing existentialism:Existentialists believe that human existence is characterized by a tension between being and becoming. The former is a matter of specific moments, facts, and actions. The latter is a matter

      • See Eff Pee
        08/12/11
        Last year's 1st annual Albany grad student conference conference was a great success, and it turns out that the '1st annual' was not mere bluster. The 2nd annual grad conference will focus on political philosophy. Thomas Pogge will be the keynote.

        If you are a grad student

      • Hunting the essence of existentialism
        08/12/08
        'Existentialism' has been a bit of vexed jargon in the 20th century. Teaching existentialism this term, I put some thought into the matter. I have started several times to blog about it (eg) but often my ruminations have threatened to overrun the borders of any reasonable blog post.
        <

    • October
      • Existential notes from the campaign
        08/10/12
        Via Leiter and Erfani, this curious little gem from Bloomberg columnist Jeremy Gerard describing the debate:As the world burned, the presidential candidates were sober, lucid, rarely off topic and always in character last night. Watching it was like having to read Sartre on the first day of spring.T

      • Induction by any other name would smell
        08/10/11
        My paper on demonstrative theories of induction is now forthcoming in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. I just sent off my formatted final draft, which I've mirrored on the website.

        A couple of years ago, I blogged about the worry that putting papers on-line might w

      • Happy third blogiversary!
        08/10/04
        Thus concludes year three of the blog. The statistics stand at 137 entries using 58,868 words. About 14k of those words were from the previous year. If you plot words blogged per year and draw a best fit line, the output reaches zero at the end of the fifth year. However, even if output decreases mo

      • Playing telephone with the echo chamber
        08/10/01
        There's been some blog reaction to my fibs in Wikipedia paper. That's unsurprising, since the paper is freely available on-line and addresses a topic close to some bloggers' hearts.

        What surprises me a bit is that all of the reactions interpret my study as vindicating Wikip

    • September
      • The sincerest form of flattery
        08/09/17
        Philip Kitcher introduced the phrase 'Galilean Strategy' in a 2001 paper to describe a form of realist argument. I wrote about it shortly after, and my paper was published in 2003. Today, the top Google result for the phrase 'galilean strategy' is this page, the abstract of a pap

      • My insidious lies
        08/09/05
        A short paper of mine was just published in First Monday. The abstract is this:A number of studies have assessed the reliability of entries in the Wikipedia at specific times. One important difference between the Wikipedia and traditional media, however, is the dynamic nature of its entries. An entr

      • Courses as dry goods
        08/09/01
        I was recently advising undergraduates as they registered for classes. This Fall, the PeopleSoft database has a new web interface. Now, when students initially select courses, the courses appear in their "shopping cart." The students are not actually enrolled until they "check out.&qu

    • August
      • The birth of trivia
        08/08/15
        At dinner several weeks ago, I mentioned that the word 'broad' to describe a woman originally referred to pregnant cows. I forget why I offered this item of trivia, but several of the people I was dining with were curious about it. One looked at the Online Etymology Dictionary and found an

    • July
      • Their insidious reference
        08/07/28
        Not long ago, I picked up an issue of the Artist's Magazine in an airport. (May 2008, as it happens.) It includes a profile of the painter Costa Vavagiakis. Among other things, it recounts how the artist was impressed by the Charioteer of Delphi as a young boy. Understandably, it does not inclu

      • The pixels or print dilemma for free textbooks
        08/07/23
        Free textbooks have gotten media attention recently. Mostly, they are offered as a solution to the rising cost of higher education. See, for example, this USA Today story. Academic fashion plate that I am, I was ahead of this trend. I wrote an open access logic textbook back before free textbooks we

      • Performance in print
        08/07/03
        Not long ago, I wrote a short paper on musical performance. My interest in the topic was prompted by conversations with Cristyn and various musicians, and further prodded on by my old friend turned philosopher of art Christy Mag Uidhir. Such writing poses the risk that I'll look dilettante, but

    • June
      • Curiouser and curiouser
        08/06/15
        I've posted a new draft of my paper on epistemic significance and natural curiousity.

        In other news, Summer is hot.

    • May
      • A distinct paper on identical rivals
        08/05/15
        One of my first publications was a PSA paper about what I then called the problem of identical rivals. The 'problem' is that an apparent case of underdetermination might not involve any rival theories after all, if the would-be rivals were merely different formulations of the same theory.

      • Big monkey, logic book
        08/05/14
        Rob Helpy-Chalk runs down the options for open access logic books, including forall x. He concludes, "Heck, the Magnus book looks like just the item. That was quick."

      • Meme: Passion Quilt (and merch)
        08/05/10
        Janet tagged me in another meme.*THE RULES:
        Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

        Give your picture a short title.

        Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."

        Link back to th

      • Reid rides again
        08/05/08
        My Reid paper has now appeared at Philosopher's Imprint.

