Slater Reports

Yellowstone in the Winter — take two

2012-01-03T22:13:00.001-05:00

The Lamar Buffalo Ranch at Sunrise, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone

We made a repeat of our Winter 2007 trip to Yellowstone to once again do some wolf-watching with some of the great instructors of the Yellowstone Association. Four days at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch (where North American bison were basically rescued from extinction in the early 20th century), and three days at the Snowlodge at Old Faithful.

Like before, it was a fantastic time. For one, it was much warmer than it was in 2007. Rather than the –40° temps we endure (the point at which celsius and fahrenheit converge!), it hovered in the high 20s (F). And we got very lucky both with wolves — they basically came to us on Christmas morning and lounged about on the hill opposite the Ranch — and the geysers. Such a wonderful place. . . .

It turns out that "Nature" just released their "Christmas in Yellowstone" program (love the Dipper!). For my still photos from this round (involving more family merriment than the Nature episode), see here.

Natural Kinds in Granada

2011-12-19T21:10:00.000-05:00

With the term over, I finally had time to look back at some of my photos (and papers). Here are some shots from the lovely workshop on "Natural Kinds in Philosophy and in the Life Sciences: Scholastic Twilight or New Dawn?" The title is a reference to a recent screed by the famous philosopher of science Ian Hacking called "Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight". As the title suggests, Hacking thinks that philosophical research on natural kinds has entered a period of scholastic navel-gazing. I have two (conflicting) reactions to this. (1) No it's not! (2) He's wrong to think that it ever wasn't (in at least some sense) — it's just that our navels were previously out of focus. Right now, I'm more inclined to the second interpretation, no doubt partly because I'm busy writing two books on natural kinds! Fortunately, Hacking's arguments are pretty uncompelling.

Anyway, Hacking wasn't at the conference to defend his honor. And that's fine. The folks there were for the most part committed to the idea that there's something non-incestuous (or not problematically incestuous) about the idea of natural kinds in the biological sciences. I decided to talk about cell types — extending some of the sketchy thoughts offered at ISHPSSB a few weeks back. Finally, I have a decent draft of a paper on this subject:

"Cell Types as Natural Kinds"

It feels like just a start. But that's okay. I'm already way over the word-limit. And I'll definitely be coming back to these issues when I'm able to get back to writing my book on Biological Kinds. In the meanwhile, I'm all about species! Got a June deadline to worry about. . . .

Anyway, while at the conference, enjoying spectacular weather — I stayed a few extra days because I had a Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule and I could — Lewisburg saw the worst flooding since the catastrophic 1972 Agnes flood. Bloomsburg, about 40 minutes away, was really devastated: like roads/bridges washed away, homes floating down the Susquehanna River, and so on. So between checks of the hydrological survey online and Facebook updates of emergency basement clearings — our house, being on a hill, was unaffected —, I was touring the Alhambra. Bizarre. I missed the whole flood visiting a parched country.

For more photos of Granada, see here.

Species & Biodiversity Reading Group

2011-12-05T13:26:00.001-05:00

I was delighted to receive a David T. Scadden Fellowship to fund a project investigating the philosophical and biological underpinnings of the concept of biodiversity. It seems to me that this term is much used, but poorly understood. The more I've thought about the vagaries of biological classification, the more problematic the issue seems.

So starting in the Spring 2012 term, I will be running an interdisciplinary reading group on the nature of species and biodiversity. The group will include a mix of students and professors and we will read several books and articles — to be decided, but right now I'm thinking about reading Wheeler & Meier (eds.) Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate, Richard Richards' The Species Problem, James Maclauren and Kim Sterelny's What is Biodiversity?, and some chapters form my book manuscript, Are Species Real? (forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012), among other things. Meetings are tentatively scheduled for alternating Wednesdays from noon-1PM (over lunch).

Students may join the reading group for credit (a full course-credit section of PHIL 320). If you're interested, please send me an email (matthew.slater@b...) or come chat with me about your experience/coursework in biology (and philosophy, if any). Specific requirements (papers, projects, &c.) for receiving credit will be negotiated on an individual basis.

The Fellowship will also allow me to fund one or two students to continue their research over the summer or fall of 2012 (and possibly attend a relevant conference). So students who are interested in getting some independent research experience on biodiversity are especially encouraged to join.

Carving Nature at its Joints

2011-11-10T17:40:00.000-05:00

Well isn't this a handsome, well-priced, and interesting-looking volume of essays on natural kinds! Now on sale at all discerning bookshops (and some undiscerning ones too).

Here's the penultimate version of the comprehensive introduction co-written by one of the co-editors (me).

My Species Book — now forthcoming

2011-09-22T18:17:00.000-04:00

So now it appears that I actually have to finish my book on the metaphysics of species, for it will soon be under contract with Palgrave-Macmillan in their new "New Directions in the Philosophy of Science" series. The manuscript is due in June, so I have months, but they will doubtless go by quickly. If anyone would like to read a draft manuscript, please let me know. I'll be happy to send you a link when I get the draft ready enough to bother folks with (probably in January).

I'm grateful to Steven French and the editorial board for the series for pursuing this with me. I had originally thought that I was writing one giant book on biological kinds, but then realized when they got in touch that in fact I had a book on biological species a bit closer to hand. I'd encourage anyone who's working on a book-length manuscript in the philosophy of science to get in touch with them. All signs are that this is going to be an excellent series and that Palgrave is really serious about stepping up their presence in philosophical monographs generally.

Meta-Crashing

2011-07-20T15:18:00.005-04:00

I can't shut down my computer when MS Word is running, because whenever the computer attempts to quit it, Word crashes and then opens the Microsoft Crash Reporting program. I've gotten used to this, partly because I've been successful reducing my usage of Word to simply formatting my bibliographies when I'm ready to send out a paper.

Recently, however, the crash reporter has started crashing. Fortunately the crash reporter has no crash reporter, so it doesn't look like I'll get stuck in a big loop. My new solution is to simply use MacOSX's "Force Quit" function whenever I want to stop using Word (which is pretty much right after I start using it).

ISHPSSB 2011 in Salt Lake City

2011-07-18T21:33:00.002-04:00

I just got back from my last philosophy-related trip for a good two months: my first time at the biennial meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB, pronounced as “Ishkabibble” by its members). The idea of the conference is to bring together a bunch of humanists and biologists and get some good cross-disciplinary discussion going. And I have to say, the conference did a nice job at this. I was in a triple session on cell signaling that included biologists Brian Hall (one of the early founders of Evo-Devo!), Scott Gilbert (a prominent developmental biologist — he wrote the textbook I and everyone I know learned developmental biology from), Karl Matlin (a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago), and other philosophers, historians, and sociologists (Barton Moffatt, Ken Waters, Beckett Sterner, Christina Brandt, Hannah Landecker, and Andrew Reynolds: the organizers of the session). Unfortunately Scott had to return early for a minor medical emergency, but otherwise, I thought the sessions were really good. There turned out to be a good deal of cohesion between the talks and some good discussion. And, as I've mentioned before, Utah is still gorgeous! This time, I brought my camera!

For some reason, I was particularly anxious about this talk. This isn’t usually an issue for me, but I had the distinct feeling that I had bitten off more than I could chew as I was preparing for my presentation. When Hannah and Andrew posted the idea for the session in the ISH (“Ish”) discussion board, I thought: “Oh, I can see how one could give an account of cellular kinds by drawing on research on cell signaling!” I wrote the following abstract for my talk:

Talk of different types of cells is commonplace in the biological sciences. We know a great deal, for example, about human muscle cells by studying the same type of cells in mice. Information about cell type is apparently largely projectible across species boundaries. But what defines cell type? Do cells come pre-packaged into different natural kinds? Philosophical attention to these questions has been extremely limited (see, e.g., Wilson 1999 and Wilson, Barker, and Brigandt 2007). On the face of it, the problems we face in individuating cellular kinds resemble those biologists and philosophers of biology encountered in thinking about species: there are apparently many different (and interconnected) bases on which we might legitimately classify cells. We could, for example, focus on their developmental history (a sort of analogue to a species' evolutionary history); or we might divide on the basis of certain structural features, functional role, location within larger systems, and so on. In this paper, I focus on an especially promising way of thinking about many cell types which unifies much of this plurality. In multicellular contexts, cells become the sorts of things they are, find themselves where they are, and do the sorts of things they do in virtue of complex communication networks with other cells. Cells, in a sense, announce — or are told — what kinds they are and take up their proper roles accordingly. While this cannot be the whole story about cell type individuation, it seems to me an important component. The paper will conclude with some preliminary thoughts about how to think about the plurality of ways to divide cells into kinds and whether a "Cell Problem" analogous to the infamous "Species Problem" results.

I titled my paper “Hi, I’m a Fibroblast!” — an attempt at a clever reference to my signaling metaphor; think conference name badges. This lead to several references in Brian Hall’s talk along the lines of “we’ll be hearing more about fibroblasts in the next talk….” Oops: I guess I set expectations for biological-information content too high!

Matt Haber and Jim Tabery — the local organizers
on the last day of the conference (whew!)

Anyway, troublesome details about the workings of signal transduction started revealing themselves as I looked into the literature a bit more — troublesome for my name-tag analogy, anyway. Damned reality! I was hoping that I’d be able to offer a sort of top-down approach to kind membership for cells rather than the recursive, bottom up stance about kinds that is currently popular. It turns out that some cells do different things even when they receive the same signal (in the chemical sense — I suppose one could argue that it’s a different signal in a more nuanced, context-sensitive sense). So unless we were prepared to paper over such differences in a cellular taxonomy, other internal features of cells are relevant to how they integrate themselves into signaling. It’s as if name tags meant different things in different rooms or depending on who else was around. There are other complications that I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that I’ve got some work to do. Since I’m planning on presenting on this topic at a workshop on natural kinds in Granada in September, I’d better get on it. Sincere thanks to Matt and Jim for organizing such a fantastic conference. Big success, guys.

Aside from catching up with a lot of phil-bio friends, I was able to get up into the hills outside of Salt Lake City. Maureen O’Malley and I had a nice afternoon hike in Alta the day before my talk. We were initially cross that the dirt road to some of the longer hikes was closed off. So we started a short one and made it longer by going off trail a bit (though every so often, we’d say “oh, there’s a trail again!”) in order to get to the top of the ridge. As we tried to make a loop our of our there-and-back trail, we discovered the likely reason that the road was closed: even on July 13th, there was still a lot of snow up there. Go figure. Photos from the whole shebang here.

Protein Classification

2011-06-24T05:54:00.006-04:00

My last talk in Sydney was, appropriately, in the "Work-in-Progress" Seminar. As I mentioned in my previous post, Emma Tobin and I are working on a joint reply to William Goodwin's paper, "Structure, Function, and Protein Taxonomy". We're still in thinking-stage now, squeezing it in between other projects. So the WiP Seminar offered a good opportunity for me to think out loud a little.

One of the strange things about my reaction to Goodwin's paper is that I'm not really sure how much I disagree with him (or he with me). He wants to say that amino acid sequence plays a "fundamental" role for protein taxonomy in that it substantially determines the possibilities for protein function. True, which of these functions are realized may depend on biochemical context, but that's something that biochemists can accommodate in their practice. He makes a number of other points, but this seems to be Goodwin's core position. And I don't disagree substantially with it. Clearly, the possibilities of "higher-order" structures of proteins are constrained by its primary structure. But it's not as clear that this shows that primary structure delimits different protein kinds. In my (2009) paper, I argued that counting by primary structure plausibly undercounts protein kinds. The same primary structure can be differently folded in different contexts and assume different biochemical functions. Emma noted a similar point in connection with intrinsically-disordered/unstructured proteins: sometimes there's simply no single "native" folding (the kind of conformation that encourages the anthropomorphic language in videos like the following).

