PhD & Postdoc opportunities at Kent

Postdoctoral Research Associate
£30,870 starting salary + annual increments.

PhD studentship
Fees paid + an annual maintenance grant of £13,590 per annum for three years.

1st May 2012 – 30 April 2015
Philosophy Department, University of Kent

To work with Prof. Jon Williamson on a project to research the relationship between Bayesian epistemology and inductive logic, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will focus on the development of a particular inductive logic, analysis of its key properties, and the development of computationally tractable methods for performing inferences in the inductive logic. This will require some familiarity with probability and logic. Programming competence would also be desirable. Applicants will be expected to hold a PhD on a related topic in mathematics, computing, philosophy or a related subject.

The PhD student will focus on the question of whether the resulting inductive logic survives a number of philosophical critiques. This will require competence in philosophical argumentation and knowledge of epistemology and elementary logic. Applicants will be expected to hold a Master’s degree, and a Bachelor’s degree at class 2(i) or higher; at least one of these degrees should be in philosophy.

Information about the project and application process is available at http://www.kent.ac.uk/reasoning/obeil.pdf

The deadline for applications is 15th December 2011.

CFP: 9th Annual Formal Epistemology Workshop

We are happy to announce that the Ninth Annual Formal Epistemology Workshop (FEW 2012) will be held in Munich, May 29 - June 1, 2012. This year's meeting is sponsored by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. The meeting will take place at the (stunningly beautiful) Nymphenburg Palace (compliments of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation).
Confirmed invited speakers include: Cristina Bicchieri, David Christensen, Igor Douven, Sarah Moss, Eric Pacuit, Rohit Parikh, Jeff Paris, Paul Pedersen, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Charlotte Werndl, and Robbie Williams.
We are accepting submissions for contributed papers. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2012. Notifications will be sent out by March 15, 2012. Please send submissions to Branden Fitelson. A selection of papers presented at FEW 2012 will be published in a special issue of Erkenntnis.
Some funding will be available for graduate student participation. Please contact Hannes Leitgeb for more information.
There will be two special (afternoon) sessions at this year's FEW. The first will be a special session on Logic & Rationality, which will include talks by David Christensen and Robbie Williams, and the second will be a memorial session for Horacio Arló-Costa, which will include talks (pertaining to Horacio's various seminal philosophical contributions) by Cristina Bicchieri, Eric Pacuit, Rohit Parikh, and Paul Pedersen.
We will also have two (two part) tutorials, presented by Jeff Paris (inductive probability), and Charlotte Werndl (determinism, indeterminism, and underdetermination).
This year's local organizers are Hannes Leitgeb, Florian Steinberger, Vincenzo Crupi, and Ole Hjortland.
FEW 2012 is being funded by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

Call for Book Proposals: Experimental History and Philosophy of Science

Paolo Palmieri and I are starting a new book series with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Please, contact us if you have book suggestions.

Another Philosophy Jobs Site: PhilJobs

We had none, now we have two and they are both amazing!!! Open-access philosophy job listings, that is. Alongside Phylo Jobs (check out the new features, btw!), now we have PhilJobs (courtesy of David Bourget and David Chalmers).
The next step now is to replace first-round interviews at the Eastern with either Skype interviews or straight on campus interviews and the dysfunctional APA will have be made completely irrelevant.

Spreading the word on a new jobs board.

Given what a disaster the APA website has turned out to be this year, I think its worth publicizing a new place to advertise philosophy jobs. Most of you have probably seen this already, but I think the more places it is posted, the better. Copying from The Philosophy Smoker:

David Morrow, who is awesome, writes:

Chris Sula and I have revamped the Phylo site to create an actual jobs board to (ahem) supplement the JFP. The URL is the same as the old wiki: http://phylo.info/jobs. As of today, we'll start accepting job postings in that space from departmental representatives only. Following Harry Brighouse's advice, we'll also require a link to an external site (e.g., an announcement on the department's web site) to verify each post's authenticity. We're moving the job wiki tohttp://phylo.info/jobs/wiki. People will still be able to post unofficial updates there. We're still in the process of updating the wiki software to play nicely with the jobs board, but it will be up well before anyone needs to post status updates. In the meantime, watch the main jobs board to find out about job openings..

The Conclusion of the Kanazawa Affair

The LSE internal review into Satoshi Kanazawa's controversial blog post (which we discussed here and here) is finally concluded. The findings (and a letter of "apology" from Kanazawa) can be read here. The report states, among other things that

some of the arguments used in the publication were flawed and not supported by evidence, that an error was made in publishing the blog post and that Dr Kanazawa did not give due consideration to his approach or audience

that

some of the assertions put forward in the blog post were flawed and would have benefited from more rigorous academic scrutiny

and that

the author ignored the basic responsibility of a scientific communicator to qualify claims made in proportion to the certainty of the evidence.

As a result of these findings LSE has taken disciplinary action against Kanazawa:

In particular, Dr Kanazawa must refrain from publishing in all non-peer reviewed outlets for a year. Further, he will not be teaching any compulsory courses in the School for this academic year. 

Somehow the school thinks that these measures will ensure that

an incident of this nature does not happen again.

I don't know what readers of this blog who followed this story think, but as far as I am concerned this is an egregious example of too little too late and I really can's see how the measures put in place by the school can stop a repeat offender like Kanazawa, whose modus operandi crucially involves making outrageous and divisive claims on the basis of very little or no evidence evidence for the purpose of presumably getting some press attention, from offending again. What do others think?

Evolutionary Psychology and Philosophy of Biology

Philosophers of biology often have a very dim view of evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary-psychology bashing has been a successful cottage industry.

I have been unimpressed by many of these criticisms, in part because of the feeling that the critics of evolutionary psychology were very poorly informed about what evolutionary psychology was. Imo, many of them simply have no serious acquaintance with the field they are criticizing.

But, so far, my reaction was just that: an opinion, a feeling. Not anymore.

In a forthcoming article ("An evidence-based study of the evolutionary behavioral sciences" in BJPS), Kara Cohen and I have provided support for this impression. using a new tool: quantitative citation analysis. We show that the usual, very negative characterization of evolutionary psychology is largely mistaken, and that philosophers of biology have been fighting a strawman.

It is also noteworthy that quantitative citation analysis could be particularly useful for philosophers of science who want to add quantitative tools to their toolbox.