UCSB Philosophy Blog

Members of the UCSB Department of Philosophy and anyone else are welcome to talk philosophy with us. Bring your own brain.

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

UCSB Debating Darwin Conference

This blog isn't really active, but this is a good place to announce:

The Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara is pleased to announce a Steven Humphrey Fund for Excellence in Philosophy Conference:

Debating Darwin: Philosophical Issues in Evolution and Natural Selection
February 18-20, 2011
UC Santa Barbara

Invited Speakers

Discussants

Additional details TBA at: http://www.philosophy.ucsb.edu/conferences/

Contact: ucsb.conf@gmail.com.

Registration: For those wishing to attend the conference, registration is appreciated. It’s free, and it helps our planing. To register send an email to the conference email address (ucsb.conf@gmail.com) with “Registration” in the subject line. If you give us your name and institutional affiliation, we will have a name tag waiting for you.

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Monday, August 04, 2008

Philosophy Media

Friday, July 13, 2007

Progress in Philosophy

Hi all. I'm not sure if this blog is dead, or if anyone still checks this thing, but I have something that might be interesting to discuss:

I've been thinking about progress in philosophy. I don't like that philosophy is often perceived, especially by undergrads, as just "a bunch of philosophers throwing ideas around." I get the impression that many of them think that philosophy is subjective in some god-awful sense---that, unlike the empirical sciences, we don't (or can't?) seek truth. Of course, that is quite a misperception of the facts. But what causes this?

Of course, part of the problem is that this is somewhat the way that philosophy is portrayed in pop-culture. Another problem is that undergrads are probably too quick to judge without being exposed to much philosophy. But are we not in part to blame? Or is there not something we can do to help?

I see some potential ways in which we might be contributing to this problem ourselves, primarily with the way philosophy is taught. First, "Philosophy of X" courses are often taught by merely providing what major philosophers have said about X throughout history. I think this often gives students the impression that there is no fact of the matter. Although, it is, I think, actually a great method of teaching philosophy. It often helps to touch on the historical background of an issue in order to understand where we stand now with respect to that issue, etc. But, this is problematic if there are no morals or conclusions drawn in the course with respect to issue X. I take it that philosophy professors are often worried about drawing any conclusions with respect to X and teaching them as fact since, so it is often assumed, "everything is controversial in philosophy" and they don't want to be accused of teaching in a "biased" manner.

But is this right? I don't really see why philosophy is any different in this respect from any empirical science (e.g., chemistry). In chemistry, students are taught some history of the field and then told what "the facts" are. But, then, five years later, those are no longer "the facts," they are replaced by something else. That is, science classes are allowed to teach certain opinion as fact, but allowed to modify it later, change their minds in light of new evidence and considerations.

Now I think this practice is all fine and good (since it's of course backed up by research, data, rational thought, and other things that warrant attributing progress to such disciplines). My question is: why can't we do it? The scientific community too is often in disagreement about things. Now, one might retort: "But, there is not as large of a portion of the philosophical community that agrees about anything." But, first of all, I'm not sure that's true. Second, even if it is true, so what? There's still a fact of the matter regardless of whether over 50% of the philosophical community agrees on some claim (excluding, of course, especially weird cases dealing with, say, vagueness or something).

But let's concede that point. Perhaps we do need to keep our professors on some sort of leash. Perhaps they should only teach what's not significantly controversial (how "significantly" is cached out, I'm not sure). This is probably the case. But is it not true that there are some things that the majority of philosophers agree on? That is, isn't there progress in philosophy that's at least somewhat similar to the progress in any other academic discipline that seeks truth (which surely we do, contrary to popular undergraduate belief)?

Now we can finally get to what I wanted to ask the readers of this blog:

(*) What sort of progress has been made in philosophy?

Imagine you are teaching an Intro to Philosophy course and you want to teach it like an Intro to Chemistry course. What are the main sorts of morals, conclusions, or generally agreed-upon points of progress that have occurred in philosophy? Answers of course could be quite general or specific.

Allow me to throw out some suggestions. I'm thinking that some answers would be something like:

(1) The development of modern propositional logic with quantification over categorical logic.

Perhaps one might also include:

(2) Since the 20th century people have tended more to realize the proper differences between the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic, and don't consider them to be obviously extensionally equivalent.

Is that the end of the list? Is that even a good list?

Help, save our discipline from subjectivity! :)

Saturday, June 02, 2007

In ur university, bloggin ur blogz

This might amuse some of you:

http://community.livejournal.com/loltheorists

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Philosophers in the News

Hi, all. This is a bit late, but there have been two major spottings of philosophers recently in the news (specifically, comedic news):

Harry Frankfurt was on The Daily Show plugging his new book, On Truth. (Watch it here.)



Also, Peter Singer was on The Colbert Report plugging his new book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. (Watch it here.)



