I don’t believe in magic. At least, I thought I didn’t. Then I started worrying that I might not actually know what the heck it is that I am denying the existence of. So…let’s try to analyze it.

Why Care About This?!
Normally, I don’t feel the need to justify engaging in a conceptual analysis. It’s just fun to try and determine what the underlying nature of some complex concept is. However, since some people who read this blog who might not appreciate the joys of conceptual analysis (especially about a concept like magic) - I thought I’d explain why I think there are good reasons to do this.

Despite the apparent frivolity of the exercise I’m about to engage in, there are some good reasons to be concerned about the concept of magic. First, many people deny the existence of magic. I’m one of them.  If you’re going to deny the existence of something, it would be nice to know what it is you’re denying the existence of. If you’re going to use a word as if you know what it means, then it would be good to try and understand the nature of the property picked out by that word. Second, some philosophical thought experiments hinge on magic being metaphysically possible. One example deals with discussions of different analyses of causation. Certain theories of causation are argued against on the basis of some thought experiments that involve the possibility of magic (see for example Schaffer’s Paper Trumping Preemption p. 165;  McDermott’s paper Causation: Influence vs. Sufficiency p.89). So, philosophical debates that do matter assume the possibility of magic. Third, there is an interesting tension for various semantic theories if it turns out that (a) there are no actual instances of magic and (b) there are possible instances of magic (think about what Kripke says regarding the possibility of unicorns). Fourth, this is a philosophy blog. I’m allowed to do some fun (apparently silly) conceptual analysis and figure out later if there was any good reason to do it. This is a place to test the waters.

So let’s try and figure out what this concept is that we think we understand.

What is Magic?
First, it’s not clear what magic is supposed to be a property of. In fiction, we hear talk of magical objects and artifacts, magical potions, magical spells, and magical people. I suspect these things are all supposed to be magical in their stories because of their capacity to bring about a magical event. So, my first guess as to what magic is supposed to be is that it is supposed to be a property of events. So let’s try and analyze magic and assume that events are the sorts of things that would be magic (if anything were magic).

Law of Nature Analysis of Magic
(LN)Event E is magic =df.) E violates a law of nature.

This is what I suspect would be a good candidate first stab at an analysis. The problem is that if we’re analyzing the same sort of concept that pops up in fiction (e.g. Harry Potter), then this is analysis has a problem. Presumably, the magic that happens in Harry Potter functions according to regular laws. Whenever you utter Crucio and point your wand in a certain direction under the right conditions, your target will experience a tremendous amount of pain. It seems like were these things to occur, they should count as magic.

One might argue that the Cruciatus curse functions according to laws of magic, which are different from the laws of nature. So while magic might happen according to regular laws, we should think of these laws as laws of magic, not laws of nature. So, violating a law and nature (and I suppose following from a law of magic) would qualify an event as magic. This suggests the following analysis.

Magical Explanation Analysis
E is magic = df.) there is a magical explanation for E.

E has a magical explanation =df.) there is a law of magic M (that is not a law of nature) such that M plus events prior to E entail E.

This might work. I was assuming in my argument above that any regularity would qualify as a kind of law of nature. This analysis separates regularities into kinds. But it separates regularities into kinds in a way that is not particularly helpful. We’ve introduced a new notion to analyze magic - a law of magic. I have no idea what that is. In fact, I have a better grasp on what it would be for an event to be magic than what it would be for a law to be a law of magic (in a way that made it something different from a law of nature). Let’s try a third analysis and then I’ll be done with this silly post.

No Scientific Explanation Analysis
E is magic =df.) There is no good scientific explanation for the occurrence of E.

I’ve heard people say that what would make something magical is the lack of scientific explanation. This also seems like a good candidate. However, we better not cash out scientific explanation in terms being entailed by a law of nature. This runs the risk of collapsing into the first definition, and it would entail that what Harry Potter does is not magic

So, let’s assume that whatever we mean by scientific explanation it won’t be cashed out in this way.

