New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Boycotting "white dude" conferences?

The Feminist Philosophers have a post with a link to an article discussing the idea that white men should refuse to participate in all-white male panels. The post also raises the question: should something similar be considered with respect to philosophy conferences? As some of you may remember, last year I wrote a post suggesting that, upon receiving a conference invitation, male philosophers could (should?) politely inquire as to the gender distribution of other invitees, and in case women were severely misrepresented, they could respectfully express their disapproval and perhaps suggest a few names.

There are specialists, and then there are specialists...

Brian Leiter reports that Klaus Corcilius will be moving From Hamburg to Berkeley (with tenure). He is described as a specialist in "Ancient Philosophy"; given that he is one of the great Aristotle scholars of our time, that seems fair. But it is worth pointing out that Corcilius has also written quite importantly on, for example, Hobbes, as well as the historiography of the practical syllogism (in recent times). This is just to say, there are specialists and then there are specialists!

Quicky philo of economics : on the origins of federal bank deposit insurance

A cute NYT article is going around facebook (thank you Esther-Miriam Sent!) about a banker, Robert G. Wilmers, who tells the truth about banking. The piece is full of common sense wisdom.

But one line is not quite right. At one point the NYT Journalist, Joe Nocera, writes "it meant that banks were taking excessive risks that were never really envisioned when the government began insuring deposits — and became, in effect, the backstop for the banking industry." (In context it seems that Nocera is reporting Wilmers' views, but it could also be commentary by Nocera.) But as I have reported before here (citing work by David Levy and Sandra Peart, who share my fascination with Max Weber's legacy at The University of Chicago) this is not quite true. Weber's last student, Melchior Palyi (who late in life ended up being associated with cranky right wing views about the gold standard), was an early and prescient critic of the way in which desposit insure by way of reliance on rating agencies would lead to catastrophe.

Must we hide the identity of chapter authors when confronted with The McDowell Move?

My post-title is a (serious-silly) pun.

Here's a review of an edited volume on Searle. The author has the peculiar tendency not to mention the names of "the authors" of the chapters reviewed (they are called, "authors," even when quoted!). (The editors of the volume are also not named within the confines of the review--we only know their identity in virtue of NDPR's format!) If it makes us focus intensely on the arguments (or whatever) there is a kind of elegance to this procedure (think Nick Bourbaki). But oddly enough, not only is Searle regularly named, so are folk (e.g., Jaegwon Kim, Alexander Nehemas, J.L. Austin), who (as far as I can tell) are not in the volume at all! What could motivate this? (At one point I wondered if it was some kind of weird status game: Searle, Kim, Nehemas, Austin--vs the nobodies?)

The review has the peculiar result to focus attention on Searle's inability to be understood by nameless authors. "In many cases Searle charges the authors with misunderstanding his views." Let's call this "The McDowell Move." Now as the author notes -- with references to Austin -- this move can, in fact, be a subject of profound philosophic investigation. But it turns out "most of Searle's accusations of misunderstanding cannot be so neatly brought under the Austinian taxonomy." Yet, a bit later we learn, "Searle uses some authors' confusions about the relation of ethics and institutional reality, not only to abate those confusions, but to elaborate on the place of ethics and aesthetics within his social ontology." Hmm...isn't this "enough about you and your pesky objections, let's talk about my interesting ideas?" (Since we're name-dropping, John Haugeland used to point out this is one of my favorite moves.)

A part of me thinks that there are duties to the profession and to the authors reviewed that have not been met in this review, but, please, don't let me interrupt the conversation...

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Helen Beebee

Some philosophers are really big deals in the profession, yet still fit all the rules for most underrated. (They inhabit a metaphysical grey zone?) This week's most underrated, Helen Beebee (Birmingham), is one of the most prominent metaphysicians of our time (with influential work on causation, free will, natural kinds, etc), an inspiring scholar of David Hume, and an important public philosopher as Director of the British Philosophical Association. During the last week I have been browsing in the OUP Handook volume on causation she co-edited, and I was reminded how much she offers the discipline by way of edited volumes and taking on the task of representing us to the outside. Her most famous paper (judging by citations) is her "causing and nothingness" (in which she defends Lewisian orthodoxy). I have long admired the frankness (involving the cost of adopting her position) exhibited by another paper that defends a descriptive account of the laws of nature. Of course, I am most familiar with her work on Hume's account of causation. She has a very fine book on the topic. But in my view her 2007 joint session piece was really important because it finally said "stop" to all the folk who try to read Hume entirely in light of the Old/New Hume debate. Moreover, it wisely points out that Hume's "definitions" are not what *we* would call definitions.

