New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

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.

Astronomers on Gender Equality

The American Astronomical Society (membership (~7,000)) has been focused on the status of women in Astronomy since their Baltimore meeting in 1992. The AAS Committee on the Status of Women (CSWA)  has been promoting the so-called Pasadena Recommendations for Gender Equality in Astronomy. Interestingly enough, CSWA maintains a webpage in which it lists quite a bit of data on gender ratios at conferences, including the names of the Scientific Organization Committee Chairs of the conferences. [HT to Julia Driver.]

Scientists, Your Gender Bias Is Showing

Sean Carroll writes:

I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.

That's the conclusion of a new study in PNAS by Corinne Moss-Racusin and collaborators at Yale. (Hat tip Dan Vergano.) To test scientist’s reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.

Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.

[Quoted from here; HT to L.A. Paul & Gwyneth Harrison-Shermoen on Facebook]

Tactical reviewing

"The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States. Tocqueville (Democracy in America.)

Let's stipulate that the readers of the NYRB and the public image of philosophy are not well served by demolition jobs masquerading as reviews. Let's also stipulate that Thomas Nagel is one of the most important and interesting philosophers of the last four decades so it is no surprise that NYRB turns to him. Now, Mohan has already called attention to the silly claims about the relationship between the so-called "Hard Problem of Consciousness" and evolution. Even so, what the hell is going on in Nagel's review of Plantinga? Even if we leave aside the remarkably uncritical attitude toward Plantinga, take the first sentence: "The gulf in outlook between atheists and adherents of the monotheistic religions is profound." In what world is Nagel living? You don't need to agree with Nietzsche (who saw the ascetic ideal operating both in faith in God and faith in science) to see that modern, educated North American atheists and Christians are fare more alike in the practical and theoretical things they take for granted than, say, the Babylonian high-priest who believed in omens. 

The grey zone in experimental psychological research ethics

Following the high-profile cases of Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters, and Marc Hauser, there has been a lot of blogging on NewAPPs and elsewhere on academic fraud in experimental psychology. Between outright fraud (fabricating data, omitting data etc) and doing clean experiments, there is a large grey zone. How do we delineate what is and isn't ethical in experimental psychology?

Richard Feynman compared grey-zone practices in psychology and other fields to   Oceanic cargo cults (where the adherents believe the ancestors will come and shower them with cargo, if only they perform the right rituals). Feynman admonishes scientists that they are in effect behaving like Cargo cultists. To avoid cargo cult science, we need a rigorous ethics of conducting and reporting experiments. Here is a recent take on this for psychology.

However, the practice of experimental psychological publishing makes it difficult to adopt these simple principles. Reporting a series of experiments, a psychologist team is not merely reporting the testing of a hypothesis, but constructing a compelling narrative. Below the fold are some common practices (as I gather from speaking with experimental psychologists). 

Empirical Ethics: not even getting the retraction right

"Of these 119 statements, only 41.2% mentioned ethics at all (and only 32.8% named a specific ethical problem such as fabrication, falsification or plagiarism), whereas the other 58.8% described the reason for retraction or correction as error, loss of data or replication failure when misconduct was actually at issue." See here. [HT Retractionwatch]

"Former Harvard psychology prof Marc Hauser committed misconduct in four NIH grants: ORI"

For more on the story here. [Retractionwatch.wordpress.com is a great blog, by the way.]

We have been following Hauser's shenanigans at NewAPPS for some time now (here, here, here).

One interesting oddity is that a chunk of these documented misconducts by Hauser concern work never written up for publication. 

On Stebbing, Gellner, and Eddington

Mohan ridicules Stebbing with a fantastic bit of rhetoric: "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." Now, first, I had written, appreciatively about "her willingness to challenge the way the authority of science is used in irresponsible, public speech." In fact, Stebbing is not setting up common sense as a competitor to physics, nor is she concerned about defending common sense against displacement from science. Rather, she is attacking muddled metaphysics and muddled theology that mixes common sense and esoteric mathematical physics. (I am willing to grant that in doing so she may have missed what is valuable in Eddington.) On the contrary, she has a healthy respect for physics qua physics. As she writes, "in the present stage of physics, very little can be conveyed to those who lacks the mathematical equipment required to understand the methods by which results are obtained and the language in which these results can alone find adequate expression" (p. 44 in the  1944 edition; p. 50 in the origiginal).

