P.D. Magnus

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…”¹

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

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 5.²

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. Varshney³

* Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit, with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz

* Music genres as historical individuals, with Emmie Malone and Brandon Polite

Kania on kopycats

The distinction between mimic covers and rendition covers is central to the work my collaborators and I have done on cover songs. Recently at the APA blog, Andrew Kania argues that the distinction is unfounded.

A falswiftiable hypothesis

It’s not very often that philosophers make empirically testable predictions, but it’s happened.

In considering whether Taylor Swift’s rerecording of her songs are covers of her earlier tracks, my coauthors and I asked what would happen if she were to acquire rights to her original recordings. We conjectured: She wouldn’t rerecord the remaining albums. We took this to show that her motive was commercial displacement of the original— a typical function for early covers, one that’s often cited to explain the etymology of the term itself (“covering over”).

Now Swift has bought the rights to her earlier records. Recording was complete for the new version of her debut album. Those tracks may be released at some point, but a doppleganger album doesn’t have the same rationale it did before. She hadn’t gotten very far in rerecording her album Reputation, though, and now there won’t be new versions of the tracks from that album at all.

The thought experiment is made real, y’all, and we are vindicated.

Higher-order bullshit

Three snapshot applications of AI:

During early phases of the war in Gaza, the Israeli military used software to select bombing targets on a scale that would not have been possible for human analysts.⁴

During the Trump administration’s initial attack on the federal government, there was lots of nonsense about how Elon Musk and DOGE were using software to identify waste. House Speaker Mike Johnson commented that Musk has “created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data, and… the data doesn’t lie.”⁵

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commissioned a report with the ridiculous title “Make America Healthy Again.”⁶ It turns out that many of the citations in the study are erroneous, including references to articles which simply do not exist. Incorrectly citing things and misrepresenting results is plausibly human malfeasance or incompetence, but totally inventing sources suggests chatbot hallucination.

The wrongs committed here are morally different, and I don’t want to suggest a false equivalence. But each of these cases provides a specimen of how reliance on AI has been used to further dangerous agendas. Yet the reliance on AI is really just a sideshow.

Fun with fallacies

A couple of months ago, I made note of the neosemantic fallacy: “the magic of neologisms, which encourage [one] to infer that a new word refers to a new kind of thing.”⁷

I realized yesterday that it was just a flavor of the fallacy of reification. JS Mill characterized this as the tendency “to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own.”

The fact that giving reification a new name made me think of it as a distinct fallacy means that I committed the neosemantic fallacy in my earlier post. So, although it’s not the autological fallacy, it is an autological fallacy.⁸

A Trumpian fallacy redux

During the first Trump administration, I pointed out that his thinking about immigration committed the fallacy of conflating within-group and between-group differences. In an on-line discussion today, I realized that Trump’s tariff policy is guilty of it as well.⁹