New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Weekly Philo of Economics: Central Banking with materially flawed models

The idea that there is something like an efficient market in scientific ideas (EMISI), supporting a ruling 'paradigm,' is very dangerous in the policy sciences. Even if we assume that scientists are individually pure truth-seekers, imperfections in scientific markets can produce non-epistemic (and epistemic) externalities (recall here, including criticism of a famous paper by Aumann). EMISI provides cover for 'The Everybody Did It' (TEDI) Syndrome (recall here). With Merel Lefevere, I have been exploring in what circumstances the presence of TEDI Syndrome is indicative of collective negligence (or a negative externalities). One possible consequence of our approach is that those scientists/institutions that interface with policy should seek out  critics and critical alternatives to the existing paradigm. Jon Faust, an economist, sometimes acts as such an in-house critic at the United States Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the Riksbank. Two of his relatively non-technical papers (here and here) prompted this post.

Central Banks rely, in part, on models developed by academic economists to set monetary policy. Yet, Faust notes two problems in the way the intellectual supply-chain works: (i) there is almost no venue for "high-level conversation" about "academic work and its relation to actual practice." (53) (ii) State of the art models are often applied without full knowledge of all their possible consequences in the real world because these models models "have substantial areas of omission and coarse approximation" (55)  In light of (i) and (ii), Faust's aim (iii) is to help central bankers and the modellers develop "a formal literature on best methods and practices for using materially flawed models in practical policymaking," (55) or "how to make the most responsible use in policymaking of what we now know." (60) My first reaction was, 'it is about time;' my second, more generous response was warmth in my philosophical heart that Faust is engaging in philosophy of scientific methodology and non-ideal regime/institution construction. His main idea is to adapt a kind of policy protocol from a literature that "goes under names like “human relevance of animal studies” and “interspecies extrapolation” (57) in the practice(s) of Toxicology.

History and Philosophy of Biology Resources webpage

For some years now, I've been maintaining a webpage of internet resources that aims to be useful to historians and philosophers of biology; it originally began as a page just for myself and grew over time.  Although it has been public for a long time, and linked to from places like Wikipedia's philosophy of biology page, it occured to me that some who might be interested don't know about the page.  So, at John Protevi's suggestion, I am linking to it here (continuing a series of NewAPPS posts calling attention to web resources useful for philosophers; see, e.g., here and here).  

If you find it useful, please feel free to share with students and colleagues. And if you see things that are missing or mistaken, please let me know. I am happy to make additions and corrections. Apologies in advance if I have overlooked your page of publicly available HPB articles or other important internet source for HPBers.

But mainly, having put in the effort to maintain it, I'd love to know that others besides myself are using it!

DeLanda's doubled difference of Deleuze

Manuel DeLanda published his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy a little more than ten years ago. The book influenced me greatly at the time, and still does. Here's a slightly revised and expanded version of a review of it I did way back in 2003 in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Here's the hook: 

DeLanda provides a doubled difference, a differentiation and differenciation, of Deleuze. While DeLanda certainly provides a straightforward explanation of the process Deleuze calls counter-actualization (moving from the actual to the virtual), he does so not by an interpretation of Deleuze’s full philosophical output, but by a reconstruction of the ontology and epistemology of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense: ‘This line of argumentation ... is, in fact, not Deleuze’s own, although it follows directly from his ontological analysis’ (39). As DeLanda puts it: Deleuze’s world rather than his words. But this folds Deleuze back on himself, giving us a virtualization of Deleuze, moving from the actual productions of Deleuze (his books) to the differentiated structures of his production process (the network of his concepts) in order to produce a new, divergent, differenciation (DeLanda’s book). By virtue of being a book on Deleuze, of course, this product has itself the all-important fold of explaining the structures of all processes (or more precisely, explaining that all processes are structured, and that the structure of the realm of those structures, the virtual, can itself by explicated).

And here's an outline of ISVP I did for a course I taught back then.

Spinoza vs Jonathan Schaffer [Open vs Closed Systems.]

In a forthcoming paper (I heard a version of it here), Jonathan Schaffer offers the following argument:

1. Leibnizian substance: Something is a substance if and only if it evolves by the fundamental laws
2. Russellian laws: The cosmos is the one and only thing that evolves by the fundamental laws
3. Spinozan monism: The cosmos is the one and only substance (from 1 and 2)

As Schaffer is well aware, there is lots of irony in all of this. (At NewAPPS we have discussed Russell's reservations about Spinoza several times here, here, and also Jeff. [Recall also Russell's debts to Boole on Clarke vs Spinoza; and Stebbing on Spinoza.]) Now, my objection to this argument is inspired by my reading of Spinoza's so-called "Letter on the Infinite," but what follows is not meant to be a historical argument (or a gotcha, 'you got the history wrong' moment). Recall that I read Spinoza as claming that characterizing and grasping substance as such does not involve our ordinary scientific 'utensils' (e.g., measures, mathematics, laws of nature), but rather concepts like essence and eternity. Mathematical physics can only give a partial view of substance as such. Now one reason for this is that mathematical physics of Spinoza's day, treats some part of nature as a closed system (governed by its own 'conservation' rules/laws). Moreover, Spinoza would deny that  fundamentally the universe evolves. For, applying temporal concepts to the universe is, however useful it may be, always a less than fully adequate conceptualization of the universe.

