P.D. Magnus

A grue by any other name is just as likely to eat you in the dark

Over at the APA blog, Noël Carroll whinges about the fact that the blog categorizes his post as Philosophy of Film. He acknowledges that the label is used for a particular philosophical subdiscipline, but he doesn’t like it. On the one hand, the subdiscipline addresses not just movies but also television and video games. On the other hand, “film” in an original sense is strictly photographic. Today even most movies aren’t on film.

Further adventures in art pluralism

A short paper by Christy Mag Uidhir and me has been accepted by Estetika. It further develops and refines the view we’ve articulated in earlier work.

TITLE: Does art pluralism lead to eliminativism?

ABSTRACT: Art pluralism is the view that there is no single, correct account of what art is. Instead, art is understood through a plurality of art concepts and with considerations that are different for particular arts. Although avowed pluralists have retained the word “art” in their discussions, it is natural to ask whether the considerations that motivate pluralism should lead us to abandon art talk altogether; that is, should pluralism lead to eliminativism? This paper addresses arguments both for and against this move. We ultimately argue that pluralism allows one to retain the word “art”, if one wants it, but only in a loose, conversational sense. The upshot of pluralism is that talk of art in general cannot be asked to do theoretical and philosophical work.

LLMs have the wrong ontology for scholarship

I have read suggestions that LLMs might help with the routine and tedious parts of writing, like a literature review. This is undermined by their failure to distinguish the literature (which is to be reviewed) from discourse in general.

Parallel thinking about rap and injustice

On Cardiff’s academic blog, Tareeq Jalloh blogs about his work on drill music and epistemic injustice. The post summarizes a recent paper of his about the way that, in the UK, lyrics from drill music are interpreted as confessions of criminal activity. In the US context, this has been called the rap on trial mentality. Evan and I take it as our speciment example in our recent paper.

What are you doing next summer?

UPDATE: I have sent my list off to Evan, so response to this post would no longer be timely.

Three egocentric top-five lists

It is never clear to me which things I’ve written have had the most impact. Two easy answers: First, there is forall x. It exists in myriad versions now, customized and translated by people around the world. But that’s a textbook, so it isn’t readily comparable to all the other things. Second, nothing I have written has had too much impact. Still, one can make distinctions even in the low end.

So here are some metrics.

All-some and a rhetorical misstep

John Norton breezes through an example of a deductive inference so as to characterize induction by contrast. His example of a valid deductive inference form is: “All As are B. Therefore, some As are B.” He even dubs this the all-some schema.¹

It is a perplexing example. In old-school Aristotelean logic, the all-some schema is valid. In modern first-order logic, however, A may be an empty predicate. There being no As makes ∀x(Ax→Bx) true and ∃x(Ax&Bx) false, showing that the schema is invalid.

This got me thinking about whether the modern reading of the schema is really better than the classical one. I think it is.

Textbooks in philosophy

At Daily Nous, Curtis Franks provides a summary of OER and free logic textbooks and courseware. On Mastodon, Anthony Eagle comments: “It is so great that there is so much effort by philosophers on this part of the textbook market; maybe we should now turn to other areas.” I sympathize.

I’ve written OER notes on scientific inference, which cover the difference between deduction and induction, problem of inductions, and underdetermination. I’ve often thought I should extend it out to be a whole textbook. There are several reasons that I haven’t.²

The bagel disputation

A recent exchange over on bookface:

Gary Hardcastle: Necessarily, there is no everything bagel. It would have to contain itself as an ingredient. But, I can buy one at the deli.

P.D. Magnus: A bagel always trivially includes itself.

GH: That way lies madness.

PDM: Take an empty bag. Put a bagel in it. There is nothing in the bag now that was not an ingredient of the bagel. Since the bagel is in the bag, it follows that the bagel too is an ingredient of the bagel.

I feel like I should drop a QED at the end of that, but I also feel like this is the kind of dispute which would get one of us excommunicated if we were medieval monks.

And that’s why I’d make a bad monk.

Philosophy rort

I’m not an essentialist about philosophy, but there can be better or worse answers to the question of what philosophy is. Here’s a bad one I encountered recently:

When people ask what philosophy is good for, I don’t think one can do anything except say philosophy is the following series of books: starting with Plato and coming on down, all those things that Whitehead called footnotes to Plato. These books have influenced the way human beings have thought of themselves, the way they’ve organized themselves into social groups in various ways. The people who are writing footnotes to footnotes to footnotes to Plato are making suggestions about how we might think of ourselves, how we might organize society. But of course, so are all the other intellectuals. They’re making the same sorts of suggestions. Philosophy is just suggestions of this sort made by people who have read certain books as opposed to suggestions made by people who have read other sets of books.
Richard Rorty³

Two concerns.