May 08, 2008
Wustl Commencement
If you've been paying attention to the news recently you might have noticed that the university where I work - Washington University in St Louis - has decided to give an honourary doctorate to Phyllis Schalfly. I, like many people here, hadn't heard of Ms Schlafly, but having read some of her columns and having learned of her work against the Equal Rights Amendment, I've signed the letter from the Association of Women Faculty protesting the decision. It's hard to see how our university can support someone whose life work has been to undermine the legal and social status of so many of its students and colleagues.
But enough about Schlafly. Those more familiar with her will provide a better rapsheet. D's description of the up-coming ceremony as the worst graduation ever made me try to remember who had been honoured at my own undergraduate graduation ceremony. And the person who sticks out most in my mind is the actress Helen Mirren, who was then famous for playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the TV-series Prime Suspect. And I remember, not just because my dad was rather awed to see Mirren in real life, but because of the speech one of the St Andrews officials gave to introduce her. He talked about how, when he had been growing up, and a girl his own age had been asked what she wanted to be when she grew up she had usually replied with one of the few professions that were thought of as suitable to women at the time: nurse, air-hostess, etc. But last week when he asked his own young daughter what she wanted to be, she'd replied, to his surprise: "Detective Chief Inspector".
I wonder what my students will remember about their graduation ceremonies this year.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 08:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 07, 2008
Shazeen Samad
My first ever book has just come out, and is now available world-wide. Here's what it looks like:
It's called Truth in Virtue of Meaning and it's basically a new account of the analytic-synthetic distinction (one which is designed to fit better with phenomena like contextualism and semantic externalism than pre-Quine conceptions of the distinction did), and a defence of that distinction against about 7-zillion arguments (ok, maybe more like 15 arguments) against analyticity.
I'm going to post a bit more about the content of the book later in the week, but what I thought I'd do right now is tell you a bit about the photograph on the cover. The photo is by a Maldivian photographer called Shazeen Samad. He has a beautiful website and some of my favourite images of his are here, here, here and here. If you are looking to procrastinate while you should be grading/writing that final paper, and you won't be depressed by images of incredibly beautiful people hanging out in what appears to be the most beautiful place on earth, then the site comes highly recommended.
The photo that Shazeen very kindly let me use is called "Maldavian Reflection" and it is an image of the ocean at sunset, when the water is so still that the entire sky (which has lots of cool clouds) is reflected in it. A couple of people have remarked that the picture is beautiful, but doesn't have much to do with the topic of the book. But to those people I say two things: first, off, what did you want? pictures of bachelors? of one concept containing another? and second: not so! when you first look at the photograph it can seem pretty chaotic and hard to work out what it is a picture of. But then you look harder, and you realise that it is in two halves, with the horizon down the middle and that everything below the horizon is water, and everything above it is sky. What could be more appropriate?
Posted by Gillian Russell at 04:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
April 03, 2008
Blackboard Tiles
This stuff 
One of those things that I think good logic students quickly realise is that it's one thing to be able to follow a proof in class, and quite another to be able to reproduce it yourself in homework or on a test. Well one of the things that I've learned from teaching logic is that it is one thing thing to be able to scribble a proof out on a notepad, and another to be able to present clearly on a blackboard during a lecture.
Why? Well, it has something to do with the fact that one's notepad is uebersichtlich - scrawling out some complicated instance of an axiom isn't that hard if the axiom is at the top of your page, but it can be a bit harder when that axiom is 2 blackboards back, or on the other side of the room. (My logic classroom has 6 huge boards that scroll past each other - I rather like that, but it can make it easy to loose the first part of a proof.) So I think that for me to write a proof on the board requires that I know more of the proof off by heart than when I'm just writing it on paper. Second, of course, there's just more pressure when 30, or 60, eyes are on you, all waiting to be reminded what the induction hypothesis 2 boards ago actually was. And third, when I'm putting a proof on the board I'm often talking at the same time. And as teachers everywhere know, talking goes faster than writing, so you're basically running two trains of thought at once anyway.
So I'd been yearning for a blackboard in my office, and then I found this stuff.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
March 06, 2008
The Philosophy of Philosophy
Amazon unexpectedly coughed up an official copy of Williamson's new book today. We had a reading group on it here at Wash U, so I've read a version of it already, but this made me smile:
In this case study, our interest in giving a clear and critically reflective answer to a simple, non-technical, non-metalinguistic, non-metaconceptual question forced us to adjudicate between complex, technical, metalinguistic and metaconceptual theories. This phenomenon seems to have been overlooked by those who complain about the "arid" technical minuteness of much of philosophy in the analytic tradition. A question may be easy to ask, but hard to answer. Even if it is posed in dramatic and accessible terms, the reflections needed to select rationally between rival answers may be less dramatic and accessible. Such contrasts are commonplace in other disciplines; it would have been amazing if they had not occurred in philosophy. Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention spans.
I think I might have to read that out in my philosophy of language class today.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
March 05, 2008
Metamorphosis
Butterflies remember what they learned as caterpillars. But how do we know that they aren't just Q-memories?
