by Avrom on Saturday, November 29, 2008
I’m going to do something here that I very rarely did as a graduate student in philosophy: Present the beginnings of a positive theory. This, I think, was what I had seen my dissertation as leading up to, although it never got there and I’ve only recently thought of a completely choate way of expressing the idea.
Before I start presenting the positive, though, I have to indulge myself and do a little bit of teardown. The idea I want to tear down is one that equates the content of a sentence with its intension. The positive theory I’ll propose–and I’m only going to propose it in outline here; I think this may be a fairly major project to complete–is a replacement for this theory of content.
(Continued)
by Avrom on Tuesday, November 25, 2008
This is a continuation of the story begun here. There’s still more to go; although I talk about making the decision to leave academia in this post, I’m going to devote another post to what the transition out of the academy was like and to how it appears in hindsight.
In November, the weather turned sour (I’m a California boy, born and raised, and I was rapidly discovering that great lakes winters–indeed, great lakes autumns–were not for me). I started missing my girlfriend quite painfully. And actually being a working philosopher, out in the field, was just not all I’d hoped it would be.
The thing is, I’m not–have never been–a voracious reader of philosophy. I stumbled on the occasional article or book that was actually a pleasure, but overall I found secondary research nothing but a chore. I only got occasional and mild pleasure from writing about it. And as a teacher, my skill was indifferent at best. (It’s better now, if I do say so myself, partly from additional experience and partly because technological changes have very much favored my preferred teaching style; I find myself regularly marvelling at the fact that people managed, for thousands of years, to impart information in a lecture format without the use of PowerPoint.) (Continued)
by Avrom on Monday, November 24, 2008
This started as an off-the cuff comment over at the blog for Philosophy Talk, a radio show run by two Stanford philosophers, John Perry and Ken Taylor. But I decided I liked this idea too much to leave it as an unpolished comment.
Reductionism, if you don’t know, is the thesis that claims from one “science” (this might be a true science in the technical sense, or simply any realm of human experience/endeavor) can be “reduced” to claims from another science. Psychology, for example, may be reducable to biology, biology may be reducable to chemistry, chemistry may be reducable to physics, and so on. What this means is that, for example, if we really had a completed biology (and, potentially, a lot of time to state what would count as simple facts from a psychological perspective), we could get rid of psychological language entirely: All psychological claims could be replaced with (admittedly rather more complex) biological claims.
I’m going to argue that reductionism is false–but not (unless there’s an extant argument I’m unaware of) on any of the grounds that people before have argued that reductionism as false. (Continued)
I’m not an economist, but you knew that, right? In fact, my exposure to the science of economics is one freshman-level econ course, taken almost 20 years ago, plus the minimum due diligence that I think any citizen owes in learning about things that might affect the way they’d vote, plus the random poking about that I do in most subjects because I’m just generally a geek. So you should all take this with a grain of salt.
That said, there’s a theory that’s been bouncing around in my head for years now that I want to get out there. I’ve actually asked a couple of economists about it, but I have a feeling that my economics vocabulary just wasn’t up to communicating the idea properly, because I kind of felt like we were talking past each other. Hopefully in writing, with diagrams, I can communicate this a bit more clearly. What I want to argue is that, contrary to the standard economic line, well-judged price caps can actually reduce shortages, and a well-judged minimum wage can actually stimulate the creation of jobs. (Continued)
by Avrom on Thursday, November 20, 2008
So, I promised I’d do this. Gulp.
OK, a word of warning: This is long. So long, in fact, that I’m not going to post it all right now; in fact, I’m not even going to post about my actual decision to leave my field (academic philosophy), its reasons or its consequences, today. I started to write about background–and it really wasn’t my intention to write my autobiography, honest–and suddenly discovered that I didn’t feel like I could really give an account about why I left philosophy, and academia, without, well, a lot of background. If background bores you, you might want to skip this; I’ll start actually talking about the events that triggered the decision, and the decisionmaking process, in another post. It’ll probably take still another post to get to the consequences of the decision and my thoughts on the path not taken, and how it might compare to the one I ended up on.
(Continued)