On the origins of analytic philosophy

(Cross-posted at M-Phi.)

Greg Frost-Arnold has a nice post on the origins of the phrase ‘analytic philosophy’, in particular on when it began to be used roughly with its current meaning. He has a useful chart showing that already in the 1960s the phrase was being regularly used, whereas ‘continental philosophy’ only became more prominent as a phrase in the 1990s.

But besides the question of uses of the terminology, in comments to the post different people have been presenting insightful remarks on the origins of the very idea of ‘analytic philosophy’ as a particular way of doing philosophy. Greg himself (in comments) offers the following observation as a starting point:

Go back to Europe in 1932. We have the following 3 intellectual groups: the phenomenologists (esp. Husserl and Heidegger), the folks dedicated to (something like) Moorean analysis, and the Vienna Circle and their intellectual allies (perhaps we include here the Lvov-Warsaw school).

Why not all of Kanazawa's papers spark equal amounts of controversy

The title of this blog post emulates the titles of several of Prof. Satoshi Kanazawa's paper. To take a random sample of this: 'Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent', 'Why Night Owls Are More Intelligent', 'Why More Intelligent Individuals Like Classical Music', 'Why Beautiful People Are More Intelligent.' or - his latest installment - the retracted blogpost in Psychology Today, which, after initial screening was rephrased as 'Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?'

Note that in each case, Prof. Kanazawa takes a controversial statement that needs to be proven as already established, and promises an evolutionary explanation of why the statement is true. Unfortunately, in many cases, the statistical data do not really support the controversial statement in the first place, as was shown in a re-analysis of the data of the retracted paper.

My question today is though: why do not all the other (dubious) papers spark the same amount controvery? Should we be OK with the assumption that less beautiful people being less intelligent, or with the conclusions in the paper "Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent"? This paper which appeared in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, Social Psychology Quarterly,  basically says that people who are more religious are less intelligent, and offers a (to my mind ad hoc) evolutionary explanation for this. I skimmed the web for cries of outrage at this paper, but what I found mostly positive assessments, not just on atheist-friendly blogs but also on science blogs, such as here.

Yet, a re-evaluation of the experimental design indicates serious methodological problems with the study. For example, in study 1, Kanazawa did not use fine-grained measures of religiosity (merely the extent to which people consider themselves religious), and that he used two protocol that were designed to study verbal intelligence, however, he generalized these findings to make statements about the participants' general intelligence. The degree to which verbal intelligence is a good indicator of general intelligence remains unclear in cognitive psychology. Moreover, he makes the substantial assumption that religiosity is the default, standard mode of thinking, whereas atheism is evolutionarily novel. I have argued against this naturalness of religion elsewhere, but here it suffices to say that this is a controversial assumption even among cognitive scientists who study the evolutionary origins of religion.

In sum, a scientific study that could be equally hurtful and damaging to some people as the study on attractiveness in black women was reported and accepted without question. This can be problematic, as, at least in Belgium and The Netherlands, politicians get away with saying that people who practice some religions (notably Islam) are less intelligent, more backward (etc.), and they argue that it is not racist, since they do not target an ethnic minority, but are merely making statements about the effects of culture. It just goes to show that this type of 'research' can also be potentially hurtful and damaging to some people, not just research that is overtly racist.

It follows a pattern, if you dig what I mean

That's the closing line of a couplet from Gil Scott-Heron's H2O-gate Blues. The first line of the couplet is "Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean." His most famous song of course was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised:

Brazilian music on Thursdays: 'Virgem'

I've been too busy this week, and with too little internet connection, to be able to write a post. Now I am at the lounge, waiting for my flight back to Amsterdam, after a FANTASTIC week in Brazil, both in professional terms and in terms of fun.

Anyway, just so that this week doesn't go by without a Brazilian song, here's a song that is also very much about Rio de Janeiro. It is by Marina Lima, a somewhat pop-ish singer who was quite successful in the 1980s. Some of her songs are really nice, such as this one, 'Virgem', which mentions a lot of different places in Rio. It's basically about a break-up, if I understand it correctly (it's all 'poetic' and all), and about how the whole city is indifferent to the break-up. Here is the link to the videoclip, but the youtube version has such an awful sound that I'm posting a different one. Still, you may want to check the video if you turn off the sound :)

CFP: Ontology and politics workshop

Call for Papers - Ontology and Politics Workshop / http://manceptworkshops.wordpress.com/

Despite its pervasiveness, the question of the relation between ontology and politics continues to be a crucial one for Continental philosophy.  While the place and status of the question of being in the realm of the political has occupied much of social theory in the past twenty or thirty years, we remain no closer to drawing any common ground on these themes. Post-structuralist or post-foundational political thought has insisted on the inherent contingency of any political ontology and has, from this notion, sought to draw out a framework for an emancipatory politics grounded
in the concepts of difference and otherness.

