New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

An inside view on Greek academic life during the crisis.

One of my favorite monthly philosophical Zines, The Reasoner, has an interview with the distinguished Greek General Philosopher of Science, Stathis Psillos. It ranges widely, but Stathis' comments about the impact of the crisis on Greek academic life are very sobering, even moving: "Greece is in a terrible mess and no end of the crisis is in sight. The story is complex and interesting, but my own view—or the bottom line of it—is that in Greece we live through a massive attack on the welfare state as this was built and developed after the collapse of the military junta in 1974. The standards of living of the majority of the population—which, admittedly, rose over the last two decades but mostly due to really hard work—are being squeezed; unemployment is rising beyond control (especially among the youth) and at the same time (despite, or because of, the crazy austerity programmes) the economy has gone into a deep depression. There will be philosophical lessons to be drawn from what has now been happening in Greece, I am sure. The universities suffer no less. The budget has been slashed to the extent that there is a serious chance that there won’t be enough money to see the year through; there are about 800 young academics (and some talented philosophers among them) that have been elected to junior university posts but are not being appointed by the state; there is a lot of to-ing and froing concerning the promotion and the tenure cases of many university teachers; there will be huge reductions to the temporary sta that the universities employ to do teaching; the government is about to impose a massive reform of the structure of higher education, which might lead to mergers of universities and the closing down of departments as well as to the appointment of unelected governors to run the universities; most of the research funds (including EU funded projects) are frozen. There is a real danger that the Greek universities will be devalued and that a whole academic generation—and one with better education and research profile as a rule—will be lost for good. This is the setting (not to mention the cutbacks of about 15% of our annual salary with more to come) within which we are invited to do our academic job, to ‘intensify’ our research output and to create centres of excellence. Apart from any political action anyone sees fit, I believe that the Greek academics (and philosophers in particular) who have contributed to the advancement and the rising international standing of the Greek universities have an intellectual obligation to fight against this assault, by example and intellectual mobilization."

More folk that get the gendered conference (I mean speaker-series) campaign...

The folk at the Rotman Institute get it, too.

Maybe the Gendered Conference campaign should be expanded to the Gendered Speaker-series campaign!

Is philosophy a 'normal science'--or some conflicted musings on textbooks in philosophy

On the Leiter report there is an interesting discussion on what to read in order to learn "the basics of analytical philosophy" (typo corrected in the quote). [I am going to ignore how the question as quoted by Leiter seems to equate "learning the basics of analytical philosophy" as a proxy for "sufficient background in the subject so that [s/he] might read...Quine, Putnam, and Davidson".] The suggestions by Leiter's commentators are thought provoking and (I think) very useful in lots of ways. Even so, I am struck by the fact that text-books seem very high on the recommendation list. I am very ambivalent about the role of textbooks in teaching intro philosophy. (By this I mean introductory survey texts of a field/area, not anthologies.) I have used them in my courses (although I more frequently assign primary sources), and I want to articulate some of my ambivalence.

Should math be taught in schools?

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

I came across a funny but disturbing video today, via Language Log. The background context is the fact that one of the questions contestants had to answer at the Miss USA pageant earlier this month was whether evolution should be taught in schools. We are all familiar with the heated debates on this topic in the US (especially after the whole Synthese drama...), so from a societal point of view it is not an entirely absurd question to be asked in this context. However, more broadly speaking, to wonder whether evolution (the theory which arguably unifies all fields of research in biology) should be taught in schools is as absurd as wondering whether math should be taught in schools. So someone came up with this video to illustrate the analogy:

They get it in Konstanz!

An International workshop with (terrific) Female keynote Speakers only!

Brazilian music on Thursdays: Fabio Goes

This week’s column is special (for me, in any case), as I will be talking about an old friend of mine, Fabio Góes. We first met when we were in the same class in kindergarten, at age 5 (!!!), and then we were in school together all the way until the end of high school (we were close friends especially between 13 and 16 years old). Already in high school, Góes was involved with all kinds of garage bands, and at the time he was mostly a drummer; but in college he increasingly moved closer to the spotlights to become a ‘front man’ (lead vocals and guitar). By now, he plays pretty much all instruments you can think of, but in recent years the piano in particular has occupied an important place in his music.