        It's a publication, which is always a good thing, but I'm especially happy with this one. I pointed to an on-line draft of this paper in my first ever blog post. As I've mentioned before, I have a high regard for

      • Brief debriefing
        08/05/07
        Yesterday was the last day of class, and so it was time for the usual debriefing. I asked slightly different questions in 17th&18th c. Philosophy than last year, so I can't compare numbers directly. Considering favorite and lease favorite material with respect to philosophical content, the

    • April
      • What I believe about easy knowledge
        08/04/28
        I've been thinking about this since the conference a couple of weeks ago.

        The problem of easy knowledge is alleged to put the kibosh on reliabilism.* Consider, for example, a situation in which I make a series of perceptual judgments. There are many piles of cardboard tokens on the t

      • Two realisms enter, only one can leave
        08/04/14
        I gave my Saturday over to the UAlbany Grad Student Philosophy Conference, and I am glad I did. There were some very good papers. Props are due to the grad students who organized it. This post records a thought I had during the conference. I'll start by explaining the point in terms of Philip K

    • March
      • Rook takes Bishop, Angler takes Trout
        08/03/25
        In Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment,* Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout argue that epistemology needs to be informed by empirical results about how humans actually reason. I am sympathetic with this approach, having myself advocated using a psychological hammer to crack a traditionally

      • Labouring over master arguments
        08/03/12
        I have been teaching Berkeley in my 17th&18th c. philosophy course. It is always a bit of trip, because students never come to the good bishop's defense. That leaves me in the role of trying to make the view seem as plausible as possible. I won't convince any of them, of course, but I

      • Making teen moms disappear
        08/03/05
        PZ Meyers links to a news item about a Texas high school that is censoring the yearbook. The students staffers of the yearbook wrote a profile of two teen mothers who are part of the graduating class. The excuse for the censorship?Principal Paul Cash said the topic of the article conflicts with the

      • forall x, x provides feedback
        08/03/03
        Last week I received the student comment forms from my teaching last term. Once again, I asked students a number of specific questions about the textbook, forall x.*

        The raw data looks like this:

        Did the textbook explain matters clearly?
        yes 23
        meh

    • February
      • Police help sound bite victim
        08/02/23
        Ron McClamrock and Brian Leiter link to a page at the University of Wellington that offers several answers to the question What is Philosophy? Both approvingly quote this answer:I see philosophy not as groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the sam

      • Cold call
        08/02/08
        Earlier this week, I received a call on my office phone. The caller explained that her son is taking an introductory philosophy course at another college in the area. He is having difficulty with the course, and she hoped that I could recommend a tutor. I asked if the son had spoken with the profess

      • Claiming amnesty
        08/02/04
        Bridget and Janet both made note of Blogroll Amnesty Day. I thought that maybe I should use the occasion to actually add a blogroll here at FoE. Since I have recently begun using Bloglines, generating the list would be as easy as this:



        Adding it to the right-hand column would

    • January
      • Blog software update
        08/01/26
        I have updated to the new version of SimplePHPBlog. This broke the theme I had been using, but I have hammered the default theme into some approximation of it. If the change has broken anything else, please let me know either in comments or by e-mail.

      • The teaching meme
        08/01/25
        Janet has tagged me with the following question: Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?

        The glib answer is that I teach because it pays the bills, and without academic freedom it would be more fun to work at a coffee shop instead.

        A longer answer:

      • I can never post at the same blog twice
        08/01/11
        In the comments at Brian Leiter's blog, several of us have been discussing what it means for the profession that so many philosophy papers are available for download. David Velleman writes: The recent trend toward conducting philosophy in ephemeral venues such as blogs and online postings, with

      • Reaching out toward Exceeding Our Grasp
        08/01/10
        In a previous paper about Kyle Stanford's New Induction, I interpreted it as a wholesale argument and argued that it fails. I had occasion to rethink this while teaching his book, Exceeding Our Grasp, in a seminar last Fall. I now think that it can succeed as a retail argument. I have posted a

      • forall x rides again
        08/01/10
        In my logic class, I offer students extra credit for finding errors in forall x. As errors are discovered and corrected, opportunities for these bonuses are diminishing. I have now fixed the minor errors that students found last Fall, yielding the new version 1.24 [080109]

      • Blog meetup
        08/01/09
        I was in Las Vegas for a couple of days visiting my brother (who blogs at Age Against the Machine), his wife (who blogs at Short Woman, Central Sanity, and the eponymous Bridget Magnus), and their son (who does not blog yet).

        I also took the opportunity to meet up with Greg (who blogs at

      • A trivial trio for the new year
        08/01/01
        Three items related to papers and publication:

        Preprint, postprint
        Christy Mag Uidhir and I had talked about coauthoring a paper on the ontology of musical performance and recording. I even listed the planned collaboration on my faculty activity report a couple of years ago, but we n

  • 2007
    • December
      • Laying Down the Law
        07/12/18
        The New York Times has just run a perverse item about the origin of laws of nature. The article is a muddle in more ways than I can count.

