Paul L. Franco

A clown at a desk greets somebody in a suit. There's another work in the back not wearing a clown suit. The caption says: I'm dressed like a clown because I'm going to the Gathering of the Juggalos after work. What's the Gathering? It's a festival by Insane Clown Posse. Who's that? A Detroit rap group that has two members: Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. Bob back there doesn't like ICP. I played Miracles for him, but he said it wasn't his style. I even showed him the time Violent J went on Bill O'Reilly and he just shrugged. Anyway. How can I help you?

I needed a new hobby so I'm going to try to win the New Yorker Caption Contest. Here's my first entry.

I once missed an episode of X-Files to go to a middle school dance (I was in middle school at the time) and had to live with that decision for years, but I at least learned a lesson about making informed trade-offs. Nowadays, kids can just watch YouTube shorts *at* the dance.

The real problem with kids these days is they never had to wait four whole ass months to find out Maggie, of all people, was the one who shot Mr Burns.

I use interactive polls in my large lecture courses and they work fine, but one innovative pedagogy idea I have that will improve student engagement and also make me and the university some money is to get a FanDuel sponsorship and allow students to bet the over/under on different answers.

HOPOS 2026 Paper and symposium proposals for HOPOS 2026 can now be submitted through this web site. For detailed instructions, plea

International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science -- #HOPOS 2026
Ohio State University, Columbus (OH)
22 to 26 June 2026

NEW Submission Deadline: 15 October 2025, 11:59 (PT) & remote option for scholars unable to travel to US
hopos2026.dryfta.com.
#HPS #philsky 🗃️

Robert H. Thouless - Wikipedia

This guy who wrote a book about critical thinking (which Stebbing cites in Thinking to Some Purpose), was friends with Wittgenstein, and thought he had a method to communicate with the living from the grave seems interesting.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...

‘Air Bud Returns’ Casts Its Dogs: Golden Retrievers Charlie and Summer Chosen From 5,000 Canines 'Air Bud Returns' has cast two Golden Retrievers in the coveted canine role of Buddy.

These filmmakers obviously didn't read the philosopher's amicus curae brief about organizing sports around nature's joints.

variety.com/2025/film/ne...

In philosophy, all sufficiently advanced forms of logical analysis are indistinguishable from magic.

Focusing on kitchen table issues hasn't helped make analytic metaphysics any more popular so I don't know why people think it will work for politicians.

The Little League World series category "International" is gerrymandered--and includes two gerrymandered categories "Far East, Latin America"--so organizing the two brackets into US & International isn't reasonable. Besides, everyone knows the proper sports organizing principle is Kant's four races.

On any given day from 2005-2012, there was at least one person there with the Cambridge Edition of one of the Critiques.

Roku City. Stitch is dancing on the lawn of a house that doesn't even fit in with the nice brownstone right next to it. A van with agzzz on it.

Weird vans with business names I don't know, palm trees next to a classic brownstone, spaceships on the lawn, Elvis blasted at all hours of night. The Roku City I knew and loved doesn't exist anymore.

If I hadn't gotten approved as a commenter on 2007 Deadspin back when you still had to get approved to join the comments section, I would probably be an ICE agent now.

Warning: If you read Churchman and related work by Ackoff, you may end up convinced that the one true science of ethics is management science done from a systems thinking perspective even if you don't really know what any of those words mean.

Readings in Philosophical Analysis. HERBERT FEIGL AND WILFRID SEL- LARS. Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., New York, 1949. x + 626,$5.00. Most of the essays in this collection represent the positions of Cambridge Analysis and Logical Positivism. The book contains a good number of the classics of analysis and should therefore provide useful source material for courses in Contemporary Philosophy, Problems, and Methods. Those represented in the selections are Feigl (4 essays), Kneale, Quine (2), Tarski, Carnap (3), Frege, Russell, Lewis (3), Schlick (4), Aldrich (2), Adjukiewicz, Nagel, Waismann, Hempel (4), Reich- enbach (2), Moore, Stace, Sellars, Broad (3), Chisholm, Mace, Ducasse, and Stevenson. The essays cover the subjects of linguistics, logic, mathematics, the a priori, induction, probability, mind and body, description, explanation, and ethics. R. L. A.

I'm not sure that Russ Ackoff made it past the table of contents of Feigl and Sellars's anthology.

Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family? - Research in Higher Education This paper investigates the amount of academic service performed by female versus male faculty. We use 2014 data from a large national survey of faculty at more than 140 institutions as well as 2012 d...

