Today I posted a new draft, coauthored with Ron McClamrock: Reflections on popular music and collapse phenomena
Continue reading “A draft and a fragment”Author: P.D. Magnus
Vaccinated yesterday
I’m feeling a bit achy today, in part because I got my covid and flu shots yesterday. It’s weird that this rudimentary bit of public health is also deeply political.
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 and 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.
Continue reading “Norms of science in present times”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.
Continue reading “How science informs philosophy”Four!
A correction to an earlier post, confirming my suspicion from the post before: A recent collaboration, when published, will reduce my Erdős Number to 4.
This required running the query on a different database, one which included more of computer science connections.
E-scatology
My paper Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit (with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz) has been accepted at the journal AI and Ethics.
Five degrees of separation
In a footnote to the previous post, I suggested that a recent collaboration would lower my Erdős Number to 5.
On the basis of having checked a long time ago, I knew that my Erdős Number was at most 6 on account of having coauthored with Craig Callender.
Since then, however, Craig has also collaborated with more people. So his Erdős Number went down to 4 years ago, meaning that mine was already 5 or less. The new paper just means that there are multiple paths by which I’m entitled to an Erdős Number of 5.6
Updated drafts with ten different coauthors
Updated drafts posted in the last few weeks:
* Who’s sorry now: User preferences among Rote, Empathic, and Explanatory apologies from LLM chatbots, with Zahra Ashktorab, Alessandra Buccella, Jason D’Cruz, Zoë Fowler, Andrew Gill, Kei Leung, John Richards, and Kush R. Varshney7
* Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit, with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz
* Music genres as historical individuals, with Emmie Malone and Brandon Polite