Can Teleology Supplement Physics?

In an earlier post, I began to write about John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan’s analysis of teleological causation. (Eric has written about related topics too.) My aim there was primarily to summarize H&N’s analysis. Here I have some critical thoughts—I have only been thinking about this for a couple of weeks, so my opinions are far from final.  H&N ask two questions: Is teleology coherent? Is teleology consistent with contemporary physics? Can it be added on? In my opinion, their analysis demonstrates coherence. (That's not a very high bar, but they clear it with ease.) I am less clear about consistency with physics. 

Let’s start by considering the motion of a single particle. (I’ll consider ensembles of particles in a further post.) H&N distinguish three types of process (all more fully described in my earlier post): mechanical (for simplicity’s sake, Newtonian), retrotemporally mechanical (like Newton’s, but moving backward in time), and teleological or goal-directed. Since Newtonian trajectories are reversible—the temporal reversal of a trajectory is possible if the trajectory is possible—the paths of single particles do not distinguish between the first two options. If they are consistent with Newtonian mechanics, they are also consistent with time-reversed Newtonian mechanics. (See Eric Winsberg's comments on my earlier post.)

Now, Hawthorne and Nolan open the door to two ways of distinguishing goal-direction or teleological causation from both mechanical and retro-mechanical causation at the level of single particles.

Nagel and the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism

Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself...I agree with Alvin Plantinga that...the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of our own cognitive capacities should undermine, though it need not completely destroy, our confidence in them. Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole. I  think the evolutionary hypothesis would imply that though our cognitive capacities could be reliable, we do not have the kind of reason to rely on them that we ordinarily take ourselves to have using in them directly--as we do in science. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 27-28 (emphasis in original)

A non-trivial (albeit not the most fundamental) feature of Nagel's book (recall my here, here, here; see Feser's response to me and also Mohan's posts: here, here, here and here) is his reliance on Plantinga's so-called evolutionary argument against naturalism (hereafter EAAN; see also pp. 74-78). Let's leave aside the fact that Nagel pretends in his book that this (evolving) EAAN argument has not been subject to significant criticism. (It must be convenient to think that one is obliged to engage only with one's referee [Sober, although even his criticism of EAAN is ignored], one's colleague [Street], one's cheerleader [Plantinga], and one's deus ex machina [Hawthorne & Nolan].) Here I explore a response to this style of argument that is overlooked by Nagel and, I think, not explored in the literature (but would love to learn otherwise--it's not my field).  So, let's grant -- for the sake of argument -- the claim that "Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole." What follows from this?

My quick and dirty answer is: nothing. For the crucial parts of science really do not rely on such mechanisms of belief formation. Much of scientific reason is or can be performed by machines; as I have argued before, ordinary cognition, perception, and locution does not really matter epistemically in the sciences.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith's Third Invisible Hand.

Since an article by Macfie (1971), scholars have recognized that Smith uses the phrase “invisible hand” three times in his corpus; once in Wealth of Nations; once in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Recently the great, late Warren Samuels bequeathed us a lifetime of scholarship on the enormous variety of interpretations  that Smith’s “invisible hand” has generated. In this post I focus on the "third" use, which occurs in Smith's "History of Astronomy" -- one of the founding documents of the philosophy of science (and simultaneously the history of the philosophy of science) -- published posthumously in 1795.

Hence the origin of Polytheism, and of that vulgar superstition which ascribes all the irregular events of nature to the favour or displeasure of intelligent, though invisible beings, to gods, daemons, witches, genii, fairies. For it may be observed, that in all Polytheistic religions, among savages, as well as in the early ages of Heathen antiquity, it is the irregular events of nature only that are ascribed to the agency and power of their gods. Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter s ever apprehended to be employed in those matters. But thunder and lightning, storms and sunshine, those more irregular events, were ascribed to his favour, or his anger. Man, the only designing power with which they were acquainted, never acts but either to stop, or to alter the course, which natural events would take, if left to themselves. Those other intelligent beings, whom they imagined, but knew not, were naturally supposed to act in the same manner; not to employ themselves in supporting the ordinary course of things, which went on of its own accord, but to stop, to thwart, and to disturb it. And thus, in the first ages of the world, the lowest and most pusillanimous superstition supplied the place of philosophy.

Are we living in an age where the naturalistic consensus will be shattered?

