Missing Shades of Grue

Returned yesterday from a very fun and very enlightening AAPT conference at Coastal Carolina University (SC). Made some new friends with whom I had some great discussions. The workshops and presentations were all impressive. I learned much.

Our workshop on Social Technology and Teaching Philosophy succeeded in streaming John Basl's live presentation in Twitter and Wave to the group. We used Wimba. My part of the presentation (Teaching in the Cloud) really required more time than I had, but I had a chance to introduce colleagues to what I do in HNR 101 and share a few resources (like Diigo and Netvibes). My links can be found below. My pictures of the weekend can be found on my Picasa site. The indoor shots of beer drinking and arm wrestling are poor because I refused to use a flash and I was beer drinking. The outdoor shots are more sober and clear.

I posted my presentation at SlideShare. Because of overlap with others' and time constraints I didn't talk about it all at the session.



HNR 101 is the class I described as partly in the cloud. To create a social bookmarking and annotation site I used Diigo. Netvibes provided the platform on which the students create and then present online "posters" of their course projects. I also created a YouTube playlist for the class.

For more information about these technologies and others I refer you to Technologies for Teaching and Learning. I update this site regularly and welcome ideas from others.

Interesting article in the NYT about the Auburn philosophy teacher who has made something of the program there.

"Jolley says he thinks of his relationships with his students less as teacher-student than as master-apprentice. His goal, as he sees it, isn't to teach students about philosophy; it is to show them what it means to think philosophically, to actually be a philosopher."

Rodin's Thinker could afford to sit around and think; obviously no committee assignments or essays to grade. Rodin's Thinker isn't really the model here, is it?

The College Issue - The Thinker - NYTimes.com

I just found this interesting 1988 Dutch video on "the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter." Dan Dennett participates in a fun dramatization of the "Where Am I?" story.



Victim of the Brain | Google Video

I'm not calling myself wise. I refuse to grow up. But there are certain threads. Whether you connect the threads together, well... And really, there's nothing quite like having your kids or your grandkids or the people you know and love still say you're okay, because quite honestly I don't know if I am or not. I mean, I'm just gonna do what I've got to do, and I've gotta live with the consequences, which I have quite often--including, you know, people like Brian dying--and thinking, you know, Did I cause that? Because I've never killed a man. Yet. Knowingly. And I don't wanna... I mean, I'm getting to retirement, whether I want it or not. Do you know that I actually have a bus pass? In England? I've reached the age where I am given a free bus pass. [laughs] I feel like going to England right now and riding every bus I can get! [pause] There's a certain thing about growing old, which is I'm still getting used to it. It's a whole new experience.

THE GQ&A: KEITH RICHARDS: GQ Features on men.style.com

In what looks like a review of Searle's book Freedom and Neurobioogy, David Papineau reviews Searle. The review is appropriately positive.

...perhaps Searle's loyalty to everyday thinking is a price worth paying for his undoubted virtues. During the course of his intellectual lifetime, philosophy has become a dry and technical business. Most philosophers today write only for other philosophers about issues that can accurately be termed scholastic. Against this background, Searle is a beacon of accessible expertise, a throwback to a time when philosophy was part of public debate. His work is devoted to some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy, yet he never gets bogged down in the kind of esoteric disputation that forgets why the issues matter in the first place. If he does this by sticking closely to the firm ground of common sense, this has not prevented him from producing a constant stream of challenging views across a large range of topics. Fortunately, there is no sign of his stopping yet.

And what about the book?

For Searle, genuine freedom is incompatible with determinism, and that?s that. Given this, he turns to quantum mechanical indeterminism to make space for free will. His admittedly tentative solution is that the unreduced conscious mind might play an independent role in directing brain processes that are subject to indeterminacy at the neuronal level. ...If Searle?s suggestion is right, then this principle breaks down inside the human brain, at those points where conscious minds exert an independent influence on events. This implication is not incoherent, but it seems highly unlikely. Serious physicists are unlikely to start looking for violations of quantum mechanics inside the human skull. With free will, as with consciousness, it seems that Searle?s affinity for common sense has left him in a philosophically unstable position.

And regarding the construction of social reality and his analysis of political power...

Here and elsewhere, it is a pity that Searle has not stopped to learn more from thinkers in the sociological tradition. By building his analysis of social reality solely out of materials provided by his native common sense, he has missed out on some hard-won insights.

David Papineau on John Searle TLS

Anthony Appiah's Idea Lab article about experimental philosophy has received lots of attention. It's an exciting trend in philosophy--a revitalized empiricism--and Appiah describes some of the interesting experiments from Knobe, Machery and others. What I like most about the x-phi movement is that it highlights, as serious empiricism should do, the character and credibility of intuitions. Ordinary language philosophy offered up claims about what ordinary intuitions were, but it assumed an authority on these matters that seems to me to be undeserved. Armchair introspection can only go so far. And asking philosophical colleagues what they think a term means risks the problems of small samples biased toward a narrow tradition. X-phi does the actual work by digging more deeply into the cognitive sciences to uncover the relevant intuitions. Of course, one still has to decide which intuitions are relevant and to attend to what connects intuitions to theory and explanation. Intuitions may shift as theorizing becomes more sophisticated and available (philosophical and pre-philosophical intuitions frequently differ); and theories change as they confront new intuitions about new problems.

