philosophy – News For Wombats

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.”¹

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.²

“On trusting chatbots” is live

My paper On Trusting Chatbots is now published at Episteme. It is in the penumbral zone of publication, with a version of record and a DOI but without appearing yet in an issue.

Publishing things on-line is a good thing. Waiting for space in a print issue is a holdover from the 20th-century. But it creates the awkward situation where the paper will be cited now as Magnus 2025 but, if it doesn’t get into an issue this year, cited in the future as Magnus 202x (for some x≠5).

If we care about careful and accurate citation, there’s got to be a better way.

Doctor gpt

At Daily Nous, there’s discussion of Rebecca Lowe’s post about how great it is to talk philosophy with the latest version of Chat GPT.

There’s pushback in the comments. Others reply that the critics haven’t used the latest version (which is only available behind a paywall). Discussion of LLMs will always allow this: Complaints about their shortcomings are answered by pointing to the next version that’s supposed to resolve all the issues.

Lowe and other commenters reveal that lots of philosophers are using LLMs in the regular day-to-day of their research. I’m still trying to figure out what I think about that. For now, let’s deflect Lowe’s ridiculous offhand claim that “Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic.” I say ridiculous for a few reasons—

Sorry, not sorry

I’m involved in an interdisciplinary collaboration about chatbot apologies. One product of that, from the philosophers’ side, is a paper that I’ve cowritten with my colleagues Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz.

link: Chatbot Apologies: Beyond Bullshit

It’s still a work in progress, so any feedback is welcome.

Grad conference on Pop Culture and Philosophy

The theme for this year’s UAlbany grad student conference is Pop Culture and Philosophy. The keynote speaker will be William Irwin, who as a volume and series editor basically invented the genre.

If you have something that might fit the bill, I recommend submitting. It’s a fun conference, and I look forward to it every year.

Details are at PhilEvents.

Qualifying the praise of outsiders

At Daily Nous, Justin writes in praise of the outsider perspective. He quotes William Lycan:

An outsider to a small subliterature is more likely than is an insider to make an interesting or even important contribution to it. And the same for an outsider to a whole problematic within an area of philosophy. And possibly the same for an outsider to a whole area.

This resonates with me. As a philosopher of science, I ended up with a research program in the philosophy of music because my perspective on problems cast an interested light on questions beyond science. That said, here are some cautionary remarks about the outsider perspective— running roughly in order from the least serious to the most fundamental.

Goodbye, Robert

Today I attended the memorial service for my late colleague Robert Meyers, who passed away last week.

His philosophical writing addressed epistemology and pragmatism, among other things. His work on Peirce and James contains insights that informed my own work.

When I interviewed for the job here at Albany, I had breakfast with another of the faculty on the morning before my flight back to Maine. Robert met us in the parking lot to give me copies of several papers that we’d discussed, and he said he hoped to be seeing me in the Fall.³ I had to wait for the department’s decision to make me an offer, of course, but it was a welcome positive sign.

Parrot progress

Emily Bender famously coined the phrase stochastic parrot to describe text-only chatbots. The trend towards parrots continutes: Ars Technica has a clip of a ChatGPT-4o test run where the bot, which has a canned voice it is supposed to use, replies in the user’s own voice.

OpenAI promises that the actual release version totally doesn’t do this.⁴

Measuring influence today

At The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel updates his “rough measure of current influence in … ‘mainstream Anglophone philosophy’.” The method is to count the number of distinct Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles in which the philosopher is cited.

When he ran the number five years ago, I defined the Putnam as a unit of influence: By definition, 1 Putnam of influence means being cited in as many articles as Hilary Putnam.⁵

The news: My influence has increased from 77 to 89 milliPutnams.⁶

A snippet about covers

It’s hard to believe July is almost over! A couple of weeks ago I was in Santa Fe for the Rocky Mountain ASA. It was my first aesthetics conference ever. That felt a bit awkward since I’ve been actively doing philosophy of art for more than fifteen years, but everyone was super-welcoming. It was a great conference.

Today I was editing the remarks I delivered there and ended up cutting several paragraphs. I took them out because they don’t need to be in the paper, but I think they’re correct nevertheless. So here they are…