New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Jon Stewart and the unilinear ideological motivation vs "senseless lunacy" dichotomy

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Stewart displays the same exclusive binary to which I object below in this nonetheless heartfelt piece: either we can show a straight line causality or we can't make any sense out of a "complex ecosystem." So it's either a coherent ideological act (message – belief – action) or it's "senseless," it's "lunacy." But there are other forms of causation than straight line efficient causality, for example, the sort of environmental pressure causing increased phenotypic variance that Schmalhausen's Law describes. I hope we can say something analogous about the relation between the Giffords shooting and the extreme political rhetoric and images of Tucson Arizona without it being mere correlational "hand-waving." And actually I think Stewart's "toxic environment" trope is a good place to start. 

UPDATE, T 11 Jan, 12:50 CST: William Connolly and Jairus Grove of Johns Hopkins have nicely invited me to contribute to their blog, The Contemporary Condition. Jairus has compiled a great photo essay to accompany this piece of mine on the Giffords case. 

Conference: Living with the Past

I just came across the CFP of a very interesting conference which will take place in Johannesburg, called 'Living with the past'. A few months ago I had complained about the Netherlands' failure to deal with their colonial past, so it is with concerns of this nature in mind that I am thrilled to see this CFP. It is nowhere near my own professional expertise, but I am delighted to see that philosophy can perhaps contribute to the proper treatment of such absolutely fundamental issues of 'real life'. I've heard Lucy Allais (the sender of the CFP to philos-l) speaking on the South-African “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” once, and it was truly inspiring. Definitely a conference to keep track of!

I couldn't find a link to the conference's website, so I'm copying here the CFP as posted on philos-l:

First call for papers: Living with the past

The Philosophy Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, is hosting a conference on the topic ‘Living with the Past’.

Date: 3-5 June 2011

Keynote speakers:             
Howard McGary (Rutgers) 
Lionel K. McPherson (Tufts)

Impossible demands for "proof" in the Giffords assassination attempt

It's a short post over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, so I'm going to reproduce it here, with the comment I left there. 

The post: 

January 10, 2011 | Charli Carpenter

John Sides at the Monkey Cage weighs in with some social science on the relationship between militant metaphors in political speech and individuals’ willingness to engage in actual political violence against government officials. The findings he cites: an experimental study has shown there seems to be no effect on the overall population of exposure to “fighting words” in political ads, but there isan effect on people with aggressive tendencies. Moreover:

This conditional relationship — between seeing violent ads and a predisposition to aggression — appears stronger among those under the age of 40 (vs. those older), men (vs. women), and Democrats (vs. Republicans).

But his real point is that we should be cautious of inferring from this or any wider probabilistic data causation regarding a specific event:

To prove that vitriol causes any particular act of violence, we cannot speak about “atmosphere.” We need to be able to demonstrate that vitriolic messages were actually heard and believed by the perpetrators of violence. That is a far harder thing to do. But absent such evidence, we are merely waving our hands at causation and preferring instead to treat the mere existence of vitriol and the mere existence of violence as implying some relationship between the two.

My response: 

So that’s it, a binary between “hand waving” and billiard ball causality? Somebody’s got a terribly impoverished view of “causality” here. I’d say it was an example of “physics envy” but contemporary physicists aren’t that crude.

Let me give an analogy to a well-known biological principle, Schmalhausen’s Law, to show that we can make sense of the interchange of environment and population w/o meeting an impossible billiard ball causality standard. Schmalhausen showed that in species-typical environments, developmental robustness hides a lot of genetic variation. In other words, in normal environments you can get roughly the same results in a population with genetic variance. But put that population under environmental stress and the previously hidden genetic variation shows up in a greater range of phenotypes. This is not “hand-waving” but neither does it adhere to an impossible physics-envy billiard ball causality standard.

The analogy here of course, is that today’s political rhetoric environment is so extreme that we can plausibly suppose that it will expose the psychological variation in the population that would otherwise remain unexpressed.

That is not hand-waving, and it shouldn’t be dismissed because it doesn’t match some ridiculous standard of a direct cause-and-effect of one statement to one act.