After some success with a band named Pau Mandado in the late 1990s, by the early 2000s he was working in the studio of Antonio Pinto, who is responsible for the soundtracks of many important Brazilian films (such as Cidade de Deus (City of God); one of the tracks is by Góes himself). In 2007, Fabio Góes released his first solo album, Sol no Escuro, with an independent label. Slowly but surely, he received more and more media attention; Sol no Escuro ended up on the Brazilian Rolling Stone list of 15 best albums of the year. Some of its songs were then featured in an HBO-produced Brazilian TV series, Alice, and ‘Sem mentira’ in particular became quite popular.

How Much Should Philosophy Rely on Counter-Examples?

The method of counter-examples was introduced to philosophy by that under-achieving gadfly, Socrates, and it was one of Plato’s great achievements that he transcribed some of the conversations in which Socrates used this method. Justice is not the repayment of what you owe, Socrates argued, because it is not an exercise of justice when you return a weapon that you owe to a homicidal maniac.

That example, in the Republic, showed a plausible theory false, but this was not the only use to which Socrates put counter-examples. He used them positively as well: the very fact that the method of counter-examples works shows that analysis (or the answering of ‘What is X?’ questions) is a search for property-identities. Analysis cannot rest content with illumination by convincing paradigms. You cannot answer the question, “What is justice?” simply by pointing to the Supreme Court, or the Constitution. You must designate justice (the property) another way, a way that is easier to understand than designating it as justice. And when you do this, you are open to counter-examples.

Though Socrates’ discovery marked the beginning of philosophy as we know it, and is the origin of analytic philosophy in particular, the method of counter-examples hasn’t been hugely important in the history of philosophy. Plato himself turned to reductios (for example in the Parmenides) and Aristotle’s methods are largely constructive. When Descartes wanted to prove the dualism of mind and matter, he didn’t do so by counter-exampling identity theory; similarly Hume and the rationalist theory of causation. The last two authors proceeded from first principles, and this was the dominant method of philosophy even in the heyday of analysis. What are Frege’s great counter-examples? Russell’s?

Report on the Extended Cognition workshop

Here is a short report on the Extended Cognition Workshop, which just took place over the last days in Amsterdam. The general goal of the workshop was to bring together people interested in the concept of extended cognition in the spirit of ‘second wave EM’ (EM: extended mind) (Sutton) and ‘cognitive integration’ (Menary). The main characteristic of this general approach is emphasis on what is often described as the complementarity principle:

In extended cognitive systems, external states and processes need not mimic or replicate the formats, dynamics, or functions of inner states and processes. Rather, different components of the overall (enduring or temporary) system can play quite different roles and have different properties while coupling in collective and complementary contributions to flexible thinking and acting. (Sutton, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity’)

The contrast is with versions of EM which emphasize the parity principle:

Cognitive states and processes extend beyond the brain and into the (external) world when the relevant parts of the world function in the same way as do unquestionably cognitive processes in the head.(Sutton, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity’)

Take that Alvin Plantinga!

The First Presbyterian Church of NY is on 5th Ave & 12th St., right smack on the Pride Parade route. The photographer could not fit in the picture my fellow Reformed brothers and sisters passing out water to the parade goers. In addition to the freedom flag, pictured above, there was a huge welcome banner with boss triangles on it too. And man I would have loved to have been in New York City at First Presbyterian during the parade, revelling in Christ's love the very day after gay marriage was legalized.

I didn't blog about this while it was going on, but just in case anyone didn't follow it, this great news fom New York follows a recent landmark decision in the Presbyterian Church USA explicitly allowing ordination of openly gay clergy.  In a great article (HERE) Rev. Dr. Janet Edwards explains in part why this is so significant.

What makes this moment even more significant is that unlike the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which all adopted similar policies through top-level governing bodies alone, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) requires one additional step: ratification by a majority of the individual presbyteries. We have seen ministers and elders in presbyteries like Central Nebraska, Eastern Oklahoma, Middle Tennessee and North Alabama cast the majority of their votes for inclusion. Everyday clergy and lay leaders in areas that have traditionally skewed older, and more conservative — many of whom voted "no" in previous years when this question was brought to them — have voted "yes" this time.

As a pessimist and curmudgeon, I tend to not read Jesus' exhortation that the kingdom of God is at hand in terms of anything actually happening in history. But here I see my own church and surrounding society too actually get closer to that Kingdom, vanquishing some of the most depraved human expressions of that awful kind of Pride that one embraces to elevate oneself via the oppression of others. Well the joy edges out Schopenhauer and all good things seem possible, even if briefly, very much at hand.

