Though I haven’t yet read Sandy Goldberg’s brand new book Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification I do look forward to doing so. I’d be interested to how Sandy’s work differs from Jessica Brown’s Anti-Individualism and Knowledge of a few years ago.
Oakeshott’s great essay “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” is now available in book form. For several years prior to the opening up of the LSE Oakeshott archives, this essay was being passed around in photocopy form, a copy of a copy etc . . . making it ever harder to read. Whatever else is in this collection, this…
Tyler Cowen’s Washington Post review of Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales From Evolutionary Economics.
With the passing of Peter Lipton, who formulated and coined the term “inference to the best explanation“(IBE) I was reminded that I once “controversially” (at least to some, though not philosophers of history) deployed the term in a paper to do with the philosophy of history. When I spoke to Peter about it, he couldn’t see any…
This posting refers to this posting. Excerpt from my Polybius essay. Oakeshott (1983: 94) characteristically offers a brilliant analysis of the problem which he calls the ‘dry wall theory’. Keeping in mind Pedach’s and Walbank’s account of historical development, Oakeshott believes that though historical events are not themselves contingent, they are related to one another contingently.…
Volume 4, issue 2, a special issue of EPISTEME is now available. Guest Editor: David Coady Contents and Abstracts available here.
Cass Sunstein writes on the TPM Blog that Hayek’s ideas of distributed knowledge “bear directly on open source software, wikis, prediction markets, and perhaps much more”. Yes, indeed. The mechanism that captures this aggregating phenomenon is called STIGMERGY: the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Indeed, much of what goes on in the complex…
Blaise Cronin’s comments that the term social epistemology has provenance going back to the 1950s library science is absolutely correct. The point that needs to be made, however, is that this “in vogue” term does not denote a unified tradition. Given the rather amorphous and diffuse nature of social epistemology its domain, approach, structure and value are highly…
My recent co-authored paper now available to download through MindPapers. The abstract: To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex…
I’ve just come across an article entitled “Gamma Oscillations Distinguish True From False Memories” that has just appeared in the November issue of Psychological Science. I haven’t had an opportunity to read the article beyond the abstract: To test whether distinct patterns of electrophysiological activity prior to a response can distinguish true from false memories, we…
manwithoutqualities 