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From The Wall Street Journal: Jim Brown knew he was in trouble before his mother finished asking the question. "Am I a better cook than your wife?" she asked, calmly stirring a pot on the stove in her kitchen. With...
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From Nature: Late in the morning on 20 February, more than 200 people packed an auditorium at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. The purpose of the event, according to its organizers, was to explain why a...
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Maggie Koerth-Baker in the New York Times: In the days following the bombings at the Boston Marathon, speculation online regarding the identity and motive of the unknown perpetrator or perpetrators was rampant. And once the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and...
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Justin E. H. Smith in his blog: A student in rural Iceland, of sheep-farming stock, had her guard down, or didn't yet have a guard. She didn't know how to talk to foreigners, or perhaps felt there was something she...
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Jalees Rehman in The Guardian: The bulk of contemporary science journalism falls under the category of "infotainment". This expression describes science writing that informs a non-specialist target audience about new scientific discoveries in an entertaining fashion. The "informing" typically consists...
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No summary available for this post.
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Razib Khan in Gene Expression: My own inclination has been to not get bogged down in the latest race and IQ controversy because I don’t have that much time, and the core readership here is probably not going to get...
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I would dearly love to be able to start this piece by saying that The Poor Mouth is the funniest book ever written. It’d be a real lapel-grabber, for one thing, an opening gambit the casual Millions reader would find...
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As such, a number of temptations continue to arise when discussing Malick. Foremost among these is the tendency to perpetuate the go-to myths: that the famously media-shy filmmaker is also a recluse, or that he once disappeared from Hollywood for...
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Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is certainly no stranger to controversy. His radical reconceptualization of the term “Holocaust” — in whose “unscrupulous employment” he locates “a cowardly and unimaginative glibness” — to extend beyond the scope of the concentration camps and...
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This is a quick comment on the issue about Mochizuki's claimed proof of the abc conjecture that Catarina wrote about a couple of days ago. (I don't know much about this number theory stuff.)Are proofs cognitive entities? Is every proof cognized? Known? Knowable?Cognitive Reductionism about ProofsEvery proof P of a mathematical claim is cognizable by some one (or more) agent.This claim is analogous to certain verificationist claims more generally (e.g., every truth is knowable). I believe that […]
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Cognitive Reductionism about languages is the following (empirical) claim:Every language L is spoken/cognized by some one or more speakers.That is, the claim that languages can be reduced to cognitve states of some one or more speakers. However, I think that cognitive reductionism is deeply mistaken. There are languages which are not spoken, or cognized.So, on my view, statements of the form:Agent A cognizes language LAgents A and B cognize the same ("shared") language L. are contingent […]
