I said a thing

At Scientific American, Meghan Bartels reflects on Wikipedia at age 25. The story includes some discussion of my research as well as a quote from me.

I took media training a while ago, but this is really the first time I’ve ever been interviewed by someone in the press about my work. It’s a bit ironic, since the work on Wikipedia really didn’t count toward my tenure. It was just this extra thing I did, over and above the research that made the case for my promotion.

To paraphrase Voltaire

Set aside the fact that Charlie Kirk was a vile bigot.1 Set aside the question of what motivated his killer.2

It is a performative contradiction to claim simultaneously that his legacy is one of free speech and open debate but that anybody who says bad things about him should be fired from their job. Such vehement rhetoric is incoherent on its face.

A true champion of free speech might wholly disapprove of what someone says, but would defend in their death the right to say it.

Pragmatism redux

I’m teaching pragmatism again, which has led to corrections and revisions in my archive of readings in pragmatism and American philosophy. I’m doing some sections from Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, so those are added to the archive. Also, a chapter by Mead on scientific method.

I also put together versions of some essays by WEB DuBois and Alain Locke, although those ended up not making the cut in the syllabus.3

Norms of science in present times

Last week I taught an essay by sociologist Robert Merton which I first read almost 30 years ago. Originally published in 1942, the essay is about the institutional norms of science in the context of broader society. He identifies several norms of science and suggests that they fit with the norms democracy.4

Although I have taught it something like 20 times before, when reading it through this semester, the opening paragraph hit me with a currency that it has never had before.

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How science informs philosophy

At the Blog of the APA, Nina Emery discusses the relation between philosophy and science. I want to discuss what she calls

Content Naturalism. Philosophers ought not put forward theories that conflict with the content of our best scientific theories.

This is close to a kind of philosophical conservatism according to which “philosophy cannot credibly challenge… the established theses of the natural sciences…”5

In that stark form, there are at least two problems with it.

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