The pluralist about protein taxonomy, in my view, takes such facts as giving us good reason for refusing to make generalizations about how to classify proteins. Perhaps in some cases we ought to divide by function and in others by primary structure; perhaps in some cases, tertiary or quaternary structure is stable and fruitful enough to be useful. The monist's claim appears to be a normative one: that one should conform one's categories to those defined by primary structure. It's not totally clear to me that Goodwin would accept even this much. Perhaps monism for him is a metaphysical/explanatory thesis: that primary structure is explanatorily fundamental. I don't think I know what this means, though. . . . And even if there turned out to be some sense of 'explanatorily fundamental' that attached to primary structure, again, I don't see how it would show that it should have a 'fundamental individuating role'.

I was thinking about this sort of analogy from metaphysics. One flat-footed justification for primary-structure-monism could be that biochemists often say things like "proteins are certain polymers of amino acids", suggesting that they ought to be divided into kinds on that basis. Likewise, one might be tempted to say that statues are certain conformations of lumps of clay (or what have you). That looks like an identification on the surface. But it’s problematic. For when I steamroll the statue of David, I destroy the statue but not the lump of clay. Lump is squashable; David isn’t: so they must be different things (goes the thought). Indeed, I might take Lump and reshape it into a statue of Joe the Plumber. David ≠ Joe, so it can’t be that David = Lump and Joe = Lump by the transitivity of identity. Certain metaphysicians want to say that the Lump constitutes David. I think this response has some problems (despite its obvious appeal) in this case, but I find that I'm tempted to give this sort of response in the protein case. While biochemists often say that proteins are strings of amino acids (suggesting that a monism about 1-ary structure is appropriate to describe biochemical discourse), what they mean is that proteins are (mostly) constituted by amino acids. Perhaps ‘protein’ is actually ambiguous between meaning just polypeptide strings and some more complicated notion with connected to structure and evincing different identity conditions.

Apply the statue/clay analogy back to biochemistry. Here’s a globular protein: when I denature it, have I destroyed it? I feel a bit torn. Well: I’ve most likely taken away its function, but as Goodwin might insist, it still has that function inasmuch as it retains the capacity to refold and execute that function in the proper circumstances. (Capacities are funny, though: as David Lewis wrote, he has the capacity to speak Finnish; but don’t take him to Finland, because he can’t speak Finnish!) But now let’s reform the lump: take our polypeptide into a different context where it refolds into a radically different globular structure. How many different types of proteins has this story been about? There’s been one polypeptide but two proteins, I can imagine being inclined to say (filling out the details in certain ways). This is roughly what I had in mind when I cited the possibility of different "modes" of classification. I don’t think that this is pluralism exactly (I might be changing my mind from what I wrote in 2009 — or perhaps I wasn’t clear about it there). The pluralism comes from there being cases of the same basic structure where we lump instead of split (or vice-versa), perhaps because we are impressed with certain functional differences or what not. And the point is that there doesn’t seem to be any fact of the matter about what level of organization is more important for doing so. Take Emma's example of different hemoglobin isoforms: judged on a metric of amino-acid similarity, it might be that the functionally very different forms are much closer together (they might have just one substitution), whereas the silent polymorphisms are much farther apart in terms of their primary structure. Paul Griffiths pointed out to me that there’s a nice analogy with databases of RNAs: geneticists often have to annotate the sequences so as to cross-classify rather dissimilar sequences which are similar but which have different higher-level structural properties.

Once again, I'm indebted to the Sydney crew for their insightful comments/questions on my ramblings on this topic (and others). They sure were a good group of people to hang out with. Now returned to the Northern Hemisphere, I'm happy to be enjoying summer again, but sad to have left their company (and the beauty of Sydney!). I'd certainly encourage philosophers/historians of science to apply to their visiting fellows program (especially if they like bushwalking!).

Talking and Walking in Sydney

2011-06-04T04:34:00.004-04:00

The Quad

Last week started my first week properly at the Centre for the Foundations of Science at the University of Sydney (rather than merely a resident of Sydney). We got right to business with a reading-group session in Paul Griffiths’ office on a very interesting paper by John Wilkins on whether species should be considered as theoretical objects of biology (objects necessary for biological explanation) or rather as targets of explanation. This was warm-up for his seminar on the 15th to which I’m looking forward. After that, I started getting situated in the Centre office, in the front of the amazing Quad building. Because there aren’t a lot of other visitors to the Centre at the moment, and the administrator is on leave, I’ve so far had this huge office to myself (I’ll post interior photos soon).

On Wednesday, I gave my own talk in the seminar series. Again, it was on material drawn from my paper on stable property cluster kinds — this time on the heart of the concept of stability I think makes for a more general account of natural kinds, developing some of the ideas I started working out in the UK last fall. I was, I admit, a little reticent about this since the paper straddles the fence between criticism and friendly amendment to the Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) account of kinds — an account that one of my hosts (and the chair of the session) Paul Griffiths has done much to articulate and promote. Couple that with the fact that the audience was sprinkled with philosophical heavyweights (e.g., Huw Price, shortly to take up the Bertrand Russell chair at Cambridge), wicked-smart metaphysicians (Rachel Briggs, David Braddon-Mitchell , Kristie Miller, &c.) and a host of philosopher of biology (Wilkins, Dominic Murphy, Mark Colyvan, and walking-biological-encyclopedia Maureen O’Malley) and the Q&A session was ripe for devastating objections. Fortunately, though, the audience was ideal: challenges were offered in a friendly and productive spirit and suggestions for clarification and extension were unusually helpful. Whew! Thanks everyone!

Once again, though, I have another talk to prepare before I’m able to really process the questions and suggestions that came up. Fortunately, it’s a “Work-in-Progress” seminar in a room without slideshow capabilities (lest I get tempted): so there’s no demand to present something “polished”. The plan is to start working out a reply to a paper William Goodwin recently published in Biology & Philosophy criticizing papers by me and Emma Tobin about protein classification. Emma and I are talking about co-writing the response. But first I need to sort out what I want to say. . . .

Meanwhile, Maureen took me walking in Balmain (basically across the bay from Glebe), a former factory district, now turned site of rather expensive cottages, with lovely views back east onto the inner harbors. Photos from that (and around Glebe) here. Tomorrow I head out into the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney for a long walk (aka “hike”) with Paul, Maureen, and Kristie. Hopefully the weather will hold enough for some nice shots of the many vistas we’re supposed to enjoy.

Australia Arrival and ANU Talk

2011-05-28T19:42:00.001-04:00

After a one day delay because I and the Australian government were stupid about visa issues — I won’t try to settle who was more stupid (though let’s just note that if their credit card processor for visa transactions had been working, I’d have gone on my flight no problem) — I finally survived the 2-hour, 4-hour, then 15-hour flights and made it to my home base off of Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. I’m just adjacent to a little park with running trails. The runners and the rowers constantly crossing my view both shame and inspire me. To stay up and get adjusted to the 14-hour time difference, I walked for about five hours around to the fish markets and then around Pyrmont.

But then it was back to preparing for the talk I'd give at ANU the next day. I had originally planned on talking about the problems facing the species-as-individuals (SAI) metaphysic (something I’ve been thinking about for a good while now); specifically, addressing the move that my friend Matt Haber suggested to me back in Utah and why it didn’t look very promising to me. But on the plane ride over, I started thinking about the issue from a methodological perspective (inspired by the discussion at MPSC2011) and wrote out a different talk where I said a bit about the worries for SAI, a bit about my (supposed-to-be non-worrisome) alternative view, and concentrated on the status of SAI as a piece of “naturalized metaphysics”. It seems like an interesting case to me, since (if I’m right about it) we have some scientists reading off metaphysical conclusions from the science which I think decisively run afoul of considerations from analytic metaphysics. So it’s a case where naturalizing metaphysics goes wrong — or better, where you can't just read off the metaphysics without doing significant work in the very domain that the philosophers of science often find themselves decrying. After writing out all this and what to think of it, I managed to leave my notebook on the plane. Damn! The only consolation was that it was a brand-new notebook and I didn’t lose any other bright ideas.

In the haze of my jet-lag, I tried my best to put together a coherent and interesting talk, mostly on the train to Canberra (some lovely views!). I can’t judge whether either aim succeeded. The schtick for talks there is quite something. It starts off with a seminar with the graduate students, designed to fill them in on any necessary background. Then we retire to a balcony/courtyard thing for tea and biscuits. Then there’s the talk and Q&A that goes about two hours. My audience was sympathetic of my jet lag but not with my ideas, raising worries and challenges that will keep me busy for a while. (I certainly wasn’t able to offer satisfactory replies there — judging from their facial expressions, anyway. At least Dave liked my fonts. . . .) But that’s exactly what one wants out of this kind of experience. Thanks in particular are due to Dave Chalmers, Adrian Currie, Zoe Drayson (my old pal from Edinburgh), Dan Korman (my old pal from metaphysics talks at various APAs and seminar convener), Daniel Nolan, Wolfgang Schwarz, Adam Sennet, and Daniel Stoljar (and probably others I’ve undeservedly forgotten).

Post-pre-talk, pre-seminar tea.

Korman is not convinced by my gesturing. . . .

More skeptical looks.

Most of these photos taken by notorious conference/talk photojournalist, Dave Chalmers. Thanks! I'll be collecting more photos from Australia as I have time to upload them here.

Back in Sydney now, I have to put off processing all this in order to prepare for my next talk on the 1st on a completely different topic (expanding something else from my paper on SPC kinds). My walk over to Darling Harbour will have to wait.

Metaphysics in the Philosophy of Science 2011 at Toronto

2011-05-17T10:39:00.000-04:00

I'm recently back from the MPSC2011 Conference at the University of Toronto and must say that I thought it went extremely well. Thanks to everyone who came and to our gracious hosts at IHPST! Of course, I wish we had more time for discussion (in pretty much every session), but I thought that the discussion was really great. It was certainly helpful for me (that was the point, right?). If you missed it, here are some photos (email me if you have any more to contribute) and here's an area for papers from the conference.

Westward Swing

2011-05-09T09:17:00.004-04:00

Quarters of the Philosophy Department at Utah: cool building!

On my way to the Pacific APA, I stopped off at the University of Utah to give a talk and visit my friend Matt Haber. The paper I gave was an a brief summary and then elaboration of §7 of my paper on Stable Property Cluster kinds: the bit on the polymorphism problem for cluster kind views of species. My response is basically to admit that it could be a problem in some cases and simply accept that the relevant species taxa fail to be natural kinds in those cases. This only gets awkward and embarrassing, I think, if one is interprets the thesis that species are natural kinds as an answer to a metaphysical question: to what ontological category do species taxa belong? Fortunately, that's not the question I think we ought to be asking — or better, it's not the question that is answered when I claim that (many) species taxa are natural kinds. This is one issues my book on species (Are Species Real?) will aim to clarify. But in talking with Haber, I realized that my interpretation of one very popular philosophical account of species may be overly narrow [sigh]. Not a "back-to-the-drawing-board" realization, by any means, but it looks like I'll need to at least reframe and expand a chapter or two. So it goes. . . .

But interestingly, it also seemed to me that though Haber and I are notationally on other sides of the table on the metaphysics of species (he is a sympathizer of the "species-as-individuals" view, I am a critic), we aren't as far apart as I previously thought. This might be because he's a non-standard SAI-ist — I'm not sure. His suggestion, as I understand it, is that there is a biological notion of parthood that applies to species and which lacks many of the features of the standard-issue parthood relation (e.g., transitivity). I'm now working on a paper exploring different ways of putting this idea into practice.

San Diego had it all! (not my photo, unfortunately!)

I must say as well that Salt Lake City triggered a bit of West Coast envy: those mountains, that weather, the laid-back atmosphere. . . . Utah reminded me a lot of Idaho. I'm looking forward to heading back to SLC for the ISHPSSB meeting in July. That West Coast envy was triggered in a slightly different way when I continued on to San Diego for the Pacific APA. Since the Pacific meeting is often held over Easter weekend, it coincided with Laura's Spring "Break" (I still find it unbelievable that — before snow days take their toll — spring break here doesn't go weekend to weekend!). We made a long weekend of it and visited our favorite pair of ENT surgeons, Jeremiah and Rowley, driving around twisty hillside roads in our rented convertible, going on hikes among gorgeous flowering cacti, visiting the many breweries in and around San Diego (including the Stone Brewery — a must-go for an IPA fan like myself), and going sailing with Miah. Fun stuff! Why I didn't bring my camera on the trip remains a compete mystery.

