Category: Eric Schwitzgebel
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by Eric Schwitzgebel Yesterday Stephen Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisors, called the media “the opposition party“. My op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times is my response to that type of thinking. What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can’t Be Both Factual and Balanced? Does democracy require journalists and educators to strive for…
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by Eric Schwitzgebel One of my regular TAs, Chris McVey, uses a lot of storytelling in his teaching. About once a week, he’ll spend ten minutes sharing a personal story from his life, relevant to the class material. He’ll talk about a family crisis or about his time in the U.S. Navy, connecting it back…
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by Eric Schwitzgebel Spoiler Alert: Not much! I estimate that 97% of citations in the most prestigious English-language philosophy journals are to works originally written in English. In other words, the entire history of philosophy not written in English (Plato, Confucius, Ibn Rushd, Descartes, Wang Yangming, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc., on into the 21st…
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by Eric Schwitzgebel We might think of fictions as extended thought experiments: What might it be like if…? Ordinary fiction confines itself to hypotheticals in the ordinary run of human affairs (though sometimes momentous, exotic, or exaggerated). In contrast, speculative fiction considers remoter hypotheticals. Although much speculative fiction considers hypotheticals of future technology (and thus…
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By Eric Schwitzgebel Consider cases in which a person sincerely endorses some proposition (“women are just as smart as men”, “family is more important than work”, “the working poor deserve as much respect as the financially well off”), but often behaves in ways that fail to fit with that sincerely endorsed proposition (typically treats individual…
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Eric Schwitzgebel and Carolyn Dicey Jennings This article brings together lots of data that we have been gathering and posting about over the past several years, here and at The Splintered Mind. Considered jointly, these data tell a very interesting story about the continuing gender disparity in the discipline. Here’s the abstract: We present several…
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by Eric Schwitzgebel The Survey of Earned Doctorates is a questionnaire distributed by the U.S. National Science Foundation to doctorate recipients at all accredited U.S. universities, which draws response rates over 90% in most years. The survey includes data on gender and ethnicity/race. Data for 2009-2014 are readily available online here. At my request, the…
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by Eric Schwitzgebel Carrie Figdor has been arguing that they do. Consider these sentences, drawn from influential works of neuroscience (quoted in Figdor forthcoming, p. 2): A resonator neuron prefers inputs having frequencies that resonate with the frequency of its subthreshold oscillations (Izhikevich 2007). In preferring a slit specific in width and orientation this cell…
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… has been publishing philosophers’ op-eds recently — a couple by me (here and here), and this past week Harry Frankfurt on why inequality isn’t immoral and an adaptation of Regina Rini’s Splintered Mind guest post on microaggression. The new op-ed editor Juliet Lapidos is behind this trend. Encourage Juliet by sharing the LA Times…
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by Eric Schwitzgebel As a fan of profane language judiciously employed, I fear that the best profanities of English are cheapening from overuse — or worse, that our impulses to offend through profane language are beginning to shift away from harmless terms toward more harmful ones. I am inspired to these thoughts by Rebecca Roache‘s…
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