[punkrockmonday #12] Pixar Studios - Cars 2; The Bang Bang - Sitting in a Car; Angry Samoans - Hot Cars; Black Flag - Drinking and Driving; Gary Numan - Cars; Queen - Bicycle Race

As I've been reading the reviews of Disney Pixar's Cars 2, it's been hard to imagine a greater aesthetic catastrophe. To be fair, I had a dark premonition of all of this while watching the straight to video Mater's Tall Tales the fifty-third time with my three year old Thomas. What if Cars 2 was just another half-assed premise to follow Mater/Larry the Cable Guy around as he did narratively unsatisfying and psychologicall implausible things? The very thought left me riddled with anxiety.

The first Cars has such a sweet moral center that I am not joking when I say that it is the closest thing our culture can come to Tolstoy's Resurrection. The story arc concerns the moral regeneration of race car Lightning McQueen who comes to know the spiritual deadness of the solipsistic, masturbatory values of modern celebutard culture and who is then also saved by learning to care selflessly for a group of new friends, some of whom have little to recommend themselves, such as the aforementioned Mater. It was Owen Wilson's greatest dramatic role, one for the ages. And the eccentricities of the other cars in Radiator Springs (George Carlin, Cheech Marin, Paul Newman, and yes Larry the Cable Guy in proper proportion) just leavened what Wilson's brilliant performance. Moreover, (1) the political message is right on in the same manner as Roger Rabbit, and (2) Pixar did what Pixar did best, making a movie for both parents and kids without resorting to the horribly lame Dreamworks style double entendres and pop culture references lost on kids but that idiot parents laugh at, not because they are funny, but just to show all the other idiot parents that they understand that there was supposed to be  joke there.

Follow-up on women and conference submissions

As readers may recall, last week I formulated the hypothesis that women may be submitting papers to conferences less often than men do, even if relative to the absolute numbers of women and men in a given area/field. I suggested there could be all kinds of reasons why this might be so, but in particular that women may feel more inclined to conclude that their work does not fit the description of the conference, or that it’s just not ‘good enough’. This would be related to the well-documented phenomenon of higher standards being applied to women, which many of them then go on to internalize. Subsequent discussion both here at NewAPPS and at the post over at Feminist Philosophers linking to my post have been very illuminating (at least speaking for myself). It seems clear to me now that it is very likely that many women indeed shy away from submitting papers (to conferences, volumes etc.), simply assuming that what they have to say will not be perceived as relevant.

Coincidentally, a few days ago the same Feminist Philosophers had a post linking to an excellent article at the Feministing blog, which is precisely about the need to increase the visibility of women, in particular as speakers at conferences (the article’s starting point was the poor gender balance at the otherwise excellent TED conferences). The article also offers a very thorough list of facts and figures clearly showing that women are still severely under-represented at several levels (political, artistic etc.) One passage from the article, on what can and should be done to redress the imbalance, strikes me as deeply right:

The Given: Your Myth, My Idol

My post the other day on horrible philosophical prose was brilliantly and energetically discussed, but more or less inevitably slipped into the deep-thought vs simply-bad-writing death spiral. My fellow blogger, Mark Lance, and I got into a disagreement about John McDowell in particular. I promised more discussion in another thread. Here, dedicated to Mark, is a brief account of why the Given is no Myth.

You are standing in a large room. Above you, there looms a large red sphere suspended from the ceiling. When you look at the sphere, you are subject to a certain visual experience: call this experience E. For the sake of simplicity, think of E as an event in the Cartesian soul. E has certain phenomenal properties: it is an instance of phenomenal RED, of phenomenal LARGE, and so on.  To be clear, these phenomenal properties are characteristics of E. Traditionally, empiricists take experiences such as E to be the ultimate source of empirical knowledge. This is the infamous Myth of the Given.

When a human subject has an experience like E, s/he tends to arrive at the belief that there is a large red sphere above. What explains this? A legitimate question, surely. There are two mental events here: an experience E, followed by the onset O of a belief. Moreover, there is a pattern: experiences of the same phenomenal type lead to beliefs with the same type of content. Why?

Do women submit papers to conferences less often than men do?

Within the gendered conference campaign, a lot of emphasis is placed on the idea that the line-up of invited speakers at conferences should have a good gender balance. One underlying assumption seems to be that, if there is a good number of women as invited speakers, other women will feel more compelled to submit papers to the conference than they would otherwise, as the message being sent is that the particular conference in question will offer a woman-friendly environment. Moreover, drafting the list of invited speakers is (usually) fully under the control of the organizers, so it is the ideal moment for them to exert a positive influence in terms of gender balance.

