New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Behind the headlines....petrodollars at work

On the surface Dutch politics has turned vehemently Anti-Islam. This is translating into restrictive immigration policies and laws targeted at particular ethnic minorities.

Behind the scenes, the Dutch government happily welcomes petro-dollars. As the press release reveals, Gazprom, the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, and the Dutch are strategic allies. (This bubbled to the surface because the residents of Bergen -- a once famed artist colony, now a sleepy beach-town with well-to-do-residents -- are not happy about the plans.)

Uncertainty vs Risk vs Randomness vs Risk

During the last two weeks I was immersed in Ghislaine Idabouk's briliant dissertation on the mathematics of options pricing (Black, Scholes, Merton, etc). She passed her Viva with flying colors and all of us encouraged her to translate it into English and expand it in order to publish it as a monograph. Ghislaine's dissertation has inspired me to start a weekly regular column on contemporary philosophy of economics (on Tuesdays).

Ghislaine's dissertation nicely brings out how many of the assumptions behind the mathematical structure of finance theory borrows  (and interestingly re-orients it away) from the core of post WWII economic theory. This core is derived from work done by Arrow and Samuelson. (Other names, Debreu, of course, could also be mentioned.) It is worth emphasizing this because in recent (reasonably intellectual) public discussions and polemics about economics, Keynes, Friedman, and Hayek all figure more prominently. This is why I was so delighted by Paul Krugman's recent colum (initially discussed on this blog here), where Samuelson's legacy is singled out. There is much to say about Krugman's view on it (and his views on why the legacy was "unstable"). But here I am going to focus on a bedrock assumption within the Arrow/Samuelson legacy, one of the crucial steps to make economics a science useful to technocrats: the reformulation of uncertainty as randomness.

Priest on paradoxical truth at NYT

Those of you who read Leiter's blog are no doubt familiar with the series of philosophical texts being published in the NYT's 'Opinionator' section. The series is called 'The Stone', and it is under the direction of Simon Critchley (to Leiter's horror). For the most part, the 'The Stone' texts have been widely criticized for a variety of reasons. For example, one of the recent installments is a piece which diagnoses Wittgenstein as autistic, suggests that there is an inherent connection between being autistic (referred to as being 'mind-blind', following a terminology introduced by S. Baron-Cohen) and doing philosophy, and further conjectures that this may be the reason why there is such a poor gender balance in philosophy (given the much higher incidence of autism among men). The piece was rightly torn to pieces at several places (here and here, for example).

This week, however, The Stone has a piece by the Prince of Darkness (that's his name in the Logician's Liberation League) Graham Priest, unsurprisingly on the topic of dialethia and true contradictions. Graham did a good job at explaining in more or less accessible terms what a paradox is, why it is important for philosophy, and the two basic approaches to a paradox: either accept the initially implausible conclusion, or go back in your inferential steps to figure out where you went 'wrong'.

Flash mob student occupation of retail store in London

More great stuff, targeting corporate tax cheats.

 

Most underrated philosopher of the week

This week I am cheating a bit. (Lots of travel, so I went with my first choice.) This week's winner fits the official rules for most-underrated philosopher of the week. Yet, she works in a research intensive department, which is especially strong in history and philosophy of life sciences.

Nevertheless, Anya Plutynski is a worthy winner. She is one of the world's leading young philosophers of biology, and combines this with a strong interest in the history of biology and the history of philosophical reflection on biology. While this is not so unusual among philosophers of biology, she also writes on philosophy of education and on policy matters (pertaining to the environment and cancer). My favorite piece of hers is this brilliant paper on Fischer, but I have to admit I have not followed the ongoing controversy since.

"I like to see the ladies"

The 21st Century Monads, a philosophical band composed of Kris McDaniel (Syracuse), Ben Bradley (Syracuse) and Carrie Jenkins (Nottingham), have a new song about the gendered conference campaign, and more generally about female representation in edited volumes, anthologies, conferences etc. It is appropriately called "I like to see the ladies". Here is an interview with Kris McDaniel about the song. Do go to the Monads' website to check it out!

The lyrics:

The University for Strategic Optimism

[UPDATE: 30 November, 19:00 CST]: Website of the University for Strategic Optimism.

This is great stuff. A bit of Situationist street theater, a bit of quick strike flash mob , a bit of hand-held video technology, and a lot of reclaiming public space. The taxpayers bailed out the banks, so we should reclaim bank space as public space.

