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October 28, 2005
2006 Syracuse Graduate Conference
CALL FOR PAPERS:
March 3-4, 2006
Keynote speaker: Professor Mark Heller (Syracuse University)
Submission Deadline: January 5th, 2006
We invite papers of high quality in any area of philosophy. Please send your submission to Deke Gould at degouldATTsyrDOTTedu as an email attachment in PDF, Microsoft Word or Rich Text formats.
Please submit:
1. A paper no longer than 4,500 words
2. A cover page containing (a) author’s name (b) paper title (c) author’s contact information. (NB: If sending in PDF format, please include (a), (b), & (c) information in a separate document.)
3. An abstract of 200 words or less.
Please submit in blind review format, with all identifying information on the cover sheet; your paper should contain no self-references or other information that indicates your identity. No more than one paper will be reviewed per author. Please do not submit multiple papers.
Submission deadline: January 5th, 2006
For more information, contact Matthew Skene at mskeneATTsyrDOTTedu. A website with more information will be available here.
Posted by Jeremy at 1:47 PM
October 19, 2005
An Empirical Question?
Dave Bzdak and I just had a conversation with Don Arentz, one of our colleagues in teaching at Le Moyne College, about what seems to be an empirical question but seems difficult to see how it might be empirical. How big is your vocabulary? It would seem that the question is indeed an empirical matter. Yet how would you go about empirically investigating it? Dave suggested maybe it would be in principle possible but only if you kept track of every single word you ever encountered to get a list of all the words that might be in your vocabulary, and then you investigated to see if they were still in your vocabulary at a given time. Could you do this, though? I'm not worrying about the possibility of coming up with a list of all the words you've ever encountered. Suppose you could do it. That's in principle possible, I would say, even if in practice it would be amazingly difficult to implement. Given that list, could you determine which of those words are in your vocabulary at any given time? It seems that, if you could, then you would know how big your vocabulary at the time was.
So suppose I want to know how many of those words are in my vocabulary right now. I could presumably go down the list to investigate which ones I know, right? I'm not sure it's so easy, though. I could recognize some words that I know. But wouldn't there be others that I know and don't recall the meaning of just by seeing the word in isolated form? There are some whose meaning I would remember if I saw it in the right sort of sentence that would trigger my memory. Of course, there would be others that I don't know but would get from context, in which case I've just added a word to my vocabulary. I shouldn't count those. I wanted to know how many were in it before I started the investigation. What if I'm not in a position to distinguish between the cases when the sentence triggers my memory of what a word means and cases when the context helps me add a new word to my vocabulary? It's not clear to me that I could tell the difference. If that's right, then the exact count of my vocabulary isn't really empirically discoverable after all. That's really weird. Does that mean the size of my vocabulary is not really an empirical question?
Posted by Jeremy at 10:56 AM | Comments (9)
October 14, 2005
"Before"
Before a seminar a few of us got into an argument. The argument was over the following sentence and what it entails. "Albert grew a beard before Carla." Supposing that Carla never grows a beard, is this sentence true? Some said 'yes', others said 'no'. Those who said 'no' did so, I think, because they think that this sentence entails that Carla grew a beard. I don't want to go through the argument step by step; instead, I suggest that we take it to the comments thread. Feel free to comment with just a 'yes' or a 'no' if you don't want to give (or don't have) an argument to defend that answer.
Posted by mbarber at 12:12 AM | Comments (12)
October 3, 2005
Informed Consent and the Ick Factor
Wired News has a fascinating article on face transplants. It contains an interesting statement. Some doctors have suggested that the novelty of the surgery and the lack of certainty on what risks even are make informed consent impossible. I commented on Jonathan Ichikawa's post about this, pointing this out, wondering what they might have meant by that, and his response struck me as equally unusual. He thinks this is an attempt to make a philosophical argument out of an ick factor. Is that really what's going on? What does this statement about informed consent amount to? I have some thoughts, but I really wanted to see what people think about this without my suggesting anything.
Update: Comments are close. If you'd like to comment, do so on this post.
Posted by Jeremy at 8:33 PM | Comments (3)