David Papineau
@davidpapineau
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King's College London. Working on mind, metaphysics, and science.
London
Joined September 2009
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I've enrolled as an official Labour Party member. There are reasons why I've finally joined after all this time, not least that it can now be done in about 30 secs online
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Now published! Looks wonderful, especially with the cover featuring a detail from a painting by
@katypapineau
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RIP Saul Kripke (1940-Sep 15 2022). A loss to philosophy and the CUNY Graduate Center. (Photo, with P F Strawson, circa 1975.)
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The cover for my new book to be published in March. Artwork from a painting by Katy Papineau.
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Saul Kripke and P. F. Strawson circa 1975 (courtesy of Galen Strawson and the
@KripkeCenter
)
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RIP Dan Dennett. I was blown away by Content and Consciousness when an undergraduate—there wasn't anything like it then—and since then I've learned so much from him. Last saw him six months ago. Can't believe he's gone. A huge contribution.
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Really sorry to burst your bubble, but in my experience the student nodding and grinning at you is having pleasant dreams about where they're going tonight. The students to cherish are the angry-looking ones scowling at you because they're thinking hard about what you're saying.
To the student in my Monday morning class who nods as I talk: Please know that you are the backbone of this class. You’re the one keeping us going. Real MVP 😂
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My son says socks with sandals is now a thing. We are in the end times.
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Updated my entry on "Naturalism" in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy. Now much cleaner and covers more. Thanks to the SEP editors for their help. They're doing a great thing and we philosophers are in their debt.
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Post the first four books that started you on your current intellectual journey, no matter how cringe.
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"In my view, imagination is nothing" The first slide of
@BenceNanay
's talk at
@BilkentPhil
's Mind's Eye conference names his thesis with his name
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J M Coetzee, Geoff Hinton, John Maynard Smith, J S Bell, Mike Brearley, Arthur Balfour, Tom Stoppard, Eusebius McKaiser, Julian Nida-Rümelin, Michael Frayn, J C Smuts, Tolstoy, . . . tell me when you want me to stop
Some claim
#philosophy
is useful. But when I ask for concrete real world examples of people who are 1) NOT philosophers and 2) who are successful BECAUSE they understand philosophy, I get nothing, nada, zilch, bupkis. Is philosophy intrinsically useless?
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Best sentence ever
In linguistics, Escher sentences are sentences which initially seem acceptable but upon further reflection have no well-formed meaning.
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Rail strike. Crisis, what crisis? But Stanford Encylopedia seems to be down. Disaster. Philosophical production across the world grinds to a halt.
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Is ChatGPT dumb? Damn right it is. It's just a next-word predictor, trained by trial-and-error to produce a likely next word given some text, and then a likely next word after that . . . Myself, I'm astounded this simple process is enough to yield such elegant and germane speech.
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The concept of knowledge is a relic of a bygone age, erroneously thought to do no harm. I'm serious. My draft paper "The Disvalue of Knowledge" argues that a concern with knowledge, rather than true belief, messes us up in legal contexts and elsewhere.
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Oh dear. Twitter seems to be self-destructing under a storm of accusations of people behaving badly on Twitter. Can we please now ban all such complaints and stick to important first-order issues--like the definition of "biscuit", the nature of sport, and panpsychism?
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The problem of demarcation is entirely of Popper's own making. In truth, the distinguishing feature of science is that it accepts theories only when they've been confirmed by evidence. But Popper can't say that because, absurdly, he doesn't believe in evidential confirmation.
The problem of demarcating science from non-science is...
(Give some reasons for your answer in the comments, if you are so inclined.)
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@tommie_shelby
Kripke, Naming and Necessity. Circa 1960 everybody supposed "necessary" just means "a priori", and that what you are referring to is fixed by what's in your head. Nobody thinks those things any more.
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Sad news. My supervisor and ideal of a philosopher. Did so much. How many know he was first to show conditionalization independent synchronic coherence ("Slightly More Realistic Personal Probability" 1967) & was early fan proof-theory semantics for logic ("What is Logic?" 1979)?
Ian Hacking, an influential and prolific philosopher known for his work on various topics in philosophy of science, died earlier today.
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I've written a book. "The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience." You can see the draft version here: . Comments welcome. Not that I'm planning to rework it significantly, but I'd be glad to know about bits that are unclear or unconvincing.