What I’m more worried about with this analysis is parasitic on an issue that comes up when we try to offer an account of physicalism or naturalism. Physicalism is the thesis that all facts are physical facts. What counts as a physical fact often gets cashed out  in terms of scientific explanation. But there are two options here for the requirement. (1) we require that the explanation be one that our best science accepts or (2) we merely require that there be a scientific explanation out there to be discovered by our best ideal science.

If we’re going to analyze magic by appeal to lack of scientific explanation, we really have two versions of the analysis to consider. The first version would hold that lack of an actual explanation that is supported by our best science makes something magic. This version would preserve the intuition that what goes on in the Harry Potter fictions is magic. Perhaps the scientific community in Harry Potter doesn’t actually have a scientific explanation for what goes on in Harry Potter. However, the problem with this first version is that there would be quite a lot of magic in this world.

The second version of the Scientific Explanation Analysis would hold that merely lacking an actual explanation supported by our best science wouldn’t be good enough for something to count as magic. It would have to be, in some sense, not even possible for our best ideal science to ever discover a scientific explanation. However, if the requirement is this loose, then it looks like we have the same problem with Harry Potter that we’ve been trying to avoid. What goes on in Harry Potter might not qualify as magic - if we assume that the best idealized science wouldn’t be able to come up with an explanation.

Conclusion
I’ll stop there for now. I thought I had a reasonably clear grasp on this thing that I deny the existence of, and now I’m not sure that I do.

UPDATE: Bibliography
I mentioned above that one of the reasons to be concerned about the concept of magic is that philosophers assume the metaphysical possibility of it in thought experiments in discussions about causation. I thought it would be good to track down as many articles as I could that at some point discussed a thought experiment involving the possibility of magic. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

I’m attracted to a traditional account of the semantics of belief reports which holds that the semantic content of a belief report of the form ‘S believes that P’ is a two-place relation that holds between a person and a proposition.

I’m curious about other common phrases in English that (a) use the word ‘believe’, (b) appear to be something like a belief report, and (c) do not appear to fit the above schema.

These reports use ‘believes in’ and appear to express relations that obtain (if at all) between a concrete particular thing and another concrete particular thing.

Here are some examples.

(A) Virginia believes in Santa Claus
(B) Bob believes in God
(C) Dave believes in Jesus
(D) Andy believes in Tim

I we only had (A) and (B) to worry about, then we could reduce ‘believes in’ to ‘believes that’ as follows:

(BIBT) S believes in R =df.) S believes that R exists

But (C) and (D) pose trouble, right? Dave can believe that Jesus exists without believing in Jesus (in the sense that I think Christian theists talk about when they say they believe in Jesus)

An easier example would be when persons talk about believing in other ordinary people as in (D).

I’m wondering if there is a uniform treatment of ‘believes in’ locutions that captures (A)-(D) and is cashed out in terms of ‘believes that’.

Bleg: Anyone see discussions of this in the literature on the semantics of belief reports? I’d love a few references.

(Posted from my Android Phone)

I spoke with the head of IT at one of the schools from the list of SUNY schools that appeared to have made the switch to Google Apps.

Here’s an interesting update. The switch was put on hold and will take effect soon, because…and this is the exciting part…in the next few weeks there will be a SUNY wide contract with Google Apps! This is VERY exciting.

It won’t force Google Apps on any SUNY school. The purpose of the contract is to cover any SUNY school that decides to make the switch to Google Apps. My guess is that there are a few privacy issues that schools generally would want commitments in writing from Google before jumping on board. This SUNY wide contract would eliminate the need for each SUNY school to work out separate contracts with Google.

This is good stuff. This means that SUNY Fredonia, if willing, can make the switch to Google Apps without the hassle of working out a separate contract.

Sweet!

Google Apps offers a free Education Edition to schools. Schools can provide all of their faculty, staff, and students with a gmail account that uses the school’s domain!