But what happens next? As some of you may know, I am organizing a workshop on extended cognition taking place next week, with a rather good gender distribution for the invited speakers (60%-40%). I sent out a call for papers, and very much to my surprise, out of the circa 30 submissions I received (which I thought was an excellent number, much beyond what I had expected), only ONE was by a woman. Given that I only had 5 to 6 slots for contributed papers, the competition was rather fierce, and this paper didn’t make it to the final list. I thus ended up with a workshop having NINE male speakers, and only TWO female speakers – a rather frustrating outcome.

The pernicious effect of insincere affirmative action notices

Brian Leiter has a post up where he queried Prof. Lionel McPherson on his experiences on the job market. McPherson's view is that affirmative action/equal opportunity notices can have pernicious effects. Importantly, he does not oppose affirmative action initiatives, but rather, he questions the use of notices professing affirmative action policies without implementing such policies. I quote his letter in Leiter's blog: "I have grown skeptical in general about affirmative action/equal opportunity notices from leading philosophy departments, at least regarding minority candidates. In short, I believe that such notices stigmatize minority candidates, mislead non-minorities about the prevalence of minority hires and hiring attempts, and provide false cover against the charge of lack of faculty diversity--while rarely making an ultimate difference to actual hiring practices."

An entry on the what's it like to be a woman in philosophy blog voices a similar concern: "Many of the entries on this blog refer to affirmative action, as if there is some stigma attached to being an affirmative action hire. I think women and minorities should worry about the so-called ‘unfair’ advantage given by affirmative action exactly when the white males start worrying about the unfair advantage given by white male privilege."

So, despite the best intentions it seems that Affirmative Action notices can sometimes have an adverse effect - they give the misleading impression that minority candidates have an unfair advantage (whereas affirmative action precisely tries to mitigate the unfair advantage of non-minority candidates!). How do we amend the pernicious effects of insincere affirmative action notices, short of introducing actual quotas? 

Brazilian music on Thursdays: Axe music

One of the currently most popular music genres in Brazil is what is known as Axé. The genre originated in Salvador (Bahia) in the 1980s, as a fusion of different Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian rhythms. It is intimately related to street carnival in Salvador (and mind you, street carnival in Salvador is not exclusively a February phenomenon!), where bands play on top of trucks (known as ‘trios elétricos’) which keep moving slowly while people frantically dance around. It’s quite an experience, I’m told (I’m ashamed to admit never to have experienced it myself...). In the 1990s, Axé became popular in all corners of the country, and is now certainly one of the most successful genres, commercially speaking. (The wikipedia entry on Axé is pretty good.)

Weekly Philo economics (part II): On the (neo-Liberal) history of uncertainty as randomness....or a "modest" proposal!

Before the formal revolution in economics (let's date it to Samuelson's 1947 Foundations), the distinction between risk and uncertainty was well understood by Keynes and Knight (ideologically far apart). There is a crisp (Knightian) distinction between (measurable) risk and (unmeasurable) uncertainty (as regular readers of this blog know (see also, here, here), I am fascinated by it.) In fact, the loss of this distinction in modern economics is a nice example of a so-called "Kuhn Loss" (that is, insights of past theories that cannot be articulated or recognized by the new theory). In particular, in the new technocratic and mathematical policy science of economics uncertainty became equated with randomness. (So that in effect all events fell under risk.) One consequence of this is that economists as policy-scientists ">trade in numbers where they really should be developing precautionary principles, institutional design that can withstand crises, and help develop an ethos that can prevent crises. (My obsession with crisis prevention is a consequence of the fact that given political realities, the have-nots tend to suffer disproportionaly during crises.)

Weekly philo eco (Part 1): Uncertainty in action...on Kuhn Losses...

This week, I return to uncertainty. in this post I make two points; i) that even the modellers are confused about the distinction between risk and uncertainty; ii) that photographic models of reality trade-off realism for predictive-value. (In a seperate post, I will call attention to previously overlooked historical sources for the equation between uncertainty & randomness. It's a 'modest proposal'...)

