Slate Article Under Discussion

The recent article in Slate has, unsurprisingly, generated a fair amount of commentary across the philosophical blogosphere.   We already have a bit of discussion of David Velleman's complaints against it on this post here.  That discussion also got picked up in a post by Joshua Knobe over on the 'garden of forking paths' blog.

The legendary hilzoy of Obsidian Wings has posted a typically thoughtful discussion (which I became aware of thanks to her kindly telling us in a comment on the earlier thread), and from there I was able to harvest (from her commentator Bob McManus) several other links to discussions, which I'll list here.  I do note that she seems to have gotten the same interpretation that Velleman did, that experimental philosophers are particularly touting their new "discoveries" of the cases themselves and/or philosophical theories based on them.  I don't know what in the Slate article gave that false impression, but I do believe that it's an unfortunate misreading of our actual intentions & ambitions.

Harvard-philosophy-concentrator-turned-liberal-media-dude Matthew Yglesias offers some thoughts, and there are some interesting moves in the discussion thread until it turns into primarily a discussion of basketball.

(The Slate article also got linked to by Weatherson, but not with any discussion.)

If people find other blogs talking about the article, post a comment here & I'll add it to the list.

UPDATE: A little googling found the following:

Felix Salmon, who I am not antecedently familiar with, offers an outsider's perspective on the article.

We also have conservative journalist/pundit Ross Douthat weighing in.

Bioethicist Art Caplan just offers a link, but there's a bit of discussion (mostly negative) in his comments.

UPDATE: I rather doubt that anyone here needs to be told this, but for the sake of completeness: there is a big post up on Brian Leiter's blog, with a bunch of us x-phi types explaining a few aspects of how we understand our research, and with a bit of discussion (including a response by Velleman) as well.

UPDATE: Gualtiero Piccinini, my neighbor to the west-and-just-a-little-bit-south, has put forward some views on the matter on his "Brain" blog.

Comments

[Gualtiero Piccinini]

For those who might be interested, I posted a commentary on the experimental philosophy debate on my blog (link from my name).