        The author, Dennis Overbye, quotes some physicists as proposing that there might be some underlying random context in which the complex laws of nature

      • Conference Call
        07/12/17
        The students here at UAlbany are organizing an epistemology-themed graduate student conference. As far as I can tell, they have done it autonomously. The masterminds behind the project have a clear vision of what they want to do, have tapped into extradepartmental pots of money, and have exploited t

      • Second annual bulletpoint year in review
        07/12/16
        At the end of 2006, I summarized the year by aggregating the first sentence from the first post of each month. Now, as Janet notes, it's a tradition.

        For 2006, the conclusion of the analysis was that "I seem to be concerned with logic, pragmatism, random bits of pop culture, my

      • Working retail
        07/12/03
        I've been thinking about the distinction between retail and wholesale arguments in philosophy of science. A retail argument is about a specific theory, specific kinds of entity, or a specific practice. A wholesale argument promises a conclusion about all or most of science. Wholesale arguments

    • November
      • Ruminations on type
        07/11/02
        Carefully deployed fonts and typefaces can add clarity and precision to a manuscript, but it makes is unclear what to do when presenting the same material in lecture.

        In forall x, I differentiate bits of the object language from metavariables by writing the former in roman letters and the

      • Glib remarks about taking things seriously
        07/11/01
        Andre Kukla* insists,surely we must agree to the following principle: if there is some chance that we will have to take a claim seriously in the future, then we already have to take it seriously now, albeit perhaps not as seriously.This principle is offered without argument, and Kukla seems to suppo

    • October
      • Yammering on about brevity
        07/10/20
        In a recent discussion with Mark about paper lengths, I claimed that my papers tended to be pretty short. My general inclination: Brevity.

        Curious as to whether this claim is actually true, I dropped all of my papers onto latexcount. Since the files are not precisely the published version

      • Imprint, offprint, inprint
        07/10/14
        My Reid paper has been accepted to one of my favorite journals, Philosophers' Imprint. I'll post a link once the final paper appears. For now, you get these ruminations on electronic journals:

        On-line academic journals are an obvious idea. The primary value in academic publicati

      • The great divide
        07/10/06
        Brian Leiter has claimed that the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy, whatever its merits might have been forty years ago, is no longer useful. Gualtiero Piccinini responds, arguing that there is a real distinction and that it goes like this:Analytic philosophy is a set of overl

      • Happy second blogiversary!
        07/10/04
        Thus concludes year two of the blog. It includes about 20,000 words of blog content, down 20% from the year before.

        Traffic has reached a few hundred mostly anonymous visitors per day. Of course, many of them are looking for the significance of epicycles, footnotes on hamlet, information

    • September
      • Drowning in spam
        07/09/14
        I have had several dozen items of comment spam appear throughout the site in the last 24 hours. I have temporarily turned turned off comments in order to put a lid on it.

        Update: I have upgraded to the latest version of SimplePHPBlog and turned comments back on. I've activated modera

      • Lo, Quine!
        07/09/13
        In Theories and Things and Perspectives on Quine, Quine defines an observation sentence for an individual in this way:If querying the sentence elicits assent from the given speaker on one occasion, it will elicit assent likewise on any occasion when the same total set of receptors is triggered; and

      • Watch Thag simulate the world
        07/09/07
        Scholars typically explain the demise of the Neanderthals by claiming that they were better suited for colder climates and so died out when the Ice Age ended. They had bigger brains than Homo sapiens, however, and so they probably could have still out-thought us. Their cleverness suggests other poss

      • New draft on theories
        07/09/07
        I've wanted to write this paper for quite some time, but the material from different areas has failed to cohere on the previous occasions when I've tried to write it. Now I finally have a complete draft.

        What SPECIES can teach us about THEORY
        ABSTRACT: This paper argues aga

      • Duhem? I never even...
        07/09/04
        I am teaching Poincaré and Duhem in seminar this week. They are both so sensible that reading them elicits a twinge of despair at how little progress has been made in philosophy of science since. They were ahead of their time, of course, and there have been some real advances. This is not a post abo

    • August
      • Who put the we in the wikipedia?
        07/08/25
        Ron alerted me to the existence of Wikipedia Scanner, a service that does the reverse lookup to follow anonymous Wikipedia edits back to their source. As one might expect, it has turned up a number cases in which corporations actively manipulated their own entries. You can get details from Wired-- o

      • Simulation
        07/08/20
        The New York Times Science section recently ran this item on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument. It is an odd article, because the Science section usually touts recent or upcoming research. Bostrom's paper touting the simulation argument was in Phil Quarterly in 2003 and had been circulati

    • July
      • All the chimps give a shout out to Benedict
        07/07/28
        Speaking recently before a bevy of priests, Pope Benedict is reported to have claimed (in effect) that creationism is bunk. In this story, he is quoted as saying that "there is much scientific proof in favour of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our under

      • Whinging about conditionalization
        07/07/18
        Subjective Bayesianism as it is often employed in philosophy of science consists of three commitments:
        PSYCH (the psychological bit) An agent's degrees of belief can be represented as a real number for each proposition of the language.

