When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

J.J. Gibson with some truth bombs in Ch. 3 of The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:

"A special case of the ground is a floor."
"A stick is an elongated object."

More seriously, this attempt at constructing in effect a phenomenological taxonomy of the lived world is fascinating. #philsky

Fittingly, this paper is part of the special issue of contributions to the GWP.2022 conference, and comes out just as the current #GWP conference starts in Erlangen, which I am also attending!

New paper alert!
My take on solving the scaling-up problem (representation-hunger) using mechanistic compositionality is now out with JGPS! #philsci #philsky

doi.org/10.1007/s108...

5) This is of course still contentious, but the distinction is important in understanding what the argument is actually supposed to show. Generally, philosophers tend to preempt simple rejoinders when making and defending arguments.

4) But he argues that these laws could be different, which shows that there are distinct mental properties and physical properties bridged by such laws. And the fact that we can coherently conceive of zombies is what shows this to be the case.

3) Crucially, the philosophical zombies argument concerns metaphysical possibility, not nomological possibility. Chalmers would agree that if all the natural laws (including psychophysical laws) remain the same, then there cannot be zombies.

2) In your analogy, it is nomologically impossible to have a large ball of uranium without reaching critical mass. But if the laws of radioactive decay were different enough, then you could have a large ball of uranium without it blowing up. So it is a metaphysical possibility.

1) Because that would be beside the point. You need the distinction between "nomological possibility" and "metaphysical possibility". Nomological possibility concerns what is possible given the laws of nature as they are in the actual world. Metaphysical possibility allows different natural laws.

"The situation in France isn't as bad as people think it is. It's just that the French are stubbornly opposed to paying taxes, and so their governments keep on failing."

"Cogwheels" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (orig. publ. 1927)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

It's not exactly by choice. We have to publish in good journals. Publishers ask for upwards of 2000 EUR for open access. That's almost my whole paycheck as a philosophy academic. Unless my university has a special deal, under the paywall it goes...

The Economist’s Off The Charts newsletter sometimes shares the more fun sides of data. It’s not all a socio-economic snooze fest. This colour “Rorschach test” is an example, created by an AI and neuroscience researcher: ismy.blue
Here’s @alexselbyb.bsky.social results, what’s up with his brain?!

I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem while taking a philosophy class in high school. Then when it came time to choose between history and philosophy, I wrote a personal statement for philosophy and was too lazy to try doing one for history too. So, philosophy it was.

We --the MeReX-project-- are organizing a conference on mechanistic, computational, and representational explanation in cognitive neuroscience at TU Berlin in February 2025! 🧠

Come and join us all! Registration opens in about a week.

further info: www.merex-project.org

#philsci #neuroscience

Read China Mieville's Embassytown recently. Highly recommended to anyone looking for linguistics inspired SF where the premise is not just "What if Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, amirite?".

Academic pet-peeve: Writing "pace", when you mean "contra".

And today marks another day in my professional life that I wish I had taken a stats class in my BA instead of Latin. Though I did enjoy watching the suffering of my Psychology studying friends with smug superiority at the time, they do get the last laugh after all...

Normally, it is thought that physics is not restricted, because the existence of non-physical objects/properties is controversial (often straight-up rejected). In practice, the term "special sciences" ends up just meaning any empirical science that isn't physics.

Whether special sciences are reducible to physics, and if so, then in what sense, is a point of considerable debate.

The special sciences are just sciences whose domain is restricted in some way. For example, psychology's domain is restricted to things which exhibit intelligent behaviour (sub in your preferred definition).

Just a few days left to submit an abstract for our February workshop on neuroscientific explanation in Berlin. The deadline is this Sunday (29th September).

For more info, visit: neuroexp2025.sciencesconf.org

#PhilosophyOfScience #neuroscience

I'm attending the #DKPhil (German Congress of Philosophy) in Münster this week and giving a talk on my recently published paper on virtual causation tomorrow afternoon.

If you are around, come have a look!

Yeah, if you could not foist that guy on us (philosophers of science), that would be great. Thanks!

My new paper on "Illusionism about virtual causation" is out now at Inquiry with Open Access. Check it out at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#philosophy #VR