Throughout his piece, Mohan misrepresents  the dialectic between Stebbing and Eddington. For example, in context, Stebbing is not refuting external-world skepticism (as Mohan implies), but an argument that such external world skepticism "can itself be the outcome of the labours of the physicists," (p. 90 in my 1944 edition; p. 112 in the first; note Stebbing's plural) because (of course) such (shared) labors presuppose that the "the world of physics" is about *something* (that is, "the physical world"). That is, in fact, a solid bit of philosophical wisdom.

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.

Further thoughts on genital alteration

 A heated discussion ensued from my post on circumcision last week, which in turn was essentially a plug to a thought-provoking post by Brian D. Earp at the Oxford Practical Ethics blog. The controversial point was whether circumcision is or is not to be compared to female genital cutting.

I’ve learned a lot from the different perspectives presented during the discussion; among other things, I’ve learned the terms ‘genital alteration’ and ‘genital cutting’, which now seem to me to be more adequate than either ‘circumcision’ or ‘genital mutilation’ to formulate the issue in a non-question-begging way (as argued here). And yet, I am now even more convinced that the analogy between male genital alteration and female genital alteration is a legitimate one – which (and let me say this again!) does not mean that there are no crucial differences to be kept in mind. That's what an analogy is, after all.

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?)

Philosophy of mind without citations to the experimental literature

This is a very critical review of a recent book by Paul Churchland. I can't say if it is fair or not, although to me it read as if the reviewers were rightly annoyed at the lack of attention to opposing views ("While his book has many virtues, it is unfortunate that he repeatedly fails to do justice to his opponents' views."). But I was struck by the last paragraph:

A final striking fact about Churchland's book is that it seems almost wholly divorced from empirical psychology. Remarkably, indeed, in a book that advances a theory of the mind that is supposed to be empirically supported, Churchland provides only around thirty scientific references, just a third of which date from the twenty-first century, and many of which are computational rather than experimental in nature. One would like to think that he chose to provide only a judicious selection so as not to overwhelm his audience with references. But since he ignores a great many results that appear inconsistent with his main theses, we fear that the paucity of references requires a different explanation. Indeed, Churchland ignores almost entirely the extensive work in developmental and experimental psychology, in neuroscience, and in studies of comparative cognition that have been conducted by cognitive scientists, especially over the last twenty years. And it is precisely once we examine the theories supported by empirical phenomena of these psychological sorts that past and present arguments for nativism and for LOT (appropriately understood) begin to emerge.

Now I doubt I have a firm grip on the computational vs experimental distinction here. (Is the former a simulation with a Bayesian networks and the latter work on real humans and other animals?) Either way, this paragraph made me wonder: does a book entitled How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals,  have to cite experimental literature?

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.

Is the future of professional philosophy in applied ethics?

After working Stateside and the Netherlands, ever since I moved professionally to Ghent (201o) I have come to think I have a better grasp of the future of philosophy. While enrollments certainly play a significant role in long-term staffing decision, a good portion of our research funding comes from (i) block-grants that reward scientific 'output'; (ii) individual grants to (a) research groups and (b) individual researchers. The grants under (ii) also reward past and prostpective scientific output. During my job interview with the Research Council of my university (note, not the philosophy department!), I was told that if I were to be hired I should change my publication strategy (which had been informed by considerations of visibility and prestige as well as desire to see things in print quickly) and focus on refereed journal articles. (Turns out in Flanders that primarily means journals listed in Web of Knowledge.) Along the way, I have had to re-learn how to write focused articles for journal publication. Given (ii) I now understand myself, in part, as akin to a Lab-Director, who spends a considerable part of his time on grant-making and recruiting talent primarily for the research group I belong to, but also for the wider department/university. It's a zero-sum game, after all. To give you a sense of what is at stake: In addition to my own grant (which funds a cushy salary and low teaching load), I have seven Phd students on a variety of grants working with me. (That represents about two million Euros in taxpayer funded grants.) Of course, this also means that my most valuable skill is the ability to project an image of future scientific output; do you know your H index number? I am also no stranger anymore to all the problems that scientific labs encounter--folk that put names on papers they barely contributed to; I have learned that the interests of Lab, which needs publications, and PhD students, which need intellectual development and viable career paths among other things, don't exactly coincide.