As far as my professional responsibilities at the APA went, I was commenting on a really interesting paper by Kelly Trogdon on the "Non-Transitivity of Metaphysical Grounding", which argued from a purported failure of the transitivity of causal explanation that metaphysical grounding may fail to be transitive for similar reasons. My commentary focused Kelly's contention that causal explanation fails to be transitive. The old example that is supposed to reveal this comes from the proverb "For Want of a Nail":

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

We're supposed to have the intuition that though the want of a nail explains why the shoe was lost (and so on for each proximate explanatory connection), the want of a nail does not explain why the kingdom was lost. I won't trot out my full commentary here (mostly because it was from handwritten notes), but it occurs to me now why this sort of example might get one thinking that transitivity can fail. Take the individual explanatory links in the lines of the proverb: the lack of a nail sure does seem to explain why the horseshoe was lost; it is a clear "difference-maker" for the horseshoe loss. It's even a strong contender for being counted as the explanation of that shoe loss (rather than being merely explanatorily relevant in some weaker fashion). Why? Because the background conditions which facilitate the relevant difference-making are unexceptional. They don't themselves cry out for explanation. The salient difference-maker is the nail lack. If we wished to extend the explanation, these background conditions (things being eminently normal) will be a less tempting target than the lack of a nail: was a careless farrier to blame or are the nails faulty? That's the fact that (still) calls out for explanation.

But as we widen our scope and assemble the explanatory links, the need for explanation shifts to the background conditions which ground the chain as a whole. So assembled, they are hardly unexceptional. They depict a kingdom on the brink — where one nail can make the difference between victory and defeat! This is a very delicate situation indeed: one might fairly wonder how it came to pass. But given that they constitute the background conditions for the chain (the sum, as it were, of the background conditions of each link), the transitivity of the explanatory difference-making between the lack of a nail and the loss of the kingdom seems untouched. Of course, it won't be very tempting to say that the lack of a nail is the explanation of the loss of the kingdom. The lack of a nail is now the more unexceptional fact! Here's an analogy: suppose Kelly's jacket is dirty. I ask my friend why. She explains that it's because he dived into the dirt after the assassin appeared from behind the bushes to take a shot at him. It would be quite strange for me to be satisfied with this explanation! I should want to know why some assassin is hunting him (and I should probably decline to comment in his APA session). But I can still recognize that his diving onto the ground is an explanatory difference-maker for his jacket being dirty. It seems to me that the same sort of thing is going on in the "For Want of a Nail" example. I need to think more about Kelly's diagnosis of the case and its relevance for metaphysical grounding.

Side note: I've now been tangentially involved with different philosophers suggesting that the grounding relation is not irreflexive (Carrie Jenkins' paper in my Monist issue — out just recently!) and not transitive. Simple induction would suggest that someone will attack the asymmetry of the relation directly and I will be asked to comment. Or maybe I should try it!

Monist Issue Released

2011-05-08T11:06:00.011-04:00

Found this in the mail the other day. I was hoping for the green! Sweet! Here's the Table of Contents:

My hat's off to the contributors, who wrote what I think are some really interesting papers and were a pleasure to deal with throughout the editorial process. Thanks for your hard work on this topic! Thanks as well to the dozens of referees, who slaved away in anonymity to provide the authors and me with valuable feedback. Likewise, it was a pleasure working with Barry Smith and George Reisch at the Monist Mothership.

I just looked back into my email and see that it was in late June 2007 that Barry asked me to design an issue around the theme "Carving Nature at its Joints". It so happened that I was in the planning stages of a conference on that theme which was to have an associated volume with precisely that title. I was delighted to be asked to edit an issue, but somewhat panicked at the thought of editing two distinct volumes with the same name. (In retrospect, I kind of wish I had just for novelty's sake.) In 2007, the issue's release date of April 2011 seemed flying-car, hoverboard distant — a different decade! The future is now.

Stable Property Cluster Kinds

2011-04-17T12:30:00.002-04:00

I've just posted a significantly updated version of a paper I've been working on for a while that sketches my favored account of natural kinds (a loosening of the Homeostatic Property Cluster account). It's still quite drafty: bracketed notes sprinkled about request some specific help/advice, and it clearly needs to be expanded in places and cut down in others. In particular, I'm not certain that I'm really in a position to say something about species as a case-study in the last section. I worry that it just raises more questions than it answers. So any opinions about that would be most welcome. Feel free to post in the comments or simply email me.

"A Different Kind of Property Cluster Kind" [PDF]

Program for MPSC 2011 Posted

2011-03-29T15:10:00.000-04:00

My co-organizers and I just posted a tentative program for the Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science Conference taking place from May 13th–15th. It's looking vaguely coherent — hopefully not too many people will need to move around due to travel stuff.

We were pretty much inundated with papers for this thing, getting more than 85 submissions and ending up doing more parallel sessions than we were expecting. Should be a really interesting conference. And registration is free, so hopefully more folks will decide to come.

See you in Toronto in late May!

Arguments for the Existence of God

2011-02-05T22:58:00.002-05:00

I am constantly impressed by the rhetorical power of satire to efficiently rebut nonsense. Colbert is a master.

April 2011 Monist: The Architecture of Reality

2010-12-04T09:43:00.002-05:00

I'm very happy to announce the contents of the issue of The Monist I'm editing on the theme "The Architecture of Reality":

Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Realism and Ontological Relativity”
Bence Nanay, “What if the World has No Architecture?”
Devin Henry, “Aristotle’s Pluralistic Realism”
John Roberts, “Extra-Physical Structure in a Physical World?”
Matthew Haug, “Natural Properties and the Special Sciences”
Carrie Jenkins, “Is Metaphysical Grounding Irreflexive?”
Daniel Nolan, “Categories and Ontological Dependence”

The papers are great but I'm very glad to be done bugging people for final copies, copy-editing, checking references, and so on. Brief aside: some of the final editing — giving things a penultimate proofread, making sure the references checked out, getting them into final format, replacing hyphens with en- and em-dashes as needed, and so on — was done in a skeezy little launderette in Exeter while I refreshed my suitcase from my UK tour (at an incredible £4 a load!). This made me wonder about other strange places in which editorial work or writing has been conducted. At first blush, one might think that this is a post-laptop phenomenon — it's not like Quine typed "Two Dogmas" on the train to Cheboygan one morning. (Still, I suppose he might have written it in weird circumstances.)

Slater Reports on Tour

2010-12-02T21:14:00.003-05:00

A typical scene: map on iPad in a pub.

I just got back a few days ago from a little mini-tour of the UK, my first time back since I was an exchange student at Edinburgh ten years ago, and [gulp] my first time ever south of Scotland. Had some lovely meetings with philosophers in Nottingham, Bristol, Exeter, and London. Lots of real hand drawn ale (served at the proper cellar temperature) and fish and chips (with plenty of malt vinegar). Thanks to all my hosts for some very enjoyable and productive visits.

I was a bit disappointed to discover the price of beer had increased over the last decade to the point where the £2 coins no longer purchased a pint (I missed my "beer tokens"). . . . But I did appreciate a lot of the things that I fully admit the Scots and Britons have over us Americans as a society. Food-wise, you can't argue with fish and chips, really — except for the mushy peas (an abomination of nature). And they've clearly mastered the melding of meat and pastry, recognizing that little meat pies make great fast food. A new phenomenon this time around that I participated in in a few train stations: the Chicken Tikka Pasty. . . . [slow clap] For dessert, I loved sticky toffee pudding and hot custard. You just don't see that kind of love in the States.

I was also impressed with the sheer number of electric kettles for tea (even in cheap hotel rooms) and the use of radiators as towel racks — though these two items were sometimes the sole source of heat in the room. You have to hand it to them on tea in general. I brought back a good bit of it and so far it's been fantastic. And of course, there's the whisky. Beer, while good, didn't do as much for me as I can get in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Roundabouts and the general retrofitting of older buildings have to be applauded on the city planning fronts.

Fortunately, there are some items that we Americans can still do better. Street signs for one: just the fact that we have them at all is a big bonus (maybe not Boston). Crosswalks were also rare. There were many occasions when I had to run to cross the street, which made getting to/from a train station with my suitcase exciting. Since this may have been a consequence of the prevalence of roundabouts, I'll call this a draw. Showers were also fairly mysterious to me. (1) They seemed to be either tiny or big with a tiny curtain or little window to prevent water from splashing into the bathroom. (2) Many had the water heater in the shower — not that I don't love the thought of showering with a 240 volt appliance. . . . Okay and how about this "Full English Breakfast" routine that I had way too many times? Sorry Brits, I can make a better breakfast half asleep — come over sometime and I'll demonstrate this. Halfheartedly broiled tomatoes, soggy mushrooms, sugary beans, under-spiced sausage and undercooked (and often non-smoked!) bacon? If there's a common thread here, it may be a lack of faith in the deliciousness of the Maillard reaction.

All and all, though, it's a wonderful but very different country. I'm looking forward to returning as soon as I can manage.

Photos from the trip here.

A Week of Whisky in Scotland

2010-11-14T17:41:00.000-05:00

The Vaults at Leith

Directly after the PSA, I took a vacation of sorts last week to go touring around Scotland in search of Guid Scotch Drink with my friend and whisky tour-guide Jason Johnstone-Yellin. What a great time! We started out in Edinburgh at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society Vaults where we could sample from unique single-cask offerings bottled by the SMWS. I'm a member of the SMWSA — and so can order these bottles — but it was great to be able to "try before you buy". Hopefully they'll still have some of 127.5 (Cask #5 of Bruichladdich's Port Charlotte line) for me to order. . . .

Dog guarding Knockdhu.

After Leith, we headed up north to visit Glenglassaugh and Knockdhu distilleries in the Highlands, passing by dozens of Speyside distilleries. Had really wonderful visits with distillery managers there where we saw the whole production works in action. We also got to visit a certain cask of Glenglassaugh of which I am a shareholder (the 2nd peated octave there). Judging from what we tasted there (even very young stuff), we have reason for being pretty excited about this. I'm expecting a little more than three bottles of a unique cask-strength malt a few years from now. . . .

We swung down from the highlands to catch the ferry from Kennacraig to Port Ellen on Islay — my favorite whisky region. The weather was picking up by this time and they decided to make the ferry foot passengers only. So with some trepidation, we left our car behind and took a surprisingly calm two hour ride to Port Askaig (on the other side of the island) and bused down to Port Ellen. Luckily, the car was waiting for us, keys under the windshield wipers, the next morning. Welcome to Islay! Stayed at Rhona and Hamish Scott's great B&B, Caladh Sona in Port Ellen (Hamish is former distillery manager at Ardbeg, and I understand presided over some fantastic malts — need to remember to pick up my birthday malt one of these days before it disappears!). Really enjoyed meeting two other Oregonians who were staying there: Mick and Tammy, owners of the Highland Stillhouse near Portland. Great folk! I'll be a regular there whenever I'm back in Portland.

We hit all of the distilleries on Islay except Kilchoman, the newest distillery on Islay which is also producing some really promising spirit which I got to try at the Glasgow Whisky Festival. The UK was enjoying some pretty rough weather, including wind gusts at up to 80mph! Nothing like horizontal rain to drive one inside (even if just into a warehouse!) for a dram. The best visit was definitely with the distillery manager at Bruichladdich, by far the quirkiest distillery on the island. Spent several hours with him.

Weather (so it was said) held us up on Islay a short while longer — long enough to enjoy another fabulous breakfast from Rhona! — so we were only able to catch the last two hours or so of the Glasgow Whisky Festival, where we were able to taste a few things that we didn't catch while touring around. All in all, it was just a great trip. I highly recommend you take a tour with Jason. It's well worth the money: he can get you into places that other tour groups (we saw them) can't even get near (and with good cheer)! Now to start saving up for the next one. . . .

