logicandlanguage.net

May 20, 2008

Blank Slate, Fool!

Student Youtube video explaining Berkeley's response to Locke.

Posted by Gillian Russell at 04:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 14, 2008

Born to Run

Amazon writes:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Paul Horwich have also purchased Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) by Randall E. Auxier...

Now. Which one of you was it?

Posted by Gillian Russell at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 13, 2008

Previous attempts to Define Analyticity

From Nathan Salmon's "Analyticity and A priority" (J-store access required for the link):

A number of definitions or explications of analyticity have been proposed. My favourite is a proposal by Hilary Putnam. In an exposition of W. V. Quine's famous (if little understood) attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, Putnam suggests that a sentence may be termed 'analytic' if it is deducible from the sentences in a finite list at the top of which someone who bears the ancestral of the graduate-student relation to Carnap has printed the words 'Meaning Postulate'. This definition not only acknowledges the central importance of Carnap's contribution to the role of the analytic-synthetic distinction in analytic philosophy, but it has the additional virtue that it accords to those few among us who bear this special relationship to Carnap and authority that strikes me as only fitting.

Who'd have thought that an additional virtue of Josh Dever's Philosophical Family Tree is that it can help one to determine the extension of the word 'analytic'?

Posted by Gillian Russell at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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 (4) | TrackBack (0)

April 03, 2008

Blackboard Tiles

This stuff is great. I've been teaching a slightly-harder-than-usual logic course this semester and I really wanted a blackboard for my office, for practicing proofs on.

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. . It consists of flexible blackboard tiles that stick to your wall (they're removable and re-positionable- they come off my white-painted wall easily, without leaving a mark, and stick right back on, and, surprisingly, it's really easy to write on them with chalk and clean them off. (I imagine if your wall is a different colour from your chalk you'll end up with a chalk-coloured "halo" around the board though.) They're a bit smaller than they look in the photo - each tile is about the size of a US letter sheet of paper - and I ended up buying 2 packs of 4. Also, I think the tiles are a little prone to getting scratched by the chalk - I can imagine having to buy some more after a couple of years or so. But they look great on my wall and they do the job (every Tuesday and Thursday morning before my logic lecture...)

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)