However, such a stance finds itself increasingly challenged today.  On the one hand, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere call for the need to think a politics grounded in a conception of universality rather than alterity, while on the other hand, so-called speculative realism more fundamentally challenges the very notion of ontology as it has been conceived by the majority of Continental thinkers in recent decades.

This panel aims to explore the intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for thinking both the political and the philosophical. We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:

• Is there a place for reflection on ontology in the theorisation and study of politics?
• Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the political?  How should this relation be conceived?
• Is there a necessarily leftist or emancipatory ontology?
• Should the politics which has generally been thought to follow from post-foundational or post-structuralist ontologies be re-evaluated in light of recent critiques?
• Does a new and different relation between ontology and politics follow from recent speculative materialist ontologies?

If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please submit an abstract of 300-500 words (or a full paper to Paul Rekret (Queen Mary) or Simon Choat (Kingston) by 15 June 2011.

Amended comments policy

We've decided to slightly amend our comments policy. The added passage: 

We encourage the use of real names, but we realize that some people have a legitimate need for anonymity or pseudonymity. However, anonymity or pseudonymity places the commenter under the obligation to be prudent in the choice of language, and we will place anonymous or pseudonymous comments under greater scrutiny. It's thus to the advantage of such commenters to provide legitimate email addresses so that we can contact them in borderline cases. If we can't get in touch with you to discuss and / or clarify comments, we're much more likely to delete a borderline comment.

A found manuscript of Spinoza's Ethics!

Dutch media are reporting that Leen Spruit has discovered a manuscript of Spinoza's Ethics in Vatican library. (By chance on Monday in Oxford, I had heard about this from Pina Totaro (CNR, Roma), who is involved in publication of the manuscript.) This is exciting news! The Dutch article writes that this ms was submitted to the Inquisition by Spinoza's ex-friend Nils Steno in 1677. The team that is analyzing the ms suspects Steno obtained the manuscript from Spinoza's interlocuter, Ehrenfried Walther Tschirnhaus.

The newspaper article subtly implies, however, that this ms is more authentic than the one published in Spinoza's Opera Posthuma. The article suggests that this ms proves that the posthumous work must have been edited and changed from the manuscript Spinoza left for his editors (now lost, presumably destroyed). But it is not impossible that Spinoza made some changes to the Ethics after he circulated the version now found in the Vatican library. Moreover, the Dutch translation that accompanied the Ethics in the Opera Posthuma contains subtle differences -- often clarifications --, suggesting that the editors were cautious in altering the Latin. Anyway, until the world's expert on these matters, Prof. Piet Steenbakkers, weighs in, I remain skeptical about the suggestion that we will need to study this manuscript as the authentic Spinoza.

Update: the manuscript will be invaluable to help figure out the extent of Spinoza's intellectual development during the last few years of his life. In particular, it may allow us to discern the impact, if any, of Spinoza's non-trivial correspondence with Tschirnhaus (and their intermediary, Schaller). Moreover, the Dutch newspaper reports also provide more evidence for the idea that the Ethics may have originally been conceived in four parts (or that material that was intended for a fourth part, ended up in the final part, which has a rather sharp break between proposition 20 en 21).

Continental Connections Thursday #1: White Light/White Heat

White Light/White Heat refers, as many probably caught, to an album by The Velvet Underground, and hopefully this will not to be a random reference given what I want to make of it. As one of the premier experimental rock bands of the 1960s—their first album was a joint project with Andy Warhol—The Velvet Underground, following the inspiration and lead of front man Lou Reed, would frequently draw upon the use of feedback distortion to the point where it became nearly indistinguishable from white noise. To be fair, Lou Reed also had a knack for writing traditional songs as well, with catchy melodies and a good sense for the use of harmony. In 1975 Lou Reed took his white noise tendency to an extreme when he released Metal Machine Music, which is to many ears (mine included) largely a compilation of white noise. There is some debate about whether or not this album was released as a joke or as a way to quickly complete his contractual obligations to the record label he had become disenchanted with. Whatever the motivations, one should not be too quick to discount the use of white noise or discredit a work that makes use of it.

Academic freedom and tenure

The recent discussions on academic freedom on this blog warrant, I think, a re-examination of academic freedom as a justification for tenure. Tenure can only be revoked on the basis of severe misconduct or gross incompetence, and revocation is usually a tedious procedure. The rationale for this is to protect scholars when they dissent from authority, general opinion, or choose to undertake risky research. However, given that researchers have to wait and struggle increasingly long (or fail altogether) to obtain a tenured position, this justification seems to me hardly defensible. I do not think academic freedom should be reserved for the select few, but rather, I invite suggestions on how to make academic freedom available for the non-tenured as well. 

