New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Four Species of Reflexivity and History of Economics in Economic Policy Science

I am circulating a draft of a paper ("Four Species of Reflexivity and History of Economics in Economic Policy Science"), and I welcome comments.

Mercier and Sperber on the origins of reasoning

If I had to bring only one journal to a desert island, it would probably be Behavioral and Brain Sciences; I am continuously amazed by the high-quality and innovative nature of its contents. It works with the very interesting format of one target article per issue (usually a long, controversial and ambitious piece), and short commentaries by peers. One of the signs that it is a truly exciting journal is that commentators often come from different disciplines; in particular, it is very common to see philosophers commenting. The current issue, for example, is dedicated to Sue Carey’s new book The Origin of Concepts, and has commentaries by people such as Tyler Burge, Christopher Gauker, Edouard Machery, Eric Margolis (just to mention some of the philosophers).

But today I would like to focus on the April issue of BBS, with a controversial target article by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber: ‘Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory’ (an open-source pdf of the paper can be found here). Let me quote its abstract in full:

Graham Harman's LARB review of Tweets from Tahrir

All of us who continue to read about the revolution in Egypt and much else at his blog will really dig Graham Harman's new review (in the Los Angeles Review of Books) of the just published Tweets from Tahir: Egypt's Revolution as it Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It.

Harman's review is itself a great capsule history of the earth shaking events of January 25 through February 11, 2011. He concludes with:

It is often said that good authors disappear and allow us to focus only on the scenes they describe. If the same can be said of good editors, then Nunns and Idle clearly pass the test. With their excellent selection of tweets and the light touch of their editorial voiceovers, they succeeded in allowing this reviewer to forget he was reading a book at all, and simply to relive the Revolution as it unfolded.

Man this book looks excellent; I'm amazoning it tonight.

Has Dennett gotten it right?

I just finished the first draft of a paper on Daniel Dennett’s so-called heterophenomenology; actually against it. It bears the title “Phenomenological Skillful-Coping: Another Counter-Argument to Dennett’s Heterophenomenology” and I go on to explain the gist of Dennett’s heterophenomenology in order to criticize it from the point of view of European phenomenology. As everybody knows, with heterophenomenology Dennett attempts to provide a neutral method accounting for people’s utmost subjective experiences, what Dennett persistently calls their ‘own phenomenologies’. He has described heterophenomenology as “the neutral path leading from objetive physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjetive experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science” (Consciousness Explained).

I really don’t want to get into technicalities. Suffice it to say that there’s nothing easier than weeding out Dennett’s interpretation of phenomenology as introspection because —as Dan Zahavi has consistently pointed out—  “all the major figures in the phenomenological tradition have openly and unequivocally denied that they are engaged in some kind of introspective psychology and that the method they employ is a method of introspection” (for example, Husserl, Heidegger, Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty in several passages). Moreover, introspection is actually antiphenomenological from the outset for the very point of departure of phenomenology in Husserl’s breakthrough work, Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901), was precisely a call to abandon the dichotomy (Scheidung) between inner and outer perceptions, which Husserl associated with a naïve commonsensical metaphysics left behind with the concept of intentionality. And of course, introspection is parasitic of this Scheidung which endorses the idea that consciousness is somewhat inside the head and the world outside.

So when for example Thomas Metzinger, following Dennett, affirms (cf. Being No One, 2003) phenomenology is so absurd for it must clumsily settle conflicting statements such as the following: “This is the purest blue anyone can perceive!” versus “No, it isn’t, it has a faint but perceptible trace of green in it!” or, “This conscious experience of jealousy shows me how much I love my husband!” versus “No, this emotional state is not love at all, it is a neurotic, bourgeois fear of loss!”… well, then we laugh with scorn. By ‘we’ I mean, of course, the ones acquainted with the phenomenological tradition.

MCMP video podcasts

The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU in Munich is now having its first (and very busy!) semester in full operation. In particular, there are two series of colloquia (programs here and here), focusing mostly, though not exclusively, on applications of formal, mathematical methods to philosophical problems. The lectures are being filmed, and some of them have already been turned into ultra-professional video podcasts, which are made available here (you do need to have iTunes installed in your computer to view them). As far as I know, the plan is to make all talks of the two colloquia available as podcasts.

So far, there are talks by Volker Halbach, Douglas Patterson, Berit Brogaard, Richard Pettigrew, Alexandru Baltag, Sonja Smets, and myself. I gave two talks at the Center last week, with the titles 'Cognitive motivations for treating formalisms as calculi' and 'The 'fitting problem' for logical semantic systems'; the second one is the one available as a video podcast (for now at least). (I watched bits of it yesterday, and found it amusing to notice that I am at my most Brazilian in terms of body language: 'speaking' with my hands almost as if I were a user of sign-language. Oh well, at least it's lively, I suppose (^_^) ) For those interested in keeping up with the Center's activities and developments in 'mathematical philosophy' more generally, this is a very useful service indeed. And of course, there's also the M-Phi blog, to which I also contribute, and which is basically the 'official' blog of MCMP.

