Nat Hansen

A still from Whit Stillman's movie Metropolitan (1990). Rick von Sloneker and Cynthia are sitting on a couch in a parlor room. Rick is saying "You really take that sort of thing seriously? I can't" in response to someone saying that the debutante season is almost over.

Here's round 3 in my and Zed's argument with @nickriggle.bsky.social over how to understand aesthetic conversation: philpapers.org/rec/HANTVI-3
In this round, we make the case for "seriousness" in aesthetic judgment and take some jabs at vibing, communitarianism & the "omnivore monoculture".

This is just another way of saying that I love mixed methods work, I guess. Archival research? Yes! Data collection? Yes! Quantitative analysis? Yes! Close reading? Yes! Case studies? Yes! Theoretical speculation? Yes! Let’s do it all why not

Twin peaks: The Return

So cool!—will there be a U.K. book tour?

This looks like a fascinating study both of what gentrification is and also of the stakes of expanding the meaning of political terms!

Looks super cool, thanks for turning on the conceptual inflation alarm!

This is a fantastic paper!

To celebrate the launch of the xphi-journal and kick-off our talk series, we are happy to invite everyone to this talk by Edouard Machery.

ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/6780355881...

I really enjoyed this paper!

Reposting this convo with @xphilosopher.bsky.social about some evidence from conversations with participants that fits with the "truthfulness" finding in the recent Zyglewicz, Reuter, and Mandelbaum paper:

Yeah! It's cool to see more substantial evidence that fits with our impressionistic findings about people responding to other factors besides narrow truth/falsity.

And here are some other "truthfulness"-like responses that people gave:

Here's a snippet of that kind of response from a chat:

When we asked people to explain their TVJs about Travis color scenarios, a fair number of people said things that suggest they are thinking about truthfulness. E.g.: some people say that the subject of the scenario doesn't know that his walls are made of white plaster, when that is not specified.

This paper is super cool, very glad to see it forthcoming! I got to chat with @ericman.bsky.social a bit about it over chicken rolls last week—I think some of the qualitative evidence in our "Socratic Questionnaires" paper fits with the paper's idea that the TVJ task is a measure of "truthfulness".

Beautiful experimental philosophy paper on what people ordinarily mean when they say that a statement is “true”

Turns out it’s not always about corresponding correctly to the facts. Sometimes it’s more closely related to a moral ideal of “truthfulness”

philarchive.org/archive/ZYGTJN

Hey @liao.shen-yi.org here's another new journal for your diamond open access file

It's a pleasure to argue aesthetics with @nickriggle.bsky.social!

Congrats—really glad to see this is out!

Thank you Edouard! It was inspired by your guys' excellent paper.

Even with pretty extensive interventions (nearly hour long scripted conversations with participants where they were asked to explain their responses and consider disagreement) we also found it hard to find any effect: academic.oup.com/book/57562/c...

For people who like spicy

John Haugeland saying “computers don’t give a Damn” in his article understanding natural language

Haugeland, “Understanding Natural Language”! (1979)

www.jstor.org/stable/20256...

Kramnick also attributes a dubious virtue to the method of close reading as he understands it: unlike the human sciences that have suffered from a replica- tion crisis in the twenty-first century, the work of liter- ary studies is not replicable, ‘because there is no result independent of perspective that could be replicated’ (p. 91). But the idea that the sciences produce results or run replicable experiments that are ‘independent of perspective’ is a myth. No two experiments are

conducted in exactly the same conditions; participants differ, time has gone by , the mode of presentation of the experimental materials changes. The philosopher of science Edouard Machery has argued that the notion of a replication itself has so far not been well under- stood, and that the right way to think of replications is as ‘resampling the … components of an experiment’ (Machery 2020: 547). In a ‘direct’ replication of an ex- periment using humans as participants, only partici- pants are resampled (different people encounter the same materials in the same experimental design), but experimental materials themselves can be resampled in the same way: you could give participants relevantly similar prompts to make sure they are not just respond- ing to idiosyncratic features of the original experimen- tal materials, for example. Understood in that way, replication is possible in criticism. The art historian Michael Baxandall says that his explanations of what is happening in paintings should be repeatable and open to testing by other people in the sense that if his explanation ‘does not prompt other people to a sharper sense of the pictorial cogency of Chardin’s A Lady T aking T ea, then it fails: I reported an experiment and it has been found not repeatable’ (Baxandall 1985: 137). The idea of the replicability of critical judge- ments by other judges is part of the venerable philo- sophical idea that aesthetic judgement aims at agreement. For example, Cavell says that the vindica- tion of a critic’s judgements can only come from get- ting the audience to see, hear, or taste what they find in the object being judged (Cavell 1976: 87). Contrary to Kramnick’s claim, not only can you repeat someone else’s reading of an object, but you need to, to see if it rings true (p. 24).

In particular, I'm interested in his view that unlike the sciences, replication is not possible in the humanities. In my review, I give some reasons in favor of thinking it is possible. (I've screenshotted the relevant bits).

Cover image of British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 65, Number 4, October 2025.

I'm interested in different methodologies in the humanities, so I wrote a review of Jonathan Kramnick's *Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies* for the British Journal of Aesthetics, which is now in an issue:

philpapers.org/archive/HANC...

I agree! And sometimes you have more freedom to write a proper essay as a book review than in a peer-reviewed article.

The journal "Experimental

Please share!

I think the best feature of Bluesky is the option of non-black-box algorithmic feeds. I haven't built a useful one but others have. So I want to share three that I use the most.

First, Philosophy Papers by @catsaintcroix.bsky.social . Does it what it says.

bsky.app/profile/cats...

Experimental philosophers: what do we do with this?