Random things

Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.

One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution – after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that – apart from anything else – prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers.

Another, in no particular succession, is whether we need to start a discipline of Unapologetics to counter really bad theological justifications of religion.

I am also led by several papers, one by Peter Godfrey-Smith and another by Paul Griffiths and his collaborators Ed Machery and Stefan Linquist, both on the nature of innateness as a concept, and Paul’s paper also on a concept – of homology – to wonder if there may be the beginnings of a historical critical methodology for constructing the likely speciality-specific deviations of terms like this from “folk belief”, via the use of X-phi (experimental philosophy), developed initially by Stephen Stich. If we know pretty much what the naive folk concept is, then we have a good reason to think we can work out what semantic variables have been changed in the refiguring of a concept in a given discipline. Of course, there are complications – common sense is common only in the sense that it is what the wider culture receives from experts. So the current received meaning may already have been modified by the sciences (as in the concept of “species”). Food for thought.

More as it occurs to me.