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.
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.
Continue reading “Qualifying the praise of outsiders”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.1 I had to wait for the department’s decision to make me an offer, of course, but it was a welcome positive sign.
Continue reading “Goodbye, Robert”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.2
Continue reading “Parrot progress”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.3
The news: My influence has increased from 77 to 89 milliPutnams.4
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…
Continue reading “A snippet about covers”My forthcoming paper On trusting chatbots is centrally about the challenge of believing claims that appear in LLM output. I am sceptical about the prospects of AI-generated summaries of facts, but I also throw a bit of shade on the suggestion that AI should be used for brainstorming and conjuring up early drafts. Sifting through bullshit is not like editing in the usual sense, I suggest.
Nevertheless, I know people who advocate using chatbots for early drafts of formulaic things like work e-mails and formal proposals. That’s fine, I suppose, but only for the sorts of things where one might just as well find some boilerplate example on-line and use that as a starting place. For anything more original, there’s a real danger in letting a chatbot guide early writing.
Continue reading “On writing and thinking”It’s been a while since I’ve updated the plot of paper-length over time to check in on whether I have become more long-winded as I’ve gotten older. Short answer: I have not.
Continue reading “Brevity update”In arguing for the exclusive primacy of the studio track as the work in rock music, Theodore Gracyk points out that the Beatles stopped touring as they became fixated on sophisticated albums. I heard an interview with Michael Lindsay-Hogg today which upends the example.
Continue reading “That tracks”I posted recently on Mastodon that, when I hear new material by a musician I like, I often have to give it a second listen before I can tell what I think about it. Good or bad, it lacks the familiar and nostalgic contours of their old stuff.
For music that doesn’t command an antecedent commitment, I probably won’t push through and listen enough to acquire an appreciation for it. I only listened to Taylor Swift enough to have opinions because I was thinking about her project of recording. And I only listened all the way through the new Beyoncé album because I was thinking about genre.5
Lots of things bounce off because I only give them half a listen. That’s always been true to an extent, but moreso these days. Being able to stream almost everything has the up side that I can make a deep dive into anything. But the down side of that same availability is that anything new-to-me has to compete for my attention against literally everything else. There is not even the inertia of changing the channel or swapping out the disc.
