FYI--Bertrand Russell Visiting Professorship--McMaster University

FYI--Bertrand Russell Visiting Professorship 

The Department of Philosophy invites applications for a Visiting Professorship in Russell and the History of Early Analytic Philosophy. McMaster University, which houses the Bertrand Russell Archives and the Bertrand Russell Research Centre, is one of the leading centres for research on Russell's philosophy.

The Visiting Professorships, one of which will be available each year, are intended for established scholars whose research would be benefited by access to the Bertrand Russell Archives for an extended period. They are tenable for either one or two semesters, and involve the obligation to present at least one paper in the Philosophy Department's Speakers Series and teach one fourth year undergraduate course also open to graduates, preferably on the history of analytic philosophy (although a different topic may be agreed upon with the Chair of the Department of Philosophy), while undertaking research in the Russell Archives. The stipend for teaching the course is up to $15,749.00, depending on rank, in accordance with the standard schedule for overload teaching for 2014/2015. 

It is expected that successful applicants will be on research leave from their home university during the term of their Visiting Professorship and thus can rely on their regular leave salary for their main financial support. The closing date for applications for 2014-15 is April 30, 2014. Applicants should send a copy of their CV together with a description of the research they propose to conduct at the Russell Archives to the Chair ( chphilo@mcmaster.ca ), Department of Philosophy, University Hall 310, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4K1, Canada. 

CFP: Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference

Call for papers, for your information:
Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference

The submission deadline for the 6th annual Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference is Saturday, 01.Mar.14. They will be accepting submissions starting 08.Feb.14.

This conference is organized to provide undergraduate cognitive scientists with an opportunity to present their research to their peers from across the Midwest.

[Conference planners] are pleased to welcome Dr. Olaf Sporns as the keynote speaker this year. Dr. Olaf Sporns is a Provost Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University with a focus in computational cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Sporns is well known for his work with the Human Connectome Project.

Abstracts should be between 150-300 words, and potential topics span the full breadth of cognitive science. Many students have taken this as an opportunity to further develop a project they have started in a course, or to receive feedback on independent research.

Undergraduate students who wish to present a poster or talk can submit their abstracts through a form on the submissions page on the MUCSC website (http://mucsc.info/submissions.php).

The deadline for submissions is 01.Mar.14. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the program committee and notifications will be emailed by 22.Mar.13.

The conference will be held at the Bloomington, IN campus of Indiana University on Friday, 11.Apr.14 and Saturday, 12.Apr.14.

Undergraduates are invited to submit their research projects as a 15 minute talk or a poster through the online submission form at http://mucsc.info/submissions.php. [Planners] encourage submissions from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, economics, criminal justice, informatics, anthropology, and the humanities. The aim of the conference is to provide a venue for young, aspiring cognitive scientists to share their work with both peers and senior faculty, and to foster relationships among undergraduates throughout the Midwest region.

Everyone interested in Cognitive Science, regardless of age, is encouraged to register to attend the conference at http://mucsc.info/registration.php. Lunch will be catered, and they want to make sure there's enough for everyone!

For more information, see www.mucsc.info or send an email to cogsconf (at) indiana (dot) edu.

Forwarded to me by Joyce Uland, MUCSC Co-chair.

Brandon Butler to speak on intellectual property law

This is for your information:

Brandon Butler will speak on intellectual property law at the Billy
Date: Wed, 26.Feb.14
Time: 12:30-13:45
Atrium Auditorium

His short bio: Brandon Butler is the Practitioner-in-Residence at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C.  Before teaching law, he was the Director of Public Policy Initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).  Before that, he was an associate in the Media and Information Technologies practice group at the Washington, D.C. law firm Dow Lohnes PLLC.  He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.

I may have a conflict, but if I'm free, I plan to be there. 

Geometric Stacker models

Melissa and Doug's Geometric Stackers on my workbench. A piece or two is missing from peg 3, btw.

I don't recall playing with stacker toys as a kid. Blocks, play-doh, stuff like that, but toys where you stack wood pieces on pegs didn't show up on my radar until I started using them in work on logic.

As part of a larger research problem I'm exploring on the logic of toys, I have some questions about stackers. But first a few observations.

Two obvious big facts about stackers. First, there are lots of brightly colored, variously shaped pieces (they have holes in them that accommodate the pegs they are stacked on). And second, there are those pegs. The pegs force the pieces into some arrangement or other, but the pieces have their various properties independent of their arrangement.

The stackers thus permit a grid system: peg 1, first position--perhaps 1.A, something like that--and on in the obvious way: 1.A, 1.B, 1.C, and so on. The height of the peg and the thickness (height) of each piece, if they are all similar, thus determine how many slots each peg has.

Suppose we create a model as our initial state in which piece a and piece b, both circular, are stacked on peg 1 in the first two positions (1.A and 1.B). Then suppose we create a model to be our final state, in which piece a is still at 1.A, but octagonal piece c is at 2.A and octagonal piece d is at 3.A. (Sorry--next time I'll have more pics. Maybe I'll move this discussion to my Tumblr blog.)

I'll hold off on the list of sentences in the model until Tumblr. For now, let me point out a couple of constraints on the Stackers:

1. The universe has pegs, numbered/slotted into a grid system (as I've been suggesting).
2. It will help enormously to have functions to make instructions simpler: $remove _top-most_ piece _early-most_$. The $_top-most_$ function is a space function (describing location in space), while the $_early-most_$ function is a time function (describing position in time).

Enough for now. 