UPDATE: Now there are many more video podcasts availabe, including my 'Cognitive motivations...' and talks by Ed Zalta, Branden Fitelson, Steve Awodey, among others.

Weekly philo of economics blog: Black Swans and Mediocristan vs Extremistan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is one long polemic against views that are taken for granted by professional economists and philosophers (both of whom are repeatedly and fairly criticized throughout the book--historians are also criticized, but these have largely abandoned the views attributed to them since their so-called 'linguistic turn'). Luckily, philosophy has no Nobel, so we are spared his worst ire. Leaving aside the economists, philosophers have responded by ignoring the book. This is a shame because not only is Taleb sometimes eerily spot on in his observations, Taleb is also extremely erudite about philosophy and its history (Nelson Goodman’s Grue and Averroes can be found in the same chapter), and full of pointed criticisms of philosophical practice and how it is implicated in supposedly ‘scientific’ ideas that have had disastrous afterlife in social policy [I call this the ‘Socratic Problem.’].) In some ways Taleb takes the impact of philosophy more seriously than professional philosophers are inclined to do.

The lack of attention to The Black Swan within the discipline can be explained, in part, by the admission that most philosophers don't read books (anymore), but I have no such excuse; more important because I have been discussing ideas anticipated by Taleb in the life of this weekly blog-entry (including a modest criticism of one of Taleb’s articles), I am obliged to engage with it. The book is full of philosophical ideas that are treated in a very lively manner—I would happily teach it to an introductory class in philosophy of social science (except, perhaps, that I dislike teaching books with which I agree so much). Today I discuss two aspects of Taleb’s book. First, I articulate his main criticism of philosophers; second, I criticize the core distinction in the book (I do so in spirit of constructive engagement—rather than as attempt at refutation).

First, Taleb's two core (related) criticisms of the philosophers (especially epistemologists and decision theorists) is that i) we are obsessed with confirmation (which prevents us from real learning and gives us false confidence) [Popper is one of Taleb's heroes] and that ii) we engage in what he calls the 'ludic fallacy'--we model decision (or even probability) on what he calls the "sterilized" uncertainty "we encounter" in (casino) "games". The second is really four related problems: a) we pretend as if we can assign probabilities to events that are fundamentally (epistemically) opaque to us; b) we pretend that there is commensurability between our credence(s) and the probable structure of the world; c) when we create our toy-models, we fail to ask about the unknown, unknowns--Taleb's Black Swans--that fall outside our models of reality. (In the artificial environment of the model of well-oiled turn of a roulette table this may be legitimate, but not in the environment of human decision, including the vendetta's among casino owners and their employees.) There is a fourth (which I have discussed on this blog): when we mathematically model unknown, unknowns (that is, genuine Knightian uncrtainty) as "randomness" and put it inside the model, we create false confidence in our numbers (recall how I took Samuelson and Arrow to task for this move against Knight [somewhat unfairly, Taleb fails to realize that Knight should be one of his good guys]).

Now, Taleb admits there are social circumstances in which our toy-models will do reasonably well (even outside a casino). In (reasonably) closed environments where unknown, unknowns can be safely ignored and where we have independent knowledge about the nature of underlying distributions or where we can safely rely on the law of large numbers, we can bring our mathematical tools (including the Gaussian, which is one of Taleb’s bete noirs) to bear on problems. Such circumstances are what he calls ‘Mediocristan’ (circumstances where Black Swans can be ignored). These are opposed to what he calls ‘Extremistan,’ where a singleton (event/observation, etc) can impact the total outcome, that is, places where unknown, unknowns can be disastrous or extremely profitable. (I am going to resist the urge to call such unknown unknowns, ‘highly improbable,’ or ‘fat tails,’ because often our very models hide the black swans from us, what Taleb calls the ‘masquerade problem’.)

Now, my simple criticism is that Taleb has a tendency to treat Mediocristan and Extemistan as given rather than as, in part, manufactured or constructed (by, say, policy-makers and their consultants). Or, at least, many social Extremistan’s are the (perhaps unintentional, but foreseeable even if current social scientific orthodoxy refuses to admit it) consequence of policies that are designed to privilege some well connected political group. (This is as true of right-wing deregulation pushed by well connected managerial class as it is of, say, left-wing development projects.) Now implicitly Taleb realizes this (he attacks, for example, the culture of ‘bonus’ incentives to managers of nuclear plants and financial assets), but too often he treats Extremistan as given (some of his core examples concern wealth distribution). And this leads him to discount the possibility that we (concerned, informed citizens) can influence politicians and their experts to think about (social) decision making in terms of robustness to error (the underlying idea is that one cannot avoid, say, stock market crashes, but can do quite a bit to avoid financial meltdown or the socialization of their costs). That is, in its mistrust of the experts (and the way we sell ourselves to highest bidders) the book is anti-political in a way that reinforces the status quo (even if Taleb teaches his readers how to think profitably about black swans).

