New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Weekly Philo of Economics: when Larry Summers was just an Imperialist Economist and a footnote to Derrida

Before "Larry Summers" became synonymous with expert for hire by Wall Street, he was the Harvard President, who suggested, while claiming that he wished to "provoke,"  that "there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude," that might explain the relatively low presence of women "in high-end scientific professions." Summers insisted that his is an "entirely positive" not "normative approach." (Summer 2005; he is deploying a standard distinction among economists.) The lecture set off a furore that contributed to his eventual resignation from Harvard (it surely did not help he was in charge of a nearly US$ 1 Billion loss on speculative investments). But...before his notoriety Summers was one of those economists that effortlessly move between academia and government (while generally serving the interests of the wealthy). Such folk become prominent within public policy economics through highly regarded academic work, which won Summers the John Bates Clark Medal (1993) and which partially accounted for his selection as Chief economist at The World Bank (1991-3). As the politically influential, but nevertheless academic Vice-President of the World Bank,  Summers was invited to Pakistan to give The Quaid-i-Azam Lecture in 1992, "Investing in All the People," to the Pakistan Society of Development Economists. The main point of Summers' lecture, which has been cited close to 300 times and is easily found on the internet, is:

Investing in the education of girls may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world. As such, increasing the level of female education is an especially high priority in Pakistan.

So, before Summers became synonymous with sexism in academia he was an advocate of underprivileged women's education. (A topic Summers continues to talk about.) The paper was admiringly profiled in Business Week, and created the meme of Summers as "iconoclastic Liberal." For those that like their irony fully symmetric, I note that the 1992 magazine article treats Summers as an academic "provocateur." Summers' Pakistani hosts asked a mathematical economist hailing from Waziristan, MA Khan (then as now at Johns Hopkins), to offer comments (see here). Rather than dazzle his famous American colleague and "the Pakistani Minister of Defence and Minister of Water and Power" (quoted from Richard H. Sabot's response to Summers) with state of the art mathematical technique, Khan quotes Derrida and Clifford Geertz in the process of calling Summers "reckless."

Interview with Jesse Prinz

Here is an excellent interview with Jesse Prinz (H/T Markus Schlosser) on the themes of his new book, Beyond Human Nature (which I still haven’t gotten around to reading). The main idea of the book is that experience and culture, as opposed to genetic and biology, play a much larger role in determining our behavior than is often thought. Some excerpts:

“If we are interested in differences in intelligence, the thing we should be interested in is learning and culture.”

“Brazilians are super-nice.” 

I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything that Prinz says in the interview (including the bit about Brazilians…), which is not so surprising, given that, like him, I am very much of a ‘nurture-culture’ person on the nature-nurture dimension. (A bit of self-promotion: here is a recent paper of mine, "A dialogical account of deductive reasoning as a case study for how culture shapes cognition", forthcoming in the Journal of Cognition and Culture.)  But more importantly, to my mind he manages to set up the debate in a very subtle and informative way, so I very much recommend the interview to anyone interested in this debate. (Btw, I’ve posted on my enthusiasm for his work before.)

Will the web transform philosophical praxis? If so, how?

Let's stipulate an expansive notion of 'technology' such that (a) linguistic, mathematical, and logical developments also count as 'technology' and, thus, (b) a lot of philosophical breakthroughs are  preceded by technological ruptures. (Sometimes they redefine philosophy so much that we do not recognize the successor disciplines as "philosophy.") If so, is the web transforming or about to transform philosophical praxis? I use "praxis" to distinguish this question from the one about to what degree professional philosophy is being transformed by the web.

Let me first say what I do not mean with this question. The web *is* transforming philosophical scholarship by facilitating amazing storage & information retrieval (etc.) capacities. I used to spend huge amount of time in libraries (to look at old books and and to scan journals)--now I am genuinely surprised when I enter a library. There are regular on-line/skype seminars on papers, books, topics, etc. The web brings together distributed audiences previously unknown to each other. Blogs have created dedicated intellectual communities, and spawned philosophical movements and catapulted some echo-chambers to professional prominence. (We are probably living in a new golden age of philosophical correspondence--I bet Leibniz would have adored email.) Citation practices are being influenced by blog communities, phil papers, and google.scholar., etc. All of this is swell, but it does not challenge what we mean by "philosophy." (So here I am also ignoring all the exciting ways the web changes how we teach philosophy, and maybe I shouldn't.)

Suppes on neuroscience as foundations of mathematics

(OK, so it looks like I’m over-posting a bit today… Just one more!)

Between today and tomorrow, the workshop ‘Groundedness in Semantics and Beyond’ is taking place at MCMP in Munich, co-organized with the the ERC project Plurals, Predicates, and Paradox led by Øystein Linnebo. The workshop’s program seems excellent across the board, but the opening talk is what really caught my attention: Patrick Suppes on ‘A neuroscience perspective on the foundations of mathematics’. The abstract:

I mainly ask and partially answer three questions. First, what is a number? Second, how does the brain process numbers? Third, what are the brain processes by which mathematicians discover new theorems about numbers? Of course, these three questions generalize immediately to mathematical objects and processes of a more general nature. Typical examples are abstract groups, high dimensional spaces or probability structures. But my emphasis is not on these mathematical structures as such, but how we think about them. For the grounding of mathematics, I argue that understanding how we think about mathematics and discover new results is as important as foundations of mathematics in the traditional sense.

More on the virtue of collaboration

A few days ago, Berit posted on the virtue of philosophers collaborating with psychologists.  I've thought a bit about collaboration over the last 5-10 years, and I want to suggest some reasons why I think it is far more important than is generally recognized.

Why philosophers and psychologists should collaborate

We have witnessed a growing interest in experimental philosophy in recent years. The field that has commonly been referred to as "experimental philosophy" has so far been taken to include empirical tests of intuitions concerning philosophical concepts, such as knowledge and intentional action. There are lots of other areas of philosophy that rely on empirical data and even studies and experiments. Several years ago, it became slightly uncool to do philosophy of language in complete isolation from the empirical findings in linguistics. Many philosophers of language decided to conduct their own tests of certain word groups or word constructions. There are also several folks working in philosophy of mind who take empirical data in neuroscience and psychology seriously. Some of us also conduct our own studies in these areas.