UPDATE, M 10 Jan, 17:04 CST: Thinking about the exchange with Scalinger in comments below, it came to me that this billiar-ball-causality view has a lot in common with the isolated libertarian subject. Libertarians, I think, have to deny corporate advertising effects on the formation of choices, since that’s their bedrock, the individual and a consistent preference set. So they will deny any cultural influences and the porous subject that goes along with that. So there’s the isolated hard-shell individual (the billiard ball), and the only thing that will influence it, short of literally banging into it with a real billiard ball, is direct gun-to-the-head government coercion. Hence their refrain in pushing the “taxation is theft” line: "men with guns will come to your house and make you pay taxes!" This impoverished view of causality seems to be what’s behind many demands for “proof” in the Giffords case. 

UPDATE, T 11 Jan, 12:50 CST: William Connolly and Jairus Grove of Johns Hopkins have nicely invited me to contribute to their blog, The Contemporary Condition. Jairus has compiled a great photo essay to accompany this piece of mine on the Giffords case. 

UPDATE, W 12 Jan, 19:47 CST: This exchange with Scalinger on Facebook helped me formulate my ideas: 

Scalinger: It's an interesting and (when you get down to cases) a sometimes difficult question what one should ask for in the way of evidence to exhibit a "quasi-causal” relation (sometimes referred to by the unhelpful word “influence’) between an agent’s acts (or intentions as inferred from acts) and their cultural environment. If Locke sometimes sounds Cartesian, we don’t need to find in Descartes the precise propositions in Locke we regard as Cartesian; we give Locke credit for being able to work out consequences, draw parallels, introduce new instances, and do all the other things we ourselves normally do while reading texts (‘influence’ is not a helpful word just because it turns an active into a passive process). Nevertheless *something*, some text or intermediary, must link Locke to Cartesian philosophers; otherwise we have a mere parallel, a convergence, a common source.

Protevi: Yes, I completely agree as to necessity of a link, but not as to the level on which the link was made. The link seems to be immersion in the anti-government (and violence as solution to government problem) milieu of Tucson. But I think it's a mistake to look for ideological motivation, as in a match between message intake and output, i.e., looking for a repeated key phrase or even key idea, as would be evidence for influence in the history of philosophy example. But Loughner didn't have a coherent ideology. Nonetheless, he, like many others in the last two year, chose a Democratic politician targeted by right wing rhetoric, and intensely so targeted by Giffords's opponent in the last election.

So I think we have to look not to a smoking gun ideological match but to the way the target provided a promise to at least make a mark, to show he was serious, etc. Any big target would do (why not Gov. Jan Brewer?) but this one had more energy attached to her. So the ideology doesn't belong to Loughner, but he picked up on the energy that a particular ideology aimed at Giffords.

Summary: it's not the ideology that counted to Loughner, but the social energy that became attached to Giffords. And that energy was not generalized "anti-government" sentiment, but specifically targeted by those who do have an ideology.

Some interesting data on poverty of stimulus claims

There was a great story on NPR today about some of the Hart and Risley's published research from the mid 90's concerning linguistic interactions between parents and children. You can hear or read it HERE. One of their significant findings was that by the age of four, children of middle and upper class parents (who have jobs considered professional) hear around forty-eight million utterances of words. But four year olds of parents who have received Aid to Families with Dependent Children have only on average heard around thirteen million word utterances.

Subsequent research: (1) shows there to be just as significant a gap in exposure to number of distinct words (as opposed to utterance tokens), (2) shows there to be just as significant a gap in exposure to assertions versus mere imperatives (talking to kids as opposed to just talking at them), and (3) suggests that this word gap is more predictive towards subsequent success in school than economic class in a variety of ways.

I'd be interested if people assessing arguments for various innateness hypotheses and perhaps claims about how these hypotheses should inform syntactic structure (over and above just getting distributional data right, which Chomsky describes as thinking of syntax as a mere "E-Languge" and not really linguistics) have taken up this data yet. I mean there's a lot of information now about how hearing more words, having more assertions directed at you, and hearing more utterances affect the abiltiy to master language related skills down the road. Also, the numbers might be relevant to determining how many inputs a connectionist system should be allowed before expecting it to converge on behavior that can be described with generative rules (I have no idea where these kinds of debates are at today).

At the very least, Pinker's analogy between learning a language and learning to walk in The Language Instinct now looks incredibly strained. However, one should not confuse the mere issue of innateness with the extent to which innateness claims (if true) actually do constrain syntax the way most proponents of Government and Binding or Minimalism take them too; for example, despite his continuing commitment to strong forms of innateness, Pinker (in common, and with equal cause for surprise as Jackendoff and Cullicover) is actually now a pretty severe critic of some core Chomskyan claims.