        SYNCH (the synchronic bit) An agent's

    • June
      • The world is full of strata
        07/06/28
        As Greg noted recently, there are no real measures of scholarly impact for philosophy journals. The blog Brains links to a recent effort by the European Science Foundation to provide such a measure. (I encountered the Brains entry via Brian Leiter's blog.) Various journals in philosophy and sci

      • Ruminations on fecundity
        07/06/12
        Philosophers of science who argue over the virtues of theories typically concentrate on fit with observation, novel prediction, support for intervention, explanation, and unification. For each, there are arguments that it is truth-indicative, that it is not, that it marks a theory worth accepting, t

      • Burst culture and the academic blog
        07/06/09
        Warren Ellis calls blog-writing burst culture, and he argues that it is no substitute for old school, long form writing. Wil Wheaton complains that immersion in burst culture screws up his ability to write slower-paced prose. Wheaton is talking about narrative writing, but I am curious about this pa

      • Ye olde curiosity shoppe
        07/06/09
        Yesterday, I put a draft paper about scientific significance on-line. It is directed largely at tensions in Philip Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy.

        For anyone keeping count, this is the second time I've written a paper in part because of ideas that percolated here in the

    • May
      • A blurb worthy of a book jacket
        07/05/11
        I just posted forall x version 1.23 [070512]

        The update was prompted by a recent e-mail from Nathan Carter, a math prof at Bentley College. He began:I used your textbook in a logic course I taught this past semester and found it very helpful. It is readable, clear, and addresses lots of e

      • The good bishop voted off the island
        07/05/04
        I had my last real class meeting for 17th&18th Century Philosophy yesterday. I asked variants of my usual end-of-term questions:

        Are there any of the authors we studied that you thought were insightful and valuable to read now, in the 21st century?

        Are there any of the auth

      • My sayings
        07/05/03
        Brian Leiter links to a cheeky column by Jonathan Wolff that begins in this way:Several philosophers claim to have had the following conversation on long-haul flights: "And what line of work are you in?" "Me? I'm a philosopher." "Oh, really? And what are some of your sa

    • April
      • The third degree
        07/04/29
        I've heard several reports about Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at MIT, who resigned last week after it was revealed that she had lied about her academic history.

        Twenty-eight years ago, when she got a low-level administrative job at MIT, Jones said that she had a several degrees

    • March
      • Free variables, open access
        07/03/31
        I just uploaded forall x version 1.22, which includes several small changes in response to helpful, unsolicited feedback from Craig Erb. The bigger change with this version is that the license now allows commericial use.

        It has been about a year and a half since I released the first versi

      • Author's rights, by which I mean mine
        07/03/20
        My d-cog paper just appeared in Social Studies of Science. The journal does not provide paper offprints. Instead, they sent me a link which allowed me to download a disk image. On the disk image was an application that allowed me to open a secured PDF. Once I indicated that I was using the computer

      • Author's rights and the community
        07/03/20
        Last week, I attended a session on 'Copyright for Scholarly Authors.' Listening to the spiel, it occurred to me that there was an unresolved tension in the rhetoric.

        Academic journals typically require an author to sign over rights to an article before they'll publish it. I

      • Poppy phenomena
        07/03/18
        I wrote this back in February, but saved it with the intention of honing it further. The examples, which had been on the whiteboard in my office, have now been replaced by some logical formula. So it must be time to post it.

        In Patterns of Discovery, Norwood Russell Hanson provides a figu

    • February
      • Minor ethical aspects of citation
        07/02/23
        Spawning references is an important scholarly strategy:* Begin with a recent article or book on your topic of interest. Look at the list of works cited. Go look at those articles and books. Repeat until you know enough about the topic, you have a sufficient number of references, or you are too exhau

      • Dissonance, duplicity, or duplicity
        07/02/22
        Greg links to an item in the New York Times about Marcus Ross, a guy who got a PhD in geosciences at the University of Rhode Island and now teaches at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Although Ross discusses what the Earth was like millions of years ago in his thesis, he is a young-Earth cre

    • January
      • Too much is never enough
        07/01/22
        The short version: Ratemyprofessor.com was recently acquired by MTV. This is something of which we academics should be aware, and perhaps it is a cause for concern.

        The long version: I have known about the website ratemyprofessor.com for several years. Visitors to the site rate their prof

      • Shiny new versions
        07/01/15
        I recently posted a new draft of my induction paper. Having taught with forall x last term, I had the opportunity to catch some errors and infelicities. They have been exchanged for felicities, and the new version 1.21 is on-line.

      • Miscellaneous F
        07/01/12


        Janet laments the decline of library card catalogs and links to this tool for wallowing in card-file nostalgia.

        When I was a student at UCSD, the library was slowly eliminating their collection of cards. All of the library records were available at computer terminals, and stac

      • Wikis fit wee locks
        07/01/06
        As any regular reader will recall, I have misgivings about the epistemology of the Wikipedia. Other wikis inherit these misgivings, although it really depends on the details of what information the wiki is meant to provide and who participates in maintaining it.