In tenure letters the last few years I've been forcibly struck by how much service the women I'm reviewing are doing compared to the men. (Actual evidence backs this anecdote up - see below.) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Lawn sign that says: In this house, we trust the evidence of our senses, on the whole, with regard to the existence and features of everyday objects. And we have similar confidence in the system of check, double-check, triple-check of scientific investigation, as well as the other safeguards built into the institutions of science.

For years, there wasn't a lawn sign for those households hesitant to announce "We believe...Science is real" but that were also not anti-realist either. No(a) longer!

A sign you can hang up in your home that reads: "Define, Verify, Serve life" with hearts dotting the i's.

To hang in your kitchen, or by the front door. From the Logical Empiricist collection at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

It's more convincing than any of the arguments in Two Dogmas.

I was just reading about the way my institution acted dishonorably during McCarthyism (mentioned in Reisch's book on the Cold War and philosophy of science).

magazine.washington.edu/feature/anti...

The FBI kept files on APA and SPSSI member from the 1930s on, as Harris (1980) discovered. The increased surveillance of the late 1940s and 1950s with the APA described as a communist infiltrated body had, according to Harris (1980), the indirect effect of encouraging some to abandon controversial lines of research for more conservative topics. James Gibson was investigated by the FBI starting in 1946 and lost his security clearance in 1951. His social psychological research came to an end during the 1950s, partly due to the success of his work on perception, but according to Reed (1988), partly due to his growing pessimism that the study of social issues would be possible in the anticommunist climate. Reisch (2005) argued that even the philosophy of science, including Herbert Feigl’s view of science and values, was altered by the Cold War. In such a climate, a claim to be entirely value-free would certainly be safer than the 1930s activist stance of the SPSSI founders.

Working on a paper about Feigl and found this very interesting paper about value-neutrality and the history of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and am now really interested in what is in J.J. Gibson's FBI file.

spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

No, there isn't a consensus that Oxford moral philosophy corrupts the youth; in fact, philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe argued in her famous 1957 radio lecture that it couldn't corrupt youth because the philosophy was so inert

This must be a big relief for Oxford moral philosophy.

The Wilde readership in mental philosophy at Oxford, vacant by the removal of Mr G.S. Stout to accept the professorship of logic and metaphysics at St. Andrews, has been filled by the election of Mr. William McDougall, now reader in experimential psychology at University College, London. There is more text about W.G. Smith resigning a position at King's College London and accepting one at Liverpool, as well as various other stuff, that I decided to not make a joke about.

No mention in this 1904 News and Notes piece about how G.S. [sic] Stout's move to St. Andrews from Oxford is expected to affect the general rankings and mental philosophy specialty rankings in 1905's Philosophical Gourmet Report.

The real philosophy journal scandal goes back to 1921 when The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods shortened its name to The Journal of Philosophy so it was "more convenient for citation," which of course made it easier for Mind to drop psychology from its subtitle in 1974.

I turn now to one of the most fundamental and notoriously contro- versial issues: the empiricist criterion of meaning. It is not surprising that this has aroused so much dispute. Occam's razor is apt to mobilize the castration complex of the metaphysicians. But psychoanalytic jokes aside, there are, as it were, three blades to Occam's razor,

Feigl, a paragraph later, intentionally cracking a Freudian joke about metaphysicians, and unintentionally predicting the Mach 3 razor.

It is curious that it should be the logicians who first undermine their own enterprise by a denial of the sharp distinction between the empirical and the logical (because here they are struck with the vague- ness of ordinary discourse and of scientific methodology), and then pro- ceed to blur the methodology of science beyond recognition (because from a purely formal point of view a theory is in principle adjustable in any one of its parts) . I suggest that if our logical analyses and recon- structions of the scientific enterprise are thus far unable to do justice to its most important and indispensable criteria {of confirmability and of confirmation), we must look for better analyses and reconstructions instead of giving a distorted picture of scientific method.

Herbert Feigl on W.V. Quine, who he thought was too easily impressed by a mere logical point leading to a "distorted picture of scientific method."

Hereby promising to make all my speech acts after this one constatives to avoid being thought of as a performative male.

Also worth noting that @msuarez.bsky.social and I have a chapter in the same volume on *Inference and Negative Analogy* – and broken bones, of course 🦴.
#philsci
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

black toyota RAV4 rear saying "The Kant Car" with a message about being nice to LLMs because of Kant

The Kant Car

Back when I was trying to be a Kant guy and at all the talks scholars threw around first Critique passages they memorized in German and English that I hadn't, I always wished Saturday morning teen shows would come up so I could rap the City Guys theme from memory so they knew I knew stuff too.