Consider the recent spate of tenure denials, where there are clear impingements on academic freedom: Feminist philosophers comment on the denial of tenure of about half a dozen faculty of color in De Paul. One of them, Dr. Namita Goswami, was hired to do philosophy of race, feminism and postcolonialism, but once hired, some of the faculty took issue with the subjects she investigated and decided on the basis of this that she was "not a good fit". Also, consider the recent case of Marie-Claude Lorne discussed in this blog. Her tenure review was irregular and not transparent, to say the least. These are extreme cases, but it does point toward a general trend where academic freedom is becoming a luxury for the tenured few.

In the early 2000s, the average age at which American academics got tenure was about 40, and for German academics it was about 37. I don't have more recent figures, but since the economic crisis the average age must have gone up still. This means that most researchers cannot enjoy the benefits of academic freedom for a decade or longer after their PhD, in what is often the most productive period of their career. 

The rising average age at tenure is an unfortunate thing, since it actively discourages young scholars from engaging in risky research. This is perhaps not so much a problem in philosophy as it is in other fields. Young scholars who make an honest mistake, for instance in molecular biology or physics, can basically bury their hopes for a favorable tenure review (I'm talking about honest mistake here, not about deliberate plagiarism or meddling with data). But how can you do ground-breaking risky research without at least the possibility of mistake? Another problem with the breaking down of the tenure system is that many young scholars (postdocs) cannot even choose on what they work. Increasingly in Europe, young postdocs work on larger projects that have fairly specific subject matters. Usually, the fit between these people's own interests and the project is not perfect, and in some cases, the fit is poor. I knew several young scholars who were working on matters entirely unrelated to their previous research in such projects. They were unhappy with the situation, but it was either that or academic oblivion.

The productivity of older, tenured researchers is variable. Undeniably, there are excellent tenured scholars that engage in risky research. In those cases, tenure does have a clear benefit. However, in many other cases, tenured scholars are no longer active researchers, they have not published anything in years. In those cases, tenure just grants the academic freedom to be idle.  Apart from introducing regular tenure reviews every few years (which would be very unpopular), I do not see an easy solution to this. But I do think that there are no objective grounds for reserving academic freedom for tenured folk only.   

On double standards (Synthese & Stone's plagiarism)

An anonymous author comments (on Gabriele Contessa's proposal to end subscriptions to Synthese), "Why is outrage over editorial misconduct so selective? The Synthese editors get pilloried, but there has been little or no outrage directed at the editorial misconduct of those philosophy editors who have failed to retract publicly the many plagiarized articles by Martin Stone. If the “40 Cases of Plagiarism” exposé is to be trusted, there are are plagiarized articles in the Aristotelian Society Proceedings, Traditio, and a slew of volumes from Routledge, Leuven University Press, Cambridge UP, Oxford UP, not to mention others. Somehow the editors of Synthese get all the outrage from the philosophical community, while Stone’s editors across the board get a free pass when failing to issue public retractions." Just for the record: at this blog we reported and discussed the plagiarism case extensively, and called attention to the significant import to the profession (see here, here, here), here, here, and [linking up Synthese to this discussion, here). Now anonymous thinks the whole difference by the profession's response can be explained by the presence of "the politics of ID/creation." But this seems mistaken. First, nobody is defending plagiarism, while lots of folk are defending either Synthese's editors or Plantinga's actions. Second, much as I hate to admit it, history (especially medieval/renaissance history) is not central to discipline's self-conception in the way that epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and debates over design arguments are. In addition, there is, as anonymous notes, a further political dimension. But to reduce the situation to the final point does not seem quite right to me.

New APPS interview: Elizabeth Wilson

Today’s New APPS interview is with Elizabeth Wilson, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. The subject of the interview is her new book, Affect and Artificial Intelligence (University of Washington Press, 2010). 

-----

Thank you for doing this interview with us, Elizabeth. You don’t shy away from a critical engagement with the disembodied nature of classical AI, but you don’t do it from an exteriorizing and distancing relation. Instead you seek a more positive, empathic rapport with the history of the subject and its major figures. Can you tell us more about this decision?

Much of this emerged from the archival nature of the project.  I spent a lot of time in archives looking at correspondence and marginalia and early drafts of papers written by AI pioneers like Alan Turing, Walter Pitts, and Warren McCulloch.  I also looked at logbooks and correspondence and reports written in the early computer labs (in the US and the UK).  