        Two recently-established w

  • 2006
    • December
      • Year in review, bullet point meme edition
        06/12/20
        I try to resist picking up too many blog memes, because none of you really care about my favorite color or what kind of salsa I might be. Today, I succumb.

        The rule (via Janet) is to list the first sentence of your first blog post from each month of the preceding year. Then write a two se

      • Three remarks about inkblots
        06/12/19
        Last week I was thinking about Rorschach tests, the inkblot tests that psychologists once used as diagnostic tools. A subject is shown an inkblot and asked to say what they see. Their response is supposed to indicate something about them. From what I can tell, psychologists no longer think there is

      • Papers hiding and being seen
        06/12/18
        James Beebe posts at the group blog Certain Doubts regarding double-blind peer review and posting preprints on the web. As he notes, putting a preprint of a paper on your website before it has been accepted at a journal makes it possible for referees to search the web, find the draft, and identify y

      • American idol
        06/12/09
        I had the last meeting of my American Philosophy class yesterday. On the last day of a class, I ask students to pick on one reading that they would recommend leaving out next time I teach the course and one reading that they would recommend definitely keeping. After they write down their picks, I ta

      • Data: Bruno, Ilsa, Friedrich
        06/12/02
        I am sometimes envious of philosophers of language, since any interesting turn of phrase can become a datum. Matt Weiner is especially good at turning bon mots into blog posts. I have been lecturing on Quine's 'Two Dogmas' in my American Philosophy class, however, which gives me an oc

    • November
      • Give me a ping, Vasili
        06/11/28
        Some cogno-intellectual blog monkey posts asking for people to link to him in the name of memetic science:People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happ

      • War between the states
        06/11/26
        A recent item in the New York Times asks if the present conflict in Iraq is a civil war or not. A "common scholarly definition" is given, which includes the operationalized requirement of at least 1000 dead including at least 100 from each side. These numbers give a gratifying formal weigh

      • 3... 2... 1... Logic!
        06/11/07
        Three items of forall x news:

        1. I am teaching with again it this semester. Students have turned up a few typos, but nothing major.

        2. For about a year, there were 2-3 downloads of forall x per day. Since mid-September, that has shot up to an average of about 15 downloads per d

    • October
      • The mallet and blank cartridges
        06/10/21
        I have refrained from writing anything about so-called Intelligent Design (ID) for the same reason I have refrained from hitting myself with a mallet. I have been teaching William James' Pragmatism lectures for the last couple of weeks, however, and he takes up the topic of design. The mallet

      • Happy blogiversary!
        06/10/02
        It has been about a year since I launched Footnotes on Epicycles; the one year mark is Wednesday. According to the statistics maintained by the blog software, I have posted over twenty-five thousand words in that time.

        Zow.

        Facing that datum made me wonder: What if I had writte

    • September
      • URL grey
        06/09/27
        I have been migrating between servers and, in the course of doing so, made the decision not to renew fecundity.info after the next year of registration runs out. As such, Footnotes on Epicycles has a new URL. The old one should forward for the next thirteen months or so, so you may change over bookm

      • The Doors for dogs
        06/09/24
        I am teaching Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" in a course on American philosophy. In one passage, Peirce draws an analogy between music and belief. In the course of the analogy, he notes that you can play a song in a higher or lower octave. When you do it is still the same song

    • August
      • When is a planet not a planet?
        06/08/24
        When it's a dwarf planet.

        The voting is complete. The definition of 'planet' approved today had an additional clause: A planet must have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

        This means that Ceres (in the asteroid belt), Pluto, Charon, and Xena (

      • Planet? I usually make it up as I go along
        06/08/23
        The International Astronomical Union (IAU) votes tomorrow in Prague on a proposed definition of the word 'planet.' Space.com has a nice discussion of the proposal here and here.

        There are nine canonical planets. The problem begins because one of them, Pluto, is really not up to

      • Because I can
        06/08/21
        I completed my dissertation after digital technology had overtaken document preparation, but before it overtook the submission and archiving of dissertations. I prepared it in LaTeX, processed it as a PDF, printed it on cotton paper, and submitted it in duplicate to the Office of Graduate Studies an

      • Wikipedia paper: The movie
        06/08/16
        To sum up last weekend: The Computing and Philosophy conference had suitable proportions of computing, philosophy, food, wine, and camaraderie. Kudos to the organizers for running a tight ship.

        I promoted forall x at every reasonable opportunity. I put out fliers and a sample copy in the

      • New versions
        06/08/09
        I've filled the lacuna in Epistemology and Wikipedia. The conference starts tomorrow, and I present Friday.