First, on september, 15 2008 Lehman Brothers files for chapter 11; the day after (the 16th) the official Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) [the 'house that Tinbergen -- the first Nobel laureate -- built'] predicts economic growth of 1.25% for 2009. In reality the Dutch economy declines by about 4%; uncertainty in action! (In a remarkable self-study in Dutch this is analyzed as follows:."The example of Lehman describes a fundamental problem in preparing short-term forecasts, there are always risks, the estimate is by definition uncertain. It is important that users of estimates are aware of this and keep it in mind when making policy. Even if the collapse of Lehman Brothers had been accurately predicted, then the consequences of this unique event would probably have been seriously underestimated. For economics is not an exact science.“ (9; translate.google.com with minor changes)" As regular readers of this blog know, I am fascinated by uncertainty.

Burying the lede

Blah, blah, blah private company blah blah more efficient blah blah of course the academics will run the academic side blah blah, trust us, honest, the academics will run their part of the show blah blah, er, wait a minute, what the hell does this last graf say? 

BPP is part of the Apollo Group, a market-listed US company that owns the University of Phoenix, a private institution offering degrees through distance learning.

On Holes...or, at what price, Lewisian sincerity?

Mohan's cri-de-coeur, is generating a lively discussion. I want to challenge a consensus about David Lewis' so-called 'clarity' of prose within it. In any given article by David Lewis, he clearly wants the reader to think he is "very clear," but that does not mean he is always "up-front" or even "clear". In fact, his classic, co-authored [with Stephanie Lewis] dialogue, Holes, implies (to this reader) that Lewis recognizes that clarity, too, comes with trade-offs some of which cannot be stated within the confines of a journal article, or the tradition and are, thus, unclear...

The take-home message got slightly obscured in a later book-review.

Thank you ABe Stone for calling my attention to this piece way back when.

Philosophy and the English Language

The English prose employed by analytic philosophers has grown steadily more ugly and clotted over the last twenty years. (Or has it? Was always like this?) A part of the blame rests, I am sure, on the formal languages that analytic philosophers use: complex logical structure is very important in their philosophical environment, and not easy to display gracefully in ordinary English.  Even so, one should remember that some of the most powerful logical thinkers also wrote beautifully clear prose: Frege, Russell, Quine, Goodman, Kaplan, Kripke, and (John) Perry come to mind (among many others). Nobody can say that these philosophers are easy to understand; nobody can say that their prose presents obstacles.

The problem has become more acute because English has now become the lingua franca of scientific philosophy (as I like to call what many call “analytic philosophy”). Give a paper under this rubric in Paris, or Munich, or Tokyo, or Delhi and you will give it in English.  This means that now, by contrast with fifty years ago, scientific philosophy is being practised, in English, by many whose first language is not English. As anybody knows who has learned a second language in adulthood: nestings, passive voice, abstract nouns, and sloppy grammar are extremely difficult to follow in a language you haven’t grown up with.

A while ago I gave a paper to an international audience with a handout. I had been having some trouble with Powerpoint presentations, and I thought that the talk + handout format would be a good alternative. A distinguished American philosopher took me to task for this: Powerpoint is mandatory when speaking to such an audience, he said. "But what about the handout?" I pleaded. "Didn’t it help?" No, said a young French woman, who was sharing a taxi with us: “The handout just increased the cognitive load.” Listening and reading at the same time is not easy.

Much the same sort of thing is true of clotted prose. It is hard enough for native English speakers, but painfully difficult for those for whom English is a second language. We really ought to spend time making sure that our prose is simple and straightforward.

The pursuit of happiness

One of the good things that giving in to Twitter has brought me is following the Twitter stream of Massimo Pigliucci (@mpigliucci), who is professor of philosophy at Lehman College at CUNY, and an activist for many 'rationalist' causes (science education, critical thinking etc.). He runs the site Rationally Speaking, which is full of interesting material; Massimo does the kind of 'empirically-informed philosophy' that I am so keen on, and brings in a wide range of empirical data relevant for philosophical discussion. (He also posts excellent quotes on his Twitter stream, such as: "Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex." -K. Marx. "Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love." -W. Allen.)

His latest podcast is on the science and philosophy of happiness, and I've just had the pleasure to listen to it (pun intended or not intended, whatever...). In the podcast he and his co-host Julia Galef discuss the concept of happiness from a philosophical point of view, drawing mostly from the familiar ancient sources (Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the concept of eudaimonia etc.), complemented by an array of data coming from the recent field of 'happiness studies'. They do a very good job at outlining how the two perspectives can complement and enrich each other, while also having an impact on very tangible aspects of human life. Naturally, they also discuss rankings of the happiest countries in the world, the latest version of which received quite some attention (see here for Berit Brogaard's analysis, herself a national of the country that came on top of the list, Denmark). It turns out that your typical 'happy' country is a Nothern European country with high levels of social equality, a strong welfare system and widely available healthcare and education (but countries such as Canada and Australia also do very well, for similar reasons).

