What is physicalism?
October 19, 2009 by Chris Hallquist
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The importance of in-principle predictability in modern science
The more I read discussions of things like reductionism, emergence, and the nature of the mind, the more I’m bugged by how confused these debates are, both in terms of different writers not connecting with each other and different writers not connecting with the major scientific developments of [...]
Standard of offense
February 11, 2009 by Chris Hallquist
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Hemant reports on the rejection of an atheist bus ad which read “You can be good without God.” The rationale?:
All advertisements must meet acceptable community standards of good taste, quality and appearance. Furthermore, the ads will not be considered discriminatory, or objectionable to any race creed or moral standard.
Hemant points out how ridiculous this is, [...]
Things I could have blogged about but didn’t
January 5, 2009 by Chris Hallquist
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Taking my cue from Ross Douthat, I present you, my dear readers, with a massive dump of things I had been meaning to blog about this year, but never got around to. Consider this an open thread:
*Peter Schiff apparently understand economics.
*Via BoingBoing and PZ, chem student gets labeled a terrorist and drug dealer.
*Newsflash: Facebook impacts [...]
Sociology and Economics as Physics?
December 25, 2008 by Chris Hallquist
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That’s what suggested by a recent post at the philosophy of mind blog Brains. I don’t buy it. The modeling techniques described did not, as far as I know, originate in physics, and a very important part of physics involves getting results fundamentally more precise than can be gotten from any model of human behaviour.* [...]
Continue Reading »Emergency philosophy: relevance, omission, and deception
December 10, 2008 by Chris Hallquist
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A problem I just ran into while working on a paper:
In philosophy of language and linguistics, Paul Grice is known for proposing the idea that conversation is governed by cooperative maxims–Steven Pinker actually said that the paper in which he did this is one of the most important ever. One of these maxims is relevance. [...]