I’m giving a talk at Northwestern today called “Descriptivism Meets Gettier” as part of their Epistemology Brown Bag Lecture Series.

I’ll post a draft of the paper later (I’ll likely want to make changes after the talk), but here’s the basic idea.

I think Descriptivism (about semantic content) is committed to certain speakers having knowledge in cases where intuitively they do not because they are in a Gettier case (even in conjunction with most plausible post-Gettier attempts to analyze knowledge)

Descriptivism also has the reverse problem. I argue that there are possible cases where speakers obviously know a certain proposition, but Descriptivists are committed to saying they lack knowledge because speakers are Gettiered with respect to the relevant descriptive proposition.

(Posted from my Android phone)

Here’s the Quick Tip

1. Tell your students to make sure they can edit the file in Google Docs before sharing (especially if they’re uploading .wps and .doc files).
2. Remind them to leave the “Convert to Google Docs format” option checked when uploading.
3. Remind them to leave the “To Edit” option checked when sharing.

Here’s the explanation whyOne of the great things about Google Docs for grading electronice papers is that it eliminates the administrative headache of dealing with all of the different file formats. At least 1/3 of my students don’t use MS Word or Open Office, and sometimes even MS Word files wouldn’t play well with Open Office. I know it’s alleged that you can read and edit most Word Processing documents from one word processor in another, and that this shouldn’t be an issue - but in many cases for an academic using the comment features.

Google Docs has significantly reduced this, but there are still ways for students to share files with you that make it difficult to write comments. Students sometimes…

1. Uncheck the “Convert to Google Docs” option when Uploading
2. Uncheck the “To Edit” option  when sharing with you
3. Upload file that doesn’t convert to Google Docs

These issues are rare when compared to the issues I had with students emailing attachments, so if you did nothing to prevent these issues, you would still be dealing with less headache.

But here’s what I suggest.

Dear Afraid-To-Major-In-Philosophy,

I saw today that someone searched “afraid to major in philosophy” and found my site. I can only assume it was you. I hope you found my Why Major in Philosophy Page, but I thought I’d post the link here just in case.

Sincerely,

Andy

p.s. Go for it

A while back I outlined 10 reasons to have students submit papers using Google Docs. Now that I’ve used Google Docs for two terms, I have some tips and suggestions to make using Google Docs easier on you and, generally, more awesome.

Problem: The main document browser seems rather chaotic. You need a nice, neat way to sort through all of your student paper submissions. You may, for example, want to look at just the first paper assignment from your introduction to philosophy class.

Solution: Saved searches.

1. Have your students fill out a header like you would for an old-school paper submission. Here’s what I have them do.
   First Name, Last Name
   PHIL 115
   First Paper
   Spring 2010
2. Create a “Saved Search” in Google Documents.
   Next to the search box there is a little blue hyper-link that says “Show Search Options.” Click that.
3. Type in “PHIL 115 and First Paper and Spring 2010″ in the keyword box.
4. Name and Save your search.
   Your saved search should show up like a label in the left hand navigation bar. Click on it and it will bring up all the papers from the students who submitted them correctly.

You may be wondering…What about students who forget to give me the header?

Do whatever you would for a student who forgets to turn in a paper without a name on it. Some professors take off points. Some professors simply put that paper at the bottom of the pile as a low priority.

Once you’ve graded all of the papers, if you notice that there are students that you don’t have grades for - let students know that if they didn’t do the header correctly their paper wasn’t graded and that they need to go back and enter in a header before you will grade their paper.

I’m now a contributor at AndroidGuys.

Android Guys has been one of my favorite places to get Android related news since the first Android phone launched, and so I’m pretty excited to be able to help these guys out.

You can check out my first post here..

It’s a video review/demo of Scan2pdf Mobile. Here’s the video.

Lewis Powell made this, and you all owe him your respect, admiration, gratitude, and praise. We are all indebted to him for this awesome-ness.

Within a week of each other, Windows and Apple declared legal war on Google in two separate arenas.

Windows
Earlier last week the European commission started an anti-trust probe. There were suspicions that Microsoft was behind some of the complaints. Last Friday, Microsoft acknowledged that they were. (Aside: If Google is guilty of anti-trust violation, then they should face the music - but I find it awesomely ironic that it’s Microsoft sounding the alarm). You can read up on this story here.

Apple
Then just today Apple filed a patent lawsuit against HTC over 20 patents. Why HTC? HTC is the one making all of those awesome Android powered phones (e.g. G1, Droid Eris, and Nexus One). For those of you reading this who don’t know, Android is the Google backed mobile OS that is threatening to takeover the smartphone industry.

It’s going to be interesting, but it looks like Google is now in the middle of a two front war against Windows and Apple at the same time.

A team of computer scientists from Rutgers University recently revealed a range of nasty things a hacker can do with some simple, difficult to detect, malware. A hacker could text your phone and drain your battery, turn on your microphone and eavesdrop on important conversations, or even turn on your GPS receiver and figure out where you are.

The good news is that the team did not demo ways for hackers to get these programs on your phone, and they have not identified any Android-specific vulnerabilities that would allow them to do so. The demo only shows what could be done if the malware gets on your smartphone.

While this might be good news for now, the researchers call for developing detection techniques so that average users won’t be significantly affected by these types of attacks. [HT: inc.com]

Funny, but I still favor the laptop policy I introduced a few semesters back.

Also, (Spoiler Alert) I wish I could have seen the laptop shatter. The video doesn’t catch it.

I now have rooms and times officially booked for our remaining three Young Philosophers visits. Here is all of the information regarding our three remaining speaker visits.

Dennis Whitcomb
Western Washington University
(Ph.D., 2007, Rutgers University)

• “Grounding Precludes Omniscience” (Research Talk)
  • February 25, 6PM
  • Fenton 105
• “Two Branches of Wisdom” (Intro Talk)
  • February 26 @ 12PM
  • Fenton 105

Todd Long
California Polytechnic State University
(Ph.D., 2003, University of Rochester)

• “Assets of Mentalism Revealed by Super-Blooper Epistemic Design” (Research Talk)
  • March 25 @ 6PM
  • Fenton 105
• Intro-level Talk: TITLE TBA
  • March 26 @ 12 PM
  • Fenton 105

Richard Brown
La Guardia College, CUNY
(PhD, 2008, Graduate Center, CUNY)

• “Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness and the Phenomenology of Belief” (Research Talk)
  • April 29 @ 6PM
  • Fenton 105
• “Zombies, Super-Scientists, and the Metaphysics of Consciousness” (Intro Talk)
  • April 30 @ 12PM
  • Fenton 105