Peter Ludlow | |
|---|---|
 Ludlow in 2005 | |
| Born | (1957-01-16)January 16, 1957 (age 68) |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral advisor | Charles Parsons |
Main interests | Philosophy of language,philosophy of linguistics,epistemology, conceptual issues in virtual worlds |
Notable ideas | Implicit comparison classes, the dynamic lexicon, externalism about logical form, Ψ-language, tensism, microlanguages |
Peter Ludlow (/ˈlʌdloʊ/; born January 16, 1957), who also writes under the pseudonymsUrizenus Sklar andEJ Spode, is an Americanphilosopher. He is noted for interdisciplinary work on the interface of linguistics and philosophy—in particular on the philosophical foundations ofNoam Chomsky's theory ofgenerative linguistics and on the foundations of the theory of meaning in linguisticsemantics. He has worked on the application of analytic philosophy of language to topics inepistemology,metaphysics, andlogic, among other areas.
Ludlow has also established a research program outside of philosophy and linguistics. Here, his research areas include conceptual issues incyberspace, particularly questions aboutcyber-rights and the emergence of laws and governance structures in and forvirtual communities, includingonline games, and as such he is also noted for influential contributions tolegal informatics. In recent years Ludlow has written nonacademic essays onhacktivist culture and related phenomena such asWikiLeaks and the conceptual limits of blockchain technologies. Most recently he has argued that blockchain-based communities will be the new organizing technologies for human governance, replacing the 400 year oldWestphalian system of the nation state.[1]
Ludlow has also written literature and poetry under various pseudonyms, most frequently under the name EJ Spode, which he has used to experiment with various forms of dialect prose and poetry and a genre of literature that he has called Hysterical Surrealism.[2]
Ludlow has taught as a professor of philosophy at theState University of New York at Stony Brook, theUniversity of Michigan, theUniversity of Toronto andNorthwestern University. He is currentlyDirector of the Research Institute for Philosophy and Technology (iRIFT.net) – an international research institution seeking to increase communication between philosophy and accelerated technologies.
Ludlow received his B.A. in 1979 fromBethel College. He received his PhD in philosophy fromColumbia University in 1985 under the direction ofCharles Parsons, but also studied withNoam Chomsky andJames Higginbotham atMIT. He worked for a year on projects related to natural language processing as an engineer atHoneywell from 1985 to 1986.
From 1987 to 2002 he worked at theState University of New York at Stony Brook Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor and from 1994 as an associate professor. He was a professor of philosophy at theUniversity of Michigan from 2002 to 2007, a professor of philosophy at theUniversity of Toronto from 2007 to 2008 and a professor of philosophy at theNorthwestern University from 2008 to 2015. From 2011 he was alsoJohn Evans Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University.[3]
He has been a visiting fellow at theCa' Foscari University of Venice in 1993, 1995 and 1997–1998, when he held a Fulbright distinguished chair. He has also been a visiting fellow atKing's College London in 1997 and a visiting professor at theRutgers University Center for Cognitive Science in 2012, where he taught a course onhacktivism. He has also held visiting positions at several other universities in the United States and Europe.
Ludlow's work ingenerative linguistics has revolved around three basic themes. The first theme is that generative linguistics at its best is concerned withunderstanding andexplanation, and not just withobservation anddata gathering. To this end, generative linguistics is interested in underlying mechanisms that give rise to language relatedphenomena, and this interest will often trump the goal of accumulating more data.
The second theme is what he calls the "Ψ-language hypothesis". It is the hypothesis that the underlying mechanisms (the more basic elements) posited by generative linguists are fundamentally psychological mechanisms and that generative linguistics is a branch ofcognitive psychology, but againstNoam Chomsky'sI-Language hypothesis Ludlow argues that it doesn't follow that cognitive psychology must therefore be interested inmental states individuated solely by what happens inside the language user's head. It is consistent with the Ψ-language hypothesis that psychological states (and indeed syntactic states) are individuated in part by the embedding environment.
The third theme is what Ludlow calls the principle of "methodological minimalism". It is the thesis that best theory criteria likesimplicity andformal rigor cannot be given theory neutral definitions, and thus must really come down to one thing: seek methods that help linguists to do their jobs with the minimum of cognitive labor.