Here are my favorite 165 photos from the 600 or so I took that week.

Ardbeg Distillery

PSA 2010

2010-11-11T12:43:00.003-05:00

What a concept: windows you can actually open in a hotel!

Went up to Montreal last week for the biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Two missions this time: give a paper and take photos at the meeting for the PSA to post on their website. Done and done. Got my registration comped and put up in the program chair's sweet suite before he arrived in exchange — for the photos, that is. After the Hyatt, I stayed in this lovely 27 room hotel in the old city, called Auberge du Vieux Port. Really nice place if you're looking for a good, (relatively) inexpensive place to stay in Montreal.

Really great conference. Montreal's a lovely city. Fortunately, the really nice days were before the conference got going. Have to remember to apply to organize a symposium next time — yeah San Diego! Let me book my hotel right now.

Photos from the rest of the conference here.

Scrivener 2.0 Released!

2010-10-26T15:23:00.000-04:00

Unsolicited product endorsement: I'm a big fan of Scrivener, a Microsoft Word alternative that focuses on writing instead of thinking about how one's writing is going to look. The basic idea is that writing long works is more efficient if they're split up into manageable pieces. Scrivener helps me do this and helps me keep them organized. It's been a great tool for working on my book project (Are Species Real?) and even sketching out some new stuff for my second book (The Nature of Biological Classification). My basic workflow is to write/organize using Scrivener, export to word, and then use EndNote X3 within Word to format my bibliography. Fortunately, I can still drag references into my Scrivener file and my interaction with Word amounts to selecting a menu item ("Format Bibliography") — though I've still had Word crash hard at that moment! I've heard that the new version of Word for Mac is better, but of course it breaks EndNote integration until v.37 of EndNote is released (or whatever we're up to now).

I'd really encourage anyone who detests Word to give this workflow a shot. A trial version of Scrivener 2.0 was just released in connection with NaNoWriMo which will give you quite a bit of time playing around with the program. I haven't used the new version much, but so far it looks like a pretty significant improvement over the already great v.1.5.

Need an Idea for a Paper?

2010-09-19T22:20:00.000-04:00

This was fascinating. I received a call-for-papers recently for a conference on:
THE CRISIS OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES: False Objectivity and the Decline of Creativity
March 6-8, 2011

Since I'm interested in the concept of creativity, I clicked through and found a typical conference site, with the following description:

Centralization and over-professionalization can lead to the disappearance of a critical environment capable of linking the disciplines to the “real world.” The humanities need to operate in a concrete cultural environment able to influence procedures on a hic et nunc basis and should not entirely depend on normative criteria whose function is often to hide ignorance behind a pretentious veil of value-neutral objectivity. . . .

For example, in sociology, the growth of scientism has fragmented ethical categories and distorted discourse between inner and outer selves. Philosophy is suffering from an empty professionalism current in many philosophy departments in industrialized and developing countries where boring, ahistorical, and nonpolitical exercises are justified through appeals to false excellence.

In all branches of the humanities absurd evaluation processes foster similar tendencies as they create a sterile atmosphere and prevent interdisciplinarity and creativity. An invidious technicization of theory plays into the hands of technocrats. Due to the centralization of editorial power in the hands of large university presses of anglophone countries, the content, quality, and range of modern publishing has become only too predictable.

How do people working in the humanities respond to the crisis in their respective disciplines? Papers including either meta-scientific considerations or concrete observations are welcome.

As a conference organizer myself, I'm not going to tempt Karma by dissecting or commenting on this. However, I can't resist noting the mild irony of discussing the problematic disconnect between Academy (seen in Mark Taylor-ish terms, it seems) and the "real world" (whatever that is supposed to mean) and describing a solution with an obscure Latin phrase.

Anyway, let's say I'm keen to respond to this CFP. What might I write on? Luckily, the organizers provide some suggestions in a scrolling list. Some of these are questions, some are assertions. Here's the whole list (I think). I might just attend this conference if all of these questions could be answered and all of the assertions justified!

Suicidal humanities
Transmission of culture, or transcendence?
The humanities' inferiority complex
Education and profit: The world of diploma mills
The human sciences and human values
Kulturangst
The unbearable naïveté of method
Can the nature of the human be grasped through specialization?
Does wealth of facts equal wealth of thoughts?
Philosophy and the logic choppers
In the aftermath of Constructionism
Are we turning out Business majors or ATM machines?
Ph.D.s are titles, not qualifications
Engineers of souls or dealers in death?
Why is linguistics so boring? [third favorite]
Architects build prisons, not habitats
The Social Sciences are the drug of choice
E-learning = machine learning?
In which way do psychologisms, sociologisms, historicisms, etc. obstruct any unification and integration of the human sciences?
Sociology and the abandonment of cultural content
Excessive conceptualization in psychology
Excessive relativism in the historical sciences
The loss of creativity in translations
Are Cultural Studies an alternative or do they just bandage over the hemorrhage?
The article as hack work, aimed more at securing promotion or a new job, than advancing knowledge
Numbers , numbers, numbers: Formalization and quantification
Shakespeare Inc [runner up]
Liberal, plural, multicultural, humane: The new dogma
Race, Sex, Class, Gender: Is that all we've got?
Metaphor versus metonym
Literature is soundbites: the rest is television
Paradise flossed [my personal favorite]
Why don't we teach with shades on and Death Metal playing?
Take any language: English for example…
The global mall of academia
Publish or perish
The humanities and the market: Do something popular…
Political Correctness: Never too absurd?
Can excellence be empirically established?
Positivism in anthropology: Nothing new since Darwin?
Analytical philosophy: A bunker?
Are academic superstars black holes?
The lights are on but there's no more EngLit in the house

Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science Conference

2010-08-17T12:18:00.000-04:00

A few months back, my friends Chris Haufe, Zanja, and I submitted a proposal to the Pacific APA for a kick-ass mini-conference on the troubled, on-again-off-again, relationship between metaphysics and philosophy of science. That wasn't its official title, but that's what it was going to be. . . . We were turned down. But out of the ashes an even more kick-ass conference has emerged with funding from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto and the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, University of Chicago. Clear your calendars from May 13th-15th if you're interested in Metaphysics & the Philosophy of Science and book a flight to Toronto!

Here's the Call for Papers.

Summer Travel

2010-08-15T09:03:00.001-04:00

I can tell that summer's coming to a close just because my duffle bag is put away and my photography gear is spread out on my shelves. But Laura and I had a fabulous time visiting our folks in Oregon and Alberta. Pretty stunning scenery all around. The slideshows below go to my web galleries.

Grilling Pizza

2010-06-23T23:48:00.000-04:00

The pizza-blogosphere has been furiously replicating the pizza-grilling meme recently. This is something I've been meaning to try recently, as word is that the result is closer to a pizza cooked at the proper 850°F — well beyond the capabilities of my oven! So since I was due to bake some bread and had some leftover mozzarella, I thought I'd test this out and share the results (well, the photographic record of the results).

First things first: this is all about the crust, obviously. The thought is that the grill can produce that lovely char that NY-style pizza enthusiasts crave. I decided to adapt my usual bread recipe slightly to produce some leftover dough. Here's what I did (this will produce two pizzas and a small boule of bread; if you want just pizza dough, check out Jim Lahey's method or there's Jeff Varasano's bible): Mix four cups all-purpose flour, one cup semolina, two teaspoons yeast, two teaspoons salt. Dissolve a good squirt of honey (maybe as much as 1/4 cup) into 2 cups of warm water. Mix the wet team and the dry team together with your hands (my preference) or a wooden spoon. This leads to a pretty sticky, shaggy dough. Once the ball came together enough to manage, coat it in several tablespoons of EVOO, and let sit in the bowl for 18 hours covered with plastic wrap.

At this point, the bread and pizza dough part companies. I don't think it matters how much goes to one or the other. I wanted two 9-10" thin crust pizzas, so I took about a fist-sized piece of dough and left the rest to rise for another two hours before I baked it in my dutch oven preheated to 450° (35 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off). Following Varasano's advice, I wanted my pizza dough to develop a bit more, so into the fridge it went. Another 48 hours or so, it's doubled in size. Divided again, it doesn't look like much dough, but is plenty for that lovely thin crust.

Now it's time to pre-heat the grill while you get toppings ready. My thought about sauce was keep-it-simple. So a can of mashed-up San Marzano tomatoes (yeah Wegman's!), some garlic, salt, pepper, and basil goes in a saucepan.

Other toppings all had the benefit of being either fast cooking (mozzarella, goat cheese, ricotta) or pre-cooked (sautéed onions, bacon, basil, roasted red pepper). I wanted to make sure this stuff was all ready to go, since once the cooking started, things were going to go fast. Outside!

Grill is rocket hot now (next time I will check how hot). I slide the dough off the paddle. There's minimal "droopage" of the dough through the grates. It's cooking FAST.

In about the time it takes me to wipe my hands on my apron and take this picture, I smell burning. Yep, there's definitely some charring going on! Flipped it over, turned the grill down on that side, drizzled a little olive oil, and started topping.

This one got a variant of the traditional margherita style: dollops of sauce alternating with cheese, and basil and the roasted red peppers. After a couple of minutes to cook the other side of the crust, just turned OFF the burners under the pizza and left the far left burner on high.

Another couple of minutes, and we have this loveliness:

And the "undercarriage" shows some nice char. Maybe a bit too much this time.

I cooked the next pizza slightly differently. This time I oiled the crust before I flipped it, which I think kept the char down a bit. I also spread the sauce evenly and topped a bit more liberally (with the onions, bacon, goat, ricotta, and mozzarella cheeses). And as long as I'm living dangerously, I decide to see what happens if I add a few wood chips to the business side of the grill. Note the smoke emanating from the left side of the grill. Since I'm a BBQ maniac, I wouldn't have had a problem if this tasted like BBQed (rather than grilled) pizza. . . . Hey, this is science! In fact, it was pretty subtle (not in there long enough to get really smoky) — I just got a hint of woodsmoke.

Here they are:

Have some timing kinks to work out still (the first one was overdone and the second was a hair underdone), but I'd do this again. The crust was definitely crispy yet chewy, with a nice char that I just can't get with a pizza stone in the oven. And aside from the indoor/outdoor hassles and having to use toppings that needed little further cooking, it wasn't more difficult than using the oven and probably the closest I'll get to Grimaldi's until I build my outdoor pizza oven. Yes, that will happen before I die. The sooner, the better!

Recent Scams

2010-06-06T14:28:00.001-04:00

Various people have been trying to take my money recently! In one case, it was obvious enough; in a second, by a close shave; and in a third, by an office of my employer.

Case 1: The Appeal to Ignorant Vanity

This last one is probably more well-known, but over the last month, I've received three separate requests for biographical information for such fine publications as The Marquis' Who's Who in America. I've heard about this one before. I remember looking up this wacky character who asked me an incoherent questiona bout quantum mechanics in my first ever public lecture (the lecture didn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics): most of his CV were dozens of listings in "Who's Who"-type publications and lectures to local inmates on quantum mechanics and philosophy (captive audience!). The thing I love about the Who's Who books is that the end product — which no one buys except the fools, I expect (let's hope most public libraries know better) — contains a list of the fooled. On the other hand, this guy had tenure, so perhaps he was allowing himself to be scammed in order to scam his higher-ups.

Case 2: The Spurious Internet Domain Registration

My quasi-professional photography site has its own domain name: www.visualdetail.com. I pay various parties modest amounts to host the photos and keep the domain name registered to me. The domain end of this only comes up every three to five years or so, so it's never fresh in my mind what the deal is, when the next re-up is due, what phone number I used to register, even what company I registered with! So I get this letter from Domain Registry of America (a Canadian company) requesting that I renew my domain name for another one, two, or five years. The amount seems familiar and I have very little recollection of the company. As I'm writing the check, a glimmer of a memory comes back about my actual registrar (called "Joker"). So what the hell is this company all about? Turns out I've never paid or contacted them, but that they are able to look up the address of anyone who owns a domain name, send them something which looks very much like a legit bill, but is actually a contract to transfer my domain name to them for a fee. Given their careful wording, it appears that little can be done about them legally.

