the boundaries of language

Over at Leiter Reports, Brian Leiter has publicized a 'Spot the Logical Fallacy' party to happen during the build up to the election. It's obviously time to air this old gem again then:

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From this week's Dinosaur Comics:

































HT: Tom

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I'd be very grateful if someone with a pdf of Hawthorne's 'Reply to Cohen', or with access to 2000's Philosophical Issues which it appeared in, would please email me a copy. UT's access to PI has a gaping hole in it (1999-2002).

Cheers.

Update: A reader kindly sent me a copy of the paper.

Labels: Misc

Lauren and I went to see 'The Dark Knight' last Friday, and I thought it was pretty rubbish. Not in the same league of terribleness as 'Batman Begins', but not very good at all. Anyway, this review from Pharyngula seemed right on the money, and I can't resist quoting this line:

"As a plot mover, the Joker was less an agent of chaos and more like the TA for a freshman philosophy course, leading everyone through twisty little exercises in artificial circumstances that present the poor student with difficult choices."

HT: Colleen

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I've blogged about Jeremy of Amorphia Apparel before, when he launched his new Science! range. But he's come to realize that he shouldn't let modern science tell its side of the story without extending the same opportunity to other points of view. That's why he's created a new set of designs, which are available on his new Teach the Controversy site. As the site explains, these are:

'Intelligently designed t-shirts urging you to show both sides of every story.'

Austinites can expect to see me sporting the turtle design, in the interests of keeping an open mind of course, in the new Semester.

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Kenny has an interesting post over at Antimeta on an old paper of Tyler Burge's on apriority and computer proofs, and there's an interesting exchange with Carrie Jenkins in the comment thread. I've never got around to reading that paper, though it seems of a piece with 'Content Preservation' and other papers of that period.

But what I want to know is why my map of the world shower curtain, which uses six colours to represent political regions, has Chile and Peru both orange.

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Flying home to Glasgow this morning. Here Dagless offers a taste of what's in store for me. I'm hoping to resume posting real content some point this coming week.

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David Landsberg Landsberg pointed me to this clip of Stephen Fry and Hugh 'House' Laurie on some issues in linguistics, including the flexibility and productivity of language. Enjoy!

Labels: Linguistics, Misc

For those of you who have not yet exhausted Spring Break, the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks is here to ensure that you get half as much work/play accomplished as you'd hoped. It's a really cheap way to feel superior, and it's pretty funny, so check it out.

HT: Marcus, soon to be in CT!

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I can't resist linking to Jon Cogburn's updated list of student types. If you've ever led a philosophy discussion section, this will all sound awfully familiar....

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I just found one of my favourite clips from the best comedy ever made up on Youtube, so I thought I'd share. This is Sir Humphrey trying to explain to the Prime Minister that he lied to the House of Commons..........

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All this debate. Tsch. Did Kripkenstein teach us nothing???

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Here.

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Sagittarius: A passionate and intelligent debate over semantics this week will unfortunately get bogged down by pragmatics.

(From the Onion.)

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The BBC, for what reason I know not, has been asking people to email in pictures of silly signs. This self-defeating warning sign was my favorite.

Reminded me of the old philosophy warning signs............

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Randy Barnett is giving a talk at UT next month, and its title is so awesome that it reminded me of something I've been meaning to do for a while now. Barnett's talk is called 'The New Originalism'.

A good pun title is one that makes you laugh, yet at the same time groan and feel a little bit inside of you has died forever. The bad simply encourage a sense of deep sorrow at the state of the world. And, of course, there's a very fine line here between the good and the bad.

So what are people's favorite and least favourite pun title for recent philosophy papers? Here are some of mine (in no particular order) to get things rolling.

(I hope I hardly need add that this is just meant to be for fun - no offense is meant to anyone, nor should these be regarded as comments on the content of any of the papers mentioned).

The cream of the crop:

1. Ted Sider - 'All the World's a Stage' (Sider's stage view version of 4D)
2. Graham Priest - 'A Site for Sorites' (Vagueness)
3. Christopher Hitchcock - 'Beauty and the Bets' (Sleeping Beauty problem)
(HT: Duncan Watson)
4. Kent Bach - 'The Emperor's New Knows' (Contextualism)
5. Roy Cook - 'Iteration One More Time' (The Iterative Conception of Set and Neo-Logicism - to be sung to the tune of Britney)

Oh, the humanity:

1. Crispin Wright - 'Warrant for Nothing (And Foundations for Free)?' (Epistemic Entitlement - this is one of my favourite recent papers in epistemology.....but really......)
2. Heinrich Wansing - 'Diamonds are a Philosopher's Best Friends' (The knowability paradox)
3. Fred Adams and Laura A. Dietrich - 'What's in a(n Empty) Name?' (Direct Reference theory)
4. Thomas Zimmerman - 'What's in Two Names?' (Substitution failure)
5. Timothy Smiley - 'A Tale of Two Tortoises' (Carroll's puzzle)
6. Crispin Wright and Stewart Shapiro - 'All Things Indefinitely Extensible' (Indefinite extensibility and unrestricted quantification)

I'll add more as they come to me. The comments thread is all yours.

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The mini-hiatus I've unintentionally taken this month looks set to continue for at least another week as I battle to get a draft of the paper I've been writing forever finished, and try to get ready for moving back to Austin on Thursday (how did that come up so fast?).

In the absence of any actual content, I present instead the best video on Youtube, 'Birds of Britain'. Enjoy.

Labels: Birds, Misc

AUSTIN, TX—University of Texas professor Thom Windham once again furthered the cause of human inquiry in a class lecture Monday, as he continued his longtime practice of finding connections between things and other things, pointing out these parallels, and then elaborating on them in detail, campus sources reported.

"By drawing parallels between things and other, entirely different things, I not only further my own studies, but also encourage young minds to develop this comparative methodology in their own work," said Windham, holding his left hand up to represent one thing, then holding his right hand up to represent a separate thing, then bringing his hands together in simulation of a hypothetical synthesis of the two things. "It's not just similarities that are important, though—the differences between things are also worth exploring at length."

Fifteen years ago, Windham was awarded tenure for doing this.

Here.

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.......when you could have Super-Earth?!

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