Tradition
American
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Was plate tectonics a Kuhnian revolution? Geology as a test case
In discussions of Kuhn, the examples are nearly always from physics and astronomy. I'm an environmental scientist, and I wanted to test his picture on the revolution I know best. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in the 1910s. He had real evidence:…
Started by Anand Pillai0 replies59 views -
Moral dumbfounding at a debate tournament: Haidt’s elephant and its rider
I coach high school debate, which means I spend weekends watching teenagers decide what they believe in the first ten seconds and then spend forty minutes building reasons for it. Jonathan Haidt would not be surprised. His social intuitionist model, first set…
Started by Sam Ellery0 replies56 views -
Legal realism is not a claim about what exists, and lawyers should stop treating it as one
A small irritation from the Lahore High Court bar library, where I spend too many evenings. Colleagues say "I'm a legal realist" to mean one of three things: that judges decide on their prejudices and then find reasons; that law is ultimately…
Started by Hamza Qureshi0 replies70 views -
A random string and a sonnet can carry the same information? Then what is Shannon measuring?
I drive a city bus in Ankara and listen to lectures between stops. Yesterday's was about information, and the lecturer said something that has been bothering me through two full shifts: in Claude Shannon's theory, a random string of letters and a…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies166 views -
Truth as ‘what inquiry converges on’ breaks down exactly where we most need it: ethics
Peirce wrote, in 1878, that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth. I find that a beautiful idea for physics. Scientists disagree, run experiments, and over time opinions…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies273 views -
The institutional theory of art is circular, and it’s the vicious kind
I do stand-up on the northern circuit. A mate who did an art degree keeps telling me that whether my set is art depends on the "artworld". So I read up. George Dickie's later version of the institutional theory, from The Art…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies196 views -
What does Langdon Winner mean when he says artifacts have politics?
I design puzzle games, so I already believe that rules built into a world shape what people do in it. If I put a locked door at the end of a corridor, players will spend twenty minutes looking for a key, and…
Started by Huang Wei-ting4 replies204 views -
Bridges too low for buses: what did Winner mean by “artifacts have politics”?
I drive a city bus in Ankara. In a short article about philosophy of technology I read about a bridge built too low for buses to pass under, so that the people who travel by bus could not easily reach what lay…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu3 replies186 views -
I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
I design games in Tainan. My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you…
Started by Huang Wei-ting5 replies124 views -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Huang Wei-ting6 replies284 views -
Can a tidy ledger be beautiful? What is “everyday aesthetics” about?
I do tax returns for small businesses. There is a moment near the end of every return, when the columns reconcile and the ledger is clean and everything is where it should be, that gives me a feeling I can only call…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies184 views -
Our CEO keeps announcing “paradigm shifts”. Is that what Kuhn meant?
Before I burnt out I ran a startup, and I sat through a lot of pitch meetings where someone announced a paradigm shift. A new app for ordering groceries: paradigm shift. Moving the team to four-day weeks: paradigm shift. My last investor…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies168 views -
If I try to understand a practice from the inside first, have I signed up to relativism?
I teach at a Māori-language school. When visitors come, I always ask them to understand our practices on their own terms before judging them: why we greet the way we do, why the river is treated as an ancestor, why some places…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies242 views -
“It’s just a tool” is false: instrumentalism cannot survive the smartphone
I teach philosophy to senior high students in Davao. Whenever we discuss 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,…
Started by Rowena Abellana5 replies195 views -
A student in my prison class asked why anyone should obey an unjust law. What did Aquinas say?
I volunteer teaching a reading class in a men's prison here in Nairobi. Last week we read part of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he says, following Augustine, that an unjust law is no law at all, and appeals…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies212 views -
My son’s course says ‘don’t judge other cultures’. Is that a rule for studying or a rule for living?
I farm cocoa near Kumasi. My son is at university and sends me articles from his anthropology course; I send him proverbs back. This week he sent me something on cultural relativism and we argued on the phone for an hour. His…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies207 views -
Contextual integrity explains why my aunt’s clinic group chat felt wrong
My aunt is a nurse at a small clinic outside Kuala Lumpur. Last month she showed me the staff group chat, where a colleague had posted a photo of a patient's rash to ask the doctor whether it looked like shingles. No…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies236 views -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies150 views -
Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything
I cut documentaries. Last year I worked on a film 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…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies190 views -
What are the ‘four principles’ of medical ethics, and what do you do when they conflict?
I run my family's pharmacy in Ahmedabad. A drug rep who also teaches a short course mentioned "the four principles" as if everyone knew them, and I nodded and then looked them up: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. I understand each one…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies189 views -
Reading group: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the shack to the land ethic
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, the year after he died helping fight a neighbour's grass fire. It's short, it's beautiful, and its last essay, "The Land Ethic", is one of the founding texts of environmental ethics. I work…
Started by Anand Pillai5 replies239 views -
Friedman’s billiard player: is predictive success really all a model owes us?
I build credit-scoring models for a mobile-money company in Nairobi. My models predict, quite well, who will repay a small loan, using patterns in phone and payment records. They do not describe why anyone repays. Some of the strongest predictors are things…
Started by Wanjiru Kamau4 replies120 views -
What did McLuhan mean by ‘the medium is the message’? It sounds like a slogan
I'm a data analyst in Kuala Lumpur and I work on fairness in recommendation algorithms. Colleagues quote ‘the medium is the message’ at least once a week, usually when they want to sound deep about social media. I finally looked it up:…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies110 views -
Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’
I'm a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. This spring our block association applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and…
Started by Dana Whitfield0 replies38 views -
Freire’s banking model is unfair to the lecture, and to the teachers who give good ones
I have taught Latin and Greek for twenty years, and every few years a pedagogy course reminds me that I am a banker. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the "banking" concept of education: the teacher deposits, the students receive, file…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies222 views -
Is Iris Marion Young right that most injustice is not about who gets what?
I teach Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) every year, and every year the same split appears in the seminar. Young argued that political philosophy had been captured by the "distributive paradigm": it treats justice as the fair division of…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies294 views -
Knowledge as a building or a raft? Neurath’s boat, seen from a community organiser’s chair
I'm a community organiser in Chicago and used to teach in public schools. I've always loved pragmatism because it treats knowledge as something you do with other people. Lately I've been reading about the structure of justification and want to test the…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies182 views -
Skilled manual work demands more thinking than most office work
I make cedar doors and ceilings in the Andalusian style. My cousin works in an office in Casablanca and earns three times what I do, and the family assumes his work is the one that uses the head. Matthew Crawford's Shop Class…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies236 views -
Is Wheeler’s “it from bit” a physics proposal or a piece of metaphysics?
John Wheeler's slogan "it from bit" says that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions: that reality is informational at the bottom. I'm a physicist and I hear versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening at…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies192 views -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies279 views