I’m very much looking forward to this Monist collection on Robert Musil edited by Bence Nanay. It’s about time Musil got the mainstream philosophical recognition he so deserves. Bravo Bence! Needless to say that with my moniker I’m a great fan of Musil. Here is an extract from Musil’s Man Without Qualities. And if ever you are in Klagenfurt (about a three and a half hour drive southwest of Vienna) check out the Musil Museum.
A fascinating talk by (ontology kingpin) Barry Smith entitled “John Searle and Hernando de Soto: The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality.“
Check out this recent(ish) paper by Andy Clark in Mind Vol. 118 . 472 . October 2009
Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s (1998) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind.
Here is the wonderfully lucid and often provocative Maggie Boden being interviewed. Check out her monumental Mind as Machine. Few, if any, are better placed to offer such a wide perspective of this wildly exciting field.
Here’s the penultimate draft of the aforementioned paper by Julian Kiverstein and Mirko Farina:
Abstract: Like many other studies, this paper focuses on the ways in which the functional isomorphism between neural and extra-neural features can provide the means to meet the criteria for cognitive extension. However, unlike these other studies, this paper acknowledges the stalemate into which the debate over Extended and Embedded has fallen. While surveying the literature directed at the functionalist version of Extended Mind, we investigate the feasibility of the complementarity approach. By exploring the offshoots of recent studies encompassing developmental niche construction, neural development and nurtured cognitive structures, we attempt to validate this complementarity alternative and in bringing it back to fore thereby escape the apparent impasse.
Check out the very important work being done by Roger Koppl and his associate Jim Cowan of the Institute for Forensic Science Administration (for an accessible overview of Roger and Jim’s work see Roger’s Forbes interview from a few years back). To get a sense just how vital their work is consider the stats cited in their paper:
There are over one million felony convictions per year. Risinger (2007) has established that the “minimum factual wrongful conviction rate” for capital rape-murders from 1982 through 1989 is at least 3.3% (pp. 768 & 778). The study of Saks and Koehler (2005) suggests that about two thirds of false convictions arise in part from forensic science testing errors or false or misleading forensic science testimony. Multiplying these numbers gives you a number greater than 20,000.
Turing machine: this via my chum David Livingstone Smith.
Here’s a new paper by Shannon Spaulding. The abstract:
Extended cognition is the view that some cognitive processes extend beyond the brain. One prominent strategy of arguing against extended cognition is to offer necessary conditions on cognition and argue that the proposed extended processes fail to satisfy these conditions (Adams and Aizawa, 2008; Rupert, 2010; Weiskopf, 2008). I argue that this strategy is misguided and fails to refute extended cognition. I suggest a better way to evaluate the case for extended cognition that should be acceptable to all parties, captures the intuitiveness of previous objections, and avoids the problems with the strategy of offering necessary conditions on cognition. I conclude that extended cognition theorists have failed to establish the truth of extended cognition.
Today marks the death of Robert Nozick one of the most versatile philosophers of the last quarter of the 20th Century. The more I read Nozick, the more astonishing his talent seems to be. He writes with such subtle twists about so many issues from politics to epistemology to identity to consciousness, to ethics to philosophical method – with great humility and aplomb. Philosophical Explanations is amazing for its clarity and its “meaning of life” purview for somebody within the analytical tradition. Though I admire the quality of Nozick’s mind I don’t think he led in any interesting directions. Anarchy, State and Utopia is full of clever arguments but there are counter-arguments as well (yet another mind, along with Hayek, misappropriated by the ideological libertarians). The book rests on assumptions about rights which are never made good anywhere in Nozick’s work. PE treats of ethics but doesn’t say anything about how the rights-talk of ASU can be supported. The epistemological parts of PE are a blind alley: his tracking theory doesn’t work for knowledge – or for value. He was a brilliant firework, spectacular in full blaze, then leaving us as much in the dark as ever. This said, he remains one of my favourite philosophers up there with Ryle.
A view that chimes with mine is by Alan Ryan and can be found in The Independent. A rather dull obituary can be found in The Telegraph. Here is a piece from the Harvard Gazette written by none other than Putnam, Scanlon, Scarry and Cavell. For a thoroughly uninformed (not to mention the typos) obituary see The Guardian. I briefly made contact with Nozick on the publication of his last book primarily because of the chapter on Truth and Relativism which was well within the EPISTEME remit. I wanted to ask if he’d care to become an honorary founding editor of EPISTEME: I had no idea just how ill he was. It was not to be.
I’m surprised that I couldn’t find any recordings (video or audio) of Nozick. Here is a recording that I assume is of Nozick.
manwithoutqualities 