At his blog Edward Feser has been responding to Thomas Nagel's critics (no, not me (yet)!). In response to Sober's review he concludes with the following sociological remark:

That, I think, is precisely what is going on -- the “presuppositions that Nagel is trying to transcend” run so deep in contemporary academic philosophical culture that it is difficult for most philosophers to get any critical distance on them.  They lack, as Nietzsche might have said, the courage for an attack on their own convictions.  And yet the evidence that there is something deeply wrong with the naturalistic consensus is all around them even in “mainstream” academic philosophy -- in the work of renegade naturalists like Nagel, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, et al.; dualists like Chalmers, Brie Gertler, Howard Robinson, John Foster, et al.; and neo-Aristotelians like the “new essentialist” metaphysicians and philosophers of science (Cartwright, Ellis, Martin, Heil, Mumford, et al.) and the analytical Thomists (Oderberg, Klima, Haldane, et al.).  It’s psychologically easy (even if philosophically sleazy) to dismiss one or two of these thinkers as outliers who needn’t be taken seriously.  But as their ranks slowly grow, it will be, and ought to be, harder both psychologically and philosophically to dismiss them.

Which is no doubt why the more ideological naturalists would very dearly like to strangle this growing challenge to the consensus while it is still in its crib -- hence the un-philosophical nastiness with which Nagel’s views have been greeted in some quarters.  But Sober, to his credit, is not an ideologue, and is sober enough to acknowledge at least the possibility that Nagel is on to something.--Edward Feser.

Thomas Nagel and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (or, on unprincipled natural teleology)

[Thomas Nagel's Mind & Cosmos has generated a number of very critical reviews, including this blistering one by Leiter/Weisberg, and another, wide-ranging one by Eliott Sober (thanked for his refereeing at OUP by Nagel in the preface to M&C!) as well as gratitude from the creationists (recall Mohan's discussion). Mohan has blogged about some of Nagel's moves before,  but the rather long post -- apologies -- below engages with issues thus far unexplored in these discussions.--ES.]

Analytical philosophy has made great progress over the last century. But its original, necessary biases did some harm, too. In particular, detailed working knowledge of the history of philosophy and metaphysics was banished for several generations. While metaphysics is thriving again, we still lack (despite the brilliance of David Lewis' modular approach) complete systems of thought that can rival in depth and interlocking breadth the past masters (say, Suarez, Leibniz, etc.). The damage has also been more narrow. For example, one of the most obvious so-called ‘Kuhn Losses’ is our relative ignorance of the nature and implications of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded in the act of rejecting PSR. Our forefathers’ attempt to balance between common sense and the truths of science meant -- as science and the PSR parted ways -- the willing submission to brute, ultimate facts (recall this post).  

In Mind & Cosmos, Thomas Nagel happily embraces “a form of the principle of sufficient reason” (17) in support of his "common sense" (5, 7, etc.) and against the recent “orthodox scientific consensus.” (10; 5) Rather than accepting this "ideological consensus," (128) Nagel insists -- regularly using language reminiscent of the great Feyerabend --  that "almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct." (7) While Nagel insists that the champions of scientific enlightenment are bullies, he treats the "defenders of intelligent design" with "gratitude" (Plantinga returns the gratitude),  even though Nagel clearly recognizes that once one embraces one's inner sensus divinitatis one is also compelled in one's judgments. (12) 

A classic statement of the PSR is Spinoza's "For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence." (Ethics 1p11d2) That is to say, any PSR worth having imposes significant explanatory demands (especially of non-arbitrariness) on any philosophical system in which it is deployed. Below the fold I critically discuss Nagel's way of combining the PSR and his attempted revisionary science, but here I just register the marvelousness of Nagel's deployment of the PSR as an instrument in the service of common sense! (cf. 91-2) This is certainly an original move in the history of metaphysics--one that, in a single, magical stroke overturns Lovejoy's long narrative.

Identical twins are not genetically identical: Potential consequences for the Minnesota Twin Study

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

When I was a child one of my favorite books was about a pair of identical twins who decided to switch clothes. They looked so much alike that their parents had had to dress one in blue and the other in green. The twin boys fooled their parents for a long long time. An obedient 3-year old, I was thrilled by their ingenuity and boldness.

Though parents can usually tell the difference between their identical twins--grandparents, teachers, neighbors and peers sometimes cannot. And for good reasons. Identical twins very often look almost exactly alike. No surprise there, if identical twin share all of their DNA.

A view from PSA 2012: Changes afoot

The 23rd biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (PSA) has just drawn to a successful close, with more sessions than ever and more attendees than ever.  So, from one perspective, all seems well.

Yet, it seems that one can reasonably ask why one should join a society like the PSA these days.  It used to be that many people joined in order to get the journal, Philosophy of Science.  But now, most academics get access to the journal through their universities.  Some old-fashioned types like me join societies whose goals they want to promote and whose communities they feel a part of; in addition to the PSA, I am member of HSS, ISHPSSB, ISEE, and the APA.

However, if one is not moved on that score, why join?  Why join the PSA, or any academic society, for that matter?

Kahneman on System 1 and System 2 as 'fictitious characters'

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is making quite a splash (the other day, I saw at Bristol airport that it is currently at the top of the bestseller list for non-fiction -- naturally, it still can’t compete with Fifty Shades of Gray). I haven’t read it yet, but people whose opinion I hold in high esteem tell me that it has been successful in striking the difficult balance between being accessible to a wider audience and scientifically accurate (for the most part at least) at the same time. The book summarizes research on cognitive and reasoning biases of the last decades, a research program in which Kahneman himself has been a major player. The conceptual cornerstone of the book is the (still) popular distinction between System 1 and System 2, the two systems which allegedly run in parallel underpinning all our cognitive processes, and which often conflict with each other. 