This is not so surprising, but Massimo and Julia also discuss some unexpected results of happiness studies, such as that having children seems to correlate negatively with short-term happiness (it's a tough job!). I highly recommend the podcast if you have some time to spare; after all, thinking about happiness seems like a worthy time-investment, one should think.

Most-underrated philosopher of the week: Jay Odenbaugh

[This is the last most-underrated until September.]

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 tenure-track or junior 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 philosopher of the week, Jay Odenbaugh, teaches at Lewis & Clark (in the same department as an earlier winner, Becko Copenhaver). Jay is a world-class philosopher of biology, who works on the ontology of mathematical models, the nature of ecology, the nature of complexity, the relationship between science and values (and politics), especially environmental ethics, and (like many other splendid philosophers of philosophy) on the history of biology and its philosophy. Jay's first (I think?) major publication exhibits many of his academic virtues--he takes on a technical issue in philosophy of science (with mathematical and conceptual challenges) that has significant public policy ramifications; he works through the issues in order to reach a reasoned (and surprisingly hopeful) conclusion.

One aspect that I admire about Jay's work is that he is not afraid to practice what one might call normative philosophy of science. He not merely clarifies what science is up to, but is also willing to articulate what -- given their immanent commitments -- sciences should be willing to do (check out this paper, which blew me away when I first read it). It should come as no surprise that Jay has entered the climate science battle (here) [he has more faith in 'consensus' science than I do, although I agree with his policy conclusions].

My favorite piece is a classic article on evidential arguments and constraints on theoryin the context of attempts to model very complex systems. It is rich on detail on scientific practice without losing sight of a central (even old-fashioned) question in the philosophy of science--the nature of testing. It engages with a host of philosophical challenges, while illuminating the nature of evidential arguments. Along the way, it vindicates attempts to think of ecology as, in part, a lab science (I found this very surprising).

[Punkrockmonday #11] John Lee Hooker - Hobo Blues; Weird Al Yankovic - My Sharona; Edgar Cruz - Bohemian Rhapsody

I was going to do a long-winded thing building off of Novalis' often quoted claim about philosophy arising from a sense of homelessness, and tie that to John Lee Hooker's Hobo Blues, concluding with a discussion about how punk rock, arguably like philosophy, is self-refuting in that the conditions for its production presuppose its failure, further tying this to the paradoxical way that songs of misery can be comforting. But then I just sat back and watched this a few more times and was rendered speechless by the power of the performance.

If you are a drummer who can harnass even one one-hundredth of the power of this era John Lee Hooker's tapping foot, then you can write your own ticket. Sadly, the best Chicago blues players were vastly better before they made it to Chicago to get the Chess records Willie Dixon kind of slickness put on their genius like an ill fitting coat. But the market's hand, visible or not, is certainly not attached to a brain.

NYTimes piece for Drug Legalization from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Nice piece by President Carter with links to recent pro-legalization report by Global Commission on Drug Policy HERE.

The global war on drugs perverts us in big and small ways. A few:

