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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 than the pictures for my other paper on the topology of spacetime.
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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 collar. It says merely that the NY Times stopped running gender-specific help-wanted ads in 1972. It does not say when gender-neutral want help-wanted ads were first permitted. There may have been a time when help-wanted ads were not wholly segregated, but during which some ads were gender selecting.
So, I basically know nothing about the substantive issue of gender selection and job adverts. I do have another anecdote as to how the Wikipedia is akin to gossip, however.
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Acquiring a finite Erdős 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 Erdős number is at most 6.
Erdős (0) coauthored with Ernst Gabor Straus (1), who coauthored with Peter Gabriel Bergmann (2), who coauthored with Gerrit J. Smith (3), who coauthored with Robert Weingard (4), who coauthored with Craig Callender (5), who coauthored with me (6).
Since Bergmann coauthored with Albert Einstein, it puts me only five steps away from Albert. In an unrelated statistic, Einstein was the first scientist that came to mind for 9 out of 20 students in my Understanding Science class yesterday when I asked them to think of a scientist.
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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 philosophy is the answer on the question what you study, the response is at the person asking the question generally of stupefaction. Followed by or "what is that for something?", or "what will do you with that?". In a joke this is as follows reflected: When I my grandmother answered told that I doctor in philosophy became, them: "terribly, but what kind of a sickness is philosophy actual?"Why, yes... all my base does belong to them. How nice of you to notice.
If people the word knows philosophy already, it is frequently in the meaning which is indicated by Van Dale online ones: relativising, contemplative. We have to that thank meaning probably to the philosophy of Epicurus and the stocijnen, with their philosophy as life wisdom.
Don't we don't have make urgently work of a more general term of what philosophy are? Or we must use the meaning also at academic level and, such as P.D. Magnus presents on its blog, our thesis conclude with the philosophical attitude:
"I mean, like, it sucks, basically, but it happened to me and I'm still alive."
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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 any of three reasons: (A) They relate to some more fundamental, antecedently significant question. (B) They relate to our projects and how we can best attain our goals. (C) They answer to natural human curiosity.
A crude pragmatist theory of truth, according to which an answer is true if it gets us what we want in the short term, would be enough to capture A and B. Kitcher wants truth in a stronger sense than this. Without C, this insistence loses its force.
Of course, all of these factors vary between individuals and between cultures. If two people disagree about which things are significant due to A, then we can trace it back to a disagreement about which questions are antecedently significant. If they disagree due to B, we can trace it back to a disagreement about which goals we should be pursuing. If they disagree due to C, however, there is nothing further to say. One person is curious and another is not. End of discussion.
Kitcher covers this over by calling it natural human curiosity. A total lack of curiosity would be a cognitive failure, I suppose, but someone can fail to be curious about specific things without thereby being an inhuman monster. If someone doesn't care about dinosaurs, there is nothing further to say to them.*
I cannot think of any way besides these three by which a question could be recognizable a significant one. Nevertheless, there are a great many lines of research which turn out in retrospect to be significant. Research programmes can lead in unexpected directions. Work that seems hifalutin now may yield spectacular applications down the road. This suggests another way in which questions can be significant: (D) Answers to them will lead to subsequent work that can be exploited to attain our goals, but we do not yet know which goals exactly or how.
We cannot be confident that a question is significant due to D in the way that we can with the other factors. It will inevitably involve a kind of hunch. Nevertheless, this is a standard defense of so-called pure research as opposed to applied research. The very possibility that there may be answers of this kind is enough to rebut crude pragmatism. Questions can have true answers-- or at least better or worse answers-- well before the answers have practical utility.
As Dewey often emphasized, and as Kitcher recognizes, our objectives may change over the course of enquiry. As such, there are further ways that questions may be significant: (B') They relate to projects we will pursue and how we can best attain goals we will have. (D') Answers to them will lead to subsequent work that can be exploited to attain goals we will have.
B' and D' are also matters which we cannot judge in advance, because we do not yet know what we will value. If we already did, then arguably we would already value it as a long-term objective.
Since Kitcher argues that science aims at significant knowledge, he is pressed to say that significance must be something we can recognize in advance of doing science. If we can't know it in advance, we can't aim at it. As such, although he recognizes that science can lead to unexpected developments and that our goals will change, he is not free to put D, B', and D' forward as distinct sources of scientific significance.
* In principle, there could be topics about which all humans are inclined to be curious. As an empirical matter, however, it just isn't so-- as I think Philip would concur. In a different context, he rejects the notion "that a yearning to satisfy curiosity is essential to being human" [p. 165]. (Although he does so without argument. The remainder of the paragraph seems to me to be a non sequitur.)
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