Now, as I’ve stated a few times before (here for example), I am no fan of System 1/System 2 talk at all (not even of weaker versions, the so-called dual-process theories of cognition), even though I agree that the empirical findings on cognitive biases should be taken very seriously. (I also agree that there is something to the idea of debiasing as suppressing automatic processes.) So I was curious to see how Kahneman himself introduces the System 1/System 2 distinction, and took a quick look at the book (my husband was reading it during our holiday of a few weeks ago, after having gotten it from me as a birthday present – that’s what you get for having a nerdy wife). The first thing that struck me is that, on footnote 20, he lists some of the pioneers of dual-system theories, including Jonathan Evans, Steve Sloman and Keith Stanovich, and adds: “I borrow the terms System 1 and System 2 from early writings of Stanovich and West that greatly influenced my thinking” (he refers to their 2000 BBS article on individual differences in reasoning). But what is puzzling is that Stanovich himself now overtly rejects the conceptualization of the distinction in terms of systems, which unduly suggests reified entities, and now uses the process terminology instead (same with Jonathan Evans).

But perhaps most striking is what Kahneman says in the conclusion of the book:

Minds on Monday: Are Philosophers Qualified to Diagnose Causes?

In the late 1970s, Benjamin Libet showed that motor cortex activity preparing for an action occurs before the conscious act of willing that action. (Here is a nice demonstration of the experiment by Patrick Haggard.)

 

Libet's result has been replicated countless times (as above), and though it is perhaps rash to generalize too broadly, let's just say we have strong evidence for:

1. Conscious acts of "willing" an action occur after the brain activity that cause the action, and so
2. Conscious acts of willing do not cause action.

As a philosopher, which of the following conclusions can I legitimately draw?

 

Evolutionary Biology at the top of the Intellectual Division of Labor

"(A proximate mechanism is an immediate direct cause, while an ultimate explanation is the last in the long chain of factors leading up to that immediate cause. For example, the proximate cause of a marriage breakup may be a husband's discovery of his wife's extramarital affairs, but the ultimate explanation may be the husband's chronic insensitivity and the couple's basic incompatibility that drove the wife to affairs.) Physiologists and molecular biologists regularly fall into the trap of overlooking this distinction, which is fundamental to biology, history and human behavior. Physiology and molecular biology can do no more than identify proximate mechanisms; only evolutionary biology can provide ultimate causal explanations."--Jared Diamond Why is Sex Fun?, 1997.

Let's grant Diamond the coherence of the distinction between proximate mechanisms and ultimate explanations. Let's also grant it him in the way he has articulated it, despite, perhaps, a lingering sense that being "last in the long chain of factors" does not quite grasp the fundamentality of an ultimate explanation. I was struck by (i) Diamond's insistence (without evidence) that his fellow scientists "regularly" overlook the distinction, and by (ii) his further claim that "only" evolutionary biology can get at ultimate causal explanations. Diamond has a nice sense of the intellectual hierarchy within the intellectual division of labor. (If you plug in "metaphysics" for evolutionary biology and "mechanics" for molecular biology, you get a standard 18th century picture embraced by Berkeley and Leibniz, I think.)

Here I am not interested in the hankering after even more fundamental than fundamental explanations (you know, God, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Final Causes, etc.). Rather, this morning I was gripped by this thought: why think that in the real world there is anything over and above the proximate causes and mechanism? Why isn't the whole idea of "ultimate" explanations just our chasing after patterns? Now, what would persuade me otherwise is if the evidence for the ultimate causes can (a) systematically avoid relying on the evidence for the the proximate causes and (b) be also more robust, higher quality, etc. But given that it is so hard to do controlled experiments in the service of (b), (b) doesn't seem to be so easy to achieve. I am too ignorant about the details to have any strong opinion on (a). Anyway, I bet there are standard answers to my gripped questions.

Words of Wisdom from a Salmon Preface: Formalism and Audience

The Philosophy of Biology Lab that I co-run with Jim Griesemer here at UC Davis is re-reading Wesley Salmons' Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.  I am reminded how, when doing such re-readings, one can find little nuggets of wisdom that may have been overlooked on the first read.  Even in the Preface. 

Salmon writes:

Although much modern work on scientific explanation has been rather formal and technical -- often treating various quasi-formal 'models' in great detail -- I shall dwell extensively on less formal considerations.  There are two reasons for this emphasis.  In the first place, I have been convinced for some time that many recent philosophical discussions of scientific explanation suffer from a lack of what Rudolf Carnap called "clarification of the explicandum."  As Carnap has vividly shown, precise philosophical explications of important concepts can egregiously miss the mark if we do not have a sound prior informal grasp of the concept we are endeavoring to explicate.

It's my impression that this is a lesson that many have failed to learn; all too often I see formalism with little attempt to explain what the formalism is intended to represent (and not just in philosophy of science).

More from Salmon's Preface:

On the Origin of Analytic Metaphysics, again...

