The Sooty Empiric

Saint Augustine - "Lord, grant me a sound and complete axiomatic  system, but not yet." In the fifth book of his Confessions  Saint Augustine says that realising that secular natural philosophers could give well confirmed mathematical explanations of astronomical events helped convince him that the Manichaes were wrong. I was struck by this early record of the importance of mathematical reasoning to an African philosopher, and it got me thinking. After all, I like to joke that I am simultaneously the world's best and worst formal Africana philosopher (for the record and in fact, this is only half true: Wiredu is clearly the world's best formal Africana philosopher). What does that actually mean? Is there anything to the notion of formal Africana philosophy? In particular, is there anything more informative than: a formal philosopher who is also an Africana philosopher? Kwame Appiah, for instance, has worked on the epistemic underpinnings of Ghanaian folk bel...

I haven't posted in a while, and just for the sakes of keeping the blog active I am going to post some uncompleted notes for a quite a long post I was writing some time ago and now do not think I will have time to finish. So here is what I had on the idea of methodological radicalism. It may at least be useful as a collection of links to various papers relating to the proper infusion of ethical or political values into our argumentation or modes of epistemic evaluation. Here are two senses of "method" one might use - first, a method is a procedure one uses for generating claims to endorse. So in this sense, for instance, my method for working out what the temperature is in the morning is to check the weather app on my phone. Second, a method might be a procedure one uses to justify your claims. So, in this sense, my method for justifying my beliefs about the temperature might be to tell you the above procedure and perhaps add some reasons to believe that the weather app i...

So I have a Phd now.  It has been a long road, getting from there to here. Along the way I made close friends, learned things I didn't know I didn't know, and fell in love with my  fiancée . To do all this I moved across the world, to live by myself as a stranger in a strange city, to pursue something that none of my ancestors had ever done. For I am, I say with some confidence, the first person in the entire history of my family to ever have a doctorate. (Though I won't be the last!) I am the first black person to get a PhD from my department, and will be the first such person to be employed at the department I am joining. Somewhat relatedly, I am sure I am the first person to include a substantial amount of W.E.B. Du Bois scholarship in a PhD from my department. Reflecting on these things fills me with some pride, I feel that this achievement is a very small part of a greater story about the gradual advance of families and peoples, and I am happy to be a part ...

Every well informed empiricist should be a standpoint epistemologist. Indeed, I think this should be entirely uncontroversial, so much so that after making my case for this claim most of the blog post is really going to be about why it is that people argue about this. I'm making this post because I find of myself that I keep independently arguing this to various people, so I would like to just have my thoughts written down somewhere to refer to in future. Let's begin by some definitions. For my purpose here an empiricist is somebody who thinks that - (i) people with more experience of a phenomenon will, all else equal, know more about it than those with less such experience, (ii) provided that they actually take the time to reason about it or pay attention to the evidence available to them. By "well informed empiricist" I mean somebody who believes (i) and (ii) and is aware of some of the (rather obvious) sociological facts I shall be drawing attention to in what fo...

There is a pseudo-controversy around the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner.  To my friends not in America, this is an annual event wherein the press come and make nice with the ruling class they are supposed to be keeping honest. It includes a roast, wherein a designated court jester gets to roast those present and especially the President. Tbh it's generally a pretty gross and sycophantic affair. But, obviously, civility norms are very much relaxed at comedic roasts, and we all know that - that's pretty much the whole point. And if there is any defence to be had at all of the WHCD it's that at least we get the court jester speaking truth to power for just a little bit. But some folk on the right are pretending to be shocked,  shocked! , at the ever so rude remarks of this year's court jester, Michelle Wolf. This is pretty transparently just propagandists attempting to marshal public sympathy for anti democratic (soft or hard) restrictions on criticism of Dear Lead...

For my own purposes I am going to summarise a line of argument I think is largely drawn from feminist philosophy of science, maybe especially the work of Helen Longino  - see here  for an early and relatively complete outline of the argument I summarise below. I'm spurred to do this after some internet discussion made me see that I did not have the same understanding as my interlocutors regarding what the most influential strands of feminist philosophy of science have been. If we're going to disagree about feminist philosophy of science, I'd at least like it to be clear what kind of thing I have in mind! So I hope this fosters dialogue. (Note that I don't claim any originality for this at all, in fact if I am right in my self-understanding then I am just summarising the results of a well known and developed research programme. I will often mention Longino, but she's certainly not the only person to contribute to this. Some of the relevant stuff is discussed here ....

Round here I do a fair bit of meta-philosophy. Sometimes I am opine about how we   ought   decide   upon our research questions , sometimes about how we ought evaluate our answers . Today I am going to pontificate about both at once. My aim in this blog post is just to write down in one place what seems to be the consequences of the picture I have drawn in a scattered fashion. Not only do I not claim any originality for this, my self-impression is that I am just making explicit a fairly widely held and probably communally standard picture in Anglo-American philosophy. I would be very unsurprised if somebody has published this before, please link me in the comments! Finally, not only does not my work not live up to the ideal to be expressed, but this blog post was in very large part inspired by recent self-critique, so I most certainly do not offer my own work as exemplifying this process. What follows is an idealised processes by which one might hit upon a positio...