Epistemology

This Day in Philosophy — 7 September: I. A. Richards and the problem of what a word does

I. A. Richards died on 7 September 1979. With C. K. Ogden he wrote the book that pulled the theory of meaning out of philosophy and into the reading of actual sentences — and then proved, with a famous experiment on his own students, how badly trained readers understand what they read.

Forty years on reference: Devitt draws up the account in Reference and Beyond

Michael Devitt's collection from Oxford University Press takes stock of one of the longest-running arguments in the philosophy of language: what does a name refer to? The review in NDPR calls it the most consistent defence yet written from within the causal tradition.

This Day in Philosophy — 6 September: Mendelssohn and Haraway, two ways of asking who counts as a subject

Moses Mendelssohn was born on 6 September 1729; Donna Haraway on 6 September 1944. One argued that a state has no business inspecting its citizens' beliefs; the other dismantled the figure of the pure human subject with a cyborg. Two hundred and fifteen years apart, both were asking who gets admitted to the community of reason.

'Philosophical vertigo': is AI loosening the criteria by which we hold on to reality?

A professor of psychiatry, a psychiatrist and the artificial intelligence researcher Murray Shanahan have written a paper together. Their thesis: long, emotionally charged conversations with AI can loosen the settled criteria people use to judge mind, reality and authority. And the systems offer an interpretive frame at exactly that moment.

A proposal from Boston: philosophers should collaborate with the people who disagree with them

Seven researchers from Boston University's Mind and Morality Lab argue that philosophy should import a method from the sciences: adversarial collaboration, in which opponents design the work together. Their diagnosis is blunt — philosophers argue in soldier mindset, and rarely change their minds.

A new criterion for machine consciousness: if it works, it is true

An opinion piece in Neuroscience of Consciousness argues that the debate over consciousness in artificial intelligence is being conducted on the wrong ground. The question, its authors say, is not whether a system performs the right computations but whether attributing consciousness helps explain its behaviour — the first serious change of criterion since Turing.

Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers

This Day in Philosophy — 5 September: Comte and Boltzmann, the founder and the casualty of the faith in science

Auguste Comte died on 5 September 1857; Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life on 5 September 1906. One announced that humanity had entered the age of positive science; the other was worn down defending the reality of atoms against physicists who called them a convenient fiction. The same date holds the promise of positivism and its price.

A philosophy department is saved — and philosophy argues about how to defend itself

The philosophy programme at the University of Dundee, marked for closure, has been partly reprieved. In the same weeks a survey measured how much the public actually wants universities to keep philosophy departments. And an old quarrel flared up inside the field: is experimental philosophy really philosophy?

Burge answers Descartes, and it takes him 688 pages

The philosopher who established that the content of our thoughts is not fixed inside our heads published a new book in August. Burge answers the two scepticisms that have run since Descartes, and both answers come from one place: understanding is a far greater achievement than we suppose.