1. Markets where the state abrogates its ability to enforce contracts lead to immense violence in communities. In this manner the global war on drugs has genocidal consequences in places like Mexico, Afghanistan, and urban black and rural white communities in the United States. The violence and dehumanization resulting from mafiazation are debilitating to hundreds of millions of people just trying to live decent lives.
2. Incarcerating people in an effort to save them destroys tens of millions of lives. In the United States now a black person born this year has a one in four chance of being incarcerated in the worst prison system among industrialized countries. As with the mafiazation of society, putting so many African American males behind bars has predictably awful consequences on the institution of marriage and rearing of children (children in one parent households are, all else being held equal (including standard of ling) are twenty times more likely to be incarcerated at some point in their lives).
3. All of the wasted resources in prosecuting the war on drugs and massive incarceration could be invested in something else, like infrastructure, the adequate construction of which creates the good jobs that aren't available in communities where young men are drawn to the drug trade. Likewise, decent public infrastructure is one marker of a decent society (versus the Pakistanization model of private opulence for the few and public squalor for everyone else which is sole policy prescription of the Republican Party in the United States).
4. Medicine is warped in horrificly sadistic ways as drug warriors make it impossible for millions of people to adequately medicate their pain. Recent research has shown that hallucinogens such as LSD, mushrooms, and peyote have (when used under clinical supervision) far, far better outcomes for treating depression than any of the current legal prescription medicines. It is clear now that making theses drugs illegal even in clinical settings is an act of gross inhumanity to the mentally ill. Likewise, people in chronic pain and the doctors who treat them have been imprisoned in the United States, making it harder for everyone else to get decent medical care. Anyone who has had a horrible gall or kidney stone in the United States knows this drill, where they won't give you pain medicine for hours while you are going through the worst pain of your life, just because a drug addict might be faking the pain to get the medicine. This was borderline traumatic for me with my gall stones, and I know I am not alone. For example a prominent philosopher I know has serious neuroses about pointed objects ever since as a child he was not given anaesthesia while an interveneous tube that went from his thigh to his heart was pulled out, as he was held down screaming; one of my friends was refused morphine as a child as he was forced to sit in a hot salt bath as the dead skin from the third degree burns that covered his arms was scrubbed away, again he was held down and screaming for the long ordeal and has mental scars to match those on his arms to this day. Thankfully, hopspice has waged a successful war on undermining the most sadistic of these policies against the terminally ill. Given the amount of human suffering remediated as a result, this is a story that needs to be told.
5. Public Stupidity- Like the embargo on Cuba, supply side economics, Apartheid in Israel (to be fair, supported by neither the majority of Americans nor Israelis), the war on drugs is yet another sacred cow that politicians all lie to us about, even though there is overwhelming and obvious evidence that would lead any morally decent informed person to go against the status quo. We are all made stupider by this, and I can't help but believe that the prevalence in such obvious public lies (in democracies with free presses!) cause all sorts of unrelated policy paralysis and corruption.

Anyhow, please read and link above to President Carter's nice piece and also read the report to which he links. Lots of conservative stalwarts who worked with Reagan and the United Nations and diplomatic community to bring about the immoral and idiotic status quo on drug policy have radically changed their minds. Unfortunately, no major United States politician is willing to agree with them, and Obama's "drug war Czar" predictably criticized the report in a reprehensibly dishonest manner last week.

We fought the war on drugs and drugs won! A basic level of sanity and non-sadism here and abroad require public admission of this fact and radical change in policy.

It is going to take decades for Mexico, Afghanistan, the poorer areas of the United States, and so many other areas of the world to recover from widespread mafiazation and all the other pathologies described above. The world desperately needs the chance to start healing.

Philosophically-informed empirical science

I think I speak for several authors on this blog when I express my keen interest in empirically-informed philosophy (see e.g., here), but I am also intrigued by the closely related philosophically-informed empirical science. This type of empirical science takes inspiration from philosophy to come up with empirical designs, and often makes evaluative claims regarding specific philosophical theses based on empirical findings.There is a substantial body of empirical research in cognitive psychology that is specifically aimed at investigating claims in traditional philosophy of mind, metaphysics and other fields, for example, Hume's theory of perception (in neo-empiricist research like that by Barsalou), or the evaluation of various notions of innateness. 

A recent paper by Véronique Izard, Pierre Pica, Liz Spelke and Stanislas Dehaene is a nice illustration of this (the paper can be downloaded here). It is entitled "Flexible intuitions of Euclidean geometry in an Amazonian indigene group" and has appeared in the most recent issue of PNAS. [I've been keeping track of this research group's work for some years, and in 2008 I collaborated with Pierre Pica and Véronique Izard on a special issue on the relationship between language and numerical cognition in Philosophical Psychology]

This recent paper investigates whether or not the Mundurucu, members from a small-scale South American culture, have geometrical intuitions that are in line with Euclidean geometry. A quote from the abstract:  "Kant argued that Euclidean geometry is synthesized on the basis of an a priori intuition of space. This proposal inspired much behavioral research probing whether spatial navigation in humans and animals conforms to the predictions of Euclidean geometry." From their introduction: "Although Kant’s argument for the existence of an a priori intuition of space is philosophical in nature, it implies that the human mind is spontaneously endowed with Euclidean intuitions, an empirically testable proposal that belongs to cognitive science." And further on in their discussion "In line with our previous research on intuitive arithmetic and geometry in the Mundurucu and with Plato’s views on education as developed in the Meno, the present results indicate that sophisticated protomathematical intuitions for both arithmetic and geometry can be revealed in all humans provided that the relevant abstract concepts are exemplified by concrete situations."