Ludlow's earliest work insemantics was an attempt to combine work in the theory ofmeaning with contemporary work in generative linguistics, but using resources that are moreparsimonious than those typically used in semantic theory—for example without using thehigher-order functions andintensional objects deployed inMontague grammar. The resources were largely limited to primitives liketruth andreference to individuals.
His subsequent work has explored ways of formalizing alternative approaches to semantic theory—including the possibility offormalizing aWittgensteinian use theory orexpressivist semantics for natural language, which is to say a theory in which the building blocks of a semantic theory are expressions ofattitudes rather than primitives like truth and reference.[4]
Ludlow's PhD dissertation defended a proposal dating back to the medieval logicianJean Buridan, and revived byW.V.O. Quine in philosophy andJames McCawley in linguistics, according to which so-called "intensional transitive verbs" like "seek" and "want" are reallypropositional attitudes in disguise. He has subsequently developed these ideas in collaboration with the linguists Richard Larson and Marcel den Dikken.
Ludlow's paper with the semanticist Richard Larson, "Interpreted Logical Forms", advocated a quasi-sententialist view of propositional attitude verbs (a view that has been criticized byScott Soames in Chapter 7 of his bookBeyond Rigidity). Ludlow's response to Soames involves the idea thatpropositional attitude reports are not supposed to correspond to some fact about what is going on inside the agent's head but rather are created by a speaker S, for the benefit of a hearer H, to help H form some theory about the agent being reported on. Crucial to this account is the idea that thelexicon is dynamic and that speakers engaged in conversation will negotiate the coinage of terms "on the fly" in constructing attitude reports.[5]
Ludlow's work on interpreted logical forms has led to the development of a view oflinguistic meaning according to which meaning shifts are much more common than intuition suggests. He rejects the "common coin" view of word meaning, and argues that word meanings are negotiated on the fly as conversational partners build little microlanguages together. These ideas have subsequently been applied to controversies in epistemology (see below).
In his article "Implicit Comparison Classes"[6] Ludlow argues for thesyntactic reality of comparison class variables in adjectival constructions. That is, when one says "the elephant is small", there is an implicit variable for the comparison class (in this case elephants, as in "small for an elephant"), and that variable is represented by the language faculty. That work was influential in subsequent work on the context sensitivity of language byJason Stanley and Zoltán Gendler Szabó, and has played a role in debates aboutcontextualism in contemporaryepistemology.
Recent work inepistemology has pushed back againstskepticism by arguing that knowledge attributions are context sensitive—our standards of knowledge vary from context to context. So, while in a philosophy class I may not know I have hands, in other contexts (for example, chatting in a bar) I do. Ludlow initially argued that there were implicit argument positions for standards of knowledge.[7] In response to criticism fromJason Stanley in his book "Knowledge and Practical Interests", Ludlow has advanced a doctrine that he calls "Cheap Contextualism".[8] The idea is that on the dynamic lexicon view, shifts in word meaning are ubiquitous, and the meaning of the term "know" is not an exception. Contextualism in epistemology is just a consequence of these garden variety shifts in meaning.
Ludlow has written a series of papers on thelogical form ofdeterminers (words like "all", "some", and "no") and has pursued the idea that their most interesting properties can be given purely formal or syntactic accounts. The work borrows from one of the central ideas ofmedieval logic—the hypothesis that all the key logical inferences can be reduced down to just two basic inferences that are sensitive to whether the syntactic environment wasdictum de omni or dictum de nullo—classical notions that are basically equivalent to the contemporary notions of upward anddownward entailing environments. To explain, in an upward entailing (de omni) environment a superset can be substituted for any set. In a downward entailing environment a subset may be substituted for a set. Ludlow revives the medieval project by combining it with the descriptive tools of contemporary Chomskyan linguistics and recent technical work informal logic.
Ludlow's first book,Semantics, Tense, and Time, was devoted to arguing thatpresentism, a metaphysical thesis that denies the reality of past and future events, is consistent with the intuitive truth of much of our tensed discourse. More recently, he has argued that while tense is an ineliminable feature of reality, the resulting position (called "tensism") does not force us to be presentists. He has extended this basic idea to argue that perspectival properties (properties that are not universal, but rather are tied to a person’s perspectival point of view) are ubiquitous and ineliminable, both from physics and from our attempts to explain human action and emotion. More radically, hehas argued that even the theories of information and computation traffic in perspectivalproperties.