What's great about this is the way a gathering of people disrupts the atomization on which neoliberalism feeds. Just getting people together in the same space talking to each other is a political act! Just being joyous together, rather than sad alone, is a political act! In other words, it's political affect in flesh and blood. 

Plus: "We do not believe history has ended." Take that, Francis Fukuyama!

 

Four Horsemen of the Teapocalypse

'The Four Horsemen of the Teapocalypse'

Economist Brad DeLong has an interesting take on the Austrian provenance of austerity politics (depression as a bracing constitutional, destructive yet invigoratingly creative) which strangely ends up making monetarism look sane.

Interesting piece nevertheless - I especially like the insights into the role of Andrew Mellon during the Great Depression, the same Mellon who famously remarked that in a depression property returns to its rightful owners - I meditate upon this in light of the current confusion around property rights caused by dodgy title transfers in the mortgage securitization process. Trespass returns to the non-owners.

 

Profits up; employment stalled: what's up with that?

It's funny how the Internet works. A comment to the post on the SPEP session on sexual difference sent me to Jack Balkin's page, where I discovered a number of pieces from the 80s and 90s on deconstruction and the law. As a brief glance* at some of his texts shows that like me, Balkin might be called a "right-wing Derridean" (calm down, it's not about DeMan, but about whether one stresses the conceptual system or the performativity of Derrida's texts),** I thought hmm, I should go over to Balkinization and see what's up over there. 

What I found was a very nice piece by Frank Pasquale on "closed-circuit economics," or, how rich people spending on luxury goods doesn't really translate into jobs for the rest of us. One of Pasquale's links in particular caught my eye: 5% of the population now accounts for 35% of all consumer spending!

According to the Citigroup experts, a plutonomic economy is driven by the consumption of the classes, not the masses: "In a plutonomy there is no such animal as 'the U.S. consumer' or 'the UK consumer,' or indeed the 'Russian consumer.' There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the 'no-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie." 

* I'll try to do a post one day after I've read some of the pieces more carefully. 

** I'll be interested to see where I would put Martin Hägglund's Radical Atheism on that spectrum. A post is forthcoming on that book too. 

 PS: proof that we are now in a post-post-ideological age. And not a moment too soon! 

Chinese logic and the (non-)origins of deduction

Yesterday I attended an interesting conference on the history of logic in China, organized by Fenrong Liu, Jeremy Seligman and Johan van Benthem, which took place in Amsterdam (unfortunately, I had to miss the second day today, due to a workshop in Vienna, where I am right now). At the conference I met some prominent researchers in the field of ancient Chinese logic such as Chad Hansen, Chris Fraser and Christoph Harbsmeier. I knew virtually nothing about ancient Chinese logic, but as a historian of so-called ‘western logic’ (as usual, a terrible label), I was very interested in finding out more about differences and commonalities between the two traditions.

One of the reasons why I am interested in such comparisons is that they should offer a privileged vantage point on the historical sources of the axiomatic-deductive method in ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics. The Chinese and the Indian traditions are arguably two ancient traditions having attained a level of intellectual sophistication similar to that of the Greek, but in these traditions scientific investigation developed in quite different ways. In particular, the axiomatic-deductive method in its specific details is (originally) unique to ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics. Now, if we are able to isolate specific elements of significant dissimilarity between the Greek tradition and these other traditions, then we might be able to attain a better grasp of some of the crucial factors for the development of the deductive method.

Paul Krugman takes the long view

Titled "The Instability of Moderation," this post looks at the intellectual, political, and financial instabilities that led us to forget the lessons of the Great Depression and landed us in the Great Recession. 

Here's a sample, from his discussion of intellectual instability, that is, the failure to hold micro and macro economics apart: 

it was probably inevitable that a substantial part of the economics profession would simply assume away the realities of the business cycle, because they didn’t fit the models. The result was what I’ve called the Dark Age of macroeconomics, in which large numbers of economists literally knew nothing of the hard-won insights of the 30s and 40s – and, of course, went into spasms of rage when their ignorance was pointed out.

 Let me be clear on where I stand here. What's important is that these garden variety Keynesian ideas can't even get a hearing in the US today among the Serious People (tm). Sure, Krugman writes for the NYT, but other than him, it's all neolibs all the time, which includes those whom Obama listens to.  So if even *Keynes*, self-described savior of capitalism, can't get a hearing, then left critiques of Keynes are so far off the map that we might as well be Martians rather than Marxists! 

