OLDaily

Wilfrid Sellars, sensory experience and the ‘Myth of the Given’
Nate Sheff, Psyche, 2021/03/17

I've never really agreed with Wilfrid Sellars, though he definitely gives readers things to think about. This article lays out nicely his argument concerning the 'myrh of the given'. From my perspective, all the work is done in the opening moves, where Sellars distinguishes between reading a sign in nature, like the rings of a tree, say, and a piece of text, like a sentence. Unlike the tree rings, he argues, human sentences can be misleading and mistaken. The problem with empiricists (like me), Sellars says, is that they want to say "sensory experiences themselves are meaningful like tree rings and meaningful like a sentence. And that, for Sellars, is a serious confusion." I agree. You can't give tree rings the properties of sentences. But (unlike most of Sellars's opponents) I argue that you can't give sentences the properties of sentences. That is to say, to me, when we say a sentence is 'true' or 'misleading'; or even 'self-contradictory', we are not saying something about the sentence, but rather (just like the tree rings) we're saying something about our interpretation of the sentence.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Imposters and Impersonators in Preprints: How do we trust authors in Open Science?
Leslie D. McIntosh, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2021/03/17

I didn't think this was really a problem in open publishing, but I guess if catfishing is a thing in dating sites, it can be a thing in publishing. But without establishing that it actually is a problem (which this article does not do) I'm not sure if it makes sense to invest in a system that makes sure only 'credentialed' authors are able to publish in scientific journals. And while the author sketches some scenarios where the question of trust in authorship is raised, I think the bigger problem is and has been on the other side of the ledger: fraudulent and predatory journals.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Teach Kids to ‘Read’ the Images They See
Frank Baker, Middleweb, 2021/03/17

I like this post for a number of reasons. For one thing, I think it's useful to think of 'reading' a photograph. Partially, this is the idea of developing visual literacy, and partially, this is the idea that anything we experience, even those things we seem to directly experience, are subject to interpretation, which is in many ways a process of reading. I also like the way the topic is presented such that students can't rely on depending on the source or authority of the image; they have to consider the image on its own, without context. This is important partially because it commends a sceptical attitude, and partially because many sources, even respected journalists, are not above manipulating photos, either by staging them before the shot, or editing it after.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API
Liam Wyatt, WikiMedia Foundation, 2021/03/17

Sure, everybody can access Wikipedia for free. But if you pay them money, you can get better access. That seems to be the message of this post. "The new product will standardize our data feeds for faster, more effective updates and make our content more easily machine-readable for a fee to customers who chose to use it." They argue, "what many of the largest commercial technology organizations require in order to effectively utilize Wikimedia content goes beyond what we currently provide." I also get the feeling they're trying to walk a fine line. It's true that if you offer a free service to commercial enterprises, they'll never be satisfied with that, but will keep asking for more. They're trying to address this while ensuring that Wikipedia remains free for everyone. But how long will it be before the commercial offerings - like the Wikipedia boxes in search engine results pages - are the only way we can access Wikipedia?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

GraphQL Reference Guide: Building Flexible and Understandable APIs
Daniel Bryant, InfoQ, 2021/03/17

The more time I spent messing around with APIs for learning technologies, the more I appreciate the need for a common approach like GraphQL, which "is both an open source query language for an API and a server-side runtime for executing queries. It enables the use of a type system that developers define for their data." The image this article provides is particularly useful in making the concept clear, showing a request for a number of posts with a certian number of properties and also desired relationships such as 'author' and 'company'.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Online Education as a Discipline
Steve McCarty, Academia Letters, 2021/03/17

This short paper characterizes online education as an academic discipline as "a pan-disciplinary set of meta-skills and knowledge beyond subject matter expertise, an auxiliary discipline now needed by educators and researchers in most fields worldwide." It draws on the author's experience in the "online education field for over 25 years as an academic in Japan." Note that this paper is in Academia.com, which really wants you to login, but can be viewed without login simply by scrolling down through the page (note the faint grey text 'Read Paper'. Image: OpenLearn.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]