Note: I was asked to give a short speech to the Quality Students of the Tonawandas on March 22, 2012. I decided to ask them to call the notion of "Quality Student" into question and come up with their own definition.
Note: I was asked to give a short speech to the Quality Students of the Tonawandas on March 22, 2012. I decided to ask them to call the notion of "Quality Student" into question and come up with their own definition.
Posted at 12:07 PM in Philosophy, Self Reference | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Through SFSU's College of Extended Learning and the grace of Professor Sowaal, I found a spot in Phil 770-03, a seminar on Descartes. I'm so excited to be back in school!
Whenever I have time after class, I've decided to transcribe some of my notes and thoughts to paper. I'll also be posting my papers on here, in case there was any doubt that I am a true philosophygeek.
My knowledge of Descartes comes mainly from my (analytic) epistemology classes, debates over the mind-body problem, and Rorty's scathing criticism, all focused on around Descartes famous statement: Cogito, ergo sum. Since Professor Sowaal is a Descartes scholar, she's teaching the class by focusing on Descartes other texts and contributions, and only then tackling The Meditations.
I'm excited about seeing Descartes from this different lens. One of the biggest challenges in philosophy can be to give a generous reading to a philosophy that you find distasteful, untenable, or even illogical. Anyone can bring down a weak argument, but it takes a great deal of skill to repair a broken argument and make it palatable for modern sensibilities. Professor Sowaal made an astute observation that there's a common trope in modern thought: "Descares said these very interesting, but stupid things, and this is why he is wrong." My challenge in this class will be to figure out how to preserve the interesting and correct the "stupid."
Much of the class we spent discussing the problem of universals (oddly enough, I just finished reading Quine's smackdown of the issue, in Two Dogmas of Empiricism). Roughly, the problem questions the difference between the abstract concept of "computer" and a particular computer, like the one I'm typing on. The rationalists (like Descartes and Plato) belived in the supremecy of universals, and used those to explain the variety of particulars. That is, how do we go from the form of "computer" to a bunch of things we agree are computers. On the other hand, the empiricists (Locke, Hume, et al.) try to explain how universals provide some kind of unity for a bunch of similar, but non-identical particulars. That is, how is it that we have a bunch of machines called "computers" that somehow get lumped into a concept of "computer."
From our modern perspective, this "problem" might seem ridiculous at first blush. Most everyone these days is an empiricist and language issues center around problems of meaning and representation, not about the existence of extra-sensory universals.
We read an excellent paper by Alan Nelson called The Rationalist Impulse to help explain the stance of the rationalists. First, he notes that rationalists have a different methodology: whereas empiricists use sensory perception as a primary, a rationalist must take a student through a thought experiment to arrive at their conclusions. Thus, even though universals are more primary to the rationalist, the universals are not necessarily easy to see. As an example, if one didn't know anything about music or trained in a different school of tonality, one might think that a Beethoven symphony is cacophonous. Second, he points out that empiricists still have a lacuna to cross: they must be able to explain their more abstract notions. Even Hume, the father of empiricism, couldn't say anything more about the problem of induction than "habit."
I'll be posting a paper later this week on Daniel Garber's article, Descartes against His Teachers: The Refutation of Hylomorphism. That should be interesting, since I haven't written a real philosophy paper in quite some time!
Posted at 12:14 AM in Phil 770-03 Descartes, Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Earlier today, I commented on a blog post that had wild speculative remarks about Powerset. The author sent me an e-mail back, noting that the piece was actually satirical. I would have left the comment even if I had noticed: what about other people that stumble upon the article and don't realize that it's satire? As a steward for Powerset's brand, I want to make sure that people know what's true and what's false.
But, I was reminded that the line between truth and fiction on the Web is very fuzzy. People's doctored profiles oftentimes bear little, if any resemblance to their real-word referents. One might suggest that reference is foundational to truth, but then one would be adhering to a much maligned philosophical tradition. There are also facts that are only true in some contexts. For example, in the Wikipedia article about Saddam Hussein in South Park, it's true that Saddam was killed by Satan, but we know that in the real world, Saddam was hanged. The "right" answer to "Who killed Saddam Hussein" depends on what you're talking about; and both answers might be interesting, regardless of their truth value. Satire presents another problem. Though something might be written full of "incorrect" information, the piece overall might have a lot of meaning and value. Normative statements are especially hairy. The truth of "George Bush is an idiot" depends on what your definition of "idiot" is. Truth seems to be elusive.
Inbound links, anchor text, and hundreds of other signals might be useful in determining the popularity of a page, but it's not clear to a dumb marketing guy like me how to construct a signal for truth. The source isn't much of a help, because sites like Valleywag report truths, half-truths, and fantasy all under a single umbrella. A fact's frequency might be some kind of help, but what happens when a fictional story of a historical character gets more internet play than his real story?
Part of the problem might be our inability to give an adequate theory of truth, but the same might be said about popularity in a pre-Google world. Google helped to shape our version of popularity by giving popularity a formal definition, but only because that definition agreed with our common sense notion of popularity. When you see bad search results, Google can't scold you and tell you that your ideas of popularity is wrong according to their definition. Rather, it has to figure out how to conform it's definition to the majority of people.
From that angle, maybe my worries are unfounded. People seem to have a good eye for differentiating fact from fiction, even with (or especially because?) all of the information available on the Web. My selfish concern, of course, is to make sure that Powerset returns the "right" answers to questions, but the definition of "right" is the crux of the problem.
No answers here, just a bunch of questions. That's why I love philosophy!
Posted at 12:10 AM in Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)