June 1, 2006

Racial Essentialism

I don't know if anyone is still checking anything here, but I thought I'd try to draw attention to a post on my own blog in case anyone is. I'm trying to work out a taxonomy of the various views someone might hold regarding the nature of racial groups. One of the views, sometimes called racial realism, takes races to be natural kinds something like species in biology. I'm not trying to evaluate this view at this point, just to categorize what view there might be. It seems to me that there's a great variety of possible views even within racial realism, and I'm working out some of what that variety is.

One concern that keeps arising is the use of the term 'racial essentialism', which I think is supposed to be some sort of racial realism, but most who use it don't make it clear what they mean or why they call it a kind of essentialism. I'm trying to work out the various things someone might mean when calling a view racial essentialism, and I'm looking for help in sorting through the views I've come up with and identifying any possibilities I might have missed. The post is here for any who are interested.

Since this blog is basically defunct until some Syracuse grad students want to revive it (in which case I'll happily be involved and continue to maintain the blog), I'm keeping the comments and trackbacks closed. The comments and trackbacks on the post I'm referring you to at my blog are open.

Posted by Jeremy at 8:35 AM

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)

December 4, 2004

It's wrong even when it's not

As I was flipping channels before going to bed and was just about to turn the TV off, I heard a commenter on one of the cable news networks talking about the Scott Peterson case and why the jury's deliberations would be much longer if they consider the death penalty. He said: "Everyone knows it's wrong to kill, even when it's the right thing to do." Is there any way to make sense of this? A lot of people have resistance to putting someone to death because most cases of killing are wrong, so when it comes to assigning someone the death penalty they have a lot of resistance to it. That's fine. He could have said that. I assume he said what he said because he means something more, but what he did say sounds like he was saying something can be both morally wrong and morally right at the same time. I don't think he meant it's always wrong to kill but sometimes excusable, forgiveable, or pardonable (which I see as entirely distinct concepts, having to do, respectively, with not blaming, not resenting, and not punishing). Did he really just mean that it's usually wrong to kill but sometimes right? That makes more sense, but it's not hard just to say that and not what he did say. Another possibility is that he meant to be saying it's hard to bring yourself to do something that's wrong even when society has convinced you it's ok. That's even further from what he said, and it also wouldn't be hard to see. Or maybe he was just saying something really dumb and uttering a flat-out contradiction. I'd like not to think this, but I'm having trouble making sense of the statement. Any thoughts?

Posted by Jeremy at 10:17 PM | Comments (10)

August 17, 2004

Conceptual Analysis of 'Spam'

Jonathan Ichikawa has a hilarious and frustrating conceptual analysis of 'spam' (the internet term, not the canned meat). This is what philosophy is all about.

Posted by Jeremy at 10:35 AM | Comments (2)

August 2, 2004

Double Positive

Sidney Morgenbesser, philosophy professor at Columbia University, died yesterday. NPR had a little tidbit on him this afternoon, demonstrating that a famous urban legend really happened. One of his colleagues was on the air recounting it.

J.L. Austin was giving a talk formal semantics and pragmatics or something like that, and he said something about double negatives canceling out and making a positive but that double positives never turn to a negative. Morgenbesser, under his breath and not expecting to be heard, said "Yeah, yeah..." Everyone in the room did hear and of course broke out in laughter.

I heard this story without any names and without it being said to be even related to philosophy. I think it was "Yeah, right!" instead. I had assumed it was just another urban legend like most stories about professors, but it turns out to be a true urban legend.

Posted by Jeremy at 7:35 PM | Comments (2)

July 28, 2004

John Edwards the Epistemicist

John Edwards is on right now talking about the two Americas and pointing to differences of degree along a wide spectrum while talking as if they're sharp lines (i.e. differences of kind). Does this mean he's an epistemicist about vagueness?

Posted by Jeremy at 10:37 PM | Comments (1)

June 29, 2004

Vagueness

I have two (don't ask how) hardback copies of Rosanne Keefe & Peter Smith's Vagueness: A Reader, and wish to sell one of them at $25.00. It's in perfect condition: I never opened this copy. I think that's a fair price? I thought this medium would reach more people interesting in this topic than doing a more public auction. Please contact me, if interested.

Posted by kkukla at 2:14 PM | Comments (1)

May 11, 2004

What Is Race?

We haven't had much in the way of philosophical content on our new site, mostly because we moved right in the middle of grading season. I don't have the time to type up anything new, but I posted some of what I've been working on with the racial classification issue to my own blog not too long ago. I was going to post it to OrangePhilosophy, too, but I wanted to wait until the move, and then I wanted to wait until the next draft, but since there's been little here I'm going ahead with it anyway. I've developed this a bit further since writing this, but I haven't gotten anything seriously organized enough to post. I'm developing this into one of my area papers right now, so I really am looking for feedback. Also, be aware that most of it was originally written for an undergraduate course and could use some increase in its rigor. Update: Due to circumstances beyond my control, many links on my site got changed. The link in this entry is now correct again.

Posted by Jeremy at 9:48 AM | Comments (5)