The worst use/mention disaster you’ve ever seen

Lots of lessons about conditionals here

Continental breakfast is nice and all, but have you ever tried a hearty *analytic* breakfast?

6 year old son convinced me sun is a living thing.

Philosophy paper intros:

As a grad student, allow me to share ONE WEIRD TRICK to having a philosophical research program: just be able to be annoyed by something and let it become your whole life

Loud rooms with lots of people trying to talk are such a prisoner’s dilemma

A new paper, forthcoming in PPR: Visual Icons This paper took me more than 5 years to write. It argues that the visual system constructs imagistic representations ("visual icons") and sketches a theory of how visual icons, and iconic representations generally, are compositionally structured.

If you were invited to do a Philosophy Talk at a High School, to speak about a subject that should blow the kids' minds and make them want to study Philosophy: 1. What would you talk about? And, most importantly 2. Are you really confident in your ability to be *understood and liked* by teenagers?

This is true but Kenneth is being misleading: every day at MIT philosophy is corner quote day

Corner quotes never say die

“Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab.

Drove on one French King Highway today, big news for philosophy of language

Been watching an old legal show lately and thinking it would be kinda fun in philosophy Q&As if the chair got to say “objection; asked and answered” or “this line of questioning is irrelevant”

The offer still stands

be a philosopher

Are there notable correlations between hobbies and AOSes in philosophy? Like, is a philosopher of biology more likely to be stoked to look for tiny salamanders with me than the average epistemologist?

I would like a poll on academic philosophers to see how many of us are already prone to talking to ourselves when no one is around

Got to mess around with some Greek the other day because I want to slip an Aristotle reference into one of my papers. It was fun, made me a little sad I don’t generally have sufficient reason to do that sort of thing (given time constraints etc)

New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6

Tired: film adaptation of The Odyssey Wired: film adaptation of Theodicy

Never expected that hackers would prevent me from grading essays

Anyone going to SPP interested in going birding one of the mornings?

interesting paper on what makes a psychological event count as learning by henry schiller, who is not on bluesky. highly recommend it philpapers.org/rec/SCHRLP-4

You know you can catch your boy crying over concepts

I looked at the nearest possible world in which I reduced the sun to the size of a golf ball and placed it in NYC, and I'm dubious

It's sort of wild to me that Continental Philosophy has never produced anything as perspicuous as Bertrand Russell's famously clear Gray's Elegy argument in "On Denoting."

Good news guys! I’ve discerned whether it’s continental or analytic philosophy that is the good one

Hi Bluesky! Suppose I was feeling brave and wanted to learn about how we/kids develop event cognitive capacities. Where should I start?

Philosophy is for entertainment purposes only. Philosophers can make mistakes, and they may not work before 11 am or after 3 pm. Don’t rely on philosophers for important advice. Read philosophy at your own risk.

Why do we think people get so excited about consciousness, but not representation? I know why some *philosophers* find the former more interesting. But there are endless podcasts, quirky op eds, etc, about consciousness, and laypeople eat it up. Not so much for representation. Why?

Nativists rejoice

Big dividing line among naturalistic theories of representational content is whether my watch’s 12 now means 11

Sleep talked about number perception last night. Wife wrote down that I said “You can represent that there are 17 objects without representing 17 objects. Existentially, without tracking anything.” She then asked (sleepy) me how; to which I, she reports, simply “nodded with steady determination”

Love: also systematic and productive

I’m all for the idea that our minds are really different from LLMs but sometimes I really do wake up to inner speech philosophyslop

Found it: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

Whenever a philosophy topic trends, I have two reactions. On the one hand, I'm super excited that people want to talk about anything philosophical. On the other hand, I'm annoyed how no one bothers to ask what philosophers have thought about this. They just spout off whatever occurs to them

Got sidetracked this morning trying to categorize philosophers based on whether they tend to use ‘furthermore’ or ‘moreover’ more often, love my job

Sometimes Bob Stalnaker says he doesn’t believe in possible worlds

Please make a terrible ruckus about this, if you live in Oregon

It would be fun if journal articles had YouTube-style thumbnails so you can have your silly/eye-catching thing as well as an informative title without doing the old 15-word title+subtitle thing

Tried to tell my sister that if something isn’t accurate, it can’t be knowledge. Knowing epistemology is a burden sometimes

A grad student put up a bunch of these MIT philosophy themed valentines. I thought this one was fantastic and told them so. Turns out I came up with it a couple years ago and they had just parroted me. Perry’ed again

If I had a nickel for every time a group of a cappella singers rickrolled my class, I’d have a nickel today.

Ordinary language philosopher doing philosophy of physics “Well they’re like regular mechanics, but really tiny”

Older philosophy papers without any signposting at the start are total roller coasters, you have no idea what what you’re in for

Reposting in honor of groundhog day

Philosophers who change their mind on something owe us a blurb on their website documenting the shift. It’s not enough to have a footnote “in previous work… but I’ve since changed my mind.” You had arguments for your previous view! Tell us what you think was wrong with them!!

I'm excited to share that my first paper "Guessing and its Limits" is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research! Thread below. TLDR: I present a novel puzzle for a recent "question-sensitive" theory of guessing/belief in multi-question scenarios. philpapers.org/rec/FANGAI-2