New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Pinker: 'Humans are less violent than ever'

I’m just back from an extremely enjoyable family vacation in sunny Fuerteventura, which also means that I am swamped by a zillion work-related things that need to be attended to asap. I also want to resume blogging, and have a few posts already lined up in my head (in particular, one on the ‘climate for women’ discussion which has re-emerged), but where do I find time for all this? (One almost regrets going on holiday and forgetting about it all for a while, given the harsh conditions upon return!)

But anyway, today I came across two interesting links, via the New Scientist twitter feed, and thought it might be a good topic to resume blogging. As it turns out, Steven Pinker’s most recent interest is the history of violence, which he takes to be a privileged window for his long-standing interest in human nature (broadly construed). In his new book The Better Angels of our Nature, he claims that there has been a significant decrease in homicides and violent deaths over the centuries: ‘Humans are less violent than ever’. This becomes particularly clear if the death tolls of historical occurrences of horror are estimated on the basis of the human population at the time, and what the proportion would mean in terms of the current human population in the world. This was done by finding the per-capita death rate at the midpoint of the event's range of years, based on population estimates from McEvedy and Jones.

Climate for Women (in empirically informed philosophy of mind): initial data ain't pretty

John Schwenkler has been doing an on-line survey, and the initial data is disturbing. As Schwenkler points out: "Men are more likely than women to believe that there are sizable numbers of women who have prominent positions in the field, and less likely than women to believe that there are not. Men are more likely than women to believe that women in the field are taken seriously, treated respectfully, and included in networking opportunities, and less likely than women to believe that this is not so." If the full results follow this pattern then it suggests that in this sub-field men are not allowing themselves to notice significant frustration (anger/inequity, etc) among their female peers. (I see no reason to think that this sub-field is atypical.) Hopefully other areas of specialization will follow Schwenkler's lead, and we can have a data-driven conversation among these issues.

Love Wins!

It's really, really remarkable that prominent evangelicals are now rethinking nearly every piece of dogma we assoicate with evangelicals. A decade ago Carlton Pearson was driven out of the evangelical community for simply being open to the claim that Hell does not exist. But now Mars Hill Bible Church pastor Rob Bell has made the same journey and though he is getting pilloried by all the usual suspects there is no evidence that his influential church has any indication of repudiating him.

This is actually a huge cultural shift, in importance and improbability on the level of working class people now widely supporting Occupy Wall Street (perhaps the two are related).

This from the book: "It's been clearly communicated to many that this belief (in hell as conscious, eternal torment) is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear." Amen to that.

Atheist clergy and belief in belief

[This is X-posted from The Cognition and Culture Blog] While I'm in Oxford on my project researching the cognitive basis of religion (and of theology in particular), I'll share some of my thoughts on the matter on this blog. 

About a year ago, Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola published a much-discussed paper on atheist clergymen. Their paper, which is available in open access here provides a fascinating qualitative study on atheist clergymen from various denominations, all of whom were anonymousmy interviewed about their doubts and loss of religious belief. If found out they risked losing their job at the very least, and being expelled from the religious community that had been their home for so long. Yet, many of them expressed moral qualms about not coming out: was their silence a form of hypocricy, or was it all for the best? "I’m where I am because I need the job still. If I had an alternative, a comfortable paying job, something I was interested in doing, and a move that wouldn’t destroy my family, that’s where I’d go. Because I do feel kind of hypocritical." (Dennett & Lascola 2010, p. 137)

In Christianity, endorsing the central creeds is very important. This is what Dennett and LaScola term "belief in belief".

a few numbers regarding SPEP

I don't know if this will in anyway salvage Jon Cogburn's faltering faith in the virtue of humanity, but the following numbers have recently been passed on to me by someone attending the SPEP conference.  (Please correct if they are inaccurate.)

SPEP membership = @ 2500. Members attending this conference = @ 700. Number of folks who skipped the business meeting = @ 550. 

One surely needs to keep such things in mind when drawing any statistical conclusions about SPEP membership from the recent vote.

The Zombie Argument and the Conditional Analysis

This post was provoked by Eric's comment. In my defense I have to say that I did not come up with this as I was writing. It had already been occupying my mind for days.