Case 3: The Parking Ticket
There is a row of parking on the Bucknell campus, up the hill toward the observatory which is often my last resort when close things fill up. It is not posted as anything, I see other faculty/staff stickers in it, it's adjacent to posted staff-parking, so I figure that it is fair game for anyone. One day, having parked there without incident many times, I get a $20 ticket for "EMPLOYEE IN STUD. PARKING". Am I not studly enough? The ticket reports further that it is "NOT APPEALABLE". And yet, somehow, contravening laws of logic or nature, I am able to email the office and appeal.

Ticket #09B00455
Appeal Reason:
=========================================

Hi there, I got this ticket for parking in "student parking" but there's no indication whatsoever on the street that I can see (I just drove by again) that it is student parking. It was the parking just off of the stadium. I'm fine to not park there, but if you're going to ticket there, you must have things posted better. Thanks!

Matthew Slater
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

My appeal is heard and denied on the grounds that the ticket is unappealable.

Dear, MATTHEW SLATER

Thank you for your parking ticket appeal. The University Parking Appeals Board, consisting of faculty, staff, and student representatives, carefully reviewed your appeal
with the below resolution
. . . .
The following ticket appeal has been denied. You are responsible for payment of this citation. Thank you for your time and cooperation. University Parking Appeals Board

Decision: Staff in Student parking is not able to be appealed per the University parking regulations.

When I protested that this really seemed absurd — to ticket for parking in an unmarked area, to make certain kinds of tickets "unappealable" — my second appeal received a personal response: "I have checked as well, and if you'll notice there is a sign post that has no sign on it. These signs are taken to be placed in dorm rooms or just taken on a dare by students. We will have facilities replace the sign which did state Student Parking." I pointed out that no sign had ever been there since I had come to Bucknell (nor have I seen it go up again). I guess the sign post was supposed to have clued me in enough to call parking services as I was driving around looking for parking? (I'm pretty sure that's illegal in PA.)

So are these three cases scams? My inclination is to say yes, though I note that they all appear to be legal. The first two involve companies offering real services: publishing books with names and short biographies of people (perhaps also selling that information to spammers, but never mind that) and registering domain names. It's just that you probably don't need these services. The last is merely a nifty way of helping the bottom line of a university or other highly bureaucratized institution: have unlabeled parking areas you police with unappealable tickets. Sure feels like a scam! It's like a tax on new employees.

Volcanos and Reference to Species

2010-05-01T21:34:00.001-04:00

I was in Tilburg (in the Netherlands) at the Sydney-Tilburg Future of Philosophy of Science Conference a couple of weeks ago when Mt. Nooneexceptperhapsicelanderscanpronounceit went off and marooned me in the beautiful city of Amsterdam for four extra days during a period of unseasonably warm spring weather in Europe. (The conference was very good, by the way.)

This, unfortunately, precipitated a good week of missed classes back home. I felt compelled to cancel my trip back to the 13th Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference (the INPC), a conference I've helped organize before. Luckily, the organizers were game to have me present remotely. Here's a video of the presentation:

My INPC2010 Presentation from Matthew Slater on Vimeo.

Ugh: tell me I say 'um' less when when I'm not talking in a room by myself. . . . Better, perhaps, to simply read the paper (draft here). I think my session went well. I was able to take questions (even though I couldn't see anyone in the session) and got some good feedback. Since I'm not exactly a philosopher of language, if anyone with more familiarity with this material has any comments — or any references to things that I really ought to read (that I may have overlooked) —, I'd be most grateful to hear them (either via email or comments here).

Submission Information for Upcoming Issue of the Monist (Architecture of Reality)

2010-04-04T11:53:00.000-04:00

Submissions for issue 94:2 (April 2011) of The Monist for which I am advisory editor are trickling in. I've received a few protocol questions which I'm happy to answer.

Length requirements: the submission guidelines for The Monist suggest a range of 4,000–8,000 words. Sticking to this will allow more pieces to make the issue and will correspondingly increase a paper's chances of inclusion in the issue.

Submission: The official guidelines ask for an electronic submission as well as a clear paper copy. I prefer the submission to be in PDF format (please blind it for anonymous refereeing, including removing the metadata if possible), but can accept submissions in Word (.doc or .docx) or RTF. I don't need a paper copy if you submit in PDF or if your essay does not contain anything other than regular text (e.g., diagrams, formulas involving special fonts, &c.). Paper copies may be mailed to:

Matthew Slater
Monist Issue
Department of Philosophy
Bucknell University
69 Coleman Hall, Dent Dr.
Lewisburg, PA 17837

Electronic submissions should be emailed to me at matthew.slater@bucknell.edu. Please write back if you don't receive a confirmation receipt within two days (naturally, I'll be travelling on the deadline, and so slower to respond then).

Abstract: It would be helpful to include a short (100-200 word) abstract of your submission (either in the paper or in the email) with which I might tantalize potential referees.

Thanks and don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions/clarifications. Really looking forward to reading these submissions!

Government "Intrusion"

2010-03-25T07:41:00.000-04:00

I was just rereading Leopold's (1949) Sand County Almanac this morning for a class and I noticed a wise remark relevant to the current strife about healthcare:

Industrial landowners and users, especially lumbermen and stockmen, are inclined to wail long and loudly about the extension of government ownership and regulation to land, but (with notable exceptions) they show little disposition to develop the only visible alternative: the voluntary practice of conservation on their own land.

It's not a conceptual truth that free-market approaches to health-insurance are doomed to fail any more than it is guaranteed that Leopold's industrial landowners should fail to keep their soil from washing away. But nor is it surprising that they do fail, given the relevant incentive structures. Champions of free-market approaches to this or that argue that long-term, enlightened self-interest leads to productive competition and thus valuable results — and they may be right. But haven't we seen in the last few years a conspicuous absence of foresight on the part of the piloting these hydrogen-fueled-dirigibles? "Oh the humanity!"

Snowmageddon vs. Global Warming

2010-02-13T09:34:00.001-05:00

I think I may have finally turned the corner from getting really mad at people who made elementary mistakes in scientific reasoning (and the people who credulously believe them) to finding them hilarious and taking joy from them. Well, I'm still mad that such people have such loud bullhorns, but that's another issue. . . .

So it inevitably happens that when record snowfall hits DC last week that blowhards come out of the woodwork to bash "global warming": "Hey, it's COLD here! What's all this talk of WARMING!?" The reason this kind of idiocy now makes me happy is that it invites such rich satire. Check out this clip from the Daily Show: the real fun starts at about 3:40 in.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Unusually Large Snowstorm

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Sam B.: "A dingo took my baby! That means dingos will take every baby! Al Gore, what have you done?!?"

By the way, kudos to Sean Hanity [sic?] for trying to turn climate change into a political question by attributing the theory to Al Gore. This is, I must say, a stroke of rhetorical genius and why I continue to maintain that "An Inconvenient Truth" actually set us back considerably in the race to mitigate climate change. . . . "Al Gore, what have you done?!?"

Amazing Pizza Guide

2010-01-26T07:42:00.000-05:00

I love a good New York Pizza. Possibly the best food on the planet when done right in a coal- or wood-fired oven. Someday I will build one of these ovens. In the meantime, I'm working on getting the perfect crust. Just came across this "recipe" (more like a short book!) by Jeff Varasano. Fantastic stuff. Back into the bakery laboratory I go!

God's Control Panel

2010-01-16T08:48:00.000-05:00

Pretty funny stuff here. Top setting of the rain control: clowns. That would be rough, man. . . .

From maneggs.com

Y2K in Retrospect

2010-01-14T07:42:00.001-05:00

I found this comment on an article [This Dumb Decade: The 87 Lamest Moments in Tech, 2000-2009] about how "lame" the y2k problem was to be particularly revealing and relevant to the sort of complacency that is easily encouraged by successful behind-the-scenes work.

The y2k problem was a snoozer because a LOT of geeks worked a LOT of hours in 1998 and 1999 to fix the problem before it happened. I was in a y2k war room and when midnight passed our first customer without the lights going out in Canberra (our product was controlling the Snowy Mountains Project electrical grid) we all cheered. Outside the y2k war rooms of thousands of companies whose software was supporting the world’s industrial base, nobody heard that cheer, but we damn well won that war before the first (potential) shot was fired.

I think here about the Swine-flu "non-issue". . . .

Mad Scientist of the Guitar

2010-01-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

Great (Dutch) documentary from 1997 about my guitar hero Bill Frisell (check out all three parts). I've seen Frisell in concert (mostly at the Village Vanguard) a good dozen times and always notice the sort of incongruous awkward mannerisms (if you watched him with no sound, you'd think he had no sense of rhythm) and amazing music. Great stuff. If you're new to Frisell, I highly recommend picking up some of his impossible-to-classify albums. Lots of selections on Lala (heavy on Disfarmer initially, but make sure to check out songs from his collaborations with Elvin Jones and Dave Holland, Unspeakable, Floratone, Ghost Town).

I've also been really digging his online live recording series. Number 4 is great — I was at this concert, I believe, at the wonderful Jazz Standard (which also has a BBQ restaurant upstairs) including one of my favorite songs of all time, "Follow Your Heart" by John McLaughlin. Number 5 ("Live at the Babicon") is also really good: aside from the improvisations, the album is all Beatles covers.

Side note/question: Is it wrong to like covers of the Beatles more than the Beatles themselves?

Carbon Emissions and Sequestration

2010-01-09T09:41:00.000-05:00

Gizmodo recently picked up on an article about a Japanese project aiming to use bacteria (genetically modified, possibly?) to convert CO₂ into natural gas (well, methane, anyway) and sequestering the (leftover?) carbon. They don't have funding yet and frankly I hope that it doesn't get it. Aside from the fact that we don't really know whether sequestering carbon will work — it might just seep out again — it seems to represent strange priorities. The flub in Gizmodo's write up is illustrative:

Many nations have already built massive carbon sequestration plants that can store carbon dioxide underground, as part of a worldwide effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously, sequestering atmospheric carbon does absolutely nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions! Now, I'm all for thinking about the climate change problem in terms of a total "budget" of atmospheric carbon compatible with a 2° rise in global temperature averages, but these pie-in-the-sky solutions just don't get to the heart of the problem. Worse, they allow us a sort of vague hope that technology will save the day and allow us to keep on doing what we're doing. When did we forget that technology is ultimately going to be our undoing? Haven't these people watched science fiction movies?!?

Sped-Up Bacteria Could Transform Carbon Dioxide into Natural Gas - methane - Gizmodo

Biosphere 2

2010-01-08T08:01:00.002-05:00

Just caught this post (with many photos) of the now mostly derelict Biosphere 2. Fascinating stuff (and judging from some of the comments, possibly not an accurate representation of the state of things there; the official webpage is here). I vaguely remember the buzz surrounding this thing in the early '90s. I suppose at the time that I assumed that the '2' referred to the fact that this Biosphere was a more sophisticated, bigger, whathaveyou version of Biosphere 1.0. No: we're living on Biosphere 1.0:

Watching something originally built precisely as a simulation of the Earth—the 2 in "Biosphere 2" is meant to differentiate this place from the Earth itself, i.e. Biosphere 1—slowly taken over by the very forces it was naively meant to model is philosophically extraordinary: the model taken over by the thing it represents. It is a replicant in its dying throes.

Aside from all the ironies involved, it's interesting to think about the underlying assumptions behind this project. At least, I think they were underlying assumptions: that a closed biotic system of a certain sort would attain some kind of equilibrium. Put a bunch of plants, water, microbes, animals, and whatever else together, seal it from the human-disturbed outdoors, and we'll have a sort of indoor Garden of Eden in the Sonoran Desert. But not only did its container mess things up a bit (the concrete screws with CO2 levels, I gather, the trees hit the ceiling, &c.), there was a roach/ant explosion (since presumably the relevant predators weren't included.

