Awesome. Story here.

I've decided that I'm switching to Ubuntu (Linux). I'm also switching to LatTeX. They are both awesome. Here are some reasons why.

Ubuntu: Linux for Human Beings
A while back, during my open access rants, Jeremy predicted (in this post) that I would become a Linux user soon. Jeremy, it seems, is a bit of a prophet. At the time, I had already partitioned my hard drive so I could play around with it. I finally got some of the kinks ironed out, and now I think I'm ready to make the full switch.

Ubuntu is great, and you don't need to be a computer hacker to use it. It's Linux for Human Beings.

Many of the reasons for pushing for open access in journals seem like they ought to push one toward open source software. I think that's right, and I think that explains Jeremy's prediction. In fact, Richard Chappelle over at Philosophy Etc. has a great post that is sort of related to this issue here (Although his post is limited to open source word processing).

Philosophical reasons aside, there are other some pretty good practical reasons to switch to Linux(Ubuntu)

1. Security
   Linux was made with security in mind. The Linux system is WAY more secure. You don't have to use anti-virus software.
   
   
2. Speed
   You don't have a bunch of anti-spyware/malware/anti-virus software/crummy software you'll never use that comes loaded with your windows machine. In Vista, it takes 2-3 minutes minutes from the time I push the power button to the time I'm actually doing something online. In Ubuntu - it's 30 seconds (that includes the time it takes to enter my username and password).
   
   
3. Cheap
   In the future, all that I will need to pay for to get a nice machine - is the machine! Everything else I need is FREELY available - including great open-source alternatives to many of the cool proprietary windows programs.
   

LaTeX
I've also been playing around with LaTeX. I know a lot of philosophers out there have been hip to LaTeX for awhile, and I'm sad that I am only now just discovering how great it is.

Making the sbit more in the future.witch can be a little odd for someone unfamiliar with markup languages, but there are so many template TeX files out there, that even someone with very little experience with these can jump right in.

I love LaTeX. I'll probably stump for LaTeX a bit more in my next post.

In one of Ted Sider's recent papers, he's got a nice section trying to explain why philosophers should care about the metaphysical possibility of time travel. Here's a passage.

Before expending too much energy on the topic, it is worth thinking a bit about
its point. Beyond the (perfectly legitimate) desire to set the record straight, is
there any reason to care about time travel?

The most straightforward reason to care is that today’s physics community
cares. Whether the actual laws of nature permit time travel is a live debate
in contemporary physics journals (Earman, 1995). Suppose the arguments
to be discussed in this paper against the possibility of time travel (without
shackles) succeeded. Then, given that many physicists tell us otherwise, that is
a problem! Whatever else metaphysicians must do, they should at least try to
make metaphysical sense out of what physicists take seriously.

I started to wonder exactly how seriously the physics community cares. That led to this post last week.

I found another interesting news story this week. The article is a bit sensationalist, and it's a little older - but it does report on a physicist, Amos Ori, who explains how he thinks we could make time travel happen. I assume this is the Physical Review article the newspaper is referring to. (Note: Amos Ori has an even earlier article here)

Too bad you can only read the abstracts online.

Here's a funny story about two friends. They formed a group called TEAL (Typo Eradication Advancement League), and they travel the country correcting typos.

SUNY-Fredonia's own, Neil Feit, has a book coming out this summer.

OUP has a description - plus some nice blurbs from Andy Egan and John Perry on their website. I'm pasting all of that below.

Description

Philosophers typically suppose that the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are propositions-things that might be true or false, and their truth values do not vary from time to time, place to place, or person to person. Neil Feit argues that this view breaks down in the face of beliefs about the self. These are beliefs that we express by means of a first-person pronoun. Feit maintains-following David Lewis, Roderick Chisholm, and others-that in general, the contents of our beliefs are properties. Unlike propositions, properties lack absolute truth values that do not vary with time, place, or person.

Belief about the Self offers a sustained defense of the Property Theory of Content, according to which the content of every cognitive attitude is a property rather than a proposition. The theory is supported with an array of new arguments, defended from various objections, and applied to some important problems and puzzles in the philosophy of mind.