Anyway, I had some thoughts about the conditional analysis reply to the zombie argument. To summarize: the zombie argument is an argument against standard versions of physicalism. Its two major premises are 1. that it cannot be ruled out on a priori grounds that there are beings who are physically and functionally constituted the way we are but who lack phenomenal consciousness (or qualia), and 2. If it cannot be ruled out on a priori grounds that there are beings physically and functionally constituted the way we are, then it is metaphysically possible that there are beings who are physically and functionally constituted the way we are but who lack phenomenal consciousness. Standard versions of physicalism entail that fixing the microphysical facts fixes the mental facts (including facts about consciousness). So if sound, this argument refutes standard versions of physicalism.

Bob Stalnaker, John Hawthorne and David Braddon-Mitchel have defended a conditional analysis of the conceivability of zombies. It is not conceivable that there are zombies, they say. Rather, it is conceivable that it is possible that there are zombies. According to them, it is a priori that if the microphysical facts are the way they actually are, then there are (perhaps physically reducible) qualia. But if this conditional is a priori, then it can be ruled out on a priori grounds that there are creatures who are physically and functionally constituted the way we are but who lack phenomenal consciousness.

Splendid Philosopher of the Week: David Teira

This week's splendid philosopher (cf. the rules) is David Teira, who teaches at the distance learning university of Spain in Madrid. David is a versatile philosopher who is constantly reinventing himself philosophically. He claims to be a philosopher of statistics, but he has written on a wide variety of topics in the history and philosophy of science/medicine/economics as well as social policy. (A real gem is this piece on Bernoulli's theology and the Ars Conjectandi.) Trained at LSE, he would probably be better known in the English speaking world if he didn't keep a solid research profile in Spanish. Teira is one of my heroes because he shows how rich the philosophic pay-offs from historical explorations of economics are.

Research on Chicago economics is fraught with ideological polemics. And while David's views are not hard to discern, he has written the single most insightful paper on Milton Friedman's methodology. It is a lovely mixture of philosophically motivated history with razor sharp analysis. It should be read with a companion piece, which is penetrating critical analysis of Friedman's statistical methods. The latter piece leaves us with the ironic thought that Friedman's fundamental methodological weakness does not concern a particular technique, but revolves around the commitment that all economists are disinterested truth-seekers, rather than political animals that may have incentives that can slant them (an argument extended here).

Brazilian Music on Fridays: 'Ludo Real'

I'm on holiday at the moment, but not wanting to skip a week for Brazilian Music on Fridays, I figured I needed something that does not require lengthy introductions. So I decided to post one of my favorite songs by Chico Buarque, who certainly does not require introductions for anyone minimally familiar with Brazilian music. The song is 'Ludo Real', a collaboration with Vinicius Cantuaria (who is quite famous in the New York jazz scene, after having moved there somewhere in the 2000s), from the album Francisco of 1987.

But as I just can't help myself, here's a little something about Chico Buarque I'd like to share with you. Besides being one of the most prominent figures in Brazilian music of the last decades, since the 1990s he has also been an acclaimed fiction writer. In fact, his latest book, Leite Derramado, has won the Premio Jabuti, the most important literary prize in Brazil, in 2010. (This, ladies and gentlemen, is a truly multi-talented individual!) As far as I know, his books have not been translated into English, but in the meantime you can in any case enjoy his music!

Self-Promotion File 275A: At Cal State, Long Beach today

If you are in the LA area, feel free to stop in here.

In the category, social epistemology improves us all.

In the category, social epistemology improves us all. This conference leads the gender-ratio-way in the submitted paper category . This is a shout-out-to-the graduate students at SLU; bravo!

Proposal for OWS anthem. Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

Fantastic performance (hat tip Chronicle Brainstorm).

Methodology of history of philosophy

During the last few weeks I have tried out so Download Philosophicprophecyandmethodologyoct21me ideas on you. [Special thanks to Jeff Bell, Dennis Des Chene, Michael Kremer!] Here is a VERY FIRST draft, please don't quote without permission. But your critical comments are very welcome.

Download Philosophicprophecyandmethodologyoct21

Harlan Pepper - High Tension Wires

This is basically me after a few too many, at the very point of blood alcohol level when my childhood accent magically reasserts itself. Weirdly, many other southern friends of mine manifest the same phenomena. As kids we all equated newscaster midwestern accents with basic literacy and with not being like the folks with Wallace stickers on their trucks . But, as they say, in vino veritas.

Canada's Philosophical Association: Whatever Happened?

Once the CPA was a canadian philosophical association.

