No war, no ICE

Here’s a thing I wrote to my senators:

It’s important to resist the unprovoked war with Iran, especially on the heels of the unprovoked incursion into Venezuela. Reckless and indiscriminate overthrow of governments is just a recipe for chaos.

It’s also important to resist funding ICE. I mention this in the same e-mail because I’ve seen rhetoric online trying to use our foreign wars as an excuse to fund domestic security. Murder and oppression abroad cannot be an excuse for murder and oppression of our own citizens, however. The archipelago of detainment camps that ICE is attempting to build, the extradition of people that courts have ordered should not be extradited, and untrained officers given financial incentives to sweep in as many people as possible… All these things show that ICE must not be given money to grow.

Turing cycles

In a short article at Nature, Eddy Keming Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen, and Dave Danks argue that current AI has general intelligence.1 I think that they’re argument goes wrong in some of the details, but they deal with some issues very quickly.2 On reflection, I think my bigger problem is not with their argument but with their question itself.

Continue reading “Turing cycles”

Citing “Injustice”

My paper with Emmie Malone, Popular Music and Art-interpretive Injustice, has appeared in a recent issue of Inquiry. Here’s a sentence from the conclusion, which can serve as a pull quote:

We hope the examples we have given make an initial case for adding to the already crowded field of philosophical terms that take the form ‘some adjective injustice.’

Continue reading “Citing “Injustice””

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.3 Set aside the question of what motivated his killer.4

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.5