Situationism, Honesty, and the Folk

This project aims at finding a widespread folk theory of honesty in order to construct an accurate account of the philosophical nature of honesty as a character trait. Our research process involves gathering responses from the folk, then combining and interpreting the responses. Our broad goal is to discover a solid case for the existence of character traits that can be used against the recent situationist attacks being seen in psychology. Proponents of situationism reject the existence of broad character traits, arguing that behaviour is driven by situational factors and that humans posess no significant character traits at all (Harmon, 1999, 2000 and Doris 1998, 2002). Research in psychology has been used to support situationism, but skepticism arises about the interpretation of study results. For example, Kamtekar notes that “[I]t is noteworthy that the experiments appealed by situationists for the most part assume that subjects share the experimenter’s construal of the situation” (2004, p. 471). Our research aims to provide a single, agreed-upon basis for evaluating action in terms of character traits

Experimental Philosophy--An Emerging Discipline

This poster will explain the nature of a newly emerging field in philosophy called experimental philosophy (“X-phi”) and its presence on Boise State’s campus. BSU’s X-phi group operates via gathering data from “everyday” people, sorting and statistically analyzing the data, then reviewing trends identified people’s intuitions about certain concepts (e.g. know-how, intentional action, moral correctness, etc.). We are exploring the concept of Honesty—a concept that has, to date, not been adequately analyzed. To distinguish theories developed as a result of this research, X-phi employs the term “folk theory”, literally referring to the theory that the majority of people are found to hold. It’s then interdisciplinarily informative determine where these folk theories match up, or fail to, with existing philosophical theories. X-phi is still establishing itself in the greater academic community, but is proving its worth; philosopher and professor at Tufts University, Daniel Dennett, acknowledges in a recently published book review that “some of the work has yielded interesting results that certainly defy complacent assumptions common among philosophers.” BSU’s X-Phi group has been active on campus for two years; this poster will report the group’s evolution, current work, and explain what X-Phi is in general

The Seventeenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Complete Release of MaNGA, MaStar and APOGEE-2 Data

This paper documents the seventeenth data release (DR17) from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys; the fifth and final release from the fourth phase (SDSS-IV). DR17 contains the complete release of the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey, which reached its goal of surveying over 10,000 nearby galaxies. The complete release of the MaNGA Stellar Library (MaStar) accompanies this data, providing observations of almost 30,000 stars through the MaNGA instrument during bright time. DR17 also contains the complete release of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment 2 (APOGEE-2) survey which publicly releases infra-red spectra of over 650,000 stars. The main sample from the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), as well as the sub-survey Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) data were fully released in DR16. New single-fiber optical spectroscopy released in DR17 is from the SPectroscipic IDentification of ERosita Survey (SPIDERS) sub-survey and the eBOSS-RM program. Along with the primary data sets, DR17 includes 25 new or updated Value Added Catalogs (VACs). This paper concludes the release of SDSS-IV survey data. SDSS continues into its fifth phase with observations already underway for the Milky Way Mapper (MWM), Local Volume Mapper (LVM) and Black Hole Mapper (BHM) surveys