Sunday, May 13, University of Lund, Sweden

I hereby extend a profession-wide invitation to contribute to a new blog I have created that aims to be "by and for" early-career philosophers (including philosophers of mind and cognitive science!): The Philosophers' Cocoon.

This blog aims to be a safe and supportive "grass roots" forum for early-career professional philosophers — graduate students, post-docs, and entry-level faculty members — to discuss their work, ideas, and personal-professional issues.  Philosophers who are not in the "early" stages of their careers are also invited to become contributing members, as their experiences in the profession may, for obvious reasons, be very much relevant to the blog's aims. 

Blog participants (i.e. any philosopher who wises to participate!) are invited to post working papers and ideas, as well as comments, questions, or concerns on issues including but not limited to:

• Navigating graduate school
• Publishing
• Work-life-family balance
• Etc.

This is not intended to be "my" blog.  My hope is to serve as primarily as blog moderator, and for the blog's content to be driven by and for any and every early-career philosopher who wishes to contribute. As blog moderator, I promise to rigorously ensure a safe and supportive environment for all.  I will not approve, and will immediately remove, any contributions or comments that I (or anyone else) reasonably finds remotely derogatory or threatening.  Finally, anyone who wishes to make an anonymous post (e.g. to discuss an issue they are not comfortable attaching their name to) is welcome to email me their post and request that I post it anymously.  I will post any and all such requests, provided they otherwise satisfy the aims described in this mission statement.

If you would like to become a contributor to the Philosopher's Cocoon, please simply send me an email at marvan@ut.edu.  Please also be sure to tell me in the email your present status (grad student, etc.), and feel free to provide me with a link to your homepage.

I hope that this blog finds its intended audience and grows organically to meet that audience's needs.  I very much look forward to meeting anyone and everyone who chooses to participate.

Sincerely,

Marcus Arvan

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

University of Tampa

Very happy to say that Hakwan Lau and I have completed our jointly authored paper The Emperor’s New Phenomenology?: The Empirical Case for Conscious Experiences without First-Order Representations which is forthcoming in a Festschrift for Ned Block edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar (MIT Press). The book is slated to have a response from Ned which I am very much looking forward to!

3:AM Magazine's Richard Marshall interviews our own Pete Mandik.

Here.

Hi everyone
I'm not convinced that this is of interest to anyone but me, but I'm making a list of naturalistically inclined philosophers who work on the mind:

https://sites.google.com/site/glennrjcarruthers/Home/philosophy-resources

if you can think of anyone to add let me know.

cheers
Glenn

I'm happy to announce that my criticism of Held et al.'s 2011 paper on Molyneux's question, which began as a post here at Brains, appeared today in a short paper in i-Perception. The core of my argument is the same as before, though now I draw on a wider range of experimental data to reinforce my critique, and suggest some more ways to improve the experimental setup. Here is the abstract:

How do we recognize identities between seen shapes and felt ones? Is this due to associative learning, or intrinsic connections these sensory modalities? We can address this question by testing the capacities of newly sighted subjects to match seen and felt shapes, but only if the subjects can see the objects well enough to form adequate visual representations of their shapes. In light of this, a recent study by R. Held and colleagues fails to demonstrate that their newly sighted subjects' inability to match seen and felt shape was due to a lack of intermodal connections rather than a purely visual deficit, as the subjects may not have been able visually to represent 3D shape in the perspective-invariant manner required for intermodal matching. However, the study could be modified in any of several ways to help avoid this problem.

The purpose of this post, though, is less to plug my work than to make the case for i-Perception's new "i-Comment" platform, which enabled a three-week turnaround of my article from submission to publication, and is dedicated to critical reviews of recently published articles in the science of perception. I've recently commiserated with other philosophers about the difficulty of getting our work published in "truly" scientific outlets, especially when our arguments are primarily negative or critical in spirit. (For example, Nature Neuroscience was not interested in my critique of the Held et al. paper, as the editors there told me its focus was too narrow.) By contrast, this is exactly what i-Comment articles are supposed to do:

This section publishes 'journal club' style articles that review recently published literature from any journal in the study of perception. This format is open to researchers at any stage of their career, but those at an early stage of their career (graduate students, post-docs) are particularly encouraged to submit to this section. Submissions can review articles published within the last two years. Submissions to this section could take the form of a concise and articulate summary of the most critical findings from an empirical article. More critical submissions, however, are also welcome: all too often the concerns raised by journal clubs in individual labs have no airing space in widely accessible publication formats. More speculative submissions, for example, that link an empirical article to a theoretical position, or field of research, not considered by the authors, are also encouraged.