As for Obama's stimulus, Krugman has consistently argued that the stimulus has been much too small, so that it has basically only matched state expenditure cuts, resulting in a close to zero net effect. His slogan for this is "50 little Hoovers" meaning the 50 governors.

Thanksgiving links!

Reports from the London protests yesterday: 

Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb: "spontaneous, massive, and militant."

Nina Power at Infinite Thought: "yesterday's kettle at whitehall" (for non-UK readers: "kettle" = preventive detention by police in which they cordon off a street and prevent entry / entrance)

Federico Campagna at Th-rough.eu: "kettles, troops, and students" 

Read them all; you'll be glad you did. Great photos with Nina's post too. 

Meanwhile, here in the States, Jodi Dean at I cite notes record US corporate profits. 

UPDATE: Laurie Penny at New Stateman makes the political affect point: "Inside the Whitehall kettle":

This is the most important part of a kettle, when it's gone on for too long and you're cold and frightened and just want to go home. Trap people in the open with no water or toilets or space to sit down and it takes a shockingly short time to reduce ordinary kids to a state of primitive physical need. This is savage enough when it's done on a warm summer day to people who thought to bring blankets, food and first aid. It's unspeakably cruel when it's done on the coldest night of the year, in sub-zero temperatures, to minors, some of whom don't even have a jumper.

Some of them have fainted, and need medical attention, or the loo. They won't let us out. That's the point of a kettle. They want to make you uncomfortable, and then desperate, putting your route back to warmth and safety in the gift of the agents of the state.

 

With Turkey, one's thoughts turn to Machiavelli (of course)

Earlier in the week there was a review of a new book, Maurizio Virolo's Machiavelli's God. From the review: Viroli develops the thesis that Machiavelli was not an atheist but a believer in a Christian God who loved virtue, rewarded patriotism, and expected people not to be meek and "turn the other cheek" but to defend their liberty....Viroli himself admits that he does not know exactly what Machiavelli personally thought of God: "I am not entirely sure that I have found that God. I still believe, however, that Machiavelli had a God, and that around this God of his he developed a religion of liberty that played an important historical role in Italian political culture.""

Fair enough, but it seems, then, a bit misleading to call Machiavelli a "believer in a Christian God." It would be more accurate (and in a way less anachronistic) that he (helped) redefine(d) Christian religion, and was a believer in the utility of the God of such a redefined (Republican) Christianity. The reviewer, Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, concludes, "Machiavelli did not directly engage the teachings of Christ in the Gospels and explain why they did not mean what they seem to mean. It would be interesting to see if Viroli could find advocates of virile Christianity who did so." The obvious answers are, Hobbes and (for those who think it is perverse to speak of Hobbesian Liberty), especially, Spinoza and Locke, of course!

Philosophy Updates' inconsistency

In my view Jewish analytic philosophy reduces to S. Morgenbesser's, if P, why not Q?

Others, however, think more can and must be explored. And this has created a developing mini-scandal first reported by TheProsblogion.  Philosophy Updates is a very useful WMU based philosophy listserv. It recently rejected an announcement from the Shalem Center in Jerusalem: Philosophical Investigation of Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Midrash. (Full disclosure: I am relieved that Michael Rea broke the news first, because I have been a guest at Shalem and happily enjoyed their hospitality even if we disagree on some political matters.) Michael Rea "emailed one of the moderators of Philosophy Updates to find out why they would not announce this conference." He was told that "they try to avoid posting ads for conferences that appear to pertain more to theology than to philosophy, and that one part of the policy is to avoid posting ads for conferences that have an explicitly biblical or scriptural focus." One of the folk at Shalem confirmed to me that they had received a similar explanation from Fritz Allhoff.

Most underrated philosopher of the Week: Ed Slowik

One of the regular themes on our blog (thank you for joining Catarina!) is implict bias in philosophy. In thinking about this week's most underrated philosopher of the week, I reflected on the unspoken, but quite prevalent tendency in the discipline to evaluate each other in light of 'our' ability to ask focused questions at talks (and to give focused answers) as well as 'our' collective joy at an apparently clear and tightly argued paper. (I am leaving aside all the rhetorical one-upmanship this sometimes involves when engaging with Oxbridge philosophers.) When in the Anglophone academic world, folk defend the system of hiring based on 'our' sense of who is a good philosopher, people will say that the written record (writing samples, etc) trumps all of this display of verbal fire power. I am not so confident about this.