Not long ago, Wire Science had a nice feature on it (Biosphere 2 Not Such a Bust) that pointed out its importance for preparing for future mars/moon bases. Perhaps someone should try building Biosphere 3 at sea so that we can get ready to head to Waterworld.

Periodic Circles of Elements Galore

2009-10-07T12:41:00.003-04:00

There was a recent paper posted to the general physics arXiv about how it's better in various ways to represent the table in a circular format. An article in the MIT Technology Review suggests somewhat hilariously that this is a bad idea because it's "impossible" to rotate it on most computer screens. Right: because whenever I have a portrait style photo I have to physically pick up the monitor and set it on its side (luckily I can do the impossible!). The article is pretty bad in general. My favorite is the claim that "The periodic table has been stamped into the minds of countless generations of schoolchildren." Let's see: when was it invented, again? 1869? Hmmm. . . . At least the author didn't claim that it's literally been countless generations. . . .

Anyway, it turns out that something like this has been considered many times before. There's even a site where one can buy a t-shirt of the "Mayan Period Table". Now that's some cutting-edge nerd attire. . . .

AWFUL

2009-08-29T08:20:00.003-04:00

Recently came across an ever growing club: AWFUL: Americans Who Figuratively Use 'Literally'.

From White Plume:

According to Steven Pinker's book, The Stuff of Thought, Roger Tobin coined this acronym. The book says:
The charter member was Rabbi Baruch Korff, a defender of Richard Nixon during his Watergate ordeal, who at one point protested, "The American press has literally emasculated President Nixon."
As our language evolves, using literally when speaking figuratively is becoming more accepted in informal speech as a method of exaggeration. However, in formal writing, I recommend you use both words precisely. When you're literally correct, you avoid figuratively pushing proper English out the door.

Now, I don't mind if words change their meaning as long as we have some word to stand for each of the meanings that are useful to preserve. As precise/literal sense of 'literally' is gradually being eroded away (not literally!), perhaps we should be on the lookout for words that might take its place.

How about 'metaphorically' or 'figuratively'? We could just gradually swap the meanings of 'literally' and 'figuratively'. Say I want to emphasize that what I'm saying is not a mere figurative exaggeration (I really was knocked out --- i.e., rendered unconscious --- by last night's band), I could say, 'I was figuratively knocked out by the band last night!' --- meaning not figuratively. Maybe after a while their meanings would swap back --- rather like the earth's magnetic field.

Star Wars . . . kinda

2009-08-04T22:30:00.000-04:00

This has been making the rounds on the web, I'm sure, but in case you haven't seen it (and have seen Star Wars), it's freaking hilarious:

Here's what's going on (from the creator):

My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my voice recorder and asked her to start from the top.

Even though I have seen the trilogy a bunch of times, I'm not confident that I could do significantly better if someone was holding a mic up to my face. Well, okay, I wouldn't have left off the Ice Planet Hoth. . . .

It's kinda funny thinking about how one would describe any movie's plots at a medium-level of detail. For example, though one could describe The Big Lebowski as about a lazy middle-aged stoner's "misadventures" or some such, how the hell would you explain its plot to someone? "So there's this guy who comes home to find these two thugs, one of which pees on his rug. . . ." Go on?!? . . .

A Crushing Rejection

2009-07-31T20:07:00.002-04:00

The philosophical journal Philosophical Quarterly runs annual essay prize competitions on particular topics. The last one was on "Creativity"; the prize was £1,500, which I think comes to about USD$273,000 (whatever it is, it buys few nice bottles at RMW). Now, I love "calls for papers", as the deadline gets me writing rather than letting a paper languish half done. I hate them because they involve deadlines! So after reading about every book and paper on creativity I can get my hands on in the three months or so I have before the deadline hits, I'm a few days away and need to begin writing. The night before was my first all-nighter since college (and last, I'm thinking). The paper [pdf] wasn't spectacular, but it made some interesting points I thought. I wasn't expecting to win (or really thinking it was a possibility), but I was hoping to get into the issue (that seemed less like a long shot when I pressed the 'send' button, in my no-sleep-haze).

As expected, I did not win. But there was a faint ray of sunshine: the editors mentioned that they had been contacted by some people who were editing a volume on Creativity and wanted people (especially rejects from the PQ issue, I expect!) to know about them. So I dropped them a line inquiring about the project: Did they have a publisher lined up? If so who? Were they under contract? What was the dominant displinary persuasion of the volume supposed to be? Had some contributions already been secured? And so on. I added: "The paper I wrote is entitled "Two Aspects of Scientific Creativity". I'm working on revising it now. A draft copy is on my webpage here [link]".
A while later, one of them (who turned out to be a graduate student in psychology, I think) emailed me back: "We greatly appreciate your interest in the project and we are including the essay you directed us to among our submissions. We will be getting back to you in June ’09 once our selections are finalized."

Me: "Thanks for your message, but before you consider my paper submitted to your volume, would you please answer my questions about it? Publisher? Committed authors? The focus is then on philosophical aspects of creativity?" If this book is vaporware, not in (or near) philosophy, not done by a good publisher, I don't need to go there — I'm happy enough to let the paper simmer on my research backburner for a while. It's crowded there, but I'd make room.

Them (roughly): [Some of the details requested. A well-respected publisher "has expressed interest".] Having dealt with publishers, I know that "expressing interest" is worth about zero when it comes to pushing through to a volume (on the topic, I just saw this). And there were other things that made me somewhat concerned.

I decided to put the paper on the backburner. Definitely needs more thought/tinkering/major-renovation (the usual). I need to read more on the topic (suggestions welcome, btw). I probably should have emailed them to say, "Hey guys, thanks, but I've decided not to submit for your volume. I'm, uh, holding out for a bolt of insight and then will send it to a journal." Well, I probably could have finessed it better than that. But anyway, I didn't respond (thinking my failure to actually submit the paper would amount to just that: my not being a submitter) and onto the backburner the paper went. Just the other week, I get this email:

Dear Matthew Slatter [sic],

Though we enjoyed your essay, “Two aspects of scientific creativity,” and we hope you will find a good home for it in publication, we are sorry to inform you that it will not be included in the volume we are editing on the philosophy of creativity. We received a windfall of excellent potential chapters and, alas, we can only include a few.

Given your interest in the subject, however, we thought you might be interested to attend a conference we will be hosting on the philosophy of creativity next year. The exact details are still to be determined, but it will be held at Barnard College, Columbia University, most likely in November 2010. If you would like to be notified about this event once the schedule is confirmed, please let us know and we’ll keep you posted; we would be happy to have you join us.

So, yeah. . . . A paper that was sitting on my webpage, in draft . . . was rejected. Man does that sting! I'd better right this ship lest I find other papers (or worse: talks; or worse still: classes!) similarly rejected. I'd enquire about the conference, but I'm a little scared of what might happen to my ego should I accidentally submit something again.

Adventures in BBQ

2009-07-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

My first real foray into BBQ was a botched affair. I'm not talking about grilling, now: that's direct heat, that's quick and easy (which is not to say bad). But BBQ — cooking with smoke via indirect heat — is on another plane of existence altogether in my book. So I'm visiting my parents in Portland and am all jazzed about resurrecting their smoker. I was all ready with my hunk of pork: a shoulder piece decidedly unpullable in it's uncooked state, but nicely seasoned and carefully brined over night. I got up early, as you figure about two hours per pound of meat (and I had about six pounds), and realized that their smoker was non-functional. The element had burned out or some such. Retrofit opportunity: I remembered Alton Brown's episode on BBQ where he used two big flower pots and a portable plugin burner (sweet!). Since it took about three store to find one, I'm not seeing white wisps of smoke until 9 AM or so. As these things take time, it's likely to be a late dinner. . . . So it goes. The thermometer reads 165 at about 8PM and I say, "hey, it's passed the 'acceptable temp' for pork — let's pull it". Well, first it's gotta rest. Half an hour later, it's ready for pulling. Except it doesn't pull — at all. Mom puts it into the oven. People are eating Cheerios by now, I'm sure (my memory gets fuzzy at this point). In any case, it comes out by about 10PM and no one really feels much in the mood for pulled pork anymore. It wasn't a total disaster — you could tell what it was supposed to be — but it certainly wasn't the lovin' spoonful I was going for. . . .

Fast forward five years or so. New house, new job, and no grill to speak of. I make my move and buy a Traeger Grill — my new favorite appliance. It runs on wood pellets: an auger slowly pulls them into a firebox controlled by a fan: a simple, elegant system, made just outside of Portland. People love these things. In its first week, I get the hang of it by doing a nice pork tenderloin, some chicken, and some smoked red snapper. All very nice, but now it's time to get serious. Pulled pork, version 2.o. Here's what I do (and where I went wrong):

Step 1: make friends with your butcher. Well, this is in progress. But we got friendly enough for him to fork over a nice, local hunk of hog.

Step 2: brine said hunk in a solution of ice/water (about two gallons, .5 cups salt, .5 cups molasses, 1 Tbpn black peppercorns) for 12 to 24 hours.

Step 3: prepare dry rub. I have a second coffee grinder ($12!) dedicated to spices. So toast up in a dry pan over medium heat some corriander seed, cumin seed, and mustard seed (about a handful each) and grind away with some dried chilies. That gave me a bit over a half cup of incredible smelling hot spice which I mixed together with about a half cup of good paprika, a few tablespoons each of garlic powder and onion powder, and about a cup of brown sugar. NO SALT: the pork is already seasoned enough from the brine. Spicing and seasoning are different processes, I say: best keep them separate.

Step 3: rinse meat thoroughly and pat dry. RUB with rub, generously. You'll have leftover. Sell the leftover for about $8. Let the meat sit with the rub over night. So the

timing on this starts to emerge. If you want to be eating pulled pork on Saturday, you should put your pork shoulder in the brine on Thursday night, apply the spice rub on Friday night, go to bed early and get up at the crack of dawn on Saturday to start the smoker.

Step 4: Since I've got a 6.5 pound piece of meat, figuring 1.5-2hrs/pound (a figure I've gleaned from the internets), I've got anywhere from 10 to 13 hours to wait. I'm up at 5:30: pecan pellets in the hopper, flip the switch to smoke, toss in the meat, drink my coffee in silent triumph. The internets also told me where I went wrong before: to properly pull pork, it's gotta not just be safe to eat for pork (duh), but it's gotta be rather HOT: like 200 degrees. That's about the average max temp of my smoker when it's going for a while with the lid closed. So we've gotta bring this sizable piece of meat to thermal equilibrium with its smoky surroundings. It's sorta amazing that it can even get there in 13 hours.

Herein lies the problem: it can only get there if everything goes smoothly and the BBQ stays around 200 degrees for that long. For some reason, my fire goes out. So while I'm congratulating myself for buying a fancy ass bbq that doesn't need tending, things are cooling off. At about 1PM, I go out to flip the meat and apply the probe thermometer and notice no smoke and a luke-warm temperature to the grill. It's been OUT for a good hour. So I futz around with it some, turn it off, turn it back on (the fan and auger have been running all this time), and after a few minutes I see this:

Not good. This is a lot of smoke (in case you can't tell). I guess what happened is that the firebox got too jammed up with pellets, the electric ignition was covered in ash, but finally lit ALL the pellets that had been feeding into the box without burning. A few minutes of darkness and worrying that the neighbors are going to call the fire department later, there's a huge WHOOOSH and the lid flips up about six inches and the wood goes from smoke to fire. I rescue my pork from the licking flames and turn everything off and let it smoke the neighborhood for a good half hour. Then I spoon out the embers and start again. Time lost: probably three hours of cooking time. Lesson learned: WATCH YOUR BBQ AND DON'T LET YOUR SMOKER STOP SMOKING! We call Big Al's Pizza: pretty decent pizza, as it turns out: the crust is good with honey on it (that's another story: but try it) and it's better the next day.

