Certain Doubts

Just finished a directed readings section on contextualism and invariantism, and I realized once more that the taxonomies are confusing here and that students need a lot of help sorting out the epistemological significance of the debates, regardless of how easy or difficult the issues might be if one is interested primarily in philosophy of language. So here’s a quick thought or two on the subject.
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There is an interesting series of articles (in English) in Spiegel Online about How German Intelligence helped justify the Iraq invasion. The interview with David Kay is short and to the point.

Call for Papers:
-A special issue of Synthese commemorating Henry E. Kyburg, Jr.

Edited by:
-Horacio Arló-Costa (Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University)
-Gregory Wheeler (Computer Science, New University of Lisbon)

Submission deadline:
-July 30, 2008

Henry Kyburg’s innovative ideas about probability and its role in scientific inference impacted not only philosophy, but artificial intelligence and the decision sciences too. This special issue of Synthese is designed to complement the successful Harper and Wheeler (2007) collection with a mixture of invited papers and submitted papers touching upon Kyburg’s work in epistemology, the philosophy of science, decision theory, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Original papers, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to either Horacio Arló-Costa (hcosta (at) andrew.cmu.edu) or Gregory Wheeler (grw (at) fct.unl.pt) before July 30, 2008.

In volume 5, no. 1 (July 2007) of the SIPTA newsletter there appears the first of a two-part interview Fabio Cozman conducted with Isaac Levi. The piece is extremely informative about Levi’s program and is written for a general readership.

Just finished a draft of it and anyone interested can find the paper here. It’s a defense of the view that even if there are pointless truths, the value of truth and the related values of knowledge and understanding are still unrestricted. It’s for the next Midwest Studies volume on “Truth and Its Deformities.”

Just saw today that Tony Blair will be on the faculty at Yale. Too bad it wasn’t earlier, when attending to Keith’s contextualism (or the pragmatic encroachers more generally, such as John and Jason) could have done some good. Think about the epistemology behind charges about possession of WMD’s. Apparently, Blair and Bush didn’t get the point about Keith’s high and low stakes bank case, and didn’t appreciate the significance of Jason’s motto that the more you care, the less you know.

Not that we defenders of the pristine purity of central items of our subdiscipline, unsullied by practical concerns, would come to a different conclusion. We would have just pointed out the idiocy of the following inference: apparently if you look long enough and hard enough and find nothing, they must be hiding something–something really really big! But there’s something neat about applied epistemology in service of responsible government. Maybe Keith will convert Blair, who will then spread the news in the UK…

I can hear Obama now, “In matters of foreign policy and the kind of intelligence community we need, I endorse the DeRosian approach: the more it matters, the harder it is to correctly say you know…”

A Workshop on Non-classical Logics: from Foundations to Applications is to be held at The Ennio De Giorgi Center for Mathematical Research, Pisa, Italy, from April 24-26, 2008. There are 15 stipends available for students. The application deadline is April 1st.

Went to a department store. She showed me the dressing room. “If you need anything, I’m Jill.” Wow. Never met anyone with a conditional identity. “What’s your name if I don’t need anything?” “Eugene.”

Titled Wanted: Someone Who Knows Nothing About the Job.

Fish says about Benson, whose highest degree is a B.A., giving Colorado the distinction of having the least educated President in modern history,

no crash course will yield the tacit knowledge that would make him a knowledgeable and informed steward of the university’s fortunes. Of course, this liability might be finessed if he leaves the academic side of things to the chancellors of the system’s campuses, as he has suggested he will, but it seems somewhat odd to hire a CEO and then hope that he will stay away from the store.

And one other item: apparently state support for the University has dropped to 7% of its total budget. SEVEN PERCENT???? Imagine the federal government telling the Pentagon that it would have to figure out where the other 93% of its budget will come from…