Posted by Gillian Russell at 11:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 21, 2008
Books
It's a while since I updated the bookshelf (in the sidebar to the right - scroll down to see) but there is some new stuff on it now...
Posted by Gillian Russell at 04:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 07, 2008
Initiatives in Logic
It looks like Jan Srzednicki (whom Melbourne logicians all refer to very familiarly as "Shredo") has a new book out. It's a little on the pricey side, even for a logic book, but it looks very interesting.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 11:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
February 06, 2008
On Sleep
I think it's pretty common to think of how asleep someone is as a continuous property, in the sense that someone can be a little bit asleep (in which case their eyes will be closed, but they might remember overhearing a conversation nearby, and be wake-able with very little stimulus, such as someone whispering their name, or opening the door of the room they are in), or very very deeply asleep, in which case they might sleep through a loud storm/band playing next door/someone poking them or even moving them, and in all kinds of states in between. But Demmett and Vaughan's The Promise of Sleep argues that this is wrong: though there are indeed different kinds of sleep (i.e. stages 1-4 and REM sleep) sleep itself is discrete on/off thing.
The main experiment Demmett cites in support of this goes more or less like this: you keep a subject awake for 3 or 4 days, so that they build up a large sleep debt, making them liable to fall asleep quickly. Then you clip their eyelids open (yes, it does sound torturous) and sit them in front of a bright flash, like that of a camera, which goes of randomly, but on average every 8 seconds or so. Then you ask them to push a button every time the flash goes off. Here's what happens. For the first couple of minutes they push the button diligently every time the flash goes off. But after a couple of minutes, there is a flash and they fail to push the button. The experimenters ask them why they didn't push the button, and the subject replies that there was no flash. But of course, there was a flash, the experimenters all saw it, and the subject is sitting there with their eyes pinned open in front of the flash bulb. The electrodes attached to the subjects scalp (which you can use to measure electrical activity in the brain) show that the subject actually fell asleep for 2 seconds.
Demmett argues that sleep is total cut-off of normal perceptual processes: basically the brain drops a wall between the subject and the outside world, such that the sleeper simply doesn't perceive the outside world at all. The difference between sleep and unconsciousness, coma or death is that certain things can prompt the removal of the wall (sounds, shaking the sleeper, etc). But still, either the wall is there or it isn't---the subject is either asleep or he isn't---and if he's capable of paying attention to anything in the outer world (groggily attending to nearby conversations, for example, or some language learning tape) then he isn't asleep at all.
All of which makes sleep seem really strange. It's clear from the book that nearly everything we know about sleep has been discovered very recently, and that a lot of falsehoods about sleep are still very widespread. Some of the new data about sleep has been achieved-unsurprisingly enough-through new ways of studying the brain, but there's also been plenty discovered that could have been discovered much earlier if only someone had looked. In fact, it's completely amazing, and in need of explanation, that no-one every noticed these things before. For example, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) during sleep is strikingly obvious to anyone who'd care to look. And it is ubiquitous: everyone - babies, old people, animals, men, women - has hours of REM sleep every night (well, in the case of nocturnal animals, it might be during the day, and hibernation and the like turn out to be special cases. And it takes a few weeks before the sleep of babies is consolidated into longish alternating periods of wake and sleep..but you get the point - REM sleep is all over the place.) And it isn't as if no-one ever watched anyone else sleep. And yet pre-20th century theories of sleep (Aristotle apparently thought vapours arising from one's stomach after eating put one to sleep) make no mention of it, and it wasn't discovered and studied until a few years ago. Why?
Is it just that people assumed sleep was uninteresting? It seems to me that there are a bunch of issues that could be of interest to philosophers here, but the philosophy of sleep book I've found on Amazon is Robert Macnish's The Philosophy Of Sleep, which is a 2006 reprint of the 1830 book. Here's his description of waking from a healthy night's sleep:
The sleep of health is full of tranquility. In such a state we remain for hours at a time in unbroken repose, nature banqueting on its sweets, renewing its lost energies, and laying in a fresh store for the succeeding day. This accomplished, the slumber vanishes like a vapour before the rising sun; languor has been succeeded by strength; and all the faculties, mental and corporeal, are recruited. In this delightful state, man assimilates most with that in which Adam sprang from his creator's hands, fresh, buoyant and vigourous; rejoicing as a racer to run his course, with all its appetencies of enjoyment on the edge, and all his feelings and faculties prepared for exertion. (2)
So, no need for coffee then! And no beta-waves. There is some mention of eye movement in the index, so I'm going to order a copy of the book (I got this stuff from the Amazon "search inside" feature) and see if there's anything that could be construed as early observation of REM. There might be a few more posts about sleep in the next few days or so.
Posted by Gillian Russell at 01:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
The Nature and Structure of Content by Jeffrey C. King
Forever Undecided by Ray Smullyan 
Philosophy of Language by Alex Miller
Intermediate Logic by David Bostock
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