11PM rolls around and my temp probe is finally reading 195. Good enough. I've also read that one should really let this thing rest for a good two hours. So by 1AM, I'm finally pulling (and trying not to eat all the dark bits). The next day, the fruits of my three days of labor are sweet and smoky indeed. Version 3.0 is where I'll hit my stride, I think.

Next adventure: baby back ribs. I've already called my friend Tony the butcher. . . .

Astronomers Declare February No Longer a Month

2009-07-22T20:26:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine forwarded me this from a Science Education message board. Good stuff:

Emboldened by their success in declaring Pluto not a planet, the International Astronomical Union determined this week by a close vote that February is too short to be considered a true month. It has, however, been granted the newly created status of "dwarf month." It shares this dubious distinction with several other calendar time spans, including Labor Day Weekend, Christmas Vacation, and the Time Between When You Were Supposed to Get Your Oil Changed and When You Actually Did.

"It only seems fair," said IAU President Ron Ekers. "February reaches a peak size of 29 days, averaging only 28 days for 75 percent of the time. Recent research has shown that other periods, such as the Time Between When You Were Supposed to Get Your Oil Changed and When You Actually Did, often exceed this meager time frame. In fact, this erratic behavior only strengthens our case that February does not belong in the same classification as the eleven 'true' months."

Ekers also warned that the crop of 30-day "so-called" months should be careful to maintain their number of days. "They're already cutting it pretty close in my book."

Written by Michael Haber.

The NEW Mac Lisa!

2009-07-21T09:21:00.000-04:00

For some reason, this cracks me up: imagine what Apple's homepage might have looked like circa 1983 (shortly before my family spent several grand on our first Mac 128k --- before the web, all that). I love the 'BASIC' tab. . . . Guess this irrevocably confirms my status as a geek.

The Loadout

2009-07-20T22:32:00.000-04:00

Well, we're starting to put together our house again following a successful move --- sorta feels like we just did this, even though it was over three years ago. A few photos of the Idaho side here. Stay tuned for more on the Pennsylvania side shortly.

NSF Grant

2009-06-19T21:00:00.000-04:00

Whoohoo! I was recently informed that I received a Scholar's Award fellowship from the National Science Foundation to pursue a project I proposed entitled 'Case Studies for a General Account of Biological Kinds' in which I will (as implied by the title!) be looking at a variety of case studies in the biological sciences which I can use to subject my account of natural kinds to detailed scrutiny. I'd reprint the revised abstract here, but my computer is packed. . . .

Anyway, I'll no doubt post more about this in due course, but it looks like the 2010-11 academic year will be dedicated to this research project. And the nice thing is that I'll have a year to plan what I'm going to do!

Review of Metaphysics Texts

2009-06-02T18:40:00.000-04:00

I recently wrote this essay review of a bunch of different texts/anthologies for Teaching Philosophy. Surprisingly hard work, but quite rewarding (assuming that someone actually finds it useful). Here's the penultimate draft.

Epistemology in the Post Office

2009-05-30T18:40:00.000-04:00

So I'm shipping many of my office books directly to my new office at Bucknell via the postal service's book rate (or "media rate"), since it's cheaper and in some ways easier. Well, not entirely easier: I walk in and announce my book-rate intentions and start schlepping the first round of five boxes or so. Since Laura and I enjoy our wine, several of the boxes are former wine boxes. The clerk notices the label and says: "Oh, that's a problem. That's a wine box; you can't ship books in a wine box."
me: "Why not?"
he: "Well, because we don't know that there's not wine in there."
me: "But you don't know that there isn't wine in the other boxes."
he: "But I'll ask you about what the contents of those are."
me: "Then ask me about the contents of this box and I'll tell you: 'it's just books!'" [Shaking box vigorously]: "Sounds like books, right? And anyway, can't you just open them up to check?"
he: "It doesn't matter: once we close them up again, other people will wonder."
. . . . and so on.

And even after patiently covering up all indications of wine and wine references ('vineyard', 'pinot noir', '750 ml', &c.), he insists that I cover up a large logo which happens to be a rooster. "Why? Am I not allowed to ship roosters either?" "No: it's that people will know that it's a wine box with that rooster on it." Right. . . . 'cause whenever I think 'rooster' I think wine. I'm not making any of this up. . . .

So apparently the mere suggestion that there might have once been wine (or roosters) in the boxes creates a salient enough skeptical scenario for the postal service which even direct inspection cannot resolve. Maybe wine bottles will grow in the box after it is sent: you never know! I was informed, however, that I could just cover up the wine labels and it wouldn't be a problem. . . . I'm skeptical. What about the shape of the box — the fact that its dimensions are roughly those of wine bottles arranged in a 3 x 4 grid?

Turns out that the postal service is also into fine distinctions about intentionality. In confirming the contents of the non-wine-box boxes, the clerk asked if there was any "writing" in the box. "Aside from the books," I ask? "Yeah, like handwriting," he responds. I admit that there's of course plenty of handwriting in the margins of the books. "Is it about the books?" he asks. "Because you can't send them if it's not." Wow. I'm afraid that there might be some borderline cases of "aboutness" in there (notes to myself to look at another book on a related topic, for example). Better let this go: "Yes: whatever writing is in the books is about the books."

A successful "House Hunt"

2009-05-29T13:01:00.000-04:00

It's kinda funny that the metaphor of "hunting" would apply to houses. After all, they're stationary objects par excellence. . . . One doesn't speak of "hunting" campsites or scenic vistas.

Anyway: our trip to Lewisburg saw both the successful sale of our house in Idaho and an offer that was recently accepted on this sweet little Cape Cod house about a mile and a half to campus! [photos] Like moths to flame, I'm sure we'll be drawn back to Lowes to get in over our heads with home-improvement projects. Hofstadter's Law, here we come!

INPC Weekend

2009-05-08T14:48:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all the INPC Participants who schlepped themselves all the way to Moscow, ID to come talk about "The Environment". I had a great time (and learned a lot, if that wasn't obvious) --- hope you all did too! Here are a few of the photos I snapped during the conference. I can never remember to do as many as I should. . . .

Dreaming

2009-04-04T22:22:00.000-04:00

As a dog-lover, this has to have made me laugh the hardest this week. . . . That has got to be one intense dog dream. Either that or the usual mechanism that keep us (and presumably our dogs) from acting out our dreams was, um, napping. . . .

Sleeping Dog Runs Into Wall - Watch more Funny Videos

Poor guy! Look at his hackles!

12th Best Job in the World?!

2009-03-19T19:43:00.000-04:00

Someone recently brought this to my attention: a WSJ article ranking various jobs. Philosopher ranks #12 between physicist and economist and two ahead of parole officer. Awesome! I knew it was a good gig, but I guess I didn't know how good. I wonder where my other career aspirations of lion tamer and topiary gardener fell. . . .

I particularly enjoyed this exchange in the online comments section [SICed]:

They have philosopher ranked in the top 20 ? how does one get employement as a philosopher?

Great question! I possess some really deep thoughts too, I'd make a great philosopher! I think I'll start an independent philosophy company. If it doesn't work out, I'm sure the government will bail me out.

Selling our house

2009-03-19T14:55:00.000-04:00

Oh boy . . . the prospect of moving is pretty daunting. The thought of a bunch of random people traipsing through our house doesn't appeal much. So we're going to give a shot to selling by word of mouth. Here goes nothing: if you're interested in buying our house or know someone who might be, let us know. We think it's a bargain at $199,000. . . .

Here's a wee photo tour. Other photo galleries (from parties, renovations, &c.) are here.

Moving to Pennsylvania

2009-03-08T18:41:00.000-04:00

I was offered a job at Bucknell University in central Pennsylvania and have decided to take it. It's hard to leave Idaho — we've made so many lifelong friends here, and the Uniontown Sausage Feed has become a tradition — but Laura and I are ready for a new challenge.

Blog Transition

2009-03-08T00:46:00.000-05:00

Well, the program I was using to maintain my blog finally decided to bite the dust for some strange reason. I think it might have had something to do with my file synchronization system, Dropbox (and if I have to choose, I'd choose dropbox in a heartbeat — it's awesome).

So I've migrated my old blog onto blogger, where I've had some decent success with courseblogs. We'll see how it goes here.

The Government is NOT spying on you. . . .

2009-02-25T17:19:00.000-05:00

A local (well, Spokane) engineer, posted a disturbing video recently:

Apparently (as my favorite tech blog, Gizmodo, reports), this sent a bunch of conspiracy theorists into a frenzy. His revelation that it was a hoax and he just glue-gunned some old cell phone parts into the box hasn't calmed them down much. Perhaps it's just a smoke-screen to distract from the fact that they really ARE watching you watch TV.

I just love the image of some sinister, Dr. Strangelove-esque bunker with thousands of video feeds of staring, silent couch potatoes bathed in blueish TV-light. Hilarious!

Lesson: Check Your Spam Folder!

2009-02-24T17:30:00.000-05:00

So in about two weeks I somehow manage to get about a thousand pieces of SPAM in my two email accounts. After summarily deleting all of the spam in one (I occasionally glance at it just to make sure nothing good is getting lost), I thought "Hey, perhaps I should check the other."

Good thing, as I just found a ten-day old journal acceptance for my short paper (more like a story with a philosophical moral) "A Reflection on Our Freedom" for Philosophia. (Whew!) I suppose I would have found out sooner or later. . . . But add spam to the sources of publication-related headaches!

Back to NYC

2009-01-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

We were back in NYC over the break. Had a great time, got to catch up with lots of old friends, eat great food, enjoy good music, shows, museums. . . . It was only toward the end of the trip that I started getting a little itchy to get back to the quiet of Idaho.

My one regret is that we never managed to make it to this new restaurant, wd-50 in SoHo, the brainchild of Wylie Dufresne (a Jean Georges alumn). Take a look at the menu. Weird stuff: roasted red pepper oatmeal as a side dish? Worshechire spetzle? Apparently, there's a lot of use of "foam" in the dishes. Someone reported to me when I asked what the cuisine was (i.e., French, Thai, New American, Fusion?) that they were referring to it as "molecular gastronomy". That's hilarious. The next obvious step is atomic gastronomy, I suppose. What about quantum gastronomy? Are molecules the last unit of taste? Do elements taste like anything?

Snowy Portland

2008-12-30T17:39:00.000-05:00

Wow: Portland was an absolute disaster! I went home to visit my family (once I-84 opened up again after being closed for a few days). We already know from the previous year that Portlanders can't drive in snow (I was fortunate enough to learn in New Hampshire). But this was a whole different ballgame. . . . With no --- or few --- snowplows clearing off the foot or so of snow, things ground to a halt. Huge ruts in the roads formed. It was like driving a rollercoaster. Someone sent me this time-lapse video of cars trying to make it up a little hill. Pretty funny stuff:

We're now in New York City where ironically it was just randomly warm and pleasant (read high 50s!). The world has gone haywire!

Ethics in Science Course

2008-12-21T17:42:00.000-05:00

I've uploaded a draft syllabus for my ethics in science class (PHIL 450) for Spring 2009 for those interested students. It's just a draft: more readings will be added as we go along. I'm going to try out a new aspect of the course by increasing my blogging responsibilities with a course blog. Luckily I'll have some "co-bloggers" (those enrolled in the course).

Ethics in Science 2009 Syllabus

Snowy Moscow

2008-12-20T17:53:00.000-05:00

It's been fun in the snow for Belly as she turned a year old. And yes, she's wearing pink, fleece dog-booties — otherwise she ended up with snowballs on her feet. Now hopefully the snow will calm down in the gorge long enough for us to drive to Portland (and then to New York for New Year).