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy new issue

The JFFS is now an open-source peer-reviewed journal (what we should all hope is the wave of the future for academic journals). This issue includes, besides a number of articles (including one by Leonard Lawlor on the project of "continental philosophy" with which a first glance tells me that I will probably disagree on a number of points but from which I am sure to learn, as always with Lawlor), a forum on Fanon; as history would have it, the 50th anniversary of Les Damnés de la terre coincides with the "Revolutionary Spring of 2011."

What better way to celebrate, commemorate, critically reflect on, and think through Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth fifty years after its publication with a new North African syndrome: Revolution—or at least a series of revolts that continue to rock regimes across North Africa and the region.  Fanon beginsThe Wretched writing of decolonization as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order—often against the odds—willed from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is instead an absolute replacement of one “species” of humanity by another.

In periods of revolution, like the one we are experiencing today, such absolutes appear quite normal. Indeed, radical change becomes the “new normal” and the idea that revolutionary change is impossible is simply the rantings and ravings of the conservatives and reactionaries of the ancient regime.

Too long buried under the weight of the tomes of academic discourse, Fanon has been resuscitated by the new dawn of North African revolutions. 

 

Letter to Foreigners, in View of the Lack of Trustworthy Information

Spanish Philosophy Professors and 15M movement insiders Luis Sáez (Universidad de Granada), José Luis Moreno Pestaña (Universidad de Cádiz) and Germán Cano (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) have written a Letter to Foreigners, in View of the Lack of Trustworthy Information denouncing mainstream media not reporting accurately on the events taking place in Spain.

In the letter, they render an account of the 15M movement's aims and scope against the backdrop of much parlance tending to distort the movement itself.

Accordingly, they address the lack of information, the movement's concept of democracy (¡Por una democracia real ya!), and the rallies that were followed by camp sites in Spain.

Trust, testimony and the gay girl hoax

The gay girl in Damascus, it turns out, is an American male, married blogger. Yet prior to the story of the so-called 'arrest' of the blogger, few people doubted her existence. Most of us trusted that the information on the blog was truthful, despite the fact that invented personas in blogging are quite common. The question of how far we trust information received through testimony has been the subject of intense debate, both in cognitive science and in social epistemology. Of course, nobody argues that people do not (or ought not) rely on testimony; that would open the door to an untenable form of skepticism. But clearly, people aren't blindly credulous either - we exhibit some form of epistemic vigilance, especially when the information is surprising or improbable. But the precise degree to which we are credulous or epistemic vigilant is still a matter of debate. 

Some authors, like Dan Sperber and Hugo Mericer, argue that people have evolved psychological mechanisms for epistemic vigilance to ensure that our reliance on testimony does not become disadvantageous. On the other hand, Paul Harris argues that trust in testimony is the default stance, and backs this claim up with psychological studies that indicate that young children (and sometimes also adults) do not even remember if they learnt something first-hand or through testimony (the well-observed distortion of eye witness accounts by posing leading questions is a good example of this). I am inclined to think that the fact that most people took the gay girl in Damascus story at face value lends support to the second position. 

As Dan Sperber and his commenters pointed out, the question of our reliance on human testimony was already considered by David Hume and Thomas Reid, and both seem to be precursors of current positions in cognitive science. 

Mandeville in Ghent, June 28-29, 2011

For more information on the program.

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Julie R. Klein

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 (this is adapted in light of recent discussion). 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, Julie R. Klein, teaches at Villanova. She is that rare bird, who does first class research on Medieval philosophy, including Jewish and Islamic, and early modern philosophy (which are still often scholarly worlds apart); she has also published on Continental figures (Derrida, Balibar). In fact, in Klein's work there is a fascinating slippage between historical and philosophical considerations. One of my favorite pieces, is her article on Descartes' engagement with the objection(s) to the Meditations that center on the "Atheist geometer." The upshot of her argument is that part of the ground of Descartes' philosophy is fundamentally moral.

In recent scholarship on Spinoza, the constructive role of the imagination for Spinoza has been rehabilitated (in English, see especially the work by Susan James and Michael Rosenthal). Klein has an early, perceptive piece on the topic. But my favorite article by her is another article that starts from consideration of Descartes' response to the atheist geometer. It explores the (in my view) not so hidden pantheist commitments in Descartes' thought.

Why should a woman stay in philosophy at all?

Crossposted at the Feminist Philosophers and What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?, there is a moving 'open call for reasons to stay':

I am about to start my PhD at an excellent Leiter ranked program. I have a BA and and MA from excellent schools. I have worked closely with ground breaking philosophers in my field. I have published, I have an excellent teaching resume, phenomenal letters of recommendation, and moreover I love my job. I am a good philosopher, and I am thinking about leaving philosophy.