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Post an image of yourself as the leader of an underground organization without downloading new pics.
@smithbarryc
@timcrane102
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Late 1970s. In bar after conference. Hugh Mellor, not yet Cambridge professor, complaining about philosophers who become well-known only for outrageous and easily demolished claims—"Unlike you", he said, looking at Ian, "whose outrageous claims keep turning out to be right."
@PaulLFranco
@yanaisen
Major figure in phil & hist of probability. The Emergence of Probability was pioneering I think but I’m no expert. There’s also Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? And he was part of that “causal interventionist” sci realism. He then went “Foucault”
@davidpapineau
will know.
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I’ve been working. Finished a long paper (22K words) on causation. Available now on PhilSci Archive
My analysis explains (a) causal inference techniques (b) causation’s temporal asymmetry and (c) . . . 1/2
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A first for me yesterday—gave a lecture when in hospital. (Just routine. Went home last night.) Now en route to Cambridge to tell the Moral Sciences Club about "Knowledge and the Failings of Folk Epistemology". Going to give it to them straight.
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Very sad news. I examined Karen's brilliant PhD in 1984. Amazingly for an unknown Australian student, this was widely circulated, admired and cited, long before she published anything. So she went on. All her work was powerful, insightful, influential.
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The CEU in Budapest has just announced that it will be moving all Masters' and PhD programmes to Vienna because of Hungarian government restrictions. The CEU will continue to flourish, but this is a sad day for Hungary and Eastern Europe.
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I’m sad that Roger Scruton has died. He was my first philosophy teacher and we always got on well. Some of his public posturing was silly and designed to attract attention but underneath he was a serious political thinker. 1/
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When did philosophers start this “famously” business? I mean, how can you say things like “as Dummett famously said about Tarski” with a straight face?
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Ruth Millikan, François Recanati and Bill Lycan at the Millikanfest for Ruth's 90th birthday last weekend
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I've a new piece on the Times Literary Supplement website aiming to explain Bayesian vs Frequentism to the general reader. (I come down firmly on the side of the Reverend Thomas Bayes.)
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They say there's no progress. Back in the day, when flying wasn't common, it was considered polite to strike up conversation with your neighbour. We soon learned about the perils of this practice, though, and so evolved the modern convention of safe silence. Let's stick to it.
Started talking to the guy next to me on a plane. Real talk about the state of the world started up, obviously. Whole cabin around us was soon chiming in, "thank God for you guys; I thought I was the only one."
Start speaking up, honestly and everywhere, without fear.
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I've a review of
@pgodfreysmith
's new book in this week's
@TheTLS
. Terrific on both consciousness and scuba-diving. The TLS headline: "What's It Like to Be a Shrimp?"
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So we had a bat in the bedroom last night. Always exciting. Hazard of country life. Now sleeping it off happily on the curtain. Trust it flies straight out the window at dusk.
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Recent twitter thread asked what's the weirdest thing you ever did. I once wrote three whole books longhand with a ballpoint pen on paper. I can still remember life with no mobile phones, no cheap planes, no restaurants etc. But I can't understand how I did that.
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What's this about? The 46% of invalid responses "didn't answer any questions, other than to identify themselves and declare the reason for their interest in the survey." Why did 18,000 people return an empty response to a survey? I think we should be told.
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I first met Hugh in 1968. He had just started as a lecturer in Cambridge. He never supervised me directly, but his philosophical energy and generosity shaped me and many others into the tradition of Russell, Ramsey, Braithwaite--and Mellor. He has died too soon.
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Ernest Gellner was another who rightly got rubbed up the wrong way by 1950s Oxford philosophy. "Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it . . . 1/2
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Are no other philosophers as amazed by GPT-3 as I am? I know it's only a bot trained to make intelligent-seeming conversation, but the level of knowledge it displays is scary. Not hard to imagine it soon taking over a lot of human tasks--starting with student essays.
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A puzzle. Not all sports are games (eg running, swimming) and not all games are sports (bridge, ludo). But all sports that are games seem to involve a ball (or something close - a shuttlecock). Is that right, and if so why?
@philosophybites
@runthinkwrite
@mitch_berman
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I don't understand the bad press Descartes is getting in this thread. I rate him right up there with Hume and Einstein. Maybe it's because philosophy students only get to read the tiresome Meditations and not his good stuff.
