The contributors: Knobe, Appiah, Maudlin, Williamson, Leiter, and Sosa.
The blurbs presumably meant to summarize their contributions:
Knobe: “What we are seeing is a growing willingness to just ignore the whole distinction between philosophy and psychology.”
Appiah: “The idea that philosophy has one distinctive method — phenomenological reflection, conceptual analysis, or what you will — simply excludes too much.”
Maudlin: “Philosophy departments will continue to be the places where the desire for pure understanding takes precedence over everything else.”
Williamson: “Philosophy has most to contribute to the pursuit of truth by refining its own distinctive methods, not by imitating other disciplines.”
Leiter: “Philosophy remains the only humanistic discipline that really teaches students to think critically and analytically.”
Sosa: “In principle, experimental philosophy is a welcome development; in practice, its attack on traditional methods has been unconvincing.”
Sympoze just opened up to all of academia, not just philosophy. It’s a site that works like Digg (or reddit and other “social bookmarking” websites), but is just for academics. It’s still just getting going, but it could really thrive if people get registered and start using it. So spread the word!
The first one, obviously, is the one more likely to be frequently valuable to philosophers. I’m quite surprised I hadn’t previously heard that the SEP has an iPhone app! Click on the links to learn about the others (just cancel the iTunes pop-up if you just want to read about them in your browser).
In short, DeRose attempts to argue that the empirical results (including ones I’ve reported with some people) don’t undermine the ordinary language basis for contextualism. A nice discussion is ensuing on the blog.