While I certainly saw material that sponsored a disembodied notion of AI, I also saw a lot of concerns (both quotidian and intellectual) about the nature of the body in relation to mind, especially emotion in relation to mind.  I was struck that there was more “feeling” in these materials that a conventional critique of the disembodied nature of AI usually acknowledges. 

That was one of the key realizations of the project: interest in emotion in AI and computer science didn’t just drop from the sky in the mid 1990s.  Rather, there is a history of engagement with emotion in AI from the very beginning.  This is a minor history of random notes, not to be found in every place, but nonetheless it is a history that significantly refigures the claims that the current interest in emotion and computation is new. 

And from this a number of important political and intellectual questions follow: What interests are being served when someone argues that emotion has only recently arrived in AI?  If this interest is not new, then what presumptions and expectations are being imported, silently, from older work? Is all AI affective?  If so, then what affects have counted the most, and to what ends?

weekly philo of economics blog: (reflexivity) and economists as prophets.

[This is from a larger draft-paper on the history of economics and reflexivity. I blogged about the paper before.]

Another way in which economics is reflexive is in turn divided in three kinds. Economics offers self-fulfilling prophecies, self-refuting prophecies, and what I call philosophic prophecies.These three are structurally akin, but describe slightly different aspects. All three are meant to capture the kind of priestly role of contemporary policy economics. Public pronouncements by economists – preferably brandishing mathematical formulas that are almost impossible to understand for lay-people – play a kind of oracular function in contemporary social life.

[None of this is to deny the possibility of successful predictions (that don’t meaningfully change the path of the underlying system). We can understand the important paper by E. Grunberg & F. Modigliani (1954) “The Predictability of Social Events,”, and J.F. Muth’s (1961) “Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements,”, as characterizing precise (and rather infrequent) circumstances in which this can take place. As Wade Hands points out, Herbert A. Simon (1954) “Bandwagon and Underdog Effects and the Possibility of Election Predictions” does something similar. See W. Hands (1990) “Grunberg and Modigliani, Public Predictions and the New Classical Macroeconomics” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 7: 207-223.]

Satoshi Kanazawa, Attractiveness "Research", and Add Health

Further to our discussion last week, I emailed Add Health about the nature of the data that Kanazawa used. They sent me a statement this morning, which has obviously been sent to many others who enquired. Here are some excerpts:

"The data Kanazawa used for his research were drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a congressionally-mandated study funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Add Health data are available in two forms: a “public use” data set, which includes data from a subset of participants, and a “contractual” or “restricted-use” data set, which includes the full set of variables and participants. The “restricted-use” data are available to researchers who have appropriate research credentials (e.g., post-graduate degree) and an Institutional Review Board in their research institution that ensures their use of data security procedures required by Add Health to protect data and participant privacy and confidentiality. Kanazawa applied for and was granted access to these restricted data, as have thousands of other researchers . . .

"Kanazawa based his blog post on data derived from interviewer ratings of the respondents that were recorded confidentially after the interview was completed and the interviewer had left the interview setting. It is a widely-used and accepted survey practice for interviewers and researchers to include such post-survey completion remarks. These remarks provide both an additional observation about the respondent and data on the context of the interview for researchers to assess data quality. . .

"Interviewer ratings of respondent attractiveness represent a subjective “societal” perception of the respondent’s attractiveness.  We included these items because there is a long line of research evidence that indicates that perceived attractiveness is related to important health and social outcomes, including access to health care, health education and instruction, job search, promotions, academic achievement, and social success in friendship and marriage.   For example, males who are rated more highly attractive tend to have higher wages, shorter periods of unemployment, and greater success in the job market . . .

"Because the interviewer’s perception is subjective, researchers need to account for the characteristics and life experiences of the interviewer in interpreting their ratings. A wealth of research on perceived attractiveness (that is, as perceived by others, not oneself) has shown that such ratings vary according to the characteristics of the rater. For example, a male interviewer might rate a female’s attractiveness according to different criteria than a female interviewer rating the same female’s attractiveness.  Other interviewer characteristics that are important to take into account are age, race, ethnicity, education, geographic location, and life experiences, in general."

Though some of us may have sussed out the main points, especially those contained in the final paragraph above, this statement clearly demonstrates the irresponsibility of Santoshi Kanazawa's "research". As somebody who was granted access to the restricted-use data-set, he would have been aware of the nature of the attractiveness rating. Yet, he gave no indication of this in his blog post.

Add Health Director, Dr. Kathleen Mullan Harris, a professor of sociology at UNC, Chapel Hill drove the point home in an interview with NPR, quoted in the email sent to me: "He's mischaracterizing the objectiveness of the data — that's wrong. It's subjective. The interviewers' data is subjective."