Philosophy of Biology in Spring 2009

2008-12-15T17:57:00.000-05:00

A few students have asked about my Philosophy of Biology course (PHIL 417/517, W 3:30–5:50, Spring 2009). Here's a near-final draft of the syllabus that will answer questions about the requirements and topics. Let me point out a few things for interested parties: First, the course will not be a survey. I've decided to alternate between offering more survey-style courses on the philosophy of biology (really surveys of a limited terrain within the phil bio world) and more focused, topic-based courses — the latter will be in odd years; the former in even years. In this case (an odd year par excellence), the topics we'll be dealing with will cluster around questions about biological taxonomy, biological laws, and reductionism — coincidentally all questions that I am actively working on. Thus, the course will feature a healthy dose of my articles, for better or worse. If you're inclined to think worse (my mother chided me about doing this before --- one of her professors in college apparently did something similar, to ill effect), then you should perhaps wait a year to take the course when I'll be much diluted. If you like the idea of talking about and influencing research that is currently going on, then you should enjoy the course.

Second, as the course will be taught as an advanced philosophy course (an undergrad-grad "slash" course), it is highly advisable that you have a bit of philosophy and biology under your belt (students interested in completing the Bioethics Minor should not start with this course!). If you feel especially nervous about your knowledge of evolutionary biology, I can recommend these two classic texts: Ridley's or Futuyma's. In fact, 3 credits of philosophy and 3 credits of biology are prerequisites for being in the class. Apparently, though the registrar will allow you to register for PHIL 417 without either or both (something about not being able to automatically handle non-specific prereqs). That doesn't detract from the fact that they are prerequisites still: if you do not meet them, then you need my permission to take the course.

I'll soon post the course website here. In the meantime, you wish to take a look at the course books as you course-shop, I've ordered Elliott Sober's excellent anthology Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, MIT 2006) and Lewontin's little book The Triple Helix. I also asked the UI Bookstore to order a few copies of Sterelny and Griffith's excellent and nicely named introductory text in Phil Bio as an optional text. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about the course or need to chat about your preparation for it in order to take it.

Phil Bio 2009 Syllabus

Laws in Lonely Worlds

2008-12-08T18:02:00.000-05:00

Chris Haufe and I were just informed of the acceptance of a paper we've been tinkering with for a while, "Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds", in the International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. The two referees offered us some quite helpful comments, but of course the most comment to deal with (even when offered in a friendly way) is: "Say more about this. . . . (the final section)". Hmmm. . . . yes. . . . I see your point. Hopefully we'll be able to add something without doubling the length of the paper. We'll see! Is there no room for tentative speculation to close philosophy papers anymore?!

The PSA

2008-11-10T18:04:00.000-05:00

Had a wonderful time at the Philosophy of Science Association Biennial. It was my first time there — what a conference! So many great talks, the worst part was choosing between them. Hell, I was almost torn about whether to attend my talk, given that John Norton, Peter Achinstein, Thomas Kelly symposium on induction was going on then. Thus, I'm awfully grateful for (though somewhat puzzled by!) those who chose to attend my session! Thanks. For the many who missed it, I don't blame you — here's the paper if you're curious: "Macromolecular Pluralism". I'll give a lightning quick version at the Eastern APA as well, complete with flashy animations of flopping proteins.

But the best part of the conference for me was the symposium that Chris Haufe and I organized on whether evolutionary theory is a theory of forces: Robert Brandon and Chris Stephens contended (in their own ways) that it is whereas Denis Walsh took the unpopular position that it is not — that if we construe fitness in the way that Gillespie suggests, we can't straightforwardly interpret it as a cause, as it makes possible a kind of Simpson's Paradox. A lot of the discussion focused on whether this was in fact true — whether there was a Simpson's Paradox afoot (I'm still not sure) — Bruce Glymour had to be physically restrained lest he attempt to pummel Denis into submission (just kidding, Bruce!). Despite the hot debate, everything was kept friendly and efficient by John Beatty who graciously agreed to chair the session. Hopefully we'll see their papers in the proceedings!

I tell you: organizing symposia is great! Chris and I wanted to see this debate take place and . . . Lo, it did! Too bad the next PSA isn't for another two years.

Creativity in Science?

2008-11-01T18:07:00.000-04:00

Well, I managed to churn out a draft of "Two Aspects of Scientific Creativity" — still a bit drafty, but getting there. Comments welcome.

Can a joke be a premise?

2008-10-27T18:12:00.000-04:00

Some jokes are philosophically deep. Here's a classic that I'm surprised that (as far as I know) philosophers of science haven't picked up on (my verision): A panda walks into a bar and orders a Guinness and a salad. When he's done, he pulls out a gun, fires a few shots into the air, and ambles out. As he passes, the bartender shouts: "Hey, what'dya do that for?!" To which the animal replies: "It's 'cause I'm a panda: look it up!" The bartender reaches for his copy of Mammalian Systematics and reads with a groan: "Giant Panda . . . Ailuropoda melanoleuca . . . eats shoots and leaves."

Thus begins my paper "Why the Long Face?: The Stable Property Cluster Account of Natural Kinds". The title references the (quick) joke about the horse that walks into the bar --- the bartender asks "Why the long face?" The answer, of course, is because it's a horse. So here's a quick argument that there are natural kinds in biology: These jokes wouldn't be funny if species were not natural kinds. But they are funny (well, sort of). Hence there are biological natural kinds.

The paper is basically a defense of the first premise. But I must say, it's getting a little out of hand. After "trimming" my for a while dormant paper on biological kinds, it now weighs in at a hefty 22,000 words. And of course I found all sorts of things that I need to expand and eleborate. Damn! The journey continues. [inner voice: Shhhh! Don't tell anyone or they might not read it! --- oops!]. At this rate, perhaps I should give up trying to trim it down to a stand-alone article and instead simply focus on my book.

Well, in case you work in this area and are interested, here's the most recent copy, warts and all. Comments welcome. But please don't cite it, of course.

"Why the Long Face?: The Stable Property Cluster Account of Natural Kinds"
as of 10/27/08

The HPS Series at UI

2008-10-23T18:15:00.000-04:00

We're getting there. I've been working with a number of folks in various departments to raise funds (basically going door-to-door to departments) to start a lecture series in the History and Philosophy of Science. So far, we have two scheduled speakers: Ned Hall and Sahotra Sarkar (with hopefully more to come shortly).

Professor Hall will offer two talks, one aimed at scientists and one aimed at philosophers on November 13th and 14th. I'm still working on getting a suitable room scheduled.

The new HPS Group webpage is up (in a fetal — or blastular, even — state). Look for updates there if you're interested. I'd also be keen to get suggestions for other folks to add to our list of potential invitees — particularly people outside of philosophy of whom I'm less likely to know.

Yellowstone in Fall

2008-10-16T18:17:00.000-04:00

Laura and I were recently guests of the Yellowstone Association during their Legacy for Learning Weekend. We're not going to get our names on any lists for our financial support of the association (which, by they way, deserves as much financial support as folks can muster). Instead, we played evangelists — especially after our amazing wolf-watching trip last winter. I had my camera of course and managed to get several shots I'm pretty proud of. This one might be my favorite. I love how putting the tree vertically gets the horizon just slightly off kilter. Neat.

Here are some more photos from that trip.

White Winter Hymnal

2008-10-04T18:24:00.000-04:00

I recently bought the Fleet Foxes' new self-titled album. Seattle band that doesn't really sound like Seattle. But I dig it. Particularly this song:

But I have to ask: what does it mean? Anyone?

Trip to Alaska

2008-08-26T18:26:00.000-04:00

Laura and I just returned from a fabulous ten day trip to Alaska (Juneau and the Kenai Peninsula). Great food, decent weather, and amazing scenery made for a wonderful trip. Laura's brother is a fishing guide out of Juneau and so we got the reciprocal touring hookups. I particularly enjoyed hearing his stories about idiotic tourists. You know, the ones who ask whether these fish swimming by are Atlantic salmon, or "what elevation is Juneau?": um, there's the sea . . . so. . . . Or on the Mendenhall Glacier, someone asked the guide "How did these [few] leaves get up here?!" He responded in rhythm: "Oh, those are meteoric leaves from outer space."

Some photos from the trip are here.

Course Release

2008-08-14T18:29:00.000-04:00

Just got word that my EPSCoR Proposal Enhancement Release Time (PERT) Grant was recommended for funding — gotta love the pervasive acronyms in the grant game! — allowing me a course release for the fall. While this is great and will allow me to spend a bunch more time prepping my NSF grant application supporting the History and Philosophy of Science lecture series I'm trying to get going here, it does mean giving up a course I've been hoping to teach for quite a while (Metaphysics). And of course it was the course for which I had done the most prep work. . . . Oh well, hopefully I'll get the chance again sometime soon.

To the students registered for the course: Sorry! But I've got to ask (since I won't get the chance in person): for those of you who were signed up for the course without having taken any philosophy before, what made you want to take it? It would have been damned hard to jump into an advanced class like that. Imagine signing up for PHYSICS 446: Condensed Matter Physics (or whatever) not having taken Physics 101. . . . Perhaps I'll never know.

Stay at CFI

2008-08-05T18:32:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a very pleasant stay at the Center for Inquiry, the world's "foremost not-for-profit organization devoted to the defense of reason, science, secular humanism, and the naturalistic worldview". Got to work on a few papers, talk to other research fellows and U at Buffalo faculty, and enjoy some fabulous BBQ courtesy of Neil Williams! Neil and I are working on a paper on Toxins — exploring whether they are a natural kind. Should be interesting: Neil's a rabid "powers"-guy, I'm a bit more circumspect. Fire and ice: hopefully the paper won't turn out to be lukewarm water (jeez: two Spinal Tap references in two posts). . . .

Creativity in Science

2008-08-05T18:30:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking recently about the role of creativity in scientific research. Is it necessary? What is it, exactly? At first glance, one might attempt to cash it out in Kuhnian terms as paradigm-breaking hypotheses unprompted by previous experiment â€” in other words as original "insights" that begin to define novel paradigms. The history of science would seem to lend some support for this interpretation (ask yourself: who are the creative scientists?). But it also seems that one could find scientific creativity in "normal science". Finding the right deferents and epicycles to approximately cohere with observations or developing the right experiments (e.g., Ray Davis' neutrino detector) are difficult. Moreover, simply being "original" doesn't seem to exhaust what we have in mind — one could be stupidly or mechanically original. If 'creative' only describes the source of an idea, does it turn it into a black box? On this count, there has been a good deal of work in neuroscience about where insight comes from. I'm not sure what light any of that would shed on the questions above.

So in short, I'm still casting about for ideas. Comments and references welcome. . . .

Hello Pittsburgh!!!

2008-07-20T18:33:00.000-04:00

(Imagine me shouting that like Spinal Tap's "Hello Cleveland!!!!")

I'm delighted to be on the program at the upcoming PSA2008 (Philosophy of Science Association) coming up in November. I'll present "Macromolecular Pluralism". Never been to one. From a quick glance at the schedule, it should be fantastic; I'll get to catch up with friends I don't see often and chat with people I've been hoping to chat with.

Plus, Chris Haufe (Virginia Tech) and I organized a can't-miss Symposium on whether evolutionary theory is a theory of forces with Elliott Sober, Robert Brandon, and Denis Walsh (chaired by John Beatty). At first, for some reason, I read the schedule wrong and thought that I was presenting at the same time as that symposium. I might have let out a Colbert-esque bellow of "NOOOOOooooo!", but then read a bit more carefully. . . .

Slater Reports

2008-07-02T18:34:00.000-04:00

I'm not entirely sure why I have a blog. Nor am I sure why you're reading it. But here we both are.

Actually, it's fairly simple. A handful of people are interested in what's happening in my (publically-shareable) personal life: e.g., how's our dog doing, what neato trips have we taken recently, what havoc have we gotten into in home improvement, &c. Another small handful of people are (or profess to be) interested in what I'm thinking about and working on research-wise. I'm hoping that an added bonus to writing occasionally here would be that it gets some of the ideas flowing, elicits useful comments and direction, and so on. We shall see. So if you fall into one of those categories: hey, how ya doin'. If you don't, hello, welcome; nothing like idle curiosity, eh? Mmm hmm. . . .