Philosophy papers were delivered and philosophers from coast to coast got to know each other, and valued these meetings as a chance to reunite and catch up with each others' news, academic or non. You learned about what was happening in other departments and other universities, just as much as about so-and-so's alcoholism, divorce or (more happily) new children. This created a national community. Some of the people you looked forward to meeting did interesting work that (mostly through their own choice) never got international exposure. These and other more famous people would present at the CPA in an atmosphere of pure intellectual discovery, and you would learn from year to year how their thoughts were evolving. People like

OWS poster of the day

Winston Smith at SPEP

At its Oceania meeting, SPEP has stood up for truth and justice yet once again.

Rebecca Kukla reports that a resolution . . .

Schools and Traditions; or Husserl and Realism, pt. I

In Hook’s survey of German philosophy circa 1930, which I discuss here, we saw that for Hook Husserl’s phenomenological movement (or school) is "the strongest analytical group in Germany and closest to the English and American school of neo-realism." In his follow-up post (here), Eric challenged my claim that Hook had Russell in mind but rather was thinking of “an American movement of scientific philosophers” – namely, Montague, Barton, and others who set forth their platform of neo-realism in a 1910 issue of JOP (and which Eric cites [the essay is here]). I wholeheartedly accept Eric’s claim that this is indeed who Hook had in mind when he refers to the American school of neo-realism, but I’ll stick to my guns that Russell is who is being thought of when he refers to the English school. Eric would probably accept this point, for what he is arguing is that it was only a consequence of Nagel’s successful “philosophic prophecy” which has led us to think only of Russell (and subsequently Frege) and not of the American school Hook also had in mind. Eric’s use of the concept philosophic prophecy to understand the contingencies of the history of philosophy is an important and challenging contribution to those of us who struggle to think through the historical relationships that come to constitute various philosophical “traditions” and “schools.” My only hesitation with this concept is that it seems to rely too strongly on an individualist, or great man, understanding of intellectual history. So when Eric attributes to Nagel the power to determine “The way we think about the origins of analytic philosophy,” or that Nagel was “so successful in recoining the concept “analytical philosophy”…[that most people, myself included] can’t see what he has wrought,” the Foucauldian in me becomes skeptical of attributing such authorial control over consequences. Nagel’s 1936 essay does stand as an interesting testament to the processes of inclusion/exclusion. I will grant that. But an adequate accounting of the eventual success of the narrative that legitimizes these exclusions/inclusions needs to do more than address the prophet but also look as best one can into the dialogue behind the scenes as well as the institutional and structural factors that make some inclusions/exclusions viable and others not. I have already suggested that Nagel was in dialogue with Hook but I would add another, and perhaps even more important example: Morris Cohen, who was Nagel’s former teacher and the author of the influential Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (1931) and, with Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934).

Cohen is important not only for the personal working relationship he had with Nagel but also for the fact that in the JOP issue where the neo-realist program was published the essay that immediately follows it is by Cohen, “The Conception of Philosophy in Recent Discussion” (here). One could also say that in this essay Cohen prophesies both the failure of the neo-realist program as well as, by extension, the Vienna Circle program and manifesto the neo-realists anticipate, and Cohen's piece prefigures some of the moves that will come to be made within “continental” philosophy.

Is university education a right?

Prompted by the thoughtful arguments by Professor Alessandra Tanesini in the NewAPPS interview, I am wondering whether it is the case that, as she claims, university education is a right as opposed to an important good. I was educated and am currently employed in Belgium but currently also affiliated with the University of Oxford, and the differences between the UK (which is highly selective) and Belgium (which has one of the most accessible university systems in Europe) are quite revealing. Given that I came from a low-income working class family, I could go to university as a bursary student, paying only 80 euros tuition fees per year, which were amply compensated by my scholarship. My richer peers only had to pay 500 euros per year. In contrast with UK citizens, Belgians need not apply to a university and wait to get accepted, they just enroll: if you have a diploma of the correct kind, no matter what your grades are, you can enroll in a university of your choice. This means in practice that you can choose a subject that is not well-suited to your high school training or interests, for instance, you choose a mathematics-intensive domain (like physics or economics) without having the required mathematical skills to follow the courses. The result: the overall failure rate for first-year students is about 56 % for men and 46 % for women. For instance, I have known friends from high school without mathematical background "trying out" economics and failing, "just seeing" what Latin and Greek would be like, even though their grades for those subjects were abysmal in high school, and invariably failing. This is a massive waste of resources.  