I have been a secretary and a chauffeur. I have been disingenuously promised research assistantships and letters of recommendation, in return for dinner dates and car rides. I have been asked if I was married while my colleagues have been asked what they think. I have been told that I’m both cute and idiotic. I have passed on professional opportunities because I am a woman, and no one would believe that I deserved those opportunities — accepting would make me seem like a slut, since men make it on merit, and women make it in bed. So, ironically, I have been praised as professional for having passed on professional opportunities. I have been the lone woman presenting at the conference, and I have been the woman called a bitch for declining sexual relations with one of the institutions of hosts. I think I have just about covered the gamut of truly egregiously atrocious sexist behaviour. So I just have this one question that I think I need answered: Is the choice between doing philosophy, and living under these conditions, or saving yourself, and leaving the discipline?

This is an open call for reasons to stay.

The Gay Girl in Damascus is a hoax

As pointed out by reader Seth Edenbaum here, it has now been confirmed that the 'Gay Girl in Damascus' blog is a hoax. The author, Tom MacMaster, has now published an apology on the blog, which is a pitiful attempt at recovering some dignity:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone -- I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

Best,
Tom MacMaster,
Istanbul, Turkey
July 12, 2011

The sole author of all posts on this blog

This is disappointing in so many respects, and even the knowledge that there isn't somebody called Amina in prison after all doesn't attenuate things much. I am not yet entirely sure what the repercussions may be, but for one thing I can imagine that authoritarian governments will now have the 'hoax' card to play against blogs reporting on abuse and attacks on freedom. The credibility of bloggers doing the important work of bringing out to the world the appalling conditions of so many people living under dictatorial regimes is severely affected. The credibility of serious organizations which got involved, such as Avaaz, is also affected. For now, the hoax just strikes me as utterly irresponsible. Shame on you, Tom MacMaster.

On the ethics of evidence in Bio-ethics

As I reported yesterday, on the Leiter report bio-ethicists are debating conflicts of interest policies in the running of the American Journal of Bioethics. The source of the controversy is a mean-spirited article by McCollough (et al) in response to a (rather polemical) Letter of Concern (LOC) co-signed by a number of prominent bio-ethicists and philosophers (including our very own Mark Lance). (Both pieces are here.) Such controversy is an occasion to explore the standards of argument in a neighborly field.

Yesterday, I focused on three dubious elements in McCollough et. al.'s argument. One of these, my concern over the abuse of so-called "statistical significance" prompted a (somewhat technical) exchange with Edouard Machery. While I stand by my criticism on that score, I missed a more important evidential-ethical problem.

McCollough and his colleagues accuse the authors of the LOC that it "fails to meet the fundamental standard of evidence-based reasoning" and this is described as a "a fundamental error" (38). Now, let me grant -- for the sake of argument -- that the evidential errors identified By McCollough in the LOC are correct. McCollough's crucial claim is that "data cited by the authors of the LoC do not support the LoC’s claim that “dexamethasone treatment cannot responsibly be characterized as benign.” Indeed, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the therapy is benign." (40)

Below I argue that the evidence for this claim is extremely limited. In fact, it appears to be based primarily on a single empirical study. Before I describe the limitations of this particular study, it should be clear, I hope, that no evidential-ethical claim should rest on a single study without independent, third party replication.

On experts and morals

On the Leiter report there is an ongoing debate over editorial policies (primarily failures to disclosure significant interests) at the American Journal of Bioethics. For those interested, at the end of this comment, I disclose my potential conflicts of interest.

The discussion on the Leiter report among some of the interested parties is primarily procedural, yet the tone is rather bitter (if I may use that word)--no surprise because the sides in the debate are accusing each other of misconduct and calling each other "unethical" among other things. Intrigued, I read the two pieces that are at the heart of the controversy--they can be found in a single link here (posted by G. Owen Schaefer on Leiter). Rather than rehearsing the two sides of the debate, I want to call attention to three aspects of the McCollough (et al) response that appear to be treated as standard practice among bio-ethicists, and that deserve more scrutiny regardless of the merits of this particular debate. My first two comments are directed against McCullough's arguments, although what I am really after is to raise questions against apparently prevalent norms among some (many?) bio-ethicists.

First, at one point McCullough (et al.) write: "no ethical standard for off-label use of drugs existed when Dr. New began her treatment protocol in 1986. The LoC falsely assumes such a standard has always existed. To avoid this criticism, the LoC could have cited a consensus ethical standard. The LoC does not do so because, as our review of the 68 citations indicates, there is no such standard in the literature. Grant, for the sake of argument, that such a standard has just been created. To apply it to clinical practice from 25 years ago commits the error of presentism, i.e., applying ethical standards of the present as if they applied throughout human history, against which historians rightly warn us (Pernick 2009)." (40)

Two aspects of this argument are troubling: i. a lot gets packed into the so-called "error of presentism". It is one thing to worry about anachronism: to ask Plato what he would have thought about email is silly. But it is not silly to ask Plato what he would have thought of government surveillance of its citizens (or to ask what he would have thought about eugenic practices). If after the fact one can frame a question in such a way as would have been available at some past time, one can certainly debate with past judgment. (A famous case is where Adam Smith takes Plato to task for condoning child exposure even after the economic rationale has disappeared.) ii. More subtly, the authors presuppose that until there is a "consensus" there is no standard of moral right or wrong. But even if one is no enemy of moral relativism or pluralism (as, perhaps, some readers might be) this approach has perverse consequences: a) it gives folk an interest to prevent consensus from developing; b) it means one is an ethical captive to the lowest common moral denominator; c) it makes morality a matter of decision by expert committee, but why should we trust the experts?

