Harvey Lederman
@LedermanHarvey
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Professor of philosophy @UTAustin . Philosophical logic, formal epistemology, philosophy of language, Wang Yangming.
Joined December 2019
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Pinned Tweet
Pub day for Trying w/o Fail! This might be the most accessible, fun paper I've worked on. Or anyway, we tried...
I hope the paper will reignite interest in trying, which has recently been unduly underdiscussed by comparison to intending. 1/2
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Why do Yale and Harvard have grades at all if 79% of students are getting As? Employers must think As are still valuable signals and maybe they are. But my guess is they haven't computed how weak the signal is. (1/2)
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Seriously though: why is there something rather than nothing?
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If these schools report grades, transcripts should include average class grades. My guess is employers see an A in a Harvard/Yale class as more valuable than an A in a UT class, but the latter may be harder to get -- conditional on getting in. (2/2)
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Took a walk to the cemetery after class today. Thought I should post this for completeness
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Philly’s Barnes and Noble showing solidarity with the gutting of philosophy twitter.
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Help, my office phone is ringing. Do I just throw it out the window or is there someone I can text to deal with this?
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I've often been asked why historians of Chinese philosophy don't publish in "generalist" journals like the Journal of the History of Philosophy and Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. In fact both of these journals only accept submissions in the history of European philosophy.
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Saw this mind-bending sign in a Princeton pizza place called “proof”. Triangle in the top left proving that there are some problems even Fields medalists can’t solve
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Thinking today of all those whose free will is not compatible with determinism. So grateful that mine is.
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I'm delighted to announce that my partner Chiara Damiolini and I will be moving to UT Austin in January, where Chiara () will be an assistant professor of math, and I'll be a professor of philosophy. I am very excited about this new adventure in Austin!
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("Harder" in a probabilistic sense of course may not correspond to "harder" in terms of workload, if the admissions process at higher ranked schools selects on avg "better" students. But still, it may have more meaning in terms of work done / material learned in college.)
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I gave my first academic talk in my non-native language yesterday (Chinese). Kudos to everyone who does this every day, and without the sympathy I got as a non-native Chinese speaker. A reminder of what an enormous privilege it is to have English as my native language
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You can never really know why someone isn't replying to your email. But according to the foundations of logical probability, it's probably because they hate you.
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I'm thrilled to announce that “The Introspective Model of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming” is now forthcoming in the Philosophical Review. A short thread with some context and acknowledgements (maybe a thread on the content of the paper later).
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@sebastiangood
The staff ensuring no one fails out of elite schools is enormous — pressure on faculty to get students to graduation bc US news likes that stat. So that’s not a signal at all!
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I'm delighted to announce that my new blog, the Leder Report, premiers today. The blog provides all-round reputational rankings of philosophers' personalities with a focus on likeability. Please send me your reviews! Anonymous reviews welcome.
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Happy first day of teaching to
@UTAustin
today! I have the first session of Chinese Ethical and Political Thought; we’ll be reading the books below (among others).
But first, I have to make it through a 7am Zoom talk at East China Normal University, on Wang Yangming!
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Do any fields other than philosophy use "just in case" to mean "if and only if"? I can't remember where I've seen it.
After long resistance, I'm wondering: Why do philosophers do this? There can be a slight gain in elegance, but is it worth a loss in general intelligibility?
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First class
@UTAustin
today! Philosophical topics in decision theory and formal epistemology (for grads). Today we're doing a lot of Mike Titelbaum's *fantastic* "Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology". It's my first time using it; I highly recommend it!
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Like most college professors I have never done any reading, whether as a student or instructor. As I see it, if I can’t figure out what historical authors say by the light of reason alone that’s clearly on them.
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I'm honored to have been awarded Dao's 2022 best article prize for my paper "What is the 'unity' in the 'unity of knowledge and action'?"
The announcement and official citation are here:
1/9
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This is a stunningly rich paper, which seems to me a real achievement in this area. A brief thread 🧵 1/8
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First day of classes today and there’s a full house for “Peter Singer’s Ethics: A Critical Assessment”, which Singer “expect[s]...to be the last time [he] teach[es] a graduate class at
@Princeton
”.
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I recently met someone who met Russell. This made me wonder if I've met anyone who met Wittgenstein. I'm sure I have friends who met someone who met Wittgenstein (e.g. Anscombe). But have I? Also, who do I know who met Russell?
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I am extremely excited to unveil the website for our conference Wang Yangming and Ming Thought, to be held in Princeton this March 18-20.
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I'm learning that what makes Twitter so different from real academia is that sometimes the incentives favor doing something just to get attention.
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Helping freshman and sophomores pick courses for next semester, and once again finding *so many* classes I want to *take* next semester. I guess there is a reason I'm in 30th grade.