Logic and writing templates

The little writing book _They say, I say_ is a very pleasant surprise. A colleague recommended I use it in the senior capstone seminar I'm teaching this semester, and so I adopted it sight unseen. I just got it today, and I can tell I'll like it very much.

A few thoughts, prompted as I read the introduction.

[1] Writing templates---strings such as "some object that... though I concede that... I still maintain that..."---serve an obvious practical goal, which I applaud. But they also raise an interesting side question about how logic and rhetoric are intertwined.

The "..." in the templates are obviously meant to be replaced by some content; hence they are extra-logical. But that means that logical bits are needed to create the desired relationships among those contents expressed in the total information. But the templates include rhetorical bits that do some of that work. "Though I concede that" has both a _logical form_, when combined with the informational content suppressed as "...", as well as a _capacity to help persuade the hearer_ to agree to some view (or at least---presumably---to be sympathetic to that view). 

What feature of "though I concede that..." carries the logical information, and what feature carries the rhetorical information? Classic pragmatic-semantic interface issues. I wonder how students "feel" that issue play out as they write.

[2] The authors stress heavily that writing is dialectical---a push-pull between writer as reader (capturing what "they say") and writer as writer (putting forth what "I say"). It occurs to me that there are several ways to flesh this out. The dialectic can be _adversarial_, _synthetic_, _analytic_, or maybe some other way altogether.

The adversarial dialectic pits opposing views against one another. The (hopeful) result is a "push upward"---that is, a resultant force responding to the force due to the feeder forces. The "new truth" is widely seen by its advocates as correcting certain excesses in the philosophy of logic and knowledge---the sort of thing we might suppose Socrates to have gotten right, and many of the rest of us to have gotten wrong. The synthetic dialectic is similar, but the emphasis is on the co-making of that resultant force. The analytic dialectic, unlike the other two, can be thought of as a synthetic dialectic with a downward arrow, if you'll allow me to continue the slightly opaque metaphor. That is, the push is really a pull down toward that which is fundamental.

The abstract inference that occurs to me: Push in this context can be thought of as encryption, pull as extraction. Writing then is a back-and-forth between encrypting processes applied to information, and extracting processes likewise applied to information.

The less abstract punch line: a writer aims at the spot where a bit of information shows more than anyone has a right to expect.

Could slaves be legal agents?

About the most depressing topic in legal theory is slave law.

There must have been legal principles at work as the various American colonies and states wrote laws to regulate their slave populations; if there were principles, there is work for philosophers and logicians to do. I find it an obnoxious and disagreeable thing to think about, and I think it's a permanent, weird stain on the body of law we rightly admire otherwise. But somebody's got to figure it out. It might as well be me--and those of you who've wandered by.

Let me carve out some space for a question.

Did the slave codes see the Negro slave as a legal agent for their master (in the contract-law sense of representative agent)? I'm reminded of an Oliver Wendell Holmes discussion (1891) about agency and contracts as deriving from masters who commission their slaves to act on their behalf, and the thicket of obligations resulting therefrom. It's intriguing to think that so central a tenet of both common law and American law arose from Roman slavery. I wonder how that walks back to American slave law.

There are empirical aspects to that question: What actual legal protections were guaranteed in slave codes? And what protections from masters were guaranteed? (...thereby raising the weird but intriguing question: how did slave-era law seek to protect slaves?)

There's a counterfactual-ish follow-on question as well: Could a Negro slave be a legal principal (in the contract-law sense of one who empowers a representative)? That is, if a slave could be an extension of their master's power as a representative, could they reciprocate? Or perhaps pass responsibility down the chain a bit? Could they delegate another? And if so, do they as an author of obligation have a presence in the law as such?

On the other hand, if they can't be principal, but agent only, is that a stable legal concept? If an entity cannot be the author of such a power, does that not imply that they cannot be the one on whom such power is conferred? What faculty do they lack such that they cannot be principal, and how is it that that lack doesn't thereby ill-suit them for agency altogether?

Here's a clearly philosophical aspect to the Negro-as-legal-agent question: Can the legal protections afforded slaves be understood using other legal frameworks (for example, property law as opposed to contract law)? How should we decide which conceptual framework to use?

A perfectly parallel question can be posed, but focused on Negro-as-criminal-menace instead: Did the slave codes see the Negro slave as a criminal menace to their master?

Empirical aspects: What restrictions were placed on Negro slaves? What slave-to-slave constraints were instituted (that is, constraints on socializing among blacks of different status--free, slave)?

Counterfactual-ish follow-on: Could a Negro slave be a crime victim? If not, why not? Surely someone who can be criminal is capable of the responsibility to follow the law; they are criminal only if they fail to do so. But if they cannot assume responsibility, and so must always be viewed as the ward of another (say, their master), and so cannot be treated legally as one whose property has been stolen, or who has been illegitimately subject to bodily harm, etc., how then could they be treated as criminal at all?

And a philosophical aspect: Can the legal restrictions be understood using other legal frameworks (for example, piracy law, terrorism statutes, property and vandalism statutes)? Is there a way to understand the restrictions in terms of contract law? What would guide the choice of conceptual framework?

(Will Holmes as legal pragmatist be able to help us here? Will Hart and the positivists? Don't know. Doubtful right now, though. Jurists and positivists hate this kind of question.)

This blog will live here a little longer

I blogged here a few years ago, and then let things go quiet. I've decided to revive this blog, and am planning to move it to my own site, but my HTML skills are a little rusty and everything takes longer than you think and all that. So for now I'll post here. Maybe a few days longer (especially now that snow has bought me a little time...).

I'm currently buried in philosophy of law and the logic of toys and games. So my next posts will work that over.
Talk soon, all.