Second, throughout the article McCollough (et al) appeal to studies where results that carry the authority of "statistical significance" (and "statistically convincing") are used against their critics' concerns. Now, elsewhere on this blog I have already reported qualms about the over-reliance of statistical significance (here and here). But note something important: it is very dangerous to use "statistical significance" when one is trying to prove a negative (as McCollough and his co-authors try to do--a medical technique is thought safe because the studies show no statistically significant harmful effects). But besides assuming a normal distribution (and a linearity in an effect, etc), this is especially silly when we are dealing with relatively small numbers (N=147) and "low incidence and prevalence, particularly when the effects being studied (neurocognitive behaviors) are affected by a vast array of factors" (40). Rather than claiming vindication, a more honest assessment would probably entail that it is too early to know anything with much confidence. So, the burden of evidence is not on the critics, but on the defenders of the practice. (I may be no bio-ethicist, but I think I know something about evidential arguments!)

Third, The whole argument of McCullough and his co-authors has a very legalese feel. In particular, it appears that there is an authoritative code to which proper bioethical argumentation MUST conform, and if it is NOT then it is deemed to fall short of some base-line "intellectual integrity" (41) The authority is a fifteen page article, cited as "De Grazia, D., and T. L. Beauchamp. 2001. Philosophy. In Methods in medical ethics, ed. J. Sugarman and D.P. Sulmasy, 31–46.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press." (besides, p. 41, see also 36, and 37). I have not read the piece. Let me grant that it shows superb moral and ethical insight. But who appointed these two the benchmark-guardians of proper ethical conduct among ethicists??? Did some "consensus" develop on this, too?

[Full disclosure: first, one of my esteemed co-bloggers, Mark Lance, is one of the signaturees of the fetaldex.org letter of concern, which is accused of "unethical transgressive bioethics;" second, my partner is a retina surgeon and neuro-science researcher, which occasionally accepts funding from the medical industry for her basic research, which helps cover some expenses of our forthcoming sabbatical. Her research is in no sense related to the current controversy.]

GHEMMS: First annual Ghent Metaphysics, Methodology and Science workshop, Ghent, July 4-5

Details here.

Latest news on the 'inconsistency of PA' affair

UPDATE: I'm adding a few small changes to the original post, which were suggested by Steve Awodey.

(Cross-posted at M-Phi.)

As previously reported (here and here), over the last few weeks there has been a heated debate within the foundations of mathematics community on what appeared to be a controversial statement by Fields medalist V. Voevodsky: the inconsistency of PA is an open problem. But what seemed at first instance a rather astonishing statement has become more transparent over the last couple of days, in particular thanks to posts by Bill Tait and Steve Awodey over at the FOM list. (Moreover, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing the matter with Steve Awodey in person here in Munich, in conversations which have been most informative.)

Continental Connections Thursday #3: Kafka's event-full night

 

Late in the evening of September 22, 1912, while his parents and sister were asleep in their own rooms, Franz Kafka, a 29-year-old insurance officer and writer, sat down, as he had done so many nights before, to write. This night would be different, however. When Kafka next got up from his small desk, after an all-night stint of writing, he had completed the story ‘The Judgment’, the story that would be Kafka’s watershed moment, the event of his life as a writer, or of his life tout court. Kafka himself recognized the significance of the event. Two days later, after reading the story aloud to friends (among whom were Max Brod), Kafka wrote in his diary that ‘The indubitability of the story was confirmed.’ Driving this point home, Reiner Stach, in his biography of Kafka, argues that the Kafka we associate with literature, the Kafkaesque world we have come to know, was born that night:

"Suddenly – without guide or precedent, it seemed – the Kafka cosmos was at hand, fully equipped with the ‘Kafkaesque’ inventory that now gives his work its distinctive character: the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero."

 

Brazilian music on Thursdays: 'Carolina'

A few months ago we had a couple of posts on Jorge Ben, where I mentioned that he invented what is arguably the best guitar beat ever, the 'samba rock' beat. Now. as it turns out, in the 2000s a new and extremely talented musician appeared in the samba rock tradition: Seu Jorge. He is known internationally as an actor for his participation in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, for which he also recorded most of the soundtrack (composed of David Bowie songs in Brazilian-Portuguese versions). He also had a part in City of God, one of the most important Brazilian films in the 2000s. But his career as a singer has been even more exciting than his acting career; I don't hesitate to say he's been one of the most important developments in Brazilian music in the 2000s.

