Here is the programme for the soon to be happening CO4 conference, a great initiative started by Richard Brown.
Dewey and Oakeshott on Politics and Education
Here’s a very recent paper from the Philosophy of Education. Here is the correct link for Francis Schrag’s reference to Bob Grant’s “On Writing Michael Oakeshott’s Biography.” Speaking of which, Bob Grant has written a fantastic biographical essay “The Pursuit of Intimacy, or Rationalism in Love” for Paul and my Companion.
Rob Rupert Papers
Check out two forthcoming papers from Rob Rupert, one of the sharpest minds around:
1. Against Group Cognitive States (forthcoming in S. Chant and G. Preyer (eds.), From Individual to Collective Intentionality. No listing on OUP’s website yet).
English users are not fazed by such sentences as “Microsoft intends to develop a new operating system” and “England wants to retain the pound as its unit of currency.” We produce and consume such claims frequently and with ease. One might nevertheless wonder about their literal truth. Does Microsoft — the corporation itself — literally intend to develop a new operating system? Does England — as a single body — genuinely want to retain the pound as its unit of currency. More generally, it is a substantive philosophical and empirical question whether groups of individuals (who themselves instantiate mental states) instantiate mental states properly so called.
2. Keeping HEC in CHEC: On the Priority of Cognitive Systems
Liberal Education
A review in The Economist of Stefan Collini’s What Are Universities For? The best articulation of the instrumental/intrinsic debate is still Oakeshott’s The Voice of Liberal Learning. Here is the first essay from VLL online. And Paul Franco is tackling this topic for the Oakeshott Companion.
Mr Collini is moved by Newman’s insistence that a liberal education is not about what students learn or what skills they acquire but “the perspective they have on the place of their knowledge in a wider map of human understanding”. But this is a far cry from the mechanisms government now uses (and Mr Collini’s focus is almost entirely on the British government in Westminster) to set goals for the proper expenditure of public money and to turn university students into demanding “consumers” of higher education.
Paradoxical Roots of “Social Construction”
David Kaiser reviews Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science by Mary Jo Nye.
Fifteen years ago, scientists, historians, and sociologists traded salvos in what was termed the “science wars.” Passions ran high; “social construction of science” became a battle cry. Critics like physicist Alan Sokal pointed an accusing finger at various humanists who had suggested that science was an inherently social phenomenon riven by rival interests rather than a rational pursuit of objective facts about the natural world. Some blamed the French sociologist Bruno Latour and his writings from the 1980s. Others highlighted members of the Edinburgh school of the sociology of scientif ic knowledge and their writings from the 1970s. Still others singled out Thomas Kuhn’s remarkably influential little treatise, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962.
Cognitive Enhancement
An article from The Atlantic. Allen Buchanan interviewed about his recent book.
I think that any appeal to the notion of human nature, on either side of the enhancement debate, is tricky and problematic and has to be handled with care. Yes, in one sense we might say that it’s part of human nature to strive to improve our capacities. Humans have done this in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we’ve done it with computers and the Internet. So, yes, if an alien were looking at humanity and asking “What is human nature?” one of the ingredients is going to be that these beings seem quite concerned with improving their capacities and they seem to have a knack for doing it.
On the other hand, sometimes people say that we shouldn’t engage with these technologies because we could somehow damage our nature or interfere with our nature, and in doing so they seem to have a kind of rosy pre-Darwinian view about human nature and about nature generally. They tend to think that an individual organism, a human being, is like the work of a master engineer—a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that’s the product of eons of exacting evolution.
Remembering Herbert Simon
Simon died this day in 2001. Check out these two books – Models of a Man (as with most edited books this is uneven, but there is still much to recommend it) and Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America, an excellent intellectual biography. Speaking of Simon, I have a paper coming out entitled “Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension” to be found in a collection edited by Roger Frantz and Robert Leeson Hayek and Behavioural Economics” Vol 4 of Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics with an introduction by non-other than Vernon Smith (whom I met in Tucson last May) and a host of other luminaries such as Herb Gintis, Deirdre McCloskey, Gerry Steele and others. Here is the abstract for my paper:
Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is both unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition.
A Romp Through Philosophy of Mind
Here is the delightful Marianne Talbot (thrown out of school at 15 for “truancy and disruption”) presenting four podcasts:
Part 1: Identity Theory and Why it Won’t Work
Part 2: Non-Reductive Physicalisms and the Problems they Face
manwithoutqualities 