  This week's most underrated philosopher (for the up-to-date-criteria, see last week's entry) is Ed Slowik. While working in a teaching intensive department, Ed has been quietly building a terrific ouvre in contemporary space-time theory, philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, and history and philosophy of science, not to mention a whole string of papers in philosophy of music and popular culture as well as book reviews much of it published in terrific journals. I have not read it all. But I know the online CV is not completely up-to-date because some of his splendid recent work on Newtonian space and Cambridge Platonism is not included on it. One of my favorite papers is an old, sadly neglected one, on Huygens and Newton's De Gravitatione (lovingly known as "De Grav") written well before the current obsession with DeGrav. It shows how Ed thinks through all the options available to Huygens and Newton; you can just see the relentless twists and turns of Ed's restless mind in action, and the sheer delight of thinking alongside great natural philosophers!

The false dilemma of modern motherhood

Today I read a blog post on Plato and modern motherhood (thanks to Greg Restall for the pointer!), which got me thinking. It may have been me, but the blog post seems to give the impression that there is a real dilemma between being a mother and pursuing a busy career outside the house, e.g. as an academic. The dilemma seems to be: either you have a busy career, or you are a good mother by doing things that good mothers do like baking cupcakes (and that’s of course an exclusive disjunction, in case you were wondering). Regardless of whether the author of the post herself does indeed present this as a dilemma, I believe it is in effect widely perceived as a dilemma. Some of the most outspoken feminists of previous generations (e.g. Alice Walker) contributed to this perception by being extremely critical of motherhood as something incompatible with a woman’s true personal fulfillment.

But this is a false dilemma. It only arises on the basis of a somewhat old-fashioned idea of what it is to be a good mother (e.g. baking cupcakes), which makes it seem that it is incompatible with being a scientist or an academic or what have you. What is incompatible with a career is a particular historical construal of motherhood (admittedly, a very pervasive one), not motherhood as such. There are countless ways of being a good mother, and many of them do not exclude the possibility of a successful career. Good parenting is the hardest thing in the world, but it is inherently hard, not only in combination with a busy career.

"Administrative Bloat"

You can access the full reports HERE. The authors use the data to justify some conservative talking points that don't directly follow. But the data alone is really worth thinking about.

Here's some of the summary.

Enrollment at America’s leading universities has been increasing dramatically, rising nearly 15 percent between 1993 and 2007. But unlike almost every other growing industry, higher education has not become more efficient. Instead, universities now have more administrative employees and spend more on administration to educate each student. In short, universities are suffering from “administrative bloat,” expanding the resources devoted to administration significantly faster than spending on instruction, research and service.

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent. Arizona State University, for example, increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 94 percent during this period while actually reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent. Nearly half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.

I wish the authors showed the extent to which these numbers are merely the result of a widening pay disparity between administrators and faculty, and which percentage are the result of hiring more administrators.

The rule of law in the face of 'terror'

Those are mention-quotes in the title, not scare quotes.  That is, I'm hoping to draw attention to the rule of law in the context of the word 'terror'.  A nice discussion of the way that any legal presumption of innocence has gone out the window appeared today on Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-j-greenberg/guilty-until-proven-guilt_b_785728.html

I've been following this case in the mainstream press, reading 5 or 6 articles in the Washington Post, a couple in the NY Times, and 5 or 6 scattered other articles.  What all have in common is the background assumption - with no argument whatsoever, but as if it is so obvious that no disagreement can be imagined - that Ahmed Ghailani is guilty of masterminding attacks.  The primary evidence for this claim seems to be the testimony - extracted under torture by investigators quite obviously trying to elicit just such testimony - of one "witness" (those are scare-quotes).  The judge in the civil trial rightly exclude this testimony and this is taken by all to indicate that while we know that he is guilty, this could not be legally demonstrated due to the loopholes of civil law.  The "debate" then turns on whether he should be tried by military courts with no scruples about using "evidence" secured by torture, or simply imprisoned permanently under absurd and criminal interpretations of the law of war.

None of this "debate" requires any consideration of the well-understood and empirically confirmed fact that such coerced testimony is epistemologically worthless.  None of it requires any reflection on what civil rights could mean in a context in which a court finding of innocence implies merely that one will be jailed under executive order. 

None of it requires even the mention of the word 'police state'. 