Can an untenured philosopher be underrated?

In this week's blog entry on most underrated, there was an interesting discussion on whether or not untenured people could be underrated. I fully agree with Eric that placing untenured people in this post may put them at risk. But I also agree with one of the commentors, who responded to Eric's rules for the post:

no. 1 assumes that all currently "untenured folk" are in the process of going for tenure or will someday gain access to the process of going for tenure. This is clearly not the case now nor has it been the case for some time. The vast majority of untenured faculty employed in academia nowadays will *never* be fortunate enough to bear the burden of compiling a tenure file. That is the reality of the two-tiered university system.

This brings me to the question of luck in tenure. I am currently preparing a paper on Chinese mathematics and extended cognition, which I will present at Catarina's forthcoming exciting workshop, and I have been delving into the system of the state examinations in China, which was in place from the Tang dynasty to the Ching dynasty (My main source for this is Elman, Benjamin. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.)

During these examinations, students had show their mastery of a number of disciplines (a.o., reciting classic texts by heart, answering questions on the law, ethics, and policy). Success in this system was more or less a guarantee to a secure, well-paid position of civil servant, a situation that has some similarities to tenure today. In the early days of the system, students were carefully scrutinized, and the "deserving" students often ended up on the top positions. For example, if you ended up at the top in the (local) provincial examinations, you were likely to end up at the top in the imperial examinations as well, so the system was not random in its evaluation. But as time went by, during the Ming dynasty the bureaucracy started to reduce the staff involved in the grading and training, there were more exams that had to be graded by fewer and fewer administrative staff. Also, the number of people taking the exam increased year after year, putting more and more pressure on the system. The correlation between scores in provincial and imperial tests became lower and lower, until it became for a large part a matter of chance. 

Today's situation in academia is similar.With many people vying for fewer positions, and pressure on evaluation committees, getting tenure is more and more a matter of luck. I do not deny that there is still some correlation, but the correlation is getting weaker. What factors contribute to this? When the pressure on the market is increasing, as in the case of ancient China, because more and more people compete for fewer and fewer positions, search committees and tenure review committees, whose members also have an increasing workload, will tend to resort to heuristics, which are not foolproof. First, there is the Matthew effect (where an initial advantage tends to be amplified) and its inverse, the Matilda effect. An example of this is that young scholars with an eminent dissertation advisor, or from a prestigious graduate school, are more likely not to land on the reject pile of search committees, and conversely, those who graduate from obscure departments (euphemistically denoted as teaching oriented departments) get less attention. These effects also hold when papers are refereed: apparently, some referees get tempted to google the titles of the papers they have under review to know something about the authors.

Such effects can be mitigated, I believe, for example by asking authors to post their paper under a different title or by asking referees for more self-restraint (I don't think anonymized job applications are possible though). But other stochastic factors can come into play as well: for example, I've known people who immediately got into heavy-teaching load temp positions after their PhD, which meant they could not improve their CV at all, and after some years of this, they became totally unmarketable ("What, he's 4 years past his PhD and so few publications!"). Or one may just have the bad luck of doing research in something that is not in high demand (yet). These factors seem more difficult to address - although not entirely, for example, I read at one of the entries in the What's it like to be a woman in philosophy a testimony of a woman who was encouraged to take up a teaching-intensive position for the main reason that she was a woman. So it seems that even in such cases, we can make efforts to make tenure less like a lottery and more based on merit. 

The arrest of a gay girl in Damascus

UPDATE: as pointed out by Seth Edenbaum in comments below, the 'A gay girl in Damascus' blog is a hoax. See here for relevant links.

A few weeks ago I mentioned a blog, A gay girl in Damascus, which offered (among other things) a very vivid picture of the current situation in Syria. And now I've just heard that Amina Arraf, the brave blogger in question, has been arrested. There is a petition online demanding her release, which you may consider signing. 

Let me add that I've always been a bit suspicious of such online petitions, but lately there have been some good results obtained -- such as the ditching of the anti-gay bill in Uganda, which was at least in part caused by international pressure. At any rate, the very least we can do is to keep in mind the appalling situation of many of those who oppose the current regime in Syria. Updates on Amina's situation are being posted on her blog by a relative, even though for now very little information is available. The Guardian has also reported on her arrest.

Lagarde Turns Brown

This made me feel a little ill:

The New York Times reports:

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde promised Tuesday to support emerging markets so wholeheartedly that a little part of her “would turn Indian” if she were elected head of the International Monetary Fund.

Review essay on A. Matheron's collection of essays

After some (slightly circular?) debates here on methodology in/and the history of philosophy, here's an interesting review essay (in the language of Molière) on the collection of essays by Alexandre Matheron, one of France's greatest historians of philosophy of the 20th century.

AAUP statement on attacks on tenure in Louisiana

The full statement can be found here.

