Past Futures Are the New Past Pasts

Do you find yourself obsessed with Hume's question of what could justify inductive reasoning? Boy, do I have a link for you:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Problem of Induction
If you're tired of that one, there's also a new problem of induction. Or, you could watch this video of Lewis Black describing his failure to reason inductively every year around Halloween:


In class, we talked about how attempts to justify induction beg the question. Here's a dinosaur comic on question-begging. (Click on the comic to enlarge it)


Finally, here's a stick figure comic about scientists' efforts to confirm that the future will be like the past.

Innate Ideas, I've Had a Few

Here are a couple articles by Steven Pinker that offer some psychological insights on the innate ideas debate we've been discussing in class:

The Brain’s Versatile Toolbox (1997)

Grammar Puss (1994)

But hey, why read when you can watch a video? With that in mind, here's his appearance on The Colbert Report (the second part is particularly relevant to innate ideas):

Pinker has a few books on this stuff, and a lot of other interesting articles, too.

UPDATE (10/4): Not everyone agrees with Pinker, though. Here's an article about a South American tribe that might be a counterexample to the claim that there are innate aspects of language development.

The Interpreter
(The linguist researching the tribe explains his case more here. Steven Pinker and others respond to him here.)

One more link. Here's an advanced survey article on the rationalism/empiricism debate from my favorite free online philosophy encyclopedia:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Rationalism vs. Empiricism

Yes, there is more than one free online philosophy encyclopedia.

Link-Tested, Keanu-Approved

Here's a trio of links. The first one is a guide to reading philosophy that might help you if you're having trouble understanding the assigned readings.

Jim Pryor's Guide to Reading Philosophy

The next two relate to epistemology and skepticism. The first is about the philosophical implications of the movie The Matrix. If Neo read it, he'd say "whoa."

The Matrix: Dream Skepticism

The last link is an interesting take on skeptical scenarios (or what our textbook fancily calls universal belief falsifiers). Most of us think it's pretty unlikely that we're in a computer simulation like the Matrix. After all, these skeptical scenarios seem so weird. But Nick Bostrom provides some compelling reasons to think that these scenarios may be highly probable, after all.

What's the Probability that We're Living in the Matrix?

(A more advanced version of Bostrom's argument is available here.) By the way, if you have any links you think I or others in class might find interesting, let me know. And feel free to comment on any of these posts.

Reading Response #1

Reading Response #1 is due at the beginning of class on Wednesday, September 19th if you're in the Holy Cross class, or Thursday, September 20th if you're in the Mt. Laurel morning class. In a 250- to 500-word essay response, answer the following question:

What does Descartes say he cannot be certain of? What does Descartes say he can be certain of? What are his arguments for this? Do you agree with Descartes? Why or why not?

The response is based on the Descartes reading from pages 58-71 of the textbook.