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Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    • Mark Okrent interview (hat tip Graham Harman)

      Very nice Mark Okrent inteview here, which includes this gem:

      My single most important commitment in this area is that the intentionality of action is fundamental, and the intentionality of cognitive states, including conscious states, is to be understood in relation to this fundamental intentionality of action. Action, as action, always is directed towards some telos. That is, acts are always directed towards something, they are always either in order to bring about some end or for the sake of continuing some process. It is a corollary to this basic commitment that actions don’t in general ‘acquire’ their goals by being caused by mental states that pass on their intentional content to the acts that they cause. (That is, what it is for an act to have a goal cannot be cashed out in terms of the content of the desires that might or might not partially cause the act.) It also follows from this basic commitment that we will never understand what it is for a state or event to be intentional until we can answer two questions: ‘What is it to be an agent who can act? ‘What is it for an agent to act?’ There is an interesting relationship between these two questions, taken together, and Heidegger’s question regarding the meaning of the being of Dasein.

      Great stuff. Joe Bob says to check it (as well as Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality) out.

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: Jair Rodrigues

      Yesterday the great singer Jair Rodrigues passed away at age 75; he was healthy and musically active until the end of his life (performing an average of 15 concerts per month), and died of an acute, violent heart attack. He is one of the lesser-known but very talented singers to have emerged in the 1960s, known for his samba interpretations, but in fact very versatile as a singer. In the 1960s, he hosted a very popular weekly show on TV with Elis Regina, in which many memorable duets with both were recorded.

      I’m posting here the song that Jair Rodrigues is perhaps best known for, the classic ‘Deixa isso pra lá’ (1964) (a surprisingly modern proto-rap), and one of his medley duos with Elis Regina – this one with lots of Bossa Nova classics. He will be missed.

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    • Smoking and Two Strands of Biopolitics

      Biopolitics – even when understood in its narrow sense of life itself being a political issue – comes in at least two different strands.  The first, which historically precedes the second, was concerned with what Foucault called a “politics of public health.”  In so doing, it takes on standard biopolitical issues of population optimization, public health and so forth as mass issues.   The resulting policies included mass vaccination campaigns, the installation of proper municipal sewage systems, and so forth.  These programs resulted in demonstrable and substantial gains in typical measures of public health, such as life expectancy.

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    • More Neil deGrasse Tyson awfulness

      When Tyson laughs as he dismisses philosophy as "pointless" he reminds me nothing so much as a high school bully who has just visited an indignity on his victim. And, as in high school, nobody much seems to mind.

      I don't know why this kind of thing is so popular among physicists who don't know any post-World War II philosophy of science or any pre-World War II history of science (one could do worse than starting here). See Stephen Hawking telling Google that "philosophy is dead" and Lawrence Krauss calling David Albert a "moronic philosopher" in a manner which suggests the phrase is pleonastic for him.

      It's maybe not so weird how often philosophy's enemies end up just doing bad philosophy themselves.

      Anyhow, it was very nice to read Damon Linker's take-down of Tyson's philistinism here. Depending on your meta-philosophical commitments you might be tempted to split hairs with respect to Linker's epistemology-centric characterization of the philosophical tradition. But what he writes isn't implausible, and he's clearly getting a very large part of the tradition correct.

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    • An effect of maleness

      An article by Alla Katsnelson in Nature (28 April; doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15106; currently free) reports on new results from Jeffrey Mogil, a well-known pain researcher at McGill. Mogil and his team have shown that olfactory exposure to males (humans, rats, cats, dogs, guinea pigs) dampens pain responses in mice. In a paper published in Nature Methods (doi:10.1038/nmeth.2935), Mogil and his team report that even a T-shirt, or the scent of chemicals from a male armpit, had the same effect. The only exception was male cage-mates of the subjects. Women, on the other hand, had no effect on pain sensitivity.