The lore we are told inspired by, say, Putnam (not a disinterested spectator) and more recently Huw Price, who thinks we delude ourselves, is roughly this: after the founders of analytical philosophy had successfully ridden philosophy of its thirst for metaphysics, Quine, discerning a crack in Carnap's edifice, re-opened the door to our deposed Queen, μεταφυσική, in "On What There Is" (and "Two Dogmas"); with the door ajar and Alvin Goldman and Dan Dennett distracted by 'naturalizing' everything, Hillary Putnam developed a Quine-ean argument from the authority of science for the really real existence of numbers and, more significantly, David  Lewis -- perhaps spurred on by some Antipodes -- drove a truck through the opening by embracing modal realism. 

We love linear stories [Carnap --> Quine --> Lewis], don't we, so even the descriptive metaphysics of Strawson's Individuals (1959) can't quite be squished into, shall we say, our conceptual scheme. Now consider the following paragraph written in 1930:

The pursuit of metaphysics as the study of generic characters of existence has been slowly regaining its professional adherents. Once its central theme, reaction to the unchecked flights of nineteenth century romantic speculation has well nigh banished metaphysics as a legitimate subject matter for philosophy. But the problems which professional philosophers refused to consider became acutely pressing in the special sciences. It was to be expected that ere long comprehensive treatises on the nature of existence would appear, fashioned by philosophers were where sensitive to the advances of recent science as well to the ancient tradition that philosophy is the systematic study of being. To the series of distinguishes essays on metaphysics which contemporary philosophers have contributed, these volumes [by Whitehead--ES] are a notable addition.--Ernest Nagel (1930 "Alfred North Whitehead," republished in Sovereign Reason, p. 154.)

 

The Myths of Modern Science in the Responses to Nagel's Mind and Life in the Cosmos

Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos is drawing quick responses. (Can't wait to read Mohan's!) Both in the hostile review by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg as well as in the more cautious strategic pivot by Alva Noë (who doesn't engage critically with Nagel's book), mythic history of the scientific revolution plays significant rhetorical roles.

Let's start with Noë:

If there is mind — and of course the great scientific revolutionaries such as Descartes and Newton would not deny that there is mind — it exists apart from and unconnected to the material world as this was conceived of by the New Science.--Alva Noë (NPR)

Let's accept Noë's point about Descartes. But Newton thought minds  had to be somewhere in space and in time, extended but "indivisible." Incidentally, this is also Newton's doctrine about "the Maker and Lord of all things" who "cannot be never and no where."  (Principia, General Scholium.) And at one point earlier in his career, Newton also flirted with the idea that an extended body had to be the kind of thing that was capable of exciting various perceptions in the senses and imagination of minds (this is from a piece known as "De Gravitatione;" I am linking to a very nice treatment by Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk.) [Note that I am not drawing on the infamous sensorium passage at all.]

Weekly Philo of economics: (Polling) Predictions, Modal Economics and the marriage of Philosophy & Technocracy

"It has been shown, for example, that a pollster can in principle always publish his prediction of an election result in such a form that, despite the reactions of voters to the forecast, the prediction is not falsified by those reactions. CF. Herbert A Simon"--Ernest Nagel ((1960) Structure of Science, 473, n 13)

"it was shown that it is always possible in principle to make a public prediction that will be confirmed by the event...It was shown that correct prediction requires at least some knowledge of the reaction function."--Herbert Simon (1954) 253; emphasis in original)

Simon won a Nobel in economics in 1978. (In his intellectual autobiography he recounts his debts to Carnap and his ongoing interests in philosophy of physics.) In philosophy he is probably now best remembered for his work on bounded rationality/satisficing. The work discussed by Nagel (who didn't just invent the category analytical philosophy as we know it, but was also a leading figure in the discipline in the 50s and 60s [Nagel's Structure was much cited]) above and from which I cite is part of a larger literature in which Simon played a non-trivial role as acknowledged in the key (1954) paper by Grunberg and Modigliani (who won the Nobel in 1985). Simon & Grunberg/Modigliani provide a framework for showing under what conditions social scientific predictions need not be self-refuting--a welcome result to the economics profession that was warming up to Milton Friedman's (1953) proposal that what mattered was not the realism of the assumptions in an economic model but its predictive power (Simon was critical by the way).

Nagel does not name his targets in dealing with a "difficulty confronting the social sciences, sometimes cited as the gravest one they face." (466) But if one goes to Simon's paper it's not so hard to figure out; after a nod to Aristotle, he names Frank Knight and Hayek in the first footnote. Now, there are very important differences between Hayek and the now-forgotten Knight  (not the least of which is that in TJ Rawls encouraged attention to Knight (he even tells us to read the footnotes) and not so with Hayek--a judgment of relative value that the discipline has reversed), but one important commonality is that in the 1940s and 50s economists from free-marketeers like Alchian to high theory types like Arrow were extremely eager to reject their skepticism about the technocratic turn of the discipline. Nagel is certainly aware of Hayek's skepticism. (In addition, Grunberg & Modigliani also point to another forgotten economist, Vining--recall my post.)

What happened to Philosophy of Social Science after Ernest Nagel (1961)?

