New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Dennett, Deepities, and Rowan Williams

[This is a guest-post by Michael Kremer.--ES]

Brian Leiter comments in typical acerbic style on an excerpt in the Guardian from Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, titled “Daniel Dennett’s Seven Tools for Thinking:”  “A curious list; not clear Dennett has always honored all of them!” 

What Leiter doesn’t notice, though, is that Dennett violates one of his principles in explaining another! Dennett's last tool is “beware of deepities.” He explains a deepity as

“a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.”

Dennett then offers two examples. The first is the claim that “love is just a word.” The second, he says, is not “quite so easily analyzed:” “Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as ‘a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.” Dennett concludes “I leave the analysis of this as an exercise for you.”

Presenter tips for making accessible presentations

This is a guest-post by Teresa Blankmeyer Burke.

Scaliger’s helpful post about making APA presentations visually accessible and appealing reminds me there are also things philosophers can do to make their presentations more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing audience members. Odds are good that at least a few audience members will have hearing loss -- according to the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, fifteen percent of adults between the ages of 20 and 69 have hearing loss, and this percentage increases with age.  Most of these people rely on residual hearing (amplified or unamplified) and visual cues. This post is focused on making talks more accessible to that population – I’m planning another post on accessibility for those working with sign language interpreters and CART (captioning).

Guest post by Lori Gruen on renewal of maternal deprivation research at Madison

 A few days ago Eric linked to a report by Lori Gruen (Ethics and Animals blog here; Wesleyan University website here) on the renewal of cruel maternal deprivation research on primates. The comments on Eric's post were such that we asked Lori to write a guest post for us. She graciously agreed; the post follows: [UPDATED 1:40 pm 16 Oct. See below for contact info for Madison's Provost.]

PAINFUL SCIENTIFIC FOOLISHNESS

“Major steps in scientific progress are sometimes followed closely by outbursts of foolishness. New discoveries have a way of exciting the imagination of the well-meaning and misguided, who see theoretical potentialities in new knowledge that may prove impossible to attain.” – Dr. Sherwin Nuland, Yale School of Medicine

Does the system we have in place to curtail scientific “outbursts of foolishness” and protect research subjects from “misguided” scientific curiosity work?

There was no oversight system in place back in the days when Harry Harlow’s experiments psychologically tormenting baby monkeys were making news.  Surely that sort of horrible work in which infant primates are taken from their mothers to make them crazy wouldn’t be approved of today. On my recent visit to the University of Wisconsin I was shocked to learn otherwise.  The oversight committee chairs told me they have never rejected a proposal.  Not one. 

And one of the protocols they did not reject is a renewal of maternal deprivation research. Disturbingly, it has been approved by not one, but two oversight committees.  A psychiatry professor who has a distinguished record of research on anxiety disorders plans to separate more monkey babies from their mothers, leave them with wire “surrogates” covered in cloth (a practice developed by Harlow) to emulate “adverse early rearing conditions,” then pair them with another maternally deprived infant after 3-6 weeks of being alone.  The infants will then be exposed to fearful conditions.  The monkeys in this group and another group of young monkeys who will be reared with their mothers, will then be killed and their brains examined. (The experimental protocol is here.)