Given that there are no caps on the number of students that are admitted, more and more students go to university each year (In Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, an increase of nearly 25 % over the past 5 years). A typical bachelor level class starts out with the room so full that students need to sit on the stairs and pathways, but high attrition rates in attendance prevent rooms being overfull throughout the year. There is a problem of lack of motivation with many first-year students, some of whom already stop attending classes and doing assignments after the first few weeks. A few subjects, such as medicine, have entrance exams. Unsurprisingly, the failure rate for first-years in such degrees is much lower, sometimes as low as 20 %. Yet, over the past years, the (mainly socialist) politicians responsible for education have argued that generalized entrance exams would make university undemocratic. A university education, they claim, is a right, also for people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds who would do worse on such exams. [Note that this does not eradicate inequality, Belgium has one of the highest levels of inequality between students from Belgian and students from immigrant (mainly Turkish and Moroccan) backgrounds; the rate of university attendance of foreign, non-EU background students is very low]. Nevertheless, what a contrast with the UK, where even students with good grades struggle to get one of the few university places. 

It seems Belgium needs to be more selective in admitting students, but I am not sure it is desirable to go the UK way. Education is expensive, and someone has to pay it eventually (in Belgium the taxation level is high, almost the level of Scandinavian countries). Given the importance of having a highered diploma, it seems a bit arbitrary to publically fund good education only up until age 16. 

OWS poster of the day

New APPS Interview: Alessandra Tanesini -- Part II

The New APPS interview with Alessandra Tanesini, Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, will run in two parts. Part II is here; Part I was last week.

Philosophy and other humanities are under increasing pressure to justify their existence in universities on short-term economic criteria, sometimes in number of majors or tuition income, sometimes in terms of outside grants. How is this pressure manifest at your university? How do you respond to it, practically and theoretically? 

In the UK this is an enormous issue; we are entering a phase that is likely to change British Higher Education beyond all recognition. The big hike in students’ fees is what has made the headline news, but there are other changes that in my view will prove as significant.  I believe that education is a public as well as a private good.  The education of students benefits society as a whole and also the individual recipients.  However, it does not automatically follow from this that education should be paid for by the public pursue.  Road infrastructure is a public good in the same way but it does not seem inappropriate for users to pay to use a bridge or a motorway.  What matters most in my view is not so much whether the cost of education comes from general taxation or whether individual students have to make a substantial contribution to the cost of their education but whether the arrangements, whatever they might be, do not put off people from disadvantaged backgrounds.  In this regard a graduate tax, if practicable, might have been a better option than a rise in fees since there is evidence that people think of student loans as debt but would not think of a graduate tax in the same way.  Financially speaking there probably is little difference between the two given the way students’ loans are being set up. 

Many colleagues here bemoan the loss of the government teaching grant and the whole move to a private financing of higher education.  I have to confess that I don’t wholly agree. 

idea for an informal logic textbook

Some day I am going write a short text on informal logic along the lines of Ray Perkins' excellent Logic and Mr. Limbaugh, except instead of using the illustrative sophistry of Mr. Limbaugh I will get all of my examples from conservative Christian apologists of the sort interviewed in Lee Strobel's incredibly dishonest The Case for Christ (I refuse to link to it). Back when the economy was good, and students had way more luxury to waste on stupidity, proselytizers in my intro classes used to give me the book.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Robert Price's The Case Against the Case for Christ. Price's command of New Testament scholarship and informal logic is formidable and a pleasure to read. If you read Price's book, you'll get a clear idea of how easy it would be to pen the kind of logic textbook I'm envisioning.

I must say, after sustained reading on this topic, one thing is very clear to me. Given the astounding amount of blanket dishonesty and unreason needed to sustain conservative apologetics by all of the big names at many of the relevant "Christian" universities (ones that discriminate merit scare quotes!), it is no accident that conservative Christians so often end up being such catastrophically bad people. As the Greeks say, a fish rots from the head down.*

*[Full disclosure: (1) I teach adult Sunday School in a Presbyterian church. None of the above is meant to be an indictment of Christianity. This should be clear at least to anyone who realizes that atheists like Price are often better Christians than those of us burdened with the supposedly relevant beliefs. (2) It's slightly hypocritical for me to inveigh against "bad people" in the way I do above, as my own Reformed tradition accepts as fundamental the depravity of pretty much everyone, including and especially oneself. This being said, not to notice that one's own fish is rotten is particularly odious in all sorts of ways.]

Joy, Beautiful Spark of the Gods!

I'll let John Protevi comment on the philosophical significance of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards singing Beethoven (I'm not being faceitious here; any reader of Protevi's books knows that he has interesting things to say about this kind of thing). In any case, even though the sound quality on the recording is atrocious, it still brings tears to my eyes and fills me with uncharacteristic hope.  