One important way in which 'output' is measured is by publication in high impact journals which brings me to today's inbox. I received a kind note from Springer about "a list of the highest impact journals," in its philosophy portfolio. Like it or not, Springer is an important publisher philosophy (just go to the ESF list or the recent top-20 as compiled by Brian Leiter). It does not have a monopoly, of course, but Springer matters in a lot of important philosophy niches (recall the brouhah over editorial policies at Synthese.)

Below the fold Springer's top six journals with their impact factors (IF). Five of these are in applied ethics and one is in philosophy of biology. Given that funding decisions 'follow' impact factors in the increasing number of places where funding for philosophy research follows bureaucratic rules that aim to reward scientific excellence (not to mention perceived social utility), it stands to reason that we should see an ever increasing specializing shift toward applied ethics. 

Does lack of plausible alternatives for a given hypothesis count as non-empirical evidence for that hypothesis?

In the recent excitement on the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the accompanying relief that the standard model, at least for moment, holds, I had to think about a paper by Dawid, Hartmann and Sprenger, published online earlier this year. They examine whether or not a lack of plausible alternative explanations to a given scientific hypothesis - in spite of our best efforts to come up with them - could be a form of non-empirical evidence. They argue that scientists often make arguments of this kind "despite our best efforts, the only hypothesis to reasonably explain E is H. This very fact counts as evidence to support H". This they dub "the no alternatives argument" (NAA).

"It is a 5 sigma result"

From Cern.

The BEHGHK particle (aka “Higgs”)

In advance of the big announcement from LHC, here are some links to information about the Higgs boson.

John Conway explains, in “Higgs 101” at Cosmic Variance, why physicists think there has to be a Higgs field and a corresponding particle

The so-called “Higgs mechanism”, by which massive particles receive their mass, consists in the force of the field being “felt” by those particles as resisting their motion (as a ping-pong ball immersed in water “feels” the resistance of the water, and—in good Aristotelian fashion—therefore moves at finite speed). The Higgs mechanism “breaks” an original symmetry among fundamental particles, so that some, like the proton and electron, have mass and some, like the photon, don’t. Only massless particles can travel at the speed of light; all others must move more slowly.

(the “carrier” of the field, as the photon is the carrier of electromagnetic fields, and the hypothetical graviton of gravitational fields). This is not for the totally naïve, but if you have a decent impressionistic grasp of high-energy physics, Conway’s piece will give you a good account of the importance of the Higgs particle to the so-called “Standard Model” in fundamental physics. Were it not to exist, that model would have to be radically revised.

See also the video at PhD Comics. The viXra.org blog has a nice list of papers on electroweak symmetry and symmetry breaking, from Heisenberg in 1928 to Ellis, Gaillard, and Nanopoulos in 1976, which initiated discussion of ways to detect the Higgs particle.

When the Viewer is a Projection of the Artists, and Other Magic Tricks

As recounted here, on Friday my old classmate, painter Harm van den Berg, gave me a private tour of the exhibit, Door Schildersogen (From a Painter's Perspective),  he co-curated at Arti et Amicitae. (It's closing today.) Two out of thirty-two pieces in the show have magic in the title: Roger Cremers' The Magic Lantern.

And Wouter van Riessen's The Magician:

Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?

Our friends at Retraction Watch ask: should scientific papers that are known to be very wrong (and that continue to be cited) be retracted?

My view is that evidence of “hurry and hubris” should stay on the books. What do you think?

Alan Turing's birthday

Today the whole of the internet seems to be celebrating Alan Turing's 100th birthday -- and rightly so, of course. Google in particular has one of its amazing doodles, depicting an interactive Turing machine. Here's a video on how to solve the doodle:

 

 

For those looking for more Turing-related material, check out the links assembled by Luca Baptista, which directed me to the video above.