Most overrated philosophers in history?
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I worry that future people will end up fighting wars over whether computers are conscious. The sooner we accept that there are no special facts to decide this the better. I'm with Geoff.
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Lunch is six juicy Essex oysters I took straight from the sea
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I'm old enough to remember what they were like. Crucial thing is THEY DIDN'T BELIEVE IN ATOMS. Just didn't see the theory could be taken literally. Sure they were intellectually heroic in many other ways. But lived in a world of 'givens'. A far-away country we can't return to.
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. . . Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer." 2/2
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Write first thing. (Once read an interview with Lawrence Durrell. He wrote from 0530 until nearby bakery opened an hour later. Had croissant with expresso. Walked along sea front, met friends mid-morning . . . And that was it. Spent all day thinking what he'd write next morning.)
Hello PhD people. I need your tips and strategies for the simple act of getting words onto the page. I hate the word productivity but I suppose it is that. What worked for you?
(obviously staying off twitter is high on the list)
#phdchat
#AcademicTwitter
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@MelClements91
We smoked in lectures, we smoked in exams, we smoked in cinemas, we smoked on trains, we smoked in taxis, and we specially smoked in restaurants. Even the smokers all sighed in relief when it was banned.
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The excellent
@aeonmag
has been raising the level of public philosophy for a decade
#10yearofaeon
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In Paris. The Pantheon from my hotel window. Only fair. I’m working hard.
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I am so honoured. The author of H is for Hawk has drawn me a lovely picture so I can tell a sparrowhawk from a peregrine in future.
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"The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience" gets a going-over in the new Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind. Commentaries from Angela Mendelovici
@vatmaster
Adam Pautz
@a_pautz
and Alex Byrne
@byrne_a
plus replies from me
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Will the 'hard problem of consciousness' ever be solved? Here's my answer (in 700 words):
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Nobody's ever painted me so I persuaded my daughter Katy to do it.
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Müller-Lyer on steroids
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Ooh. The SEP has just posted a comprehensive entry on the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, F. P. Ramsey (written by a team of specialists guided by Fraser MacBride)
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Often tell my graduate students that our working through their drafts reminds me of the contract scene from A Night at the Opera—and they don't know what I'm talking about. So here it is.
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Quote of the day, from someone on my old school's class of 1963 website, in response to yet another obituary: "They're cutting in our part of the woods now, boys."
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Me giving a LIVE talk with OTHER PEOPLE there in London today (the fine photo, though, was taken by
@TonyHYCheng
zooming in from the other side of the world). (
@IP_SAS
in Senate House on "Persisting Objects and Millikanian Substances".) So good to go for coffee after the talk.
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What a nice surprise. Kati Farkas talking at our sensory experience workshop in Bochum . . . and each of her slides will be illustrated by a painting by my daughter
@katypapineau
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Success semantics, redundancy truth, ramsifed types, ramsey sentences, ramsey theory, not to mention decision theory and the foundations of economics. Died when 26. Greatest philosopher of the C20
In “probability and partial belief” (1929) Ramsey anticipates lottery and preface problems (sort of as a throwaway, at the very end). He was pretty good.
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The estimable Stephen R.L. Clark is handing over the running of Philos-L nearly 30 years after setting it up. We academic philosophers are all in his debt. (The first thing I ask new graduate students is - are you on Philos-L?)
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Just off the plane. I like foreigners coming into Britain. I am positively happy if they wear different clothes, have odd customs, and even speak languages other than English. But when will they learn that it is NOT ACCEPTABLE to stand still on the left side of the escalator?
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I'll be in Oxford this Saturday discussing everything you always wanted to know about mind, meaning and metaphysics from a material point of view
THIS SATURDAY: Join Professor
@davidpapineau
, one of the world’s leading researchers in philosophy, for a day exploring mind, meaning and metaphysics. How is our material world able to accommodate consciousness and moral value? Join us online or in Oxford:
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I don't count anyone as educated who isn't familiar with set theory up to at least the non-denumerability of the reals
Don't hear much about Badiou these days. Lot of humanities grad student energy wasted on learning set theory.
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Cosmology lecturer: my calculations say the sun will be dead in a billion years.
Man in audience: What!?!
Lecturer: I said the sun will be dead in a billion years.