It is not unreasonable to ask that LSE investigate Kanazawa, and take appropriate action. I leave to others who are more experienced in this kind of action how this request could be prepared and communicated to LSE.

(I will cross-post this on It's Only a Theory.)

Logarithmic number lines and extreme wealth

Psychologists who examine numerical cognition in young children and people from nonnumerate cultures have found that our default, unlearned, mode to represent cardinalities is not according to a linear mental number line, but a logarithmic one. In other words, our intuitive sense of numerosities roughly corresponds to the natural logarithm of those numbers. Linear numerical representations, such as the natural numbers and the way we place them on rulers and other linear representations, are cultural inventions. As Dehaene et al. put it: "The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education."

The research by developmental psychologist Robert Siegler indicates that children learn to make linear representations of number by prolonged cultural expose in school and in (more informal) home settings like playing board games. Siegler and Booth (2004) found that this linearity of number lines appears gradually. In one of their experiments, they gave five- to seven-year-olds an unscaled number line with 0 at the left side and 100 at the right, and asked them to place various numbers on this number line. Younger children typically placed small numbers too far to the right. For example, they tend to place the number 10 in the middle of the scale. On the other hand, they tended to underestimate the distance between the higher numbers, placing 70 far too close to 100. The older children, on the other hand, made much more linear estimations. Intriguingly, this process is repeated as children learn to deal with cardinalities up to 1000. Siegler and Opfer gave children between 7 and 11 years of age lines from 0 to 1000, and again found that the younger children tended to have logarithmic representations, and the older ones linear representations. 

I wonder whether we could generalize the observation that linear numerical representations need to be relearned. In other words, is the case that we need to re-calibrate our mental representation of magnitudes each time we learn to deal with higher numbers? Leiter's blog recently pointed my attention to the following site, which gives you a sense of how much one billion dollars can buy. The shopping list of expensive and useless items (including a private island, a plane, some yachts, etc.) is impressive, and yet the billion dollars are not even halfway spent. Most of us have no idea what a billion dollars is, or indeed have an intuitive feeling of the difference between one billion and one million. It's all equally mind boggling.

If the default mode of our mental representation of numerosities is logarithmic, most of us have no idea of how much some people are making, and what a huge difference it would make if they were fairly taxed. In other words, one reason that we do not protest at the extreme wealth, is that we simply do not have an intuitive grasp of how extreme it is. 

New ESF journal rankings in Philosophy and philosophy of science

The updated ESF/ERIH journal rankings are now available (thanks to Thomas Sturm for pointer). I haven't had time to study these in depth. Leaving aside the use to which these rankings are put, and some obvious tacit biases in the rankings, there are at least five obvious problems: 1. There are, as Fred Muller has pointed out, discrepancies between the philosophy and philosophy of science lists. (Try Erkenntnis, for example.) 2. Idiosyncracy: if you work on Kant and Leibniz your favorite journal is A listed; but if you work on Hume, it's not (obviously Kant scholarship is much better than Hume scholarship!). 3. The criteria used are completely non-transparent (and not obviously objective). 4. Despite past protest, the panelists are, as Steven French has emphasized, few, chosen without consultation, and not obviously representative. (Also, for some reason some well connected philosophers get invited back to the panels, but others not.) 5. Interdisciplinary work is, as Loet Leydesdorff has researched, discouraged. There are deeper problems with these rankings and the uses they are put to (although there also advantages), but let me hold my fire for now. I'll open comments for discusson. I hope the discussion can shed some light on the rankings.

The Embodiment of Life: The Legacy of Francisco Varela

A conference at City University London, Wednesday June 1, in the Birley Lecture Theatre of the Centenary Building.

Description: 

Francisco Varela was one of the most innovative and influential cognitive scientists of the last 50 years. His unique ability to blend deep knowledge of neuroscience, European philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism has had a profound affect on our understanding of the immune system, embodied cognition, and the relationship between brain and consciousness. To mark the 10th anniversary of his untimely death, this symposium brings together some of those who knew Francisco and explores the way his work continues to guide investigations of human nature of many different kinds.

Among those taking part will be Stephen Batchelor (Buddhist teacher), Michel Bitbol (Philosopher), Paul Bourgine (Engineer), John Protevi (Philosopher) and Antonino Raffone (Neuroscientist).

Registration here. Program here.

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Richard T. W. Arthur

I welcome private and public nominations for my weekly, most-underrated philosopher of the week post! Here are the rules: 1. no dead people; 2. no people currently or about to be employed in a Leiter top 50 (or equivalent) 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. 6a: Excellence in more than one AOS, or 6b: noticeable public impact. (That is I want to recognize interesting philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones!)