It gets better, Google Apps comes with more than free, reliable, searchable email (with 7GB of storage space!). Your college Google account comes with free IM, free Video Chat, and free Google Documents (this last freebie is a complete online office suite, by the way). I’ll shut-up about how awesome this is for college campuses Google can sell you on Google Apps for Schools better than I can.

I think it would be awesome if SUNY Fredonia switched to Google Apps, and I’ve been asking around campus to see if we’ve considered it. A colleague of mine told me that SUNY administrators would be more likely to make the switch if we could find another SUNY school that made the switch. So, I’ve been digging around for the past couple of hours trying to find one.

I found six! And that colleague found a seventh! SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Binghamton are among them!

Seven SUNY Schools Using Google Apps

1. SUNY Buffalo [Link Here]
2. SUNY Binghamton [Link Here]
3. SUNY OCC [link here]
4. SUNY RCC [link here]
5. SUNY JCC [link here]
6. SUNY IT [link here]
7. SUNY New Paltz [link here]

So come on SUNY Fredonia, we have an opportunity to give our faculty, staff, and students an excellent, free alternative to a  service we’re paying for. But it’s better than a mere alternative - it comes loaded with tons of productivity apps (including a complete office suite!) that will make the educational environment for our students better.

Heck, Los Angeles just switched to Google Apps. If the city of Los Angeles can do it, and 7 other SUNY schools can do it - so can we.

If anyone has any information on other SUNY schools making the switch to Google Apps, let me know.

I’m using Wordpress now as my course management platform. I outline and explain the reasons why this is awesome here. In this post, I want to highlight some plugins that run the gamut from must have to cool-to-have. I’ll let you decide which is which.

1. Email Users
   The utility of this one is pretty self-explanatory.
2. WP-Hide Post
   You might want to use posts to convey information to students, that you link to from a syllabus page. Or maybe an instructions page. But you may not want these posts to disrupt the flow of the blog discussion board. WP-Hide Post puts a display in your post editor that let’s you hide posts from the front page (among other things) on a post-by-post basis.
3. Role Manager
   You might want a more fine-grained role system than the standard Editor, Contributor, Subscriber options. This where Role Manage becomes useful. You can divide your students in to different groups and assign different permissions to each group.
4. Page Restrict
   Much of my courses is page is publicly available. You can see it here. But you may want some pages to be restricted (e.g. pages with more personal information about students or pages that have contact forms that you want to keep spammers away from). Page restrict will let you select pages that you want only logged in users to have access to.
5. Private Files
   If you link to electronic readings, but want to keep things within the bounds of fair use guidelines - Private Files will lock download your upload folder. If you link to a reading that is stored in your upload folder, only logged in users will have access to it when you use private files.
6. KB Gradebook
   I thought, man it wouldn’t it be cool if there were a gradebook plugin for Wordpress. It turns out…there is one. Very simple and straight-forward plugin.
7. Sideblog Wordpress Plugin
   Sideblog let’s you set your blog up so that short posts with a certain category show up in the side bar. This would be perfect for a Course Announcements feature.
8. List Category Posts
   Let’s say you want to created an auto-generated list of links to all posts that fall under a certain category (e.g. Announcements, or Readings). This plugin lets you do that.
9. My Page Order
   Comes in Handy if you want to re-arrange the order of pages on your course blog.
10. Subscribe to Comments
    This one is really useful for students. Sometimes students don’t use RSS readers and are only interested in tracking discussions of their posts or discussion threads that they’ve participated in. This gives them a way to email subscribe to the comment thread of just the posts that they’re interested in following.
11. Wordpress Database Backup
    A must if you’re tracking student activity on the blog for a grade.
12. Force User Registration Field
    Students often use usernames like TheRealHarryPotter92. With the standard install of of Wordpress - that’s all the info you would get from your registrant. They can go in and fill out their real name in their profile, but sometimes students forget. With this plugin you can force students to provide other important information (e.g. their first and last name).
13. WPhone
    This plugin allows you to opt for a mobile phone optimized display. It’s very handy for students and professors with smartphones (e.g. an Android phone, Iphone, or Blackberry). I have an Android phone, and this thing is awesome. It gives me a nice, clean way to interface with my course blog on the go.
14. Easy Uploader
    This makes it easier to upload files from within Wordpress.
15. Batch Add Users
    I have a brief open enrollment period, and students sign-up for the course. Another option, however, would be to add multiple users. This plugin gives you a very simple way to do that. Here’s another option that works well.