Surprisingly, I haven't seen much comment on Appiah's most critical comment.

The best work in experimental philosophy would be valuable and suggestive even if it skipped the actual experiments. ("It would be natural to say," Knobe might have written, "that the chairman in one situation had harmed the environment intentionally, whereas. . . .") X-phi helps keep us honest and enforces a useful modesty about how much weight to give one's personal hunches, even when they're shared by the guy in the next office. But -- this is my own empirical observation -- although experiments can illuminate philosophical arguments, they don't settle them.

I don't see where skipping the actual experiments preserves what's novel about experimental philosophy. That's the point, isn't it? Empirical access to intuitions (as opposed to introspective access alone) is a valuable part of the philosophical enterprise of solving problems, contributing more than mere illumination. No one denies there's got to be some theorizing regarding the data one finds--but one has to collect data accurately and carefully. Good theorizing depends on it. I must admit, it does seem that most of the attention in the press has been directed at the empirical collection of intuitive data and less attention placed on what one does with the data (and how the data relate to philosophical theory). But by my lights, what settles philosophical arguments is attention to both intuition and argument.

Idea Lab - Philosophy - New York Times

Interesting article in the Times this morning about the evolutionary origins of morality.

"Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are," Dr. de Waal wrote in his 1996 book Good Natured. Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But this is a fallacy, in Dr. de Waal's view. Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in Primates and Philosophers, with "a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality."

In addition to de Waal, the article quotes Gilbert Harman, Philip Kitcher and Jesse Prinz.

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior - New York Times

I found a link to Dennett's review ("The Evolution of 'Why'?") of Robert Brandom's book Making It Explicit over at Brain Hammer. I haven't read the Brandom book, but Dennett's overview is a nice read. Their views on naturalizing norms are very similar (as Dennett readily admits), though Dennett faults Brandom for leaving out an explicitly evolutionary account of normativity, while he admits that he (Dennett) has given too little regard for the role of the linguistic community.

In the New Yorker Anthony Gottlieb reviews two new biographies of Descartes--Desmond Clark's Descartes: A Biography, which argues that Descartes philosophy is best understood in the context of his scientific work, and A. C. Grayling's Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius, where it is suggested that Descarts spent a good deal of his life as a spy. I'm rather sympathetic to the first suggestion and a bit skeptical about the latter; but I haven't read either work yet.

It isn?t easy to see Descartes?s work the way he saw it?the relationship between science and philosophy has changed too much for that. Despite his current reputation, the man himself seems to have been less interested in metaphysics than in applying algebra to geometry and delving into the innards of cows. He turned to philosophy relatively late in life, and out of fear that the Catholic Church would condemn his science. He would have been surprised at how he is remembered.

Read more at The New Yorker: THINK AGAIN

Jonathan Weiner reviews Frans de Waal's new book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved.

A very nice history of animal spirits and the discovery of electrochemical impulses in the nervous system can be found over at The Neurophilosopher.

A wondefrful list of online philosophy videos can be found at A Brood Crumb.

Bored by movies, and don't feel like reading a book? You can watch philosophical and other interesting videos on web.

Online videos of philosophical lectures ? A brood comb

Stephanie Bird has written a nice introductory article on the current state and significance of neuroethics.

If we recognize that the neurobiological events that lead to higher brain function and behavior result from complex interactions of genetic and environmental factors, it is unreasonable not to acknowledge the potential role of these factors when we assess responsibility. They ought to be considered. Among the challenges for neuroethicists will be to help us decide the degree to which various factors should be considered and to help us understand how we should conceive of personal autonomy. As a society, we must continue to discuss and debate the appropriate role for new neurobiological findings in determining culpability. With so much at stake, it is clear that we need to proceed with caution and with our best judgment when it comes to incorporating neuroscience into decisions regarding when individuals should be held accountable.

Science & Spirit

An article in the Boston Globe (with the Dylanesque title "Blood on the Tracks") briefly surveys some of the recent work exploring the relationship between reason and the emotions in moral judgment.

David Hume wrote that reason is a "slave to the emotions." But new research suggests that in our moral decision-making, reason and emotion duke it out within the mind.

The survey refers to the work of Joshua Greene (diverting killer trains by pulling switches or pushing fat men), Valdesolo and DeSteno (moral decisions primed with comedy skits), and Marc Hauser (whose forthcoming book explores the evolution of a moral faculty much like a language faculty). I'm very sympathetic with this literature, though I think we need to be careful to state what it is that is being claimed. Uncovering how we do make moral judgments doesn't automatically reveal what decisions we ought to make--though I think the work does contribute to a theory of the nature of morality generally.

Blood on the tracks - The Boston Globe

UPDATE: An interview with Marc Hauser can be found on American Scientist. Hauser describes what he call a "moral grammar," which is intended to be similar to Chomsky's universal grammar. A moral grammar is "a set of principles or computations for generating judgments of right and wrong."