This week's most underrated, Richard Arthur, possesses that rare combination of historical breadth with philosophic and mathematical acuity. He also works on a dizzying number of topics and figures: philosophy of time, history of mathematics, thought experiments, philosophy of physics, and early modern (some of this overlaps, of course). Rare among major Leibniz scholars, he knows his Newton (see a lovely comparison). Rare among serious Descartes specialists, he knows his Beeckman. I admit I have a soft spot for anybody that can swtch between work on Minkowski space-time and Daniel Sennert! In my view, Arthur's key virtue is that he is constantly critically engaging with a wide range of others (from Deleuze to Howard Stein)--I am always dazzled by the scholarship and secondary literature he has assimilitated in his work. Among my favorites of his work, is the very important old piece (destroying lots of myths) on space-time in Newton and Leibniz. More folk should know his work!

Another Synthese proposal....

Gabriele Contessa is proposing a subscription boycott.

An unhelpful way to think about the Synthese controversy

I just came across a short post by Leiter with the unbelievable title 'European formal philosophers, don't relax yet...', which made me truly uncomfortable. I've said before in comments here that, in my opinion, to insist on the differences between 'Americans' and 'Europeans' in the Synthese affair is only likely to make matters even worse. It is my conviction that a lot of the drama has been caused precisely by mutual misunderstanding on both sides, but this is all the more reason to avoid this kind of polarization and stereotypical generalization at this point. Even as a joke, it's not funny, unless Leiter's goal was to alienate even further those 'European formal philosophers' who are truly dissatisfied with the editorial decisions made by the EiC as well as with their later statements, but who may think that a boycott approach is not the most likely way to reach a resolution of the situation. (That's roughly my own position; do I count as an 'European formal philosopher'?)

For the record, I do think that the attribution of parochialism to the critics of the EiC coming from my esteemed colleagues Martin Stokhof and Frank Veltman (and there's not a hint of irony here, they are both fantastic colleagues and philosophers) was itself parochial. But by putting up a post like this, I'm not sure what exactly Leiter is trying to accomplish, beyond provoking even more unhelpful animosity.

UPDATE - Leiter has added an update in his original post, which addresses some of the concerns that have been voiced here.

 

Time without space

 
In the most recent issue of Language and Cognition, there is an article, "When time is not space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture," by Chris Sinha, Vera Da Silva Sinha, Jörg Zinken and Wany Sampaio (here). It focuses on the Amazonian tribe the  Amondawa in Brazil who lack, according to the article, an abstract conception of time in the sense of there being a space within which events occur (the BBC among other news outlets have run stories on it [see here for instance]). Such studies are not new, of course. Lev Vygotsky, for instance, did studies in rural Russia in the 1920s that also showed a lack of abstract ideas among the people that he argued was due to their being an exclusively oral culture. What I found interesting about this recent article is the debate that has emerged to account for the fact that when the Amondawa learn Portuguese they quickly adjust to mapping temporal events into spatial relations with one another. Whether the Amondawa truly lack the capacity to map temporal events into spatial relations or whether they already do so implicitly but simply lack, due to the scaffolding of their environment and language, the means to express such mappings is the subject of the debate. From my perspective this case nicely illustrates the Deleuzian distinction between intensive and extensive. I would argue that the mapping is not a consequence of the language categories that place temporal events into extensive relations with one another but these categories themselves actualize intensive properties of their social-environmental relations (and it should be noted the Amondawa do mark important life changes by giving individuals different names, so they already mark temporal events but not in relation to a more abstract space). As they learn Portuguese these intensive processes come to be actualized by way of a different set of abstract categories (categories that themselves have their own history, their own intensive properties that they have actualized), and hence the ease with which the Amondawa pick up their use. I'll be interested to hear what those who work much more than I do on linguistics, semantics, extended mind, etc., have to say.

Gabrielle Contessa leads by example

As Brian Leiter reported, Gabrielle Contessa (with a PhD in philosophy of science from LSE) writes the (new--recall the other LSE scandals!) Director of LSE a splendid letter protesting recent racism masquerading as evolutionary psychology emanating from LSE.

[Addition: here is a link to the Google cache version of Kanazawa's article, which was removed from the Psychology Today website; there are a number of responses to the article here.]

(Post)-Doctoral workshop (8-9 June, Ghent), Spinoza: the Political and the Metaphysical

On June 8-9, 2011, with support of Ghent University's Doctoral School, the Philosophy & Moral Sciences Department at Ghent University, is hosting a (Post-)Doctoral workshop on Spinoza.

