Over at the blog of the American Philosophical Association, I rant a bit about how using chatbots shirks the work of philosophical writing and reading. You can read it over there (by clicking the link) or here (below the fold).
It’s part of the APA’s AI and Teaching series. Thanks to Will Fraker, who edits the series, for some helpful pushback on bits here and there.
Continue reading “On AI at the APA”In contemporary music, the recorded track is the musical object that listeners encounter the most. Some philosophers, like Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, have taken this to mean that the track is the work of art in contemporary music. Evidence for this is the importance that many musicians put on production of the track. So much so that producers become important contributors to the musical product.
Other philosophers, like Dan Burkett, Chris Bartel, and myself, have argued that song and performance are also works worthy of aesthetic attention. So there’s a plurality of works associated with every particular record.
In a recent interview with Rick Beato, the pioneering producer Todd Rundgren reflected on the importance of the track.1 He doesn’t side either with the track-centric view or with open-ended pluralism.
Continue reading “Back on track”I am teaching 17th&18th Century Philosophy this semester for the first time in a while. This week was my favorite bit of the course: Berkeley’s argument for idealism.
It’s a short, deductively valid argument from tempting premises, to the conclusion that the whole sensible world is just ideas. It invites a kind of wonder at how thoughts can fit together.
Continue reading “Always a good idea”In a short article at Nature, Eddy Keming Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen, and Dave Danks argue that current AI has general intelligence.2 I think that their argument goes wrong in some of the details, but they deal with some issues very quickly.3 On reflection, I think my bigger problem is not with their argument but with their question itself.
Continue reading “Turing cycles”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:
Continue reading “Citing “Injustice””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.’
Today I posted a new draft, coauthored with Ron McClamrock: Reflections on popular music and collapse phenomena
Continue reading “A draft and a fragment”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”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”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. Varshney6
* Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit, with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz
* Music genres as historical individuals, with Emmie Malone and Brandon Polite
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.
Continue reading “Kania on kopycats”