McDonald's to Get Even More Horrible

Story HERE. Apparently there isn't yet enough intrusive media in all of public places in this country.

Seriously, if people start occupying against this kind of crap you can sign me up. I'll be out there faster than a New York second, in a tent with my funny sign showcasing the Hamburgler with a bottle of Xanax in his hand instead of his customary Quarter Pounder^TM.

Augh, what am I complaining about? It's not even really food anyhow. Polluting the customer's souls actually fits perfectly with what they're already doing to our bodies.

"The Beginning Is Near"

Because I did not complete my weekly philo of economics blog, I link to the following: Jennifer Uleman's dispatch from OWS. (Thank you to Linda Alcoff via facebook.)

A cartoonist is changing the world...

"Mutawa’s 99 embody and promote tolerance, kindness, generosity, and fighting for justice. Don’t’ we need more of that in the world? Asking the extreme Right on either side of the planet to see past the red cape of faith that puts them in charge is as productive as asking the Pope not to pray. If the heroes of "The 99" can in fact begin to empower Muslim children of the world to promote peace, kindness, and justice, and stand up against those who would have them embrace martyrdom for their own purposes, and if the introduction of new pop culture motifs into the western perceptions of Islam can diversify the conversation, then Mutawa’s project could be the start of a shift in our modern global history. That shift would lessen the power of extremists. No wonder they are terrified." (For more of the story here.)

Wandering minds

The default mode network is one of several brain networks active when a subject is at rest. It is found not only in humans but in monkeys and rats (see (Jessica Hamzelou, “Rat reflections give pause for thought”, New Scientist 8 Oct 2011:14). Yihong Yang and Hanbing Lu at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a study not yet published, have found evidence for a default mode network in rats. In humans the default mode network is associated with “functions of a self-referential nature” (Sheline, Barch et al 2008)—reflection or passive introspection. Activity in this network is inhibited during cognitive tasks (Greicius et al 2002).

Mantini, Gerits et al (J. Neuroscience 31(36):12954–12962, 7 Sep 2011) show that areas in the brain functionally similar to those involved in the human default mode exhibit similar patterns of activation. They conclude:

The present results suggest that, like humans, monkeys default to consistent sets of processes when left in undirected states. It is tantalizing to infer that monkeys engage in forms of spontaneous cognition detached from the external environment during idle moments. The observation that the anatomy of the DMN in monkeys includes heteromodal association areas and not sensory regions supports this speculative possibility.

They note that monkeys lack language “and therefore certain forms of self-referential processing” (citing R. Passingham, “How good is the macaque monkey model of the human brain?” Current opinion in neurobiology 19(2009):6–11). Nevertheless they exhibit “protoforms” of human capacities: and so—perhaps!—something akin to reflection, daydreaming. Another distinction goes by the wayside…

OWS poster of the day

Lalo Alcaraz.

OWS song of the day below the fold.

Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?

Really nice props from Edward Tenner of the Atlantic Monthly HERE (hat-tip Heidi Silcox).

The Jeremiad: the "need to find failure in success, regress in progress."

This is a nice piece on Nassim Taleb. [Thanks to Jean-Pierre Fouque for the pointer.]

On the invention of analytic philosophy by Ernest Nagel (II)

Following the suggestion of Greg Frost-Arnold (as discussed by Catarina), I explored Ernest Nagel as a philosophic prophet who invented analytic philosophy as we know it in 1936. In response, Jeff called attention to an important paper by Sidney Hook. Now, I fully accept Jeff's point that Nagel's two papers are a clear response to Hook. Jeff offers five important observations on Hook's paper in which he tries to suggest that Hook and Nagel (who, as the splendid Melissa Zinkin pointed out, were close friends) were offering a shared response to German philosophy. But Jeff's reading is based on a misunderstanding of what Hook is saying--and the misunderstanding is caused by the success of Nagel's way of framing things. (So much so that Hook's philosophic universe becomes almost unimaginable to us.) To see what I am getting at, let me first quote the crucial third point in Jeff's post, and then show how even a sophisticated philosopher like Jeff becomes less than sure-footed: "3. In his observations concerning Husserl, Hook makes two points that are especially relevant considering contemporary discussions within and outside continental philosophy regarding realism. First, Hook identifies the phenomenological tradition spearheaded by Husserl as "the strongest analytical group in Germany and [secondly] closest to the English and American school of neo-realism." (p. 152). Whether justified or not, Hook sees Husserl as closely aligned with the Russellian tradition in anglo-american philosophy. What is important for Hook's fourth point is that the same is not true of Heidegger."