Malament Retirement Blues

Some of the things you really need to know about David Malament's contributions to philosophy of physics (and a few other interesting facts):   [HT Taking up Spacetime]

Weekly philo of Economics: Mandeville's approach to expert failure (in Medicine)

Is there an institutional framework which will promote trustworthy experts? Milton Friedman waged a life-long, futile campaign against the American Medical Association's (AMA) guild-like ability to control licensing of physicians, entry into the profession, as well as standards of medicine:

Licensure has reduced both the quantity and quality of medical practice; that is has reduced the opportunities available to people who would like to be physicians, forcing them to pursue occupations they regard as less attractive; that it has forced the public to pay more for less satisfactory medical service, and that it has retarded technological development both in medicine itself and in the organization of medical practice. (M. Friedman, 1994)

Yet, as Friedman recognized, individuals are unwilling to trust the market to provide "evidence on the quality of a physician." Friedman was unimpressed by claims about the solidity of our medical profession; he believed it revealed "the tyranny of the status quo and the poverty of our imagination in fields in which we are laymen."

Not unlike Locke, Mandeville was a trained and practicing physician. In A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, in Three Dialogues (1711/1730), Mandeville diagnoses a market failure in medicine: from "self-interest" (then) "young physicians" avoid the "laborious, but tedious way of getting money" that is "spend your ime before the squallid beds of poor patients, and bear with the unsavory smells of a crowded hospital." (39; throughout I am quoting from the 1730 edition.) In doing so physicians fail to build up a stock of diverse and careful empirical practice (unlike the Ancient empiricks). Modern doctors find other ways to obtain a wealthy clientèle by building a reputation among fashionable and rich circles. As I have discussed before one way they can do so is by seeming learned in abstruse sciences (such as mathematics). But Mandeville also recognizes that there are other ways for doctors to get a good clientèle, including sponsoring/producing learned productions, marrying "into a good Family, and your relations will help your into practice, or else cringe and make your court to half a dozen noted apothecaries, promise them to prescibe loads of loads of" prescriptions, "get, but in favor with one that has great business, and yours is done." (40) As he puts it: "Physicians did not begin to reason about Physick [the body], and make Hypotheses, because they thought that what they writ was true, and be of service to thier postericy in curing the sick; but to ingratiate themselves with they ages they lived in." (65) None of these strategies involve curing actual patients.

The "Kuhn Loss" in the demise of natural philosophy...

Craig Callender says some very interesting things in this 3:AM Magazine interview.

Before there was physics and before there was philosophy of science, there was of course natural philosophy. When you read Newton, Maxwell, Thomson, Hertz, Boltzmann, and other greats, you would be hard pressed to circle what’s philosophy and what’s physics in these writings. There were just certain questions – e.g. are fields real or are they accounting devices? what explains entropy increase? are space and time real? – and a range of considerations for and against. The answers to these questions would draw on conceptual distinctions and scientific knowledge, however the two were classified, because these are the ingredients needed for an answer.

Specialization into distinct disciplines obviously has many benefits, but it’s naïve to think something doesn’t get lost too. Fallen into the cracks are a huge assortment of questions like the ones I just mentioned. These questions are deep and significant, but they are largely untouched. One can give sociological explanations for this: little grant money flows to such work in physics, the “linguistic turn” in metaphysics, and more. Whatever the reasons, there are good questions that deserve answers and often answering them will require the skill of a natural philosopher, be they officially a philosopher, physicist, or mathematician. 

Clarke on Spinoza on Motion

{In honor of this conference a blog about some of Clarke's interesting arguments against Spinoza.--ES} Samuel Clarke is now best known for his correspondence with Leibniz. This is a shame because it is not his finest performance that does no justice to his philosophic acumen nor to Newton's views. Clarke's (1705) A Demonstration of the being and attributes of God: more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza and their followers is full of terrific arguments and also extremely subtle readings of Spinoza (and a book I like to blog about). In preparing this post, I have found a remarkable authority for this claim (about which more some other time)!!!

Now together with other English (Newtonian) critics of Spinoza, Clarke focuses on Spinoza's rather un-sophisticated treatment of motion to argue against Spinoza's system (and argue for an alternative physics, metaphysics, and theology). Here I discuss two of these arguments: “if [motion] was of itself necessary and self-existent, then it follows that it must be a contradiction in terms to suppose any matter to be at rest.” Now, when Clarke charges a "contradiction," one ought to read it as "this is problematic." This particular claim is, of course, question-begging against Spinoza (cf. Ethics 2p13A1’: “All bodies either move or are at rest”). But the spirit behind Clarke's argument may well be Spinozistic. Let me briefly explain.

When scientific journals get captured..."tangled webs"...

