Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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  1. Justin Fisher's avatar

    To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…

  2. Mark's avatar

    Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…

  3. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  4. Keith Douglas's avatar

    Cyber security professional here -reliably determining when a computational artifact (file, etc.) was created is *hard*. This is sorta why…

  5. sahpa's avatar

    Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.

  6. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  7. Mark's avatar

‘Why is philosophy important?’

An interesting set of contributions, some by well-known philosophers, over at Weinberg's blog.  I didn't read them all by any means, but in skimming I didn't see anyone consider the possibility that philosophy is not important, but perhaps pathological.  While I'm sympathetic to Nietzche's view, I do think philosophical training serves a valuable purpose:  it is training in what I've called discursive hygiene, i.e., in being able to reason and think carefully and, to a lesser extent, argue (philosophy pays too little attention to rhetoric ever since Plato's successful defamation of the Sophists, so it is not as helpful in teaching argument as it might be).

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