Reviews

"Feit's discussion of the arguments for and against the property theory of content is philosophically sophisticated, generous, and fair-minded, and he finds some extremely interesting applications for his version of the property theory."
--Andy Egan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan

"Belief about the Self is an important contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, and useful for the broader field of cognitive science."
--John Perry, Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

In Four Dimensionalism, Ted Sider briefly presents an argument against three-dimensionalism from the metaphysical possibility of time travel.

Time Travel Argument Against Three Dimensionalism

1. If time travel is metaphysically possible and three dimensionalism is true, then it is metaphysically possible for a person to be wholly located in two different places at the same time.
   
   
2. It is not metaphysically possible for a person to be wholly located in two different places at the same time.
   
   
3. Therefore, it's not true that time travel is metaphysically possible and three dimensionalism is true.
   
   
4. Time travel is metaphysically possible.
   
   
5. Therefore, three dimensionalism is not true.

One option for the three-dimensionalist is to reject (2). I don't want to get into that (just yet). In this post, I simply want to note something odd about Sider's response to another possible three dimensionalist reply.

The three dimensionalist could reject (4). In fact, they could reject (4), precisely because they recognize the same (apparent) incompatibility between three dimensionalism and the metaphysical possibility of time travel that Sider exploits.

Sider passes the buck to David Lewis' Paradoxes of Time Travel defense of the metaphysical possibility of time travel. However, there is something dialectically odd about this move. Doesn't Lewis explicitly assume four-dimensionalism in his defense?

I've got some more thoughts on the option to reject (2) - but I need to get back to grading.

UPDATE: Here's the passage from the beginning of paradoxes of time travel that I had in mind.

The world – the time traveler’s world, or ours – is a four-dimensional manifold of events. Times is one dimension of the four…Enduring things are like timelike streaks: wholes composed of temporal parts, or stages, located at various times and places. Change is qualitative difference between different stages – different temporal parts – of some enduring things, just as a “change” in scenery from east to west is a qualitative difference between the eastern and western spatial parts of the landscape. If this paper should change your mind about the possibility of time travel, there will be a difference in opinion between two different temporal parts of you, the stage that started reading and the subsequent stage that finishes. (p.68-69)

At first I thought, "This can't be real."



But I looked into it more, and found an article that sheds a bit more light on the video. The guy in the video is Ronald Mallett. He's a professor at the University of Connecticut, and yes he intends to build a time machine. Here's a link to an article that discusses it more.

UPDATE: I just found recent RSS feeds for Mind and Australasian. The feeds on Ingenta are never current. Once I plugged those into the mashups, the returns for metaphysics papers went through the roof!

For some reason, it takes a while for the tweaks to take effect in the widget. Stay tuned and you should see more returns in the widgets.

I've added a metaphysics mashup. The mashup didn't yield nearly the number of results that the epistemology mashup yielded. That kind of surprised me.

I'll post the keywords that I used later under the main journal mashup post.

Introducing Philosophy Journal Mashups!

Any philosophy journal with an RSS feed can be run through a mashup program. Mashups combine multiple RSS feeds and automatically screen those feeds for specific content. Once you've screened the journal articles for the kind of content you want, you can turn the results into a widget to post on a blog.

I tried one out for epistemology. I plugged in the feeds from some of the top philosophy journals and then entered in search criteria so that only journal articles with the right epistemology words in the title made it through. The result was a pretty awesome blog widget that cherry picks many (but not all) of the most recent epistemology articles from some of the top philosophy journals. How awesome is that?

Right now I just have an epistemology mashup, but I'll eventually put up mashups for metaphysics, philosophy of language, mind, ethics, and philosophy of religion. (You may have noticed the new look - the new left-hand column will be for philosophy journal mashups).

Below is more information concerning the search criteria for the mashups, so you can have some idea of what will be caught by the widget and what will not be caught by the widget. I welcome any suggestions for perfecting the widget (especially with respect to keywords that - when in a title - pretty much guarantee an article on the topic of the mashup).


Enjoy the mashups!