Susan James (Birkbeck, London), Beth Lord (Dundee), and Willem Lemmens (Antwerp) have agreed to lend their expertise to the workshop.

Program:

Mr. Zero from The Philosophy Smoker analyzes Kelly James Clark's letter to Synthese; as well as one concluding thought about the dangers of academic identity politics

HERE.

The critique is well worth reading in its entirety. I think anyone who goes through it will agree with Mr. Zero's conclusion:

I hope that when the EiCs received this letter, they threw it straight into the garbage where it belongs. I really hope that this letter did not cause the EiCs to rethink their position on the Forrest piece. I really, really hope that this kind of **** is not what convinced the EiCs to attach the disclaimer.

Sadly, Alvin Plantinga repeated Clark's claim that Forrest's article was "heavy on character assasination" in the New York Times (or perhaps Clark is repeating Plantinga's claim in his letter, there is no way to know since Professor Plantinga's communication to the Eics has not been made public). Moreover, even though it is clear from everything that has been said that somebody complained about another paper that did not criticize a notable conservative Christian, the major actions of the EiCs that have been under discussion concern the reactions to Plantinga and Clark's criticisms: corresponding with Beckwith (and not the non-conservative Christian criticized in the other offending piece, nor the special issue editors for that matter) to let him (and not the other non-conservative Christian offended person) publish a non-reviewed reaction where he misquotes their initial editorial statement. Likewise the special editors said the correspondences they received from the general editors only concerned Forrest's piece.

In any case, Mr. Zero shows how incredibly misleading Plantinga and Clark's claim of "character assassination" is in reference to anything in Professor Forrest's paper.

My concluding thoughts on all of this is that Leiter and others are mistaken to say that there was presssure from "the ID lobby." Indeed, it is correct to say that Beckwith has been part of the lobby and also that the most troubling aspect of this is the manner in which the editors' actions will help the lobby. But this is all consistent with no pressure having come from the "ID lobby."

Instead, it is clear now that the pressure came from leaders of the same conservative Christian lobby that last year unsuccessfully tried to retain the APA's earlier inconsistent deference to Christian colleges with Jim Crow hiring practices and teachings. As far as anyone has been able to adduce, this recent action was solely out of the kind of misguided identity politics that constitutively produce what George Bush calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations" here creating one standard for Forrest and a contradictory, lower, standard for Beckwith (and Plantinga and Clark for that matter with respect to their public statements). Certainly not out of any reasoned position, judging by Clark's letter and Plantinga's public statement, which again solely repeats the central false conceit of Clark's letter.

[Three Notes: (1) for an open letter to Alvin Plantinga concerning his statement to the New York times from the blog's very own Eric Schliesser, go HERE, (2) I cannot state clearly enough that many prominent members of the SCP do not share Plantinga, Beckwith, and Dembski's indefensible views about our obligations towards tax exempt entities which segregate; and it would likewise be a complete mistake to infer widespread agreement with Plantinga and Clark's claims about "character assassination"; for my worries about the SCP as well as defense of a position contradicting Plantinga's essay which is linked to prominently from the SCP's web page, see the post HERE. (3) It would be remiss of me not to note here that I think it speaks very well of Professor Clark that he subjected his letter to the public scrutiny of the philosophical community, and I hope those of us who find his case as uncompelling as Mr. Zero does can still extend him respect for having done this much.]

and now, for something completely different

THIS is about the funniest thing I've read all year, the manifesto of the Logic Liberation League.

Brazilian music on Thursdays: Rio de Janeiro

Tomorrow I'm off to Brazil, to Rio de Janeiro more specifically, to speak at the 1st Rio Colloquium on Logic and Metaphysics in the Later Middle Ages (and towards the end of the week a brief visit to Porto Alegre for two talks). This means at least three things: 1) I'm much too busy with preparations today to write a proper column; 2) I'm hoping to find out about some recent good stuff that I can report on here later on, to counterbalance a bit the massive presence of the 1970s here so far; 3) I can't wait to get there!

So for today, I thought of posting two songs praising the beauties of the most beautiful city in the world (and I'm speaking from a neutral perspective here, as I'm from São Paulo, and people from São Paulo typically hate to admit that Rio is the coolest place on earth). The first is 'Aquele Abraço' by Gilberto Gil (composed in 1969), which is so quintessentially about Rio that it was used in every campaign to bring the Olympic Games to Rio (the last one finally with success). I'm posting the acoustic version, recorded in 1994, with beautiful images of the city in the 1960s. The second one is 'Samba do Avião', a classic composed by Tom Jobim, here sung by Tom Jobim himself and Danilo Caymmi.