The hazards of trying to draw conclusions about all of science, by focusing narrowly on physics were learned at the end of the last century. However, including biology and chemistry are only the beginning, not the end, of the project of trying to develop a more well-rounded picture of science.--Alisa Bokulich

The quoted passage is from a terrific NDPR review by Bokulich that Catarina discussed yesterday. Bokulich notes that "Conspicuously absent from this list are any of the social sciences." Bokulich goes on to call attention to the works of four recent leading philosophers of social science--all of which happen to be women. [By the way, when later in the review Bokulich calls attention to the lack of representation of women in the volume (and the lack of focus on philosophy race/feminism) she does not refer back to her earlier discussion. This justifies Catarina's claim that Bokulich should be praised for the "elegant way" in which these issues are raised. ]

As the epigraph to this post suggests, our current understanding of the development of philosophy of science is that we are "trying" to develop it away from an exclusively physics focus to other sciences during the last few decades. (It was gratifying to read Bokulich's claim that philosophy of economics is "thriving.") But this leaves me with a puzzle: if one opens Ernest Nagel's (1961) The Structure of Science, one notes that three out of fifteen of chapters are exclusively focused on philosophy of social sciences and history. These together comprise 25% of the text. (This understates the situation because  earlier chapters also discuss relevant material. There is is also a chapter on biology, by the way.) So, half a century ago one the most widely cited works in the philosophy of science (although probably unread these days unless one is interested in Nagel-reduction) by one of the professional leaders of the discipline (who arguably invented analytical philosophy as a category) at one of the then  elite departments already was offering a "well-rounded" picture of science. How come this was not the norm in the profession?

Book reviews and gender distribution in edited volumes

(It is usually Eric’s job to comment on noteworthy features of various NDPR reviews, but this time he’s having technical issues with his computer and thus asked me to cover this one.)

Besides the underrepresentation of women at conferences and other academic events, here at NewAPPS and elsewhere we also talk about the possible negative consequences of all-male volumes (see an old post by me on this here). Now, one is starting to see comments on the gender distribution of volume line-ups also in book reviews, such as in this excellent DNPR review by Alisa Bokulich (Boston University) of The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science, edited by Steven French and Juha Saatsi.

A second, problematic feature of this volume is that out of 20 contributors spanning the entire philosophy of science, there is not a single female philosopher of science included. While this omission may be understandable for a very small collection on a highly specialized topic, it is more difficult to excuse for a volume of this size and breadth. While I am sure this was an unintentional oversight, it is part of a disturbing larger pattern within the philosophy of science, and philosophy more broadly. Such omissions are particularly troubling when it comes to pedagogical works, such as this Companion, that are designed to help recruit the next generation of philosophers of science. These volumes then become not only a symptom of this problem, but also part of its source, by giving the impression that the philosophy of science is not a field to which women make significant contributions.

Retracting faulty science

[A] At PLOS our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. We firmly believe that acceleration also requires being open about correcting the literature as needed so that research can be built on a solid foundation. Hence as editors and as a publisher we encourage the publication of studies that replicate or refute work we have previously published. We work with authors (through communication with the corresponding author) to publish corrections if we find parts of articles to be inaccurate. [B] If a paper’s major conclusions are shown to be wrong we will retract the paper. By doing so, and by being open about our motives, we hope to clarify once and for all that there is no shame in correcting the literature.--By Virginia Barbour and Kasturi Haldar (writing at PLOS) [HT retractionwatch]

[B] "If a paper’s major conclusions are shown to be wrong we will retract the paper" is very controversial. But the reason for it "in order to ensure that errors (from whatever means – unintentional or intentional) are not simply incorporated uncritically into the scientific literature" is not silly. But readers may wish to disagree.

But what about [A] "our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine." Maybe that is part of the problem?

Three problems for Maudlin's account of Laws; (and some Newton)

[This is the third post after this and this on Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics that I am reading with F.A. Muller, Victor Gijsbers, and Lieven Decock.--ES]

[A] "If a law governs a particular space-time region then the physical states will so evolve." (Maudlin, 17)

[B] "My analysis of laws is no analysis at all. Rather I suggest we accept laws as fundamental entities in our ontology." (Maudlin, 18)

[C] "The laws can operate to produce the rest of the Mosaic exactly because their existence does not ontologically depend on the Mosaic." (Maudlin, 175; emphases in original)

[D] "The universe, as well as all the smaller parts of it, is made: it is an ongoing enterprise, generated from a beginning and guided towards its future by physical law." (Maudlin, 182; emphasis in original)

Maudlin's book is fantastic. It gives you a sense of what metaphysics  looks like if one has an advanced education in recent physics; it is also rooted in "scientific practice." With laser like precision it focuses on the most fundamental weaknesses of the most important alternative approaches (Quine, Lewis, Van Fraassen, etc), and it makes obscure physics seem easy to digest. What would stop somebody sympathetic to Maudlin's general orientation from accepting laws in one's ontology [B]?