Most of Ludlow's work on cyberculture has centered on the question of governance for virtual worlds and he has been critical of what he calls the "Greek god model" of virtual world governance. This is a model in which virtual world platform owners do not have coherent systematic policies to deal with in world disputes, but rather reach in and dabble as suits their dispositions at the moment. In an e-book entitled "Our Future in Virtual Worlds" Ludlow argues that as our lives continue to move online, the Greek god model becomes ever more dangerous. This critique has been extended to social networking platforms more generally.[9]
Ludlow foundedThe Alphaville Herald on October 23, 2003. It was the unofficial newspaper for the Alphaville server ofThe Sims Online, where Ludlow used the avatar Urizenus Sklar. Its stories uncovered in-game scams and cyber-prostitution, and highlightedElectronic Arts' indifference to the social problems in their game.
In a controversy, reported in theNew York Times[10] and elsewhere (including law journals[11]), Ludlow was kicked out ofThe Sims Online after some editorials criticized Electronic Arts Corporation for their failures at managing and policing the gamespace. The newspaper subsequently migrated to another virtual world,Second Life, in June 2004.
The Herald has been written about inWired[12] and theColumbia Journalism Review.[13] Ludlow (in the voice of Urizenus Sklar) is currently a contributing editor, while the avatar Pixeleen Mistral, revealed by Ludlow in 2010 to be Internet pioneerMark P. McCahill, is the newspaper's managing editor.
Ludlow and Mark Wallace wrote a book aboutThe Herald and its exploits calledThe Second Life Herald: the Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2007). The book received the American Association of Publishers, Professional/Scholarly Publishing award for "Best Book in Media and Cultural Studies, 2007", was named aChoice "Outstanding Academic Title, 2008", andLibrary Journal honored it as a "Top Sci-Tech Book, 2007," (they ranked it one of top 39 science books of 2007 and top book in category of Computer Science).
MTV.com has described Ludlow as the "Unwelcome Guest" in the "10 most influential video game players of all time" because of his chronicles about online video games. In particular MTV wrote thatEA revoked Ludlow's "online citizenship" inThe Sims Online, allegedly because the "offense was Ludlow's publication of aTSO-centric newspaper that chronicled creative and sometimes troublesome behavior of other gamers in the world, including allegations that under-age players were involved in virtual-sex-related activities. EA claimed Ludlow's newspaper violated the terms of service for playingTSO" and that Ludlow later similarly chronicled the gameSecond Life with hisThe Second Life Herald.[14]
Ludlow has been a highly prominent, and sometimes controversial, figure in severalvirtual worlds communities, especiallyThe Sims Online andSecond Life, since the early 2000s.[15] He has been accused byScott Jennings andCatherine Fitzpatrick of givinggriefers "his blessing" through his newspaper,The Alphaville Herald.[16] In response, Ludlow and Wallace argued in their book The Second Life Herald that merely reporting on griefer behavior is not the same as endorsing griefer behavior, and that it is better to report on such activities than to cover them up, which is why game companies aim to do.
Ludlow resigned from his position at Northwestern in November 2015 after a university Title IX Officer found that he violatedthe University’s Title IX policies.[17] Ludlow denied any wrongdoing and said the relationship was consensual, lasting three months.[18][19] Fellow Northwestern professorLaura Kipnis, famous for saying that “bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square,"[20] defended him after attending the University’s disciplinary hearings, stating that female university students should be responsible for their own decisions about whether to date a professor, and argued that "you have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens [...] and now they’re abusers of power."[21] In 2017 Laura Kipnis published the bookUnwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, discussing the Ludlow case in detail;[22][23] one of the students who brought the Title IX complaint against Ludlow has sued Kipnis for defamation based on the description in the book.[24] In March 2018, the district court denied the defendants' motion to dismiss the student's lawsuit.[25] The lawsuit against Kipnis has been resolved, and as Kipnis responded on the Leiter Reports blog, "In case there’s any confusion,Unwanted Advances remains in print and I stand by everything in the book."[26]
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| Preceded by | John Evans Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy atNorthwestern University 2011–2015 | Succeeded by |
