Andrew Cullison

I am happy to announce that Charles David Cullison was born this morning at 4am - 7lb 12oz.

I’ve attached a photo. Mama and baby are well. It was the “best labor ever” (those are Sarah’s words, not mine).

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My application to attend the Purdue Summer Seminar on moral and religious epistemology was just accepted! It’s a summer seminar directed by Michael Bergmann and sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. The email says they selected 14 other applicants. Sitting around for two weeks talking about moral and religious epistemology with 15 philosophers this summer is going to be awesome.

Here’s more info on the seminar.

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A reader sent me an email this morning asking if I would share their positive experience with a philosophy journal. This person submitted something to Dialectica and received this PDF. Since this person’s paper is still under consideration, they didn’t want to out themselves during the blind review process. Here’s what this person wrote to me:

Dear Andy,

I recently submitted a paper to Dialectica. In their email back to me acknowledging submission, they included the attached PDF which includes lots of interesting information. Not only are they aiming at transparancy regarding the process, but the submission statistics for the past few years are quite interesting. I think it would be good for this to be held up as a model for other journals to follow. Given that the part of Wide Scope that deals with journals already has a wide audience, and given that I currently have a paper under review at the journal, I’m wondering if you’d be willing to post this pdf on your blog?

I am willing to post it.  Here’s a link to the PDF again.

We see so many journal horror stories, it’s nice to see journals getting praised. Editing and refereeing for journals can be a pretty thankless job. If you have some positive experiences to report, feel free to do that here.

Filed under: journal surveys news by Andrew Cullison
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UPDATE: Moving to the top for the start of the new semester

Here’s something cool you can do with Google Docs. I’ve created a couple of short self-diagnostic quizzes so that students can practice distinguishing between valid and invalid arguments.

Feel free to embed these in your own course webpages.

Filed under: educational technology, teaching by Andrew Cullison
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Some of you may already be aware of Logos and Episteme - a new, open-access epistemology journal.

I think this is exciting, and I really hope it sticks. So far things are looking great. They have an impressive advisory board including Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, Susan Haack, Duncan Prichard, and Jonathan Kvanvig. You can check out their entire team in the sidebar of the current issue.

They also have some pretty interesting looking articles in the second issue. Carl Ginet has a paper on self-evidence.

There is also a paper called “Getting Gettier’d on Testimony” that looks interesting. Lauren J. Leydon-Hardy says she will show that we can cook up interesting Gettier cases when we think about ways in which there could have been differences in what our words mean. I’m guessing these cases will involve lucky to have justified true beliefs, because of some kind of luck involved in what our words semantically express.

I urge epistemologists to help ensure that this thing thrives. Please, please, please consider submitting your next epistemology paper to this journal.

I hereby swear that my next epistemology paper will be submitted to this journal.

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
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I have an awesome idea. I give my students argument extraction exercises so they can master presenting arguments in numbered-premise form. It’s tough because I like to rotate them out so that students who have had me for four years don’t see the same set of exercises.

How about we pool our resources and create a massive database of argument extraction exercises? If every philosopher who had their students do argument extraction exercises contributed 3 passages (2-10 sentences long) that each contain an argument along with the extracted argument for each passage, we would all have plenty of different arguments for students to practice extracting.

If 20+ philosophers post in the comments that they would contribute 3 - I’ll get the ball rolling and set up a submission form.

Please spread the word. I know we can get 20+ philosophers who (a) give argument extraction exercises and (b) would contribute 3 of them in order to get a huge database of them.

Filed under: teaching by Andrew Cullison
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I’ve posted a bit about the Nook eReader, and I also posted that I recently picked up a Samsung Galaxy Tab. While playing around with it, I discovered that with a couple of apps you can turn it into a pretty powerful research tool.

I wrote about it over at Android for Academics. Rather than cross-post - I’ll just link to it here.

Filed under: android, educational technology by Andrew Cullison
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I thought it would be a good idea to put together a short demo video of the free Attendance app we have on the Android market, so you can see how the integration with Google Docs works. Here it is.

Filed under: Uncategorized, android, educational technology by Andrew Cullison
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Thom Brooks just posted some preliminary results of a journal survey he’s been running. Here they are.

Filed under: philosophy journals by Andrew Cullison
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Many of you may be aware of the fact that a leading psych journal is set to publish an article that allegedly supports the thesis that ESP exists.

It has set off a debate in the scientific community about data analysis. See the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11esp.html?_r=1&src=tptw

The main issue is that some statisticians have long been critical of a commonly accepted methodology that they think is too permissive when determining statistical significance with respect to small sample sizes. They are now rejoicing that this ESP paper is going through, because they think it will shed light on what they have long thought is a widely-accepted, bad methodology.

I think this has some bearing on the recent experimental philosophy (xphi) movement. I’ve expressed concerns here about some very popular xphi papers that allege to show that cultural background influences intuitions about philosophical thought experiments. My main concern was the incredibly small sample size and whether the studies included statistically significant differences. I was assured by some active xphi philosophers that these sample sizes plus the standards for determining statistical significance are widely accepted, and so I took them at their word.

Note, however that these statisticians are criticizing precisely this fact. They claim that this method is widely accepted and that it is bad that this is this case. Also note, that they have as one of their targets certain kinds of social science studies that have an xphi flavor - namely, looking at what sorts of factors might bias behavior.

My question is: if much of current xphi is modeling itself after these these social science methods: is xphi as currently practiced in trouble?

Update: Here’s one place where I raised concern about the sample size of a popular xPhi paper

Filed under: philosophy, the academy, the profession by Andrew Cullison
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