        I've also posted the updated version of Tom Reid meets Tom Bayes, which continues its quixotic quest to collect rejection notices from the finest philosophy journals.
      • The Wikipedia paper
        06/08/05
        I have a draft of Epistemology and Wikipedia on-line. The paper has existed as detailed notes for quite some time, but I finally hammered it out as paragraphs. It is still waiting on some data, so there is a lacuna in the present draft. I will be presenting it at the Computing and Philosophy Confere

      • I'm just here for the natural kinds
        06/08/01
        In his TV show Good Eats and in his books, Alton Brown explains the physics and chemistry behind various recipes: what flour does at a molecular level, how butter makes biscuits fluffy, and so on. In the introduction to his book I'm Just Here For MORE FOOD, he writes: "To my mind, the grea

    • July
      • Wikipedia on Cartesian Free Masonry
        06/07/27
        I am presenting on the reliability of the Wikipedia in a few weeks, and I wish I had more data.

        A study, reported in Nature earlier this year, tested science entries from Wikipedia and Britannica. I have done some similar work on philosophy entries, although on only a handful of subjects.

      • Holmes again, Holmes again, jiggety jig
        06/07/23
        Brian Weatherson links to a recent episode of The Philosopher's Zone, an Australian radio program. They have it on-line both as audio and transcribed.

        The host, Alan Saunders, is interviewing Greg Restall. They are discussing the fact that, in classical logic, a contradiction entails

      • Defer madness
        06/07/16
        I wrote most of this entry a couple of weeks ago, after Brian Weatherson pointed to the article in question. Something else came up, so I saved it and moved on. Today I went back, cleaned it up, and posted it.

        In a recent paper in Analysis [July 2006, 179-187], Philip Pettit considers th

      • Wee-key-pedia guilt
        06/07/13
        I have been working on a draft of 'Epistemology and the Wikipedia', a paper which I am going to present next month at the NA-CAP conference. In researching the paper, I have occasionally been struck by an interesting phenomenon. Let's call it Wikipedia Guilt.

        The premise of

      • forall x, truth and satisfaction
        06/07/11
        Aaron Schiller used forall x for a course he taught in the Spring. A few weeks ago, I had coffee with him and discussed it. He pointed to two weak spots in the chapter on formal semantics, and also relayed his students' desire for more solved problems in the proofs chapter.

        These com

    • June
      • Any publication you can walk away from is a good publication
        06/06/20
        As I have mentioned before, I had a summer job in graduate school working with Mike Kalichman on The Responsible Conduct of Research website. After I left, I was credited as a coauthor.

        Having just googled my own name, I notice that the whole thing is being reprinted as a serial in the ne

      • Dear Jay, more about natural kinds
        06/06/14
        Jay Odenbaugh wrote a provocative reply to my last post on realism. I was going to leave a short reply in the comments, but it ran long.

        Reply to Jay
        As I understand Jay's reply, LIZ (lizard front ends) might be a legitimate kind. Yet Jay wants to resist accepting any artibrary

      • Great scot, Holmes! That was meant for us.
        06/06/11
        Here is a puzzle about the interpretation of ficition. As I have discussed elsewhere, I recently discovered an oddity in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Dancing Men. Holmes inspects the scene of the crime and finds a spent shell casing in the flower bed. "I thought so," he s

      • Dewey to me one more time
        06/06/01
        Thanks to a kind invitation from Matt, I've been sitting in on a reading group here in San Diego. They had already read two-thirds of the way through Dewey's Logic when I joined them. Fortuitously, they had just reached chapters that speak to the question at issue between Matt and I in our

    • May
      • Chance and credence
        06/05/29
        In his paper at the SEP, Alan Hajek argued for this analogy: One's degree of belief in P being equal to the objective chance of P is like one's categorical belief that P being true. That is, a degree of belief getting the world right consists in it matching the objective chances.

      • Sentry duty and a three-word vocabulary
        06/05/27
        There were many good talks at the SEP last week, and I am still mulling over some of them.

        I'll mention Brian Skyrms' talk briefly, because I am still mulling it over but don't have anything deep to say about it.

        Brian offered simple evolutionary models of animal

      • Rumor Volat
        06/05/18
        Tonight was the opening session of the Society for Exact Philosophy. Walking past Brian Skyrms, I said hi and congratulated him on his new position. He was somewhat taken aback, because he only just agreed to it-- not that it is secret, but there hasn't been a public announcement yet.

      • An angsty tableaux
        06/05/08
        Yesterday was the last class meeting for my Existentialism course. During the discussion, one of the students drew a doodle in her notes. She showed it to me; with her permission, I've pasted it in below. It summarizes the course, more or less. The philosophers we studied are on the left. She a

      • Another quaff of realism
        06/05/04
        In a recent entry, I discussed the possibilities for realist pluralism. This is the position that there are many real kinds out in nature, not just the priveleged short list of kinds that appears in our fundamental science. I asked how promiscuous this position ought to be: Should we say that silly,

      • Time, time, time...
        06/05/03
        ...to see what's become of me.