Maudlin calls the fundamental laws "FLOTEs" (for Fundamental Laws of Temporal Evoluton). Together with "adjunct principles," FLOTEs describe how states (may) evolve into later states. (17) Initial conditions are examples of such principles. One can certainly understand physics such that its business is mainly discovering FLOTEs.  So far so good. But [A, C, D]  describe the laws themselves as the productive sources of change. If Maudlin were writing in the seventeenth century we would describe his position about laws either as "second causes" (Cartesian language) or as a special modern instance of "formal causation" (in the way that platonizing mathematicians thought of these [see Mancosu's book])--inspired by Kuhn (and anticipated by Burtt), I think such formal causes were conceptually transformed into laws of nature by Bacon and Newton.

Domains of quantification - part 2: does science quantify over reals?

Short version: 
Science is often said to be committed to reals, because physics, for example, essentially makes use of sentences with real-quantifiers.  But we have perfectly good countable, well-founded, constructive models of full second order arithmetic.  So why can't physics, for example, simply explicitly embrace one of these as what they are working over and thereby radically simplify their alleged ontological commitments?

A Pattern of Sexual Exclusion replicates itself

Yesterday, I noticed the line-ups to three announced conferences in areas related to my research (philosophy of science and its history):

10 Men in Pittsburgh

12 Men in Lausanne

6 Men in St. Andrews

I believe all three conferences are by invitation-only. I wish I could congratulate my friends that folk want to hear them speak. Instead I can't help but thinking, this is how a pattern of exclusion in philosophy replicates itself: 28 different men and no women in an area of study populated with excellent female philosophers. (See here for my analysis of the mechanism.) We can and ought to do better (see here). Why not sign up to this call for action?

How Good Was Stebbing . . . Really?

Eric admires Susan Stebbing because she was a philosopher who spoke out against the authority of science. I am not so convinced that her stance was all that admirable. I am all for challenging scientists when their philosophy is confused. I am much less keen on setting up common sense as a competitor of science. This is what Stebbing did, and I am less than clear why Eric would endorse this aspect of her program.

Stebbing was a common sense philosopher, and sometimes an ordinary language philosopher. Her attacks on the authority of science were a reaction to its presumed displacement of every day thought. Her famous put-down of Arthur Eddington is an excellent example. Eddington had written that wooden chairs and tables were not solid, since they are mostly composed of “empty space.” Stebbing replied that chairs and tables are paradigms of what we mean by the word ‘solid’. To deny their solidity is simply to misuse the language. (This is “the argument from the paradigm case” famously mocked by Ernst Gellner in his wonderful book, Words and Things.) Why would Eric endorse such a piece of arrant snobbery?

The issue between Stebbing and Eddington has often been misunderstood.

Long before David Albert, there was L. Susan Stebbing

"I agree that there is a difficulty; it is the difficulty of the gap between conscious processes and physical events." Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists Chapter 9, 164  (in my 1944 edition [in  other editions p. 217]).

"There is an urgent need to-day for the citizens of a democracy to think well. It is not enough to have freedom of the Press and parliamentary institutions." Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose 

Readers may recall my exchange with Mohan about the enduring significance of L. Susan Stebbing. I argued that among the pre-eminent (and largely anti-metaphysical) founders of analytical philosophy she was the most significant theorist of the nature of analysis and the metaphysical turn it could take (I also argued she gives us a good glimpse of why Spinozism is the main alternative to analytical metaphysics). Mohan responded by criticizing Stebbing's command of the analytical tools available to her.  I defended Stebbing by claiming that Mohan misunderstood the way in which Stebbing is thinking about reference. We left it there in public. Mike Beaney gives a nice treatment of the issues here, although (and I say this with trepidation) Beaney mistakenly follows Max Black in understanding Stebbing-style metaphysical analysis as uncovering facts rather than the structure of facts!

Here, I focus on another enduring, largely overlooked significance of Stebbing's philosophizing: her willingness to challenge the way the authority of science is used in irresponsible, public speech (recall the moving closing lines of her (1937) Philosophy and the Physicists). Now we are all indebted to Abe Stone for reminding us that the Carnap-Heidegger split centered on what the nature of responsible speech by philosophers is (see Jeff's post and mine), but Stebbing reminds us that the authority of science has displaced philosophy (and theology)  not just to settle questions within philosophy [I call this "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy"], but also among the educated public, but in doing so the need for a certain philosophical expertise remains (recall David Albert's criticism of Krauss). Stebbing's Philosophy and the Physicist ought to be a model for us as we think about the public role of philosophy.

