Specter of Reason

In the London Review of Books , Peter Godfrey-Smith presents a very well-written and lucid criticism of Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's attack on evolutionary theory, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). (For obvious reasons, I am going to refer to Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini as F&P-P.) Their book has drawn lots of criticism from philosophers and scientists alike (e.g., here and here and here and here ), so much so that yet another criticism might look like overkill; however, Godfrey-Smith's analysis is quite accessible and a pleasure to read. I am not going to review his whole review. I just want to point out one weakness I have found in it, and then I want to address F&P-P's response . I have to question Godfrey-Smith on a point about counterfactuals. He notes that many philosophers discuss causality using counterfactuals, though he thinks this is optional. He says that, when we use counterfactuals to describe the causal relationships involved i...

Introduction In his introduction to Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge: An Interaction ( 2002 ), the late Terry Dartnall challenges his fellow cognitive scientists to pay attention to Wittgenstein in order to understand the central role of creativity in human intelligence. I want to explain why I think he is right, and why I think just as much attention should be paid to Gilbert Ryle. The main issue is the relationship between rules and behavior, an issue which may seem simple, but which implicates our very conception of what it means to be a person. It is sometimes said that, whereas people are creative, computers can only do what they are programmed to do. The idea is that creativity cannot be wholly rule-based. Our intelligence cannot simply be a matter of following rules. However, the truth may be more complicated.  Contemporary wisdom has it that the right kinds of programs can lead to creative behavior. Take genetic algorithms. They involve controlled processes of r...

I want to discuss the difference between de dicto and de re beliefs and its implications for Gettier cases. This will be an elaboration on my earlier treatment of Gettier cases . I am mainly restating my argument in terms of the de dicto / de re distinction. Unfortunately, I have read very little of the literature on this distinction, so I cannot situate my arguments in a scholarly fashion. (Any pointers to relevant papers would be greatly appreciated.) The difference between de dicto and de re beliefs is sometimes illustrated with an example like this one: (1) Ralph believes that someone is a spy. There is an ambiguity in (1): Does Ralph believe of a specific individual that he is a spy? Or does Ralph believe that at least one person is a spy, without having a belief about any particular individual being a spy? If Ralph's belief is about a specific individual, then it is de re. If Ralph's belief is not about a specific individual, then it is de dicto. My contention is...

As a number of people keep pointing out, even though Kenneth Howell seems incompetent when it comes to teaching utilitarianism and Natural Moral Law theory, and even though he uses illogical, ignorant, and manipulative tactics to espouse Catholicism, he has been recognized twice for excellence in teaching (first in the Fall of 2008 and again in the Fall of 2009). This is supposed to show that he is competent, that his department hasn't had any problems with him before, and that he's only lost his job because of his views on homosexuality. Yet, the facts speak otherwise. It's true that Howell was recognized for excellence in teaching . . . by his students . (See here: ICES Fall 2008 and Fall 2009 .) These evaluations give no indication of the views of other professors or administrators at UI. They do not mean he's competent. They just mean his students think he's a good teacher. He must have convinced them that he knows what he's talking about. (To be...

Kenneth J. Howell, an adjunct Philosophy of Religion professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has lost his job after an email he sent to his students was widely circulated around campus, inspiring some people to claim he was spreading hate speech against homosexuality. There could be a first amendment issue here, if he was fired simply for teaching students about ideas which might be considered hate speech. There is nothing wrong with exposing students to hate speech, so long as they are being taught to think critically about it. If he was propagating such speech out of professional ignorance and incompetence, and failing to present a critical or intelligent analysis of it, however, then I don't see any problem with firing him. And that appears to be what happened. The full text of the email is here . The ignorance and lack of intellectual integrity are striking, making it a clear example of professional incompetence. The email was supposed to help his studen...

I recently posted about the Miners Paradox, which Janice Dowell has been discussing over at PEA Soup . My initial reaction was to reject two of the premises in the argument, thereby undermining the paradoxical conclusion. However, as Janice pointed out to me, this is insufficient, because common sense tells us that the premises are true. That forced me to elaborate upon--though not reject--my initial response. The issue has to do with ordinary language and philosophical logic. Specifically, how do we know when and how to apply the rules of logic to ordinary speech? While modus ponens may be one of the simplest rules in logic, its application to ordinary language is not always obvious. The Miners Paradox may be instructive in this regard. I'll repost the paradox, as presented by Janice: MINERS: 10 miners are trapped in a flooding mine; they are either all in shaft A or all in shaft B. Given our information, each location is equally likely. We have just enough sandbags to ...