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Excited to share a new paper with
@kmahowald
: “Are LLMs More like Libraries or Librarians? Bibliotechnism,the Problem of Novel Reference, and the Attitudes of LLMs”! A 🧵
1/n
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Oh the things that happen at philosophy conferences
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"The main aim of this paper will be to cite myself. A subsidiary aim will be to present some of the last philosophical ideas to be developed by people, before the bots take away this meaningful, oddly beautiful work that it has been the pleasure of my life to do."
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My first paper to have its original publication in Chinese has been published! I argue that we should accept Wang Yangming's statements that all mental events are actions at face-value.
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If you're at all interested in Chinese philosophy and aren't reading the work of Justin Tiwald, you are missing a treat.
Justin just posted two new papers, so I thought I'd do a short thread on them (and some of his other work):
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Belated congrats to
@UTAustin
philosophy alum Wes Anderson on his first Academy Award! (Who says philosophy is useless?)
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Criticism of uneven coverage in history of philosophy w/in philosophy depts typically focuses on gaps in non-European. But coverage of Europe is also v. uneven, e.g. big gaps in medieval, renaissance. Are these issues related? Or totally different? Curious to hear your thoughts!
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I'm in favor of having a single course that all grads take, which covers basic topics from all relevant formal areas (probability, modal logic, semantics, decision theory). The old model of a strict "logic" requirement is not relevant to most research. But I think we benefit...
Yale philosophy has officially replaced the grad program “logic requirement” with a broader “formal methods requirement.”
Students can choose which course to take (logic, probability, stats, game theory, etc.)
Feels like a symptom of a much larger change in the discipline
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A classic article about the extraordinary Saul Kripke, who I just learned has passed away.
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Like many of you, I love to travel. Unlike many of you, I thought this essay was wonderful.
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Really disagree! Listening well involves thinking of objections and questions so that you understand the view/argument more deeply. This requires referring to earlier material. It also means sometimes you miss something (but that’s okay!), which you need to catch up on later.
Today is the day I come out against handouts in philosophy talks.
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Last week at Academia Sinica, I spoke at a panel on the path forward for Chinese Philosophy. I'm posting my (provocative) remarks about the aim of historical work on these texts. Curious to hear comments and criticisms (including the angry ones!).
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It saddens me greatly to report that Bernard Williams did not understand the concept of a normative reason.
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My new paper "Higher-order metaphysics and propositional attitudes" will appear in what promises to be a fantastic volume on higher-order metaphysics edited by Peter Fritz and Nick Jones.
What's it all about?
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Interesting to see philosophy as an outlier with less grade inflation than other humanities. A lot of discussion about the crisis in the humanities. Less discussion of grade inflation's. Employers are interested in courses where they get a signal... (1/4)
Why do Yale and Harvard have grades at all if 79% of students are getting As? Employers must think As are still valuable signals and maybe they are. But my guess is they haven't computed how weak the signal is. (1/2)
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Just arrived in Oxford, where I'll be visiting
@GPIOxford
for a month. I'm grateful for this chance to visit! I don't have strong views about many of the topics they work on here, and I'm excited to learn. If there's anything you want to know, ask me and I'll ask them!
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In philosophy, we rarely schedule formal meetings for speakers, leaving all conversation to the talk and dinner. (Sometimes there's a grad student session.) But maybe we should! The model in this thread sounds fantastic both for speakers and for the host dept in myriad ways
Hi folks. A few months back I gave a talk at Caltech.
It was the best campus visit experience I've had in quite some time. And it has made me want to change campus visit norms a bit.
So today at lunch
@sgehlbach
told me I should tweet about it, which I'm now doing.
1/
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This history and context is important and interesting, but it isn't a replacement for engagement with the arguments. I would love to see more critical responses which address the substance of longtermism (like Kieran Setiya's fantastic Boston Review piece).
A short history of longtermism, which you may have come across in the New York Times, New Yorker, BBC, Guardian, etc. It’s everywhere right now, and will only become more influential in the future. A🧵1/24
The roots of longtermism go back more than a century, but in contemporary
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Look what came in the mail! Thanks to Peter Fritz and Nick Jones for putting together this fantastic (and beautiful!) volume, and seeing it into print
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Over the last two weeks, I've been reading about the history of
@UTAustin
and the UT System. Many Texans in the 1870s were excited and proud to found a great university. In true Texas spirit, they wanted it to be the best. They said so explicitly in the constitution (1876). 1/4
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I'm not a longtermist, but I've been disappointed with the level and style of some of the anti-longtermist discussion. Recently, David Thorstad, a postdoc at
@GPIOxford
, has been writing a blog, "Ineffective Altruism" with more substantive objections
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Ch. 2 of my dissertation (2014) argues that making sense of common ground does not require "common" (i.e. infinitely iterated) attitudes. I recently put the chapter on PhilPapers to make it more accessible, so I thought I'd do a short 🧵
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If ever a people raised their hand to say that their language was not the language of the book of the world it was the Italians who chose a mass noun for grape. Let them eat grape, they said, throwing them one at a time into a confused crowd.