Journals Tracked (for all Mashups)
Journals Screened:
Analysis (Blackwell)
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (Blackwell)
Mind
Nous (Blackwell site)
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Blackwell site)
Philosophical Quarterly (Blackwell)
Philosophical Review
(I'll be adding more journals soon)

Journals Attempted
Journal of Philosophy (no feed)

Epistemology Mashup (Keywords: Title Search)
knowledge
epistemic
evidentialism
reliabilism
proper functionalism
foundationalism
coherentism
internalism (I'm worried that this might be too permissive)
externalism (I'm worried that this might be too permissive)
contextualism (this one sometimes brings up 'moral contextualism')
justification
gettier
skepticism
scepticism (I found that both spellings are necessary)
safety
a priori
testimony
testimonial
common sense
proper functionalism
proper function
accessibilism
epistemic luck
fallibilism
infallibilism
warrant

Tracking Rule Disclaimer
As of right now the mashup only tracks the above listed journals. It only screens the titles from those journal for one of the above keywords. If one of the above keywords appears in the title of any recent articles from the above listed journals, then the mashup permits the article through to the widget (so don't get lazy. This IS NOT going to catch all the wonderful epistemology that's out there.)

I'll add more journals and tracking rules when I have time. I welcome any suggestions.

Lying is prima facie morally wrong. But most people are willing to acknowledge that it is sometimes OK to lie.

Cognitive Daily has an interesting post concerning a study designed to assess when teenagers think it's OK to lie. You might be amazed at what teenagers regard as permissible defeating circumstances. Here is the link to the article.

Why should philosopher professors be interested in this? First, the data is interesting. Second, it may come in handy if you ever talk about lying as a case of wrongness in intro or ethics. Third, it may tell us some interesting things about student/teacher relationships. Fourth, it should motivate us to be careful about how we argue with students when we argue that plagiarism is wrong.

Plagiarism
When most students are told about the evils of plagiarism, it's usually cashed out in terms of lying. We often do give students other reasons, but I bet that these other reasons don't always sink in. If the student has an overly permissive attitude as to when it's OK to lie - they will not be terribly moved by plagiarism-is-lying-arguments for the wrongness of plagiarism.

I've always suspected that this was true, which is why I like to stress other reasons for thinking that plagiarism is wrong. These reasons have little to do with lying, and I think these are more compelling reasons for why plagiarism is wrong.

One of the primary reasons I give for thinking that plagiarism is wrong is that it harms (or risks harm) to the other students. Word gets travels fast - particularly in the local area about how easy it is to get through the local college with a degree. The more plagiarism that happens, the more it devalues other student's degrees.

I like to give my students the following analogy. Imagine all of your classmates bought a $20,000 plot of land and you poured salt all over it. Plagiarism is like doing that. It pours salt over a degree and makes it worthless in the eyes of some potential employers.

So, an interesting result of the study is that perhaps it should move us to emphasize the wrongness of plagiarism that does not merely reduce the wrongness of plagiarism to the wrongness of lying.

(Aside: The other reason I like to emphasize the Harm-To-Other-Students argument over other reasons is it gives non-plagiarizing students a very reason to be angry about plagiarism at their school.)

Here's an interesting op-ed from The Wall Street Journal. A Dartmouth professor is "threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights." Here's more from the article.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

Students can get pretty hostile, but if you're trying to argue that scientific knowledge is a social construct - you've laid the stages for a debate.

What I don't understand is that - I hope that my students will argue with me - and I think the last paragraph of the op-ed sums this thought up nicely.

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.

I just discovered Phd Comics today. I'm posting two of the strips below. Here's a link to their top 200 rated comics.

This is interesting. A while back I posted about some pretty interesting cognitive science studies about people having certain perceptual seemings that are caused by their expectations to see a certain object. Here is that post.

Then, I suggested that experiments of this kind in cognitive science might cut against attempts in experimental philosophy to draw some conclusion about whether or not intuitions can justify beliefs.

This was just posted at Cognitive Daily. The focus of this study is on hearing rather than vision.

I just posted Dr. Joshua Thurow's introductory level lecture titled "Is Morality Real, or Do We Make It Up?" over at the website for the Young Philosophers Lecture Series.