In any case the happy news in the story is that programs have been set up to help parents communictate better with children and they are showing some success. This is a really nice instance of social science research having the capacity to make a positive difference to education in the broad sense.

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Kevin Meeker

Technically, I am still on holiday. But I did not want to postpone rebooting this weekly blog-entry until the middle of January. So this week's most-underrated-philosopher-of-the-week is: Kevin Meeker. Kevin has been publishing away on a wide variety of topics in top journals even though he is in a high teaching-load department. I know Kevin through the Hume Society, where for many years, against the Hume-is-a-naturalist or skeptical-realist crowd, he was a lonely voice arguing that Hume REALLY WAS A HONEST TO GOD SKEPTIC! (See also this lovely piece.) I recall that Kevin's arguments would be met with friendly ridicule--Humeans would not be mean, of course.

quote of the day

In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .

In Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding–named by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party–Harding was accosted by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag. Why not just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?"

William Manchester, Death of a President: November 20- November 25, 1963

Chris Newfield on "The View from 2020: How Universities Came Back"

One of my favorite analysts of universities is Christopher Newfield. He's quoted in this LA Times article on the MLA conference on the topic of "bootleg universities." Here's the text of his MLA presentation on the past and future of US public universities (sans slides, unfortunately). Excerpts: 

A larger number of independent analysts began to do the math on sponsored research projects. They found that this research produced large gross income and, at the same time, net losses, once overall expenses were calculated....

The US had had an educational advantage over every other country in the world from about 1840 on – first in high school graduation rates, then in college graduation.  This was an edge in the attainment of the whole population, not just for the top 1% that went to Ivy League Plus.  Between 1980 and 2010, the US completely squandered this historic advantage. It fell behind many high-income countries, and behind some medium-income countries as well....

After a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, a major state university system revealed that savings of about a million dollars from closing humanities departments overshadowed by losses of nearly $50,000,000 annually in its sponsored research programs... 

Note: he's talking about SUNY in that last graf. 

UPDATE: Harold notes below in comments the analogy between sponsored research and football as net losses. I complete agree, and thought I would call readers' attention to the Knight Commission report on US college athletics. Here's a key graf from that report: 

With few exceptions, however, reported operating surpluses from the two marquee sports were not enough to cover the costs of an athletic department’s other sports offerings, whether it be 14 or 24 squads. The myth of the business model – that football and men’s basketball cover their own expenses and fully support non-revenue sports – is put to rest by an NCAA study finding that 93 institutions ran a deficit for the 2007-08 school year, averaging losses of $9.9 million. That was more than twice as large as the average net revenue ($3.9 million) for the 25 programs that reported an operating surplus in 2008.

Neo-liberalism, bio-power, misogyny, and racism

All in one package. 

Two Mississippi sisters who have been imprisoned for 16 years were released on Friday morning on the condition that the younger sibling donate a kidney to her older sister, whose organs are failing....

The Scotts were arrested on Christmas Eve 1993, when Jamie was 21 and Gladys 19, and they were convicted the following year on charges that they led two men into an ambush, during which the men were robbed of about $11, according to the trial transcript.

Three boys, aged 14 to 18 at the time, were also convicted in the case; they served their sentences and were released from custody years ago, Mississippi officials said. The sisters have denied playing any role in the crime....

Gov. Barbour said he had acted in part out of concern over Jamie Scott’s health, but also to relieve the state of the cost of her dialysis treatment, approximately $200,000 a year.

“The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society,” Mr. Barbour said in a Dec. 29 statement. “Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi.”

Didn't I read somewhere that a large percentage of US slave manumission was when slaves were too ill to work and their cost of upkeep exceeded their profitability? And that by shifting the cost of upkeep of old and ill people onto their still enslaved family members, slave owners would delay the time when productive slaves could purchase their freedom? I'm looking in Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity (Harvard UP, 2003), but can't find it there. But I'm quite sure I've read that somewhere. Any help would be appreciated. 

Hiatus for 'The Stone'

I've just noticed that 'The Stone', the philosophy section of the 'Opinionator' blog of the NYT, will go on a break. With his usual (and to my mind quite irritating) verve, Simon Critchley announces that there will not be any new 'The Stone' entries for the time being; he says the section will be back, but he does not say when.