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@lastpositivist
When Derek Parfit visited NYU he had a strange white faux leather recliner he liked to have in his office. When he wasn’t visiting the chair was stored in the office I had as a postdoc. Just to say that there are many ways to have a named chair.
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Today marks ten years since the oral defense of my PhD! I feel old. Since it's the time of year where people are full of advice here, I'm doing a thread with all the completely general lessons I've learned, that will work regardless of your personality and circumstances. 1/n
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New paper online first at S&P! A thread.
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Can someone go back and tell 1991 that actually Trumpism is not about this at all.
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One of the best parts of being a philosopher is turning to a subject you've never studied in detail but have long thought about as an amateur and finding it so completely solved that you never worry about it again. This week I'm reading about the meaning of life and
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So much interest in this question! If you haven’t read it, I recommend this piece by Derek Parfit, which covers a lot of ideas people have mentioned in comments
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New paper "Fregeanism, sententialism, and scope", forthcoming in Linguistics and Philosophy! 1/n
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Here at UT, Miriam Schoenfield teaches a wonderful course, which I think was ultimately inspired by Sarah Moss's syllabus: . This is exactly what I would love to see become more standard in the profession as a first step for formal methods!
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#Duolingo
really got me addicted to keeping a streak (for two years). But their new “upgrade” eliminates all the more advanced material, so even I have to admit that it’s just a game now. What should I do next? (For Italian.)
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I believe this will be the first research article in the Philosophical Review on a non-European philosophical tradition since 1948, and the first research article in the journal dedicated to the works of a single Chinese philosopher since the journal started in 1892.
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My paper "What is the 'Unity' in the 'Unity of Knowledge and Action'?" has now been published online at Dao. It is my second paper to appear on the Unity of Knowledge and Action (the first is linked below).
I'm thrilled to announce that “The Introspective Model of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming” is now forthcoming in the Philosophical Review. A short thread with some context and acknowledgements (maybe a thread on the content of the paper later).
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Very excited to be hosting such a wonderful group of philosophers in Austin later this week for a workshop on completeness and incompleteness in preference and value, co-organized by me and
@johangustafsson
:
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New paper (with Peter Fritz and Gabriel Uzquiano) in JPL! A thread.
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📣
@kmahowald
and my paper is out in TACL! Thanks to extremely thoughtful comments from five (!) anonymous referees and the editor the paper is much improved from an earlier version. Read it at the link below! 🧵 in first comment
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Thanks
@HiPhiNation
for giving me (and all of us) this incredible opportunity!
This weekend in downtown NYC, 10 philosophers from around the world learned about longform magazine writing from
@NewYorker
@joshuarothman
,
@LarissaMacFarqu
,
@TheAtlantic
@andersen
@NYTmag
@trapmotives
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as a profession from having a shared language that everyone can be expected to know. The free-for-all "go learn whatever methods you need!" model does not achieve this. There should also (independently) be more scaffolding + rewards for students to get intermediate training...
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Is it acceptable for faculty in philosophy to coauthor with their graduate students? Is it a mark of a good advisor that they advisor coauthors with their students? 1/3
They never should
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Sometimes it's fine
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All good advisors should
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Today the legislature will vote on
#SB18
, a bill that would damage the reputation of Texas' great universities, hurting our ability to recruit faculty, and hurting the students we teach and train. The bill would make our university system second-class.
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My copy of Wing-tsit Chan’s translation of Wang Yangming originally belonged to Pocock (it has his name and notes in it). I never met him but every time I consult it (at least once a week) I think of his legacy and try a bit harder. Sad to hear of his passing.
Deeply sad to learn that John Pocock passed away yesterday at the extraordinary age of 99. The greatest historian of political thought of his generation, he was perhaps the greatest historian of historiography we'll ever see. Il miglior fabbro.
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What if anything should we do about grade inflation? Two ideas to spur discussion:
(1/6)
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@ben_golub
Loved this: "I have this math competition experience, that as a mathematician you have...to be fast,” he said. “But June is the opposite…If you talk to him for five minutes about some calculus problem, you’d think this guy wouldn’t pass a qualifying exam. He’s very slow."
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At the same time, I'm sad to go. It's been a privilege to work at Princeton; I've been able to do things here that I simply couldn't have done elsewhere. I'm deeply grateful to my wonderful colleagues, students, and friends for all that they've taught me in the last five years.
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in the formal areas most relevant to them (e.g. machine learning, psych, etc.). A shared set of tools (as given by a basic class) are part of what makes the discipline coherent. I think that's a real value, though what is covered in that basic class should be updated regularly...
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