Jennifer Saul is the 2011 Distinguished Woman Philosopher

The Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) has just announced that the Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award of 2011 goes to Jennifer Saul (University of Sheffield). Previous winners include Sally Haslanger (2010), Ruth Millikan (2006) and Sara Ruddick (2002) (for a list of past recipients, see here). Here is the full announcement, from which I would like to single out the following statement (my emphasis):

Jenny Saul has demonstrated courage and leadership, and she is leading feminists forward to new ways of thinking and connecting.

Indeed, these are perhaps two of the most admirable features of Jenny’s work. Her work on the role of implicit biases in sexism (and other –isms) has significantly contributed to a new recasting of the issues: the most subtle, most ubiquitous and arguably most dangerous expressions of sexism are in fact related to highly unconscious cognitive processes. So it is not (only) a matter of opposing sexism on explicit, ideological grounds; perhaps more importantly, what needs to be addressed are these underlying mechanisms which even those who do not see themselves as sexist fall prey to. Among other things, this approach sheds new and important light on the issue of the blameworthiness of sexist behavior. Another important aspect of her work is that it can be described as ‘empirically-informed feminism’, which is a great development. (On a personal note: it is no secret to anybody that I am a fan of pretty much anything that is ‘empirically-informed’, and the move away from purely ideological/conceptual discourse towards empirically-informed analysis is one of the reasons why I felt compelled to become a bit of a feminist myself.)

Wow...thank you!

THANK YOU! Thank you for the HUGE vote of appreciation. I am confident I speak for all of the regular (and occasional) bloggers on NewAPPS when I say that we are grateful for and proud of your support and daily (critical!) interest. Thank you.

Continental Connections Thursday #4: pure experience

In “A Pluralistic Universe” and in some of his essays, William James develops the notion of a pure experience, which he defines as being ‘plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that.’ This is not a subjective that, nor an objective that, but is rather for James the ‘one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed.’

Part of James’s motivation for this move to ‘pure experience’ was a lingering problem that he felt persisted with Hume’s philosophy. Among other problems, the one most relevant to the idea of pure experience is that Hume’s form of empiricism failed to do justice to novelty. To see something as a novelty would entail, on James’s reading of Hume, seeing it as an effect that is related to the cause of which the novelty is the effect, but then by Hume’s system this novelty is already contained in the cause as that which enabled us to see the relationship between a cause and a novel effect. James is quite forthright that this would be damning to his understanding of pluralism, if true: ‘The effect in some way already exists in the cause. If this be so, the effect cannot be absolutely novel, and in no radical sense can pluralism be true.’

 

Brazilian music on Thursdays: Joao Gilberto

A few weeks ago I had a post on Bebel Gilberto, where I mentioned that she is the daughter of the legendary João Gilberto. Thinking a bit more about it, I realized that ‘legendary’ is a relative/context-sensitive concept, and figured it would be worthwhile writing a post on ‘the legend’ himself. Those of you who don’t know about him should know about him, and those of you who already do will certainly not mind being graced with one or two of his pearls on this Thursday morning!

João Gilberto is one of the founders of the Bossa Nova style together with Tom Jobim, in the late 1950s. It all started when he invented a new guitar beat, loosely inspired by traditional samba beats. But while in ‘ordinary’ samba, percussion plays a crucial role, in Bossa Nova the rhythmic role is taken over by the guitar itself, along with its traditional melodic function. To top it up, João Gilberto developed his own characteristic singing style, which can be described as ‘minimalistic’, to say the least. He whispers more than he sings (not a shred of vibrato), and with his absolute pitch, every single note is exactly what it should be: it's all about precision. Moreover, he deliberately sings ahead or behind the beat, creating a unique effect. (It is interesting to notice that, at the beginning of his career, he sang in ‘full throttle’ style, so the smooth singing is in no way a consequence of modest lung and throat functions!) 

Fascinating Thomas Friedman editorial about global reception of Harvard ethicist

Really neat article about Michael J. Sandel HERE with links to his televised ethics course. The nicest bits concern how discussion-heavy ethics classes modelled on Sandel's are being set up in Japanese and Chinese universities and how the web available versions of Sandel's course have made him a rock star in these countries.

One of the coolest recent conversations I've had was when Emily and I saw Greg Restall at the Boston APA. Greg's taught logic part time at a Chinese university and it was just fascinating to hear about it.

It's great how philosophy really can bridge quite different cultures and encourage both globe crossing discussions and friendships.