As I noted in a previous blog post of mine, the section has been severely criticized, for example over at Leiter's blog (he truly dislikes Critchley to start with). There have been indeed some terrible pieces, but there have been some very good ones too; to mention but a few, the Priest piece I commented on, but also the one by Andy Clark, the one by Tyler Burge (with which I thoroughly disagree, but it is surely interesting), the one by Frans de Waal, the one by Martha Nussbaum, and a few others. So overall, I think it was a valuable attempt, even if it could have been much better perhaps.

More generally, the most interesting thing about this enterprise has been the massive amount of responses it generated in the form of comments left by readers. The number of comments invariably went beyond three digits, and sometimes even four (predictably, with Peter Singer's piece). Apparently, the idea was that of 'putting philosophy back in the public arena', a goal which has, at least to some extent, apparently been attained. In fact, it's great to see philosophy attracting so much attention from readers.

meditations from 2010 Eastern APA

1. Biggest bummers. My rough estimate is that a third of the people who were supposed to be there didn't get through the bad weather. The biggest bummers for me here were that (a) my cowriter Frankie Worrell got stranded in New Orleans and didn't make it, and (b) that Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla didn't make it for the scheduled author meets critic section of "Yo!" and "Lo!": The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. I'm going to teach the book next Fall in a Philosophy of Language class, so at least I'll still get to study it deeply. [Professor A to Professor B: Have you read book X? Professor B: Read it? I haven't even taught it yet!]

2. Weird synchronicity. Even though Lance wasn't at the APA a lot of us got exposure to some of his work. Greg Restall's fantastic presentation on proof theory and meaning centrally focused on Lance and White's "Stereoscopic Vision: Persons, Freedom, and Two Spaces of Material Inference" (2007, Philosophers' Imprint 7 (4):1-21). Thanks to that, I actually feel that for the first time like I'm on the cusp of really deeply understanding two dimensionalism and the real nature of the difference between subjunctive and indicative conditionals. And I have taught 2 dimensionalism before. Restall's presentation got me re-energized about proof theory too. [I think I found a new non-standard logical operator during his presentation that does weird things to various accounts of the relation between the intuitive notion of Dummettian harmony and Gentzen/Prawitz cut elimination/normalization results. I'm going to get caught up on the relevant literature before I say anything though, because the point is so seemingly obvious that it's likely to have a simple flaw or be already discovered.]

3. Weirder synchronicity relating to logic types on this blog. Van Bentham presented after Restall in the logic section, and about four or five times he mentioned stuff that Catarina Novaes said at the empirically informed logic workshop.

4. First inevitable moment of APA related depression. During the discussion session of any talk there is a ratio of questions that try to destroy the speaker's argument and questions that point out the way the speaker's argument can be enriched or applied to other issues. At some point in going to talks I just became convinced that in Philosophy this ratio is way too high (I know that it's much lower in Linguistics at least). In my own presentation the only question of the motivationally helpful type I got was by someone who came up afterwards and pointed me to some Buddist discussions of vagueness and ethics that fit really well with what Frankie and I were doing. All the other questions were of the former type. In some of the other talks I went to, none of the questions were supportive. I couldn't help but to feel that something was wrong with us.

5. Second inevitable moment of APA related depression. A number of the questioners at me and Franki'es talk were grad students dissertating on vagueness. I managed to catch up with three of them at the smoker. All were really great, ferociously sharp, and doing interesting work. None of them had any interviews. 

6. Third inevitable moment of APA related depression. At the smoker I manged to hook up with some other OSU folks, and for a couple of hours we just had a blast talking philosophy and gossiping. At some point we all realized that a few years ago when all of us were trying to get jobs the very sight of us now yucking it up amidst so much doom would have inspired some gamut of emotions from mild Nietzschean ressentiment to near rage.

7. Greatest APA epiphany. At one point outside of the conference hotel I realized I was still wearing my name tag. I felt uncool and started to take it off, but before I'd unhooked the pin I looked up and saw Daniel Dennett, striding boldly down the street proudly wearing his APA name tag. Who's too cool for school now Cogburn? Seriously, that part of my soul deformed by the highschool terror of being uncool got a little bit further unkinked. It's just yet another thing to be thankful to Daniel Dennett for.

