Here’s a paper from Susan Haack to be delivered at the Helsinki Metaphysical Club. In philosophy, George Santayana famously observed, “partisanship is treason.” I agree. Like good-faith inquirers in any field, philosophers have an obligation to seek true and illuminating answers to the questions that concern them; and it would obviously be a serious breach…
Philosopher of mind, Tim Crane, on religion and evidence in The New York Times. For what it’s worth I have repeatedly said that epistemologically speaking, the concept of God does not achieve enough clarity and distinctness to be discussable. When we cite the divine attributes—omniscience, omnipotence, and so on—I do not think we have the least purchase on…
On hearing that Simon’s “thinking machine” computer program Logic Theorist not only validated Russell and Whitehead’s axioms and theorems (but even proved one more elegantly), Russell replied: “I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery. I [only] wish Whitehead and I had known of this possibility before we both…
Here’s a just published paper by Duncan Pritchard in Synthese. It’s reassuring to see epistemologists picking up on the extended mind thesis – the other notable epistemologist pursuing this line is Sandy Goldberg. This is the way things are going – I for one am working on a project that will be a major push in…
Check out my chum, philosopher extraordinaire, and occasional co-author, Chris Onof’s new piece for the Kant Yearbook.
Here is a collection from OUP with a section devoted to SE (how times have changed) with some top-notch names anchored of course by Alvin Goldman. Special Theme: Social Epistemology Guest Editor: Alvin Goldman 8: Alvin Goldman: Systems-Oriented Social Epistemology 9: Franz Dietrich & Christian List: The Aggregation of Propositional Attitudes: Towards a General Theory…
Here’s a brief view of neurophilosophy from Anthony Grayling in The Philosopher’s Magazine.
Stigmergy – the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment – was first conceptualized by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in his ground-breaking work on termite colonies (Grasse 1959). It wasn’t until 1999 that Grasse’s work was brought to a wider audience by Eric Bonabeau et al (1999) in a special issue of Artificial…
Here’s an article from The Economist on the practical application of swarm intelligence to human optimization problems.
I shall disclaim responsibility for this particular choice of terms. The phrase “artificial intelligence,” which led me to it, was coined, I think, right on the Charles River, at MIT. Our own research group at Rand and Carnegie Mellon University have prefered phrases like “complex information processing” and “simulation of cognitive processes.” But then we run…
manwithoutqualities 