From Benjamin Lee Whorf's "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior To Language," published in Language, Thought, and Reality (ed. Jones & Carroll; MIT, 1956):"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for ...

[The following is a guest post from Jack.]Here is a fun experiment in philosophy. But first, let me define my terms.Philosophers speak frequently about justified and unjustified beliefs. What does it take to believe justifiedly? That is a matter of controversy. But it is often supposed that another way of saying that a belief is (un)justified is saying that it is (in)appropriate for you to ...

A friend of mine from the Physics and Astronomy Department let me read his response to list-serve post where someone derided the doomsayers of the Hadron Collider, a 17 mile long particle accelerator on the Swiss/French border, where scientist hope to create small black holes.  As I understand it the doomsayers worry that it might [...]

A) Even if everything is constructed, this does not necessarily mean: 1. That everything is constructed as much as the next thing; or 2. That our constructions do not thereby correspond to reality to some greater or lesser degree. "If society is an ensemble of texts, are all texts of equal importance, and how can we judge their [...]

There is an interesting new paper by Frederick Schauer: "In Defense of Rule-Based Evidence Law - And Rule-Based Epistemology Too".The thesis is, in general, good: It is epistemologically possible and sound to have (some) general rules about the probative worth of (some) classes of evidence.Schauer's general thesis is, thus, sensible. But more arguments in favor of his general thesis must be made. ...

The press release for our big grant came out today. I have so far been interviewed by the student paper, and the local NPR station, and I have already learned some things about what not to do in interviews with friendly reporters. Some tips are below that I'll add to over the day, and please share some of your thoughts in the comments. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this ...