As many of you know, philosophers are not often allowed to talk to the general public. They are often thought to "corrupt the youth" and so forth. In a way it's sad that philosophers can only promote their work on Comedy Central. However, as far as I'm concerned, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the best damn news programs in the U.S.

Monday, October 09, 2006

The Mind-Body Problem Down Under

A radio show on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has done an interesting episode commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of U.T. Place's "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?". There are interviews with Smart, Armstrong, Chalmers, and others.

The audio can be found here: "The Mind-Body Problem Down Under"

I found out about this at fragments of consciousness which has additional links.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for “yes” and “no” are “da” and “ja” in some order. You do not know which word means which.[1]



[1]George Boolos (1996), p. 62.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Saucy Jack

Brian sent out the following question. I was going to just reply via email, but I thought it better to put it up here, in case anybody else wanted in on the action.

Do you guys get a difference here?

(12) If Prince Albert committed those murders, he is Jack the Ripper.

(13) If Prince Albert had committed those murders, he would have been Jack the Ripper.

If so, how would you make sense of the difference? Any thoughts?


My response (a little rough, but hopefully readable):
The most natural reading of "Jack the Ripper" is as a name, and the most natural reading of (13) is as a counterfactual conditional, (12) as a material conditional. So (12) could be true, and if so is necessary in virtue of the necessity of the consequent (on the other hand, if false, it's necessarily false). If someone's having committed the murders is good evidence that they are JtR, then the antecedent is even good evidence for the consequent, so it could plausibly be given some kind of relevance (non-truth-functional) reading. I know very little about relevance logic, but it seems to me that some kind of Bayesian (evidential probability) sorta guy might do that job for cases like (12) (ordinary, non-counterfactual conditionals).

(13) is weird, since counterfactual conditionals sound so much like relevance conditionals (perhaps even more so than do ordinary indicative conditionals); that's perhaps reason to believe that the Lewis/Thomason semantics for them doesn't capture English usage (since it's open to the same "paradoxes of the conditional" as the ordinary strict conditional is). On the L/T reading, (13) is false only if Prince Albert is not Jack the Ripper (that identity being necessary if true and impossible if false) and it's possible that Prince Albert committed those murders (and so it's probably false). I can't make sense of an evidential relevance reading of (13), probably because I can't make much sense of such readings for any counterfactual conditionals (more on this below). Furthermore, I'm not sure I can give ANY kind of coherent relevance reading for (13), or at least a coherent and true reading. That's because relevance readings typically express exclusivity, and so a conterfactual relevant conditional implies the falsity of its consequent as well as its antecedent. Given the falsity of the consequent (which is then impossible), nothing could have made it true, not even murder. I'm not sure if that's a false relevance reading or just not a coherent relevance reading since there's no relevance. Counterfactual + relevance + identity (or another necessary/impossible proposition) = weird, and probably just false. As I said, I think a relevance reading is the most natural reading (caveat: I know almost nothing about relevance logic), and taken in that way, (13) is either false or incoherent.

The natural readings of (12) (material or evidential relevance) allow that it be true. However, given an evidential relevance reading of (12), I'm not sure what COULD count as evidence for the consequent, since I assume that we (in place of the dudes from Scotland Yard) aren't so strange as to lack the belief that JtR is JtR or that PA is PA, and so the belief that JtR is PA (iff that's true). So I definitely don't want to say that the antecedent could be evidence supporting BELIEF in the conclusion, although perhaps 'evidence' is broad enough to include things that make you recognize stuff (where that's not a matter of belief so much as having the OBJECTS that are involved in your beliefs "lined up" in a certain way in thought).

As for an evidential reading of (13), I have trouble making sense of such a thing because evidential evalutation seems to be tied to my perspective in a way that ordinary truth-evaluation is not. In other words, if I consider a hypothetical situation and what would be evidence for what for me, I can't but evaluate it in terms of my actual evidence; thus counterfactuals can't be given evidential readings that aren't rather weird. In the case of (13), I can only consider my actual evidence for the antecedent and the consequent; if PA is not JtR, then NOTHING is evidence for the consequent, no matter what I would think if I knew/believed different things. This understanding of counterfactual evidence may all depend on my not much understanding a sense of evidence (or reason to believe/recognize, if there is such a notion) that isn't factive. I'm inclined to say that if P is false, then you don't have evidence for P or a reason to believe that P, although you may think you do. Now perhaps there's a coherent category of stuff that's like evidence (or reasons) but not factive. Perhaps one might be inclined to say that it's one's "qualitative evidence", or "seemings", and furthermore that the antecedent of (13) should be understood as specifying conditions in terms of this "kind of evidence". I think that's a rather theory-laden (i.e., poorly motivated) response; I'm not currently convinced that it's incoherent or anything, but I'm mostly inclined to think it's false. In other words, I don't think such a notion (if coherent) is sufficiently evidential to give us a coherent and possibly true reading of (13). I think (13) just doesn't work like that, nor does other evidential talk in English.