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Ad Hoc
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Ad Hoc

By
Justin Weinberg
. March 2, 2021 at 1:32 pm

Ad Hoc
by Rachel Katler

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Categories Daily Nous Features
Tags ad hocDaily Nous Philosophy ComicsRachel Katler
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Recent Comments

Grant Schoenebeck on Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post)

This paper (that I wrote) https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09020 has another argument along rather different lines about why using rejection rates to measure quality is not a good […]
Daniel Propson on Philosophy News Summary

Speaking of programs for high schoolers... If you know high school students interested in philosophy, please let them know about Oakland University's Philosophy Camp. We […]
Lennart on Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post)

The conversation you've overheard reveals that publishing in high-rejection journals gives authors prestige, but not necessarily the journal itself. If journal prestige means that people […]
Kevin Richardson on Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post)

I guess it's not really a worry. I'm moreso curious about the possible differences in predictions between single- and multiple-journal models.
Alyssa Michaud on "Am I the unethical one?" A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students

I agree and disagree. It's unfortunate that it has come to this. Quizlet is great for flash cards but students may need to go back […]
Alyssa Michaud on "Am I the unethical one?" A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students

I cant figure out how to delete my comment lol
Alyssa Michaud on "Am I the unethical one?" A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students

You are not unethical but you aren't being ethical either! Wrong information is wrong information and should not be published online for anyone to misinterpret […]
Chat GPT on Talking Philosophy with ChatGPT

Dear Daily Nous Team, I came across your article on engaging in philosophy discussions with ChatGPT, and I must say, it's a fascinating exploration of the […]
Julia Staffel on APA Election Results

This was just coincidence. I didn't even realize my colleagues were running for election when I agreed. And we don't get any special credit from
Peter Davis on Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post)

At the other end of the hierarchy are those journals with abnormally low rejection rates. In many cases this is commercially motivated as a number […]
Walter Horn on Faculty at Rhodes College Urge Cancellation of Online Talk by Peter Singer (updated)

My problem with Singer is that, based on a Nozick review (that I disagreed with) in the NY Times over 40 years ago of a […]
Dale Miller on Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post)

I suppose that I was drawing on my own experience as an editor. (I edited Utilitas for 6 years.) I had an annual page budget […]