8. Another random weird moment. The employees at Legal Seafood who refilled the Tabasco bottle neglected to reinstall the little aperture at the top. So when I tried to put some in my lobster bisque it had the same effect as the old practical joke where someone loosens the top of the salt shaker. About 1/5th of my appetizer was Tabasco sauce. The waitress offered to get me some new bisque, but it still tasted great to me. She said, "you must be from Louisiana." I guess I am now.

9. Yet more being-in-a-strange-city synchronicity. Someone at my talk told me about the advertisement pictured above, which says that vagueness leads to socks, ties, and underwear. Me and Frankie's substantive conclusion neither entails nor contradicts that. So it's worth thinking about.

Ranciere on "populism"

The column is here, in Libération, dated Monday 3 January. A few excerpts with quick translations: 

Il ne se passe pas de jour où l’on n’entende dénoncer les risques du populisme. Il n’est pas pour autant facile de saisir ce que le mot désigne. Qu’est-ce qu’un populiste ? A travers tous les flottements du mot, le discours dominant semble le caractériser par trois traits essentiels : un style d’interlocution qui s’adresse directement au peuple par-delà ses représentants et ses notables ; l’affirmation que gouvernements et élites dirigeantes se soucient de leurs propres intérêts plus que de la chose publique ; une rhétorique identitaire qui exprime la crainte et le rejet des étrangers.

Il est clair pourtant qu’aucune nécessité ne lie ces trois traits.

Not a day goes by that we don't hear someone denouncing the dangers of populism. But it's not so easy to grasp what the word means. What is a populist? Across all the drifting uses of the word, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it by three essential traits: a style of direct address to the people bypassing their representatives; the affirmation that governments and societal elites care more about their own interests than those of the public good; an identitarian rhetoric that expresses a fear and rejection of foreigners.

It's clear however that there is no necessary link of these three traits. 

......

La notion de populisme remet en scène une image du peuple élaborée à la fin du XIX^e siècle par des penseurs comme Hippolyte Taine et Gustave Le Bon, effrayés par la Commune de Paris et la montée du mouvement ouvrier : celle des foules ignorantes impressionnées par les mots sonores des «meneurs» et menées aux violences extrêmes par la circulation de rumeurs incontrôlées et de frayeurs contagieuses.

The notion of populism re-establishes an image of the people elaborated at the end of the 19th Century by thinkers such as Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon, frightened by the Paris Commune and by the growth of the workers' movement: that of ignorant crowds impressed by the squawking of "leaders" and led to extreme violence by the circulation of uncontrolled rumors and contagious frights. 

-----

Ainsi ni les «populistes» ni le peuple mis en scène par les dénonciations rituelles du populisme ne répondent-ils vraiment à leur définition. Mais peu importe à ceux qui en agitent le fantôme. L’essentiel, pour eux, est d’amalgamer l’idée même du peuple démocratique à l’image de la foule dangereuse. Et d’en tirer la conclusion que nous devons nous en remettre à ceux qui nous gouvernent et que toute contestation de leur légitimité et de leur intégrité est la porte ouverte aux totalitarismes.

Thus neither the "populists" nor the people conjured up by the ritual denunciations of populism truly correspond to their definition. But that doesn't matter to those who scare up these ghosts. The essential, for them, is to amalgamate the very idea of a democratic people with the image of the dangerous crowd. And to draw from that the conclusion that we must hand ourselves over to those who govern us and that any contestation of their legitimacy and their integrity opens the door to totalitarianism.

LRB review of Dosse's book on Deleuze and Guattari

The review, by Adam Shatz in the LRB, is here. As Facebook friends Jason Read and Greg Seigworth have noted, it is quite a good introduction to DG as cultural phenomenon and as philosophical innovators, not always the case with journalistic treatments of DG-oriented materials. Dosse's book is available here from the Columbia University Press website. See also this CUP blog post on Dosse's recent book tour of the States.

It is always fine to hear economists pretend that financial incentives do not matter.

The New York Times reports that the AEA is considering an ethics code. In the article, Mr. Lucas is reported as saying: “What disciplines economics, like any science, is whether your work can be replicated. It either stands up or it doesn’t. Your motivations and whatnot are secondary.” (Lucas won a Nobel in 1995.)