This seems to me to meet a real need in the scientific literature, and I hope that other journals will follow the lead. Add to this the fact that all i-Perception articles are open access (with a small per-page fee to publish), and it's clearly a resource that more philosophers should be taking advantage of.

Just a quick note to let you know that Mark Phelan is coordinating the second annual Experiment Month initiative and that the deadline for submissions is June 15th.

The basic idea of the initiative is simple. If you are interested in running an experiment to address a philosophical question, you submit the plan for your experiment to Experiment Month. Then, if your submission is accepted, the staff will help you out with the more technical side of running the study. More specifically:

1. If you think it might be helpful, staff members will connect you with an 'experiment buddy' who will help you out with experimental design. 

2. Once the design is complete, the staff will run your experiment online and send you the data.

3. Finally, staff members will help you with the statistics needed to analyze your data and see whether your hypothesis was confirmed.

To get a better sense of how this project has gone in the past, check out this summary of what ended up happening for the philosophers who submitted last year.

Last week I had the good fortune of participating in a stimulating workshop on protolanguage organized by Dorit Bar-On and Mitch Green at the University of Virginia.  Thanks to the organizers for their excellent work.

I was asked to comment on a paper by Bruno Galantucci (BG) et al. on a new discipline I never encountered before: experimental semiotics (ES). ES asks people to communicate in novel ways under various constraints and studies the novel communication systems that emerge in those contexts.

Experimental Semiotics (ES) looks like an innovative and promising way to investigate many features of communication systems, including their acquisition, structure, and evolution.

Two questions that are of special interest to philosophers and to those interested in the origin of language are what the nature of language is and whether language is continuous or discontinuous with other (especially non-human) communication systems.

As Bruno Galantucci (BG) pointed out, ES provides evidence that “combinatoriality” (recurrence of basic forms) emerges during a semiotic coordination game when the communication system fades quickly and compositionality (complex expressions take their meaning from the meanings of their parts) emerges during a semiotic matching game when players have to often encode novel meanings. 

I pointed out that human language is productive, i.e. it can generate infinitely many recursive structures from finitely many primitives.  Combinatoriality defined simply as recurrence of basic forms does not seem to be enough for true productivity.  True productivity requires a grammatical division of words into types (noun, verb, etc.) and a recursive syntax that determines which combinations of primitives are well formed (sentences) and which combinations are not.  A relevant question is whether any of the ES games that BG describes exhibit “combinatoriality” with enough structure (rules) to amount to true productivity.

A similar point applies to compositionality. True linguistic compositionality comes hand in hand with true productivity, which requires a grammar and a recursive syntax.  A relevant question is whether any of the ES games that BG describes exhibit full-blown linguistic compositionality.

It may well be that relatively simple ES games produce communication systems with some degree of “combinatoriality” and a simple form of compositionality.  But that is not enough for these communication systems to be of the same kind as natural language.  Perhaps the communication systems that ES has studied so far are more akin to a protolanguage than a full blown language.  If any ES games do exhibit true productivity and compositionality, then perhaps they should be considered novel languages on a par with natural languages.

Thinking about ES was fun and suggested an experiment that as far as I know has not been tried.  I called it a Gavagai Game (in honor of Quine, who thought that reference is indeterminate and therefore we could never be sure that someone who utters “gavagai” while pointing at a rabbit means rabbit rather than undetached rabbit parts, etc.).  Two or more people who speak very different languages (and perhaps come from different cultures) are forced to communicate under various conditions, without restrictions to a particular medium of communication or communication rules.  It would be interesting to see what kind of communication system they would develop (would it be a pidgin?), what their first steps would be, how their communication system would evolve, how close to a language it would be, and how they would reach agreement as to what they are referring to (to the extent that they do).  If anyone has the time and resources to try this...

Here.