Very nice overview of the neuroscience of memories over at Scientific American. Scientific American has significantly improved its magazine the past year or two. It's nearly as good as it was back in the 80's. New Scientist, on the other hand, has been getting annoyingly sensationalist. I'd stopped reading Scientific American back in the early 90's precisely because it had gotten too sensationalist. It had also gotten quite political. Then it tried to branch out more towards general readers rather than those with at least some limited science background. (i.e. college freshman targeted articles summarizing various areas of research) In the late 90's Scientific American started mimicking New Scientist (IMO) with disastrous results. However I'm very pleased with the last while. Further their website, while very cluttered and busy, has a lot of good content. I'm seriously thinking of resubscribing.
Getting back to memory, I should also add that Stanford Encylcopedia of Philosophy has some excellent must-read articles on memory. The first is a fairly general discussion of the philosophy of memory. The more interesting one is the article on epistemological problems of memory. It's a very interesting article that I've meant to blog on for several weeks now. It's especially interesting to religiously inclined philosophers since there often are interesting parallels and analogies between memory and revelation. A lot of reliabilists make such connections, although as I've mentioned before I find reliabilism problematic for a wide variety of reasons. (Interestingly Dennis Potter has recanted his reliabilist tendencies, feeling that they undercut the entire epistemological project. Although I think he goes too far when he rejects externalism entirely)
Hopefully I'll get this week to a few thoughts on the externalism - internalism deabte. (Although it is such a wide ranging debate I doubt anyone has read close to all the literature on it - I certainly haven't come close) I really want to write up something on memory and revelation as a well. However I also wish to avoid the problems that I think reliabilism and related movements bring one. As apologetics I simply don't find Plantinga or Alston terribly convincing here.
Sorry, no philosophical insights here, just a comment on Scientific American...
One of the things I had always liked about SA was that the articles were by the practicing scientists, not journalist hacks. I was a little disappointed when they started including more major articles by the journalists, and I unsubscribed. But I ended up missing it, and dropped a hint for a subscription this past Christmas (and got it). I've made my peace with the journalists' presence, and even liked one of their articles in the first issue I got.
To be fair, one downside to articles by the practictioners is that they can be one-sided and even idiosyncratic. I could notice this in my field of expertise, and was left wondering how often this was the case in other fields where I don't know enough to know the difference. So one good thing about the journalists' articles is that you can potentially get a more balanced view, even if it is a step away from the experts themselves.
I think a lot of it depends upon the quality of the journalists as well. The main problem with "regular" media is that they typically assign journalists with no background on science to cover scientific matters. That combined with the ever present quest for sensationalism means that most journalism gets science issues horribly wrong. I give New Scientist a hard time, but they're still head an shoulders better than what you read in most papers or hear on TV.
Still you are right. Having some of the top experts in a field write up a summary was always great. I still have some books from Scientific American on physics which are just reprints of articles on particle physics and the quest for GUTs back in the 80's. I also had some on the then breakout discoveries in genetic research that we now take for granted. What was so nice is that the articles didn't talk down to readers. They were great for eager high school students or freshmen. It's sad they don't have more of that. However as I said, they are getting better.
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Blogged by Clark Goble