From Newton and Spinoza to Tim Maudlin and Judith Butler (via Russell & Nietzsche)

People do not say that a barometer "knows'' when it is going to rain; but I doubt if there is any essential difference in this respect between the barometer and the meteorologist who observes it.--Bertrand Russell (1923) "Vagueness"

"[Gender] identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results"--Judith Butler Gender Trouble. (33)

In my spare time I am reading Tim Maudlin's  (2007) The Metaphysics Within Physics (recall this) and Judith Butler's (1999 [1990]--I have used the 1999 edition which has an additional, fascinating preface]) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in seperate, ongoing reading groups. This has led me to notice some surprising similarities. For example, they are both unabashedly concerned with metaphysics, and while they differ in lots of ways, they have a shared target: the idea that metaphysics ought to be articulated in terms of substance(s) with properties (or attributes/accidents); they both dislike universals. Both attribute the metaphysics of substance to an illegitimate "projection of the structure of language onto the world." (Maudlin, 79; compare that with Butler pp. 25-28 [where she summarizes others] & p. 33 [where she speaks in her own voice]). Maudlin aligns his view with Bertrand Russell's position in "Vagueness" (79-80), while Butler traces (33) her criticism back to Nietzsche's famous passage in which he explains how in our metaphysics we are "a dupe of the tricks of language." Russell, who knew his Nietzsche, may well have gotten this line of argument from him (I'll leave that to the scholars). The idea that our inherited metaphysical categories may be a projection arguably goes back  to Spinoza and his famous argument against final causes in the Appendix to Ethics 1. (Perhaps, it is better to say that Protagoras is the grandfather of this whole line of argument?)

Aristotle on Art and Nature: A Footnote to Eric on Posidonius

Eric’s fascinating post quotes Posidonius:

If, then, the things achieved by nature are more excellent than those achieved by art, and if art produces nothing without making use of intelligence, nature also ought not to be considered destitute of intelligence.

What does it mean to attribute intelligence to “Nature”? Is it to posit a purposeful, instrumentally rational, and technically omni-adept Creator? Or is it merely an analogy that ultimately rests on something other than intelligence? According to Eric, Adam Smith took him the first way:

The idea of an universal mind, of a God of all, who originally formed the whole, and who governs the whole by general laws, directed to the conservation and prosperity of the whole, without regard to that of any private individual, was a notion to which they [i.e., the pusillanimously superstitious] were utterly strangers.

So for Smith, and for his hero, Posidonius, the excellence of nature points to a God who is never arbitrary or ad hoc (as the pusillanimous suppose), but always rational, always universal in her edicts.

But Eric also quotes the divine David Hume:

It was pretty late too before these [Greek natural philosophers] be thought themselves of having recourse to a mind or supreme intelligence, as the first cause of all.

I don’t know exactly who Hume had in mind, but Aristotle would be a good example of some one who asserted the analogy, but did not avail himself of a Creator (except as an ultimate cause of movement and change).

The Modest Proposal in the National Post

For a couple of days I have been mulling over whether Catarina's take on the National Post article about Eric and Mark's modest proposal is right. In the end, I don't think I agree with it.

1. First of all, and I think that this is an important piece of context, the article was not as such about the Gendered Conference Campaign. The GCC is not news: it is three years old and newspapers are not (usually) interested in reporting three year old events. It is about Eric Schliesser's proposal that some speakers at a male-only conference should be publicly named as having failed, before accepting the invitation, to ascertain that only males had been invited. As the journalist paraphrased Eric: "Proceed with a Berlin-based conference that features 14 male speakers and no women, and I will essentially launch a campaign to take you down professionally." (By the way, I don't think that the reporter implied that these were Eric's words.)

2. Of course, the GCC is the background for that call. But it is obvious from reading the piece that a) a thorough analysis of GCC was not the journalist's agenda, and b) that her interest was piqued by the (shall we say?) boldness of Eric's direct intervention in the program of a conference that he wasn't actually organizing. It's a little utopian to expect that the National Post (of all newspapers) would pay a great deal of attention to the GCC, and pretty unexpected even that something on this blog would have come to their notice.

3. Against that background, I find that what Catarina's criticism unrealistic and not totally fair:

Maudlin on Einstein and Lewis, and some Spinoza...

[I am reading Tim Maudlin’s The Metaphysics Within Physics with Fred Muller, Victor Gijsbers, and Lieven Decock. The following post was inspired by our recent discussion.—ES]

In the context of a critical discussion (that I admire) of what he calls a "Separability" doctrine that he attributes to David Lewis, Tim Maudlin quotes a letter from Einstein to Born:

"The following idea characterises the relative independence

of objects far apart in space (A and B): external influence on A

has no direct influence on B; this is known as the 'principle

of contiguity', which is used consistently only in the field

theory. If this axiom were to be completely abolished, the idea

of the existence of (quasi-) enclosed systems, and thereby the

postulation of laws which can be checked empirically in the

accepted sense, would become impossible." (See here for the full letter, p. 170-1; a fuller extract is quoted in Maudlin, pp. 53-54, and discussed around pp. 63-4)

By ‘Separability,” Maudlin means “The complete physical state of the world is determined by (supervenes on) the intrinsic physical state of each spacetime point (or each pointlike object) and the spatio-temporal relations between those points.” (51)  Maudlin takes Einstein’s letter as evidence that in the face of evidence from quantum mechanics, Einstein also endorses Separability (and, thus, Lewis’ position is not just “a philosopher’s fancy.”)  In response, Maudlin writes, “Quantum theory has both been formulated and rigorously tested despite the centrality of non-Separable elements in its ontology. Whatever Einstein had in mind, he had to be wrong.” (64)

Now, I am no scholar of Einstein, but I suspect Maudlin is seriously misreading Einstein here.