In " Veiled Threats? " and again in " Beyond The Veil: A Response ," Martha Nussbaum defends the right to cover one's face in public. Laws against veils are a hot topic in Europe, with several EU countries pushing for legislation which would prevent many Muslim women from wearing full-face Islamic veils. Nussbaum goes over and rejects several arguments which are commonly made in support of such a ban. Though I'm not quite sure where my mind is on the issue, I have some problems with what she says. One of the arguments she rejects is that the full-face veil depersonalizes women. To counter this argument, Nussbaum begins by suggesting that Muslim women may not be degraded or depersonalized by this tradition. This suggestion is not persuasive, however, because some Muslim women have spoken out against the full-face veil for just that reason. More importantly, we have reason to be suspicious of reports by women who say they like the full-face veil. Thes...

Over at PEA Soup , Janice Dowell discusses an interesting argument for a moral paradox. This is how she presents it: 10 miners are trapped in a flooding mine; they are either all in shaft A or all in shaft B. Given our information, each location is equally likely. We have just enough sandbags to block one shaft, saving all the miners, if they are in the blocked shaft, but killing them all if they are in the other. If we do nothing, the water will distribute between the two shafts, killing only the one miner positioned lowest. On the basis of these considerations, (1) seems true: (1) We ought to block neither shaft. While deliberating, though, we accept both (2) If the miners are in A, we ought to block A and (3) If the miners are in B, we ought to block B. We also accept (4) Either the miners are in A or they are in B. And (2)-(4) seems to entail (5) Either we ought to block A or we ought to block B. Paradox! She mentions a paper in which some philosoph...

I'm very disappointed in Jon Stewart. He passed up a great opportunity to stand up for science and reason, and instead he promoted ignorance and confusion. It happened a few days ago, when he interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson , who was promoting her new non-fiction work, Absence of Mind . The discussion was about the public conversation on science and religion. Robinson claims that both religion and science have been poorly represented in the public domain. She says can help us understand both, and why both science and religion must work together to help us understand ourselves and the world. She doesn't spend any time criticizing religion or religious leaders, however, so it's not clear what problem she has there. She's a Calvinist , in fact, though she says she loves science. She tells Stewart that the "new cosmologies and so on are among the most beautiful things that people have conceived." (As I'll explain, I have ...

Larry Nemirow once told me that I should try to publish my good ideas wherever I can, and not wait until somebody else gets credit for them first. This apparently happened often to grad students. These days, it's a choice between waiting several months before getting a rejection letter (and, as a non-professional, I cannot expect anything other than rejection letters) or getting my ideas out in the open through my blog (or other online venues.) So that's what I'm gonna do now. Below is a very short paper I wrote which was rejected by a reputable philosophy journal a couple months ago. (I'm not sure why, but it seems better not to say which journal.) The editor-in-chief gave me some instructive comments--journals don't always do that, and I'm truly grateful. I'd like to spend a month or so researching and rewriting the paper, but I don't know when I'll have time to do that. In the meantime, maybe some readers can give me a few suggestions or cri...

Richard Brown, of Philosophy Sucks!, has posted some interesting ideas about dreams and consciousness, and whether or not we have (or can have) evidence of consciousness in dreams. I posted the following in the comments section: The question of consciousness in dreams is very interesting, and I like the idea of testing it by determining whether or not people can report dream experiences while dreaming. But I think the only way this could be done is if the dreaming subject were reporting the experiences to somebody else--that is, there must be interaction between the dreaming subject and another subject within the dream. The experimenter would have to interact with a person as a part of their dream, like in Dreamscape (1984) . We have no evidence that this sort of interaction is even possible, so it follows that we have no evidence that consciousness of this sort is present in dreams. But, as I suggested in my last sentence, perhaps we can talk about dream consciousness of another...