SPREAD THE WORD! The more people who know about this and watch it, the more likely it is we'll be able to fund more lectures.

Here's more exciting news. Young Philosophers now officially lives up to its name of being a podcast. This set of lectures will include a lower resolution video file in QuickTime format - that's the format you need to post in order for Itunes to pick up the video file and automatically drop it into your Ipod.

I'll post Dr. Thurow's research lecture sometime next week.

I'm starting to warm up to the idea that there may be a kind of rational inference (apart from disjunctive syllogism) from a known disjunction.

This is very half-baked, but here's the idea - suppose you've got a known disjunction (P or Q). Suppose you know that P is possible, but you're not sure whether or not Q is possible. Suppose you cannot conceive of how Q could be true, but you have a clear idea how P could be true. Would that be enough to reasonably infer P? I lean toward, yes.

We could frame this as an epistemic principle.

(DM) If S is justified in believing that (P or Q), S is justified in believing that P is possible, and S is not justified in believing that Q is possible, then S is justified in believing P.

Quick Clarification: "S is not justified in believing that Q is possible" should not be confused with "S is justified in believing that Q is not possible" - if it were the latter, then that would amount to knowing (P or Q) and being justified in believing not-Q - you could run an ordinary disjunctive syllogism.

I'm imagining a scenario where S is not justified in believing not-Q and S is not justified in believing Q. The scenario is such that you should suspend judgment about Q. (Also, keep in mind that this is the inclusive-or that we're talking about)

If you're on board with (DM) we could push the envelope. Imagine S is justified in believing both that P is possible and that Q is possible, but S's justification for believing that P is possible is much higher than S's justification for believing that Q is possible. Is that enough to reasonably conclude that P is true? In other words, is (DM*) true?

(DM*) If S knows that (P or Q) and S's degree of justification for believing that P is possible is higher than S's justification for believing that Q is possible, then it is justified in believing P.

Homework:

1. Has anyone encountered an argument that employed this kind of reasoning?
2. What decisive counterexamples can we construct? I'm looking forward to either a completely decisive counterexample, or nit-picky one that would force us to Chisholm away at either of the above principles.
   

Where is this going?
I think we could do some pretty interesting philosophical work with either of these two principles - especially (DM*)

[p.s. Madison is kind of awesome]

I just arrived in Madison for the Wisconsin Epistemology Conference. It's going to be awesome. The line-up of speakers is great.

Kudos to Juan Comesaña for organizing this.

I've got some ideas that occurred to me on the plane. I'll post them in a bit, but right now I'm going to go find breakfast.

Stay tuned.

Someone visited my blog by searching "What is Wide Scope Descriptivism?" This is a pretty great coincidence because I'm currently working on a paper arguing against Wide Scope Descriptivism (aka Widescopism).

To that person: Here is the first paragraph of that paper. I hope it answers your question.

Widescopism is a version of descriptivism about proper names. Widescopists hold that when sentences containing names are embedded inside modal operators, the descriptive semantic content of these names should always take widescope with respect to the modal operators. This enables widescopism to offer a version of descriptivism that is immune to Kripke’s famous modal objection to descriptivism.

Funny article from The Onion [HT: Justin Conroy]

Tyler Hansbrough Staying In School To Take This One Awesome Philosophy Class

CHAPEL HILL, NC—University of North Carolina forward Tyler Hansbrough told reporters yesterday that his decision to forgo the NBA Draft and return for his senior year stems from a desire to "take this one awesome philosophy class that is, like, only offered in the fall [semester], I think." The class, PHIL 740: Philosophy of the Mind, is reportedly taught by Professor David Hartz, who Hansbrough described as "like the coolest guy in the world especially because the only grade is just this one big paper at the end [of the term], and he doesn't even take attendance." "He's like super smart and he makes you think completely differently about your perspectives on stuff, which is awesome," said Hansbrough, adding that he is going to read all the books and everything. "And my girlfriend is taking it too, so it should be pretty sweet." Hansbrough denied allegations that he is staying in school because his socio-economic background allows himself the freedom to have fun and not worry about the welfare of his family.