Bonus points for introducing something like the duplication problem for various theories of personal identity.

I had a lot of requests to add new journals to the survey list. I finished putting up the last of them this morning. A lot of new journals have been added now. Keep the requests coming, and keep filling out those surveys.

Remember, any time you get a decision from a journal, come fill out a survey. The surveys will never close. All entries are time stamped, so eventually we’ll be able to make some interesting comparisons across the years.

Here’s a list of the journals that were request last month that are now on the survey list.

Educational Philosophy and Theory
Studia Logica
Zeitschrift fur philosophische Forschung
Grazer Philosophische Studien
Philosophical Investigations
Dialogue
Disputatio
Sorites
Studia Philosophica Estonica
South African Journal of Philosophy
Journal of Philosophy of Education
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
International Journal for Philosophical Studies
International Philosophical Quarterly
International Studies in Philosophy
Midwest Studies in Philosophy
Educational Theory
Axiomathes
Theory and Decision
Analyse & Kritik

If you can break down what you’re looking for in a good paper into a set of categories and assign a numerical value to each category, then you should definitely consider using Google Forms to help you grade. I just developed a quick and easy way to do this. Here’s what I do.

I have 10 categories worth 10 points each. My students submit their papers electronically, and I download their papers (all at once) into a single folder.

I create a Google form to use as my grading tool. The first question on the form is a text entry for the student’s name. Every question after that is scale question. I set my scale 1-5, and I create a question for each of the main items I’m looking for.

With all of the above complete, I’m ready to start grading. I open the first student paper and resize it so that it takes up three-quarters of the screen. I open up my form in a Firefox window and fill the otherquarter of the screen.

Here’s a screenshot. Click on it to see a large version.

What To Do

1. Enter Their Last Name/First Name in the Form on the Right
2. Grade the Paper
   I read through the paper and type detailed comments in the margins, bold & underline awkward words, phrases etc. As I read, I can grade the student using the form on the right.
3. Click Submit
   Once you’re done grading the paper and you’ve checked all of your boxes, submit the form.
4. Grab Grade from Spreadsheet
   Something I didn’t mention about the setup is that you should open the spreadsheet the form dumps data into in another tab. Keep that open throughout the grading process. When you submit a form for a student, click over to the spreadsheet. Grab student’s grade and type it into a comment box at the end of the student’s paper.
   (NOTE: The first time you click over, you’ll have to insert a column and program that column to calculate the student’s full grade. I set mine up to the left of the student name column)
5. Rinse and Repeat
   Open the next student paper. It should be sized just right. Click back to the tab in Firefox with the form. Refresh to start a new form. You’ll notice that I have a bookmark button for the form in the top left. It makes quick work of opening a new form.

Odds and Ends

Transfering to Gradebook
When you’re finished. You have all of the student paper grades listed alphabetically the way they would appear in your gradebook. Copy the two columns with the student names and grades and paste it into your main gradebook.

The Form is Reusable
Once you’re done grading a set of papers and have copied them over into your main gradebook, delete all of the rows that were submitted by the form. You’re ready to go with the next batch of papers. Once you set this nifty tool up once, you’re done.  You can go back to it again and again.

