P.D. Magnus

Pluralism (art) and trust (AI)

Two small updates:

Does art pluralism lead to eliminativism? Co-authored with Christy Mag Uidhir and published recently in Estetika. TL;DR: Maybe.
On trusting chatbots, still in draft form but updated. TL;DR: It’s vexing.

Whence genre?

At the Guardian, Rhiannon Giddens denounces gate-keeping around country music which snipes at Beyoncé’s recent forays into the genre. Yet, in the course of it, she denounces genre as a capitalist scheme to monetize art and enforce racism. She writes:

Genre… is a product of capitalism, and people with access to power create it, control it, and maintain it in order to commoditise art. In the 1920s, recording industry executives quickly realised that in order to maximise record sales, they needed to market them. In order to market them, they needed to create categories where they could reduce the totality of the American experience to a few buzzwords, and because this is the US, our cultural lenses are conditioned to project racial categories on to everything.

Surely genre can be an imposition of record labels to market music. Sometimes that is explicit. The genre world music, initially at least, was just a catch-all category agreed upon by record labels to sell albums from around the world that didn’t fit into an existing sales category. Our genre categories have been significantly shaped both by the recording industry and by services like Billboard that rank music in genre-segregated lists.

Nevertheless, the rise of recorded music did not just create an opportunity for the music industry. It also created a challenge for music listeners. There’s just too much music. Nobody can listen to everything, and most of us wouldn’t want to even if we could.

Fallaciagenesis

It’s been a while since I had an addition to my list of bespoke fallacies, one of the oldest features of my website.¹ This week, however, I came across the lovely neosemantic fallacy. Joshua Habgood-Coote, who attributes the label to Thi Nguyen, describes it as “the magic of neologisms, which encourage [one] to infer that a new word refers to a new kind of thing.”

Cover shift

On his blog, Brad Skow discusses Theodore Gracyk’s account of cover songs. He gives a fair summary of Gracyk’s view, according to which a version is only a cover if reference to the canonical version is part of its artistic content. So (on this view) you can only appreciate a cover by taking into account the canonical version. In contrast with common usage, Gracyk holds that any version which lacks this referential structure is a remake instead of a cover.²

With all that in place, Skow notes that Taylor Swift’s remakes of her own work seem designed to efface the originals rather than refer to them. So he suggests we might call them anti-covers.³

The problem is that one familiar function of so-called covers has been to crowd another recorded version out of the market. This is often given as an explanation for why the word cover was used in the first place: They were meant to cover over or cover up the originals.⁴

Who even am I?

I’ve watched a bunch of superhero movies recently. Some (like Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad) lived up to expectations. Others were surprising.

Based on friends’ comments on social media, I expected Quantumania (the third Antman movie) to be a dud. But it was a fun ride, with fun world building and characters. And it had MODOK!

Based on friends’ comments and the fact that it had Batman in it, I expected to enjoy The Batman (the 2022 movie). I was disappointed in it and surprised with myself.

Imagination, philosophy, and imitation games

Via Daily Nous, I came across a blog post by Justin Smith-Ruiu about creative writing as philosophy. The post is, ultimately, an argument that philosophy can be “incitement of the imagination, by creative means, to see the world in unfamiliar ways.” I agree with that! But there are digressions along the way that range from false speculation to attacks on the kind of philosophy that I (sometimes) do.

What I said on the socials

My department has been posting Faculty Spotlights on its social media feeds. I was the target earlier this month, and here’s what I said about myself. To be clear, the hashtags were added by Marcus (who posted them) and were not part of what I originally wrote.

Two drafts about music

I’ve posted two draft papers,written with different collaborators, addressing different issues in the philosophy of music.

Tell Me Why This Isn’t a Cover: A paper with Cristyn Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Ron McClamrock, using lessons from the philosophy of cover songs to think about Taylor Swift’s project of rerecording her earlier work.
Music genres as historical individuals: A paper with Evan Malone and Brandon Polite, arguing that genres are historical individuals in a sense. That qualifier “in a sense” is carrying a lot of weight.

Engines of enshittification

Via Ars Technica, I’ve learned that shady Amazon sellers have been using chatbots to automatically write item descriptions. The result is hot offers on items like “I cannot fulfill that request” and “I apologize but I cannot complete this task.” This is a natural progression from Amazon product listings which were simply misdescribed by humans.

Wrap up of 2023

Last year’s blogging tallies up to 10,484 words in 47 posts.

There used to be a blog tradition of summing things up by listing the first sentences of each of first posts from each month of the previous year. Since all the old ways are coming back, I’ve assembled that list below.