Man: Phew! For a moment there I thought you said a million years.
Recently I can't stop dwelling on the fact that at some point in the future the stars will go out and there will never again be intelligent life anywhere, for ever more. People who say they're not bothered by this either haven't thought it through or are psychopaths.
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Here goes. First online lecture of the term. Big signs on my wall reminding me to press the "record" button. Hope they work.
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Some thoughts about Large Language Models on the excellent Joe Murray's "The Human Podcast"
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This was huge fun. Among other things, we covered the nature of philosophy, consciousness, statistical mechanics, the scientific revolution, causation, animal welfare, many worlds, significance testing, large language models, and what happened to "scientific method"?
What role should philosophy play in science?
I had the privilege to talk to
@davidpapineau
who's thought carefully about this and many other topics — causation, consciousness, the replication crisis + more.
🎧⤵️
YouTube:
Spotify:
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Blustery day on the estuary, but sea bass for supper tonight, and skate tomorrow.
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I can’t help feeling,
@TheBJPS
@StathisPsillos
@WayneMyrvold
, that we’re losing the wood for the trees in all these details about which positivist said what and when about unobservables. In truth, a huge sea-change took place in our philosophical tradition in the 20C. 1/x
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My new paper on "The Problem of Consciousness" - to appear in Uriah Kriegel ed Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Consciousness
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@philosophybites
@gdmorejon
I think Dunbar’s stuff is all made up. Sat next to him at lunch once. He said you can only put names to 1500 faces. I said that’s bollocks—from TV I can recognise far more actors and athletes than that, even before we start on people I know. He didn’t have an answer
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@modalizing
@philophyser
Took my three-year old daughter to a philosophy seminar once. Afterwards her mother asked what happened. "They just talked." "Was that all?" "No. They ate biscuits."
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In what world can this not be a parody?
Our team returns to Hungary and investigates how one nation stopped George Soros from undermining civilization. An exclusive preview is available now of our Season Finale of Tucker Carlson Originals: “Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization."
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The best thing is when a philosopher says something that’s mind-numbingly obvious to everybody outside the subject, and therewith sweeps away a whole tradition of pointless debate. Two classics to follow. Any more emperor’s new clothes moments?
@timcrane102
@keithfrankish
1/3
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@DAaronovitch
@Docstockk
@BBCr4today
I’ve been a member for 48 years and am a firm believer in unions. Resigned last week.
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We're making a permanent appoinment in the history of early modern or modern philosophy
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Universal moral principle: don't tell someone the haircut they've just had looks bad
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From my SEP entry on Naturalism: “The term ‘naturalism’ has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy . . . The important thing is to articulate and assess the reasoning that has led philosophers in a generally naturalist direction, not to . . . 1/2
calling for a total and complete shutdown of philosophers using the word “naturalism” until we can figure out what the hell is going on
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We're hiring again. Medieval Philosophy broadly conceived.
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Of the 97 tenure-track hirings in top 20 philosophy departments in the USA 2012-2017, EIGHTY EIGHT went to candidates from the same 20 departments. Just saying. (See the analysis and wonderful graphics in
@Helenreflects
' )
@RIngthorss
@davidpapineau
@ehud
In fact, they love letters so much in the US that it’s tempting to think they invented interfolio to enable them to read EVEN MORE letters … sometimes six or seven for each candidate
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@quiteclare
How can the pain be in your foot if it’s in your head? I was about 12. (Oddly, given that I want to nail everything down philosophically, I’ve never got back to that properly, and still couldn’t give you a straight answer.)
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Want to feel good? In Nov 1934 Ella Fitzgerald was 17 and living rough in Harlem. She entered Amateur Night at the Apollo theatre, meaning to dance, but got stage fright and sang instead. Two months later she was lead singer for the Chick Webb Orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom.
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This business of universities getting their undergrads to cold call alumini/ae asking for donations—isn't it tacky? I feel mean turning them down, but I don't like being pressured in this way, nor their being induced to do it.
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The final version of my Synthese paper "The Disvalue of Knowledge" is now online
And here's the Aeon article from the summer running the same line but with fewer arguments and more examples
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The New Statesman has now posted a full transcript of that Roger Scruton interview Gives a very different impression--he's thoughtful and reasonable throughout (except about architecture). Even the comment about "Islamophobia" looks better in context. 1/2
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