Those of you who would like to follow up on the history of color concepts can do no better than to check out Zed Adams’ fascinating book on the topic! On the Genealogy of Color, Zed Adams Happy reading. Matt Teichman ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month, we talk to Zed Adams (New School for Social Research) about colors like red, blue, and green. Click here to listen to our conversation. What is the color red? Is it a physical property of certain chemicals–the fact that they tend to reflect light with a wavelength of about 670 nm and absorb the rest? Or does the subjective experience of seeing something that looks red figure somehow into the definition of what it is to be red? Believe it or not, it is possible to produce a painting that looks like a blank red canvas in daylight but a big X in artificial light, because of the different ways slightly different shades of red paint respond to different kinds of light. So are the two reds in the painting the same or different? Kind of hard to say, since the both conditions are considered equally ‘standard’ or ’normal.’ ...
If you’d like to follow up on our interview with Zsofia Zvolenszky, check out her paper: Fictional Characters, Mythical Objects, and the Phenomenon of Inadvertent Creation, Zsofia Zvolenszky Happy reading! Matt Teichman ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month, we talk to Zsofia Zvolenszky (Eötvös University) about fictional characters and places. Click here to listen to our conversation. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker sneak on board the Death Star and attempt to rescue to Princess Leia. The escape plan goes awry, and pretty soon it looks more like Princess Leia is rescuing them. That was me summarizing the plot of Star Wars: A New Hope . But what was I talking about, exactly? We know that Princess Leia doesn’t actually exist–she’s a character that George Lucas made up. But she also isn’t the same thing as, for example, a person I made up a lie about as part of a con. Anyone who hears the above plot synopsis knows that I’m talking about a fictional character, and agrees to play along with me in pretending that this person exists, so that we can all enjoy the movie. The difficult question is: what does it mean to ‘play along’ in this way? ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month, we talk about whether we owe the dead anything with Barry Lam. Barry Lam is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College, Story Lab Fellow at Duke University, and creator, producer, and lead host of Hi-Phi Nation, an exciting new philosophy podcast that turns stories into ideas. Click here to listen to our conversation. ...
If you’d like to do a deep dive into some of our esteemed guest’s writings on epistemic oppression, here are links to some of her papers on the topic: ‘Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,’ Kristie Dotson ‘A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression,’ Kristie Dotson ‘Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,’ Kristie Dotson Happy reading! Matt Teichman ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in 2016, prior to the US presidential election. Kristie Dotson will be coming back in a future episode to give us her latest thoughts on these topics in light of recent developments in US politics! Full transcript here. This month, we talk to Kristie Dotson (Michigan State University) about how people’s ability to gather and share information can be negatively impacted under oppressive social systems. Click here to listen to our conversation. ...
Hello, everyone! Hope you’re enjoying the new year. If you enjoyed our episode on counterfactuals and would like to learn more about Paolo Santorio’s causal network theory, check out the following paper: ‘Interventions in Premise Semantics,’ Paolo Santorio For a broader overview of casual network approaches to counterfactuals, the following paper by R.A. Briggs is a wonderful start: ‘Interventionist Counterfactuals,’ R.A. Briggs Happy reading! Matt ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month, we talk to Paolo Santorio about counterfactuals, also known as statements of the form ‘If A were, then B would be.’ Click here to listen to our conversation. Counterfactual statements, those funny conditional statements where the word ‘would’ comes after the word ’then,’ play an absolutely central rule both in everyday commonsense reasoning and in our more formal scientific theorizing. Consider, for instance, how we talk about history. If Archduke Ferdiand hadn’t been assassinated, World War I wouldn’t have been fought. If the earth hadn’t been struck by an asteroid during the Mesozoic era, the dinosaurs wouldn’t have gone extinct. If I had lingered at home to watch the finale of my favorite TV show, I would have missed the bus this morning. Etc. We use these kinds of statements to describe our beliefs about laws or patterns in nature, or perhaps to say something about what someone can and can’t reasonably expect. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month, we talk to Ásta Sveinsdóttir (San Francisco State University) about social-institutional entities, like money, the economy, political borders, nation states, and, interestingly, categories of people. Click here to listen to our conversation. For a while now, philosophers have been interested in the status of things like money. A $5 bill has the purchasing power it has not because of any intrinsic features that belong to the paper it’s printed on, but because we all agree to treat it as having that purchasing power. By treating liquid currency as something that can be exchanged for lattes or ice cream cones, we confer on it the property of being something that can be exchanged for these things, but not for many other things (like a car, or the latest iPhone). That doesn’t mean this purchasing power isn’t real, or that it isn’t objectively true or false that a $5 bill currently has the purchasing power it has. Quite the contrary–these are verifiable/falsifiable objective facts that we can discuss. But it does mean that our attitudes are playing an special role in making such facts obtain. By contrast, the fact that Saturn is more massive than the planet Earth is a fact that does not obtain in virtue of what anyone thinks about anything. Saturn just is the size that it is, independently of how we treat it as being. ...