But as Chomsky pointed out long ago, a loud and acrimonious "debate" among two narrowly different positions, each of which presupposes all the views that matter is a far better way to manipulate public thought than a single government view that simply states those views.  The latter naturally leads folks to wonder what others think.  The former, leads them to pick one side or the other.  So, as Greenberg points out in this case, we shout back and forth between the "progressive" view that these obviously guilty people can all be convicted in civilian court, and the "conservative view" that the courts are so tilted toward the rights of the guilty that some of the obviously guilty people would be let off thereby necessitating imprisonment without trial.

And there we are.  the question is what anyone is doing about it.

Four kinds of 18th century Empiricisms...

I have been having an ongoing debate (my end: http://itisonlyatheory.blogspot.com/2010/09/speculative-vs-experimental-philosophy.html &  http://www.newappsblog.com/2010/10/on-the-history-of-experimental-philosophy.html & most recently http://www.newappsblog.com/2010/11/on-newtonianism-in-18th-century-moral-philosophy.html) with the folks at the Otago Early Modern Experimental Philosophy group (see their initial response, https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/emxphi/2010/10/reply-to-schliesser/ and more recent one https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/emxphi/2010/11/anti-newtonianism-in-moral-philosophy/). The core of my criticism revolves around the fruitfulness and dangers of the Otago use of the speculative/experimental distinction in treating 18th century natural and moral philosophy. In particular, I claimed that they were incapable of doing justice to a tradition of theory-mediated measurement. In initial response, Peter Anstey claimed that, in fact, there were two experimental traditions one Baconian that got supplanted by a Newtonian one.

In Barcelona, I will present my counter taxanomy "Eighteenth Century Newtonianism and Four kinds of Empiricism" at the European Society for History of Science Conference. I offer a fourfold distinction to do justice to the fact that Newton's authority was challenged (by lots of folk) and to dramatically differing forms of methodological empiricisms.I distinguish between: 1. The sciences of Theory-mediated measument (in Newton these are based on abstraction). 2. Autonomous experimental sciences. 3. A method of inspecting ideas in two forms: 3A. One that combines a normative theory of cognition with a method of discovering clear ideas (this is Hume's Treatise, but very indebted to Locke, I think) 3B: One that deploys the copy principle (this is Hume's first Enquiry) 4. The method of natural history (especially Buffon, who is great and seems to have assimilated the part of Hume's Treatise everybody skips, I.2), which is an inductive science of relations (and law-like relations between them) that is anthropocentric, but not anthropomorophic; experiments and mathematics have limited subservient, instrumental value within natural history.

Security Theater

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money links to a blog post  asking travelers to direct their frustration over the new full body image scanners vs full body search "choice" not at TSA workers but at TSA administrators. Sounds reasonable, but then all hell breaks loose in the comments, where "fascism" and "Good Germans" are tossed around casually, and even Niemöller's poem makes an appearance ("first they came for our shoes ....")

So what are we to make of the new scanners? The whole thing seems to me to be "security theater," that is, an excuse to try out an array of social and electronic control mechanisms under the guise of making us "safer." I don't know about the safety, but it is surely a good way of inducing obedience and docility in the population. Or maybe it amplifies paranoia and rage, which can also have their uses. Not that I'm blaming the TSA alone for the Tea Party, but ...

Black Pete: institutionalized racism in the Netherlands

It’s that time of the year again… November in the Netherlands means Sinterklaas hysteria; all children, and many adults, can think of nothing else but the preparations for the biggest event of the year, the Saint Nicholas celebration on December 5^th. For children, it is more important than Christmas itself: it is when they receive most of their presents, and lots of special parties and festive events take place.

So far so good, but there is (literally) a dark side to the tradition: in his endeavors of distributing presents to all children, Sinterklaas is assisted by Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), or more often by a team of Black Petes. Black Petes are typically incarnated by (white) adults, who dress in old-fashioned typical clothes and, most importantly, paint their faces black, their lips thick with red and wear curly hair wigs (just google 'Zwarte Piet' to see pictures if you are curious).

Michael Berube is making sense, comme d'habitude

Michael Bérubé over at Crooked Timber makes an excellent point in saying that Humanities majors at US universities have been stable at 8% since the late 80s, i.e., more than 20 years ago. So there's nothing behind the argument that they should be cut because they're in decline. That's because they are not, in fact, in decline. 

 

Murder Mystery--Tycho Brahe

Was Tycho Brahe murdered in Prague? (Thanks to Alison Simmons for the pointer.)

I suspect a lifetime interest in alchemical experimentation may be the cause of high concentrates of mercury on his body. Of course, that is compatible with death by poisoning.