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    • Gender, Characterization, and Memory

      This blog officially has 16 authors, 6 of whom are women. A quick glance to the category cloud will show you that one of the most prolific authors is a woman. So then why does a commentator at Philosophy MetaBlog characterize the blog as run by men? This is the comment linked to by Brian Leiter:

      “Anonymous May 4, 2014 at 8:48 AM
      I can't speak for others' use of the term, but in my case the behavior over the last few years of Protevi, Schliesser, Matthen, Lance, Kazarian, et al. is what makes the term 'Nudechapps' so fitting. The boys have made a habit of prancing around in condescending moral superiority over so many things that one is reminded of a person engaging in a shameless display of self-aggrandizement. What's worse, the Nudechapps consistently treat dissenters with derision and disgust. So the echochamber these nincompoops have created for themselves has allowed them to spread a view within their little clique that is grotesque in many of its details.

 And the handful of hangers-on that support their shenanigans are like nothing so much as the stupefied populace trying so hard to convince themselves that the emperor is wearing the glorious raiment of moral superiority. But of course the emperor is wearing no clothes, and he is shameless about how good he looks. Thus, Nudechapps.”

      This description, and others in the comments at Philosophers’ Anonymous, seems to me an ignoble attempt to take down individuals without recourse to evidence or argument. For the most part, I do not find such expressions worthy of consideration. But this one is interesting, I think, because of what is left out. Is it the case that the commentator thinks that none of the women at NewAPPS fit the description he or she finds so apt for its men? I doubt it. A more reasonable reading of this comment is that the author has simply forgotten the women of NewAPPS, or finds them relatively unimportant. Such forgetting, together with so much vitriol about feminism in the comment stream at that blog is striking, if not all that surprising. As one recent study found, "hostile sexists and feminists were more and less likely, respectively, to show implicit prejudice against female authorities." In this case, gender bias serves to spare our blushes, but not without reminding us that we have to work harder to be heard, especially by those who start from further away. 

      Update: I added text above to distance the gender bias claim for the comment in question from the claim about vitriol toward feminism found in the overall comment stream. 

    • “Mathematicians are supposed to prove things *in* arithmetic, not *about* arithmetic!”

      Hitler does not like Gödel's theorem one bit. Perhaps surprisingly, he displays a sophisticated understanding of the implications and presuppositions of the theorem. (In other words, there's some very solid philosophy of logic in the background — I think I could teach a whole course only on the material presupposed here.)

      (Courtesy of Diego Tajer, talented young logician from Buenos Aires, giving continuation to the best Monty Python tradition!)

       

    • Voltaire’s Prayer

      We had a big internal debate at newapps a while ago about the use of snark and each of us individually resolved to try our best to avoid it from that point on out. First, it's too easy to be mistaken about when it might be justified. Second, even if might be in principle justified there are just too many negative consequences. We all resolved to try not to use snark even if snark was directed against us.

      Nonetheless, there is some great snark in the philosophical canon. Perhaps the most famous is from Voltaire:

      I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.

      This is pretty funny at first glance, but I think a little bit problematic too.

      First, as Voltaire realized to his detriment, it's possible that one's enemies be ridiculous without people realizing that they are. This can get pretty destructive. So he could have come up with a better prayer. Second, in a more Nietzschean vein, ridiculous enemies don't really help you do a better job. At best they just waste everybody's time.  Finally, we should have some compassion for the ridiculous. We've all been ridiculed, rightly and wrongly. It's so little fun being ridiculed that it can drive people mad, making them that much more ridiculous. This is a pretty bad dynamic.

    • How do we interpret the IPCC’s statements regarding uncertainty?

      Not very well, claims a study recently published in Nature.   The principle claim is that "laypeople interpret IPCC statements as conveying probabilities closer to 50% than intended by the IPCC authors."  In other words, if the IPCC uses a term to convey that a hypothesis is 90% likely, people intepret it to mean that the hypothesis is significantly less than 90% likely.   And mutatis mutandis if the hypothesis is highly unlikely:  people intepret the phrase to mean something closer to 50% then the authors of the report intend.

    • Mechanisms and functions

      There appeared this morning a very interesting review of Craver and Darden’s recent book In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences by the biologist Stuart Newman.   Among the points he makes is the claim that it will no longer do for philosophers to define the function of some mechanism (or anything else) as "the role the part played in the evolutionary history of the organisms that have it” (C&D’s phrase).   This is so, he argues, because  the “phenomenon of ‘developmental system drift’ plays havoc with conventional ideas about mechanism.”

       

      He gives the following examples:

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