Emailing to Students
Someone once asked me something like “So…do you…like…email each student their paper?” But this person’s tone implied that they thought this was a real pain (and a good reason not to grade papers this way). It’s actually not a pain at all. With a good email client like Thunderbird and an alphabetized email list (which the students can generate for you) - emailing papers back to students is  one of the quickest and easiest administrative tasks I have deal with in a semester. Just make sure students are required to begin their file name with their last name. If they don’t do this it is a pain. It’s way faster than passing them back in class. If the student saved the paper in the right format, this is a quick and easy affair. I might post how I do this soon.

Why Do This?
This is the quickest and easiest deployment of the grading rubric method I’ve encountered. All of the other methods of grading on a rubric with 10+ categories that I’ve used were either tedious (or left something desirable out of the picture).

More Details On My Paper Assignment
In case you’re interested, here is a brief summary of the sort of papers I have my students write. They are required to present, explain, and evaluate an argument. They must extract an argument from some text and put it in numbered-premise form. The argument must be valid. They must define technical terms. They must discuss initial motivations for each premise. They must have a clear position on soundness. Whether they argue for soundness or unsoundness, they must critically discuss an objection to a premise. And they must consider a counter-response to their reasoning. Notice, all of those things are things that students can objectively fail to do. That’s why I can use this Google Form method, and it keeps me objective. Here’s a list that I give my students that outlines what I’m looking for in one of these short papers. This list corresponds to the categories in my form.

The Monads are back. I suspect a lot of my readers are familiar with the Monads. What you may not realize is that they are back.

Kris McDaniel, an original member of the Monads, has revived the group with Ben Bradley and Carrie Jenkins. They are calling themselves “The 21st Century Monads”, and they already have four new tracks.

You can listen classic Monad and new Monad stuff here.

They also have a facebook page.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Monads, they are a band of comprised of philosophers that pays rocking tribute to philosophers, philosophical theories, and (occasionally) an inference pattern.

The Nook is looking even less attractive. The Kindle has an experimental web browser. Based on the answers provided by B&N in the discussion forum here, it looks like the Nook isn’t going to have one of these.

This may well be a deal breaker for me. What’s really weird is their stated reason for not including the browser.

Hello, tmnc.

nook does not have a web browser. The E Ink display is great for reading, but is less ideal for web browsing. We’re focused on the eReading experience, and think we’ve got the features most people are looking for.

Thanks for the question.

I call bull. E-ink is not great for serious web browsing with lots of flash or java scripts, but for lightweight web browsing it’s great. I borrowed a friend’s Kindle for the weekend a few weeks ago to try it out. Browsing blogs in Google Reader was awesome. Reading mobile versions of main-stream media was also awesome. The notion that the web browsing wouldn’t be good on an eReader for the sorts of things an technophile would use it for is completely bogus.

Furthermore, the suggestion that “they’re not focusing on it” because it’s not part of the eReading experience makes me think they want people to think that installing a web browser would have diluted their focus. Come on! First, lightweight web browsing is part of the eReading experience (see paragraph above) for a lot of people. Second, the thing runs Android. A web browser is pretty much ready to go. B&N could have put a lightweight browser on there with next to no effort. And they can label the thing as “experimental” like Amazon did, and they pretty much relieve themselves of the expectation to support it.

One of the speculated reasons why B&N isn’t actually including a web browser is that they must have some deal with AT&T. I think that’s probably right. I suspect another reason is that they want to sell Nook users subscriptions to newspapers. If Nook users had free mobile web access to their favorite news content, they’d be less likely to buy subscriptions (although that didn’t stop Amazon from including a web browser).

If PDF support is adequate, then I may still break down and get a Nook. That is the most important feature for me. However, I’ll probably be waiting until after the holidays. On January 7, Plastic Logic gives us full details on the Que. We don’t have many details yet, but what we do know is that it’s size of a standard sheet of paper. It has a bigger screen with native PDF, Word, Spreadsheet, and Powerpoint viewing capability. My main concern with the Que is that, because they’re targeting businesses, the device may be out of an academic’s price range. We’ll have to wait and see.