I am deeply disturbed by reports that the University of Louisiana System has embarked on what appears to be an unprecedented and unwarranted assault on its faculty.  In 2010, Southeastern Louisiana University discontinued its undergraduate major in French, dismissing its three tenured professors with a  year’s notice.  

... no reason was given for the decision, and the French program was not underenrolled in comparison to majors such as Spanish; but we are especially alarmed by SLU’s subsequent action, in which the administration proceeded to offer a temporary instructorship to one of the tenured professors it had just fired. 

This year, the AAUP has learned that the University of Louisiana at Monroe is planning to do the same, or slightly worse, to its four tenured professors of Chemistry: dismiss them with six months’ notice, then offer to re-hire them at the rank of instructor without tenure.  We believe we do not have to wait to hear a third report from the UL system before concluding that we see an emerging pattern....

These practices violate so many AAUP principles that it is hard to know where to begin.  But we should probably start by remarking that if senior professors with tenure can be fired and then immediately offered employment as short-term instructors, then tenure is essentially meaningless in the University of Louisiana System....

[We] acknowledge that many institutions are facing financial hardship, and will have to make difficult and painful decisions.  The University of Louisiana System, however, appears to be going well beyond anything that can be justified by economic hardship, launching a capricious assault on tenure as well as minimal standards of job security for the untenured.  

Faculty nationwide should be advised that the UL System has effectively nullified its tenure procedures; and students in the UL System, and their parents, should be advised that maintaining the quality of core liberal arts programs is no longer a priority of the UL System administration.

Evolutionary Psychology: Two Strands

Reading Helen De Cruz's interesting post on Evolutionary Psychology, it occurs to me that EP is of two kinds, stemming from two rather different motivations. The baddest stuff mostly belongs to the second of these two kinds--see below.

The biggest problem in human evolution is its speed and huge discontinuities in a small amount of time. Speculation in this area has been supported by a concerted effort to compare human early cognitive development with that of other primates, since this gives evidence of phylogeny. (Hauser's research on cottontops was in this genre.) There are a number of hypotheses that have been advanced to try and show how fast evolution could have occurred. The most promising ones invoke assortative mating and sexual selection. The late Denis Dutton's book, The Art Instinct (which I review in the July 2011 issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy) is an example of this kind of work.

This research area is wide open, highly speculative, and very exciting. People put forward all kinds of wild hypotheses: cheater detection in the pleistocene, massive modularity, art as sexual display, and so on. These wild hypotheses are probably all wrong, but they are a necessary launching pad for the ultimate true theory. It's misguided, in my view, to demand discipline in this area. Nobody knows what discipline would be, aside from silence. (Of course, we do know that it is a failure of discipline (!) to fabricate evidence.)

A second strain of EP is, to my mind, much less exciting, and comes from an opposite point of view. It doesn't address the question of how humans developed all their unique abilities in a short period of time. Rather, it addresses how humans are depressingly the same as primates: sexually dimorphic with regard to cognitive abilities, sexual behaviour and mate choice, generally violent, inclined to racism, etc. It relies on what is in large measure unconvincing empirical research. It exaggerates and misinterprets this research, which is already flawed. It advances madcap "explanations" of misinterpreted research. Satoshi Kanazawa is a gargoyle on the edifice of this line of EP. From what I have read in the reviews--dangerous source of information, I must say--David Brooks is another practitioner.

I can't see much value in wild speculation in this second area of evolutionary psychology. Discipline here is easily defined: shut up unless you have subjected your evidence and theories to the normal standards of scientific scrutiny. Advance cautious hypotheses. Take social conditioning into account.

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Richard Polt

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 Polt (Xavier University in Cincinnati), is probably the first destination for folk that want to figure out what the fuss is about with Heidegger, but find Heidegger's German (or in translation) too forbidding. After I read Polt's Heidegger: An Introduction as an advanced graduate student, I recall thinking that I had wished I had read it as an undergrad. I found his a clear and encouraging guide. Polt's acclaimed translations of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Baumgartner (and a few otehrs) are his service to the profession.

Much of Polt's scholarly output is related to work on Heidegger. That alone means one has to have a very sound grasp of much of the history of philosophy (if only not to be misled by Heidegger's often self-serving rhetoric). For example, Polt has written subtly on Aristotelian motion.

Of course, there has been much polemic on Heidegger's Nazism. Even so, few have had the courage to explore the episode in order to shed light on the nature and dangers of political philosophy. Polt's piece on the topic is a very fine exception: Polt is unflinching, and via Arendt returns us to Aristotle's enduring wisdom. One senses that Polt is a genuine critical friend of Liberal Democracy--he won't sign up for its self-serving myths, and wishes more from it. But he does not succumb to the fantasies of its enemies either...

Academic freedom under attack in Flanders (Belgium)!

