Many arguments are called ‘cynical,’ but is there anything that is common to them? Is there a general form of cynical argument? One type of cynical argument is a kind of reductio ad absurdem, a proof by contradiction, to discredit a premise. The first step is to take the premise and associate it with some worldview. Assume P. (premise) P holds under worldviews W. (Cynical Generalization) Then, the cynic discredits those worldviews. Worldviews W are […]
Category: philosophy
On Philosophy Publishing
There has been some discussion in the philosophy blogosphere on citation rates in academic philosophy journals. Since I recently decided that I was going to try to get my work published, I have spent a bit of time thinking about this. When John Protevi at NewAPPS asked about citation patters, I left a comment, but the topic really warrants a longer treatment. Here are some thoughts: Let me postulate, for this discussion, that doing philosophy […]
An Introduction to the Game Theoretic Semantics view of Scientific Theory
What is a scientific theory? In an abstract sense, a scientific theory is a group of statements about the world. For instance the Special Theory of Relativity has, “The speed of light in a vacuum is invariant,” as a core statement, among others, about the world. This statement is scientific because, in part, it is meant to hold in a ‘law-like’ fashion: it holds across time, space and observer. The Popperian view is that we […]
You think this has nothing to do with you.
Philosophy is disparaged often enough, and by people who ought to know better. As of late, every time this happens I think of this scene — but with the text (something like) below….. Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your desk and you select, I don’t know, some statistical mathematical model, for instance, because you’re trying to show the world that you take science seriously […]
Risky Kakanomics
Gloria Origgi writes: This is an application of the theory of kakonomics, that is, the study of the rational preferences for lower-quality or mediocre outcomes, to the apparently weird results of Italian elections. The apparent irrationality of 30% of the electorate who decided to vote for Berlusconi again is explained as a perfectly rational strategy of maintaining a system of mediocre exchanges in which politicians don’t do what they have promised to do and citizens […]
On Matthen’s Intelligibility Argument
Mohan Matthen’s post Teleology in Big Systems brought up two options explaining how someone — Tom Nagel in Mind and Cosmos — would choose a teleological explanation over a naturalistic one. The first, below, got me thinking: First, he might be saying that though it is physically possible (by a fluke series of mutations, for example) for mentality to have come about, it would be better explained by teleology. (Let’s call this the “intelligibility” argument.) […]
Ethics Oppositions
What comprises an ethical decision according to theory? For the Consequentialist the crux is always in determining and executing the best consequences.* This means that making a consequentialist decision involves two steps. First is to imagine different possible futures and evaluate them. Once the evaluation is done, the consequentialist chooses the future scenario that maximizes the ‘Good’ (or what have you) and works towards realizing that scenario. Being moral is having skill in figuring out […]
Charity and OOPs
Given an Object Oriented Ontology ethics can present a problem.* It is not obvious how to fit ethics into an object oriented view: even if objects have ethical properties, ethics itself has to be considered just as arbitrary as any other property. One could, of course, hold some Deontological, Consequentialist or other ethical viewpoint, but this position would have to be justified on other grounds, since O.O.O. is silent on the matter. Hence having ethics […]
Aether Discontinuity
Assume space-time is quantized. This would mean that space-time is broken up into discrete bits. It then follows that time is broken up into discrete bits. This disagrees with basic experience: we can start counting time at any arbitrary point. “Now” could be any time whatsoever. Moreover, we run our physical experiments at any given point; we don’t have to wait to start our clocks. But what if our ability to run experiments at any […]
EIFL (Domainless Logic)
I saw this post by Mark Lance over at New APPS and he brought up one of the issues that I have recently been concerned with: What is a logical domain? He said: So our ignorance of our domain has implications for which sentences are true. And if a sentence is true under one interpretation and false under another, it has different meanings under them. And if we don’t know which of these interpretations we […]