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A model can work for decades without being true, and instrumentalism is the honest response
In my work we tune computer models of reservoirs to match years of production data, a process called history matching, and then use them to forecast. Here's the uncomfortable part: several quite different models of the rock underground match the same history…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
“It’s just a tool” is false: instrumentalism cannot survive the smartphone
Whenever my class discusses phones, someone says, "A phone is just a tool. It depends how you use it." Everyone nods, and the discussion ends. I want to argue that this sentence is false, at least about the devices my students carry.…
Started by Rowena Abellana5 replies -
Moral disputes are disagreements in attitude, not in belief, once the facts are agreed
I want to defend a view that comes from Charles Stevenson, who distinguished disagreement in belief from disagreement in attitude. Two engineers who disagree about whether a bridge will bear a load disagree in belief. One of them is wrong, and a…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Hume’s ‘true judges’ are the best answer we have to whether taste can be wrong
Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757) is pinned to my shed wall, because I get tired of being told that taste is just opinion. The story everyone remembers is from Don Quixote: Sancho's two kinsmen taste wine from a hogshead.…
Started by Bec Doyle5 replies -
An outsider can understand a culture, and sometimes better than its own members do
My walking tours go past the Mezquita-Catedral and through the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, the city where both Ibn Rushd and Maimonides were born. Tourists want a story of three faiths living in harmony, the famous convivencia. I try to tell…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto7 replies -
We will never have a test for machine consciousness, and we should say so plainly
This is not a spiritual worry, and I say so as a materialist. It's a methodological one. Three questions get blurred in public talk about AI. Can machines behave intelligently? That is an engineering question and the answer keeps moving. Do they…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
A river is not scenery, and environmental aesthetics should stop treating it like a view
In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was recognised in law as a legal person, Te Awa Tupua. The iwi of that river have a saying: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au, I am the river and…
Started by Aroha Tipene4 replies -
My clients can’t tell walnut from stained beech, but they still mean walnut
Half the customers who order furniture from me ask for walnut. Most of them could not pick walnut out of a pile of stained beech if their life depended on it, and some unscrupulous workshops count on that. A friend lent me…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything
Last year I worked on a documentary about a factory closure, and I made two rough cuts from the same footage for the director. In one the closing of the gates is a tragedy: a community undone by forces it could not…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Anscombe was right: we see causing all the time
I make cedar doors and ceilings in Tetouan. When I push a chisel through cedar I do not see a chisel, then a cut, and infer a connection. I see the chisel cutting. When my apprentice drops a plank and it cracks,…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Genes carry information only in Shannon’s sense; the rest is metaphor
In biology, people talk about information constantly. Genes "encode" proteins, DNA is a "blueprint" or a "program", development "reads out" the genome. My thesis is that only one of those uses is literal, and it is the least interesting one. In Shannon's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Frankfurt is right that we don’t love our children for their qualities, and all love works that way
Raising two children has given me a lot of time with the evidence. Harry Frankfurt argues in The Reasons of Love that love is not a response to the beloved's value. It is a form of caring, and caring is what makes…
Started by Thamarai Raman6 replies -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Reproduction did not wither the aura of art; it made the aura more valuable
I've just reread Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, from the mid-1930s. His claim, roughly: the original work has an "aura", its unique presence in one time and place, its embeddedness in a…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
Aristotle was right that distributive justice is proportion; every quarrel is about what counts as merit
The fiercest arguments I ever heard as a school coach were about team selection. So I've been reading Aristotle to find out whether I was teaching justice or just picking teams. In Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics he says distributive justice…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
A correlation explains nothing until someone shows the mechanism
Our data say that people who charge their phones at regular times are more likely to repay small loans. The effect is real, stable and useful for prediction. But when a manager says this explains repayment, I object. It explains nothing. Perhaps…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga6 replies -
Justice should start from dependency, not from independent adults making a deal
Every baby born on our ward is completely dependent, and so is the mother for a few hours, and so, at the end of life, most of us will be again. Reading Eva Kittay's Love's Labor this year, I felt someone had…
Started by Farhana Akter7 replies -
Logical pluralism is right, for the same reason statistical pluralism is
In data science the old fight between frequentist and Bayesian statistics has mostly cooled into pluralism: each is legitimate, they answer different questions, and a good analyst knows which to use when. I think logic is the same. Carnap said something like…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
The replication crisis is a philosophical problem before it is a statistical one
I've followed the replication crisis in psychology closely. A large collaborative project published in 2015 tried to repeat about a hundred published studies, and fewer than half produced results as strong as the originals. Since then the standard diagnosis has been statistical:…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Teleosemantics is the best naturalistic theory of content we have
I dive in kelp forests on the Chilean coast, and I came to philosophy through biology, so I will defend the view that feels most like home. The puzzle: a frog's tongue fires at small dark moving dots. Usually they are flies,…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Kurup6 replies -
Taylor’s happy Sisyphus shows meaning is purely subjective
I make my debaters argue the side they don't believe, so here's me arguing a side I'm only half sure of. Richard Taylor's version of Sisyphus goes like this. The gods, in pity, implant in Sisyphus an overwhelming desire to roll boulders.…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Possibility lives in the powers of real things, not in other worlds
When I look at a plank of cedar I see what it can become: a panel, a frame, a box. That "can" is not in some other world. It is in the cedar: its grain, its weight, the way it takes a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani5 replies -
Relativism about truth refutes itself, but relativism about morality does not, at least not so easily
There is a passage in Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates turns Protagoras's own doctrine against him. Protagoras says man is the measure of all things: what seems true to each person is true for that person. Socrates points out that most people believe…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Species are drawn, not discovered: biology has already chosen nominalism
I dive in the kelp forests along the Chilean coast. In the years I have been diving there, the species boundaries in some kelp groups have been argued over and redrawn on the basis of genetic data, and biologists still disagree about…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
If many-sidedness is true only from a standpoint, then Jain anekāntavāda undermines itself
Here is the classic challenge, which I want to press as hard as I can before I hear the answer. Anekāntavāda says reality is many-sided, and every claim holds only from some standpoint. Now take that claim itself. Either it holds absolutely,…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies -
Not every coherent prior is rational: subjective Bayesianism is far too permissive
The subjective Bayesian line, roughly de Finetti's, is that any coherent prior is permissible and evidence does the rest. Start where you like, conditionalise honestly, and the data will eventually bring reasonable people together. I think this is too generous, for three…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
The statue-and-clay puzzle is a verbal dispute, and metaphysicians should admit it
I coach high school debate. Half my job is stopping kids from winning arguments by quietly changing what a word means. So I'm primed to spot verbal disputes, and I think I've spotted a big one. The puzzle: a sculptor shapes a…
Started by Sam Ellery5 replies -
Epicurus’s argument about death still works if you throw away the atoms
As a volunteer in Montreal, I spend a lot of my evenings with people who are dying. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching, so I want to defend him against a claim I keep reading: that his consolations about death…
Started by Nadia Haddad6 replies -
Treating beauty as a matter of personal taste is the odd one out among the world’s traditions
I make hand-drawn batik in Yogyakarta, in a workshop my mother started. Our motifs carry Javanese ideas about harmony and Sufi ideas about longing. When foreign buyers ask me "which pattern do you like best?", I find the question strange. A motif…
Started by Ratna Wulandari5 replies