[Afer a brief, two paragraph introduction, I have copied and pasted a petition.] On Friday June 3th 2011, the Catholic University of Leuven sacked researcher Barbara Van Dyck because of her public support for the actions of the Field Liberation Front in the context of an action against an experimental, genetically modified potato field in Wetteren, Belgium on Sunday May 29th. (Van Dyck had been employed in the architecure department at Leuven.) Van Dyck had refused to condemn the "vandalism" of the protestors when interviewed on TV. Whether one agrees with the aim and tactic of this action or not, the sanction is disproportionate and a breach of academic freedom and freedom of speech. My own university, Ghent University, also quickly condemned the vandalism and has joined in the (initial) media hysteria against the protestors. It is not the first time that environmental activists have damaged property (or worse) in the Low Countries. I am, in fact, no friend of the fanatical elements of the environmental movement. But there are plenty of legal sanctions available to the authorities against activists convicted of crimes in a court of law. The Flemish universities caved in to the bio-engineering-industrial complex and are not protecting the right, even necessity of holding unpopular views. Given that research funding sources encourage conformity of opinion this is a very regrettable action. I am proud to say that my colleagues, Dean Freddy Mortier and Jean-Paul Van Bendegem, have been leading the opposition against the sacking of Van Dyck. Below an appeal to academics worldwide to resist this dismissal and to sign this open letter. UPDATE: A LINK TO THE PETITION IS HERE.

The worst of both worlds

Nina Power reacts strongly

The ‘New College’ represents a worrying stage in the closing off of HE. On this model - a bad, cheapish version of the American one, without the scholarships and new buildings, universities will become ever more the preserve of the ultra-rich, and subjects such as Philosophy will remain in the hands of those who somehow feel they have a ‘natural’ right to own it.

to the matter discussed in this Guardian article:

New College of the Humanities, based in Bloomsbury, is being backed by private funding and will aim to make a profit. It will offer some scholarships, with assisted places being granted to one in five of the first 200 students....

One of the backers is Charles Watson, chairman of the City PR firm Financial Dynamics. He said: "Higher education in the UK must evolve if it is to offer the best quality experience for students and safeguard our future economic and intellectual wealth. New College offers a different model – one that brings additional, private sector funding into higher education in the humanities when it is most needed, and combines scholarships and tuition fees."

UPDATE: Correspondence between the Chair of the Birkbeck Student Union and AC Grayling, the front man for the New College.

UPDATE 2: A video with a great soundtrack!

UPDATE 3: A marvelously curt statement from the Master of Birkbeck College: 

Professor Anthony Grayling has resigned from Birkbeck to lead New College of the Humanities.  Birkbeck has no links with New College and no agreement to provide New College with access to any of its facilities.

Something to be happy about in the whole DSK affair

This morning I came across an interesting article at the Guardian (via the Feminist Philosophers). According to the article, a small sexual revolution is taking place in France in wake of the DSK affair: women are fed up (ras le bol!) with the general attitude of tolerance towards sexual harassment and even rape. In particular, it appears now that high-placed politicians and other powerful men are treated with much too much lenience, a phenomenon that can be traced back to a long history of association of political power to sexual ‘exuberance’, to use a euphemism (many historical leaders such as Napoleon and Louis XIV had dozens, even hundreds of mistresses). Even more worrisome, and clearly related to the DSK affair, is the powerful men’s perceived ‘right’ to demand sexual favors from women of ‘lower rank’. As the article describes:

For many, the French culture of sexual conquest is a hangover from the old, monarchic traditions of the Ancien Régime: powerful men seen as having a right to exact sexual favours from subordinates and political leaders held in esteem for their libido.

Evolutionary psychology and high standards of scientific research

Since its official launch in the early 1990s, and its precursor sociobiology in the 1970s, evolutionary psychological research has been the repeated target of controversy. Dawkins, in his afterword of David Buss' Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005), wondered whether EP really warrants this degree of controversy and scrutiny. At the 'high' end of the spectrum of scientific claims, we find controversial claims like the effectiveness of homeopathy or the existence of telepathy, at the low end of the spectrum, we find questions like the effects of alcohol on motor control, and it seems self-evident that the former type of claims need to be held to much higher standards than the latter. At what end of the spectrum does EP lie? To Dawkins "Evolutionary psychology is seen by its critics as out at the high hurdle end [in terms of the plausibility of its claims]--the telepathy end of the spectrum--while it is simultaneously seen by its practitioners as down at the plausible end of the spectrum" Dawkins (2005, 978) unambiguously sides with EP; he writes "Without a doubt, the evolutionary psychologists are right in this case. The central claim they are making is not an extraordinary one. It amounts to the exceedingly modest assertion that minds are on the same footing as bodies where Darwinian natural selection is concerned." This seems to capture the hard core of the evolutionary psychological research program quite well, and phrased in these generic terms, it does not sound at all uncontroversial.

Yet, the recent retraction of Kanazawa's paper on the alleged racial differences in perceived physical attractiveness, and the earlier controversy on Hauser's scientific misconduct have each sparked debates that do seem to question EP's most basic assumptions.