 

Disappearing Departments

A Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry defends the Humanities brilliantly (and amusingly): "Young people haven't, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it's hard for most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature. The Inquisitor says that the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering. That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I'm sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it - if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don't."Read the whole piece here: http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138

Most underrated philosopher of the week

Here are the rules for my weekly most-underrated philosopher of the week entry: 1. no dead people; 2. no people currently or about to be employed in a Leiter top 50 department (even thought these are also filled with underrated folk); 3. no former dissertation advisors, or other teachers from graduate school; 4. no former students; 5. No untenured folk. There is also an unofficial rule: 6. Excellence in more than one AOS. (That is I want to recognize *interesting* philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones.)

This week's most underrated philosopher, Steff Rocknak, exemplifies breadth, especially. She not only works on David Hume, early analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind, and even some Husserl, but she is also a nationally recognized sculptor. That is, somebody that is so...NewAPPS! I am most familiar with Steff's work on David Hume. She is circulating a brilliant manuscript that is a commentary on one of the most difficult  and complicated parts of Hume's Treatise, 1.4.2. In it she overturns a lot of the easy/lazy readings of Hume as a straightforward empiricist. Hume scholarship will not be the same after it has been published.

 

Statistical Significance

As Deirdre McCloskey has been arguing for some time (see here an intro to her book on the topic), in the absence of background theory (a mechanism, etc) statistical significance  is largely meaningless concept. It is just a way to generate 'results' (and publications/grants) in social science. (It gives free license to data-minding.) Paradoxically, as I noticed a while ago, it makes 'results' too easy to come by. At best it might motivate further research. There is now a lovely reductio ad absurdum of its use from one of the great experimental disciplines, social psychology.

The retreat from public higher education makes the WaPo!

One of our blog's themes gets some publicity in a Washington Post blog. In the piece there's a nice shout-out to Aaron Bady, whom I cited in this Stanley Fish post of a few weeks ago.

The WaPo column begins: 

One striking thing about the current global recession, a crisis that has hit those in the United States with weaker education backgrounds much harder than others, is that one response has been the massive retrenchment, austerity and abandonment of the promise and ideal of public college education.

The comments are just sad, though, with the exception of Bady's own. 

Intuition-based philosophical methodology and belief bias

In my previous post on gender and philosophical intuitions I mentioned that I am quite critical of intuition-based philosophical methodology, and since then I’ve been telling myself (and others) that I should develop my criticism in more detail. So here it is!

I want to articulate my criticism of this methodology in terms of a cognitive tendency that human agents seem to have, which has been identified and studied by the experimental psychology of reasoning: the tendency to reason towards the beliefs we already hold so as to lend them additional support. One of the terms used in the literature to describe this phenomenon is ‘belief bias’, but I also like to use the less judgmental term ‘doxastic conservativeness’.

Let me briefly summarize these results. In several experiments, it has been shown that subjects have a strong tendency towards endorsing or drawing inferences whose conclusions are ‘believable’, and similarly a tendency towards rejecting or refusing to draw inferences whose conclusions are unbelievable. One typical example comes from Sá, West and Stanovich (1999): subjects were presented the following invalid syllogism and asked to assess whether it was a correct argument:

Cambridge researchers on music and biocultural evolution

Alva Noë's excellent blog post yesterday on care-taker / child intercorporeal rhythms, primary intersubjectivity, and turn-taking in conversation reminded me of research on music and biocultural evolution by two Cambridge researchers, Ian Cross and John Bispham. (I ran across their work doing research for this paper, which eventually appeared in Theory & Event 13.3 (September 2010).)

Here's what I wrote that connects most directly with Noë's post, though there's more in the linked paper on the topic (where the references are also available):

No Hate

Well I guess this atones for that awful Terri Gross interview that almost led me to throw out my KISS albums (cf. how incredibly charming, kind, and humorous Tom Waits and Iggy Pop are when they go on Fresh Air). Also really nice to see Slash stepping back from the ethos that produced "One and a Million" as well.

Seriously, the biggest surprise about this is that they actually criticize the evil legal and religious forces that help create, and exploit, the kind of sadism they are speaking against. This kind of honesty is almost never there in celebrity activism (cf. the Hurricane Katrina relief benefits where nobody mentioned the Army Corps of Engineers, the mineral extraction companies, the timber companies, any political parties, or even how civilized countries such as the Netherlands deal with such ecological issues). I'm actually pretty astounded to see the honesty here.