        Last week I revised my paper on four-dimensionalism and sent it off to another journal. Although it is not the cleverest thing I have ever written, I would like to see it published. It has the coolest pictures of any paper I have ever done, even cooler

      • Cat and Girl in the echo chamber
        06/05/02
        Dorothy uses the phrase 'pink collar worker' in today's Cat&Girl. Below the comic, she comments:Did you know that the New York Times segregated its help wanted section by gender until 1972? That may or may not be true. Thanks, Wikipedia!Yet, compare the Wikipedia entry for pink co

    • April
      • Six degrees of separation
        06/04/25
        Acquiring a finite Erdös number was icing on the cake when I coauthored with Craig Callender a few years back. Now, by way of the MathSciNet Collaboration Calculator, I have been able to confirm that my finite Erdös number is at most 6.Erdös (0) coauthored with Ernst Gabor Straus (1), who coauthored

      • 'Words are curious things' redux
        06/04/23
        Stijn writes a blog entry about the meaning of 'philosophy' and links to a sarcastic post that I wrote on the subject. I noticed the link, followed it back, saw that he quoted me, and wondered as to the context. Turning to Babelfish for a translation, I got the following:
        If philosoph

      • The Revenge of the Dinosaur Argument
        06/04/23
        I have commented on Philip Kitcher and scientific significance before, both here and in the d-cog paper. To briefly recap Philip's argument in in ch 6 of Science, Truth, and Democracy, he claims that science aims at finding true answers to significant questions. Questions can be significant for

      • Bacchanalian realism
        06/04/18
        An old line of thought, resurfacing in recent rumination:

        In asking whether categories are real, the problem is sometimes posed in this way: Is the world really objectively divided into real kinds of things, or is it just facts about us (our languages, our cultures, our interests, the way

      • D-cog in d-machine
        06/04/17
        This is the last entry written in a Hungarian cafe. It's a revised version of the d-cog paper, and this aside that did not make the cut:

        Some authors distinguish between collective cognition and distributed cognition, both of which are distinct from individual cognition. In individua

      • Jon, Ron, and the wages of sin
        06/04/15
        Another entry written in Cafe Isolabella, this one riffing on blog entries written by two of my colleagues. They seem related without actually talking about the same thing, so here is a bit of conceptual connect-the-dots.

        Jon comments on a study finding that praying for patients seems to

      • She wants to keep her baby
        06/04/14
        I managed to do a good bit of writing in Budapest. I wrote this in a cafe just off Batthyany Square. In a bit of synchronicity, Papa don't preach was playing on the radio.

        Recently, a state or two has banned abortion so as to give the newer, more conservative Supreme Court a chance t

    • March
      • Thursday procrastination
        06/03/30
        I get some of my best work done at coffee shops, and today I am at Professor Java's trying to catch up on a thousand things. I was briefly chatting with another patron, and it came out that I teach philosophy. He fondly recalled philosophy classes from back in undergrad. It introduced him to a

      • Style and substance
        06/03/25
        Common wisdom among educators is that there are different learning styles: Some students are visual learners and learn best by seeing. Others are auditory learners and learn best by hearing. When I was a grad student, the woman leading the TA orientation went so far as to distinguish between tactile

      • It should have been called the 'negatron'
        06/03/02
        A propos of Owen Chamberlain's death, the New York Times describes his work in the 50s to experimentally demonstrate the existence of the anti-proton. The story contains this somewhat cryptic passage:
        But as a sort of mirror-image of the proton... [the anti-proton] captured the imagination

    • February
      • RCRambling
        06/02/27
        I was thinking about something in the neighborhood of research ethics and thought that I should make a short blog post about it. I realized that the point I had in mind depended on a bunch of context, so I wrote the following screed:

        Several years ago, I worked on The Responsible Conduct

      • Today I have a blog
        06/02/27
        Footnotes on Epicycles received its first piece of comment spam today. I guess that makes it an official blog. Now I just need to stop posting for a month and return only to post an apology for not posting.

      • Anticipations of revolutions
        06/02/26
        In the same vein as my remark about Peter Winch: Today I ran across another anticipation of the Kuhnian distinction between normal and revolutionary science.

        In his 1960 introductory text Philosophy of Science, Stephen Toulmin discusses what it means for a theory to count as 'fundame

      • Demon. Theories
        06/02/23
        I just uploaded a new version of my induction paper. This draft rectifies a systematic problem with terminology. Although I still think that the arguments have implications for what John Norton calls material theories of induction, they most readily apply to demonstrative theories of induction.

      • Kierkegaard and the sermon problem
        06/02/15
        Academic philosophers typically write for a philosophical audience. There are problems that are understood, more or less, and you write to address them. If you want to reconstrue the problem, then you say as much.

        This fact becomes a problem when academic philosophers write in response to

      • forall x, forsome x, forno x
        06/02/07
        Today I received student comments from last term. Since it was the first time teaching with forall x, I asked a number of questions about the text itself. There aren't very many dust-jacket quality comments, but here is one: "Very clear. Not overly wordy. Great book to use."

