(This is part of a series on the topic. Previous installments are here and here. The post is really a follow-up on the first of these.)
One way of getting into philosophy of language is by asking whether language is a good tool for representing the world. And that depends, at least in part, on how much is already built into our language that might make it hard to represent the world in certain ways, or achieve other representational aims we have. In a previous post on this, I introduced the topic of a job application. What we’d like to do is represent the application in such a way that our representation of the candidate’s suitability for the job depends only on the merits of that applicant, not on prejudices that have nothing to do with these merits. However, applications coded female might, as a matter of fact, have less success of passing just because it’s part of the representation that the application is by a female candidate.
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(For the first part, see here.)
This answer is, in some respects, the most straight-forward, and in that same way, the least interesting answer. One might study philosophy of language as a means towards better methodology elsewhere. In many pursuits outside of philosophy of language, we couch the evidence for our positions in often quite self-consciously linguistic terms. In the course of elucidating a concept, we ask ourselves whether we would happily use a certain sentence to describe a situation.
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October 28th, 2008 in
Philosophy |
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(This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)
Teaching statements are kind of easy, but they’re hard to feel good about. Mostly, that’s because they’re about how to be a good teacher, or perhaps more specifically, about why you are a good teacher. And explaining what makes someone a good teacher is a lot like trying to teach someone how to teach. If you try to do it in words, you’ll probably end up saying the obvious and obviously inane: “be engaging, be well-prepared, foster an active learning-environment, make room for everybody, etc.” Yeah, that really clears it up!
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Let’s turn to dissertation abstracts. (This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)
The dissertation abstract that you produce as part of your job market dossier gives a brief overview of your dissertation, much like an abstract of an article gives a brief overview of the article. But it also does a whole lot more, and I want to mostly focus on that “more.”
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It is a useful exercise from time to time to reflect on why one does what one does. Perhaps the reasons have gone stale, or perhaps it’s just good to be reminded. So: why study philosophy of language? And why do I do it?
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October 23rd, 2008 in
Philosophy |
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“I love you very much.”
“Why do you love me?”
“Because you’re excellent, sweet, and really wonderful.”
“No, because I’m me!”
October 19th, 2008 in
Family |
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I’ve never read any of the huge books that David Foster Wallace. It seemed like a project on a par with life projects—kottke.org has this list of resources for reading Infinite Jest. I am still really sad that he passed. If you want to get a sense of what really good writing is, in any domain, I recommend reading his piece on Roger Federer in the New York Times sports magazine Play.
September 15th, 2008 in
Uncategorized |
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Welcome back! Time to report on our most recent meeting of our reading group, this one concerned with chapter 6. I presented, and my handout is available here.
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I grew up playing basketball. I played until Zoe was born, and then several things happened that made me stop. For one, I usually played after work, but that has become prime family time. For another, I blew out my knee. I finally got my knee fixed, though that didn’t do anything to remove the scheduling difficulty. So once I started exercising again, I mostly just ran.
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August 28th, 2008 in
Running |
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I talked about some aspects of writing a job market writing sample here. In that post, I emphasized the ways in which a writing sample is different from a paper aimed at publication. Today, I want to talk about one of the points of correspondence between them.
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