"The editors of a journal invite two of their own editorial board members (one of whom edits a marginally competing journal) to write a review article which turns out to plagiarize from a paper in the editor’s own journal!" Quoted from my favorite website, where you can read the details of this sordid story. =

Doubled differences: the Gulf Oil Disaster multiplicity and models of future deep-water spills

Deleuze's "ontological difference" between virtual multiplicity and intensive individuation processes can help us think the ontological status of "model" in its relation to the events it models. The "doubling" of difference in the post title means that the multiplicity (the model) is differential (a-centered) and that its actualizations are all different events. Translating into other terms, the second claim is that the Deleuzean scheme accounts for the "multiple realizability" of models (but please note that Deleuze would not use this term because for him the virtual is real, so individuation is actualization rather than realization).  

What crisis in General Philosophy of Science?

In a recent post, I proposed an intellectual division of labor between General Philosophy of Science (GPOS), which rests on a quasi-transcendental assumption (QTA): if anything counts as knowledge it is fallible science, especially physics (chemistry, biology, whatever), so let's now articulate how this is possible or, more formally, justified (and develop, say, norms appropriate to this); by contrast Gettierized Epistemology (hereafter GE), which from the vantage point of ordinary cognition (perception, locution, observation), deals with a variety of skeptical challenges to any purported knowledge claims and works out the norms that govern, say, ordinary testimony, etc. Of course, a naturalistic GE can draw on scientific knowledge about cognition (etc). A naturalistic GPOS can draw on empirical work (history, sociology, or case-studies) on scientific practice, or rely on work done in philosophy of a particular science (PoX), while recognizing much of the autonomy of PoX [some other time more about the relationship between GPOS and PoX]. This division of labor recognizes that both enterprises (GE & GPoS) can be normative, explanatory, descriptive, etc. Moreover, it protects practitioners of GE from saying silly things about science (and so their reliance on outlandish and toy-examples does not embarrass us to our colleagues in the sciences); it protects GPOS from saying silly things about whether it is raining or not.

Retraction Watch

I am one of those philosophers of science that believes we learn as much (or more) from scientific failure (and its nieces, dis-confirmation, falsification, lack of statistical significance) as from successful science. So, this very entertaining website, Retraction Watch, is a must-read Godsend, and almost amusing to read as The Onion, if it weren't so sad.

For example, believe it or not a paper by S. Kalimuthu (whose email address is “ohm@budweiser.com.”) was retracted from Computers & Mathematics with Applications, an Elsevier title. Of course, the subtext of the site is important: as scientific metrics take over judgments of quality, the premium to control and publish in impact journals becomes higher and higher.

Duhemian General Philosophy of Science VS Gettierized Epistemology (or an afterthought about Bergson)

When in science we measure we dramatically eliminate (as opposed to ordinary observation) our access to huge amount of potential information we can extract from the environment. Even so, as we have learned since the time of Huygens onward this is a price worth paying when our measures are theoretically fruitful (etc). One nice feature of measurement is that (if well designed) it makes observation of one's measurements trivial; so much so that one could, in principle, farm out the whole process of registering the measurements to machines (as is often done now). Observation does no interesting epistemic work in theory-mediated measurements. While there are sciences where observation matters a lot (taxonomy and Marc Hauser's experiments come to mind), for much of science (as in mathematics) it plays no foundational role whatsoever. Those of us working within General Philosophy of Science (GPOS) have known this since Duhem.

This is why Mohan and epistemologists more generally are wrong in thinking that Gettierized Epistemology (hereafter GE) provides the so-called content-general framework with which to evaluate knowledge claims and the status of science more generally. GE mistakenly presupposes that ordinary cognition, perception, and locution matter epistemically in science. Now this is not to deny that GE explores important issues that matter to us citizens on a day to day basis; the recently popular work on testimony comes to mind. (As long as the authority of science does not displace the experiences of ordinary witnesses this remains to be true in law courts.) But whatever special expertise GE has in answering the skeptic is largely irrelevant to thinking about science. Now (as I have remarked before) GPOS, by contrasts, rests on a quasi-transcendental assumption (QTA): if anything counts as knowledge it is fallible science, especially physics (chemistry, biology, whatever), so let's now articulate how this is possible or, more formally, justified. So, GPOS is a in bad position to answer the skeptic, except to remark that within the scientific machinery one is not much perturbed by it.