      • forall x marches on
        06/02/02
        A few random remarks about forall x:

        (i) At the APA in December, I had a number of strange conversations about the book. People would say how great it was that I was making it available for free over the internet, but (they asked) what if someone used it as a course textbook? How did I pl

    • January
      • The d and the cog in d-cog
        06/01/31
        Working on my distributed cognition paper, I have been thinking along these lines: We cannot treat the skin of an organism as the boundary of every cognitive activity in which the organism is involved; the boundaries of the cognitive system often must be drawn so as to include tools, parts of the en

      • Further reverberations in the echo chamber
        06/01/31
        The mononymous Helmut blogs about my discussion of the wikipedia. He writes: "Ideally, other readers engage in a collective re-editing of each entry, and I like that ideal as a kind of Peircean community of inquirers." As he notes, the ideal, Peircean community doesn't include just an

      • Gossiping in the echo chamber
        06/01/30
        More ruminations about the reliability of the wikipedia; cf. my earlier post Reliability on Wikipedia.

        Meandering off-task this morning, I was browsing the wikipedia entry for Aldous Huxley. It claims that he wrote the original screenplay for Disney's Alice in Wonderland. The entry f

      • Significance in the 20th century
        06/01/28
        Working on the d-cog paper and teaching Understanding Science again have got me ruminating on scientific significance.

        In The Advancement of Science, Philip Kitcher first advocated the view that science aims not at truth but at significant truth. At the time, he treated significance as an

      • File under 'words are curious things'
        06/01/21
        I am aware that the words 'philosophy' and 'philosophical' are commonly employed in ways that have nothing to do with academic philosophy, but a story in today's the NY Times seemed obviously wrong to me. The story by Denise Grady is about a GI who suffered crippling injurie

      • iLogic, youLogic, weAllLogic
        06/01/20
        In Summer 2000, I had a job developing on-line materials for the intro logic book that Rick Grush was writing. He wanted to have little movies of someone lecturing, so that students could watch and rewatch material outside of class. Bandwidth restrictions made that impractical at the time, so we did

      • Parapsychology and demarcation
        06/01/13
        Writing about parapsychology [here], Paul Churchland argues that parapsychologists do nothing more than point to anecdotal results that are anomalous for materialism. Since every theory faces some anomalies, this on its own shows nothing. Borrowing material from Feyerabend, Paul says that a genuinel

  • 2005
    • December
      • On seeing a theorem
        05/12/25
        A stray thought that didn't make it into the induction paper:
        In John Worrall's 2000 BJPS article, he writes:
        Recognising that some proposition is indeed a theorem of some axiomatic system is clearly an outstandingly creative act... But what else can a great mathematician be doin

      • Is induction inductive?
        05/12/25
        I had the idea for this paper several years ago, but the pieces only clicked into place recently. It has reached the whole-draft stage, so I'm posting a copy.

        Eliminating induction

        According to some accounts, however, scientific inference is deductive: Apparently ampliativ

      • Winch orm, winch orm, measuring the marigolds
        05/12/12
        Reading Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (1958), I was surprised by the following passage:
        The accepted view runs, I think, roughly as follows. Any intellectual discipline may, at one time or another, run into philosophical difficulties, which often herald a revolution in the fun

    • November
      • I may if I might, but I can't so I won't
        05/11/27
        I've been thinking about Roger White's essay `Epistemic Permissiveness' (available on his website), and I have an argument that I want to try out.

        Permissive cases, in White's jargon, are ones in which it would be possible for two agents with the same evidence and back

      • Dapple is as dapple does
        05/11/26
        I just posted a draft of a brief paper discussing Paul Teller's article 'How we dapple the world.' His title riffs off of Larry Sklar's `Dappled theories in a uniform world' which itself riffs off of Nancy Cartwright's The dappled world.

        Following the flurry

      • There exists 'forall x'
        05/11/26
        I just posted a new version of forall x, my introductory logic text. I have been using it as the text in my 130 member intro logic class this term, and I have been fairly satisfied. The process has allowed me to catch a bevy of typos and little slips. The new version corrects those, has added practi

    • October
      • Reliability on Wikipedia
        05/10/28
        In a paper for MacHack several years ago, I tried to sort out the possible methods for evaluating claims found on the internet. (`Reliability on a Crowded Net' -- The conference still hosts a PDF of it.) I was primarily interested in claims made on web pages and in chat rooms, and I think the a

      • Zo, vhere vere ve?
        05/10/16
        I've been reading Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box, a popularized discussion of significant experiments in 20th-century psychology. The book is best when it presents facts and background, and worst when it tries to pose philosophical questions. One chapter is about Elizabeth Loft

      • The Hamlet antinomy
        05/10/07
        At lunch, discussion led to this question: Is the world that 'Rosencrantz&Guildenstern are Dead' is set in the same world that 'Hamlet' is set in?

        Thesis: They are the same world. Tom Stoppard took great care in making the events that happen in 'R&G'

      • Tell me a story
        05/10/04
        Last May, Carl Sachs asked me what I thought the difference was between a story and a theory. I replied along these lines: A story specifies what its world is like. A theory conjectures what our world is like. Put differently, a theory is a story which we take to be about our actual world.
      • Tom Reid meets Tom Bayes
        05/10/04
        I have finally closed all the open references in my paper on Thomas Reid and dogmatism. The new version has been sent off to scout for rejection notices.