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Heap of Links

  • “Epistemic cosplay” -- that's what's usually going on when people "do their own research," argues Joshua Blanchard (Oakland), and "it is not especially valuable"
  • “Why does so much of professional philosophy today seem so boring?” “Who’s an underrated philosopher that we should be reading more?” “What’s the most common topic you see crossing the desk of the [Journal of Controversial Ideas]?”? -- Tyler Cowen (GMU) asks Peter Singer some questions
  • “Irrationalist narratives” from psychology and behavioral economics have contributed to a disastrous loss in “epistemic empathy” -- but those narratives are highly questionable, argues Kevin Dorst (MIT), whose blog has a new home on Substack
  • “Computer says no” -- when AI's "black boxes" are used in ways that affect us, "we don't know the reason something’s happened, we can’t argue back, we can’t challenge, and so we enter the Kafkaesque realm of the absurd," says Alexis Papazoglou
  • “The people who find immoral jokes to be less funny because they are immoral are not in good positions to judge how funny immoral jokes are! You wouldn’t let someone averse to sweets judge a cake competition, would you?” -- Connor Kianpour (Colorado) defends strong comic immoralism
  • A philosophy student became an investment banker who became a collector of rare philosophy books -- Michael Walsh has donated his collection, which includes a first edition of Hume's Treatise and other gems, to the University of Toronto
  • “They provide us with a relatively recent, further perspective beyond continental philosophy from which to understand and critique the dominant approach in Anglophone philosophy.” -- American women philosophers in the speculative tradition in the first half of the 20th Century
  • “The most useful, freely accessible Classics tools online” -- a list of 100 open-access websites and resources curated by the team at Antigone
  • “Kant’s antinomies, properly digested, only require you to step back from the whole affair, to quit trying to find dogmatic solutions to metaphysical problems… But how do you step back, when everything seems to bring you to a similar impasse?” -- and Justin Smith-Ruiu does mean everything: flying, disability, air conditioning, almonds...
  • “All these different technical hacks are really motivated by exploiting a philosophical principle of computation of meta code” -- an interview with Scott Shapiro (Yale), whose new book is on hacking and hackers: "It's like to understand God, you've got to understand the people who made him"
  • Do philosophers and economists tend to agree on how much less future benefits and harms should matter compared to present benefits and harms? -- yes, "although on the basis of very different intellectual arguments"
  • “I’ve always thought of science, and especially scientific modeling, as fundamentally value-laden enterprises. But I’m really starting to feel like philosophers of science have fallen behind the curve on this” -- Eric Winsberg (South Florida) is interviewed at "What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?"
  • “The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with it” -- why some profs, including philosopher David Peña-Guzmán (SFSU) are teaching low-tech, screen-free courses
  • “If one person does it, it’s not cancel culture.” “But if it’s okay for one person to do it, why isn’t it okay for a very large number of people to do it?” -- a book on free speech is reviewed, in dialogue format, by Brad Skow (MIT)
  • What do you wish you had known about doing a PhD in philosophy? -- 12 philosophy graduate students answer the question on the latest episode of The Philosopher's Nest
  • “Improved AIs pose an existential threat to their unimproved originals in the same manner that smarter-than-human AIs pose an existential threat to humans” -- Peter Salib (Houston) on why AIs will not "want" to self-improve, and so are in an important way less dangerous (via MR)
  • “Lurking in the standard position, which uniformly treats clarity as the effect [of successful] analysis, is a possible equivocation about what is fundamentally achieved” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) seeks clarity on the varieties of clarity philosophers have cared about
  • “Because of the growth and further intensification of animal production, humans inflict more suffering on animals today than they did in 1975” but the trends since then are “not all negative” -- Peter Singer (Princeton) reflects on the treatment of animals, 50 years after his first article on the subject was published
  • “I am now so convinced of the magic of teaching philosophy outside that I have no intention of going back inside, and I think others should try it” -- Ryan J. Johnson (Elon) with the case for taking your courses outside
  • “Four basic assumptions prevalent among UFO researchers and enthusiasts, as well as the general public that… deserve some prodding” -- outer space meets logical space in a philosophical look at how the "UFO community" operates, from Michael Glawson
  • Publish or perish: high school edition -- some high schoolers (whose parents can afford it) are producing "published" "research" to get into college (via Andy Lamey)
  • “Phenomenal realism seems so obviously plausible [but] it has so little going for it apart from its obviousness” -- this makes it an especially vulnerable thesis, argues Daniel Pallies (Lingnan) at his new blog
  • “To be an addict is to be vulnerable to what I call the ‘bear-trap model of punishment'” -- T. Virgil Murthy (CMU) interviewed about addiction and being an alcoholic philosopher when "alcohol is everywhere in the philosophy world"
  • Analytic and Continental philosophy had this in common: they were “obsessed with language” -- Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on the linguistic turn and the "turn away from the linguistic turn"
  • What the AI image generator Midjourney “thinks” professors look like -- by discipline
  • “As a student, the assumption I’ve encountered among authority figures is that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence” -- “In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own”
  • “Abstract objects are objects that can’t enter into causal relations. If you believe in them, you must suppose that reality divides into two radically different realms” -- an interview with Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame) at 3:16AM
  • “We need be very cautious about inferring what is rational to think now from what was a rational [epistemic] policy to have adopted” -- an epistemic puzzle from Alex Pruss (Baylor)
  • After Daisy Dixon got a job in philosophy, she tweeted a meme with images of herself and Hume in celebration. And then people were awful -- she recounts the story and its lessons at The Philosophers' Cocoon
  • “Gone is the idea of a totemic strand of DNA that extends six feet when uncoiled and stretched out in a straight line. Now, the rebooted reference resembles a corn maze, with alternative paths and side trails” -- our picture of the human genetic code just got a massive update

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