Sometimes it really is great to see the hammer of justice descend. Can you imagine what could have happened if Mark Emmert had helped himself to whatever this guy's been eating?
This being said, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar here makes a pretty good argument that nobody involved should be doing a victory dance.
Are students aware that most of their professors can accurately predict their final grades prior to the final exam or paper? Is this just hubris on my part, or do people in the biz long enough get very good at this?
If it's not hubris, then it raises a genuine practical ethics problem. If I already know what the student is going to make, why do I feel morally obligated to grade the paper? I can't figure this out.
I'm clearly obligated by prudence to grade the papers as the LSU hair and teeth men* would be very unhappy with me for not doing so. But would they be right to be unhappy?
Maybe the problem is that if the students knew I wasn't grading their final papers, then they wouldn't do the work. So perhaps not doing the grading would involve deception? This seems pretty weak to me though. I could just not say anything one way or the other, or honestly say that I might** grade the person's exam or paper. Knowing their exams might be graded would motivate them enough.
A few students want comments on their work and we owe them that, but the overwhelming majority of them don't. So why not just hold onto the papers and grade them later if a student wants comments?
I might be being an idiot here, but I can't for the life of me figure out how the following inference is disallowed in the Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy textbook:
1. Ex(Rax)
2. ExEx (Rxx) 1, E introduction
This is clearly invalid, because there are anti-symmetric relations (note that if it were valid one can prove ExEx (Rxx) from ExEy (Rxy), and that ExEx(Rxx) has the same truth conditions as Ex(Rxx)).
Intuitively, Existential Introduction should be restricted so that one cannot replace a name or eigenvariable with a variable that is already bound in the sentence. But I can't find this restriction in Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy. My friend couldn't find it in the old red Mates book either, so we think it's not unlikely that we're both missing something obvious.
I turned to the soundness proof in Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy and they leave the case of Existential Introduction as an excercise to the reader. It has a little star next to it showing that it is a difficult problem. I'm wondering if it's impossible. But, again, it's more likely that I'm missing something, so if anyone who teaches from the book could take a look my introductory logic students would appreciate it.
Helen De Cruz has some excellent suggestions for how to talk to creationists given that neither debate nor denouncement are likely to be productive. She describes the way in which a religious person who is not a creationist can speak to another religious person who is a creationist, e.g., by pointing out that Biblical literalism is a recently emerged approach, one that may be impossible to apply consistently, and for that reason among others it may not be thoroughly used by anyone.
This article by Dan Kahan suggests that disbelief in human-caused climate change is like belief in creationism in this respect: What people "believe" about each doesn't reflect what they know, but rather expresses who they are. This supports the thesis that providing evidence for creationism isn't likely to change minds and that providing evidence for climate change isn't likely to change minds, either.
But what is the climate change equivalent, where we speak to people from their own perspective as Helen proposes that we do for religious people who are creationists?
There’s a discussion going on over at Leiter about the results of his latest poll: which modern philosopher had the “most pernicious influence” on philosophy? Heidegger was the strong #1, both in terms of the number of people who hated him, and the intensity of their hatred. This doesn’t seem that surprising, given that Leiter’s readers, um, lean analytic and since Leiter took their Derrida option off the table.
Much more interesting, it seems to me, is the historical skew of the results. Most of the figures in the top 20 are 20th century philosophers, and all but three (Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant) are 19th or 20th century (and it wouldn’t be conceptually wrong to put Kant in with the 19c). Does this reflect poor historical training? Do influential but controversial positions get absorbed into the ‘mainstream?’
This week I am posting ‘Palco’, a 1981 song by Gilberto Gil. The other day I was reminded of this song and then showed it to my daughters; they now love it, especially the part at the beginning that goes ‘my soul smells like talcum power, like a baby’s buttocks’ (‘minha alma cheira a talco, como bumbum de bebê'). It’s a great song, even if betrays its 1980s-ness in the instrumental overproduction. But it’s upbeat and lively, so perfect to put ya’ll in the mood for the weekend.
(BMoF will be on recess next week.)
Should be working again! Thanks for everyone's patience while we've been having problems with Typepad.
In a comment to the previous post on the Fermi Paradox, David Wallace wrote this terrific exposition of it. I agree with almost everything he says, so I will save my own quibbles for a comment. David writes:
Just to clarify the force of the Fermi paradox (which is intended to rest on quantitative factors, not just a general "where are they?"), here are the main basically-uncontroversial premises that get it going:
A friend of mine is doing her DPhil in Oxford. She's American, and out of term she goes back to her home in middle America. She recently went to see the newly refurbished museum in her home town. When she was looking at the displays on human evolution, a museum guard, who had been observing her, suddenly said "So, what side are you on: the Bible or evolution?" Whereupon my friend replied "What do you mean what side am I on? This is not a football game, you know".
I am deeply troubled by the incipient creationism, which treats biblical literalism as a serious intellectual contender to scientific inquiry. I want my children to grow up with normal biology textbooks, not with Of Pandas and People. If creationists win their lobbying efforts to make creationism mainstream in schools and the public sphere, that is a loss for everyone (including the creationists). Debates don't seem to do any instrumental good. If we are not going to fight creationism through debates, how can we – as public intellectuals – ensure that creationism doesn't encroach even further upon our schools and public life?
A petition is circulating online asking Gov. Bill Haslam to veto SB 1391. The bill would modify the Tennessee criminal code to allow for criminal assault charges to be brought against women who use illegal narcotics while pregnant, should their drug use lead to harm or death for the fetus or child. These charges carry a penalty of up to 15 years in prison. But the bill is so badly written, it could affect all pregnant women in Tennessee, whether or not they use drugs, should something go wrong during their pregnancy. In effect, SB 1391 threatens to criminalize pregnancy in Tennessee.
Policy analysts and political commentators across the world have voiced their concerns with SB 1391, arguing that it could have far-reaching consequences (Reality Check, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and NPR). Even some pro-life groups recognize that SB 1391 could incentivize abortions for women who use drugs, since women risk up to 15 years in prison by continuing their pregnancy, especially if they are unable to access drug treatment programs (All Our Lives).
If we really want to support the flourishing of children in Tennessee, then we need to move beyond the pro-life/pro-choice framework to seek reproductive justice for everyone, based on “the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (SisterSong). For example, rather than punishing women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, we should be extending the Safe Harbor Act to support women who use either prescription drugs or non-prescription drugs to get the treatment they need, and to stay clean for the sake of their families and themselves.
New APPS 