Sorry I haven’t been here in a few days but I see I was tagged here: there is a whole movement in philosophy. check out among many others Mike Titelbaum at Wisconsin, and people at the department of logic and philosophy of science at UC Irvine as well as the CMU Phil dept
Mindscape 315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability. Finally we decide whether all ravens are black. #MindscapePodcast
www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...
Most times I encounter this, the evidence is that the relevant variable takes, like, a dozen possible values
Today’s pet peeve: when people reason from “the answer to question Q isn’t binary” to “it’s a continuum”. This is the academic’s “literally”.
So I think math logic instruction has plenty of value (in my dept we offer at least 4 different non basic logic courses) but I don’t know that it’s justifiable as a requirement across Phil students — even PhD’s
For many, this is the first time they work at this level of abstraction and, on the other side, they might work in parts of philosophy with no formal content. Meanwhile you could teach them
the difference b/w conditional probability and likelihood in one lecture and they immediately have a tool.
As someone who’s taught this class many times, I think you are in the top percentile of people for whom this course logic is beneficial. I’m guessing you got to it with enough formal maturity and subjective interest that you were able to see the main morals and the point of the techniques.
I am terribly sorry.
(I have to check it every. single. time.)
It's a psychological impossibility to memorize the ZIP code of one's department.
More generally because we all agree this is a helpful tool, I think I know when to just advise students to trust it, and when not to.
I’m sure I remember, though I won’t discuss any cases online. More charitable view is to say that what counts as specializing in Phil language is fairly flexible, which affects both the evaluators list and the classification of faculty members.
This is probably true of the other specialty rankings too. There are some real head scratchers in the language category (setting completely aside our own placement in it there are puzzling artifacts I’d advise students to disregard).
This sentiment is so striking. Usually deaths, and especially murders bring out the apologists. In this case the hatred for private health insurance is so deep seated that it’s theme #1 in every conversation.
I mean I’m confident that I have more theoretical clarity than nearly all speakers of English could articulate explicitly. But people still seem to follow some rule comfortably!
Initially I thought this was a rare win for free enrichment theories but of course the matter is far too conventionalized to speak in favor of them.
Just landed on the correct theory of the weird American usage of “this Friday”/“next Friday”. It means “Friday of this/next week”. Previous theory was: “this Friday” = the first from now; “next Friday” = “the one after this Friday”.
I love this because when people ask me what’s the point of writing a book over a collection of articles my top answer is “to have the runway to reeducate your readers and rewrite the history of your subject”.
If only one could have guessed that doing all of that disrupting in such an amateurish way would have led to some problematic picks!
This is great!
My book on Knowledge is out today (World Philosophy Day) with Open Book Publishers.
It's freely downloadable in PDF and Epub form, and cheap to order in hardback or paperback. #philsky
Can I just say Bluesky has already won by allowing opening newspaper articles directly in the relevant apps instead of in some stupid local browser that keeps logging you out ?
Dentist causal modeling: I only floss my upper palate because there is no space in the lower to floss comfortably. Yet in my life I’ve had a dozen cavities and two root canals on top and zero on bottom. What’s the correct distribution over the available causal models ?
This amazing review takes off from this point and hits it out of the park: youtu.be/D0V554NyXWM?...
Given their interdisciplinary nature, the strategy for these positions is quite different from the strategy for ordinary philosophy jobs. I'd be happy to take questions from my point of view as the chair of Philosophy (NB: I am *not* on the search committee).
philjobs.org/job/show/28002
UMD center for AI (AIM) is running a search for 30 interdisciplinary positions in AI (the search is spread over a few years). Philosophy is included (e.g., as the host department for the upcoming BA in AI). Here is our tailored ad with a link to AIM's official ad.
Logic pedagogy q: suppose that, instead of introducing sentential logic via a language with atomic formulas, we used predicates and constants (but no variables or ∀,∃). Would this: (a) help students in the transition to quantificational logic or (b) obscure important generalizations?
Whoever introduced the double square bracket notation started a multi-generational battle between semanticists and typesetters. After being asked to convert to Word, I suffered through the equation environment to render them. Just got the copy editor's version they are all '[['.
On the magic of structured procrastination: I made a to do list for the week this morning with 7 items on it. After completing 1, I started adding new items to the original list. Final day tally: original items 1/7; new items 4/4.
There is a whole class of objects that create their own necessity. (E.g. sunglasses!) this is definitely one of them!
